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Tin
Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn (from ) and atomic number 50. Tin is a silvery metal that characteristically has a faint yellow hue. Tin, like indium, is soft enough to be cut without much force. When a bar of tin is bent, the so-called “tin cry” can be heard as a result of sliding tin crystals reforming; this trait is shared by indium, cadmium, and frozen mercury. Pure tin after solidifying keeps a mirror-like appearance similar to most metals. However, in most tin alloys (such as pewter), the metal solidifies with a dull gray color. Tin is a post-transition metal in group 14 of the periodic table of elements. It is obtained chiefly from the mineral cassiterite, which contains stannic oxide, SnO2. Tin shows a chemical similarity to both of its neighbors in group 14, germanium and lead, and has two main oxidation states, +2 and the slightly more stable +4. Tin is the 49th most abundant element on Earth and has, with 10 stable isotopes, the largest number of stable isotopes in the periodic table, thanks to its magic number of protons. It has two main allotropes: at room temperature, the stable allotrope is β-tin, a silvery-white, malleable metal, but at low temperatures, it transforms into the less dense grey α-tin, which has the diamond cubic structure. Metallic tin does not easily oxidize in air.
The first tin alloy used on a large scale was bronze, made of tin and copper, from as early as 3000 BC. After 600 BC, pure metallic tin was produced. Pewter, which is an alloy of 85–90% tin with the remainder commonly consisting of copper, antimony, and lead, was used for flatware from the Bronze Age until the 20th century. In modern times, tin is used in many alloys, most notably tin / lead soft solders, which are typically 60% or more tin, and in the manufacture of transparent, electrically conducting films of indium tin oxide in optoelectronic applications. Another large application for tin is corrosion-resistant tin plating of steel. Because of the low toxicity of inorganic tin, tin-plated steel is widely used for food packaging as tin cans. However, some organotin compounds can be almost as toxic as cyanide.
Tin is a soft, malleable, ductile and highly crystalline silvery-white metal. When a bar of tin is bent, a crackling sound known as the "tin cry" can be heard from the twinning of the crystals. Tin melts at low temperatures of about , the lowest in group 14. The melting point is further lowered to for 11 nm particles.
β-tin (the metallic form, or white tin, BCT structure), which is stable at and above room temperature, is malleable. In contrast, α-tin (nonmetallic form, or gray tin), which is stable below , is brittle. α-tin has a diamond cubic crystal structure, similar to diamond, silicon or germanium. α-tin has no metallic properties at all because its atoms form a covalent structure in which electrons cannot move freely. It is a dull-gray powdery material with no common uses other than a few specialized semiconductor applications. These two allotropes, α-tin and β-tin, are more commonly known as "gray tin" and "white tin", respectively. Two more allotropes, γ and σ, exist at temperatures above and pressures above several GPa. In cold conditions, β-tin tends to transform spontaneously into α-tin, a phenomenon known as "tin pest" or "tin disease". Some unverifiable sources also say that, during Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812, the temperatures became so cold that the tin buttons on the soldiers' uniforms disintegrated over time, contributing to the defeat of the Grande Armée, a persistent legend that probably has no background in real events.
Although the α-β transformation temperature is nominally , impurities (e.g. Al, Zn, etc.) lower the transition temperature well below and, on the addition of antimony or bismuth, the transformation might not occur at all, increasing the durability of the tin.
Commercial grades of tin (99.8%) resist transformation because of the inhibiting effect of the small amounts of bismuth, antimony, lead, and silver present as impurities. Alloying elements such as copper, antimony, bismuth, cadmium, and silver increase its hardness. Tin tends rather easily to form hard, brittle intermetallic phases, which are often undesirable. It does not form wide solid solution ranges in other metals in general, and few elements have appreciable solid solubility in tin. Simple eutectic systems, however, occur with bismuth, gallium, lead, thallium and zinc.
Tin becomes a superconductor below 3.72 K and was one of the first superconductors to be studied; the Meissner effect, one of the characteristic features of superconductors, was first discovered in superconducting tin crystals.
Tin resists corrosion from water, but can be attacked by acids and alkalis. Tin can be highly polished and is used as a protective coat for other metals. A protective oxide (passivation) layer prevents further oxidation, the same that forms on pewter and other tin alloys. Tin acts as a catalyst when oxygen is in solution and helps to accelerate the chemical reaction.
Tin has ten stable isotopes, with atomic masses of 112, 114 through 120, 122, and 124, the greatest number of any element. Of these, the most abundant are 120Sn (almost a third of all tin), 118Sn, and 116Sn, while the least abundant is 115Sn. The isotopes with even mass numbers have no nuclear spin, while those with odd have a spin of +1/2. Tin, with its three common isotopes 116Sn, 118Sn, and 120Sn, is among the easiest elements to detect and analyze by NMR spectroscopy, and its chemical shifts are referenced against .
This large number of stable isotopes is thought to be a direct result of the atomic number 50, a "magic number" in nuclear physics. Tin also occurs in 31 unstable isotopes, encompassing all the remaining atomic masses from 99 to 139. Apart from 126Sn, with a half-life of 230,000 years, all the radioisotopes have a half-life of less than a year. The radioactive 100Sn, discovered in 1994, and 132Sn are two of the few nuclides with a "doubly magic" nucleus: despite being unstable, having very lopsided proton–neutron ratios, they represent endpoints beyond which stability drops off rapidly. Another 30 metastable isomers have been characterized for isotopes between 111 and 131, the most stable being 121mSn with a half-life of 43.9 years.
The relative differences in the abundances of tin's stable isotopes can be explained by their different modes of formation in stellar nucleosynthesis. 116Sn through 120Sn inclusive are formed in the "s"-process (slow neutron capture) in most stars and hence they are the most common isotopes, while 122Sn and 124Sn are only formed in the "r"-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and are less common. (The isotopes 117Sn through 120Sn also receive contributions from the "r"-process.) Finally, the rarest proton-rich isotopes, 112Sn, 114Sn, and 115Sn, cannot be made in significant amounts in the "s"- or "r"-processes and are considered among the p-nuclei, whose origins are not well understood yet. Some speculated mechanisms for their formation include proton capture as well as photodisintegration, although 115Sn might also be partially produced in the "s"-process, both directly, and as the daughter of long-lived 115In.
The word "tin" is shared among Germanic languages and can be traced back to reconstructed Proto-Germanic "*tin-om"; cognates include German ', Swedish ' and Dutch '. It is not found in other branches of Indo-European, except by borrowing from Germanic (e.g., Irish ' from English).
The Latin name ' originally meant an alloy of silver and lead, and came to mean 'tin' in the 4th century—the earlier Latin word for it was ', or "white lead". ' apparently came from an earlier ' (meaning the same substance), the origin of the Romance and Celtic terms for "tin". The origin of '/' is unknown; it may be pre-Indo-European.
The ' speculates on the contrary that ' is derived from (the ancestor of) Cornish "", and is proof that Cornwall in the first centuries AD was the main source of tin.
Tin extraction and use can be dated to the beginnings of the Bronze Age around 3000 BC, when it was observed that copper objects formed of polymetallic ores with different metal contents had different physical properties. The earliest bronze objects had a tin or arsenic content of less than 2% and are therefore believed to be the result of unintentional alloying due to trace metal content in the copper ore. The addition of a second metal to copper increases its hardness, lowers the melting temperature, and improves the casting process by producing a more fluid melt that cools to a denser, less spongy metal. This was an important innovation that allowed for the much more complex shapes cast in closed molds of the Bronze Age. Arsenical bronze objects appear first in the Near East where arsenic is commonly found in association with copper ore, but the health risks were quickly realized and the quest for sources of the much less hazardous tin ores began early in the Bronze Age. This created the demand for rare tin metal and formed a trade network that linked the distant sources of tin to the markets of Bronze Age cultures.
Cassiterite (SnO2), the tin oxide form of tin, was most likely the original source of tin in ancient times. Other forms of tin ores are less abundant sulfides such as stannite that require a more involved smelting process. Cassiterite often accumulates in alluvial channels as placer deposits because it is harder, heavier, and more chemically resistant than the accompanying granite. Cassiterite is usually black or generally dark in color, and these deposits can be easily seen in river banks. Alluvial (placer) deposits may incidentally have been collected and separated by methods similar to gold panning.
In the great majority of its compounds, tin has the oxidation state II or IV.
Halide compounds are known for both oxidation states. For Sn(IV), all four halides are well known: SnF4, SnCl4, SnBr4, and SnI4. The three heavier members are volatile molecular compounds, whereas the tetrafluoride is polymeric. All four halides are known for Sn(II) also: SnF2, SnCl2, SnBr2, and SnI2. All are polymeric solids. Of these eight compounds, only the iodides are colored.
Tin(II) chloride (also known as stannous chloride) is the most important tin halide in a commercial sense. Illustrating the routes to such compounds, chlorine reacts with tin metal to give SnCl4 whereas the reaction of hydrochloric acid and tin produces SnCl2 and hydrogen gas. Alternatively SnCl4 and Sn combine to stannous chloride by a process called comproportionation:
Tin can form many oxides, sulfides, and other chalcogenide derivatives. The dioxide SnO2 (cassiterite) forms when tin is heated in the presence of air. SnO2 is amphoteric, which means that it dissolves in both acidic and basic solutions. Stannates with the structure [Sn(OH)6]2−, like K2[Sn(OH)6], are also known, though the free stannic acid H2[Sn(OH)6] is unknown.
Sulfides of tin exist in both the +2 and +4 oxidation states: tin(II) sulfide and tin(IV) sulfide (mosaic gold).
Stannane (SnH4), with tin in the +4 oxidation state, is unstable. Organotin hydrides are however well known, e.g. tributyltin hydride (Sn(C4H9)3H). These compound release transient tributyl tin radicals, which are rare examples of compounds of tin(III).
Organotin compounds, sometimes called stannanes, are chemical compounds with tin–carbon bonds. Of the compounds of tin, the organic derivatives are the most useful commercially. Some organotin compounds are highly toxic and have been used as biocides. The first organotin compound to be reported was diethyltin diiodide ((C2H5)2SnI2), reported by Edward Frankland in 1849.
Most organotin compounds are colorless liquids or solids that are stable to air and water. They adopt tetrahedral geometry. Tetraalkyl- and tetraaryltin compounds can be prepared using Grignard reagents:
The mixed halide-alkyls, which are more common and more important commercially than the tetraorgano derivatives, are prepared by redistribution reactions:
Divalent organotin compounds are uncommon, although more common than related divalent organogermanium and organosilicon compounds. The greater stabilization enjoyed by Sn(II) is attributed to the "inert pair effect". Organotin(II) compounds include both stannylenes (formula: R2Sn, as seen for singlet carbenes) and distannylenes (R4Sn2), which are roughly equivalent to alkenes. Both classes exhibit unusual reactions.
Tin is generated via the long "s"-process in low-to-medium mass stars (with masses of 0.6 to 10 times that of the Sun), and finally by beta decay of the heavy isotopes of indium.
Tin is the 49th most abundant element in Earth's crust, representing 2 ppm compared with 75 ppm for zinc, 50 ppm for copper, and 14 ppm for lead.
Tin does not occur as the native element but must be extracted from various ores. Cassiterite (SnO2) is the only commercially important source of tin, although small quantities of tin are recovered from complex sulfides such as stannite, cylindrite, franckeite, canfieldite, and teallite. Minerals with tin are almost always associated with granite rock, usually at a level of 1% tin oxide content.
Because of the higher specific gravity of tin dioxide, about 80% of mined tin is from secondary deposits found downstream from the primary lodes. Tin is often recovered from granules washed downstream in the past and deposited in valleys or the sea. The most economical ways of mining tin are by dredging, hydraulicking, or open pits. Most of the world's tin is produced from placer deposits, which can contain as little as 0.015% tin.
About 253,000 tonnes of tin have been mined in 2011, mostly in China (110,000 t), Indonesia (51,000 t), Peru (34,600 t), Bolivia (20,700 t) and Brazil (12,000 t). Estimates of tin production have historically varied with the dynamics of economic feasibility and the development of mining technologies, but it is estimated that, at current consumption rates and technologies, the Earth will run out of mine-able tin in 40 years. Lester Brown has suggested tin could run out within 20 years based on an extremely conservative extrapolation of 2% growth per year.
Secondary, or scrap, tin is also an important source of the metal. Recovery of tin through secondary production, or recycling of scrap tin, is increasing rapidly. Whereas the United States has neither mined since 1993 nor smelted tin since 1989, it was the largest secondary producer, recycling nearly 14,000 tonnes in 2006.
New deposits are reported in Mongolia, and in 2009, new deposits of tin were discovered in Colombia by the Seminole Group Colombia CI, SAS.
Tin is produced by carbothermic reduction of the oxide ore with carbon or coke. Both reverberatory furnace and electric furnace can be used.
The ten largest companies produced most of the world's tin in 2007.
Most of the world's tin is traded on the London Metal Exchange (LME), from 8 countries, under 17 brands.
An International Tin Council was established in 1947 to control the price of tin, until it collapsed in 1985. In 1984, an "Association of Tin Producing Countries" was created, with Australia, Bolivia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, and Zaire as members.
Tin is unique among other mineral commodities because of the complex agreements between producer countries and consumer countries dating back to 1921. The earlier agreements tended to be somewhat informal and sporadic and led to the "First International Tin Agreement" in 1956, the first of a continuously numbered series that effectively collapsed in 1985. Through this series of agreements, the International Tin Council (ITC) had a considerable effect on tin prices. The ITC supported the price of tin during periods of low prices by buying tin for its buffer stockpile and was able to restrain the price during periods of high prices by selling tin from the stockpile. This was an anti-free-market approach, designed to assure a sufficient flow of tin to consumer countries and a profit for producer countries. However, the buffer stockpile was not sufficiently large, and during most of those 29 years tin prices rose, sometimes sharply, especially from 1973 through 1980 when rampant inflation plagued many world economies.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. Government tin stockpile was in an aggressive selling mode, partly to take advantage of the historically high tin prices. The sharp recession of 1981–82 proved to be quite harsh on the tin industry. Tin consumption declined dramatically. The ITC was able to avoid truly steep declines through accelerated buying for its buffer stockpile; this activity required the ITC to borrow extensively from banks and metal trading firms to augment its resources. The ITC continued to borrow until late 1985 when it reached its credit limit. Immediately, a major "tin crisis" followed — tin was delisted from trading on the London Metal Exchange for about three years, the ITC dissolved soon afterward, and the price of tin, now in a free-market environment, plummeted sharply to $4 per pound and remained at that level through the 1990s. The price increased again by 2010 with a rebound in consumption following the 2008–09 world economic crisis, accompanying restocking and continued growth in consumption by the world's developing economies.
London Metal Exchange (LME) is the principal trading site for tin. Other tin contract markets are Kuala Lumpur Tin Market (KLTM) and Indonesia Tin Exchange (INATIN).
The price per kg over years:
In 2018, just under half of all tin produced was used in solder. The rest was divided between tin plating, tin chemicals, brass and bronze alloys, and niche uses.
Tin has long been used in alloys with lead as solder, in amounts 5 to 70% w/w. Tin with lead forms a eutectic mixture at the weight proportion of 61.9% tin and 38.1% lead (the atomic proportion: 73.9% tin and 26.1% lead), with melting temperature of 183 °C (361.4 °F) . Such solders are primarily used for joining pipes or electric circuits. Since the European Union Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) and Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive came into effect on 1 July 2006, the lead content in such alloys has decreased. Replacing lead has many problems, including a higher melting point, and the formation of tin whiskers causing electrical problems. Tin pest can occur in lead-free solders, leading to loss of the soldered joint. Replacement alloys are rapidly being found, although problems of joint integrity remain.
Tin bonds readily to iron and is used for coating lead, zinc and steel to prevent corrosion. Tin-plated steel containers are widely used for food preservation, and this forms a large part of the market for metallic tin. A tinplate canister for preserving food was first manufactured in London in 1812. Speakers of British English call them "tins", while speakers of American English call them "cans" or "tin cans". One derivation of such use is the slang term "tinnie" or "tinny", meaning "can of beer" in Australia. The tin whistle is so called because it was first mass-produced in tin-plated steel. Copper cooking vessels such as saucepans and frying pans are frequently lined with a thin plating of tin, since the combination of acid foods with copper can be toxic.
Tin in combination with other elements forms a wide variety of useful alloys. Tin is most commonly alloyed with copper. Pewter is 85–99% tin; bearing metal has a high percentage of tin as well. Bronze is mostly copper (12% tin), while addition of phosphorus gives phosphor bronze. Bell metal is also a copper–tin alloy, containing 22% tin. Tin has sometimes been used in coinage; for example, it once formed a single-digit percentage (usually five percent or less) of American and Canadian pennies. Because copper is often the major metal in such coins, sometimes including zinc, these could be called bronze and/or brass alloys.
The niobium–tin compound Nb3Sn is commercially used in coils of superconducting magnets for its high critical temperature (18 K) and critical magnetic field (25 T). A superconducting magnet weighing as little as two kilograms is capable of the magnetic field of a conventional electromagnet weighing tons.
A small percentage of tin is added to zirconium alloys for the cladding of nuclear fuel.
Most metal pipes in a pipe organ are of a tin/lead alloy, with 50/50 being the most common composition. The proportion of tin in the pipe defines the pipe's tone, since tin has a desirable tonal resonance. When a tin/lead alloy cools, the lead phase solidifies first, then when the eutectic temperature is reached the remaining liquid forms the layered tin/lead eutectic structure, which is shiny and the contrast with the lead phase produces a mottled or spotted effect. This metal alloy is referred to as spotted metal. Major advantages of using tin for pipes include its appearance, its workability, and resistance to corrosion.
The oxides of indium and tin are electrically conductive and transparent, and are used to make transparent electrically conducting films with applications in Optoelectronics devices such as liquid crystal displays.
Punched tin-plated steel, also called pierced tin, is an artisan technique originating in central Europe for creating housewares that are both functional and decorative. Decorative piercing designs exist in a wide variety, based on local tradition and the artisan's personal creations. Punched tin lanterns are the most common application of this artisan technique. The light of a candle shining through the pierced design creates a decorative light pattern in the room where it sits. Lanterns and other punched tin articles were created in the New World from the earliest European settlement. A well-known example is the Revere lantern, named after Paul Revere.
Before the modern era, in some areas of the Alps, a goat or sheep's horn would be sharpened and a tin panel would be punched out using the alphabet and numbers from one to nine. This learning tool was known appropriately as "the horn". Modern reproductions are decorated with such motifs as hearts and tulips.
In America, pie safes and food safes were in use in the days before refrigeration. These were wooden cupboards of various styles and sizes – either floor standing or hanging cupboards meant to discourage vermin and insects and to keep dust from perishable foodstuffs. These cabinets had tinplate inserts in the doors and sometimes in the sides, punched out by the homeowner, cabinetmaker or a tinsmith in varying designs to allow for air circulation while excluding flies. Modern reproductions of these articles remain popular in North America.
Window glass is most often made by floating molten glass on molten tin (float glass), resulting in a flat and flawless surface. This is also called the "Pilkington process".
Tin is also used as a negative electrode in advanced Li-ion batteries. Its application is somewhat limited by the fact that some tin surfaces catalyze decomposition of carbonate-based electrolytes used in Li-ion batteries.
Tin(II) fluoride is added to some dental care products as stannous fluoride (SnF2). Tin(II) fluoride can be mixed with calcium abrasives while the more common sodium fluoride gradually becomes biologically inactive in the presence of calcium compounds. It has also been shown to be more effective than sodium fluoride in controlling gingivitis.
Tin is also used as a target to create laser induced plasma's which act as the light source for Extreme ultraviolet lithography.
Of all the chemical compounds of tin, the organotin compounds are most heavily used. Worldwide industrial production probably exceeds 50,000 tonnes.
The major commercial application of organotin compounds is in the stabilization of PVC plastics. In the absence of such stabilizers, PVC would otherwise rapidly degrade under heat, light, and atmospheric oxygen, resulting in discolored, brittle products. Tin scavenges labile chloride ions (Cl−), which would otherwise initiate loss of HCl from the plastic material. Typical tin compounds are carboxylic acid derivatives of dibutyltin dichloride, such as the dilaurate.
Some organotin compounds are relatively toxic, with both advantages and problems. They are used for biocidal properties as fungicides, pesticides, algaecides, wood preservatives, and antifouling agents. Tributyltin oxide is used as a wood preservative. Tributyltin was used as additive for ship paint to prevent growth of marine organisms on ships, with use declining after organotin compounds were recognized as persistent organic pollutants with an extremely high toxicity for some marine organisms (the dog whelk, for example). The EU banned the use of organotin compounds in 2003, while concerns over the toxicity of these compounds to marine life and damage to the reproduction and growth of some marine species (some reports describe biological effects to marine life at a concentration of 1 nanogram per liter) have led to a worldwide ban by the International Maritime Organization. Many nations now restrict the use of organotin compounds to vessels greater than long.
Some tin reagents are useful in organic chemistry. In the largest application, stannous chloride is a common reducing agent for the conversion of nitro and oxime groups to amines. The Stille reaction couples organotin compounds with organic halides or pseudohalides.
Tin forms several inter-metallic phases with lithium metal, making it a potentially attractive material for battery applications. Large volumetric expansion of tin upon alloying with lithium and instability of the tin-organic electrolyte interface at low electrochemical potentials are the greatest challenges to employment in commercial cells. The problem was partially solved by Sony. Tin inter-metallic compound with cobalt and carbon has been implemented by Sony in its Nexelion cells released in the late 2000s. The composition of the active material is approximately Sn0.3Co0.4C0.3. Recent research showed that only some crystalline facets of tetragonal (beta) Sn are responsible for undesirable electrochemical activity.
Cases of poisoning from tin metal, its oxides, and its salts are almost unknown. On the other hand, certain organotin compounds are almost as toxic as cyanide.
Exposure to tin in the workplace can occur by inhalation, skin contact, and eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for tin exposure in the workplace as 2 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has determined a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 2 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday. At levels of 100 mg/m3, tin is immediately dangerous to life and health. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30042 |
Tellurium
Tellurium is a chemical element with the symbol Te and atomic number 52. It is a brittle, mildly toxic, rare, silver-white metalloid. Tellurium is chemically related to selenium and sulfur, all three of which are chalcogens. It is occasionally found in native form as elemental crystals. Tellurium is far more common in the Universe as a whole than on Earth. Its extreme rarity in the Earth's crust, comparable to that of platinum, is due partly to its formation of a volatile hydride that caused tellurium to be lost to space as a gas during the hot nebular formation of Earth, and partly to tellurium's low affinity for oxygen, which causes it to bind preferentially to other chalcophiles in dense minerals that sink into the core.
Tellurium-bearing compounds were first discovered in 1782 in a gold mine in Kleinschlatten, Transylvania (now Zlatna, Romania) by Austrian mineralogist Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein, although it was Martin Heinrich Klaproth who named the new element in 1798 after the Latin word for "earth", "tellus". Gold telluride minerals are the most notable natural gold compounds. However, they are not a commercially significant source of tellurium itself, which is normally extracted as a by-product of copper and lead production.
Commercially, the primary use of tellurium is copper (tellurium copper) and steel alloys, where it improves machinability. Applications in CdTe solar panels and cadmium telluride semiconductors also consume a considerable portion of tellurium production. Tellurium is considered a technology-critical element.
Tellurium has no biological function, although fungi can use it in place of sulfur and selenium in amino acids such as tellurocysteine and telluromethionine. In humans, tellurium is partly metabolized into dimethyl telluride, (CH3)2Te, a gas with a garlic-like odor exhaled in the breath of victims of tellurium exposure or poisoning.
Tellurium has two allotropes, crystalline and amorphous. When crystalline, tellurium is silvery-white with a metallic luster. It is a brittle and easily pulverized metalloid. Amorphous tellurium is a black-brown powder prepared by precipitating it from a solution of tellurous acid or telluric acid (Te(OH)6). Tellurium is a semiconductor that shows a greater electrical conductivity in certain directions depending on atomic alignment; the conductivity increases slightly when exposed to light (photoconductivity). When molten, tellurium is corrosive to copper, iron, and stainless steel. Of the chalcogens (oxygen-family elements), tellurium has the highest melting and boiling points, at and , respectively.
Tellurium adopts a polymeric structure consisting of zig-zag chains of Te atoms. This gray material resists oxidation by air and is not volatile.
Naturally occurring tellurium has eight isotopes. Six of those isotopes, 120Te, 122Te, 123Te, 124Te, 125Te, and 126Te, are stable. The other two, 128Te and 130Te, have been found to be slightly radioactive, with extremely long half-lives, including 2.2 × 1024 years for 128Te. This is the longest known half-life among all radionuclides and is about 160 trillion (1012) times the age of the known universe. Stable isotopes comprise only 33.2% of naturally occurring tellurium.
A further 31 artificial radioisotopes of tellurium are known, with atomic masses ranging from 104 to 142 and with half-lives of 19 days or less. Also, 17 nuclear isomers are known, with half-lives up to 154 days. With the exception of beryllium-8 and beta-delayed alpha emission branches in some lighter nuclides, tellurium (104Te to 109Te) is the lightest element with isotopes known to undergo alpha decay.
The atomic mass of tellurium (127.60 g·mol−1) exceeds that of iodine (126.90 g·mol−1), the next element in the periodic table.
With an abundance in the Earth's crust comparable to that of platinum (about 1 µg/kg), tellurium is one of the rarest stable solid elements. In comparison, even the rarest of the stable lanthanides have crustal abundances of 500 µg/kg (see Abundance of the chemical elements).
This rarity of tellurium in the Earth's crust is not a reflection of its cosmic abundance. Tellurium is more abundant than rubidium in the cosmos, though rubidium is 10,000 times more abundant in the Earth's crust. The rarity of tellurium on Earth is thought to be caused by conditions during preaccretional sorting in the solar nebula, when the stable form of certain elements, in the absence of oxygen and water, was controlled by the reductive power of free hydrogen. Under this scenario, certain elements that form volatile hydrides, such as tellurium, were severely depleted through evaporation of these hydrides. Tellurium and selenium are the heavy elements most depleted by this process.
Tellurium is sometimes found in its native (i.e., elemental) form, but is more often found as the tellurides of gold such as calaverite and krennerite (two different polymorphs of AuTe2), petzite, Ag3AuTe2, and sylvanite, AgAuTe4. The city of Telluride, Colorado, was named in hope of a strike of gold telluride (which never materialized, though gold metal ore was found). Gold itself is usually found uncombined, but when found as a chemical compound, it is most often combined with tellurium.
Although tellurium is found with gold more often than in uncombined form, it is found even more often combined as tellurides of more common metals (e.g. melonite, NiTe2). Natural tellurite and tellurate minerals also occur, formed by oxidation of tellurides near the Earth's surface. In contrast to selenium, tellurium does not usually replace sulfur in minerals because of the great difference in ion radii. Thus, many common sulfide minerals contain substantial quantities of selenium and only traces of tellurium.
In the gold rush of 1893, miners in Kalgoorlie discarded a pyritic material as they searched for pure gold, and it was used to fill in potholes and build sidewalks. In 1896, that tailing was discovered to be calaverite, a telluride of gold, and it sparked a second gold rush that included mining the streets.
Tellurium (Latin "tellus" meaning "earth") was discovered in the 18th century in a gold ore from the mines in Kleinschlatten (today Zlatna), near today's city of Alba Iulia, Romania. This ore was known as "Faczebajer weißes blättriges Golderz" (white leafy gold ore from Faczebaja, German name of Facebánya, now Fața Băii in Alba County) or "antimonalischer Goldkies" (antimonic gold pyrite), and according to Anton von Rupprecht, was "Spießglaskönig" ("argent molybdique"), containing native antimony. In 1782 Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein, who was then serving as the Austrian chief inspector of mines in Transylvania, concluded that the ore did not contain antimony but was bismuth sulfide. The following year, he reported that this was erroneous and that the ore contained mostly gold and an unknown metal very similar to antimony. After a thorough investigation that lasted three years and included more than fifty tests, Müller determined the specific gravity of the mineral and noted that when heated, the new metal gives off a white smoke with a radish-like odor; that it imparts a red color to sulfuric acid; and that when this solution is diluted with water, it has a black precipitate. Nevertheless, he was not able to identify this metal and gave it the names "aurum paradoxum" (paradoxical gold) and "metallum problematicum" (problem metal), because it did not exhibit the properties predicted for antimony.
In 1789, a Hungarian scientist, Pál Kitaibel, discovered the element independently in an ore from Deutsch-Pilsen that had been regarded as argentiferous molybdenite, but later he gave the credit to Müller. In 1798, it was named by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who had earlier isolated it from the mineral calaverite.
The 1960s brought an increase in thermoelectric applications for tellurium (as bismuth telluride), and in free-machining steel alloys, which became the dominant use.
The principal source of tellurium is from anode sludges from the electrolytic refining of blister copper. It is a component of dusts from blast furnace refining of lead. Treatment of 1000 tons of copper ore typically yields one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tellurium.
The anode sludges contain the selenides and tellurides of the noble metals in compounds with the formula M2Se or M2Te (M = Cu, Ag, Au). At temperatures of 500 °C the anode sludges are roasted with sodium carbonate under air. The metal ions are reduced to the metals, while the telluride is converted to sodium tellurite.
Tellurites can be leached from the mixture with water and are normally present as hydrotellurites HTeO3− in solution. Selenites are also formed during this process, but they can be separated by adding sulfuric acid. The hydrotellurites are converted into the insoluble tellurium dioxide while the selenites stay in solution.
The metal is produced from the oxide (reduced) either by electrolysis or by reacting the tellurium dioxide with sulfur dioxide in sulfuric acid.
Commercial-grade tellurium is usually marketed as 200-mesh powder but is also available as slabs, ingots, sticks, or lumps. The year-end price for tellurium in 2000 was US$14 per pound. In recent years, the tellurium price was driven up by increased demand and limited supply, reaching as high as US$100 per pound in 2006. Despite the expectation that improved production methods will double production, the United States Department of Energy (DoE) anticipates a supply shortfall of tellurium by 2025.
Tellurium is produced mainly in the United States, Peru, Japan and Canada. The British Geological Survey gives the following production numbers for 2009: United States 50 t, Peru 7 t, Japan 40 t and Canada 16 t.
Tellurium belongs to the chalcogen (group 16) family of elements on the periodic table, which also includes oxygen, sulfur, selenium and polonium: Tellurium and selenium compounds are similar. Tellurium exhibits the oxidation states −2, +2, +4 and +6, with +4 being most common.
Reduction of Te metal produces the tellurides and polytellurides, Ten2−. The −2 oxidation state is exhibited in binary compounds with many metals, such as zinc telluride, , produced by heating tellurium with zinc. Decomposition of with hydrochloric acid yields hydrogen telluride (), a highly unstable analogue of the other chalcogen hydrides, , and :
The +2 oxidation state is exhibited by the dihalides, , and . The dihalides have not been obtained in pure form, although they are known decomposition products of the tetrahalides in organic solvents, and the derived tetrahalotellurates are well-characterized:
where X is Cl, Br, or I. These anions are square planar in geometry. Polynuclear anionic species also exist, such as the dark brown , and the black .
Fluorine forms two halides with tellurium: the mixed-valence and . In the +6 oxidation state, the structural group occurs in a number of compounds such as , , , and . The square antiprismatic anion is also attested. The other halogens do not form halides with tellurium in the +6 oxidation state, but only tetrahalides (, and ) in the +4 state, and other lower halides (, , , and two forms of ). In the +4 oxidation state, halotellurate anions are known, such as and . Halotellurium cations are also attested, including , found in .
Tellurium monoxide was first reported in 1883 as a black amorphous solid formed by the heat decomposition of in vacuum, disproportionating into tellurium dioxide, and elemental tellurium upon heating. Since then, however, existence in the solid phase is doubted and in dispute, although it is known as a vapor fragment; the black solid may be merely an equimolar mixture of elemental tellurium and tellurium dioxide.
Tellurium dioxide is formed by heating tellurium in air, where it burns with a blue flame. Tellurium trioxide, β-, is obtained by thermal decomposition of . The other two forms of trioxide reported in the literature, the α- and γ- forms, were found not to be true oxides of tellurium in the +6 oxidation state, but a mixture of , and . Tellurium also exhibits mixed-valence oxides, and .
The tellurium oxides and hydrated oxides form a series of acids, including tellurous acid (), orthotelluric acid () and metatelluric acid (). The two forms of telluric acid form "tellurate" salts containing the TeO and TeO anions, respectively. Tellurous acid forms "tellurite" salts containing the anion TeO.
When tellurium is treated with concentrated sulfuric acid, the result is a red solution of the Zintl ion, . The oxidation of tellurium by in liquid produces the same square planar cation, in addition to the trigonal prismatic, yellow-orange :
Other tellurium Zintl cations include the polymeric and the blue-black , consisting of two fused 5-membered tellurium rings. The latter cation is formed by the reaction of tellurium with tungsten hexachloride:
Interchalcogen cations also exist, such as (distorted cubic geometry) and . These are formed by oxidizing mixtures of tellurium and selenium with or .
Tellurium does not readily form analogues of alcohols and thiols, with the functional group –TeH, that are called tellurols. The –TeH functional group is also attributed using the prefix "tellanyl-". Like H2Te, these species are unstable with respect to loss of hydrogen. Telluraethers (R–Te–R) are more stable, as are telluroxides.
The largest consumer of tellurium is metallurgy in iron, stainless steel, copper, and lead alloys. The addition to steel and copper produces an alloy more machinable than otherwise. It is alloyed into cast iron for promoting chill for spectroscopy, where the presence of electrically conductive free graphite tends to interfere with spark emission testing results. In lead, tellurium improves strength and durability, and decreases the corrosive action of sulfuric acid.
Tellurium is used in cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar panels. National Renewable Energy Laboratory lab tests of tellurium demonstrated some of the greatest efficiencies for solar cell electric power generators. Massive commercial production of CdTe solar panels by First Solar in recent years has significantly increased tellurium demand. Replacing some of the cadmium in CdTe by zinc, producing (Cd,Zn)Te, produces a solid-state X-ray detector, providing an alternative to single-use film badges.
Infrared sensitive semiconductor material is formed by alloying tellurium with cadmium and mercury to form mercury cadmium telluride.
Organotellurium compounds such as dimethyl telluride, diethyl telluride, diisopropyl telluride, diallyl telluride and methyl allyl telluride are precursors for synthesizing metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy growth of II-VI compound semiconductors. Diisopropyl telluride (DIPTe) is the preferred precursor for low-temperature growth of CdHgTe by MOVPE. The greatest purity metalorganics of both selenium and tellurium are used in these processes. The compounds for semiconductor industry and are prepared by adduct purification.
Tellurium, as tellurium suboxide, is used in the media layer of rewritable optical discs, including ReWritable Compact Discs (CD-RW), ReWritable Digital Video Discs (DVD-RW), and ReWritable Blu-ray Discs.
Tellurium dioxide is used to create acousto-optic modulators (AOTFs and AOBSs) for confocal microscopy.
Tellurium is used in the new phase change memory chips developed by Intel. Bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) and lead telluride are working elements of thermoelectric devices. Lead telluride is used in far-infrared detectors.
Tellurium has no known biological function, although fungi can incorporate it in place of sulfur and selenium into amino acids such as telluro-cysteine and telluro-methionine. Organisms have shown a highly variable tolerance to tellurium compounds. Many bacteria, such as "Pseudomonas aeruginosa", take up tellurite and reduce it to elemental tellurium, which accumulates and causes a characteristic and often dramatic darkening of cells. In yeast, this reduction is mediated by the sulfate assimilation pathway. Tellurium accumulation seems to account for a major part of the toxicity effects. Many organisms also metabolize tellurium partly to form dimethyl telluride, although dimethyl ditelluride is also formed by some species. Dimethyl telluride has been observed in hot springs at very low concentrations.
Tellurium and tellurium compounds are considered to be mildly toxic and need to be handled with care, although acute poisoning is rare. Tellurium poisoning is particularly difficult to treat as many chelation agents used in the treatment of metal poisoning will increase the toxicity of tellurium. Tellurium is not reported to be carcinogenic.
Humans exposed to as little as 0.01 mg/m3 or less in air exude a foul garlic-like odor known as "tellurium breath".
This is caused by the body converting tellurium from any oxidation state to dimethyl telluride, (CH3)2Te. This is a volatile compound with a pungent garlic-like smell. Even though the metabolic pathways of tellurium are not known, it is generally assumed that they resemble those of the more extensively studied selenium because the final methylated metabolic products of the two elements are similar.
People can be exposed to tellurium in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) limits (permissible exposure limit) tellurium exposure in the workplace to 0.1 mg/m3 over an eight-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set the recommended exposure limit (REL) at 0.1 mg/m3 over an eight-hour workday. In concentrations of 25 mg/m3, tellurium is immediately dangerous to life and health. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30043 |
Thorium
Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element with the symbol Th and atomic number 90. Thorium is silvery and tarnishes black when it is exposed to air, forming thorium dioxide; it is moderately hard, malleable, and has a high melting point. Thorium is an electropositive actinide whose chemistry is dominated by the +4 oxidation state; it is quite reactive and can ignite in air when finely divided.
All known thorium isotopes are unstable. The most stable isotope, 232Th, has a half-life of 14.05 billion years, or about the age of the universe; it decays very slowly via alpha decay, starting a decay chain named the thorium series that ends at stable 208Pb. On Earth, thorium, bismuth, and uranium are the only three radioactive elements that still occur naturally in large quantities as primordial elements. It is estimated to be over three times as abundant as uranium in the Earth's crust, and is chiefly refined from monazite sands as a by-product of extracting rare-earth metals.
Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Norwegian amateur mineralogist Morten Thrane Esmark and identified by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Its first applications were developed in the late 19th century. Thorium's radioactivity was widely acknowledged during the first decades of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, thorium was replaced in many uses due to concerns about its radioactivity.
Thorium is still being used as an alloying element in TIG welding electrodes but is slowly being replaced in the field with different compositions. It was also material in high-end optics and scientific instrumentation, used in some broadcast vacuum tubes, and as the light source in gas mantles, but these uses have become marginal. It has been suggested as a replacement for uranium as nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors, and several thorium reactors have been built.
Thorium is a moderately soft, paramagnetic, bright silvery radioactive actinide metal. In the periodic table, it lies to the right of actinium, to the left of protactinium, and below cerium. Pure thorium is very ductile and, as normal for metals, can be cold-rolled, swaged, and drawn. At room temperature, thorium metal has a face-centred cubic crystal structure; it has two other forms, one at high temperature (over 1360 °C; body-centred cubic) and one at high pressure (around 100 GPa; body-centred tetragonal).
Thorium metal has a bulk modulus (a measure of resistance to compression of a material) of 54 GPa, about the same as tin's (58.2 GPa). Aluminium's is 75.2 GPa; copper's 137.8 GPa; and mild steel's is 160–169 GPa. Thorium is about as hard as soft steel, so when heated it can be rolled into sheets and pulled into wire.
Thorium is nearly half as dense as uranium and plutonium and is harder than both. It becomes superconductive below 1.4 K. Thorium's melting point of 1750 °C is above both those of actinium (1227 °C) and protactinium (1568 °C). At the start of period 7, from francium to thorium, the melting points of the elements increase (as in other periods), because the number of delocalised electrons each atom contributes increases from one in francium to four in thorium, leading to greater attraction between these electrons and the metal ions as their charge increases from one to four. After thorium, there is a new downward trend in melting points from thorium to plutonium, where the number of f electrons increases from about 0.4 to about 6: this trend is due to the increasing hybridisation of the 5f and 6d orbitals and the formation of directional bonds resulting in more complex crystal structures and weakened metallic bonding. (The f-electron count for thorium metal is a non-integer due to a 5f–6d overlap.) Among the actinides up to californium, which can be studied in at least milligram quantities, thorium has the highest melting and boiling points and second-lowest density; only actinium is lighter. Thorium's boiling point of 4788 °C is the fifth-highest among all the elements with known boiling points.
The properties of thorium vary widely depending on the degree of impurities in the sample. The major impurity is usually thorium dioxide (ThO2); even the purest thorium specimens usually contain about a tenth of a percent of the dioxide. Experimental measurements of its density give values between 11.5 and 11.66 g/cm3: these are slightly lower than the theoretically expected value of 11.7 g/cm3 calculated from thorium's lattice parameters, perhaps due to microscopic voids forming in the metal when it is cast. These values lie between those of its neighbours actinium (10.1 g/cm3) and protactinium (15.4 g/cm3), part of a trend across the early actinides.
Thorium can form alloys with many other metals. Addition of small proportions of thorium improves the mechanical strength of magnesium, and thorium-aluminum alloys have been considered as a way to store thorium in proposed future thorium nuclear reactors. Thorium forms eutectic mixtures with chromium and uranium, and it is completely miscible in both solid and liquid states with its lighter congener cerium.
All but two elements up to bismuth (element 83) have an isotope that is practically stable for all purposes ("classically stable"), with the exceptions being technetium and promethium (elements 43 and 61). All elements from polonium (element 84) onward are measurably radioactive. 232Th is one of the three nuclides beyond bismuth (the other two being 235U and 238U) that have half-lives measured in billions of years; its half-life is 14.05 billion years, about three times the age of the earth, and slightly longer than the age of the universe. Four-fifths of the thorium present at Earth's formation has survived to the present. 232Th is the only isotope of thorium occurring in quantity in nature. Its stability is attributed to its closed nuclear subshell with 142 neutrons. Thorium has a characteristic terrestrial isotopic composition, with atomic weight 232.0377(4). It is one of only four radioactive elements (along with bismuth, protactinium and uranium) that occur in large enough quantities on Earth for a standard atomic weight to be determined.
Thorium nuclei are susceptible to alpha decay because the strong nuclear force cannot overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between their protons. The alpha decay of 232Th initiates the 4"n" decay chain which includes isotopes with a mass number divisible by 4 (hence the name; it is also called the thorium series after its progenitor). This chain of consecutive alpha and beta decays begins with the decay of 232Th to 228Ra and terminates at 208Pb. Any sample of thorium or its compounds contains traces of these daughters, which are isotopes of thallium, lead, bismuth, polonium, radon, radium, and actinium. Natural thorium samples can be chemically purified to extract useful daughter nuclides, such as 212Pb, which is used in nuclear medicine for cancer therapy. 227Th (alpha emitter with an 18.68 days half-life) can also be used in cancer treatments such as targeted alpha therapies. 232Th also very occasionally undergoes spontaneous fission rather than alpha decay, and has left evidence of doing so in its minerals (as trapped xenon gas formed as a fission product), but the partial half-life of this process is very large at over 1021 years and alpha decay predominates.
Thirty radioisotopes have been characterised, which range in mass number from 209 to 238. After 232Th, the most stable of them (with respective half-lives) are 230Th (75,380 years), 229Th (7,340 years), 228Th (1.92 years), 234Th (24.10 days), and 227Th (18.68 days). All of these isotopes occur in nature as trace radioisotopes due to their presence in the decay chains of 232Th, 235U, 238U, and 237Np: the last of these is long extinct in nature due to its short half-life (2.14 million years), but is continually produced in minute traces from neutron capture in uranium ores. All of the remaining thorium isotopes have half-lives that are less than thirty days and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than ten minutes.
In deep seawaters the isotope 230Th makes up to 0.04% of natural thorium. This is because its parent 238U is soluble in water, but 230Th is insoluble and precipitates into the sediment. Uranium ores with low thorium concentrations can be purified to produce gram-sized thorium samples of which over a quarter is the 230Th isotope, since 230Th is one of the daughters of 238U. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) reclassified thorium as a binuclidic element in 2013; it had formerly been considered a mononuclidic element.
Thorium has three known nuclear isomers (or metastable states), 216m1Th, 216m2Th, and 229mTh. 229mTh has the lowest known excitation energy of any isomer, measured to be . This is so low that when it undergoes isomeric transition, the emitted gamma radiation is in the ultraviolet range.
Different isotopes of thorium are chemically identical, but have slightly differing physical properties: for example, the densities of pure 228Th, 229Th, 230Th, and 232Th are respectively expected to be 11.5, 11.6, 11.6, and 11.7 g/cm3. The isotope 229Th is expected to be fissionable with a bare critical mass of 2839 kg, although with steel reflectors this value could drop to 994 kg. 232Th is not fissionable, but it is fertile as it can be converted to fissile 233U by neutron capture and subsequent beta decay.
Two radiometric dating methods involve thorium isotopes: uranium–thorium dating, based on the decay of 234U to 230Th, and ionium–thorium dating, which measures the ratio of 232Th to 230Th. These rely on the fact that 232Th is a primordial radioisotope, but 230Th only occurs as an intermediate decay product in the decay chain of 238U. Uranium–thorium dating is a relatively short-range process because of the short half-lives of 234U and 230Th relative to the age of the Earth: it is also accompanied by a sister process involving the alpha decay of 235U into 231Th, which very quickly becomes the longer-lived 231Pa, and this process is often used to check the results of uranium–thorium dating. Uranium–thorium dating is commonly used to determine the age of calcium carbonate materials such as speleothem or coral, because uranium is more soluble in water than thorium and protactinium, which are selectively precipitated into ocean-floor sediments, where their ratios are measured. The scheme has a range of several hundred thousand years. Ionium–thorium dating is a related process, which exploits the insolubility of thorium (both 232Th and 230Th) and thus its presence in ocean sediments to date these sediments by measuring the ratio of 232Th to 230Th. Both of these dating methods assume that the proportion of 230Th to 232Th is a constant during the period when the sediment layer was formed, that the sediment did not already contain thorium before contributions from the decay of uranium, and that the thorium cannot migrate within the sediment layer.
A thorium atom has 90 electrons, of which four are valence electrons. Three atomic orbitals are theoretically available for the valence electrons to occupy: 5f, 6d, and 7s. Despite thorium's position in the f-block of the periodic table, it has an anomalous [Rn]6d27s2 electron configuration in the ground state, as the 5f and 6d subshells in the early actinides are very close in energy, even more so than the 4f and 5d subshells of the lanthanides: thorium's 6d subshells are lower in energy than its 5f subshells, because its 5f subshells are not well-shielded by the filled 6s and 6p subshells and are destabilized. This is due to relativistic effects, which become stronger near the bottom of the periodic table, specifically the relativistic spin–orbit interaction. The closeness in energy levels of the 5f, 6d, and 7s energy levels of thorium results in thorium almost always losing all four valence electrons and occurring in its highest possible oxidation state of +4. This is different from its lanthanide congener cerium, in which +4 is also the highest possible state, but +3 plays an important role and is more stable. Thorium is much more similar to the transition metals zirconium and hafnium than to cerium in its ionization energies and redox potentials, and hence also in its chemistry: this transition-metal-like behaviour is the norm in the first half of the actinide series.
Despite the anomalous electron configuration for gaseous thorium atoms, metallic thorium shows significant 5f involvement. A hypothetical metallic state of thorium that had the [Rn]6d27s2 configuration with the 5f orbitals above the Fermi level should be hexagonal close packed like the group 4 elements titanium, zirconium, and hafnium, and not face-centred cubic as it actually is. The actual crystal structure can only be explained when the 5f states are invoked, proving that thorium, and not protactinium, acts as the first actinide metallurgically.
Tetravalent thorium compounds are usually colourless or yellow, like those of silver or lead, as the Th4+ ion has no 5f or 6d electrons. Thorium chemistry is therefore largely that of an electropositive metal forming a single diamagnetic ion with a stable noble-gas configuration, indicating a similarity between thorium and the main group elements of the s-block. Thorium and uranium are the most investigated of the radioactive elements because their radioactivity is low enough not to require special handling in the laboratory.
Thorium is a highly reactive and electropositive metal. With a standard reduction potential of −1.90 V for the Th4+/Th couple, it is somewhat more electropositive than zirconium or aluminium. Finely divided thorium metal can exhibit pyrophoricity, spontaneously igniting in air. When heated in air, thorium turnings ignite and burn with a brilliant white light to produce the dioxide. In bulk, the reaction of pure thorium with air is slow, although corrosion may occur after several months; most thorium samples are contaminated with varying degrees of the dioxide, which greatly accelerates corrosion. Such samples slowly tarnish, becoming grey and finally black at the surface.
At standard temperature and pressure, thorium is slowly attacked by water, but does not readily dissolve in most common acids, with the exception of hydrochloric acid, where it dissolves leaving a black insoluble residue of ThO(OH,Cl)H. It dissolves in concentrated nitric acid containing a small quantity of catalytic fluoride or fluorosilicate ions; if these are not present, passivation by the nitrate can occur, as with uranium and plutonium.
Most binary compounds of thorium with nonmetals may be prepared by heating the elements together. In air, thorium burns to form ThO2, which has the fluorite structure. Thorium dioxide is a refractory material, with the highest melting point (3390 °C) of any known oxide. It is somewhat hygroscopic and reacts readily with water and many gases; it dissolves easily in concentrated nitric acid in the presence of fluoride.
When heated in air, thorium dioxide emits intense blue light; the light becomes white when ThO2 is mixed with its lighter homologue cerium dioxide (CeO2, ceria): this is the basis for its previously common application in gas mantles. A flame is not necessary for this effect: in 1901, it was discovered that a hot Welsbach gas mantle (using ThO2 with 1% CeO2) remained at "full glow" when exposed to a cold unignited mixture of flammable gas and air. The light emitted by thorium dioxide is higher in wavelength than the blackbody emission expected from incandescence at the same temperature, an effect called candoluminescence. It occurs because ThO2 : Ce acts as a catalyst for the recombination of free radicals that appear in high concentration in a flame, whose deexcitation releases large amounts of energy. The addition of 1% cerium dioxide, as in gas mantles, heightens the effect by increasing emissivity in the visible region of the spectrum; and because cerium, unlike thorium, can occur in multiple oxidation states, its charge and hence visible emissivity will depend on the region on the flame it is found in (as such regions vary in their chemical composition and hence how oxidising or reducing they are).
Several binary thorium chalcogenides and oxychalcogenides are also known with sulfur, selenium, and tellurium.
All four thorium tetrahalides are known, as are some low-valent bromides and iodides: the tetrahalides are all 8-coordinated hygroscopic compounds that dissolve easily in polar solvents such as water. Many related polyhalide ions are also known. Thorium tetrafluoride has a monoclinic crystal structure like those of zirconium tetrafluoride and hafnium tetrafluoride, where the Th4+ ions are coordinated with F− ions in somewhat distorted square antiprisms. The other tetrahalides instead have dodecahedral geometry. Lower iodides ThI3 (black) and ThI2 (gold-coloured) can also be prepared by reducing the tetraiodide with thorium metal: they do not contain Th(III) and Th(II), but instead contain Th4+ and could be more clearly formulated as electride compounds. Many polynary halides with the alkali metals, barium, thallium, and ammonium are known for thorium fluorides, chlorides, and bromides. For example, when treated with potassium fluoride and hydrofluoric acid, Th4+ forms the complex anion , which precipitates as an insoluble salt, K2ThF6.
Thorium borides, carbides, silicides, and nitrides are refractory materials, like those of uranium and plutonium, and have thus received attention as possible nuclear fuels. All four heavier pnictogens (phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth) also form binary thorium compounds. Thorium germanides are also known. Thorium reacts with hydrogen to form the thorium hydrides ThH2 and Th4H15, the latter of which is superconducting below 7.5–8 K; at standard temperature and pressure, it conducts electricity like a metal. The hydrides are thermally unstable and readily decompose upon exposure to air or moisture.
In an acidic aqueous solution, thorium occurs as the tetrapositive aqua ion [Th(H2O)9]4+, which has tricapped trigonal prismatic molecular geometry: at pH 4+ ion is the largest of the tetrapositive actinide ions, and depending on the coordination number can have a radius between 0.95 and 1.14 Å. It is quite acidic due to its high charge, slightly stronger than sulfurous acid: thus it tends to undergo hydrolysis and polymerisation (though to a lesser extent than Fe3+), predominantly to [Th2(OH)2]6+ in solutions with pH 3 or below, but in more alkaline solution polymerisation continues until the gelatinous hydroxide Th(OH)4 forms and precipitates out (though equilibrium may take weeks to be reached, because the polymerisation usually slows down before the precipitation). As a hard Lewis acid, Th4+ favours hard ligands with oxygen atoms as donors: complexes with sulfur atoms as donors are less stable and are more prone to hydrolysis.
High coordination numbers are the rule for thorium due to its large size. Thorium nitrate pentahydrate was the first known example of coordination number 11, the oxalate tetrahydrate has coordination number 10, and the borohydride (first prepared in the Manhattan Project) has coordination number 14. These thorium salts are known for their high solubility in water and polar organic solvents.
Many other inorganic thorium compounds with polyatomic anions are known, such as the perchlorates, sulfates, sulfites, nitrates, carbonates, phosphates, vanadates, molybdates, and chromates, and their hydrated forms. They are important in thorium purification and the disposal of nuclear waste, but most of them have not yet been fully characterized, especially regarding their structural properties. For example, thorium nitrate is produced by reacting thorium hydroxide with nitric acid: it is soluble in water and alcohols and is an important intermediate in the purification of thorium and its compounds. Thorium complexes with organic ligands, such as oxalate, citrate, and EDTA, are much more stable. In natural thorium-containing waters, organic thorium complexes usually occur in concentrations orders of magnitude higher than the inorganic complexes, even when the concentrations of inorganic ligands are much greater than those of organic ligands.
Most of the work on organothorium compounds has focused on the cyclopentadienyl complexes and cyclooctatetraenyls. Like many of the early and middle actinides (up to americium, and also expected for curium), thorium forms a cyclooctatetraenide complex: the yellow Th(C8H8)2, thorocene. It is isotypic with the better-known analogous uranium compound uranocene. It can be prepared by reacting K2C8H8 with thorium tetrachloride in tetrahydrofuran (THF) at the temperature of dry ice, or by reacting thorium tetrafluoride with MgC8H8. It is unstable in air and decomposes in water or at 190 °C. Half sandwich compounds are also known, such as ("η"8-C8H8)ThCl2(THF)2, which has a piano-stool structure and is made by reacting thorocene with thorium tetrachloride in tetrahydrofuran.
The simplest of the cyclopentadienyls are Th(C5H5)3 and Th(C5H5)4: many derivatives are known. The former (which has two forms, one purple and one green) is a rare example of thorium in the formal +3 oxidation state; a formal +2 oxidation state occurs in a derivative. The chloride derivative [Th(C5H5)3Cl] is prepared by heating thorium tetrachloride with limiting K(C5H5) used (other univalent metal cyclopentadienyls can also be used). The alkyl and aryl derivatives are prepared from the chloride derivative and have been used to study the nature of the Th–C sigma bond.
Other organothorium compounds are not well-studied. Tetrabenzylthorium, Th(CH2C6H5), and tetraallylthorium, Th(C3H5)4, are known, but their structures have not been determined. They decompose slowly at room temperature. Thorium forms the monocapped trigonal prismatic anion [Th(CH3)7]3−, heptamethylthorate, which forms the salt [Li(tmeda)]3[ThMe7] (tmeda= Me2NCH2CH2NMe2). Although one methyl group is only attached to the thorium atom (Th–C distance 257.1 pm) and the other six connect the lithium and thorium atoms (Th–C distances 265.5–276.5 pm), they behave equivalently in solution. Tetramethylthorium, Th(CH3)4, is not known, but its adducts are stabilised by phosphine ligands.
232Th is a primordial nuclide, having existed in its current form for over ten billion years; it was forged in the cores of dying stars through the r-process and scattered across the galaxy by supernovae and neutron star mergers. The letter "r" stands for "rapid neutron capture", and occurs in core-collapse supernovae, where heavy seed nuclei such as 56Fe rapidly capture neutrons, running up against the neutron drip line, as neutrons are captured much faster than the resulting nuclides can beta decay back toward stability. Neutron capture is the only way for stars to synthesise elements beyond iron because of the increased Coulomb barriers that make interactions between charged particles difficult at high atomic numbers and the fact that fusion beyond 56Fe is endothermic. Because of the abrupt loss of stability past 209Bi, the r-process is the only process of stellar nucleosynthesis that can create thorium and uranium; all other processes are too slow and the intermediate nuclei alpha decay before they capture enough neutrons to reach these elements.
In the universe, thorium is among the rarest of the primordial elements, because it is one of the two elements that can be produced only in the r-process (the other being uranium), and also because it has slowly been decaying away from the moment it formed. The only primordial elements rarer than thorium are thulium, lutetium, tantalum, and rhenium, the odd-numbered elements just before the third peak of r-process abundances around the heavy platinum group metals, as well as uranium. In the distant past the abundances of thorium and uranium were enriched by the decay of plutonium and curium isotopes, and thorium was enriched relative to uranium by the decay of 236U to 232Th and the natural depletion of 235U, but these sources have long since decayed and no longer contribute.
In the Earth's crust, thorium is much more abundant: with an abundance of 8.1 parts per million (ppm), it is one of the most abundant of the heavy elements, almost as abundant as lead (13 ppm) and more abundant than tin (2.1 ppm). This is because thorium is likely to form oxide minerals that do not sink into the core; it is classified as a lithophile. Common thorium compounds are also poorly soluble in water. Thus, even though the refractory elements have the same relative abundances in the Earth as in the Solar System as a whole, there is more accessible thorium than heavy platinum group metals in the crust.
Natural thorium is usually almost pure 232Th, which is the longest-lived and most stable isotope of thorium, having a half-life comparable to the age of the universe. Its radioactive decay is the largest single contributor to the Earth's internal heat; the other major contributors are the shorter-lived primordial radionuclides, which are 238U, 40K, and 235U in descending order of their contribution. (At the time of the Earth's formation, 40K and 235U contributed much more by virtue of their short half-lives, but they have decayed more quickly, leaving the contribution from 232Th and 238U predominant.) Its decay accounts for a gradual decrease of thorium content of the Earth: the planet currently has around 85% of the amount present at the formation of the Earth. The other natural thorium isotopes are much shorter-lived; of them, only 230Th is usually detectable, occurring in secular equilibrium with its parent 238U, and making up at most 0.04% of natural thorium.
Thorium only occurs as a minor constituent of most minerals, and was for this reason previously thought to be rare. Soil normally contains about 6 ppm of thorium.
In nature, thorium occurs in the +4 oxidation state, together with uranium(IV), zirconium(IV), hafnium(IV), and cerium(IV), and also with scandium, yttrium, and the trivalent lanthanides which have similar ionic radii. Because of thorium's radioactivity, minerals containing it are often metamict (amorphous), their crystal structure having been damaged by the alpha radiation produced by thorium. An extreme example is ekanite, (Ca,Fe,Pb)2(Th,U)Si8O20, which almost never occurs in nonmetamict form due to the thorium it contains.
Monazite (chiefly phosphates of various rare-earth elements) is the most important commercial source of thorium because it occurs in large deposits worldwide, principally in India, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Malaysia. It contains around 2.5% thorium on average, although some deposits may contain up to 20%. Monazite is a chemically unreactive mineral that is found as yellow or brown sand; its low reactivity makes it difficult to extract thorium from it. Allanite (chiefly silicates-hydroxides of various metals) can have 0.1–2% thorium and zircon (chiefly zirconium silicate, ZrSiO4) up to 0.4% thorium.
Thorium dioxide occurs as the rare mineral thorianite. Due to its being isotypic with uranium dioxide, these two common actinide dioxides can form solid-state solutions and the name of the mineral changes according to the ThO2 content. Thorite (chiefly thorium silicate, ThSiO4), also has a high thorium content and is the mineral in which thorium was first discovered. In thorium silicate minerals, the Th4+ and ions are often replaced with M3+ (where M= Sc, Y, or Ln) and phosphate () ions respectively. Because of the great insolubility of thorium dioxide, thorium does not usually spread quickly through the environment when released. The Th4+ ion is soluble, especially in acidic soils, and in such conditions the thorium concentration can reach 40 ppm.
In 1815, the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius analysed an unusual sample of gadolinite from a copper mine in Falun, central Sweden. He noted impregnated traces of a white mineral, which he cautiously assumed to be an earth (oxide in modern chemical nomenclature) of an unknown element. Berzelius had already discovered two elements, cerium and selenium, but he had made a public mistake once, announcing a new element, "gahnium", that turned out to be zinc oxide. Berzelius privately named the putative element "thorium" in 1817 and its supposed oxide "thorina" after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. In 1824, after more deposits of the same mineral in Vest-Agder, Norway, were discovered, he retracted his findings, as the mineral (later named xenotime) proved to be mostly yttrium orthophosphate.
In 1828, Morten Thrane Esmark found a black mineral on Løvøya island, Telemark county, Norway. He was a Norwegian priest and amateur mineralogist who studied the minerals in Telemark, where he served as vicar. He commonly sent the most interesting specimens, such as this one, to his father, Jens Esmark, a noted mineralogist and professor of mineralogy and geology at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania (today called Oslo). The elder Esmark determined that it was not a known mineral and sent a sample to Berzelius for examination. Berzelius determined that it contained a new element. He published his findings in 1829, having isolated an impure sample by reducing KThF5 with potassium metal. Berzelius reused the name of the previous supposed element discovery and named the source mineral thorite.
Berzelius made some initial characterizations of the new metal and its chemical compounds: he correctly determined that the thorium–oxygen mass ratio of thorium oxide was 7.5 (its actual value is close to that, ~7.3), but he assumed the new element was divalent rather than tetravalent, and so calculated that the atomic mass was 7.5 times that of oxygen (120 amu); it is actually 15 times as large. He determined that thorium was a very electropositive metal, ahead of cerium and behind zirconium in electropositivity. Metallic thorium was isolated for the first time in 1914 by Dutch entrepreneurs Dirk Lely Jr. and Lodewijk Hamburger.
In the periodic table published by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, thorium and the rare-earth elements were placed outside the main body of the table, at the end of each vertical period after the alkaline earth metals. This reflected the belief at that time that thorium and the rare-earth metals were divalent. With the later recognition that the rare earths were mostly trivalent and thorium was tetravalent, Mendeleev moved cerium and thorium to group IV in 1871, which also contained the modern carbon group (group 14) and titanium group (group 4), because their maximum oxidation state was +4. Cerium was soon removed from the main body of the table and placed in a separate lanthanide series; thorium was left with group 4 as it had similar properties to its supposed lighter congeners in that group, such as titanium and zirconium.
While thorium was discovered in 1828 its first application dates only from 1885, when Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle, a portable source of light which produces light from the incandescence of thorium oxide when heated by burning gaseous fuels. Many applications were subsequently found for thorium and its compounds, including ceramics, carbon arc lamps, heat-resistant crucibles, and as catalysts for industrial chemical reactions such as the oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid.
Thorium was first observed to be radioactive in 1898, by the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt and later that year, independently, by the Polish-French physicist Marie Curie. It was the second element that was found to be radioactive, after the 1896 discovery of radioactivity in uranium by French physicist Henri Becquerel. Starting from 1899, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the American electrical engineer Robert Bowie Owens studied the radiation from thorium; initial observations showed that it varied significantly. It was determined that these variations came from a short-lived gaseous daughter of thorium, which they found to be a new element. This element is now named radon, the only one of the rare radioelements to be discovered in nature as a daughter of thorium rather than uranium.
After accounting for the contribution of radon, Rutherford, now working with the British physicist Frederick Soddy, showed how thorium decayed at a fixed rate over time into a series of other elements in work dating from 1900 to 1903. This observation led to the identification of the half-life as one of the outcomes of the alpha particle experiments that led to the disintegration theory of radioactivity. The biological effect of radiation was discovered in 1903. The newly discovered phenomenon of radioactivity excited scientists and the general public alike. In the 1920s, thorium's radioactivity was promoted as a cure for rheumatism, diabetes, and sexual impotence. In 1932, most of these uses were banned in the United States after a federal investigation into the health effects of radioactivity. 10,000 individuals in the United States had been injected with thorium during X-ray diagnosis; they were later found to suffer health issues such as leukaemia and abnormal chromosomes. Public interest in radioactivity had declined by the end of the 1930s.
Up to the late 19th century, chemists unanimously agreed that thorium and uranium were analogous to hafnium and tungsten; the existence of the lanthanides in the sixth row was considered to be a one-off fluke. In 1892, British chemist Henry Bassett postulated a second extra-long periodic table row to accommodate known and undiscovered elements, considering thorium and uranium to be analogous to the lanthanides. In 1913, Danish physicist Niels Bohr published a theoretical model of the atom and its electron orbitals, which soon gathered wide acceptance. The model indicated that the seventh row of the periodic table should also have f-shells filling before the d-shells that were filled in the transition elements, like the sixth row with the lanthanides preceding the 5d transition metals. The existence of a second inner transition series, in the form of the actinides, was not accepted until similarities with the electron structures of the lanthanides had been established; Bohr suggested that the filling of the 5f orbitals may be delayed to after uranium.
It was only with the discovery of the first transuranic elements, which from plutonium onward have dominant +3 and +4 oxidation states like the lanthanides, that it was realised that the actinides were indeed filling f-orbitals rather than d-orbitals, with the transition-metal-like chemistry of the early actinides being the exception and not the rule. In 1945, when American physicist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team had discovered the transuranic elements americium and curium, he proposed the actinide concept, realising that thorium was the second member of an f-block actinide series analogous to the lanthanides, instead of being the heavier congener of hafnium in a fourth d-block row.
In the 1990s, most applications that do not depend on thorium's radioactivity declined quickly due to safety and environmental concerns as suitable safer replacements were found. Despite its radioactivity, the element has remained in use for applications where no suitable alternatives could be found. A 1981 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States estimated that using a thorium gas mantle every weekend would be safe for a person, but this was not the case for the dose received by people manufacturing the mantles or for the soils around some factory sites. Some manufacturers have changed to other materials, such as yttrium. As recently as 2007, some companies continued to manufacture and sell thorium mantles without giving adequate information about their radioactivity, with some even falsely claiming them to be non-radioactive.
Thorium has been used as a power source on a prototype scale. The earliest thorium-based reactor was built at the Indian Point Energy Center located in Buchanan, New York, United States in 1962. One of the largest supplies of thorium in the world is in the country of India, where there is not much uranium. In the 1950s, India targeted achieving energy independence with their three-stage nuclear power programme. In most countries, uranium was relatively abundant and the progress of thorium-based reactors was slow; in the 20th century, three reactors were built in India and twelve elsewhere. Large-scale research was begun in 1996 by the International Atomic Energy Agency to study the use of thorium reactors; a year later, the United States Department of Energy started their research. Alvin Radkowsky of Tel Aviv University in Israel was the head designer of Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first American civilian reactor to breed thorium. He founded a consortium to develop thorium reactors, which included other laboratories: Raytheon Nuclear Inc. and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States, and the Kurchatov Institute in Russia.
In the 21st century, thorium's potential for reducing nuclear proliferation and its waste characteristics led to renewed interest in the thorium fuel cycle. India has projected meeting as much as 30% of its electrical demands through thorium by 2050. In February 2014, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), in Mumbai, India, presented their latest design for a "next-generation nuclear reactor" that burns thorium as its fuel ore, calling it the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AWHR). In 2009, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission said that India has a "long-term objective goal of becoming energy-independent based on its vast thorium resources."
When gram quantities of plutonium were first produced in the Manhattan Project, it was discovered that a minor isotope (240Pu) underwent significant spontaneous fission, which brought into question the viability of a plutonium-fueled gun-type nuclear weapon. While the Los Alamos team began work on the implosion-type weapon to circumvent this issue, the Chicago team discussed reactor design solutions. Eugene Wigner proposed to use the 240Pu-contaminated plutonium to drive the conversion of thorium into 233U in a special converter reactor. It was hypothesized that the 233U would then be usable in a gun-type weapon, though concerns about contamination from 232U were voiced. Progress on the implosion weapon was sufficient, and this converter was not developed further, but the design had enormous influence on the development of nuclear energy. It was the first detailed description of a highly enriched water-cooled, water-moderated reactor similar to future naval and power reactors.
During the Cold War the United States explored the possibility of using 232Th as a source of 233U to be used in a nuclear bomb; they fired a test bomb in 1955. They concluded that a 233U-fired bomb would be a very potent weapon, but it bore few sustainable "technical advantages" over the contemporary uranium–plutonium bombs, especially since 233U is difficult to produce in isotopically pure form.
Thorium metal was used in the radiation case of at least one nuclear weapon design deployed by the United States (the W71).
Energy, some of it in the form of visible light, is emitted when thorium is exposed to a source of energy itself, such as a cathode ray, heat or ultraviolet light. This effect is shared by cerium dioxide, which converts ultraviolet light into visible light more efficiently, but thorium dioxide gives a higher flame temperature, emitting less infrared light. Thorium in mantles, though still common, has been progressively replaced with yttrium since the late 1990s. According to the 2005 review by the United Kingdom's National Radiological Protection Board, "although [thoriated gas mantles] were widely available a few years ago, they are not any more."
During the production of incandescent filaments, recrystallisation of tungsten is significantly lowered by adding small amounts of thorium dioxide to the tungsten sintering powder before drawing the filaments. A small addition of thorium to tungsten thermocathodes considerably reduces the work function of electrons; as a result, electrons are emitted at considerably lower temperatures. Thorium forms a one-atom-thick layer on the surface of tungsten. The work function from a thorium surface is lowered possibly because of the electric field on the interface between thorium and tungsten formed due to thorium's greater electropositivity. Since the 1920s, thoriated tungsten wires have been used in electronic tubes and in the cathodes and anticathodes of X-ray tubes and rectifiers. Thanks to the reactivity of thorium with atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen, thorium also acts as a getter for impurities in the evacuated tubes. The introduction of transistors in the 1950s significantly diminished this use, but not entirely. Thorium dioxide is used in gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) to increase the high-temperature strength of tungsten electrodes and improve arc stability. Thorium oxide is being replaced in this use with other oxides, such as those of zirconium, cerium, and lanthanum.
Thorium dioxide is found in heat-resistant ceramics, such as high-temperature laboratory crucibles, either as the primary ingredient or as an addition to zirconium dioxide. An alloy of 90% platinum and 10% thorium is an effective catalyst for oxidising ammonia to nitrogen oxides, but this has been replaced by an alloy of 95% platinum and 5% rhodium because of its better mechanical properties and greater durability.
When added to glass, thorium dioxide helps increase its refractive index and decrease dispersion. Such glass finds application in high-quality lenses for cameras and scientific instruments. The radiation from these lenses can darken them and turn them yellow over a period of years and it degrades film, but the health risks are minimal. Yellowed lenses may be restored to their original colourless state by lengthy exposure to intense ultraviolet radiation. Thorium dioxide has since been replaced by rare-earth oxides in this application, as they provide similar effects and are not radioactive.
Thorium tetrafluoride is used as an antireflection material in multilayered optical coatings. It is transparent to electromagnetic waves having wavelengths in the range of 0.35–12 µm, a range that includes near ultraviolet, visible and mid infrared light. Its radiation is primarily due to alpha particles, which can be easily stopped by a thin cover layer of another material. Replacements for thorium tetrafluoride are being developed as of the 2010s.
Mag-Thor alloys (also called thoriated magnesium) found use in some aerospace applications, though such uses have been phased out due to concerns over radioactivity.
The main nuclear power source in a reactor is the neutron-induced fission of a nuclide; the synthetic fissile nuclei 233U and 239Pu can be bred from neutron capture by the naturally occurring quantity nuclides 232Th and 238U. 235U occurs naturally and is also fissile. In the thorium fuel cycle, the fertile isotope 232Th is bombarded by slow neutrons, undergoing neutron capture to become 233Th, which undergoes two consecutive beta decays to become first 233Pa and then the fissile 233U:
233U is fissile and can be used as a nuclear fuel in the same way as 235U or 239Pu. When 233U undergoes nuclear fission, the neutrons emitted can strike further 232Th nuclei, continuing the cycle. This parallels the uranium fuel cycle in fast breeder reactors where 238U undergoes neutron capture to become 239U, beta decaying to first 239Np and then fissile 239Pu.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium, and can satisfy world energy demands for longer.
232Th absorbs neutrons more readily than 238U, and 233U has a higher probability of fission upon neutron capture (92.0%) than 235U (85.5%) or 239Pu (73.5%). It also releases more neutrons upon fission on average. A single neutron capture by 238U produces transuranic waste along with the fissile 239Pu, but 232Th only produces this waste after five captures, forming 237Np. This number of captures does not happen for 98–99% of the 232Th nuclei because the intermediate products 233U or 235U undergo fission, and fewer long-lived transuranics are produced. Because of this, thorium is a potentially attractive alternative to uranium in mixed oxide fuels to minimise the generation of transuranics and maximise the destruction of plutonium.
Thorium fuels result in a safer and better-performing reactor core because thorium dioxide has a higher melting point, higher thermal conductivity, and a lower coefficient of thermal expansion. It is more stable chemically than the now-common fuel uranium dioxide, because the latter oxidises to triuranium octoxide (U3O8), becoming substantially less dense.
The used fuel is difficult and dangerous to reprocess because many of the daughters of 232Th and 233U are strong gamma emitters. All 233U production methods result in impurities of 232U, either from parasitic knock-out (n,2n) reactions on 232Th, 233Pa, or 233U that result in the loss of a neutron, or from double neutron capture of 230Th, an impurity in natural 232Th:
232U by itself is not particularly harmful, but quickly decays to produce the strong gamma emitter 208Tl. (232Th follows the same decay chain, but its much longer half-life means that the quantities of 208Tl produced are negligible.) These impurities of 232U make 233U easy to detect and dangerous to work on, and the impracticality of their separation limits the possibilities of nuclear proliferation using 233U as the fissile material. 233Pa has a relatively long half-life of 27 days and a high cross section for neutron capture. Thus it is a neutron poison: instead of rapidly decaying to the useful 233U, a significant amount of 233Pa converts to 234U and consumes neutrons, degrading the reactor efficiency. To avoid this, 233Pa is extracted from the active zone of thorium molten salt reactors during their operation, so that it does not have a chance to capture a neutron and will only decay to 233U.
The irradiation of 232Th with neutrons, followed by its processing, need to be mastered before these advantages can be realised, and this requires more advanced technology than the uranium and plutonium fuel cycle; research continues in this area. Others cite the low commercial viability of the thorium fuel cycle: the international Nuclear Energy Agency predicts that the thorium cycle will never be commercially viable while uranium is available in abundance—a situation which may persist "in the coming decades". The isotopes produced in the thorium fuel cycle are mostly not transuranic, but some of them are still very dangerous, such as 231Pa, which has a half-life of 32,760 years and is a major contributor to the long-term radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel.
Natural thorium decays very slowly compared to many other radioactive materials, and the emitted alpha radiation cannot penetrate human skin. As a result, handling small amounts of thorium, such as those in gas mantles, is considered safe, although the use of such items may pose some risks. Exposure to an aerosol of thorium, such as contaminated dust, can lead to increased risk of cancers of the lung, pancreas, and blood, as lungs and other internal organs can be penetrated by alpha radiation. Internal exposure to thorium leads to increased risk of liver diseases.
The decay products of 232Th include more dangerous radionuclides such as radium and radon. Although relatively little of those products are created as the result of the slow decay of thorium, a proper assessment of the radiological toxicity of 232Th must include the contribution of its daughters, some of which are dangerous gamma emitters, and which are built up quickly following the initial decay of 232Th due to the absence of long-lived nuclides along the decay chain. As the dangerous daughters of thorium have much lower melting points than thorium dioxide, they are volatilised every time the mantle is heated for use. In the first hour of use large fractions of the thorium daughters 224Ra, 228Ra, 212Pb, and 212Bi are released. Most of the radiation dose by a normal user arises from inhaling the radium, resulting in a radiation dose of up to 0.2 millisieverts per use, about a third of the dose sustained during a mammogram.
Some nuclear safety agencies make recommendations about the use of thorium mantles and have raised safety concerns regarding their manufacture and disposal; the radiation dose from one mantle is not a serious problem, but that from many mantles gathered together in factories or landfills is.
Thorium is odourless and tasteless. The chemical toxicity of thorium is low because thorium and its most common compounds (mostly the dioxide) are poorly soluble in water, precipitating out before entering the body as the hydroxide. Some thorium compounds are chemically moderately toxic, especially in the presence of strong complex-forming ions such as citrate that carry the thorium into the body in soluble form. If a thorium-containing object has been chewed or sucked, it loses 0.4% of thorium and 90% of its dangerous daughters to the body. Three quarters of the thorium that has penetrated the body accumulates in the skeleton. Absorption through the skin is possible, but is not a likely means of exposure. Thorium's low solubility in water also means that excretion of thorium by the kidneys and faeces is rather slow.
Tests on the thorium uptake of workers involved in monazite processing showed thorium levels above recommended limits in their bodies, but no adverse effects on health were found at those moderately low concentrations. No chemical toxicity has yet been observed in the tracheobronchial tract and the lungs from exposure to thorium. People who work with thorium compounds are at a risk of dermatitis. It can take as much as thirty years after the ingestion of thorium for symptoms to manifest themselves. Thorium has no known biological role.
Powdered thorium metal is pyrophoric: it ignites spontaneously in air. In 1964, the United States Department of the Interior listed thorium as "severe" on a table entitled "Ignition and explosibility of metal powders". Its ignition temperature was given as 270 °C (520 °F) for dust clouds and 280 °C (535 °F) for layers. Its minimum explosive concentration was listed as 0.075 oz/cu ft (0.075 kg/m3); the minimum igniting energy for (non-submicron) dust was listed as 5 mJ.
In 1956, the Sylvania Electric Products explosion occurred during reprocessing and burning of thorium sludge in New York City, United States. Nine people were injured; one died of complications caused by third-degree burns.
Thorium exists in very small quantities everywhere on Earth although larger amounts exist in certain parts: the average human contains about 40 micrograms of thorium and typically consumes three micrograms per day. Most thorium exposure occurs through dust inhalation; some thorium comes with food and water, but because of its low solubility, this exposure is negligible.
Exposure is raised for people who live near thorium deposits or radioactive waste disposal sites, those who live near or work in uranium, phosphate, or tin processing factories, and for those who work in gas mantle production. Thorium is especially common in the Tamil Nadu coastal areas of India, where residents may be exposed to a naturally occurring radiation dose ten times higher than the worldwide average. It is also common in northern Brazilian coastal areas, from south Bahia to Guarapari, a city with radioactive monazite sand beaches, with radiation levels up to 50 times higher than world average background radiation.
Another possible source of exposure is thorium dust produced at weapons testing ranges, as thorium is used in the guidance systems of some missiles. This has been blamed for a high incidence of birth defects and cancer at Salto di Quirra on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Terbium
Terbium is a chemical element with the symbol Tb and atomic number 65. It is a silvery-white, rare earth metal that is malleable, ductile, and soft enough to be cut with a knife. The ninth member of the lanthanide series, terbium is a fairly electropositive metal that reacts with water, evolving hydrogen gas. Terbium is never found in nature as a free element, but it is contained in many minerals, including cerite, gadolinite, monazite, xenotime, and euxenite.
Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium as a chemical element in 1843. He detected it as an impurity in yttrium oxide, Y2O3. Yttrium and terbium are named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden. Terbium was not isolated in pure form until the advent of ion exchange techniques.
Terbium is used to dope calcium fluoride, calcium tungstate and strontium molybdate, materials that are used in solid-state devices, and as a crystal stabilizer of fuel cells which operate at elevated temperatures. As a component of Terfenol-D (an alloy that expands and contracts when exposed to magnetic fields more than any other alloy), terbium is of use in actuators, in naval sonar systems and in sensors.
Most of the world's terbium supply is used in green phosphors. Terbium oxide is in fluorescent lamps and television and monitor cathode ray tubes (CRTs). Terbium green phosphors are combined with divalent europium blue phosphors and trivalent europium red phosphors to provide trichromatic lighting technology, a high-efficiency white light used for standard illumination in indoor lighting.
Terbium is a silvery-white rare earth metal that is malleable, ductile and soft enough to be cut with a knife. It is relatively stable in air compared to the earlier, more reactive lanthanides in the first half of the lanthanide series. Terbium exists in two crystal allotropes with a transformation temperature of 1289 °C between them. The 65 electrons of a terbium atom are arranged in the electron configuration [Xe]4f96s2; normally, only three electrons can be removed before the nuclear charge becomes too great to allow further ionization, but in the case of terbium, the stability of the half-filled [Xe]4f7 configuration allows further ionization of a fourth electron in the presence of very strong oxidizing agents such as fluorine gas.
The terbium(III) cation is brilliantly fluorescent, in a bright lemon-yellow color that is the result of a strong green emission line in combination with other lines in the orange and red. The yttrofluorite variety of the mineral fluorite owes its creamy-yellow fluorescence in part to terbium. Terbium easily oxidizes, and is therefore used in its elemental form specifically for research. Single terbium atoms have been isolated by implanting them into fullerene molecules.
Terbium has a simple ferromagnetic ordering at temperatures below 219 K. Above 219 K, it turns into a helical antiferromagnetic state in which all of the atomic moments in a particular basal plane layer are parallel, and oriented at a fixed angle to the moments of adjacent layers. This unusual antiferromagnetism transforms into a disordered paramagnetic state at 230 K.
Terbium metal is an electropositive element and oxidizes in the presence of most acids (such as sulfuric acid), all of the halogens, and even water.
Terbium also oxidizes readily in air to form a mixed terbium(III,IV) oxide:
The most common oxidation state of terbium is +3 (trivalent), such as . In the solid state, tetravalent terbium is also known, in compounds such as TbO2 and TbF4. In solution, terbium typically forms trivalent species, but can be oxidized to the tetravalent state with ozone in highly basic aqueous conditions.
The coordination and organometallic chemistry of terbium is similar to other lanthanides. In aqueous conditions, terbium can be coordinated by nine water molecules, which are arranged in a tricapped trigonal prismatic molecular geometry. Complexes of terbium with lower coordination number are also known, typically with bulky ligands like bis(trimethyl-silylamide), which forms the three-coordinate Tb[N(SiMe3)2]3 complex.
Most coordination and organometallic complexes contain terbium in the trivalent oxidation state.
Divalent (Tb2+) complexes are also known, usually with bulky cyclopentadienyl-type ligands. A few coordination compounds containing terbium in its tetravalent state are also known.
Terbium combines with nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, boron, selenium, silicon and arsenic at elevated temperatures, forming various binary compounds such as TbH2, TbH3, TbB2, Tb2S3, TbSe, TbTe and TbN. In those compounds, Tb mostly exhibits the oxidation states +3 and sometimes +2. Terbium(II) halogenides are obtained by annealing Tb(III) halogenides in presence of metallic Tb in tantalum containers. Terbium also forms sesquichloride Tb2Cl3, which can be further reduced to TbCl by annealing at 800 °C. This terbium(I) chloride forms platelets with layered graphite-like structure.
Other compounds include
Terbium(IV) fluoride is a strong fluorinating agent, emitting relatively pure atomic fluorine when heated rather than the mixture of fluoride vapors emitted from CoF3 or CeF4.
Naturally occurring terbium is composed of its only stable isotope, terbium-159; the element is thus mononuclidic and monoisotopic. Thirty-six radioisotopes have been characterized, with the heaviest being terbium-171 (with atomic mass of 170.95330(86) u) and lightest being terbium-135 (exact mass unknown). The most stable synthetic radioisotopes of terbium are terbium-158, with a half-life of 180 years, and terbium-157, with a half-life of 71 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are much less than a quarter of a year, and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than half a minute. The primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, 159Tb, is electron capture, which results in production of gadolinium isotopes, and the primary mode after is beta minus decay, resulting in dysprosium isotopes.
The element also has 27 nuclear isomers, with masses of 141–154, 156, and 158 (not every mass number corresponds to only one isomer). The most stable of them are terbium-156m, with a half-life of 24.4 hours, and terbium-156m2, with a half-life of 22.7 hours; this is longer than half-lives of most ground states of radioactive terbium isotopes, except those with mass numbers 155–161.
Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium in 1843. He detected it as an impurity in yttrium oxide, Y2O3. Yttrium is named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden. Terbium was not isolated in pure form until the advent of ion exchange techniques.
Mosander first separated yttria into three fractions, all named for the ore: yttria, erbia, and terbia. "Terbia" was originally the fraction that contained the pink color, due to the element now known as erbium. "Erbia" (containing what we now call terbium) originally was the fraction that was essentially colorless in solution. The insoluble oxide of this element was noted to be tinged brown.
Later workers had difficulty in observing the minor colorless "erbia", but the soluble pink fraction was impossible to miss. Arguments went back and forth as to whether erbia even existed. In the confusion, the original names got reversed, and the exchange of names stuck, so that the pink fraction referred eventually to the solution containing erbium (which in solution, is pink). It is now thought that workers using double sodium or potassium sulfates to remove ceria from yttria inadvertently lost the terbium into the ceria-containing precipitate. What is now known as terbium was only about 1% of the original yttria, but that was sufficient to impart a yellowish color to the yttrium oxide. Thus, terbium was a minor component in the original fraction containing it, where it was dominated by its immediate neighbors, gadolinium and dysprosium.
Thereafter, whenever other rare earths were teased apart from this mixture, whichever fraction gave the brown oxide retained the terbium name, until at last, the brown oxide of terbium was obtained in pure form. The 19th century investigators did not have the benefit of the UV fluorescence technology to observe the brilliant yellow or green Tb(III) fluorescence that would have made terbium easier to identify in solid mixtures or solutions.
Terbium is contained along with other rare earth elements in many minerals, including monazite ((Ce,La,Th,Nd,Y)PO4 with up to 0.03% terbium), xenotime (YPO4) and euxenite ((Y,Ca,Er,La,Ce,U,Th)(Nb,Ta,Ti)2O6 with 1% or more terbium). The crust abundance of terbium is estimated as 1.2 mg/kg. No terbium-dominant mineral has yet been found.
Currently, the richest commercial sources of terbium are the ion-adsorption clays of southern China; the concentrates with about two-thirds yttrium oxide by weight have about 1% terbia. Small amounts of terbium occur in bastnäsite and monazite; when these are processed by solvent extraction to recover the valuable heavy lanthanides as samarium-europium-gadolinium concentrate, terbium is recovered therein. Due to the large volumes of bastnäsite processed relative to the ion-adsorption clays, a significant proportion of the world's terbium supply comes from bastnäsite.
In 2018, a rich terbium supply was discovered off the coast of Japan's Minamitori Island, with the stated supply being "enough to meet the global demand for 420 years".
Crushed terbium-containing minerals are treated with hot concentrated sulfuric acid to produce water-soluble sulfates of rare earths. The acidic filtrates are partially neutralized with caustic soda to pH 3–4. Thorium precipitates out of solution as hydroxide and is removed. After that the solution is treated with ammonium oxalate to convert rare earths into their insoluble oxalates. The oxalates are decomposed to oxides by heating. The oxides are dissolved in nitric acid that excludes one of the main components, cerium, whose oxide is insoluble in HNO3. Terbium is separated as a double salt with ammonium nitrate by crystallization.
The most efficient separation routine for terbium salt from the rare-earth salt solution is ion exchange. In this process, rare-earth ions are sorbed onto suitable ion-exchange resin by exchange with hydrogen, ammonium or cupric ions present in the resin. The rare earth ions are then selectively washed out by suitable complexing agent. As with other rare earths, terbium metal is produced by reducing the anhydrous chloride or fluoride with calcium metal. Calcium and tantalum impurities can be removed by vacuum remelting, distillation, amalgam formation or zone melting.
Terbium is used as a dopant in calcium fluoride, calcium tungstate, and strontium molybdate, materials that are used in solid-state devices, and as a crystal stabilizer of fuel cells which operate at elevated temperatures, together with ZrO2.
Terbium is also used in alloys and in the production of electronic devices. As a component of Terfenol-D, terbium is used in actuators, in naval sonar systems, sensors, in the SoundBug device (its first commercial application), and other magnetomechanical devices. Terfenol-D is a terbium alloy that expands or contracts in the presence of a magnetic field. It has the highest magnetostriction of any alloy.
Terbium oxide is used in green phosphors in fluorescent lamps and color TV tubes. Sodium terbium borate is used in solid state devices. The brilliant fluorescence allows terbium to be used as a probe in biochemistry, where it somewhat resembles calcium in its behavior. Terbium "green" phosphors (which fluoresce a brilliant lemon-yellow) are combined with divalent europium blue phosphors and trivalent europium red phosphors to provide the trichromatic lighting technology which is by far the largest consumer of the world's terbium supply. Trichromatic lighting provides much higher light output for a given amount of electrical energy than does incandescent lighting.
Terbium is also used to detect endospores, as it acts as an assay of dipicolinic acid based on photoluminescence.
As with the other lanthanides, terbium compounds are of low to moderate toxicity, although their toxicity has not been investigated in detail. Terbium has no known biological role.
Tungsten
Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with the symbol W and atomic number 74. The name "tungsten" comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral "scheelite", which means "heavy stone". Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively combined with other elements in chemical compounds rather than alone. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite.
The free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the elements discovered, melting at . It also has the highest boiling point, at . Its density is 19.25 times that of water, comparable with that of uranium and gold, and much higher (about 1.7 times) than that of lead. Polycrystalline tungsten is an intrinsically brittle and hard material (under standard conditions, when uncombined), making it difficult to work. However, pure single-crystalline tungsten is more ductile and can be cut with a hard-steel hacksaw.
Tungsten's many alloys have numerous applications, including incandescent light bulb filaments, X-ray tubes (as both the filament and target), electrodes in gas tungsten arc welding, superalloys, and radiation shielding. Tungsten's hardness and high density give it military applications in penetrating projectiles. Tungsten compounds are also often used as industrial catalysts.
Tungsten is the only metal from the third transition series that is known to occur in biomolecules that are found in a few species of bacteria and archaea. It is the heaviest element known to be essential to any living organism. However, tungsten interferes with molybdenum and copper metabolism and is somewhat toxic to more familiar forms of animal life.
In its raw form, tungsten is a hard steel-grey metal that is often brittle and hard to work. If made very pure, tungsten retains its hardness (which exceeds that of many steels), and becomes malleable enough that it can be worked easily. It is worked by forging, drawing, or extruding but it is more commonly formed by sintering.
Of all metals in pure form, tungsten has the highest melting point (), lowest vapor pressure (at temperatures above ), and the highest tensile strength. Although carbon remains solid at higher temperatures than tungsten, carbon sublimes at atmospheric pressure instead of melting, so it has no melting point. Tungsten has the lowest coefficient of thermal expansion of any pure metal. The low thermal expansion and high melting point and tensile strength of tungsten originate from strong covalent bonds formed between tungsten atoms by the 5d electrons.
Alloying small quantities of tungsten with steel greatly increases its toughness.
Tungsten exists in two major crystalline forms: α and β. The former has a body-centered cubic structure and is the more stable form. The structure of the β phase is called A15 cubic; it is metastable, but can coexist with the α phase at ambient conditions owing to non-equilibrium synthesis or stabilization by impurities. Contrary to the α phase which crystallizes in isometric grains, the β form exhibits a columnar habit. The α phase has one third of the electrical resistivity and a much lower superconducting transition temperature TC relative to the β phase: ca. 0.015 K vs. 1–4 K; mixing the two phases allows obtaining intermediate TC values. The TC value can also be raised by alloying tungsten with another metal (e.g. 7.9 K for W-Tc). Such tungsten alloys are sometimes used in low-temperature superconducting circuits.
Naturally occurring tungsten consists of four stable isotopes (182W, 183W, 184W, and 186W) and one very long-lived radioisotope, 180W. Theoretically, all five can decay into isotopes of element 72 (hafnium) by alpha emission, but only 180W has been observed to do so, with a half-life of years; on average, this yields about two alpha decays of 180W per gram of natural tungsten per year. The other naturally occurring isotopes have not been observed to decay, constraining their half-lives to be at least 4 × 1021 years.
Another 30 artificial radioisotopes of tungsten have been characterized, the most stable of which are 181W with a half-life of 121.2 days, 185W with a half-life of 75.1 days, 188W with a half-life of 69.4 days, 178W with a half-life of 21.6 days, and 187W with a half-life of 23.72 h. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than 3 hours, and most of these have half-lives below 8 minutes. Tungsten also has 11 meta states, with the most stable being 179mW ("t"1/2 6.4 minutes).
Elemental tungsten resists attack by oxygen, acids, and alkalis.
The most common formal oxidation state of tungsten is +6, but it exhibits all oxidation states from −2 to +6. Tungsten typically combines with oxygen to form the yellow tungstic oxide, WO3, which dissolves in aqueous alkaline solutions to form tungstate ions, .
Tungsten carbides (W2C and WC) are produced by heating powdered tungsten with carbon. W2C is resistant to chemical attack, although it reacts strongly with chlorine to form tungsten hexachloride (WCl6).
In aqueous solution, tungstate gives the heteropoly acids and polyoxometalate anions under neutral and acidic conditions. As tungstate is progressively treated with acid, it first yields the soluble, metastable "paratungstate A" anion, , which over time converts to the less soluble "paratungstate B" anion, . Further acidification produces the very soluble metatungstate anion, , after which equilibrium is reached. The metatungstate ion exists as a symmetric cluster of twelve tungsten-oxygen octahedra known as the Keggin anion. Many other polyoxometalate anions exist as metastable species. The inclusion of a different atom such as phosphorus in place of the two central hydrogens in metatungstate produces a wide variety of heteropoly acids, such as phosphotungstic acid H3PW12O40.
Tungsten trioxide can form intercalation compounds with alkali metals. These are known as "bronzes"; an example is sodium tungsten bronze.
In 1781, Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that a new acid, tungstic acid, could be made from scheelite (at the time named tungsten). Scheele and Torbern Bergman suggested that it might be possible to obtain a new metal by reducing this acid. In 1783, José and Fausto Elhuyar found an acid made from wolframite that was identical to tungstic acid. Later that year, at the Royal Basque Society in the town of Bergara, Spain, the brothers succeeded in isolating tungsten by reduction of this acid with charcoal, and they are credited with the discovery of the element (they called it "wolfram" or "volfram").
The strategic value of tungsten came to notice in the early 20th century. British authorities acted in 1912 to free the Carrock mine from the German owned Cumbrian Mining Company and, during World War I, restrict German access elsewhere. In World War II, tungsten played a more significant role in background political dealings. Portugal, as the main European source of the element, was put under pressure from both sides, because of its deposits of wolframite ore at Panasqueira. Tungsten's desirable properties such as resistance to high temperatures, its hardness and density, and its strengthening of alloys made it an important raw material for the arms industry, both as a constituent of weapons and equipment and employed in production itself, e.g., in tungsten carbide cutting tools for machining steel.
Now tungsten is used in many more applications such as aircraft & motorsport ballast weights, darts, anti-vibration tooling, and sporting equipment.
The name "tungsten" (which means "heavy stone" in Swedish) is used in English, French, and many other languages as the name of the element, but not in the Nordic countries. "Tungsten" was the old Swedish name for the mineral scheelite. "Wolfram" (or "volfram") is used in most European (especially Germanic, Spanish and Slavic) languages and is derived from the mineral wolframite, which is the origin of the chemical symbol W. The name "wolframite" is derived from German ""wolf rahm"" ("wolf soot" or "wolf cream"), the name given to tungsten by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius in 1747. This, in turn, derives from Latin ""lupi spuma"", the name Georg Agricola used for the element in 1546, which translates into English as "wolf's froth" and is a reference to the large amounts of tin consumed by the mineral during its extraction.
Tungsten is found mainly in the minerals wolframite (iron–manganese tungstate (Fe,Mn)WO4, which is a solid solution of the two minerals ferberite FeWO4, and hübnerite MnWO4) and scheelite (calcium tungstate (CaWO4). Other tungsten minerals range in their level of abundance from moderate to very rare, and have almost no economical value.
Tungsten forms chemical compounds in oxidation states from -II to VI. Higher oxidation states, always as oxides, are relevant to its terrestrial occurrence and its biological roles, mid-level oxidation states are often associated with metal clusters, and very low oxidation states are typically associated with CO complexes. The chemistries of tungsten and molybdenum show strong similarities to each other, as well as contrasts with their lighter congener, chromium. The relative rarity of tungsten(III), for example, contrasts with the pervasiveness of the chromium(III) compounds. The highest oxidation state is seen in tungsten(VI) oxide (WO3). Molybdenum trioxide, which is volatile at high temperatures, is the precursor to virtually all other Mo compounds as well as alloys. Tungsten(VI) oxide is soluble in aqueous base, forming tungstate (WO42−). This oxyanion condenses at lower pH values, forming polyoxotungstates.
The broad range of oxidation states of tungsten is reflected in it various chlorides:
Organotungsten compounds are numerous and also span a range of oxidation states. Notable examples include the trigonal prismatic W(CH3)6 and octahedral W(CO)6.
The world's reserves of tungsten are 3,200,000 tonnes; they are mostly located in China (1,800,000 t), Canada (290,000 t), Russia (160,000 t), Vietnam (95,000 t) and Bolivia. As of 2017, China, Vietnam and Russia are the leading suppliers with 79,000, 7,200 and 3,100 tonnes, respectively. Canada had ceased production in late 2015 due the closure of its sole tungsten mine. Meanwhile, Vietnam had significantly increased its output in the 2010s, owing to the major optimization of its domestic refining operations, and overtook Russia and Bolivia.
China remains the world's leader not only in production, but also in export and consumption of tungsten products. The tungsten production gradually increases outside China because of the rising demand. Meanwhile, its supply by China is strictly regulated by the Chinese Government, which fights illegal mining and excessive pollution originating from mining and refining processes.
Tungsten is considered to be a conflict mineral due to the unethical mining practices observed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There is a large deposit of tungsten ore on the edge of Dartmoor in the United Kingdom, which was exploited during World War I and World War II as the Hemerdon Mine. Following increases in tungsten prices, this mine was reactivated in 2014, but ceased activities in 2018.
Tungsten is extracted from its ores in several stages. The ore is eventually converted to tungsten(VI) oxide (WO3), which is heated with hydrogen or carbon to produce powdered tungsten. Because of tungsten's high melting point, it is not commercially feasible to cast tungsten ingots. Instead, powdered tungsten is mixed with small amounts of powdered nickel or other metals, and sintered. During the sintering process, the nickel diffuses into the tungsten, producing an alloy.
Tungsten can also be extracted by hydrogen reduction of WF6:
or pyrolytic decomposition:
Tungsten is not traded as a futures contract and cannot be tracked on exchanges like the London Metal Exchange. The tungsten industry often uses independent pricing references such as Argus Media or Metal Bulletin as a basis for contracts. The prices are usually quoted for tungsten concentrate or WO3.
Approximately half of the tungsten is consumed for the production of hard materials – namely tungsten carbide – with the remaining major use being in alloys and steels. Less than 10% is used in other chemical compounds. Because of the high ductile-brittle transition temperature of tungsten, its products are conventionally manufactured through powder metallurgy, spark plasma sintering, chemical vapor deposition, hot isostatic pressing, and thermoplastic routes. A more flexible manufacturing alternative is selective laser melting, which is a form of 3D printing and allows creating complex three-dimensional shapes.
Tungsten is mainly used in the production of hard materials based on tungsten carbide, one of the hardest carbides, with a melting point of 2770 °C. WC is an efficient electrical conductor, but W2C is less so. WC is used to make wear-resistant abrasives, and "carbide" cutting tools such as knives, drills, circular saws, reloading ammunition dies, milling and turning tools used by the metalworking, woodworking, mining, petroleum and construction industries. Carbide tooling is actually a ceramic/metal composite, where metallic cobalt acts as a binding (matrix) material to hold the WC particles in place. This type of industrial use accounts for about 60% of current tungsten consumption.
The jewelry industry makes rings of sintered tungsten carbide, tungsten carbide/metal composites, and also metallic tungsten. WC/metal composite rings use nickel as the metal matrix in place of cobalt because it takes a higher luster when polished. Sometimes manufacturers or retailers refer to tungsten carbide as a metal, but it is a ceramic. Because of tungsten carbide's hardness, rings made of this material are extremely abrasion resistant, and will hold a burnished finish longer than rings made of metallic tungsten. Tungsten carbide rings are brittle, however, and may crack under a sharp blow.
The hardness and density of tungsten are applied in obtaining heavy metal alloys. A good example is high speed steel, which can contain as much as 18% tungsten. Tungsten's high melting point makes tungsten a good material for applications like rocket nozzles, for example in the UGM-27 Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile. Tungsten alloys are used in a wide range of applications, including the aerospace and automotive industries and radiation shielding. Superalloys containing tungsten, such as Hastelloy and Stellite, are used in turbine blades and wear-resistant parts and coatings.
Quenched (martensitic) tungsten steel (approx. 5.5% to 7.0% W with 0.5% to 0.7% C) was used for making hard permanent magnets, due to its high remanence and coercivity, as noted by John Hopkinson (1849–1898) as early as 1886. The magnetic properties of a metal or an alloy are very sensitive to microstructure. For example, while the element tungsten is not ferromagnetic (but iron is), when it is present in steel in these proportions, it stabilizes the martensite phase, which has greater ferromagnetism than the ferrite (iron) phase due to its greater resistance to magnetic domain wall motion.
Tungsten's heat resistance makes it useful in arc welding applications when combined with another highly-conductive metal such as silver or copper. The silver or copper provides the necessary conductivity and the tungsten allows the welding rod to withstand the high temperatures of the arc welding environment.
Tungsten, usually alloyed with nickel and iron or cobalt to form heavy alloys, is used in kinetic energy penetrators as an alternative to depleted uranium, in applications where uranium's radioactivity is problematic even in depleted form, or where uranium's additional pyrophoric properties are not desired (for example, in ordinary small arms bullets designed to penetrate body armor). Similarly, tungsten alloys have also been used in cannon shells, grenades and missiles, to create supersonic shrapnel. Germany used tungsten during World War II to produce shells for anti-tank gun designs using the Gerlich squeeze bore principle to achieve very high muzzle velocity and enhanced armor penetration from comparatively small caliber and light weight field artillery. The weapons were highly effective but a shortage of tungsten used in the shell core limited that effectiveness.
Tungsten has also been used in Dense Inert Metal Explosives, which use it as dense powder to reduce collateral damage while increasing the lethality of explosives within a small radius.
Tungsten(IV) sulfide is a high temperature lubricant and is a component of catalysts for hydrodesulfurization. MoS2 is more commonly used for such applications.
Tungsten oxides are used in ceramic glazes and calcium/magnesium tungstates are used widely in fluorescent lighting. Crystal tungstates are used as scintillation detectors in nuclear physics and nuclear medicine. Other salts that contain tungsten are used in the chemical and tanning industries.
Tungsten oxide (WO3) is incorporated into selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalysts found in coal-fired power plants. These catalysts convert nitrogen oxides (NOx) to nitrogen (N2) and water (H2O) using ammonia (NH3). The tungsten oxide helps with the physical strength of the catalyst and extends catalyst life.
Applications requiring its high density include weights, counterweights, ballast keels for yachts, tail ballast for commercial aircraft, rotor weights for civil and military helicopters, and as ballast in race cars for NASCAR and Formula One. Depleted uranium is also used for these purposes, due to similarly high density. Seventy-five-kg blocks of tungsten were used as "cruise balance mass devices" on the entry vehicle portion of the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft. It is an ideal material to use as a dolly for riveting, where the mass necessary for good results can be achieved in a compact bar. High-density alloys of tungsten with nickel, copper or iron are used in high-quality darts (to allow for a smaller diameter and thus tighter groupings) or for fishing lures (tungsten beads allow the fly to sink rapidly). Tungsten has seen use recently in nozzles for 3D printing; the high wear resistance and thermal conductivity of tungsten carbide improves the printing of abrasive filaments. Some cello C strings are wound with tungsten. The extra density gives this string more projection and often cellists will buy just this string and use it with three strings from a different set. Tungsten is used as an absorber on the electron telescope on the Cosmic Ray System of the two Voyager spacecraft.
Its density, similar to that of gold, allows tungsten to be used in jewelry as an alternative to gold or platinum. Metallic tungsten is hypoallergenic, and is harder than gold alloys (though not as hard as tungsten carbide), making it useful for rings that will resist scratching, especially in designs with a brushed finish.
Because the density is so similar to that of gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), and its price of the order of one-thousandth, tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold, which has been observed since the 1980s, or taking an existing gold bar, drilling holes, and replacing the removed gold with tungsten rods. The densities are not exactly the same, and other properties of gold and tungsten differ, but gold-plated tungsten will pass superficial tests.
Gold-plated tungsten is available commercially from China (the main source of tungsten), both in jewelry and as bars.
Because it retains its strength at high temperatures and has a high melting point, elemental tungsten is used in many high-temperature applications, such as Incandescent light bulb, cathode-ray tube, and vacuum tube filaments, heating elements, and rocket engine nozzles. Its high melting point also makes tungsten suitable for aerospace and high-temperature uses such as electrical, heating, and welding applications, notably in the gas tungsten arc welding process (also called tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding).
Because of its conductive properties and relative chemical inertness, tungsten is also used in electrodes, and in the emitter tips in electron-beam instruments that use field emission guns, such as electron microscopes. In electronics, tungsten is used as an interconnect material in integrated circuits, between the silicon dioxide dielectric material and the transistors. It is used in metallic films, which replace the wiring used in conventional electronics with a coat of tungsten (or molybdenum) on silicon.
The electronic structure of tungsten makes it one of the main sources for X-ray targets, and also for shielding from high-energy radiations (such as in the radiopharmaceutical industry for shielding radioactive samples of FDG). It is also used in gamma imaging as a material from which coded apertures are made, due to its excellent shielding properties. Tungsten powder is used as a filler material in plastic composites, which are used as a nontoxic substitute for lead in bullets, shot, and radiation shields. Since this element's thermal expansion is similar to borosilicate glass, it is used for making glass-to-metal seals. In addition to its high melting point, when tungsten is doped with potassium, it leads to an increased shape stability (compared with non-doped tungsten). This ensures that the filament does not sag, and no undesired changes occur.
Through top-down nanofabrication processes, tungsten nanowires have been fabricated and studied since 2002. Due to a particularly high surface to volume ratio, the formation of a surface oxide layer and the single crystal nature of such material, the mechanical properties differ fundamentally from those of bulk tungsten. Such tungsten nanowires have potential applications in nanoelectronics and importantly as pH probes and gas sensors. In similarity to silicon nanowires, tungsten nanowires are frequently produced from a bulk tungsten precursor followed by a thermal oxidation step to control morphology in terms of length and aspect ratio. Using the Deal–Grove model it is possible to predict the oxidation kinetics of nanowires fabricated through such thermal oxidation processing.
Due to its high melting point and good erosion resistance, tungsten is a lead candidate for the most exposed sections of the plasma-facing inner wall of nuclear fusion reactors. It will be used as the plasma-facing material of the divertor in the ITER reactor, and is currently in use in the JET test reactor.
Tungsten, at atomic number "Z" = 74, is the heaviest element known to be biologically functional. It is used by some bacteria and archaea, but not in eukaryotes. For example, enzymes called oxidoreductases use tungsten similarly to molybdenum by using it in a tungsten-pterin complex with molybdopterin (molybdopterin, despite its name, does not contain molybdenum, but may complex with either molybdenum or tungsten in use by living organisms). Tungsten-using enzymes typically reduce carboxylic acids to aldehydes. The tungsten oxidoreductases may also catalyse oxidations. The first tungsten-requiring enzyme to be discovered also requires selenium, and in this case the tungsten-selenium pair may function analogously to the molybdenum-sulfur pairing of some molybdopterin-requiring enzymes. One of the enzymes in the oxidoreductase family which sometimes employ tungsten (bacterial formate dehydrogenase H) is known to use a selenium-molybdenum version of molybdopterin. Acetylene hydratase is an unusual metalloenzyme in that it catalyzes a hydration reaction. Two reaction mechanisms have been proposed, in one of which there is a direct interaction between the tungsten atom and the C≡C triple bond. Although a tungsten-containing xanthine dehydrogenase from bacteria has been found to contain tungsten-molydopterin and also non-protein bound selenium, a tungsten-selenium molybdopterin complex has not been definitively described.
In soil, tungsten metal oxidizes to the tungstate anion. It can be selectively or non-selectively imported by some prokaryotic organisms and may substitute for molybdate in certain enzymes. Its effect on the action of these enzymes is in some cases inhibitory and in others positive. The soil's chemistry determines how the tungsten polymerizes; alkaline soils cause monomeric tungstates; acidic soils cause polymeric tungstates.
Sodium tungstate and lead have been studied for their effect on earthworms. Lead was found to be lethal at low levels and sodium tungstate was much less toxic, but the tungstate completely inhibited their reproductive ability.
Tungsten has been studied as a biological copper metabolic antagonist, in a role similar to the action of molybdenum. It has been found that tetrathiotungstates may be used as biological copper chelation chemicals, similar to the tetrathiomolybdates.
Tungsten is essential for some archaea. The following tungsten-utilizing enzymes are known:
A "wtp" system is known to selectively transport tungsten in archaea:
Because tungsten is a rare metal and its compounds are generally inert, the effects of tungsten on the environment are limited. The abundance of tungsten in the Earth's crust is thought to be about 1.5 parts per million. It is one of the more rare elements.
It was at first believed to be relatively inert and an only slightly toxic metal, but beginning in the year 2000, the risk presented by tungsten alloys, its dusts and particulates to induce cancer and several other adverse effects in animals as well as humans has been highlighted from in vitro and in vivo experiments.
The median lethal dose LD50 depends strongly on the animal and the method of administration and varies between 59 mg/kg (intravenous, rabbits) and 5000 mg/kg (tungsten metal powder, intraperitoneal, rats).
People can be exposed to tungsten in the workplace by breathing it in, swallowing it, skin contact, and eye contact. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and a short term limit of 10 mg/m3.
Tungsten is unique amongst the elements in that it has been the subject of patent proceedings. In 1928, a US court rejected General Electric's attempt to patent it, overturning granted in 1913 to William D. Coolidge.
Thulium
Thulium is a chemical element with the symbol Tm and atomic number 69. It is the thirteenth and third-last element in the lanthanide series. Like the other lanthanides, the most common oxidation state is +3, seen in its oxide, halides and other compounds; because it occurs so late in the series, however, the +2 oxidation state is also stabilized by the nearly full 4f shell that results. In aqueous solution, like compounds of other late lanthanides, soluble thulium compounds form coordination complexes with nine water molecules.
In 1879, the Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve separated from the rare earth oxide erbia another two previously unknown components, which he called holmia and thulia; these were the oxides of holmium and thulium, respectively. A relatively pure sample of thulium metal was first obtained in 1911.
Thulium is the second-least abundant of the lanthanides, after radioactively unstable promethium which is only found in trace quantities on Earth. It is an easily workable metal with a bright silvery-gray luster. It is fairly soft and slowly tarnishes in air. Despite its high price and rarity, thulium is used as the radiation source in portable X-ray devices, and in some solid-state lasers. It has no significant biological role and is not particularly toxic.
Pure thulium metal has a bright, silvery luster, which tarnishes on exposure to air. The metal can be cut with a knife, as it has a Mohs hardness of 2 to 3; it is malleable and ductile. Thulium is ferromagnetic below 32K, antiferromagnetic between 32 and 56K, and paramagnetic above 56K.
Thulium has two major allotropes: the tetragonal α-Tm and the more stable hexagonal β-Tm.
Thulium tarnishes slowly in air and burns readily at 150°C to form thulium(III) oxide:
Thulium is quite electropositive and reacts slowly with cold water and quite quickly with hot water to form thulium hydroxide:
Thulium reacts with all the halogens. Reactions are slow at room temperature, but are vigorous above 200°C:
Thulium dissolves readily in dilute sulfuric acid to form solutions containing the pale green Tm(III) ions, which exist as [Tm(OH2)9]3+ complexes:
Thulium reacts with various metallic and non-metallic elements forming a range of binary compounds, including TmN, TmS, TmC2, Tm2C3, TmH2, TmH3, TmSi2, TmGe3, TmB4, TmB6 and TmB12. In those compounds, thulium exhibits valence states +2 and +3, however, the +3 state is most common and only this state has been observed in thulium solutions. Thulium exists as a Tm3+ ion in solution. In this state, the thulium ion is surrounded by nine molecules of water. Tm3+ ions exhibit a bright blue luminescence.
Thulium's only known oxide is Tm2O3. This oxide is sometimes called "thulia". Reddish-purple thulium(II) compounds can be made by the reduction of thulium(III) compounds. Examples of thulium(II) compounds include the halides (except the fluoride). Some hydrated thulium compounds, such as TmCl3·7H2O and Tm2(C2O4)3·6H2O are green or greenish-white. Thulium dichloride reacts very vigorously with water. This reaction results in hydrogen gas and Tm(OH)3 exhibiting a fading reddish color. Combination of thulium and chalcogens results in thulium chalcogenides.
Thulium reacts with hydrogen chloride to produce hydrogen gas and thulium chloride. With nitric acid it yields thulium nitrate, or Tm(NO3)3.
The isotopes of thulium range from 145Tm to 179Tm. The primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, 169Tm, is electron capture, and the primary mode after is beta emission. The primary decay products before 169Tm are element 68 (erbium) isotopes, and the primary products after are element 70 (ytterbium) isotopes.
Thulium-169 is thulium's only primordial isotope and is the only isotope of thulium that is thought to be stable; it is predicted to undergo alpha decay to holmium-165 with a very long half-life. The longest-lived radioisotopes are thulium-171, which has a half-life of 1.92 years, and thulium-170, which has a half-life of 128.6 days. Most other isotopes have half-lives of a few minutes or less. Thirty-five isotopes and 26 nuclear isomers of thulium have been detected. Most isotopes of thulium lighter than 169 atomic mass units decay via electron capture or beta-plus decay, although some exhibit significant alpha decay or proton emission. Heavier isotopes undergo beta-minus decay.
Thulium was discovered by Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve in 1879 by looking for impurities in the oxides of other rare earth elements (this was the same method Carl Gustaf Mosander earlier used to discover some other rare earth elements).
Tantalum
Tantalum is a chemical element with the symbol Ta and atomic number 73. Previously known as "tantalium", it is named after "Tantalus", a villain from Greek mythology. Tantalum is a rare, hard, blue-gray, lustrous transition metal that is highly corrosion-resistant. It is part of the refractory metals group, which are widely used as minor components in alloys. The chemical inertness of tantalum makes it a valuable substance for laboratory equipment, and as a substitute for platinum. Its main use today is in tantalum capacitors in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, DVD players, video game systems and computers.
Tantalum, always together with the chemically similar niobium, occurs in the mineral groups tantalite, columbite and coltan (a mix of columbite and tantalite, though not recognised as a separate mineral species). Tantalum is considered a technology-critical element.
Tantalum was discovered in Sweden in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg, in two mineral samples – one from Sweden and the other from Finland. One year earlier, Charles Hatchett had discovered columbium (now niobium), and in 1809 the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston compared its oxide, columbite with a density of 5.918 g/cm3, to that of tantalum, tantalite with a density of 7.935 g/cm3. He concluded that the two oxides, despite their difference in measured density, were identical and kept the name tantalum. After Friedrich Wöhler confirmed these results, it was thought that columbium and tantalum were the same element. This conclusion was disputed in 1846 by the German chemist Heinrich Rose, who argued that there were two additional elements in the tantalite sample, and he named them after the children of Tantalus: niobium (from Niobe, the goddess of tears), and pelopium (from Pelops). The supposed element "pelopium" was later identified as a mixture of tantalum and niobium, and it was found that the niobium was identical to the columbium already discovered in 1801 by Hatchett.
The differences between tantalum and niobium were demonstrated unequivocally in 1864 by Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand, and Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville, as well as by Louis J. Troost, who determined the empirical formulas of some of their compounds in 1865. Further confirmation came from the Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, in 1866, who proved that there were only two elements. These discoveries did not stop scientists from publishing articles about the so-called "ilmenium" until 1871. De Marignac was the first to produce the metallic form of tantalum in 1864, when he reduced tantalum chloride by heating it in an atmosphere of hydrogen. Early investigators had only been able to produce impure tantalum, and the first relatively pure ductile metal was produced by Werner von Bolton in Charlottenburg in 1903. Wires made with metallic tantalum were used for light bulb filaments until tungsten replaced it in widespread use.
The name tantalum was derived from the name of the mythological Tantalus, the father of Niobe in Greek mythology. In the story, he had been punished after death by being condemned to stand knee-deep in water with perfect fruit growing above his head, both of which eternally "tantalized" him. (If he bent to drink the water, it drained below the level he could reach, and if he reached for the fruit, the branches moved out of his grasp.) Anders Ekeberg wrote "This metal I call "tantalum" ... partly in allusion to its incapacity, when immersed in acid, to absorb any and be saturated."
For decades, the commercial technology for separating tantalum from niobium involved the fractional crystallization of potassium heptafluorotantalate away from potassium oxypentafluoroniobate monohydrate, a process that was discovered by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac in 1866. This method has been supplanted by solvent extraction from fluoride-containing solutions of tantalum.
Tantalum is dark (blue-gray), dense, ductile, very hard, easily fabricated, and highly conductive of heat and electricity. The metal is renowned for its resistance to corrosion by acids; in fact, at temperatures below 150 °C tantalum is almost completely immune to attack by the normally aggressive aqua regia. It can be dissolved with hydrofluoric acid or acidic solutions containing the fluoride ion and sulfur trioxide, as well as with a solution of potassium hydroxide. Tantalum's high melting point of 3017 °C (boiling point 5458 °C) is exceeded among the elements only by tungsten, rhenium and osmium for metals, and carbon.
Tantalum exists in two crystalline phases, alpha and beta. The alpha phase is relatively ductile and soft; it has body-centered cubic structure (space group "Im3m", lattice constant "a" = 0.33058 nm), Knoop hardness 200–400 HN and electrical resistivity 15–60 µΩ⋅cm. The beta phase is hard and brittle; its crystal symmetry is tetragonal (space group "P42/mnm", "a" = 1.0194 nm, "c" = 0.5313 nm), Knoop hardness is 1000–1300 HN and electrical resistivity is relatively high at 170–210 µΩ⋅cm. The beta phase is metastable and converts to the alpha phase upon heating to 750–775 °C. Bulk tantalum is almost entirely alpha phase, and the beta phase usually exists as thin films obtained by magnetron
sputtering, chemical vapor deposition or electrochemical deposition from an eutectic molten salt solution.
Natural tantalum consists of two isotopes: 180mTa (0.012%) and 181Ta (99.988%). 181Ta is a stable isotope. 180mTa ("m" denotes a metastable state) is predicted to decay in three ways: isomeric transition to the ground state of 180Ta, beta decay to 180W, or electron capture to 180Hf. However, radioactivity of this nuclear isomer has never been observed, and only a lower limit on its half-life of 2.0 × 1016 years has been set. The ground state of 180Ta has a half-life of only 8 hours. 180mTa is the only naturally occurring nuclear isomer (excluding radiogenic and cosmogenic short-lived nuclides). It is also the rarest primordial isotope in the Universe, taking into account the elemental abundance of tantalum and isotopic abundance of 180mTa in the natural mixture of isotopes (and again excluding radiogenic and cosmogenic short-lived nuclides).
Tantalum has been examined theoretically as a "salting" material for nuclear weapons (cobalt is the better-known hypothetical salting material). An external shell of 181Ta would be irradiated by the intensive high-energy neutron flux from a hypothetical exploding nuclear weapon. This would transmute the tantalum into the radioactive isotope 182Ta, which has a half-life of 114.4 days and produces gamma rays with approximately 1.12 million electron-volts (MeV) of energy apiece, which would significantly increase the radioactivity of the nuclear fallout from the explosion for several months. Such "salted" weapons have never been built or tested, as far as is publicly known, and certainly never used as weapons.
Tantalum can be used as a target material for accelerated proton beams for the production of various short-lived isotopes including 8Li, 80Rb, and 160Yb.
Tantalum forms compounds in oxidation states −III to +V. Most commonly encountered are oxides of Ta(V), which includes all minerals. The chemical properties of Ta and Nb are very similar. In aqueous media, Ta only exhibit the +V oxidation state. Like niobium, tantalum is barely soluble in dilute solutions of hydrochloric, sulfuric, nitric and phosphoric acids due to the precipitation of hydrous Ta(V) oxide. In basic media, Ta can be solubilized due to the formation of polyoxotantalate species.
Tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) is the most important compound from the perspective of applications. Oxides of tantalum in lower oxidation states are numerous, including many defect structures, and are lightly studied or poorly characterized.
Tantalates, compounds containing [TaO4]3− or [TaO3]− are numerous. Lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) adopts a perovskite structure. Lanthanum tantalate (LaTaO4) contains isolated tetrahedra.
As in the cases of other refractory metals, the hardest known compounds of tantalum are nitrides and carbides. Tantalum carbide, TaC, like the more commonly used tungsten carbide, is a hard ceramic that is used in cutting tools. Tantalum(III) nitride is used as a thin film insulator in some microelectronic fabrication processes.
The best studied chalcogenide is TaS2, a layered semiconductor, as seen for other transition metal dichalcogenides. A tantalum-tellurium alloy forms quasicrystals.
Tantalum halides span the oxidation states of +5, +4, and +3. Tantalum pentafluoride (TaF5) is a white solid with a melting point of 97.0 °C. The anion [TaF7]2- is used for its separation from niobium. The chloride , which exists as a dimer, is the main reagent in synthesis of new Ta compounds. It hydrolyzes readily to an oxychloride. The lower halides and , feature Ta-Ta bonds.
Organotantalum compounds include pentamethyltantalum, mixed alkyltantalum chlorides, alkyltantalum hydrides, alkylidene complexes as well as cyclopentadienyl derivatives of the same. Diverse salts and substituted derivatives are known for the hexacarbonyl [Ta(CO)6]− and related isocyanides.
Tantalum is estimated to make up about 1 ppm or 2 ppm of the Earth's crust by weight. There are many species of tantalum minerals, only some of which are so far being used by industry as raw materials: tantalite (a series consisting of tantalite-(Fe), tantalite-(Mn) and tantalite-(Mg)) microlite (now a group name), wodginite, euxenite (actually euxenite-(Y)), and polycrase (actually polycrase-(Y)). Tantalite (Fe, Mn)Ta2O6 is the most important mineral for tantalum extraction. Tantalite has the same mineral structure as columbite (Fe, Mn) (Ta, Nb)2O6; when there is more tantalum than niobium it is called tantalite and when there is more niobium than tantalum is it called columbite (or niobite). The high density of tantalite and other tantalum containing minerals makes the use of gravitational separation the best method. Other minerals include samarskite and fergusonite.
The primary mining of tantalum is in Australia, where the largest producer, Global Advanced Metals, formerly known as Talison Minerals, operates two mines in Western Australia, Greenbushes in the Southwest and Wodgina in the Pilbara region. The Wodgina mine was reopened in January 2011 after mining at the site was suspended in late-2008 due to the global financial crisis. Less than a year after it reopened, Global Advanced Metals announced that due to again "... softening tantalum demand ...", and other factors, tantalum mining operations were to cease at the end of February 2012. Wodgina produces a primary tantalum concentrate which is further upgraded at the Greenbushes operation before being sold to customers. Whereas the large-scale producers of niobium are in Brazil and Canada, the ore there also yields a small percentage of tantalum. Some other countries such as China, Ethiopia, and Mozambique mine ores with a higher percentage of tantalum, and they produce a significant percentage of the world's output of it. Tantalum is also produced in Thailand and Malaysia as a by-product of the tin mining there. During gravitational separation of the ores from placer deposits, not only is cassiterite (SnO2) found, but a small percentage of tantalite also included. The slag from the tin smelters then contains economically useful amounts of tantalum, which is leached from the slag.
World tantalum mine production has undergone an important geographic shift since the start of the 21st century when production was predominantly from Australia and Brazil. Beginning in 2007 and through 2014, the major sources of tantalum production from mines dramatically shifted to the DRC, Rwanda, and some other African countries. Future sources of supply of tantalum, in order of estimated size, are being explored in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greenland, China, Mozambique, Canada, Australia, the United States, Finland, and Brazil.
It is estimated that there are less than 50 years left of tantalum resources, based on extraction at current rates, demonstrating the need for increased recycling.
Tantalum is considered a conflict resource. Coltan, the industrial name for a columbite–tantalite mineral from which niobium and tantalum are extracted, can also be found in Central Africa, which is why tantalum is being linked to warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). According to an October 23, 2003 United Nations report, the smuggling and exportation of coltan has helped fuel the war in the Congo, a crisis that has resulted in approximately 5.4 million deaths since 1998 – making it the world's deadliest documented conflict since World War II. Ethical questions have been raised about responsible corporate behavior, human rights, and endangering wildlife, due to the exploitation of resources such as coltan in the armed conflict regions of the Congo Basin. However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008.
The stated aim of the "Solutions for Hope Tantalum Project" is to "source conflict-free tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo"
Several steps are involved in the extraction of tantalum from tantalite. First, the mineral is crushed and concentrated by gravity separation. This is generally carried out near the mine site.
The refining of tantalum from its ores is one of the more demanding separation processes in industrial metallurgy. The chief problem is that tantalum ores contain significant amounts of niobium, which has chemical properties almost identical to those of Ta. A large number of procedures have been developed to address this challenge.
In modern times, the separation is achieved by hydrometallurgy. Extraction begins with leaching the ore with hydrofluoric acid together with sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid. This step allows the tantalum and niobium to be separated from the various non-metallic impurities in the rock. Although Ta occurs as various minerals, it is conveniently represented as the pentoxide, since most oxides of tantalum(V) behave similarly under these conditions. A simplified equation for its extraction is thus:
Completely analogous reactions occur for the niobium component, but the hexafluoride is typically predominant under the conditions of the extraction.
These equations are simplified: it is suspected that bisulfate (HSO4−) and chloride compete as ligands for the Nb(V) and Ta(V) ions, when sulfuric and hydrochloric acids are used, respectively. The tantalum and niobium fluoride complexes are then removed from the aqueous solution by liquid-liquid extraction into organic solvents, such as cyclohexanone, octanol, and methyl isobutyl ketone. This simple procedure allows the removal of most metal-containing impurities (e.g. iron, manganese, titanium, zirconium), which remain in the aqueous phase in the form of their fluorides and other complexes.
Separation of the tantalum "from" niobium is then achieved by lowering the ionic strength of the acid mixture, which causes the niobium to dissolve in the aqueous phase. It is proposed that oxyfluoride H2[NbOF5] is formed under these conditions. Subsequent to removal of the niobium, the solution of purified H2[TaF7] is neutralised with aqueous ammonia to precipitate hydrated tantalum oxide as a solid, which can be calcined to tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5).
Instead of hydrolysis, the H2[TaF7] can be treated with potassium fluoride to produce potassium heptafluorotantalate:
Unlike H2[TaF7], the potassium salt is readily crystallized and handled as a solid.
K2[TaF7] can be converted to metallic tantalum by reduction with sodium, at approximately 800 °C in molten salt.
In an older method, called the Marignac process, the mixture of H2[TaF7] and H2[NbOF5] was converted to a "mixture" of K2[TaF7] and K2[NbOF5], which was then be separated by fractional crystallization, exploiting their different water solubilities.
Tantalum can also be refined by electrolysis, using a modified version of the Hall–Héroult process. Instead of requiring the input oxide and output metal to be in liquid form, tantalum electrolysis operates on non-liquid powdered oxides. The initial discovery came in 1997 when Cambridge University researchers immersed small samples of certain oxides in baths of molten salt and reduced the oxide with electric current. The cathode uses powdered metal oxide. The anode is made of carbon. The molten salt at is the electrolyte. The first refinery has enough capacity to supply 3–4% of annual global demand.
All welding of tantalum must be done in an inert atmosphere of argon or helium in order to shield it from contamination with atmospheric gases. Tantalum is not solderable. Grinding tantalum is difficult, especially so for annealed tantalum. In the annealed condition, tantalum is extremely ductile and can be readily formed as metal sheets.
The major use for tantalum, as the metal powder, is in the production of electronic components, mainly capacitors and some high-power resistors. Tantalum electrolytic capacitors exploit the tendency of tantalum to form a protective oxide surface layer, using tantalum powder, pressed into a pellet shape, as one "plate" of the capacitor, the oxide as the dielectric, and an electrolytic solution or conductive solid as the other "plate". Because the dielectric layer can be very thin (thinner than the similar layer in, for instance, an aluminium electrolytic capacitor), a high capacitance can be achieved in a small volume. Because of the size and weight advantages, tantalum capacitors are attractive for portable telephones, personal computers, automotive electronics and cameras.
Tantalum is also used to produce a variety of alloys that have high melting points, strength, and ductility. Alloyed with other metals, it is also used in making carbide tools for metalworking equipment and in the production of superalloys for jet engine components, chemical process equipment, nuclear reactors, missile parts, heat exchangers, tanks, and vessels. Because of its ductility, tantalum can be drawn into fine wires or filaments, which are used for evaporating metals such as aluminium. Since it resists attack by body fluids and is nonirritating, tantalum is widely used in making surgical instruments and implants. For example, porous tantalum coatings are used in the construction of orthopedic implants due to tantalum's ability to form a direct bond to hard tissue.
Tantalum is inert against most acids except hydrofluoric acid and hot sulfuric acid, and hot alkaline solutions also cause tantalum to corrode. This property makes it a useful metal for chemical reaction vessels and pipes for corrosive liquids. Heat exchanging coils for the steam heating of hydrochloric acid are made from tantalum. Tantalum was extensively used in the production of ultra high frequency electron tubes for radio transmitters. Tantalum is capable of capturing oxygen and nitrogen by forming nitrides and oxides and therefore helped to sustain the high vacuum needed for the tubes when used for internal parts such as grids and plates.
The high melting point and oxidation resistance lead to the use of the metal in the production of vacuum furnace parts. Tantalum is extremely inert and is therefore formed into a variety of corrosion resistant parts, such as thermowells, valve bodies, and tantalum fasteners. Due to its high density, shaped charge and explosively formed penetrator liners have been constructed from tantalum. Tantalum greatly increases the armor penetration capabilities of a shaped charge due to its high density and high melting point. It is also occasionally used in precious watches e.g. from Audemars Piguet, F.P. Journe, Hublot, Montblanc, Omega, and Panerai. Tantalum is also highly bioinert and is used as an orthopedic implant material. The high stiffness of tantalum makes it necessary to use it as highly porous foam or scaffold with lower stiffness for hip replacement implants to avoid stress shielding. Because tantalum is a non-ferrous, non-magnetic metal, these implants are considered to be acceptable for patients undergoing MRI procedures. The oxide is used to make special high refractive index glass for camera lenses.
Tantalum receives far less attention in the environmental field than it does in other geosciences. Upper Crust Concentrations (UCC) and the Nb/Ta ratio in the upper crust and in minerals are available because these measurements are useful as a geochemical tool. The latest values for UCC and the Nb/Ta(w/w) ratio in the upper crust stand at 0.92 ppm and 12.7 respectively.
Little data is available on tantalum concentrations in the different environmental compartments, especially in natural waters where reliable estimates of ‘dissolved’ tantalum concentrations in seawater and freshwaters have not even been produced. Some values on dissolved concentrations in oceans have been published, but they are contradictory. Values in freshwaters fare little better, but, in all cases, they are probably below 1 ng L−1,since ‘dissolved’ concentrations in natural waters are well below most current analytical capabilities. Analysis requires pre-concentration procedures that, for the moment, do not give consistent results. And in any case, tantalum appears to be present in natural waters mostly as particulate matter rather than dissolved.
Values for concentrations in soils, bed sediments and atmospheric aerosols are easier to come by. Values in soils are close to 1 ppm and thus to UCC values. This indicates detrital origin. For atmospheric aerosols the values available are scattered and limited. When tantalum enrichment is observed, it is probably due to loss of more water-soluble elements in aerosols in the clouds.
Pollution linked to human use of the element has not been detected. Tantalum appears to be a very conservative element in biogeochemical terms, but its cycling and reactivity are still not fully understood.
Compounds containing tantalum are rarely encountered in the laboratory. The metal is highly biocompatible and is used for body implants and coatings, therefore attention may be focused on other elements or the physical nature of the chemical compound.
People can be exposed to tantalum in the workplace by breathing it in, skin contact, or eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for tantalum exposure in the workplace as 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and a short-term limit of 10 mg/m3. At levels of 2500 mg/m3, tantalum is immediately dangerous to life and health.
Torch
A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. In some countries "torch" in modern usage is the term for a battery-operated portable light.
From the Old French ""torche"" meaning "twisted thing", hence "torch formed of twisted tow dipped in wax", probably from Vulgar Latin *"torca", alteration of Late Latin "torqua", variant of classical Latin "torques" "collar of twisted metal", from "torquere" "to twist".
Torch construction has varied through history depending on the torch's purpose. Torches were usually constructed of a wooden stave with one end wrapped in a material which was soaked in a flammable substance. In ancient Rome some torches were made of sulfur mixed with lime. This meant that the fire would not diminish after being plunged into water. Modern procession torches are made from coarse hessian rolled into a tube and soaked in wax. A wooden handle is usually used, and a cardboard collar is attached to deflect any wax droplets. They are an easy, safe and relatively cheap way to hold a flame aloft in a parade or to provide illumination in any after-dark celebration.
Modern torches suitable for juggling are made of a wooden-and-metal or metal-only stave with one end wrapped in a Kevlar wick. This wick is soaked in a flammable liquid, usually paraffin (kerosene).
The torch is a common emblem of both enlightenment and hope. Thus the Statue of Liberty, actually "Liberty Enlightening the World", lifts her torch. Crossed reversed torches were signs of mourning that appear on Greek and Roman funerary monuments—a torch pointed downwards symbolizes death, while a torch held up symbolizes life, truth and the regenerative power of flame. The torch is also a symbol used by political parties, for instance by both Labour (from 1918 to 1980) and the Conservatives (from 1983 to 2006) in the UK, and the Malta Labour Party. In the seals of schools in the Philippines, the torch symbolizes the vision of education to provide enlightenment to all the students.
A torch carried in relay by runners is used to light the Olympic flame which burns without interruption until the end of the Games. These torches and the relay tradition were introduced in the 1936 Summer Olympics by Carl Diem, the chairman of the event because during the duration of the Ancient Olympic Games in Olympia, a sacred flame burnt inside of the temple of Hera, kept in custody by her priestess.
Juggling torches are often used as a prop in toss juggling: they can be flipped into the air in an end-over-end motion while being juggled, in the same manner as juggling clubs or juggling knives, but because of their sound and 'trail of flame', they can appear much more impressive to audiences. To a skilled juggler, there is only a slight chance of being burned, but they are still dangerous.
In former times, liturgical torches were carried in Eucharistic processions simply to give light. The Church eventually adopted their use for Solemn High Masses.
According to Adrian Fortescue, the more correct form of liturgical torches are non-freestanding (i.e. cannot stand up on their own). However, today, even in the Vatican, freestanding, tall candles in ornate candle-stick holders have replaced the former type. The torches are carried by torchbearers, who enter at the Sanctus and leave after Communion.
Anglicans of the High Church and some Lutherans use torches in some of their liturgical celebrations as well.
Torchlight march is a type of illuminated procession which is held after dark so that torches carried by the participants form a spectacle (other types of an illuminated procession involve candles, lanterns etc).
The association of a torch with love may date to the Greek and Roman tradition of a wedding torch,
lit in the bride's hearth on her wedding night, then used to light the hearth in her new home. Such a torch is associated with the Greek god of marriage Hymen.
The idiom to carry a torch (for someone) means to love or to be romantically infatuated with someone, especially when such feelings are not reciprocated. It is often used to characterize a situation in which a romantic relationship has ended, but where one partner still loves the other. It is considered by some to be dated, but still in wide usage. A torch song is typically a sentimental love song in which a singer laments an unrequited love.
The Qt Company
The Qt Company (pronounced "cute"; formerly Trolltech; originally Quasar Technologies,) is a software company based in Espoo, Finland. It oversees the development of its Qt application framework within the Qt Project. It was formed following the acquisition of Qt by Digia, but was later spun off into a separate, publicly traded company.
It has core R&D in Oslo, Norway, as well as large engineering teams in Berlin, Germany, and Oulu, Finland. The Qt Company operates in China, Finland, Germany, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India, and the United States.
The company provides software development platforms and frameworks, as well as expert consulting services. Its flagship product is Qt, a multi-platform Graphical User Interface (GUI) framework written in C++. Qt is popular with application developers using C++ but is supported by bindings for other programming languages too, such as Python. Qt also includes packages such as data structures and a networking library. The popular free and cross-platform KDE Plasma desktop environment and software compilation uses the Qt library. The company also employs several KDE developers.
In 2001 Trolltech introduced Qtopia which is based on Qt. Qtopia is an application platform for Linux-based devices such as mobile phones, portable media players, and home media. It is also used in many non-consumer products such as medical instruments and industrial devices. Qtopia Phone Edition was released in 2004, and their Greenphone smartphone is based on this platform.
Trolltech was founded by Eirik Chambe-Eng and Haavard Nord on 4 March 1994. They started writing Qt in 1991, and since then Qt has steadily expanded and improved. Trolltech completed an initial public offering (IPO) on the Oslo Stock Exchange in July, 2006.
On 28 January 2008, Nokia Corporation announced that they had entered into an agreement that Nokia would make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech. The total cost for Nokia was approximately €104 million. On 5 June 2008 Nokia's voluntary tender offer was approved for all the shares in Trolltech. By 17 June 2008, Nokia had completed its acquisition of Trolltech. On 30 September 2008, Trolltech was renamed as Qt Software, and Qtopia was renamed as Qt Extended. On 11 August 2009, the company's name was changed to Qt Development Frameworks.
Nokia sold the commercial licensing business of Qt to Digia in March 2011. The remainder of the assets were subsequently acquired by Digia in 2012.
In September 2014, Digia formed The Qt Company, a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to the development and governance of the Qt platform. In May 2016, the company went public on NASDAQ Helsinki as QTCOM.
Trojan horse (computing)
In computing, a Trojan horse, or trojan, is any malware which misleads users of its true intent. The term is derived from the Ancient Greek story of the deceptive Trojan Horse that led to the fall of the city of Troy.
Trojans are generally spread by some form of social engineering, for example where a user is duped into executing an email attachment disguised to appear not suspicious, (e.g., a routine form to be filled in), or by clicking on some fake advertisement on social media or anywhere else. Although their payload can be anything, many modern forms act as a backdoor, contacting a controller which can then have unauthorized access to the affected computer. Trojans may allow an attacker to access users' personal information such as banking information, passwords, or personal identity. It can also delete a user's files or infect other devices connected to the network. Ransomware attacks are often carried out using a trojan.
Unlike computer viruses, worms, and rogue security software, trojans generally do not attempt to inject themselves into other files or otherwise propagate themselves.
It's not clear where or when the concept, and this term for it, was first used, but by 1971 the first Unix manual assumed its readers knew both:
Another early reference is in a US Air Force report in 1974 on the analysis of vulnerability in the Multics computer systems.
It was made popular by Ken Thompson in his 1983 Turing Award acceptance lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust", subtitled: "To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software." He mentioned that he knew about the possible existence of trojans from a report on the security of Multics.
Trojan viruses, in this way, may require interaction with a malicious controller (not necessarily distributing the trojan) to fulfill their purpose. It is possible for those involved with trojans to scan computers on a network to locate any with a trojan installed, which the hacker can then control.
Some trojans take advantage of a security flaw in older versions of Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to use the host computer as an anonymizer proxy to effectively hide Internet usage, enabling the controller to use the Internet for illegal purposes while all potentially incriminating evidence indicates the infected computer or its IP address. The host's computer may or may not show the internet history of the sites viewed using the computer as a proxy. The first generation of anonymizer trojan horses tended to leave their tracks in the page view histories of the host computer. Later generations of the trojan tend to "cover" their tracks more efficiently. Several versions of Sub7 have been widely circulated in the US and Europe and became the most widely distributed examples of this type of trojan.
In German-speaking countries, spyware used or made by the government is sometimes called "govware". Govware is typically a Trojan software used to intercept communications from the target computer. Some countries like Switzerland and Germany have a legal framework governing the use of such software. Examples of govware trojans include the Swiss MiniPanzer and MegaPanzer and the German "state trojan" nicknamed R2D2. German govware works by exploiting security gaps unknown to the general public and accessing smartphone data before it becomes encrypted via other applications.
Due to the popularity of botnets among hackers and the availability of advertising services that permit authors to violate their users' privacy, trojans are becoming more common. According to a survey conducted by BitDefender from January to June 2009, "trojan-type malware is on the rise, accounting for 83% of the global malware detected in the world." Trojans have a relationship with worms, as they spread with the help given by worms and travel across the internet with them. BitDefender has stated that approximately 15% of computers are members of a botnet, usually recruited by a trojan infection.
The term "trojan horse" in computing is derived from the legendary Trojan Horse; itself named after Troy. For this reason "Trojan" is often capitalized. However, while style guides and dictionaries differ, many suggest a lower case "trojan" for normal use. That is the approach taken in this article - apart from when first introducing the word and its derivation.
Tokyo
Tokyo (; Japanese: , "Tōkyō" ), officially , is the capital and most populous prefecture of Japan. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central Pacific coast of Japan's main island, Honshu. Tokyo is the political and economic center of the country, as well as the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the national government. In 2019, the prefecture had an estimated population of 13,929,280. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents as of 2018.
Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became a prominent political center in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population numbering more than one million. Following the end of the shogunate in 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to the city, which was renamed Tokyo (literally "eastern capital"). Tokyo was devastated by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and again by Allied bombing raids during World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, the city underwent rapid reconstruction and expansion, going on to lead Japan's post-war economic recovery. Since 1943, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has administered the prefecture's 23 special wards (formerly Tokyo City), various bed towns in the western area, and two outlying island chains.
Tokyo is the largest urban economy in the world by gross domestic product, and is categorized as an Alpha+ city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Part of an industrial region that includes the cities of Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Chiba, Tokyo is Japan's leading center of business and finance. In 2019, it hosted 36 of the "Fortune" Global 500 companies. In 2020, it ranked third on the Global Financial Centres Index, behind New York City and London.
The city has hosted multiple international events, including the 1964 Summer Olympics and three G7 Summits (1979, 1986, and 1993); it was also set to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, which were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tokyo is an international center of research and development and is represented by several major universities, notably the University of Tokyo. Tokyo Station is the central hub for Japan's Shinkansen bullet train system, and the city is served by an extensive network of rail and subways. Notable districts of Tokyo include Chiyoda (the site of the Imperial Palace), Shinjuku (the city's administrative center), and Shibuya (a commercial and business hub).
Tokyo was originally known as , a kanji compound of 江 ("e", "cove, inlet") and 戸 ("to", "entrance, gate, door"). The name, which can be translated as "estuary", is a reference to the original settlement's location at the meeting of the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay. During the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the name of the city was changed to when it became the new imperial capital, in line with the East Asian tradition of including the word capital () in the name of the capital city (like Kyoto (), Beijing () and Nanjing ()). During the early Meiji period, the city was sometimes called "Tōkei", an alternative pronunciation for the same characters representing "Tokyo", making it a kanji homograph. Some surviving official English documents use the spelling "Tokei"; however, this pronunciation is now obsolete.
Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo, in what was formerly part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified by the Edo clan, in the late twelfth century. In 1457, Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred from Mikawa Province (his lifelong base) to Kantō region. When he became "shōgun" in 1603, Edo became the center of his ruling. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century. But Edo was Tokugawa's home and was not capital of Japan. (That was caused by the Meiji Restoration in 1868.) The Emperor himself lived in Kyoto from 794 to 1868 as capital of Japan. During the Edo era, the city enjoyed a prolonged period of peace known as the "Pax Tokugawa", and in the presence of such peace, Edo adopted a stringent policy of seclusion, which helped to perpetuate the lack of any serious military threat to the city. The absence of war-inflicted devastation allowed Edo to devote the majority of its resources to rebuilding in the wake of the consistent fires, earthquakes, and other devastating natural disasters that plagued the city. However, this prolonged period of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Commodore Perry forced the opening of the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, leading to an increase in the demand for new foreign goods and subsequently a severe rise in inflation. Social unrest mounted in the wake of these higher prices and culminated in widespread rebellions and demonstrations, especially in the form of the "smashing" of rice establishments. Meanwhile, supporters of the Meiji Emperor leveraged the disruption that these widespread rebellious demonstrations were causing to further consolidate power by overthrowing the last Tokugawa "shōgun", Yoshinobu, in 1867. After 265 years, the "Pax Tokugawa" came to an end.
In 1869, the 17-year-old Emperor Meiji moved to Edo, and in accordance, the city was renamed Tokyo (meaning Eastern Capital). The city was divided into Yamanote and Shitamachi. Tokyo was already the nation's political and cultural center, and the emperor's residence made it a de facto imperial capital as well, with the former Edo Castle becoming the Imperial Palace. The city of Tokyo was officially established on May 1, 1889.
Central Tokyo, like Osaka, has been designed since about 1900 to be centered on major railway stations in a high-density fashion, so suburban railways were built relatively cheaply at street level and with their own right-of-way. Though expressways have been built in Tokyo, the basic design has not changed.
Tokyo went on to suffer two major catastrophes in the 20th century: the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which left 140,000 dead or missing; and World War II.
In 1943, the city of Tokyo merged with the prefecture of Tokyo to form the "Metropolitan Prefecture" of Tokyo. Since then, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government served as both the prefecture government for Tokyo, as well as administering the special wards of Tokyo, for what had previously been Tokyo City. World War II wreaked widespread destruction of most of the city due to the persistent Allied air raids on Japan and the use of incendiary bombs. The bombing of Tokyo in 1944 and 1945 is estimated to have killed between 75,000 and 200,000 civilians and left more than half of the city destroyed. The deadliest night of the war came on March 9–10, 1945, the night of the American "Operation Meetinghouse" raid; as nearly 700,000 incendiary bombs rained on the eastern half of the city, mainly in heavily residential wards. Two-fifths of the city were completely burned, more than 276,000 buildings were demolished, 100,000 civilians were killed, and 110,000 more were injured. Between 1940 and 1945, the population of Japan's capital city dwindled from 6,700,000 to less than 2,800,000, with the majority of those who lost their homes living in "ramshackle, makeshift huts".
After the war, Tokyo was completely rebuilt and was showcased to the world during the 1964 Summer Olympics. The 1970s brought new high-rise developments such as Sunshine 60, a new and controversial airport at Narita in 1978 (some distance outside city limits), and a population increase to about 11 million (in the metropolitan area).
Tokyo's subway and commuter rail network became one of the busiest in the world as more and more people moved to the area. In the 1980s, real estate prices skyrocketed during a real estate and debt bubble. The bubble burst in the early 1990s, and many companies, banks, and individuals were caught with mortgage-backed debts while real estate was shrinking in value. A major recession followed, making the 1990s Japan's "Lost Decade", from which it is now slowly recovering.
Tokyo still sees new urban developments on large lots of less profitable land. Recent projects include Ebisu Garden Place, Tennōzu Isle, Shiodome, Roppongi Hills, Shinagawa (now also a Shinkansen station), and the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station. Buildings of significance have been demolished for more up-to-date shopping facilities such as Omotesando Hills.
Land reclamation projects in Tokyo have also been going on for centuries. The most prominent is the Odaiba area, now a major shopping and entertainment center. Various plans have been proposed for transferring national government functions from Tokyo to secondary capitals in other regions of Japan, to slow down rapid development in Tokyo and revitalize economically lagging areas of the country. These plans have been controversial within Japan and have yet to be realized.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of the northeastern coast of Honshu was felt in Tokyo. However, due to Tokyo's earthquake-resistant infrastructure, damage in Tokyo was very minor compared to areas directly hit by the tsunami, although activity in the city was largely halted. The subsequent nuclear crisis caused by the tsunami has also largely left Tokyo unaffected, despite occasional spikes in radiation levels.
On September 7, 2013, the IOC selected Tokyo to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. Tokyo will be the first Asian city to host the Olympic Games twice.
The mainland portion of Tokyo lies northwest of Tokyo Bay and measures about east to west and north to south. The average elevation in Tokyo is . Chiba Prefecture borders it to the east, Yamanashi to the west, Kanagawa to the south, and Saitama to the north. Mainland Tokyo is further subdivided into the special wards (occupying the eastern half) and the Tama area () stretching westwards.
Also within the administrative boundaries of Tokyo Metropolis are two island chains in the Pacific Ocean directly south: the Izu Islands, and the Ogasawara Islands, which stretch more than away from the mainland. Because of these islands and the mountainous regions to the west, Tokyo's overall population density figures far under-represent the real figures for the urban and suburban regions of Tokyo.
Under Japanese law, Tokyo is designated as a , translated as "metropolis". Its administrative structure is similar to that of Japan's other prefectures. The , which until 1943 constituted the city of Tokyo, are self-governing municipalities, each having a mayor, a council, and the status of a city.
In addition to these 23 special wards, Tokyo also includes 26 more cities ( -shi), five towns ( -chō or machi), and eight villages ( -son or -mura), each of which has a local government. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government administers the whole metropolis including the 23 special wards and the cities and towns that constitute the prefecture. It is headed by a publicly elected governor and metropolitan assembly. Its headquarters is in Shinjuku Ward.
The of Tokyo comprise the area formerly incorporated as Tokyo City. On July 1, 1943, Tokyo City was merged with forming the current "metropolitan prefecture". As a result, unlike other city wards in Japan, these wards are not conterminous with a larger incorporated city.
While falling under the jurisdiction of Tokyo Metropolitan Government, each ward is also a borough with its own elected leader and council, like other cities of Japan. The special wards use the word "city" in their official English name (e.g. Chiyoda City).
The wards differ from other cities in having a unique administrative relationship with the prefectural government. Certain municipal functions, such as waterworks, sewerage, and fire-fighting, are handled by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. To pay for the added administrative costs, the prefecture collects municipal taxes, which would usually be levied by the city.
The special wards of Tokyo are:
The "three central wards" of Tokyo – Chiyoda, Chūō and Minato – are the business core of the city, with a daytime population more than seven times higher than their nighttime population. Chiyoda Ward is unique in that it is in the very heart of the former Tokyo City, yet is one of the least populated wards. It is occupied by many major Japanese companies and is also the seat of the national government, and the Japanese emperor. It is often called the "political center" of the country. Akihabara, known for being an otaku cultural center and a shopping district for computer goods, is also in Chiyoda.
To the west of the special wards, Tokyo Metropolis consists of cities, towns, and villages that enjoy the same legal status as those elsewhere in Japan.
While serving as "bed towns" for those working in central Tokyo, some of them also have a local commercial and industrial base, such as Tachikawa. Collectively, these are often known as the Tama area or Western Tokyo.
Twenty-six cities lie within the western part of Tokyo:
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has designated Hachiōji, Tachikawa, Machida, Ōme and Tama New Town as regional centers of the Tama area, as part of its plans to relocate urban functions away from central Tokyo.
The far west of the Tama area is occupied by the district ("gun") of Nishi-Tama. Much of this area is mountainous and unsuitable for urbanization. The highest mountain in Tokyo, Mount Kumotori, is high; other mountains in Tokyo include Takanosu (), Odake (), and Mitake (). Lake Okutama, on the Tama River near Yamanashi Prefecture, is Tokyo's largest lake. The district is composed of three towns (Hinode, Mizuho and Okutama) and one village (Hinohara).
Tokyo has numerous outlying islands, which extend as far as from central Tokyo. Because of the islands' distance from the administrative headquarters of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in Shinjuku, local subprefectural branch offices administer them.
The Izu Islands are a group of volcanic islands and form part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. The islands in order from closest to Tokyo are Izu Ōshima, Toshima, Nii-jima, Shikine-jima, Kōzu-shima, Miyake-jima, Mikurajima, Hachijō-jima, and Aogashima. The Izu Islands are grouped into three subprefectures. Izu Ōshima and Hachijojima are towns. The remaining islands are six villages, with Niijima and Shikinejima forming one village.
The Ogasawara Islands include, from north to south, Chichi-jima, Nishinoshima, Haha-jima, Kita Iwo Jima, Iwo Jima, and Minami Iwo Jima. Ogasawara also administers two tiny outlying islands: Minami Torishima, the easternmost point in Japan and at the most distant island from central Tokyo, and Okinotorishima, the southernmost point in Japan. Japan's claim on an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) surrounding Okinotorishima is contested by China and South Korea as they regard Okinotorishima as uninhabitable rocks which have no EEZ. The Iwo chain and the outlying islands have no permanent population, but hosts Japan Self-Defense Forces personnel. Local populations are only found on Chichi-Jima and Haha-Jima. The islands form both Ogasawara Subprefecture and the village of Ogasawara, Tokyo.
As of March 31, 2008, 36% of the total land area of the prefecture was designated as Natural Parks (second only to Shiga Prefecture), namely the Chichibu Tama Kai, Fuji-Hakone-Izu, and Ogasawara National Parks (the last a UNESCO World Heritage Site); Meiji no Mori Takao Quasi-National Park; and Akikawa Kyūryō, Hamura Kusabana Kyūryō, Sayama, Takao Jinba, Takiyama, and Tama Kyūryō Prefectural Natural Parks.
A number of museums are located in Ueno Park: Tokyo National Museum, National Museum of Nature and Science, Shitamachi Museum and National Museum for Western Art, among others. There are also artworks and statues at several places in the park. There is also a zoo in the park, and the park is a popular destination to view cherry blossoms.
Tokyo is near the boundary of three plates, making it an extremely active region for smaller quakes and slippage which frequently affect the urban area with swaying as if in a boat, although epicenters within mainland Tokyo (excluding Tokyo's –long island jurisdiction) are quite rare. It is not uncommon in the metro area to have hundreds of these minor quakes (magnitudes 4–6) that can be felt in a single year, something local residents merely brush off but can be a source of anxiety not only for foreign visitors but for Japanese from elsewhere as well. They rarely cause much damage (sometimes a few injuries) as they are either too small or far away as quakes tend to dance around the region. Particularly active are offshore regions and to a lesser extent Chiba and Ibaraki.
Tokyo has been hit by powerful megathrust earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855, 1923, and much more indirectly (with some liquefaction in landfill zones) in 2011; the frequency of direct and large quakes is a relative rarity. The 1923 earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 8.3, killed 142,000 people, the last time the urban area was directly hit. The 2011 quake focus was hundreds of kilometers away and resulted in no direct deaths in the metropolitan area.
The former city of Tokyo and the majority of mainland Tokyo lie in the humid subtropical climate zone (Köppen climate classification "Cfa"), with hot, humid summers and generally cool winters with cold spells. The region, like much of Japan, experiences a one-month seasonal lag, with the warmest month being August, which averages , and the coolest month being January, averaging . The record low temperature is on January 13, 1876, while the record high is on July 20, 2004.
The record highest low temperature is on August 12, 2013, making Tokyo one of only seven observation sites in Japan that have recorded a low temperature over . Annual rainfall averages nearly , with a wetter summer and a drier winter. Snowfall is sporadic, but does occur almost annually. Tokyo also often sees typhoons every year, though few are strong. The wettest month since records began in 1876 was October 2004, with of rain, including on the ninth of that month; the last of four months on record to observe no precipitation is December 1995. Annual precipitation has ranged from in 1984 to in 1938.
The western mountainous area of mainland Tokyo, Okutama also lies in the humid subtropical climate (Köppen classification "Cfa").
The climates of Tokyo's offshore territories vary significantly from those of the city. The climate of Chichijima in Ogasawara village is on the boundary between the tropical savanna climate (Köppen classification "Aw") and the humid subtropical climate (Köppen classification "Cfa"). It is approximately south of the Greater Tokyo Area resulting in different climatic conditions.
Tokyo's easternmost territory, the island of Minamitorishima in Ogasawara village, is in the tropical savanna climate zone (Köppen classification "Aw"). Tokyo's Izu and Ogasawara islands are affected by an average of 5.4 typhoons a year, compared to 3.1 in mainland Kantō.
Architecture in Tokyo has largely been shaped by Tokyo's history. Twice in recent history has the metropolis been left in ruins: first in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and later after extensive firebombing in World War II. Because of this, Tokyo's urban landscape consists mainly of modern and contemporary architecture, and older buildings are scarce. Tokyo features many internationally famous forms of modern architecture including Tokyo International Forum, Asahi Beer Hall, Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building and Rainbow Bridge. Tokyo also features two distinctive towers: Tokyo Tower, and the new Tokyo Skytree, which is the tallest tower in both Japan and the world, and the second tallest structure in the world after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Mori Building Co started work on Tokyo's new tallest building which is set to be finished on March 2023. The project will cost 580 billion yen ($5.5 billion).
Tokyo also contains numerous parks and gardens. There are four national parks in Tokyo Prefecture, including the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, which includes all of the Izu Islands.
Tokyo has enacted a measure to cut greenhouse gases. Governor Shintaro Ishihara created Japan's first emissions cap system, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emission by a total of 25% by 2020 from the 2000 level. Tokyo is an example of an urban heat island, and the phenomenon is especially serious in its special wards. According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the annual mean temperature has increased by about over the past 100 years. Tokyo has been cited as a "convincing example of the relationship between urban growth and climate".
In 2006, Tokyo enacted the "10 Year Project for Green Tokyo" to be realized by 2016. It set a goal of increasing roadside trees in Tokyo to 1 million (from 480,000), and adding 1,000 ha of green space 88 of which will be a new park named "Umi no Mori" (sea forest) which will be on a reclaimed island in Tokyo Bay which used to be a landfill. From 2007 to 2010, 436 ha of the planned 1,000 ha of green space was created and 220,000 trees were planted bringing the total to 700,000. In 2014, road side trees in Tokyo have increased to 950,000, and a further 300 ha of green space has been added.
As of October 2012, the official intercensal estimate showed 13.506 million people in Tokyo with 9.214 million living within Tokyo's 23 wards. During the daytime, the population swells by over 2.5 million as workers and students commute from adjacent areas. This effect is even more pronounced in the three central wards of Chiyoda, Chūō, and Minato, whose collective population as of the 2005 National Census was 326,000 at night, but 2.4 million during the day.
In the year 1889, the Home Ministry recorded 1,375,937 people in Tokyo City and a total of 1,694,292 people in Tokyo-fu. In the same year, a total of 779 foreign nationals were recorded as residing in Tokyo. The most common nationality was English (209 residents), followed by American nationals (182) and Chinese nationals (137).
Tokyo has the largest metropolitan economy in the world. According to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Greater Tokyo Area (Tokyo-Yokohama) of 38 million people had a total GDP of $2 trillion in 2012 (at purchasing power parity), which topped that list.
Tokyo is a major international finance center; it houses the headquarters of several of the world's largest investment banks and insurance companies, and serves as a hub for Japan's transportation, publishing, electronics and broadcasting industries. During the centralized growth of Japan's economy following World War II, many large firms moved their headquarters from cities such as Osaka (the historical commercial capital) to Tokyo, in an attempt to take advantage of better access to the government. This trend has begun to slow due to ongoing population growth in Tokyo and the high cost of living there.
Tokyo was rated by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the most expensive (highest cost-of-living) city in the world for 14 years in a row ending in 2006.
Tokyo emerged as a leading international financial center (IFC) in the 1960s and has been described as one of the three "command centers" for the world economy, along with New York City and London. In the 2017 Global Financial Centers Index, Tokyo was ranked as having the fifth most competitive financial center in the world (alongside cities such as London, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Sydney, Boston, and Toronto in the top 10), and third most competitive in Asia (after Singapore and Hong Kong). The Japanese financial market opened up slowly in 1984 and accelerated its internationalisation with the "Japanese Big Bang" in 1998. Despite the emergence of Singapore and Hong Kong as competing financial centers, the Tokyo IFC manages to keep a prominent position in Asia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is Japan's largest stock exchange, and third largest in the world by market capitalization and fourth largest by share turnover. In 1990 at the end of the Japanese asset price bubble, it accounted for more than 60% of the world stock market value. Tokyo had 8,460 ha (20,900 acres) of agricultural land as of 2003, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, placing it last among the nation's prefectures. The farmland is concentrated in Western Tokyo. Perishables such as vegetables, fruits, and flowers can be conveniently shipped to the markets in the eastern part of the prefecture. "Komatsuna" and spinach are the most important vegetables; as of 2000, Tokyo supplied 32.5% of the "komatsuna" sold at its central produce market.
With 36% of its area covered by forest, Tokyo has extensive growths of cryptomeria and Japanese cypress, especially in the mountainous western communities of Akiruno, Ōme, Okutama, Hachiōji, Hinode, and Hinohara. Decreases in the price of timber, increases in the cost of production, and advancing old age among the forestry population have resulted in a decline in Tokyo's output. In addition, pollen, especially from cryptomeria, is a major allergen for the nearby population centers. Tokyo Bay was once a major source of fish. Most of Tokyo's fish production comes from the outer islands, such as Izu Ōshima and Hachijō-Jima. Skipjack tuna, nori, and "aji" are among the ocean products.
Tourism in Tokyo is also a contributor to the economy. In 2006, 4.81 million foreigners and 420 million Japanese visits to Tokyo were made; the economic value of these visits totaled 9.4 trillion yen according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Many tourists visit the various downtowns, stores, and entertainment districts throughout the neighborhoods of the special wards of Tokyo; particularly for school children on class trips, a visit to Tokyo Tower is "de rigueur". Cultural offerings include both omnipresent Japanese pop culture and associated districts such as Shibuya and Harajuku, subcultural attractions such as Studio Ghibli anime center, as well as museums like the Tokyo National Museum, which houses 37% of the country's artwork national treasures (87/233).
The Toyosu Market in Tokyo is the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world since it opened in October 11, 2018. It is also one of the largest wholesale food markets of any kind. It is located in the Toyosu area of Kōtō ward. The Toyosu market holds strong to the traditions of its predecessor, the Tsukiji Fish Market and Nihonbashi fish market, and serves some 50,000 buyers and sellers every day. Retailers, whole-sellers, auctioneers, and public citizens alike frequent the market, creating a unique microcosm of organized chaos that still continues to fuel the city and its food supply after over four centuries.
Tokyo, as the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, is Japan's largest domestic and international hub for rail and ground transportation. However, its airspace has been under the US military's exclusive control after World War II. Public transportation within Tokyo is dominated by an extensive network of clean and efficient trains and subways run by a variety of operators, with buses, monorails and trams playing a secondary feeder role. There are up to 62 electric train lines and more than 900 train stations in Tokyo.
As a result of World War II, Japanese planes are generally forbidden to fly over Tokyo. Therefore, Japan constructed airports outside Tokyo. Narita International Airport in Chiba Prefecture is the major gateway for international travelers to Japan. Japan's flag carrier Japan Airlines, as well as All Nippon Airways, have a hub at this airport. Haneda Airport on the reclaimed land at Ōta, offers domestic and international flights. As of 2018, some flight routes into Haneda are permitted through Tokyo airspace.
Various islands governed by Tokyo have their own airports. Hachijō-jima (Hachijojima Airport), Miyakejima (Miyakejima Airport), and Izu Ōshima (Oshima Airport) have services to Tokyo International and other airports.
Rail is the primary mode of transportation in Tokyo, which has the most extensive urban railway network in the world and an equally extensive network of surface lines. JR East operates Tokyo's largest railway network, including the Yamanote Line loop that circles the center of downtown Tokyo. Two different organizations operate the subway network: the private Tokyo Metro and the governmental Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation. The Metropolitan Government and private carriers operate bus routes and one tram route. Local, regional, and national services are available, with major terminals at the giant railroad stations, including Tokyo, Shinagawa, and Shinjuku.
Expressways link the capital to other points in the Greater Tokyo area, the Kantō region, and the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. To build them quickly before the 1964 Summer Olympics, most were constructed above existing roads. Other transportation includes taxis operating in the special wards and the cities and towns. Also, long-distance ferries serve the islands of Tokyo and carry passengers and cargo to domestic and foreign ports.
Tokyo has many universities, junior colleges, and vocational schools. Many of Japan's most prestigious universities are in Tokyo, including University of Tokyo, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Waseda University, Tokyo University of Science, Sophia University, and Keio University. Some of the biggest national universities in Tokyo are:
There is only one non-national public university: Tokyo Metropolitan University. There are also a few universities well known for classes conducted in English and for the teaching of the Japanese language, including the Globis University Graduate School of Management, International Christian University, Sophia University, and Waseda University
Tokyo is also the headquarters of the United Nations University.
Publicly run kindergartens, elementary schools (years 1 through 6), and primary schools (7 through 9) are operated by local wards or municipal offices. Public secondary schools in Tokyo are run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education and are called "Metropolitan High Schools". Tokyo also has many private schools from kindergarten through high school:
Tokyo has many museums. In Ueno Park, there is the Tokyo National Museum, the country's largest museum and specializing in traditional Japanese art; the National Museum of Western Art and Ueno Zoo. Other museums include the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Odaiba; the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Sumida, across the Sumida River from the center of Tokyo; the Nezu Museum in Aoyama; and the National Diet Library, National Archives, and the National Museum of Modern Art, which are near the Imperial Palace.
Tokyo has many theaters for performing arts. These include national and private theaters for traditional forms of Japanese drama. Noteworthy are the National Noh Theatre for noh and the Kabuki-za for Kabuki. Symphony orchestras and other musical organizations perform modern and traditional music. The New National Theater Tokyo in Shibuya is the national center for the performing arts, including opera, ballet, contemporary dance and drama. Tokyo also hosts modern Japanese and international pop, and rock music at venues ranging in size from intimate clubs to internationally known areas such as the Nippon Budokan.
Many different festivals occur throughout Tokyo. Major events include the Sannō at Hie Shrine, the Sanja at Asakusa Shrine, and the biennial Kanda Festivals. The last features a parade with elaborately decorated floats and thousands of people. Annually on the last Saturday of July, an enormous fireworks display over the Sumida River attracts over a million viewers. Once cherry blossoms bloom in spring, many residents gather in Ueno Park, Inokashira Park, and the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden for picnics under the blossoms.
Harajuku, a neighborhood in Shibuya, is known internationally for its youth style, fashion and cosplay.
Cuisine in Tokyo is internationally acclaimed. In November 2007, Michelin released their first guide for fine dining in Tokyo, awarding 191 stars in total, or about twice as many as Tokyo's nearest competitor, Paris. As of 2017, 227 restaurants in Tokyo have been awarded (92 in Paris). Twelve establishments were awarded the maximum of three stars (Paris has 10), 54 received two stars, and 161 earned one star.
Tokyo, with a diverse array of sports, is home to two professional baseball clubs, the Yomiuri Giants who play at the Tokyo Dome and Tokyo Yakult Swallows at Meiji-Jingu Stadium. The Japan Sumo Association is also headquartered in Tokyo at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan sumo arena where three official sumo tournaments are held annually (in January, May, and September). Football clubs in Tokyo include F.C. Tokyo and Tokyo Verdy 1969, both of which play at Ajinomoto Stadium in Chōfu, and FC Machida Zelvia at Nozuta Stadium in Machida. Basketball clubs include the Hitachi SunRockers, Toyota Alvark Tokyo and Tokyo Excellence.
Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, thus becoming the first Asian city to host the Summer Games. The National Stadium, also known as the Olympic Stadium, was host to a number of international sporting events. In 2016, it was to be replaced by the New National Stadium. With a number of world-class sports venues, Tokyo often hosts national and international sporting events such as basketball tournaments, women's volleyball tournaments, tennis tournaments, swim meets, marathons, rugby union and sevens rugby games, football, American football exhibition games, judo, and karate. Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, in Sendagaya, Shibuya, is a large sports complex that includes swimming pools, training rooms, and a large indoor arena. According to Around the Rings, the gymnasium has played host to the October 2011 artistic gymnastics world championships, despite the International Gymnastics Federation's initial doubt in Tokyo's ability to host the championships following the March 11 tsunami. Tokyo was also selected to host a number of games for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and to host the 2020 Summer Olympics and the Paralympics on September 7, 2013.
As the largest population center in Japan and the site of the country's largest broadcasters and studios, Tokyo is frequently the setting for many Japanese movies, television shows, animated series ("anime"), web comics, light novels, video games, and comic books ("manga"). In the "kaiju" (monster movie) genre, landmarks of Tokyo are usually destroyed by giant monsters such as Godzilla and Gamera.
Some Hollywood directors have turned to Tokyo as a backdrop for movies set in Japan. Postwar examples include "Tokyo Joe", "My Geisha", "Tokyo Story" and the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice"; recent examples include "Kill Bill", "", "Lost in Translation", "Babel", "Inception", and "".
Japanese author Haruki Murakami has based some of his novels in Tokyo (including "Norwegian Wood"), and David Mitchell's first two novels "number9dream" and "Ghostwritten" featured the city. Contemporary British painter Carl Randall spent 10 years living in Tokyo as an artist, creating a body of work depicting the city's crowded streets and public spaces.
Tokyo is the founder member of the Asian Network of Major Cities 21 and is a member of the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations. Tokyo was also a founding member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
, Tokyo has twinning or friendship agreements with the following twelve cities and states:
Research and development in Japan and the Japanese space program are globally represented by several of Tokyo's medical and scientific facilities, including the University of Tokyo and other universities in Tokyo, which work in collaboration with many international institutions. Especially with the United States, including NASA and the many private spaceflight companies, Tokyo universities have working relationships with all of the Ivy League institutions (including Harvard, MIT, and Yale University), along with other research universities and development laboratories, such as Stanford and the UC campuses throughout California, as well as UNM and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Other partners worldwide include Oxford University in the United Kingdom, the National University of Singapore in Singapore, the University of Toronto in Canada, and Tsinghua University in China.
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War (; ) was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's "Iliad". The core of the "Iliad" (Books II – XXIII) describes a period of four days and two nights in the tenth year of the decade-long siege of Troy; the "Odyssey" describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the war's heroes. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.
The war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, after Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked "for the fairest". Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the "fairest", should receive the apple. In exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Menelaus's brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years because of Paris' insult. After the deaths of many heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse. The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans (except for some of the women and children whom they kept or sold as slaves) and desecrated the temples, thus earning the gods' wrath. Few of the Achaeans returned safely to their homes and many founded colonies in distant shores. The Romans later traced their origin to Aeneas, Aphrodite's son and one of the Trojans, who was said to have led the surviving Trojans to modern-day Italy.
The ancient Greeks believed that Troy was located near the Dardanelles and that the Trojan War was a historical event of the 13th or 12th century BC, but by the mid-19th century AD, both the war and the city were widely seen as non-historical. In 1868, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was a real city at what is now Hisarlik in Turkey. On the basis of excavations conducted by Schliemann and others, this claim is now accepted by most scholars.
Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War remains an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, and the Late Bronze Age collapse.
The events of the Trojan War are found in many works of Greek literature and depicted in numerous works of Greek art. There is no single, authoritative text which tells the entire events of the war. Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources, some of which report contradictory versions of the events. The most important literary sources are the two epic poems traditionally credited to Homer, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", composed sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. Each poem narrates only a part of the war. The "Iliad" covers a short period in the last year of the siege of Troy, while the "Odyssey" concerns Odysseus's return to his home island of Ithaca following the sack of Troy and contains several flashbacks to particular episodes in the war.
Other parts of the Trojan War were told in the poems of the Epic Cycle, also known as the Cyclic Epics: the "Cypria", "Aethiopis", "Little Iliad", "Iliou Persis", "Nostoi", and "Telegony". Though these poems survive only in fragments, their content is known from a summary included in Proclus' "Chrestomathy". The authorship of the Cyclic Epics is uncertain. It is generally thought that the poems were written down in the 7th and 6th century BC, after the composition of the Homeric poems, though it is widely believed that they were based on earlier traditions.
Both the Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle take origin from oral tradition. Even after the composition of the "Iliad", "Odyssey", and the Cyclic Epics, the myths of the Trojan War were passed on orally in many genres of poetry and through non-poetic storytelling. Events and details of the story that are only found in later authors may have been passed on through oral tradition and could be as old as the Homeric poems. Visual art, such as vase painting, was another medium in which myths of the Trojan War circulated.
In later ages playwrights, historians, and other intellectuals would create works inspired by the Trojan War. The three great tragedians of Athens—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—wrote a number of dramas that portray episodes from the Trojan War. Among Roman writers the most important is the 1st century BC poet Virgil; in Book 2 of his "Aeneid", Aeneas narrates the sack of Troy.
The following summary of the Trojan War follows the order of events as given in Proclus' summary, along with the "Iliad", "Odyssey", and "Aeneid", supplemented with details drawn from other authors.
According to Greek mythology, Zeus had become king of the gods by overthrowing his father Cronus; Cronus in turn had overthrown his father Uranus. Zeus was not faithful to his wife and sister Hera, and had many relationships from which many children were born. Since Zeus believed that there were too many people populating the earth, he envisioned Momus or Themis, who was to use the Trojan War as a means to depopulate the Earth, especially of his demigod descendants.
These can be supported by Hesiod's account:Now all the gods were divided through strife; for at that very time Zeus who thunders on high was meditating marvelous deeds, even to mingle storm and tempest over the boundless earth, and already he was hastening to make an utter end of the race of mortal men, declaring that he would destroy the lives of the demi-gods, that the children of the gods should not mate with wretched mortals, seeing their fate with their own eyes; but that the blessed gods henceforth even as aforetime should have their living and their habitations apart from men. But on those who were born of immortals and of mankind verily Zeus laid toil and sorrow upon sorrow.
Zeus came to learn from either Themis or Prometheus, after Heracles had released him from Caucasus, that, like his father Cronus, he would be overthrown by one of his sons. Another prophecy stated that a son of the sea-nymph Thetis, with whom Zeus fell in love after gazing upon her in the oceans off the Greek coast, would become greater than his father. Possibly for one or both of these reasons, Thetis was betrothed to an elderly human king, Peleus son of Aeacus, either upon Zeus' orders, or because she wished to please Hera, who had raised her.
All of the gods were invited to Peleus and Thetis' wedding and brought many gifts, except Eris (the goddess of discord), who was stopped at the door by Hermes, on Zeus' order. Insulted, she threw from the door a gift of her own: a golden apple (το μήλον της έριδος) on which was inscribed the word καλλίστῃ "Kallistēi" ("To the fairest"). The apple was claimed by Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They quarreled bitterly over it, and none of the other gods would venture an opinion favoring one, for fear of earning the enmity of the other two. Eventually, Zeus ordered Hermes to lead the three goddesses to Paris, a prince of Troy, who, unaware of his ancestry, was being raised as a shepherd in Mount Ida, because of a prophecy that he would be the downfall of Troy. After bathing in the spring of Ida, the goddesses appeared to him naked, either for the sake of winning or at Paris' request. Paris was unable to decide between them, so the goddesses resorted to bribes. Athena offered Paris wisdom, skill in battle, and the abilities of the greatest warriors; Hera offered him political power and control of all of Asia; and Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite, and, after several adventures, returned to Troy, where he was recognized by his royal family.
Peleus and Thetis bore a son, whom they named Achilles. It was foretold that he would either die of old age after an uneventful life, or die young in a battlefield and gain immortality through poetry. Furthermore, when Achilles was nine years old, Calchas had prophesied that Troy could not again fall without his help. A number of sources credit Thetis with attempting to make Achilles immortal when he was an infant. Some of these state that she held him over fire every night to burn away his mortal parts and rubbed him with ambrosia during the day, but Peleus discovered her actions and stopped her. According to some versions of this story, Thetis had already killed several sons in this manner, and Peleus' action therefore saved his son's life. Other sources state that Thetis bathed Achilles in the Styx, the river that runs to the underworld, making him invulnerable wherever he was touched by the water. Because she had held him by the heel, it was not immersed during the bathing and thus the heel remained mortal and vulnerable to injury (hence the expression "Achilles heel" for an isolated weakness). He grew up to be the greatest of all mortal warriors. After Calchas' prophesy, Thetis hid Achilles in Skyros at the court of King Lycomedes, where he was disguised as a girl. At a crucial point in the war, she assists her son by providing weapons divinely forged by Hephaestus (see below).
The most beautiful woman in the world was Helen, one of the daughters of Tyndareus, King of Sparta. Her mother was Leda, who had been either raped or seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. Accounts differ over which of Leda's four children, two pairs of twins, were fathered by Zeus and which by Tyndareus. However, Helen is usually credited as Zeus' daughter, and sometimes Nemesis is credited as her mother. Helen had scores of suitors, and her father was unwilling to choose one for fear the others would retaliate violently.
Finally, one of the suitors, Odysseus of Ithaca, proposed a plan to solve the dilemma. In exchange for Tyndareus' support of his own suit towards Penelope, he suggested that Tyndareus require all of Helen's suitors to promise that they would defend the marriage of Helen, regardless of whom he chose. The suitors duly swore the required oath on the severed pieces of a horse, although not without a certain amount of grumbling.
Tyndareus chose Menelaus. Menelaus was a political choice on her father's part. He had wealth and power. He had humbly not petitioned for her himself, but instead sent his brother Agamemnon on his behalf. He had promised Aphrodite a hecatomb, a sacrifice of 100 oxen, if he won Helen, but forgot about it and earned her wrath. Menelaus inherited Tyndareus' throne of Sparta with Helen as his queen when her brothers, Castor and Pollux, became gods, and when Agamemnon married Helen's sister Clytemnestra and took back the throne of Mycenae.
Paris, under the guise of a supposed diplomatic mission, went to Sparta to get Helen and bring her back to Troy. Before Helen could look up to see him enter the palace, she was shot with an arrow from Eros, otherwise known as Cupid, and fell in love with Paris when she saw him, as promised by Aphrodite. Menelaus had left for Crete to bury his uncle, Crateus.
According to one account, Hera, still jealous over the judgement of Paris, sent a storm. The storm caused the lovers to land in Egypt, where the gods replaced Helen with a likeness of her made of clouds, Nephele. The myth of Helen being switched is attributed to the 6th century BC Sicilian poet Stesichorus. For Homer the true Helen was in Troy. The ship then landed in Sidon before reaching Troy. Paris, fearful of getting caught, spent some time there and then sailed to Troy.
Paris' abduction of Helen had several precedents. Io was taken from Mycenae, Europa was taken from Phoenicia, Jason took Medea from Colchis, and the Trojan princess Hesione had been taken by Heracles, who gave her to Telamon of Salamis. According to Herodotus, Paris was emboldened by these examples to steal himself a wife from Greece, and expected no retribution, since there had been none in the other cases.
According to Homer, Menelaus and his ally, Odysseus, traveled to Troy, where they unsuccessfully sought to recover Helen by diplomatic means.
Menelaus then asked Agamemnon to uphold his oath, which, as one of Helen's suitors, was to defend her marriage regardless of which suitor had been chosen. Agamemnon agreed and sent emissaries to all the Achaean kings and princes to call them to observe their oaths and retrieve Helen.
Since Menelaus's wedding, Odysseus had married Penelope and fathered a son, Telemachus. In order to avoid the war, he feigned madness and sowed his fields with salt. Palamedes outwitted him by placing his infant son in front of the plough's path, and Odysseus turned aside, unwilling to kill his son, so revealing his sanity and forcing him to join the war.
According to Homer, however, Odysseus supported the military adventure from the beginning, and traveled the region with Pylos' king, Nestor, to recruit forces.
At Skyros, Achilles had an affair with the king's daughter Deidamia, resulting in a child, Neoptolemus. Odysseus, Telamonian Ajax, and Achilles' tutor Phoenix went to retrieve Achilles. Achilles' mother disguised him as a woman so that he would not have to go to war, but, according to one story, they blew a horn, and Achilles revealed himself by seizing a spear to fight intruders, rather than fleeing. According to another story, they disguised themselves as merchants bearing trinkets and weaponry, and Achilles was marked out from the other women for admiring weaponry instead of clothes and jewelry.
Pausanias said that, according to Homer, Achilles did not hide in Skyros, but rather conquered the island, as part of the Trojan War.
The Achaean forces first gathered at Aulis. All the suitors sent their forces except King Cinyras of Cyprus. Though he sent breastplates to Agamemnon and promised to send 50 ships, he sent only one real ship, led by the son of Mygdalion, and 49 ships made of clay. Idomeneus was willing to lead the Cretan contingent in Mycenae's war against Troy, but only as a co-commander, which he was granted. The last commander to arrive was Achilles, who was then 15 years old.
Following a sacrifice to Apollo, a snake slithered from the altar to a sparrow's nest in a plane tree nearby. It ate the mother and her nine chicks, then was turned to stone. Calchas interpreted this as a sign that Troy would fall in the tenth year of the war.
When the Achaeans left for the war, they did not know the way, and accidentally landed in Mysia, ruled by King Telephus, son of Heracles, who had led a contingent of Arcadians to settle there. In the battle, Achilles wounded Telephus, who had killed Thersander. Because the wound would not heal, Telephus asked an oracle, "What will happen to the wound?". The oracle responded, "he that wounded shall heal". The Achaean fleet then set sail and was scattered by a storm. Achilles landed in Scyros and married Deidamia. A new gathering was set again in Aulis.
Telephus went to Aulis, and either pretended to be a beggar, asking Agamemnon to help heal his wound, or kidnapped Orestes and held him for ransom, demanding the wound be healed. Achilles refused, claiming to have no medical knowledge. Odysseus reasoned that the spear that had inflicted the wound must be able to heal it. Pieces of the spear were scraped off onto the wound, and Telephus was healed. Telephus then showed the Achaeans the route to Troy.
Some scholars have regarded the expedition against Telephus and its resolution as a derivative reworking of elements from the main story of the Trojan War, but it has also been seen as fitting the story-pattern of the "preliminary adventure" that anticipates events and themes from the main narrative, and therefore as likely to be "early and integral".
Eight years after the storm had scattered them, the fleet of more than a thousand ships was gathered again. But when they had all reached Aulis, the winds ceased. The prophet Calchas stated that the goddess Artemis was punishing Agamemnon for killing either a sacred deer or a deer in a sacred grove, and boasting that he was a better hunter than she. The only way to appease Artemis, he said, was to sacrifice Iphigenia, who was either the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, or of Helen and Theseus entrusted to Clytemnestra when Helen married Menelaus. Agamemnon refused, and the other commanders threatened to make Palamedes commander of the expedition. According to some versions, Agamemnon relented and performed the sacrifice, but others claim that he sacrificed a deer in her place, or that at the last moment, Artemis took pity on the girl, and took her to be a maiden in one of her temples, substituting a lamb. Hesiod says that Iphigenia became the goddess Hecate.
The Achaean forces are described in detail in the Catalogue of Ships, in the second book of the "Iliad". They consisted of 28 contingents from mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, the Dodecanese islands, Crete, and Ithaca, comprising 1186 pentekonters, ships with 50 rowers. Thucydides says that according to tradition there were about 1200 ships, and that the Boeotian ships had 120 men, while Philoctetes' ships only had the fifty rowers, these probably being maximum and minimum. These numbers would mean a total force of 70,000 to 130,000 men. Another catalogue of ships is given by the "Bibliotheca" that differs somewhat but agrees in numbers. Some scholars have claimed that Homer's catalogue is an original Bronze Age document, possibly the Achaean commander's order of operations. Others believe it was a fabrication of Homer.
The second book of the "Iliad" also lists the Trojan allies, consisting of the Trojans themselves, led by Hector, and various allies listed as Dardanians led by Aeneas, Zeleians, Adrasteians, Percotians, Pelasgians, Thracians, Ciconian spearmen, Paionian archers, Halizones, Mysians, Phrygians, Maeonians, Miletians, Lycians led by Sarpedon and Carians. Nothing is said of the Trojan language; the Carians are specifically said to be barbarian-speaking, and the allied contingents are said to have spoken many languages, requiring orders to be translated by their individual commanders. The Trojans and Achaeans in the "Iliad" share the same religion, same culture and the enemy heroes speak to each other in the same language, though this could be dramatic effect.
Philoctetes was Heracles' friend, and because he lit Heracles's funeral pyre when no one else would, he received Heracles' bow and arrows. He sailed with seven ships full of men to the Trojan War, where he was planning on fighting for the Achaeans. They stopped either at Chryse Island for supplies, or in Tenedos, along with the rest of the fleet. Philoctetes was then bitten by a snake. The wound festered and had a foul smell; on Odysseus's advice, the Atreidae ordered Philoctetes to stay on Lemnos. Medon took control of Philoctetes's men. While landing on Tenedos, Achilles killed king Tenes, son of Apollo, despite a warning by his mother that if he did so he would be killed himself by Apollo. From Tenedos, Agamemnon sent an embassy to Priam, composed of Menelaus, Odysseus, and Palamedes, asking for Helen's return. The embassy was refused.
Philoctetes stayed on Lemnos for ten years, which was a deserted island according to Sophocles' tragedy "Philoctetes", but according to earlier tradition was populated by Minyans.
Calchas had prophesied that the first Achaean to walk on land after stepping off a ship would be the first to die. Thus even the leading Greeks hesitated to land. Finally, Protesilaus, leader of the Phylaceans, landed first. Odysseus had tricked him, in throwing his own shield down to land on, so that while he was first to leap off his ship, he was not the first to land on Trojan soil. Hector killed Protesilaus in single combat, though the Trojans conceded the beach. In the second wave of attacks, Achilles killed Cycnus, son of Poseidon. The Trojans then fled to the safety of the walls of their city. The walls served as sturdy fortifications for defense against the Greeks; the build of the walls was so impressive that legend held that they had been built by Poseidon and Apollo during a year of forced service to Trojan King Laomedon. Protesilaus had killed many Trojans but was killed by Hector in most versions of the story, though others list Aeneas, Achates, or Ephorbus as his slayer. The Achaeans buried him as a god on the Thracian peninsula, across the Troad. After Protesilaus' death, his brother, Podarces, took command of his troops.
The Achaeans besieged Troy for nine years. This part of the war is the least developed among surviving sources, which prefer to talk about events in the last year of the war. After the initial landing the army was gathered in its entirety again only in the tenth year. Thucydides deduces that this was due to lack of money. They raided the Trojan allies and spent time farming the Thracian peninsula. Troy was never completely besieged, thus it maintained communications with the interior of Asia Minor. Reinforcements continued to come until the very end. The Achaeans controlled only the entrance to the Dardanelles, and Troy and her allies controlled the shortest point at Abydos and Sestus and communicated with allies in Europe.
Achilles and Ajax were the most active of the Achaeans, leading separate armies to raid lands of Trojan allies. According to Homer, Achilles conquered 11 cities and 12 islands. According to Apollodorus, he raided the land of Aeneas in the Troad region and stole his cattle. He also captured Lyrnassus, Pedasus, and many of the neighbouring cities, and killed Troilus, son of Priam, who was still a youth; it was said that if he reached 20 years of age, Troy would not fall. According to Apollodorus,
He also took Lesbos and Phocaea, then Colophon, and Smyrna, and Clazomenae, and Cyme; and afterwards Aegialus and Tenos, the so-called Hundred Cities; then, in order, Adramytium and Side; then Endium, and Linaeum, and Colone. He took also Hypoplacian Thebes and Lyrnessus, and further Antandrus, and many other cities.
Kakrides comments that the list is wrong in that it extends too far into the south. Other sources talk of Achilles taking Pedasus, Monenia, Mythemna (in Lesbos), and Peisidice.
Among the loot from these cities was Briseis, from Lyrnessus, who was awarded to him, and Chryseis, from Hypoplacian Thebes, who was awarded to Agamemnon. Achilles captured Lycaon, son of Priam, while he was cutting branches in his father's orchards. Patroclus sold him as a slave in Lemnos, where he was bought by Eetion of Imbros and brought back to Troy. Only 12 days later Achilles slew him, after the death of Patroclus.
Ajax son of Telamon laid waste the Thracian peninsula of which Polymestor, a son-in-law of Priam, was king. Polymestor surrendered Polydorus, one of Priam's children, whom he had custody. He then attacked the town of the Phrygian king Teleutas, killed him in single combat and carried off his daughter Tecmessa. Ajax also hunted the Trojan flocks, both on Mount Ida and in the countryside.
Numerous paintings on pottery have suggested a tale not mentioned in the literary traditions. At some point in the war Achilles and Ajax were playing a board game ("petteia"). They were absorbed in the game and oblivious to the surrounding battle. The Trojans attacked and reached the heroes, who were only saved by an intervention of Athena.
Odysseus was sent to Thrace to return with grain, but came back empty-handed. When scorned by Palamedes, Odysseus challenged him to do better. Palamedes set out and returned with a shipload of grain.
Odysseus had never forgiven Palamedes for threatening the life of his son. In revenge, Odysseus conceived a plot where an incriminating letter was forged, from Priam to Palamedes, and gold was planted in Palamedes' quarters. The letter and gold were "discovered", and Agamemnon had Palamedes stoned to death for treason.
However, Pausanias, quoting the "Cypria", says that Odysseus and Diomedes drowned Palamedes, while he was fishing, and Dictys says that Odysseus and Diomedes lured Palamedes into a well, which they said contained gold, then stoned him to death.
Palamedes' father Nauplius sailed to the Troad and asked for justice, but was refused. In revenge, Nauplius traveled among the Achaean kingdoms and told the wives of the kings that they were bringing Trojan concubines to dethrone them. Many of the Greek wives were persuaded to betray their husbands, most significantly Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, who was seduced by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes.
Near the end of the ninth year since the landing, the Achaean army, tired from the fighting and from the lack of supplies, mutinied against their leaders and demanded to return to their homes. According to the Cypria, Achilles forced the army to stay. According to Apollodorus, Agamemnon brought the Wine Growers, daughters of Anius, son of Apollo, who had the gift of producing by touch wine, wheat, and oil from the earth, in order to relieve the supply problem of the army.
Chryses, a priest of Apollo and father of Chryseis, came to Agamemnon to ask for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refused, and insulted Chryses, who prayed to Apollo to avenge his ill-treatment. Enraged, Apollo afflicted the Achaean army with plague. Agamemnon was forced to return Chryseis to end the plague, and took Achilles' concubine Briseis as his own. Enraged at the dishonour Agamemnon had inflicted upon him, Achilles decided he would no longer fight. He asked his mother, Thetis, to intercede with Zeus, who agreed to give the Trojans success in the absence of Achilles, the best warrior of the Achaeans.
After the withdrawal of Achilles, the Achaeans were initially successful. Both armies gathered in full for the first time since the landing. Menelaus and Paris fought a duel, which ended when Aphrodite snatched the beaten Paris from the field. With the truce broken, the armies began fighting again. Diomedes won great renown amongst the Achaeans, killing the Trojan hero Pandaros and nearly killing Aeneas, who was only saved by his mother, Aphrodite. With the assistance of Athena, Diomedes then wounded the gods Aphrodite and Ares. During the next days, however, the Trojans drove the Achaeans back to their camp and were stopped at the Achaean wall by Poseidon. The next day, though, with Zeus' help, the Trojans broke into the Achaean camp and were on the verge of setting fire to the Achaean ships. An earlier appeal to Achilles to return was rejected, but after Hector burned Protesilaus' ship, he allowed his relative and best friend Patroclus to go into battle wearing Achilles' armour and lead his army. Patroclus drove the Trojans all the way back to the walls of Troy, and was only prevented from storming the city by the intervention of Apollo. Patroclus was then killed by Hector, who took Achilles' armour from the body of Patroclus.
Achilles, maddened with grief over the death of Patroclus, swore to kill Hector in revenge. The exact nature of Achilles' relationship to Patroclus is the subject of some debate. Although certainly very close, Achilles and Patroclus are never explicitly cast as lovers by Homer, but they were depicted as such in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato. He was reconciled with Agamemnon and received Briseis back, untouched by Agamemnon. He received a new set of arms, forged by the god Hephaestus, and returned to the battlefield. He slaughtered many Trojans, and nearly killed Aeneas, who was saved by Poseidon. Achilles fought with the river god Scamander, and a battle of the gods followed. The Trojan army returned to the city, except for Hector, who remained outside the walls because he was tricked by Athena. Achilles killed Hector, and afterwards he dragged Hector's body from his chariot and refused to return the body to the Trojans for burial. The body nevertheless remained unscathed as it was preserved from all injury by Apollo and Aphrodite. The Achaeans then conducted funeral games for Patroclus. Afterwards, Priam came to Achilles' tent, guided by Hermes, and asked Achilles to return Hector's body. The armies made a temporary truce to allow the burial of the dead. The "Iliad" ends with the funeral of Hector.
Shortly after the burial of Hector, Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, arrived with her warriors. Penthesilea, daughter of Otrere and Ares, had accidentally killed her sister Hippolyte. She was purified from this action by Priam, and in exchange she fought for him and killed many, including Machaon (according to Pausanias, Machaon was killed by Eurypylus), and according to one version, Achilles himself, who was resurrected at the request of Thetis. In another version, Penthesilia was killed by Achilles who fell in love with her beauty after her death. Thersites, a simple soldier and the ugliest Achaean, taunted Achilles over his love and gouged out Penthesilea's eyes. Achilles slew Thersites, and after a dispute sailed to Lesbos, where he was purified for his murder by Odysseus after sacrificing to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto.
While they were away, Memnon of Ethiopia, son of Tithonus and Eos, came with his host to help his stepbrother Priam. He did not come directly from Ethiopia, but either from Susa in Persia, conquering all the peoples in between, or from the Caucasus, leading an army of Ethiopians and Indians. Like Achilles, he wore armour made by Hephaestus. In the ensuing battle, Memnon killed Antilochus, who took one of Memnon's blows to save his father Nestor. Achilles and Memnon then fought. Zeus weighed the fate of the two heroes; the weight containing that of Memnon sank, and he was slain by Achilles. Achilles chased the Trojans to their city, which he entered. The gods, seeing that he had killed too many of their children, decided that it was his time to die. He was killed after Paris shot a poisoned arrow that was guided by Apollo. In another version he was killed by a knife to the back (or heel) by Paris, while marrying Polyxena, daughter of Priam, in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo, the site where he had earlier killed Troilus. Both versions conspicuously deny the killer any sort of valour, saying Achilles remained undefeated on the battlefield. His bones were mingled with those of Patroclus, and funeral games were held. Like Ajax, he is represented as living after his death in the island of Leuke, at the mouth of the Danube River, where he is married to Helen.
A great battle raged around the dead Achilles. Ajax held back the Trojans, while Odysseus carried the body away. When Achilles' armour was offered to the smartest warrior, the two that had saved his body came forward as competitors. Agamemnon, unwilling to undertake the invidious duty of deciding between the two competitors, referred the dispute to the decision of the Trojan prisoners, inquiring of them which of the two heroes had done most harm to the Trojans. Alternatively, the Trojans and Pallas Athena were the judges in that, following Nestor's advice, spies were sent to the walls to overhear what was said. A girl said that Ajax was braver:
For Aias took up and carried out of the strife the hero, Peleus'
son: this great Odysseus cared not to do.
To this another replied by Athena's contrivance:
Why, what is this you say? A thing against reason and untrue!
Even a woman could carry a load once a man had put it on her
shoulder; but she could not fight. For she would fail with fear
if she should fight. (Scholiast on Aristophanes, Knights 1056 and Aristophanes ib)
According to Pindar, the decision was made by secret ballot among the Achaeans. In all story versions, the arms were awarded to Odysseus. Driven mad with grief, Ajax desired to kill his comrades, but Athena caused him to mistake the cattle and their herdsmen for the Achaean warriors. In his frenzy he scourged two rams, believing them to be Agamemnon and Menelaus. In the morning, he came to his senses and killed himself by jumping on the sword that had been given to him by Hector, so that it pierced his armpit, his only vulnerable part. According to an older tradition, he was killed by the Trojans who, seeing he was invulnerable, attacked him with clay until he was covered by it and could no longer move, thus dying of starvation.
After the tenth year, it was prophesied that Troy could not fall without Heracles' bow, which was with Philoctetes in Lemnos. Odysseus and Diomedes retrieved Philoctetes, whose wound had healed. Philoctetes then shot and killed Paris.
According to Apollodorus, Paris' brothers Helenus and Deiphobus vied over the hand of Helen. Deiphobus prevailed, and Helenus abandoned Troy for Mt. Ida. Calchas said that Helenus knew the prophecies concerning the fall of Troy, so Odysseus waylaid Helenus. Under coercion, Helenus told the Achaeans that they would win if they retrieved Pelops' bones, persuaded Achilles' son Neoptolemus to fight for them, and stole the Trojan Palladium.
The Greeks retrieved Pelop's bones, and sent Odysseus to retrieve Neoptolemus, who was hiding from the war in King Lycomedes's court in Scyros. Odysseus gave him his father's arms. Eurypylus, son of Telephus, leading, according to Homer, a large force of "Kêteioi", or Hittites or Mysians according to Apollodorus, arrived to aid the Trojans. He killed Machaon and Peneleos, but was slain by Neoptolemus.
Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus went to spy inside Troy, but was recognized by Helen. Homesick, Helen plotted with Odysseus. Later, with Helen's help, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium.
The end of the war came with one final plan. Odysseus devised a new ruse—a giant hollow wooden horse, an animal that was sacred to the Trojans. It was built by Epeius and guided by Athena, from the wood of a cornel tree grove sacred to Apollo, with the inscription:
The hollow horse was filled with soldiers led by Odysseus. The rest of the army burned the camp and sailed for Tenedos.
When the Trojans discovered that the Greeks were gone, believing the war was over, they "joyfully dragged the horse inside the city", while they debated what to do with it. Some thought they ought to hurl it down from the rocks, others thought they should burn it, while others said they ought to dedicate it to Athena.
Both Cassandra and Laocoön warned against keeping the horse. While Cassandra had been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, she was also cursed by Apollo never to be believed. Serpents then came out of the sea and devoured either Laocoön and one of his two sons, Laocoön and both his sons, or only his sons, a portent which so alarmed the followers of Aeneas that they withdrew to Ida. The Trojans decided to keep the horse and turned to a night of mad revelry and celebration. Sinon, an Achaean spy, signaled the fleet stationed at Tenedos when "it was midnight and the clear moon was rising" and the soldiers from inside the horse emerged and killed the guards.
The Achaeans entered the city and killed the sleeping population. A great massacre followed which continued into the day.
Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth,
As Trojans and their alien helpers died.
Here were men lying quelled by bitter death
All up and down the city in their blood.
The Trojans, fuelled with desperation, fought back fiercely, despite being disorganized and leaderless. With the fighting at its height, some donned fallen enemies' attire and launched surprise counterattacks in the chaotic street fighting. Other defenders hurled down roof tiles and anything else heavy down on the rampaging attackers. The outlook was grim though, and eventually the remaining defenders were destroyed along with the whole city.
Neoptolemus killed Priam, who had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus of the Courtyard. Menelaus killed Deiphobus, Helen's husband after Paris' death, and also intended to kill Helen, but, overcome by her beauty, threw down his sword and took her to the ships.
Ajax the Lesser raped Cassandra on Athena's altar while she was clinging to her statue. Because of Ajax's impiety, the Acheaens, urged by Odysseus, wanted to stone him to death, but he fled to Athena's altar, and was spared.
Antenor, who had given hospitality to Menelaus and Odysseus when they asked for the return of Helen, and who had advocated so, was spared, along with his family. Aeneas took his father on his back and fled, and, according to Apollodorus, was allowed to go because of his piety.
The Greeks then burned the city and divided the spoils. Cassandra was awarded to Agamemnon. Neoptolemus got Andromache, wife of Hector, and Odysseus was given Hecuba, Priam's wife.
The Achaeans threw Hector's infant son Astyanax down from the walls of Troy, either out of cruelty and hate or to end the royal line, and the possibility of a son's revenge. They (by usual tradition Neoptolemus) also sacrificed the Trojan princess Polyxena on the grave of Achilles as demanded by his ghost, either as part of his spoil or because she had betrayed him.
Aethra, Theseus' mother, and one of Helen's handmaids, was rescued by her grandsons, Demophon and Acamas.
The gods were very angry over the destruction of their temples and other sacrilegious acts by the Achaeans, and decided that most would not return home. A storm fell on the returning fleet off Tenos island. Additionally, Nauplius, in revenge for the murder of his son Palamedes, set up false lights in Cape Caphereus (also known today as Cavo D'Oro, in Euboea) and many were shipwrecked.
According to the "Odyssey", Menelaus's fleet was blown by storms to Crete and Egypt, where they were unable to sail away because the winds were calm. Only five of his ships survived. Menelaus had to catch Proteus, a shape-shifting sea god, to find out what sacrifices to which gods he would have to make to guarantee safe passage. According to some stories the Helen who was taken by Paris was a fake, and the real Helen was in Egypt, where she was reunited with Menelaus. Proteus also told Menelaus that he was destined for Elysium (Heaven) after his death. Menelaus returned to Sparta with Helen eight years after he had left Troy.
Agamemnon returned home with Cassandra to Argos. His wife Clytemnestra (Helen's sister) was having an affair with Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, Agamemnon's cousin who had conquered Argos before Agamemnon himself retook it. Possibly out of vengeance for the death of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra plotted with her lover to kill Agamemnon. Cassandra foresaw this murder, and warned Agamemnon, but he disregarded her. He was killed, either at a feast or in his bath, according to different versions. Cassandra was also killed. Agamemnon's son Orestes, who had been away, returned and conspired with his sister Electra to avenge their father. He killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and succeeded to his father's throne.
Odysseus' ten-year journey home to Ithaca was told in Homer's "Odyssey". Odysseus and his men were blown far off course to lands unknown to the Achaeans; there Odysseus had many adventures, including the famous encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, and an audience with the seer Teiresias in Hades. On the island of Thrinacia, Odysseus' men ate the cattle sacred to the sun-god Helios. For this sacrilege Odysseus' ships were destroyed, and all his men perished. Odysseus had not eaten the cattle, and was allowed to live; he washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, and lived there with the nymph Calypso. After seven years, the gods decided to send Odysseus home; on a small raft, he sailed to Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians, who gave him passage to Ithaca.
Once in his home land, Odysseus traveled disguised as an old beggar. He was recognised by his dog, Argos, who died in his lap. He then discovered that his wife, Penelope, had been faithful to him during the 20 years he was absent, despite the countless suitors that were eating his food and spending his property. With the help of his son Telemachus, Athena, and Eumaeus, the swineherd, he killed all of them except Medon, who had been polite to Penelope, and Phemius, a local singer who had only been forced to help the suitors against Penelope. Penelope tested Odysseus and made sure it was him, and he forgave her. The next day the suitors' relatives tried to take revenge on him but they were stopped by Athena.
The "Telegony" picks up where the "Odyssey" leaves off, beginning with the burial of the dead suitors, and continues until the death of Odysseus. Some years after Odysseus' return, Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, came to Ithaca and plundered the island. Odysseus, attempting to fight off the attack, was killed by his unrecognized son. After Telegonus realized he had killed his father, he brought the body to his mother Circe, along with Telemachus and Penelope. Circe made them immortal; then Telegonus married Penelope and Telemachus married Circe.
The journey of the Trojan survivor Aeneas and his resettling of Trojan refugees in Italy are the subject of the Latin epic poem "The Aeneid" by Virgil. Writing during the time of Augustus, Virgil has his hero give a first-person account of the fall of Troy in the second of the "Aeneid" 's twelve books; the Trojan Horse, which does not appear in "The Iliad", became legendary from Virgil's account.
Aeneas leads a group of survivors away from the city, among them his son Ascanius (also known as Iulus), his trumpeter Misenus, father Anchises, the healer Iapyx, his faithful sidekick Achates, and Mimas as a guide. His wife Creusa is killed during the sack of the city. Aeneas also carries the Lares and Penates of Troy, which the historical Romans claimed to preserve as guarantees of Rome's own security.
The Trojan survivors escape with a number of ships, seeking to establish a new homeland elsewhere. They land in several nearby countries that prove inhospitable, and are finally told by an oracle that they must return to the land of their forebears. They first try to establish themselves in Crete, where Dardanus had once settled, but find it ravaged by the same plague that had driven Idomeneus away. They find the colony led by Helenus and Andromache, but decline to remain. After seven years they arrive in Carthage, where Aeneas has an affair with Queen Dido. (Since according to tradition Carthage was founded in 814 BC, the arrival of Trojan refugees a few hundred years earlier exposes chronological difficulties within the mythic tradition.) Eventually the gods order Aeneas to continue onward, and he and his people arrive at the mouth of the Tiber River in Italy. Dido commits suicide, and Aeneas's betrayal of her was regarded as an element in the long enmity between Rome and Carthage that expressed itself in the Punic Wars and led to Roman hegemony.
At Cumae, the Sibyl leads Aeneas on an archetypal descent to the underworld, where the shade of his dead father serves as a guide; this book of the "Aeneid" directly influenced Dante, who has Virgil act as his narrator's guide. Aeneas is given a vision of the future majesty of Rome, which it was his duty to found, and returns to the world of the living. He negotiates a settlement with the local king, Latinus, and was wed to his daughter, Lavinia. This triggered a war with other local tribes, which culminated in the founding of the settlement of Alba Longa, ruled by Aeneas and Lavinia's son Silvius. Roman myth attempted to reconcile two different founding myths: three hundred years later, in the more famous tradition, Romulus founded Rome after murdering his brother Remus. The Trojan origins of Rome became particularly important in the propaganda of Julius Caesar, whose family claimed descent from Venus through Aeneas's son Iulus (hence the Latin "gens" name "Iulius"), and during the reign of Augustus; see for instance the "Tabulae Iliacae" and the "Troy Game" presented frequently by the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Since this war was considered among the ancient Greeks as either the last event of the mythical age or the first event of the historical age, several dates are given for the fall of Troy. They usually derive from genealogies of kings. Ephorus gives 1135 BC, Sosibius 1172 BC, Eratosthenes 1184 BC/1183 BC, Timaeus 1193 BC, the Parian marble 1209 BC/1208 BC, Dicaearchus 1212 BC, Herodotus around 1250 BC, Eretes 1291 BC, while Douris 1334 BC. As for the exact day Ephorus gives 23/24 Thargelion (May 6 or 7), Hellanicus 12 Thargelion (May 26) while others give the 23rd of Sciroforion (July 7) or the 23rd of Ponamos (October 7).
The glorious and rich city Homer describes was believed to be Troy VI by many twentieth century authors, and destroyed about
1275 BC, probably by an earthquake. Its successor, Troy VIIa, was destroyed by fire around 1180 BC; it was long considered a poorer city, and dismissed as a candidate for Homeric Troy, but since the excavation campaign of 1988, it has come to be regarded as the most likely candidate.
The historicity of the Trojan War is still subject to debate. Most classical Greeks thought that the war was a historical event, but many believed that the Homeric poems had exaggerated the events to suit the demands of poetry. For instance, the historian Thucydides, who is known for being critical, considers it a true event but doubts that 1,186 ships were sent to Troy. Euripides started changing Greek myths at will, including those of the Trojan War. Near year 100 AD, Dio Chrysostom argued that while the war was historical, it ended with the Trojans winning, and the Greeks attempted to hide that fact. Around 1870 it was generally agreed in Western Europe that the Trojan War had never happened and Troy never existed. Then Heinrich Schliemann popularized his excavations at Hisarlik, Canakkale, which he and others believed to be Troy, and of the Mycenaean cities of Greece. Today many scholars agree that the Trojan War is based on a historical core of a Greek expedition against the city of Troy, but few would argue that the Homeric poems faithfully represent the actual events of the war.
In November 2001, geologist John C. Kraft and classicist John V. Luce presented the results of investigations into the geology of the region that had started in 1977. The geologists compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the "Iliad" and other classical sources, notably Strabo's "Geographia". Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as identified by Schliemann (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topography and accounts of the battle in the "Iliad".
In the twentieth century scholars have attempted to draw conclusions based on Hittite and Egyptian texts that date to the time of the Trojan War. While they give a general description of the political situation in the region at the time, their information on whether this particular conflict took place is limited. Andrew Dalby notes that while the Trojan War most likely did take place in some form and is therefore grounded in history, its true nature is and will be unknown. The Tawagalawa letter mentions a kingdom of "Ahhiyawa" (Achaea, or Greece) that lies beyond the sea (that would be the Aegean) and controls Milliwanda, which is identified with Miletus. Also mentioned in this and other letters is the Assuwa confederation made of 22 cities and countries which included the city of "Wilusa" (Ilios or Ilium). The Milawata letter implies this city lies on the north of the Assuwa confederation, beyond the Seha river. While the identification of Wilusa with Ilium (that is, Troy) is always controversial, in the 1990s it gained majority acceptance. In the Alaksandu treaty (c. 1280 BC) the king of the city is named Alaksandu, and Paris's name in the "Iliad" (among other works) is Alexander. The Tawagalawa letter (dated c. 1250 BC) which is addressed to the king of Ahhiyawa actually says: "Now as we have come to an agreement on Wilusa over which we went to war ..."
Formerly under the Hittites, the Assuwa confederation defected after the battle of Kadesh between Egypt and the Hittites (c. 1274 BC). In 1230 BC Hittite king Tudhaliya IV (c. 1240–1210 BC) campaigned against this federation. Under Arnuwanda III (c. 1210–1205 BC) the Hittites were forced to abandon the lands they controlled in the coast of the Aegean. It is possible that the Trojan War was a conflict between the king of Ahhiyawa and the Assuwa confederation. This view has been supported in that the entire war includes the landing in Mysia (and Telephus' wounding), Achilles's campaigns in the North Aegean and Telamonian Ajax's campaigns in Thrace and Phrygia. Most of these regions were part of Assuwa.
That most Achaean heroes did not return to their homes and founded colonies elsewhere was interpreted by Thucydides as being due to their long absence. Nowadays the interpretation followed by most scholars is that the Achaean leaders driven out of their lands by the turmoil at the end of the Mycenaean era preferred to claim descent from exiles of the Trojan War.
The inspiration provided by these events produced many literary works, far more than can be listed here. The siege of Troy provided inspiration for many works of art, most famously Homer's "Iliad", set in the last year of the siege. Some of the others include "Troades" by Euripides, "Troilus and Criseyde" by Geoffrey Chaucer, "Troilus and Cressida" by William Shakespeare, "Iphigenia" and "Polyxena" by Samuel Coster, "Palamedes" by Joost van den Vondel and "Les Troyens" by Hector Berlioz.
Films based on the Trojan War include "Helen of Troy" (1956), "The Trojan Horse" (1961) and "Troy" (2004). The war has also been featured in many books, television series, and other creative works.
Troy
Troy (, "Troía", , "Ílion" or , "Ílios"; and ; Hittite: 𒌷𒃾𒇻𒊭 "Wilusa" or 𒋫𒊒𒄿𒊭 "Truwisa"; ) was a city in the northwest of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), southwest of the Canakkale Strait, south of the mouth of the Dardanelles and northwest of Mount Ida. The location in the present day is the hill of Hisarlik and its immediate vicinity. In modern scholarly nomenclature, the Ridge of Troy (including Hisarlik) borders the Plain of Troy, flat agricultural land, which conducts the lower Scamander River to the strait. Troy was the setting of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle, in particular in the "Iliad", one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer. Metrical evidence from the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" suggests that the name ("Ilion") formerly began with a digamma: ("Wilion"); this is also supported by the Hittite name for what is thought to be the same city, Wilusa.
After a destruction at the end of the Bronze Age, believed to represent the end of the Trojan War, and a period of abandonment or near-abandonment during the subsequent Dark Age, the site acquired a new population of Greek-speakers, who built a classical city that became along with the rest of Anatolia a part of the Persian Empire. The Troad was liberated by Alexander the Great, an admirer of Achilles, who he believed had the same type of glorious (but short-lived) destiny. After the Roman conquest of this now Hellenistic Greek-speaking world, a new capital called Ilium (from Greek: Ἴλιον, "Ilion") was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, became a bishopric, was abandoned, repopulated for a few centuries in the Byzantine era, was abandoned again, and is now a Latin Catholic titular see. Most recently it has risen to prominence as an archaeological site.
In the mid-19th century the Calvert family, wealthy Levantine English settlers of the Troad, occupying a working farm a few miles from Hisarlik, purchased much of the hill in the belief that it contained the ruins of Troy. They were antiquarians. Two of the family, Frederick and especially the youngest, Frank, surveyed the Troad and conducted a number of trial excavations there. In 1865, Frank Calvert excavated trial trenches on the hill, discovering the Roman settlement. Realizing he did not have the funds for a full excavation, he attempted to recruit the British Museum, and was refused. A chance meeting with Calvert in Çanakkale and a visit to the site by Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman and archaeologist, also looking for Troy, offered a second opportunity for funding. Schliemann had been at first skeptical about the identification of Hisarlik with Troy, but was persuaded by Calvert. As Schliemann was about to leave the area, Calvert wrote to him asking him to take over the entire excavation. Schliemann agreed. The Calverts, who made their money in the diplomatic service, expedited the acquisition of a Turkish firman. In 1868, Schliemann excavated an initial deep trench across the mound called today "Schliemann's trench." These excavations revealed several cities built in succession. Subsequent excavations by following archaeologists elaborated on the number and dates of the cities.
Today a small village near the ruins, Tevfikiye, supports the tourist trade visiting the Troia archaeological site. It lies within the province of Çanakkale, some south-west of the provincial capital, also called Çanakkale. The current map shows Ilium a little way inland from the Scamander estuary across the plain of Troy. According to Korfmann, due to Troy's location near the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea, it was a central hub for military activities and trade, and the chief site of a culture he calls the "Maritime Troja Culture," which extended over the region between the Black and Aegean Seas.
Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
Homeric Troy refers primarily to the city described in the Iliad, the earliest literary work in Europe. This is a long originally oral poem in its own dialect of ancient Greek in dactylic hexameter, in tradition composed by a blind poet of the Anatolian Greek coast, Homer. It covers the 10th year of a war against Troy conducted by a coalition of Achaean, or Greek, states under the leadership of a high king, Agamemnon of Mycenae. The city was defended by a coalition of states in the Dardanelles and West Anatolian region under another high king, Priam, whose capital was Troy. The cause of the war was the elopement of Agamemnon's brother's wife, Helen, with Paris, a prince of Troy.
After the literary time of the poem, the city was destroyed when the Greeks pretended to leave after secreting a squad of soldiers in a gigantic wooden horse monument, which the Trojans brought inside the walls. In the dead of night they exited the horse and opened the gates to the Achaeans nearby. Troy was burned and the population slaughtered, although many had other fates.
Besides the "Iliad", there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the "Odyssey", as well as in other ancient Greek literature (such as Aeschylus's Oresteia). The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his "Aeneid". The fall of Troy with the story of the Trojan Horse and the sacrifice of Polyxena, Priam's youngest daughter, is the subject of a later Greek epic by Quintus Smyrnaeus ("Quintus of Smyrna").
The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War and the identity of Homeric Troy with a site in Anatolia on a peninsula called the Troad (Biga Peninsula). Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and there made sacrifices at tombs associated with the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus. In Piri Reis book "Kitab-ı Bahriye" (Book of the Sea, 1521) which details many ports and islands of the Mediterranean, the description of the island called Tenedos mentions Troy and its ruins, lying on the shore opposite of the island.
The fact that the topography around the site matches the topographic detail of the poem gives to the poem a life-like quality not equaled by other epics. In the "Iliad", the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the River Scamander (modern Karamenderes), where they beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city is some from the coast today, but 3,000 years ago the mouths of Scamander were much closer to the city, discharging into a large bay that formed a natural harbor, which has since been filled with alluvial material. Recent geological findings have permitted the identification of the ancient Trojan coastline, and the results largely confirm the accuracy of the Homeric geography of Troy.
In November 2001, the geologist John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and the classicist John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin, presented the results of investigations, begun in 1977, into the geology of the region. They compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the "Iliad" and other classical sources, notably Strabo's "Geographia", and concluded that there is a regular consistency between the location of Schliemann's Troy and other locations such as the Greek camp, the geological evidence, descriptions of the topography and accounts of the battle in the "Iliad".
The Dark Age following the fall of Troy is called so because for a time writing in Greece disappeared. There are consequently no historians from the period. Writing reappeared in the Archaic Period, after which, in the Classical Period, many historians turned their pens to record such histories of the Trojan War as had survived in oral tradition. They offer a span of about two centuries from the 1334 BC date of Duris of Samos to the 1135 BC date of Ephoros of Kyme in Aeolis. Blegen preferred the 1184 BC date of Eratosthenes, which was in his day the most favored. Whether or not the archaeology matched this span and these dates was to be determined by excavation.
With the rise of critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to legend. However, not everyone agreed with this view. The dissidents were to become the first archaeologists at Troy. The true location of ancient Troy had for centuries remained the subject of interest and speculation. Travellers in Anatolia looked for possible locations. Because of its name, the Troad peninsula was highly suspect.
Early modern travellers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including Pierre Belon and Pietro Della Valle, had identified Troy with Alexandria Troas, a ruined town approximately south of the currently accepted location. In the late 18th century, Jean Baptiste LeChevalier identified a location near the village of , a mound approximately south of the currently accepted location. Published in his "Voyage de la Troade", it was the most commonly accepted theory for almost a century.
In 1822, the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren was the first to identify with confidence the position of the city as it is now known. In the second half of the 19th century archaeological excavation of the site believed to have been Homeric Troy began. As the Iliad is taught in every Greek language curriculum in the world, interest in the site has been unflagging. Homeric experts often memorize large parts of the poem. Literary quotes are commonplace. Since the Calvert family began excavation at Hisarlik, hundreds of interested persons have excavated there. Fortunately all excavation has been conducted under the management of key persons termed its "archaeologists." Their courses of excavation have been divided into the phases described below. Sometimes there have been decades between phases. Today interest in the site is as strong as ever. Further plans for excavation have no end in the foreseeable future.
Frank Calvert was born into an English Levantine family on Malta in 1828. He was the youngest of six sons and one daughter born to James Calvert and his wife, the former Louisa Lander, the sister of Charles Alexander Lander, James' business partner. In social standing they were of the aristocracy. James was a distant relative of the Calverts who founded Baltimore, Maryland, and Louisa was a direct descendant of the Campbells of Argyll (Scottish clansmen). Not having inherited any wealth, they took to the colonies, married in Ottoman Smyrna in 1815, and settled in Malta, which had changed hands from the French to the British Empire with the Treaty of Paris (1814). They associated with the "privileged" social circles of Malta, but they were poor. James clerked in the mail and grain offices of the Civil Service.
The family regarded itself as a single enterprise. They shared property, assisted each other, lived together and had common interests, one of which was the antiquities of the Troad. They did not do well in Malta, but in 1829 the Dardanelles region underwent an upswing of its business cycle due to historical circumstances. The Greek War of Independence was about to be concluded in favor of an independent state by the Treaty of Constantinople (1832). The Levant Company, which had had a monopoly on trade through the Dardanelles, was terminated. The price in pounds of the Turkish piastre fell. A manyfold increase in British traffic through straits was anticipated. A new type of job suddenly appeared: British Consul in the Dardanelles, which brought wealth with it.
Charles Lander applied, and was made British Consul of the Dardanelles in 1829. He spoke five languages, knew the region well, and had the best connections. A row of new consular offices was being constructed in Çanakkale along the shore of the strait. He was at first poor. In 1833 he bought a house in town ample enough to invite his sister's sons to join him in the enterprise. Without exception they left home at 16 to be tutored in the trade at their uncle's house and placed in lucrative consular positions. Frederick, the eldest, stayed on to assist Charles. The youngest, Frank, at school in Athens, arrived last, but his interest in archaeology led him into a different career.
Çanakkale was a boom town. In 1831 Lander married Adele, a brief but idyllic relationship that gave them three daughters in quick succession. When the Calverts began to arrive, finding quarters in the crowded town proved to be difficult. The Turkish building code requiring buildings of wood, conflagrations were frequent. The family escaped one fire with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Lander's collection of books on the Troad was totally destroyed. In 1840 Lander suffered a tragedy when his wife, Adele, died in her 40's, leaving three small children. He chose this time to settle his estate, making Frederick his legal heir, guardian of his children, and co-executor (along with himself).
Lander dedicated himself to the consular service, leaving the details of the estate and its reponsibilites to Frederick. The family grew wealthy on the fees paid by the ships they serviced. When Frank arrived in 1845 with his sister he had nothing much to do. By this time the family had a new library. Using its books Frank explored the Troad. He and Lander became collectors. The women in the family took a supportive role as well.
Lander died in 1846 of a fever endemic to the region, leaving Frederick as executor of the will and head of the family. In 1847 he assumed his uncle's consular position. He was also an agent of Lloyd's of London, which insured ship cargos. Despite Frank's youth he began to play an important role in the family consular business, especially when Frederick was away. A few years prior to the death of Lander, the population of Çanakkale was on the rise, from 10,000 in 1800 to 11,000 in 1842. The British numbered about 40 families. The increase in ship traffic meant prosperity for the Calverts, who expedited the ships of several nations, including the United States. They had other ambitions: James William Whittall, British consul in Smyrna, was spreading his doctrine of the "Trojan Colonization Society," (never more than an idea) which was influential on the Calverts, whom he visited.
In 1847 Frederick invested the profits of the family business in two large tracts in the Troad, amounting to many thousands of acres. He founded a company, Calvert Bros. and Co., an "extended family company." The first purchase was a farm at Erenkőy, on the coast about half-way between Çanakkale and Troy. Frederick used it as a station for ships that could not make Çanakkale. The area was a target for Greek immigration. The family became money-lenders, lending only to Greeks at rates considered high (20%).
Frederick also bought a farm he intended to work, the Batak Farm (named for the Batak wetlands), later changed by Frank to Thymbra Farm, because he believed it was the site of Homeric Thymbra, after which the Thymbra Gate of Homeric Troy had been named. It was located at an abandoned village called Akça Köy, 4 mi. to the southeast of Hisarlik. The farm was the last of the village. It harvested and marketed the cups and acorns of Quercus macrolepis, the Valonia Oak, from which valonia, a compound used in dying and tanning, is extracted. The farm also raised cotton and wheat and bred horses. Frederick introduced the English plough and drained the wetlands. The farm eventually became famous as a way station for archaeologists and the home of the Calvert collection of antiquities, which Frank kept locked in a hidden room. The main house, featuring multiple guest bedrooms, was situated on a low ridge in a compound with several outbuildings. It was more of a manor, operated by farm workers and domestic servants.
In 1850–1852 Frederick solved the residence problem by having a mansion built for him in Çanakkale. Two Turkish houses were said to have been put together, but Turkish houses were required to be of wood. This one was of massive stone, which was permitted to foreigners, and was placed partly on fill jetting into the straits. It probably was the length of two Turkish houses. It remained the major building of the town until it was removed in 1942, due to earlier earthquake damage. The last of the Calvert descendants still in the region had ceded it to the town in 1939. The Town Hall was then built on the site. The mansion's extensive gardens became a public park.
The entire family of the times took up permanent residence in the mansion, which was never finished. It was almost always occupied by visitors and social events. The Calverts began a tour-guide business, conducting visitors throughout the Troad. Frank was the chief guide. The women held musicales and sang in the salons. The house attracted a stream of distinguished visitors, each with a theory about the location of Troy. Frederick, however, was not there for the opening of the house. After a fall from a horse in 1851, complications forced him to seek medical care in London for 18 months, the first of a series of disasters. He was back by 1853.
The Crimean War began in October 1853 and lasted through February 1856. Russia had arbitrarily occupied the Danube frontier of the Ottoman Empire including the Crimea, and Britain and France were providing military assistance to the Ottomans. The rear of the conflict was Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Britain relied heavily on the Levantine families for interfacing, intelligence, and guidance. Edmund Calvert was a British agent, but this was not Frederick's calling. Not long after his return the initial British expeditionary force of 10,000 men was held up in ships in the straits, with no place to bivouac, no supplies, and a commissariat of four non-Turkish speakers.
The British Army had reached a low point of efficiency since Wellington. Although it was the responsibility of Parliament, the fact that the crown retained the prerogative of command made them hesitate to update it, for fear of its being used against them. One of the major problems was the fragmentation of the administration into "a number of separate, distinct, and mutually independent authorities," with little centralization. There were always issues of who was in command and what they commanded. A Supply Corps as such did not exist. The immediate needs of the soldiers were supplied by the Commissariat Department, responsible to the Treasury. Commissaries were assigned to units as needed, but they acted to solve supply problems ad hoc. They had no idea beforehand what the army needed, or what it had, or where it was located.
All the needs were given to contractors, who usually required money in advance. They were allowed to borrow from recommended banks. The Commissariat then paid the banks, but should it fail to do so, the debts were still incumbent on the debtors. Contractors were allowed to charge a percentage for their services, and also to include a percentage given to their suppliers as enticement. The Commissariat could thus build entire impromptu supply departments on the basis of immediate need, which is what Frederick did for them.
The logistics problems were of the same type customarily undertaken by the consular staff, but of larger scale. Frederick was able to perform critical services for the army. Within several days he had all the men billeted ashore and had developed an organization of local suppliers on short notice. He secured their immediate attention by offering higher interest rates, to which the Commissary did not then object. He was so successful that he was given the problem of transporting men and supplies to the front. For that he developed his own transport division of contractors paid as direct employees of his own company. He also advised the Medical Department in their choice of a site near Erenköy for a military hospital, named Renkioi Hospital.
The army, arriving at Gallipoli in April, 1854, did well at first, thanks to the efforts of Frederick Calvert and his peers. They were contracted by Deputy Assistant Commander-General of the Commissariat, John William Smith, on the instruction of the Commander-General, William Filder, who had given Smith their names in advance, especially that of Frederick Calvert. Frederick was waiting for the fleet in Gallipoli. By June the army was doing badly. The Commissary seemed to have no understanding of military schedules. Needed supplies were not getting to their destinations for a number of reasons: perishables were spoiled through delay, cargos were lost or abandoned because there was no tracking system, or cut because a commissary speculated that they should be, etc. Frederick attempted to carry on by using his own resources in the expectation of collecting the money later by due process. By the end of the war his bill to the Commissary would be several thousand pounds. He had had to mortgage family properties in the Troad.
By June it was obvious to Parliament that the cabinet position of “Secretary of State for War and the Colonies” was beyond the ability of only one minister. He was divested of his colonial duties, leaving him as Secretary of State for War, but the Commissary was still not in his domain. In August, Frederick purchased the winter feed for the animals and left it on the dock at Salonica. Filder had adopted a policy of purchasing hay from London and having it pressed for land transport, even though chopped hay was readily available at a much cheaper price around the Dardanelles. The Commissariat was supposed to inspect and accept it at Salonica, but the presses had been set up in the wrong location. By the time they were ready for the hay, most of it had spoiled, so they did not accept any of it.
The winter was especially severe. The animals starved, and without transport, so did the men, trying to make do without food, clothing, shelter or medical supplies. Estimates of the death rate were as high as 35%, 42% in the field hospitals. Florence Nightingale on the scene sounded the alarm to the general public. A scandal ensued; Prince Albert wrote to the Prime Minister. The folly of an army dying because not allowed to help itself while its Commissariat was not efficient enough to move even the minimum of supplies became manifest to the whole nation. In December Parliament placed the Commissariat under the army and opened an investigation. In January, 1855, the government resigned, to be replaced shortly by another determined to do whatever was necessary to obtain a functional supply corps.
The army found that it could not after all dispense with the Treasury or its system of payment. The first investigation went before Parliament in April, 1855. Filder’s defense was that he had conformed strictly to regulations, and that he was not responsible for accidental events, which were “the visitations of God.” John William Smith, Frederick’s handler in the Commissariat, included a number of favorable statements about him in the report, such as “the Commissariat would have been perfectly helpless without Mr. Calvert.” Parliament exonerated the Commissariat, finding “no one in the Crimea was to blame.”
Anticipating this result, the new government started a secret investigation of its own under J. McNeill, a civilian physician, and a milItary officer, Colonel A.M. Tulloch, which it outed in April after the acquittal. The new investigation lasted until January, 1856, and had nothing favorable to say. Losses higher than any battle could produce, and higher than those of any of the allies, were not to be dismissed as accidental.
The new commissioners attacked the system: “the system hitherto relied on as sufficient to provide for every emergency, had totally failed.” The blow fell mainly on Filder. He had plenty of alternatives, Tulloch asserted, which he might have been expected to take. Chopped hay and cattle were readily and cheaply available in the Constantinople region. Filder had some cattle transports at his command in October. Once the supplies had been transported to the Crimea, they could have been carried inland by the troops themselves. Of Filder, Tulloch said: “He was highly paid — not to do merely what he was ordered, but in the expectation that, when difficulties arose, he would show himself equal to the emergency, by ... exercising that discretion and intelligence which the public has a right to expect ...”
Filder was retired by the medical board because of age and sent home. Meanwhile the Commissary had introduced the word "profiteering" in a effort to cast the blame from itself. The decisions had been made by greedy contractors charging high interest rates, who had introduced delays to push the price up. John William Smith recanted what he had said about Frederick, now claiming that Frederick had put private interests before the public, without clarifying what he meant. The insinuation was enough to brand him as a profiteer.. The entire Commissariat took it up as a theme, the banks refusing to honor contractor claims. Restrictions on loans tightened; cash flow problems developed. The inflated economy of the Troad began to collapse. The report was released in January. By then most contractors were in bankruptcy. British troops went home at the end of the war in February, having turned the Turkish merchants in the Troad against the English.
The cost of living remained high. Frederick was no longer trusted as a consular agent and had trouble finding work. His friend, John Brunton, head of the military hospital near Erenköy, was ordered to dismantle and sell the facility. He suggested that Brunton sell the medical supplies to him as surplus at a discount, so that he could recoup some of his estate by reselling them. Turning on him, as Smith had done, Brunton denounced him publicly.
Criminal charges were brought against Frederick for non-payment of debt to the War Office by the Supreme Consular Court of Istanbul in March, 1857. Due to difficulty in proving their case, it went on for months, being finally transferred to London, where Frederick joined it in February, 1858. In 1859 he served a prison term of ten weeks on one debt. Subsequently the Foreign Office stepped in to manage his appeal. The military had not understood how the interest system worked. He won his case before Parliament, with commendation and thanks, and payment of the several thousand plus backpay and interest, arriving home 2.5 years after he had left it, to rescue the estate.
During the 1860s Frederick Calvert's life and career were mainly consumed by a case of insurance fraud termed by the press the “Possidhon affair." An attempt was made to defraud Lloyd's of London of payments to an imaginary person claiming to own an imaginary ship, the Possidhon, that had gone to the bottom when its imaginary cargo burned, a claim made through Frederick. The perpetrators of the fraud, originally the witnesses of the fire, named Frederick as their ringleader. The trial was not a proper one, and Frederick was convicted on technicalities. He protested that he was the victim of an Ottoman frame-up, and was supported in that plea by his brother, Frank. There were a number of circumstances that remain historically unexplained. Modern historians who think he was guilty characterize him as a charismatic profiteer of shady ethics, while those who think he was innocent point to his patriotic motives in helping the British Army to the detriment of his own estate and his acquittal by Parliament.
Having returned from London in October, 1860, with enough money to restore the family estate, Frederick now turned his attention to the family avocation, archaeology, rejecting a lucrative job offer as a Consul in Syria. Frank, now age 32, had long been the master of the estate and of the business. By this time he was also a skilled and respected archaeologist. He spent all of his spare time investigating and excavating the numerous habitation and burial sites of the Troad. He was an invaluable consultant to specialists in many areas from plants to coins. Frederick joined him in this life by choice. For a few years he was able to work with Frank in expanding Lander’s library and collection, and in exploring and excavating ancient sites.
In 1846 Frederick married Eveline, an heiress of the wealthy Abbotts, owners of some mines in Turkey. They had at least five known children.
Frederick’s wife’s uncle, William Abbott, had gone with him to London, where they purchased a house for mutual residence. Frederick set him up in a few different businesses, the last being Abbott Brothers, dealers in firewood. His son, however, William George Abbott, a junior partner of Frederick in the consular business, remained in the Dardanelles to handle business there as acting consul. In January, 1861, the consular office was approached by a Turkish merchant, Hussein Aga, requesting 12000 £. ($} of insurance from Lloyd’s on the cargo of the Possidhon, which was olive oil. He claimed to be a broker marketing the oil produced by certain pashas and now wished to sell it in Britain.
Frederick requested William in London to borrow money as Abbot Brothers to finance the premiums. The debt was to be paid when the cargo was sold. It isn’t clear whether Abbott was to sell it, and if so, in whose name. The cargo, being insured by him, was consigned to him. A loan of 1500 £ ($) was effected on April 11, and the premiums were paid.
The ship, cleared to sail from Edremit to Britain by Frederick’s office on April 4, sailed on the 6th. Frederick was to have inspected it before issuing the clearance, but he did not. On April 28 Frederick notified Lloyd’s by telegram that the vessel had been seen burning off Lemnos in a heavy wind on April 8, which is peculiar, because it ought to have been far from Lemnos by then. When it had not arrived months later the creditors for the premiums requested their money. Frederick submitted a claim through Abbott for a total loss. He suggested Greek pirates and collaboration of the crew as causes, implicating Hussein Aga, who had not been seen since then. Lloyd’s requested documents giving testimony of the loss, turning the case over to Lloyd's Salvage Association.
Frederick forwarded to Abbott in London four affadavits from British consular agents on Tenedos and Samos of visual sightings of the ship. Conspicuously absent were any Turkish documents that should have been examined before permission to sail was granted. An investigator from Lloyd’s Salvage working from Constantinople finding no record of either Aga or the ship concluded to a fraud. Simultaneouly Frederick, conducting his own investigation, reached a similar conclusion. He had been duped by a person pretending to be a fictional Hussein Aga. The witnesses produced a confession, naming Frederick as mastermind of the scheme. The Salvage Association turned the matter over to the Foreign Office. M. Tolmides, consular agent at Tenedos, admitted to signing the affadavits. His defense was that he had given Frederick blank signed forms.
The Foreign Office issued a public statement questioning Frederick's credibility. He requested permission to leave his post to travel to London to defend himself. Permission was denied. On April 30 he issued a statement that he had been set up and was being framed by an unknown agent, for whom he was conducting an unsuccessful search at Smyrna. He found some support in the British ambassador, Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer, a liberal and a freemason, who accepted him as credible, and noted the hostility of Turkish officialdom against him. However, unless Frederick could produce some evidence of the conspiracy, he affirmed, he would officially have to side with the insurance company. The matter became international. Turkish harbor officials claimed, via Lloyd’s agents, that Frederick had submitted forged documents to them. The Ottoman Porte compalined. The Prince of Wales scheduled a visit. Fredrick was going to be brought before a consular court, an agency with a reputation for corruption; in particular, bribability.
Due to the publicity skills of Heinrich Schliemann and the public discreditation of Frederick as a convicted felon, the contributions mainly of Frank to the excavation of Troy remained unknown and unappreciated until the end of the 20th century, when the Calverts became an object of special study. A number of misunderstandings still cling to them. One is that Schliemann discovered Troy on land he had the foresight to purchase from the Calverts. To the contrary, it was Frank who convinced Frederick to purchase Hissarlik as the probable site of Troy, and Frank who convinced Schliemann that it was there, and to partner with him in its excavation. The Calverts did not hand anything over; they remained on site excavating with him and attempting to advise and manage him. Frank was often a sharp critic. Frank is sometimes called "self-taught." Educationally this was not true. He did not attend university, but there would have been no point, as archaeology was not yet taught there. Frank was the first modern (19th century) to excavate in the Troad. He knew more than all the visitors he tutored.
In 1866, Frank Calvert, the brother of the United States' consular agent in the region, made extensive surveys and published in scholarly journals his identification of the hill of New Ilium (which was on farmland owned by his family) on the same site. The hill, near the city of Çanakkale, was known as Hisarlik.
The British diplomat, considered a pioneer for the contributions he made to the archaeology of Troy, spent more than 60 years in the Troad (modern day Biga peninsula, Turkey) conducting field work. As Calvert was a principal authority on field archaeology in the region, his findings supplied evidence that Homeric Troy might have existed on the hill, and played a major role in convincing Heinrich Schliemann to dig at Hisarlik.
In 1868, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann visited Calvert and secured permission to excavate Hisarlik. He sincerely believed that the literary events of the works of Homer could be verified archaeologically. A divorced man in his 40's who had acquired some wealth as a merchant in Russia, he decided to use the wealth to follow his boyhood interest in finding and verifying the city of Troy. Leaving his former life behind, he advertised for a wife whose skills and interest were on a par with his own, Sophia. She was 17 at the time but together they excavated Troy, sparing no expense.
Heinrich began by excavating a trench across the mound of Hisarlik to the depth of the settlements, today called "Schliemann's Trench." In 1871–73 and 1878–79, he discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. He declared one of these cities—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time. Subsequent archaeologists at the site were to revise the date upward; nevertheless, the main identification of Troy as the city of the Iliad, and the scheme of the layers, have been kept.
Some of Schliemann's portable finds at Hisarlik have become known as Priam's Treasure, such as the jewelry photographed displayed on Sophia. The artifacts were acquired from him by the Berlin museums. As Sophia matured she became an invaluable assistant to Schliemann, whom he employed especially in social situations requiring the use of modern Greek. After his death she became caretaker of his funds and publications, continuing to advocate for his beliefs. She was a respected socialite in Athens.
Wilhelm Dörpfeld joined the excavation at the request of Schliemann. After Schliemann left, he inherited the management of it. His chief contribution was the detailing of Troy VI. He published his findings separately.
Carl Blegen, professor at the University of Cincinnati, managed the site 1932–38. These archaeologists, though following Schliemann's lead, added a professional approach not available to Schliemann. He showed that there were at least nine cities. In his research, Blegen came to a conclusion that Troy's nine levels could be further divided into forty-six sublevels, which he published in his main report.
In 1988, excavations were resumed by a team from the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati under the direction of Professor Manfred Korfmann, with Professor Brian Rose overseeing Post-Bronze Age (Greek, Roman, Byzantine) excavation along the coast of the Aegean Sea at the Bay of Troy. Possible evidence of a battle was found in the form of bronze arrowheads and fire-damaged human remains buried in layers dated to the early 12th century BC. The question of Troy's status in the Bronze-Age world has been the subject of a sometimes acerbic debate between Korfmann and the Tübingen historian Frank Kolb in 2001–2002.
Korfmann proposed that the location of the city (close to the Dardanelles) indicated a commercially oriented city that would have been at the center of a vibrant trade between the Black Sea, Aegean, Anatolian and Eastern Mediterranean regions. Kolb disputed this thesis, calling it "unfounded" in a 2004 paper. He argues that archaeological evidence shows that economic trade during the Late Bronze Age was quite limited in the Aegean region compared with later periods in antiquity. On the other hand, the Eastern Mediterranean economy was more active during this time, allowing for commercial cities to develop only in the Levant. Kolb also noted the lack of evidence for trade with the Hittite Empire.
In August 1993, following a magnetic imaging survey of the fields below the fort, a deep ditch was located and excavated among the ruins of a later Greek and Roman city. Remains found in the ditch were dated to the late Bronze Age, the alleged time of Homeric Troy. Among these remains are arrowheads and charred remains. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once marked the outer defenses of a much larger city than had previously been suspected. In the olive groves surrounding the citadel, there are portions of land that were difficult to plow, suggesting that there are undiscovered portions of the city lying there. The latter city has been dated by his team to about 1250 BC, and it has been also suggested—based on recent archeological evidence uncovered by Professor Manfred Korfmann's team—that this was indeed the Homeric city of Troy.
Helmut Becker utilized magnetometry in the area surrounding Hisarlik. He was conducting an excavation in 1992 to locate outer walls of the ancient city. Becker used a caesium magnetometer. In his and his team's search, they discovered a "'burnt mudbrick wall' about 400 metres south of the Troy VI fortress wall." After dating their find, it was deemed to have been from the late Bronze Age, which would put it either in Troy VI or early Troy VII. This discovery of an outer wall away from the tell proves that Troy could have housed many more inhabitants than Schliemann originally thought.
In summer 2006, the excavations continued under the direction of Korfmann's colleague Ernst Pernicka, with a new digging permit.
In 2013, an international team made up of cross-disciplinary experts led by William Aylward, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was to carry out new excavations. This activity was to be conducted under the auspices of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University and was to use the new technique of "molecular archaeology". A few days before the Wisconsin team was to leave, Turkey cancelled about 100 excavation permits, including Wisconsin's.
In March 2014, it was announced that a new excavation would take place to be sponsored by a private company and carried out by Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. This will be the first Turkish team to excavate and is planned as a 12-month excavation led by associate professor Rüstem Aslan. The University's rector stated that "Pieces unearthed in Troy will contribute to Çanakkale’s culture and tourism. Maybe it will become one of Turkey’s most important frequented historical places.”
The Turkish government created the Historical National Park at Troy on September 30, 1996. It contains to include Troy and its vicinity, centered on Troy. The purpose of the park is to protect the historical sites and monuments within it, as well as the ecology of the region. In 1998 the park was accepted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In 2015 a Term Development Revision Plan was applied to the park. Its intent was to develop the park into a major tourist site. Plans included marketing research to determine the features most of interest to the public, the training of park personnel in tourism management, and the construction of campsites and facilities for those making day trips. These latter were concentrated in the village of Tevfikiye, which shares Troy Ridge with Troy.
Public access to the ancient site is along the road from the vicinity of the museum in Tevfikiye to the east side of Hisarlik. Some parking is available. Typically visitors come by bus, which disembarks its passengers into a large plaza ornamented with flowers and trees and some objects from the excavation. In its square is a large wooden horse monument, with a ladder and internal chambers for use of the public. Bordering the square is the gate to the site. The public passes through turnstiles. Admission is usually not free. Within the site the visitors tour the features on dirt roads or for access to more precipitous features on railed boardwalks. There are many overlooks with multilingual boards explaining the feature. Most are outdoors, but a permanent canopy covers the site of an early megaron and wall.
The archaeological site of Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
For a site to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it must be claimed to have Outstanding Universal Value. This means that it must be historically, culturally, or scientifically significant to all peoples of the world in some manner. According to the UNESCO site on Troy, its historical significance was gained because the site displays some of the "first contact between...Anatolia and the Mediterranean world". The site's cultural significance is gained from the multitudes of literature regarding the famed city and history over centuries. Many of the structures dating to the Bronze Age and the Roman and Greek periods are still standing at Hisarlik. These give archeological significance to the site as well.
More information on the UNESCO qualifications of Troy can be found on the UNESCO website.
In 2018 the Troy Museum (Turkish Troya Müzesi) was opened at Tevfikiye village east of the excavation. A design contest for the architecture had been won by Yalin Mimarlik in 2011. The cube-shaped building with extensive underground galleries holds more than 40,000 portable artifacts, 2000 of which are on display. Artifacts were moved here from a few other former museums in the region. The range is the entire prehistoric Troad. Displays are multi-lingual. In many cases the original contexts are reproduced.
Some of the most notable artifacts uncovered at Hisarlik are known as Priam's Treasure. Most of these pieces were crafted from gold and other precious metals. Heinrich Schliemann put this assemblage together from his first excavation site, which he thought to be the remains of Homeric Troy. He gave them this name after King Priam, who is said in the ancient literature to have ruled during the Trojan War. However, the site that housed the treasure was later identified as Troy II, whereas Priam's Troy would most likely have been Troy VIIa (Blegen) or Troy VIi (Korfmann). One of the most famous photographs of Sophia made not long after the discovery depicts her wearing a golden headdress, which is known as the "Jewels of Helen" (see under Schliemann above).
Other pieces that are a part of this collection are:
Literary Troy was characterized by high walls and towers, summarized by the epithet "lofty Ilium." Some other epithets were "well-walled," "with lofty gates," "with fine towers." Any archaeological candidate for being the literary city would therefore have to show evidence for the walls and towers. Schliemann's Troy fits this qualification very well. High walls and towers are in evidence at every hand. Hisarlik, the name of the hill on which Troy is situated, is Turkish for "the fortress."
The walls of Troy, first erected in the Bronze Age between at least 3000 and 2600 BC, were its main defense, as is true of almost any ancient city of urban size. Whether Troy Zero featured walls is not yet known. Some of the known walls were placed on virgin soil (see the archaeology section below). The early date of the walls suggests that defense was important and warfare was a looming possibility right from the beginning.
The walls surround the citadel, extending for several hundred meters, and at the time they were built were over tall. They were made of limestone, with watchtowers and brick ramparts, or elevated mounds that served as protective barriers.
The second run of excavations, under Korfmann, revealed that the walls of the first run were not the entire suite of walls for the city, and only partially represent the citadel. According to Korfmann, "There was also a lower city that went with the Late Bronze Age Troja...1750-1200 BCE." This city had a perimeter 0f end enclosed an area 16 times that of the citadel. It was protected by a ditch surmounted by a wall of mud brick and wood. Moreover, the citadel walls were surmounted by structures of mud brick. The stone part of the walls currently in evidence were "...five meters thick and at least eight meters high - and over that a mudbrick superstructure several meters high...," which totals to about for the citadel walls at about the time of the Trojan War. The present-day walls of Troy, then, portray little of the ancient city's appearance, any more than bare foundations characterize a building.
What Schliemann actually found as he excavated the hill of Hisarlik somewhat haphazardly were contexts in the soil parallel to the contexts of geologic layers in rock. Exposed rock displays layers of a similar composition and fossil content within a layer discontinuous with other layers above and below it. The layer represents an accumulation of detritus over a continuous time, different from the times of the other layers.
Similarly Schliemann found layers of distinctive soil each containing more or less distinctive artifacts differing often markedly from other layers. He had no ready explanation for the discontinuity between layers, such as "destruction," although this interpretation has sometimes been applied. Presumably "destruction" is to be interpreted to mean some sort of malicious event perpetrated by humans or a natural disaster, such as an earthquake. In most cases no such disaster can be proved. On the contrary, the "many layers illustrate the gradual development of civilization in northwestern Asia Minor."
The discontinuities of culture in different layers might be explained in a number of ways. A settlement might have been abandoned for peaceful reasons, or it might have undergone a renovation phase. These are hypotheses that must be ruled in or ruled out by evidence, or simply be left unruled until evidence should be discovered.
What Schliemann found is that the area now called "the citadel" or "the upper city" was apparently placed on virgin soil. It was protected by fortifications right from the start. The layering effect was caused in part by the placement of new fortifications and new houses over the old. Schliemann called these fortified enclosures "cities" (rightly or wrongly). In his mind the site was composed of successive cities. Like everyone else, he speculated whether a new city represented a different population, and what its relationship to the old was. He numbered the cities I, II, etc., I being on the bottom. Subsequent archaeologists turned the "cities" into layers (rightly or wrongly), named according to the new archaeological naming conventions then being developed.
The layers of ruins in the citadel at Hisarlik are numbered Troy ITroy IX, with various subdivisions.
Until the late 20th century, these layers represented only the layers on the hill of Hisarlik. Archaeologists following Schliemann picked up the trail of his researches adopting the same fundamental assumptions, culminating in the work and writings of Carl Blegen in the mid-20th century. In a definitive work, "Troy and the Trojans", he summarized the layers names and the dates he had adopted for them. Without further excavation, Blegen's was the last word. There were, however, some persistent criticisms not answered to general satisfaction. Hisarlik, about the size of a football field, was not large enough to have been the mighty city of history. It was also far inland, yet the general historical tradition suggested it must have been close to the sea.
The issues finally devolved on the necessity for further excavation, which was undertaken by Korfmann starting 1988. He concentrated on the Roman city, which was not suspected as being over Bronze Age remains. A Bronze Age city, at low elevations, was discovered beneath it. As it is unlikely that there were two Troys side by side, the lower city must have been the main seat of residence, to which the upper city served as citadel. Korfman now referred to the layers of the lower city as associated with the layers of the citadel. The same layering scheme was applicable. The lower city was many times the size of the citadel, answering the size objection.
Meanwhile independent geoarchaeological research conducted by taking ground cores over a wide area of the Troad were demonstrating that, in the time of Troy I, "... the sea was right at the foot of 'Schliemann's Trench' during the earliest periods of Troja." A few thousand years earlier the ridge of Troy was partly surrounded by an inlet of the sea occupying the now agricultural area of the lower Scamander River. Troy was founded as an apparently maritime city on the shore of this inlet, which persisted throughout the early layers and was present to a lesser degree, farther away, subsequently. The harbor at Troy, however, was always small, shallow, and partially blocked by wetlands. It was never a "great harbor" able to collect maritime traffic through the Dardanelles. The current water table depends on the degree of irrigation of the now agricultural lands. Trench flooding has slowed investigation of the lower levels in the lower city.
The whole course of archaeological investigation at Troy has resulted in no single chronological table of layers. Moreover, due to limitations on the accuracy of C14 dating, the tables remain relative; i.e., absolute, or calendar dates, cannot be precisely assigned. In regions of the Earth where both history and C14 dating are available, there is often a gap between them, termed by Renfrew a chronological or archaeological "fault line." The two models, historical and archaeological, do not correspond, just as the contexts on either side of a geologic fault line do not correspond. "This line divides all Europe except the Aegean from the Near East."
The table below concentrates on two systems of dates: Blegen's from "Troy and the Trojans",, representing the last of the trend from Schliemann to the mid-20th century, and Korfmann's, from "Troia in Light of New Research" in the early years of the 21st century, after he had had a chance to establish a new trend and new excavations.
Prior to Korfmann's excavations, the nine-layer model was considered comprehensive of all the material at Troy. Korfmann discovered that the city was not placed on virgin soil, as Schliemann had concluded. There is no reason not to think that, in the areas he tested, Schliemann did find that Troy I was on virgin soil. Korfmann discovered a layer previous to Troy I under a gate to Troy II. He dated it 3500 BC to 2920 BC, but did not assign a name. The current director of excavation at Troy, Rüstem Aslan, is calling it Troy 0 (zero). Roman numerals have no zero, but zero is one number less than I.
Troy 0 has been omitted from the table below, due to the uncertainty of its general status. Archaeologists at the site before Korfmann had thought that Troy I began with the Bronze Age at 3000 BC. Troy zero is before this date. The remains of the layer are not very substantial. Whether the layer is to be counted as part of the preceding Chalcolithic, or whether the dates of the Bronze Age are to be changed, has not been decided through the regular channel of journal articles. One 2016 PhD Thesis complained: "... the stratigraphic sequence of the renewed excavations is presented differently by different collaborators of Korfmann ... So, until an agreed stratigraphy of Korfmann’s cycle is published, the employment of Troy as a yardstick for the whole of the Anatolian EBA remains problematic."
For example, in Korfmann elaborates beyond the chronology of Cobet's table to make new proposals regarding the layer, Troy VIIa (which he also presents in the "Guidebook"): "Troia VIIa should be assigned culturally to
Troia VI," asserting that "there were no substantial differences in the material culture between the two periods." He suggests that Dőrpfeld's classification of the material subsequently in VIIa as VIi should be restored, claiming that, regarding the details, Blegen had been "entirely in agreement" even though his chronology featured Troy VIIa. He then laments "the old terminology has, unfortunately, been retained. Confusion is to be avoided at all costs." As this view has not yet been tested in the journals and is not universal, it is mainly omitted from the table (Cobet's chart, however, includes Korfmann's VIIb 3.) This new and yet unresolved material, including Troy Zero, may, however, be included in the sections and links below reporting on specific layers
Korfmann also found that Troy IX was not the end of the settlements. Regardless of whether the city was abandoned at 450 AD, a population was back for the Middle Ages, which, for those times, was under the Byzantine Empire. As with Troy Zero, no conventional scholarly classification has been tested in the journals. The literature mentions Troy X, and even Troy XI, without solid definition. The table below therefore omits them.
The sequence of archaeological layering at one site evidences the relative positions of the corresponding periods at that site; however, these layers often have a position relative to periods at other sites. It is possible to define relative periods over a wide region of sites and for a larger slice of time. Determining wider correspondences is a major objective of archaeology. The establishment of a "yardstick," or reliable sequence, such as the elusive one mentioned above, is a desirable outcome of archaeological analysis.
The table below states the broader connections under "General Period." It references primarily the chronologies presented in the educational site created and maintained by Jeremy Rutter and team and published by Dartmouth College, entitled "Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology". The time period is generally "the Bronze Age," which has an early (EB or EBA), a middle (MB or MBA), and a late (LB or LBA). The sites are distributed over Crete ("Minoan," or M), the Cyclades ("Cycladic," or C), the Greek mainland ("Helladic," or H), and Western Turkey ("Western Anatolian," no abbreviation).
The first city on the site was founded in the 3rd millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the site seems to have been a flourishing mercantile city, since its location allowed for complete control of the Dardanelles, through which every merchant ship from the Aegean Sea heading for the Black Sea had to pass. Cities to the east of Troy were destroyed, and although Troy was not burned, the next period shows a change of culture indicating a new people had taken over Troy. The first phase of the city is characterized by a smaller citadel, around 300 ft in diameter, with 20 rectangular houses surrounded by massive walls, towers, and gateways. Troy II doubled in size and had a lower town and the upper citadel, with the walls protecting the upper acropolis which housed the megaron-style palace for the king. The second phase was destroyed by a large fire, but the Trojans rebuilt, creating a fortified citadel larger than Troy II, but which had smaller and more condensed houses, suggesting an economic decline. This trend of making a larger circuit, or extent of the walls, continued with each rebuild, for Troy III, IV, and V. Therefore, even in the face of economic troubles, the walls remained as elaborate as before, indicating their focus on defense and protection.
When Schliemann came across Troy II, in 1871, he believed he had found Homer's city. Schliemann and his team unearthed a large feature he dubbed the Scaean Gate, a western gate unlike the three previously found leading to the Pergamos. This gate, as he describes, was the gate that Homer had featured. As Schliemann states in his publication "Troja":
"I have proved that in a remote antiquity there was in the plain of Troy a large city, destroyed of old by a fearful catastrophe, which had on the hill of Hisarlık only its Acropolis with its temples and a few other large edifices, southerly, and westerly direction on the site of the later Ilium; and that, consequently, this city answers perfectly to the Homeric description of the sacred site of Ilios."Also, he uncovered what he referred to as The Palace of Priam, after the king during the Trojan War. This reference is incorrect because Priam lived nearly a thousand years after Troy II.
Troy VI was destroyed around 1250 BC, probably by an earthquake. Only a single arrowhead was found in this layer, and no remains of bodies. However, the town quickly recovered and was rebuilt in a layout that was more orderly. This rebuild continued the trend of having a heavily fortified citadel to preserve the outer rim of the city in the face of earthquakes and sieges of the central city.
Troy VI can be characterized by the construction of the pillars at the south gate. There appears to be no structural use for the pillars. The pillars have an altar-like base and an impressive magnitude. This provides some clues, and they most likely were used as a symbol for the religious cults of the city. Another characterizing feature of Troy VI is the tightly packed housing near the Citadel and construction of many cobble streets. Although only few homes could be uncovered, this is due to reconstruction of Troy VIIa over the tops of them.
Also, discovered in 1890, in this layer of Troy VI was Mycenaean pottery. This pottery suggests that during Troy IV, the Trojans still had trade with the Greeks and the Aegean. Furthermore, there were cremation burials discovered 400m south of the citadel wall. This provided evidence of a small lower city south of the Hellenistic city walls. Although the size of this city is unknown due to erosion and regular building activities, there is significant evidence that was uncovered by Blegen in 1953 during an excavation of the site. This evidence included settlements just above bedrock and a ditch thought to be used for defense. Furthermore, the small settlement itself, south of the wall, could have also been used as an obstacle to defend the main city walls and the citadel.
The topic still under debate is whether Troy was primarily an Anatolian-oriented or Aegean-oriented metropolis. While it is true that the city would have had a presence in the Aegean, pottery finds and architecture strongly hint at an Anatolian orientation. Only about one percent of the pottery discovered during excavation of Troy VI was Mycenaean. The large walls and gates of the city are closely related to many other Anatolian designs. Furthermore, the practice of cremation is Anatolian. Cremation is never seen in the Mycenaean world. Anatolian hieroglyphic writing along with bronze seals marked with Anatolian hieroglyphic Luwian were also uncovered in 1995. These seals have been seen in approximately 20 other Anatolian and Syrian cities from the time (1280 - 1175 BC).
Still, Troy VI was dominated by long distance trade. Troy VI during the height of its establishment held anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 people. At its time, Troy would have been a large and significant city. The location of Troy was extremely practical in the Early Bronze Age (2000–1500 BC). It acted as a middle ground for long distance trade with regions as far distant as Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Baltic region, Egypt, and the western Mediterranean in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Earlier trade connections during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages provided Troy VI with favorable power in the long distance trade industry of the region. The amount of objects thought to be going through Troy VI would have been quite large, obtaining metals from the east and various objects from the west including perfumes and oils. This is known due to the findings of hundreds of shipwrecks off the Turkish coast. Found in these ships was an abundance of goods. Some of these ships carried over 15 tons in goods. The goods discovered in these wrecks included copper ingots, tin ingots, glass ingots, bronze tools and weapons, ebony and ivory, ostrich egg shells, jewelry and large amounts of pottery from across the Mediterranean.
There have been 210 shipwrecks discovered in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age. Of these 210, 63 were discovered off the Turkish coastline. This provides a great deal of evidence for Troy VI being a prominent trading center for the region. But, the evidence at the site of Troy itself is minimal. Looking at the layers of Troy VI, we discover that there is little documentation of the excavation of this layer, and little documentation of the goods discovered in this layer. We also know that there were few trading centers during the Late Bronze Age. This is due to the low volume of trade during this period. The trading centers would have most likely been directly along trade routes. Troy is just north of most major long-distance trade routes. It may be unfair to classify Troy VI as a trading center but we do know that Troy VI was a prominent metropolis that did contribute to the trade of the region.
Troy VIIa can be highlighted by most of the population of Troy moving within the walls of the Citadel. This is most likely due to the threat from the Mycenaeans. Troy VI is believed to have been destroyed by an earthquake. This would not have been uncommon. Earthquakes are common throughout the region. Troy VIIa is believed to be built over the ruined Troy VI, which makes the excavation process of Troy difficult.
Troy VIIa, which has been dated to the mid-to-late-13th century BC, is the most often cited candidate for the Troy of Homer. Troy VIIa appears to have been destroyed by war. The evidence of fire and slaughter around 1184 BC, which brought Troy VIIa to a close, led to this phase being identified with the city besieged by the Greeks during the Trojan War. This was immortalized in the "Iliad" written by Homer.
Initially, the layers of Troy VI and VII were overlooked entirely, because Schliemann favoured the burnt city of Troy II. It was not until the need to close "Calvert's Thousand Year Gap" arose—from Dörpfeld's discovery of Troy VI—that archaeology turned away from Schliemann's Troy and began working towards finding Homeric Troy once more.
"Calvert's Thousand Year Gap" (1800–800 BC) was a period not accounted for by Schliemann's archaeology and thus constituted a hole in the Trojan timeline. In Homer's description of the city, a section of one side of the wall is said to be weaker than the rest. During his excavation of more than three hundred yards of the wall, Dörpfeld came across a section very closely resembling the Homeric description of the weaker section. Dörpfeld was convinced he had found the walls of Homer's city, and now he would excavate the city itself. Within the walls of this stratum (Troy VI), much Mycenaean pottery dating from Late Helladic (LH) periods III A and III B (c. 1400–c. 1200 BC) was uncovered, suggesting a relation between the Trojans and Mycenaeans. The great tower along the walls seemed likely to be the "Great Tower of Ilios".
The evidence seemed to indicate that Dörpfeld had stumbled upon Ilios, the city of Homer's epics. Schliemann himself had conceded that Troy VI was more likely to be the Homeric city, but he never published anything stating so. The only counter-argument, confirmed initially by Dörpfeld (who was as passionate as Schliemann about finding Troy), was that the city appeared to have been destroyed by an earthquake, not by men. There was little doubt that this was the Troy of which the Mycenaeans would have known.
The archaeologists of Troy concerned themselves mainly with prehistory; however, not all the archaeology performed there falls into the category of prehistoric archaeology. Troy VIII and Troy IX are dated to historical periods. Historical archaeology illuminates history. In the LBA records mentioning Troy begin to appear in other cultures. This type of evidence is termed protohistory. The literary characters and events must be classified as legendary. Prehistoric Troy is also legendary Troy. The legends are not history or protohistory, as they are not records. It was the question of their historicity that attracted the interest of such archaeologists as Calvert and Schliemann. After many decades of archaeology, there are still no answers. There is still a "fault line" between history or legend and archaeology.
If Homeric Troy is not a fantasy woven in the 8th century by Greek oral poets passing on a tradition of innovating new poems at festivals, as most archaeologists hoped it was not, then the question must be asked, what archaeological level represents Homeric Troy? Only two credible answers are available, which are the same answer: Troy VIIa in the Blegen scheme, identical to Troy VIi in the scheme suggested by Korfmann. After an earthquake brought down the walls of the city at its floruit about 1300 BC, the same people rebuilt the city even more magnificent than before. This event is considered the start of the LBA, and Homeric Troy is considered to be LBA Troy.
Both Blegen and Korfmann endorse a starting date of about 1300 BC. Blegen has it ending early at 1260 BC, but Korfmann runs it up to 1190 BC (or 1180 BC elsewhere). He abolishes VIIa, and substitutes for it VIi, more in keeping with the splendor of VI; after all, they were the same people. He estimates the population at 10,000. The end of the period is marked by weapons left laying around, skeletons, and burnt objects, considered the result of the Trojan War. Coincidentally this is the very period referenced by Egyptian and Hittite records of Troy. They hold out some hope of a protohistorical connection.
In the 1920s, the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer proposed that the placenames Wilusa and Taruisa found in Hittite texts should be identified with Ilion and Troia, respectively. He further noted that the name of Alaksandu, a king of Wilusa mentioned in a Hittite treaty, is quite similar to Homer's Paris, whose birthname was Alexandros. These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable. However, Trevor Bryce championed them in his 1998 book "The Kingdom of the Hittites", citing a piece of the Manapa-Tarhunda letter referring to the kingdom of Wilusa as beyond the land of the Seha River (the classical Caicus and modern Bakırçay) and near the land of "Lazpa" (Lesbos).
The excavation of the lower city uncovered a water distribution system containing of tunnels tapping sources higher up on the ridge. Dates from the floor deposits obtained by the Uranium-thorium dating method indicate that water was flowing through the tunnels "as early as the third millenium BC;" thus the early city made sure that it had an internal water supply. In 1280 BC a treaty between the reigning monarchs of the Hittite and Trojan states, Muwatalli II and Alaksandu of Wilusa respectively, invoked the water god, KASKAL_KUR, who was associated with an underground tunnel, adding weight to the theory that Wilusa is identical to archaeological Troy.
Among the documents mentioning Troy are the Tawagalawa letter (CTH 181) was found to document an unnamed Hittite king's correspondence to the king of the Ahhiyawa, referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. The Hittite king was long held to be Mursili II (c. 1321–1296), but, since the 1980s, his son Hattusili III (1265–1240) is commonly preferred, although his other son Muwatalli (c. 1296–1272) remains a possibility.
Inscriptions of the New Kingdom of Egypt also record a nation T-R-S as one of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt during the XIX and XX Dynasties. An inscription at Deir el-Medina records a victory of Ramesses III over the Sea Peoples, including one named "Tursha" (Egyptian: ["twrš3"]). It is probably the same as the earlier "Teresh" (Egyptian: ["trš.w"]) on the stele commemorating Merneptah's victory in a Libyan campaign around 1220 BC.
The identifications of Wilusa with Troy and of the Ahhiyawa with Homer's Achaeans remain somewhat controversial but gained enough popularity during the 1990s to be considered majority opinion. That agrees with metrical evidence in the Iliad that the name ᾽Ιλιον (Ilion) for Troy was formerly Ϝιλιον (Wilion) with a digamma.
From the beginning of the archaeology, the question of what language was spoken by the Trojans was prominent. Various proposals were made, but they remained pure speculation. No evidence seemed to have survived whatever. That they might be Greek was considered. However, if they were, the question of why they were not in the Achaean domain, but were opposed to the Achaeans. was an even greater mystery. Passages from the "Iliad" suggested that, not only were the Trojans not Greek, but the army defending Troy was composed of different language speakers arrayed by nationality.
Finally in the middle of the 20th century Linear B was deciphered and a large number of documentary tablets were able to be read. The language is an early dialect of Greek, even earlier than the Homeric dialect. Many Greek words were in the early stage of formation. The digamma abounds. Linear B tablets have been found at the major centers of the Achaean domain. None, however, come from Troy.
The documents in Linear B basically inventory the assets of Mycenaean palace-states: foods, textiles, ceramics, weapons, lands, and above all manpower, especially people held in some sort of servitude. Civilizations of the times were slave societies. The terms of servitude, however, varied widely. A study by Efkleidou in 2004 detailed the types of servitude mentioned in the Linear B tablets. To her way of thinking, the main elements of servitude are that servants are outsiders, not part of the customary social structure, and that they are coerced into their positions. Someone has authority over them, whom she calls a "superior," designated in Greek by the genitive case: "servant of ..." One of the categories of Mycenaean servant is the do-er-o (masc) and do-er-a (fem), Greek doulos, pl douloi, and doula, pl doulai. A specific type of doulos is the te-o-jo do-er-o, theoio doulos, "servant of God," a temple assistant of some sort, whose superior was the deity. These two categories were not badly off, being palace artisans, and receiving land for their services. In addition were the ra-wi-ja-ja, the lawiaiai, "captives." These were kept in groups and performed what would be termed today "factory work." The tablets, being ephemeral in nature, do not always classify these types, but they are detectable from the naming conventions, or lack of them, and the type of work. Efkleidou uses the term "dependent." In all she tallied 5233 dependents in the tablets.
Perhaps most relevant to the times are named groups of women, the group name being an ethnic or a craft name. One such group called just "captives" gives a hint to their class of servitude. The ethnic names show that western Anatolia and the islands off it are being favored. Other groups implicitly from the region are named after the type of work they do, especially the textile workers: finishers, spinners, and a group of flax handlers (ri-ne-ja, or lineiai) composed of 82 women with 61 female children and 56 male. Other groups are male bronzesmiths, house and ship builders. The majority of the females were textile workers, a development foreshadowed in the initial scene of the "Iliad", in which the priest, Chryses, entreats Agamemnon to ransom his daughter, Chryseis, only to be refused with the statement that she would be frequenting his bed and working his loom far away in Argos.
In the tablets, the coast of Anatolia is under attack by Mycenaean centers of the Achaeans, especially the center at Pylos (pu-ro). Since the tablets, which were manufactured ad hoc of fresh clay and immediately engraved with writing, only survived by being baked in the fires that destroyed the palaces, their dates depend on the those dates of destruction. The Pylos tablets record the dispatch of a fleet of "rowers" and soldiers under a "commander" to the Gulf of Corinth, and then the palace is gone, burned in its own oil. If pu-ro is the Homeric Pylos, then the date is after the Trojan War, as the legendary Pylos survived it intact. None of the names of the important men at these centers are anything like the names of the Homeric legends. Presumably, the latter had all died in their time and had been replaced by men unknown to legend, but profiting from the fall of Troy. A second possibility would be that the legends are totally imaginary, contrary to the hopes and expectations of the first archaeologists.
This time between the Trojan War and the burning of the palaces fits into another historical period, the time of the Sea Peoples. These were ethnicities from Achaea, Dardania, Etruria, Sicilia, Sardinia, and elsewhere, who, abandoning the norms of civilization, took to a life of marauding and piracy, disrupting trade, transportation, peace, and security. They placed colonies as bases. The eastern Mediterranean became a wilderness. Cities withdrew from the coast. Isolation set in.
Surprisingly, Trojan names began turning up in the archives of ancient Pylos, capital of the legendary Nestor. They were of persons kept in a servile capacity, from which the universal conclusion was that they were descended from slaves taken at Troy. Etymological analysis by linguists revealed that they were not native Greek names, suggesting that the Trojans were not Greek.
A theory began to gain influence based on the Aeneid that the Trojans were Etruscan. This theory purported to explain how the Etruscans arrived in Italy. During the 20th century, however, Etruscan archaeology investigated thousands of Etruscan sites over most of Italy, except for the Greek regions in south Italy and the Italic regions of central Italy. Moreover, Etruscan inscriptions were found in at least one valley leading to a pass over the Alps. The sites dated as early as the Bronze Age. It was soon clear that the theory of a general Etruscan migration from Troy to most of Italy was the least likely scenario. The Etruscan theory died slowly. Its advocates looked for hidden pockets of Etruscans in the backlands of Anatolia and looked for hope in some shallow genetic studies purporting to relate the inhabitants of Tuscany to the inhabitants of Turkey.
Meanwhile a greater question came to the fore. Throughout the Bronze Age the greatest power in Anatolia was the Hittites, with capital in central Anatolia. Why were there no links to them? How could the coastal states have avoided them? Anatolian studies expanded in the late 20th century. Those states had not avoided them, they were subject to them. Previously unknown scripts were found to be in Anatolian languages. The dominant one on the coast was Luwian. In the Luwian range west of the Hittite capital there was no room for any Etruscans. Whatever he was, Aeneas was not Etruscan, and whatever the ancestry of the imperial family at Rome was, which knew Etruscan and was counted as Tuscan, it derived no authority from ancient Troy.
The 1995 discovery of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy sparked heated debate over the language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen argued that the name of Priam, king of Troy at the time of the Trojan War, is related to the Luwian compound "Priimuua", which means "exceptionally courageous". Starke adds: "The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community," although it is not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or in daily colloquial use.. The tablet was discovered in the lower city, archaeologically out of the way until now, but undoubtedly more populous and frequented than the citadel. It is possible that the major archive site has yet to be discovered at Troy, if any survived.
B.W. Fortson, IV, defines the Greek Dark Ages as "The period from the demise of Mycenaean civilization to the earliest appearance of alphabetic Greek in the eighth century ..." The idea is that in the breakdown of peace and stability suffered by the Mycenaean kingdoms they entered a period of fear, isolation, and economic depression in which their writing system was lost causing a subsequent deficit of written records, interpreted by later historians as "darkness." The view is too simple, however.
While it is true that the palaces were destroyed by fire, it is untrue that they were all burned in the same year or even the same decade by a single wave of Dorian tribes from the region later known as Macedonia. The dates of the destructions differ by as much as a generation. Chadwick asks, "... where were all the Dorians during the Mycenaean period? And why were they content to wait in the wings until the time was right for this intrusion?" His own theory was that the Mycenaeans were incendiary to each other's palaces in a rash of infradynastic conflicts. These would have occupied the entire 11th century BC. There was no sudden influx of all the Dorians in one great invasion, but rather an insistent occupation of the Peloponnesus over a century or more. It has to be counted as Dorian from the 10th century BC on. Most of the former Achaean inhabitants escaped to the now depopulated coast of Anatolia as Ionians and Aeolians. Athens remained firm.
Among the Achaeans of Cyprus, on the edge of the Greek world, writing failed to disappear. They continued to write their own conservative dialect, Arcadocypriot Greek, in a few scripts of Cypriote syllabary, which they had innovated on the model of Linear A and Linear B. They were fairly isolated from their former homeland by the spread of Dorians to Crete, the southern Cyclades, and southern Anatolia. When the concept of a Greek alphabet arrived, they innovated with the Phoenician alphabet to make it fit their language, and the two systems continued side-by-side until Hellenistic times, when Attic became the common dialect. Meanwhile their dialect continued in the hills of Arcadia, but it had no writing system there. This dark age interlude in Greece is not generally interpreted as a return to prehistoric times. It is a historic age with gaps in its history, which is how the archaeologists treat it.
In both Blegen and Korfmann, Homeric Troy ends at the end of Blegen's Troy VIIa, Korfmann's VIi, with the burning of the city, presumably by Achaeans. Legend has the Trojans vanishing away, either escaping, as did Aeneas and his very large band, being slaughtered, as were Priam and his wife, or being carted off into slavery, as were the literary Trojan women. Apparently, no Trojans seem to have been left. Their enemies would have cleared them entirely away, leaving the ruined city vacant and non-dangerous.
The archaeology suggests that the literary implication of a deserted city is probably not true. After a suitable interval of hiding somewhere else in the region, perhaps with the Dardanians, who were not defeated, but appeared as marauders among the sea peoples, or further inland with the Hittites, the Trojan remnants returned to Troy to rebuild Troy VIIb, which, according to Blegen, "... obviously represents a direct survival of the culture that prevailed in Troy VIIa." The initial VIIb period is VIIb1, which Korfmann suggests should be VIj. and regards as "transitional to the Early Iron Age." As yet, however, it is contemporary with LHIIIC (LBA) pottery on the mainland. The reconstruction does not appear to have been opposed by the palaces, such as at Pylos, which were still standing. The return to a simpler pottery causes Korfmann to hypothesize a "humble folk" investment of the ruins.
Troy VIIb2 begins contemporaneously with LHIIIC, but at about 1050 BC the last of IIIC disappears, to be replaced by Sub-Mycenaean pottery, a short-lived Mycenaean-like pottery with geometric motifs, considered transitional to Geometric pottery, the ware characteristic everywhere in the Greek world of the Dark Age. The palaces can be counted as vanished, as the last pottery at Pylos was LH IIIC. Apparently, the city of the "humble Trojans" could not maintain itself, but was overrun or replaced. The latter part of Troy IIIb2 sees the replacement of their pottery with wares, such as "Knobbed Ware," characteristic of the Balkan-Black Sea region. The Luwian seal presents a problem, as it is dated Troy VIIb2. Luwian speakers would not have been as far away as the northern Black Sea. If the seal is from early VIIb2, however, it can represent the last of the Luwian speakers at Troy. A mixed culture was certainly possible. Priam's wife, Hecuba, had been a Phrygian.
Blegen ends his tale of Troy VII with VIIb2 around 1100 BC. The city was burned one last time, an event contemporaneous with the general destruction of the Mycenaean palaces. This would be the ethnical end of the Trojans at Troy by abandonment, but Blegen has a final suggestion. Troy VI was characterized by what Blegen calls "Grey Minyan Ware," now Anatolian Minyan ware. or Anatolian Grey Ware. After the abandonment of the city, the ware appears in the highlands, leading Blegen to conjecture that the Trojans gradually withdrew in that direction.
The more recent excavations turned up additional information. In the lower city was pottery from the early and middle Proto-geometric period, characteristic of the Dark Age. The Trojans may have escaped to the hills, but their burned city was occupied by their incendiary opponents, whoever they were. They brought iron with them, relying on the superior strength of iron weapons for their victory. Korfmann creates a new period for them, Troy VIIb3, 1020-950 BC.
For reasons unknown, the Iron-age people left their settlement about 950 BC, leaving it abandoned. Korfmann calls this interval a hiatus, meaning of residential occupation. A Greek colony arrived there to plant a new city about 750 BC, archaeological Troy VIII. They leveled the top of the mound to construct a temple to Athena, thus identifying themselves as being in the Attic-Ionic culture, as opposed to the Aeolic Greeks (Boeotia) who had previously been settling the north coast of Anatolia. The leveling process destroyed the previous structures at the center of the citadel. As Homeric Troy had been called "sacred Ilium," Korfmann asserts that a temple district may have been maintained there during the apparent abandonment period, but whose is not known.
In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes sacrificed 1,000 cattle at the sanctuary of Athena Ilias while marching through the Hellespontine region towards Greece. Following the Persian defeat in 480–479, Ilion and its territory became part of the continental possessions of Mytilene and remained under Mytilenaean control until the unsuccessful Mytilenean revolt in 428–427. Athens liberated the so-called Actaean cities including Ilion and enrolled these communities in the Delian League. Athenian influence in the Hellespont waned following the oligarchic coup of 411, and in that year the Spartan general Mindaros emulated Xerxes by likewise sacrificing to Athena Ilias. From c. 410–399, Ilion was within the sphere of influence of the local dynasts at Lampsacus (Zenis, his wife Mania, and the usurper Meidias) who administered the region on behalf of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus.
In 399, the Spartan general Dercylidas expelled the Greek garrison at Ilion who were controlling the city on behalf of the Lampsacene dynasts during a campaign which rolled back Persian influence throughout the Troad. Ilion remained outside the control of the Persian satrapal administration at Dascylium until the Peace of Antalcidas in 387–386. In this period of renewed Persian control c. 387–367, a statue of Ariobarzanes, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, was erected in front of the temple of Athena Ilias. In 360–359 the city was briefly controlled by Charidemus of Oreus, a Euboean mercenary leader who occasionally worked for the Athenians. In 359, he was expelled by the Athenian Menelaos son of Arrabaios, whom the Ilians honoured with a grant of proxeny—this is recorded in the earliest civic decree to survive from Ilion. In May 334 Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont and came to the city, where he visited the temple of Athena Ilias, made sacrifices at the tombs of the Homeric heroes, and made the city free and exempt from taxes. According to the so-called 'Last Plans' of Alexander which became known after his death in June 323, he had planned to rebuild the temple of Athena Ilias on a scale that would have surpassed every other temple in the known world.
Antigonus Monophthalmus took control of the Troad in 311 and created the new city of Antigoneia Troas which was a synoikism of the cities of Skepsis, Kebren, Neandreia, Hamaxitos, Larisa, and Kolonai. In c. 311–306 the "koinon "of Athena Ilias was founded from the remaining cities in the Troad and along the Asian coast of the Dardanelles and soon after succeeded in securing a guarantee from Antigonus that he would respect their autonomy and freedom (he had not respected the autonomy of the cities which were synoikized to create Antigoneia). The "koinon "continued to function until at least the 1st century AD and primarily consisted of cities from the Troad, although for a time in the second half of the 3rd century it also included Myrlea and Chalcedon from the eastern Propontis. The governing body of the "koinon "was the "synedrion" on which each city was represented by two delegates. The day-to-day running of the "synedrion", especially in relation to its finances, was left to a college of five "agonothetai", on which no city ever had more than one representative. This system of equal (rather than proportional) representation ensured that no one city could politically dominate the "koinon". The primary purpose of the "koinon "was to organize the annual Panathenaia festival which was held at the sanctuary of Athena Ilias. The festival brought huge numbers of pilgrims to Ilion for the duration of the festival as well as creating an enormous market (the "panegyris") which attracted traders from across the region. In addition, the "koinon "financed new building projects at Ilion, for example a new theatre c. 306 and the expansion of the sanctuary and temple of Athena Ilias in the 3rd century, in order to make the city a suitable venue for such a large festival.
In the period 302–281, Ilion and the Troad were part of the kingdom of Lysimachus, who during this time helped Ilion synoikize several nearby communities, thus expanding the city's population and territory. Lysimachus was defeated at the Battle of Corupedium in February 281 by Seleucus I Nikator, thus handing the Seleucid kingdom control of Asia Minor, and in August or September 281 when Seleucus passed through the Troad on his way to Lysimachia in the nearby Thracian Chersonese Ilion passed a decree in honour of him, indicating the city's new loyalties. In September Seleucus was assassinated at Lysimachia by Ptolemy Keraunos, making his successor, Antiochus I Soter, the new king. In 280 or soon after Ilion passed a long decree lavishly honouring Antiochus in order to cement their relationship with him. During this period Ilion still lacked proper city walls except for the crumbling Troy VI fortifications around the citadel, and in 278 during the Gallic invasion the city was easily sacked. Ilion enjoyed a close relationship with Antiochus for the rest of his reign: for example, in 274 Antiochus granted land to his friend Aristodikides of Assos which for tax purposes was to be attached to the territory of Ilion, and c. 275–269 Ilion passed a decree in honour of Metrodoros of Amphipolis who had successfully treated the king for a wound he received in battle.
A new city called Ilium (from Greek Ilion) was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, became a bishopric in the Roman province Hellespontus (civil Diocese of Asia), but declined gradually in the Byzantine era.
The city was destroyed by Sulla's rival, the Roman general Fimbria, in 85 BC following an eleven-day siege. Later that year when Sulla had defeated Fimbria he bestowed benefactions on Ilion for its loyalty which helped with the city's rebuilding. Ilion reciprocated this act of generosity by instituting a new civic calendar which took 85 BC as its first year. However, the city remained in financial distress for several decades, despite its favoured status with Rome. In the 80s BC, Roman "publicani" illegally levied taxes on the sacred estates of Athena Ilias and the city was required to call on L. Julius Caesar for restitution; while in 80 BC, the city suffered an attack by pirates. In 77 BC the costs of running the annual festival of the "koinon" of Athena Ilias became too pressing for both Ilion and the other members of the "koinon" and L. Julius Caesar was once again required to arbitrate, this time reforming the festival so that it would be less of a financial burden. In 74 BC the Ilians once again demonstrated their loyalty to Rome by siding with the Roman general Lucullus against Mithridates VI. Following the final defeat of Mithridates in 63–62, Pompey rewarded the city's loyalty by becoming the benefactor of Ilion and patron of Athena Ilias. In 48 BC, Julius Caesar likewise bestowed benefactions on the city, recalling the city's loyalty during the Mithridatic Wars, the city's connection with his cousin L. Julius Caesar, and the family's claim that they were ultimately descended from Venus through the Trojan prince Aeneas and therefore shared kinship with the Ilians.
In 20 BC, the Emperor Augustus visited Ilion and stayed in the house of a leading citizen, Melanippides son of Euthydikos. As a result of his visit, he also financed the restoration and rebuilding of the sanctuary of Athena Ilias, the bouleuterion (council house) and the theatre. Soon after work on the theatre was completed in 12–11 BC, Melanippides dedicated a statue Augustus in the theatre to record this benefaction.
No later than the 4th century, it was a suffragan of the provincial capital's Metropolitan Archdiocese of Cyzicus, in the sway of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Several bishops are historically documented:
The diocese was nominally restored no later than 1926 as Latin Titular bishopric of Ilium (Latin) / Ilio (Curiate Italian) / Ilien(sis) (Latin adjective).
It has been vacant for decades, having had the following incumbents, so far of the fitting Episcopal (lowest) rank:
A small minority of contemporary writers argue that Homeric Troy was not at the Hisarlik site, but elsewhere in Anatolia or outside it—e.g. in England, Pergamum, Scandinavia, or Herzegovina. These proposals have not been accepted by mainstream scholarship.
Such was the fame of the Epic Cycle in Roman and Medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various founding myths of national origins. The most influential, Virgil's "Aeneid", traces the journeys of the Trojan prince Aeneas, supposed ancestor of the founders of Rome and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In a later era, the heroes of Troy, both those noted in Homer and those invented for the purpose, often continued to appear in the origin stories of the nations of Early Medieval Europe. The "Roman de Troie" was common cultural ground for European dynasties, as a Trojan pedigree was both gloriously ancient and established an equality with the ruling class of Rome. A Trojan pedigree could justify the occupation of parts of Rome's former territories.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes that the Trojans were Greek people who were originally from the Peloponnese.
On that basis, the Franks filled the lacunae of their legendary origins with Trojan and pseudo-Trojan names: in Fredegar's 7th-century chronicle of Frankish history, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks. The Trojan origin of France was such an established article of faith that in 1714, the learned Nicolas Fréret was Bastilled for showing through historical criticism that the Franks had been Germanic, a sore point counter to Valois and Bourbon propaganda.
In similar manner, Geoffrey of Monmouth reworked earlier material such as the "Historia Brittonum" to trace the legendary kings of the Britons from a supposed descendant of Aeneas called Brutus.
Likewise, Snorri Sturluson, in the prologue to his Icelandic "Prose Edda", traced the genealogy of the ancestral figures in Norse mythology to characters appearing at Troy in Homer's epic, notably making Thor to be the son of Memnon. Sturluson referred to these figures as having made a journey across Europe towards Scandinavia, setting up kingdoms as they went.
Tübingen
Tübingen (, , Swabian: "Dibenga") is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three of the 90,000 people living in Tübingen is a student. As of the 2018/2019 winter semester, 27,665 students attend the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. The city has the lowest median age in Germany, in part due to its status as a university town; as of December 31, 2015, the average age of a citizen of Tübingen is 39.1 years.
Immediately north of the city lies the Schönbuch, a densely wooded nature park. The Swabian Alb mountains rise about (beeline Tübingen City to Roßberg - 869 m) to the southeast of Tübingen.
The Ammer and Steinlach rivers are tributaries of the Neckar river, which flows in an easterly direction through the city, just south of the medieval old town. Large parts of the city are hilly, with the Schlossberg and the Österberg in the city centre and the Schnarrenberg and Herrlesberg, among others, rising immediately adjacent to the inner city.
The highest point is at about above sea level near Bebenhausen in the Schönbuch forest, while the lowest point is in the town's eastern Neckar valley. The geographical centre of the state of Baden-Württemberg is in a small forest called Elysium, near the Botanical Gardens of the city's university.
Tübingen is the capital of an eponymous district and an eponymous administrative region ("Regierungsbezirk"), before 1973 called "Südwürttemberg-Hohenzollern".
Tübingen is, with nearby Reutlingen (about east), one of the two centre cities of the Neckar-Alb region.
Administratively, it is not part of the Stuttgart Region, bordering it to the north and west (Esslingen district in the north and Böblingen district in the west). However, the city and northern parts of its district can be regarded as belonging to that region in a wider regional and cultural context.
The area was probably first settled by ancient humans in the 12th millennium BC. The Romans left some traces here in AD 85, when they built a limes frontier wall at the Neckar River. Tübingen dates from the 6th or 7th century, when the region was populated by the Alamanni people. Some historians argue that the Battle of Solicinium was fought at Spitzberg, a mountain in Tübingen, in AD 367, although there is no evidence for this.
Tübingen first appears in official records in 1191. The local castle, "Hohentübingen", has records going back to 1078, when it was besieged by Henry IV, king of Germany. Its name was transcribed in Medieval Latin as "Tuingia" and "Twingia".
From 1146, Count Hugo V (1125–52) was promoted to count palatine as Hugo I. Tübingen was established as the capital of a County Palatine of Tübingen. By 1231, Tübingen was a "civitas," indicating recognition by the Crown of civil liberties and a court system.
In 1262, an Augustinian monastery was established by Pope Alexander IV in Tübingen; in 1272, a Franciscan monastery was founded. In 1300, a Latin school (today's Uhland-Gymnasium) was founded. During the Protestant Reformation, which Duke Ulrich of Würtemmberg converted to, he disestablished the Franciscan monastery in 1535.
In 1342, the county palatine was sold to Ulrich III, Count of Württemberg and incorporated into the County of Württemberg.
Between 1470 and 1483, St. George's Collegiate Church was built. The collegiate church offices provided the opportunity for what soon afterwards became the most significant event in Tübingen's history: the founding of the Eberhard Karls University by Duke Eberhard im Bart of Württemberg in 1477, thus making it one of the oldest universities in Central Europe. It became soon renowned as one of the most influential places of learning in the Holy Roman Empire, especially for theology (a Protestant faculty, Tübinger Stift, was established in 1535 in the former Augustinian monastery). Today, the university is still the biggest source of income for the residents of the city and one of the biggest universities in Germany with more than 26,000 students.
Between 1622 and 1625, the Catholic League occupied Lutheran Württemberg in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In the summer of 1631, the city was raided. In 1635/36 the city was hit by the Plague. In 1638, Swedish troops conquered Tübingen. Towards the end of the war, French troops occupied the city from 1647 until 1649.
In 1789, parts of the old town burned down, but were later rebuilt in the original style. In 1798 the "Allgemeine Zeitung", a leading newspaper in early 19th-century Germany, was founded in Tübingen by Johann Friedrich Cotta. From 1807 until 1843, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin lived in Tübingen in a tower overlooking the Neckar.
In the Nazi era, the Tübingen Synagogue was burned in the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. The Second World War left the city largely unscathed, mainly because of the peace initiative of a local doctor, Theodor Dobler. It was occupied by the French army and became part of the French occupational zone. From 1946 to 1952, Tübingen was the capital of the newly formed state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern (as ), before the state of Baden-Württemberg was created by merging Baden, Württemberg-Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern. The French troops had a garrison stationed in the south of the city until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
In the 1960s, Tübingen was one of the centres of the German student movement and the Protests of 1968 and has ever since shaped left and green political views. Some radicalized Tübingen students supported the leftist Rote Armee Fraktion terrorist group, with active member Gudrun Ensslin, a local and a Tübingen student from 1960 to 1963, joining the group in 1968.
Although noticing such things today is largely impossible, as recently as the 1950s, Tübingen was a very socioeconomically divided city, with poor local farmers and tradesmen living along the "Stadtgraben" (City Canal) and students and academics residing around the "Alte Aula" and the "Burse", the old university buildings. There, hanging on the "Cottahaus", a sign commemorates Goethe's stay of a few weeks while visiting his publisher. The German tendency to memorialize every minor presence of its historical greats (comparable to the statement "Washington slept here" in the United States) is parodied on the building next door. This simple building, once a dormitory, features a plain sign with the words ""Hier kotzte Goethe"" (lit.: "Goethe puked here").
In the second half of the 20th century, Tübingen's administrative area was extended beyond what is now called the "core town" to include several outlying small towns and villages. Most notable among these is Bebenhausen, a village clustered around a castle and Bebenhausen Abbey, a Cistercian cloister about north of Tübingen.
, the city had 89,000 inhabitants. Life in the city is dominated by its roughly 25,800 students. Tübingen is best described as a mixture of old and distinguished academic flair, including liberal and green politics on one hand and traditional German-style student fraternities on the other, with rural-agricultural environs and shaped by typical Lutheran-Pietist characteristics, such as austerity and a Protestant work ethic, and traditional Swabian elements, such as frugality, order, and tidiness. The city is home to many picturesque buildings from previous centuries and lies on the River Neckar.
, the German weekly magazine "Focus" published a national survey according to which Tübingen had the highest quality of life of all cities in Germany. Factors taken into consideration included the infrastructure, the integration of bicycle lanes into the road system, a bus system connecting surrounding hills and valleys, late-night services, areas of the town that can be reached on foot, the pedestrianised old town, and other amenities and cultural events offered by the university. Tübingen is the city with the youngest average population in Germany.
In central Tübingen, the Neckar divides briefly into two streams, forming the elongated "Neckarinsel" (Neckar Island), famous for its "Platanenallee" with high plane trees, some of which are more than 200 years old. Pedestrians can reach the island via stairs on the narrow ends leading down from a bridge spanning the Neckar. During the summer, the "Neckarinsel" is occasionally the venue for concerts, plays, and literary readings. The row of historical houses across one side of the elongated "Neckarinsel" is called the "Neckarfront" and includes the house with adjoining tower where poet Friedrich Hölderlin stayed for the last 36 years of his life, as he struggled with mental instability.
Tübingen's "Altstadt" (old town) survived the Second World War due to the city's lack of heavy industry. The result is a growing domestic tourism business. as visitors come to wander through one of the few completely intact historic "Altstädte" in Germany. The highlights of Tübingen include its crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow-stair alleyways picking their way through the hilly terrain, streets lined with canals, and well-maintained traditional half-timbered houses.
Old town landmarks include the "Rathaus" (City Hall) on "Marktplatz" (Market Square) and the castle, "Schloß Hohentübingen", now part of the University of Tübingen. The central landmark is the "Stiftskirche" (Collegiate Church). Along with the rest of the city, the Stiftskirche was one of the first to convert to Martin Luther's protestant church. As such, it maintains (and carefully defends) several "Roman Catholic" features, such as patron saints. Below the "Rathaus" is a quiet, residential street called the "Judengasse", the former Jewish neighborhood of Tübingen until the town's Jews were expelled in 1477. On the street corner is a plaque commemorating the fate of Tübingen's Jews.
The centre of Tübingen is the site of weekly and seasonal events, including regular market days on the "Holzmarkt" by the Stiftskirche and the "Marktplatz" by the Rathaus, an outdoor cinema in winter and summer, festive autumn and Christmas markets and Europe's largest Afro-Brazilian festival.
Students and tourists also come to the Neckar River in the summer to visit beer gardens or go boating in "Stocherkähne", the Tübingen equivalent of Oxford and Cambridge punts, only slimmer. A "Stocherkahn" carries up to 20 people. On the second Thursday of June, all "Stocherkahn" punts take part in a major race, the "Stocherkahnrennen".
Bebenhausen Abbey lies in the village of Bebenhausen, a district of Tübingen. A subdivision of the pilgrimage route known as the Way of St. James starts here and runs through Tübingen.
Tübingen has a notable arts culture as well as nightlife. In addition to the full roster of official and unofficial university events that range from presentations by the university's official poet in residence to parties hosted by the student associations of each faculty, the town can boast of several choirs, theatre companies and nightclubs. Also, Tübingen's "Kunsthalle" (art exhibition hall), on the "Wanne", houses two or three exhibits of international note each year.
There are several festivals and open air markets on a regular basis:
Tigers Tübingen are the city's only professional sports team, playing basketball.
Notable Tübingen residents and scholars included the poets Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike and Ludwig Uhland, the neurologist Alois Alzheimer from whom Alzheimer's disease takes its name, and Friedrich Miescher who was the first to discover nucleic acids. Wilhelm Schickard who was the main precursor to the mechanical calculator, was born in nearby Herrenberg. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, David Friedrich Strauss, and Johannes Kepler studied in Tübingen at the Tübinger Stift, and Joseph Alois Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) held a chair in dogmatic theology at the University. Hermann Hesse worked in Tübingen as a bookseller trainee from 1895 to 1899.
Tübingen also is the home of scholars of international renown such as the Idealist philosopher Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, the theologian Hans Küng, textual criticism pioneer F.C. Baur, jurisprudent Gerhard Anschütz, famous author Walter Jens, and developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Slovene refugee Protestant preacher Primož Trubar, who published the first two books in the Slovene language and is regarded as the key consolidator of the Slovene identity, lived in Tübingen and its suburb Derendingen and is buried there. Martin Luther's companion Philipp Melanchthon, called "Praeceptor Germaniae" (Teacher of Germany), studied here from 1512 to 1514.
Former President of Germany Horst Köhler is a Tübingen alumnus as well, as was former Chancellor of Germany Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Nobel laureate and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer published his PhD thesis in Tübingen in 1899.
Tübingen is also the hometown of former track and field athlete Dieter Baumann, winner of the 5000m at the 1992 Summer Olympics. In 1990, the award-winning Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer accepted a teaching position in Tübingen and has resided there since then.
American soccer coach Sigi Schmid, who has won Major League Soccer championships with the Los Angeles Galaxy and Columbus Crew and was an assistant coach for the U.S. at the 1994 FIFA World Cup, was born in Tübingen and moved to Torrance, California as a child.
Sung Yuri, a South Korean top actress and the youngest member of the K-Pop girl group Fin.K.L., was born in Tübingen in 1981. Her father, Sung Chong Hyon, received his doctorate degree in theology from Tübingen University and is currently a professor of New Testament at the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea.
Greek singer Despina Vandi was born in Tübingen, although her family moved back to Greece when Vandi was six years old.
Tübingen is divided into 22 districts, a town core of twelve districts (population of about 51,000) and ten outer districts (suburbs) (population of about 31,000):
Core city districts:
Outer districts:
Since World War II, Tübingen's population has almost doubled from about 45,000 to the current 88,000, also due to the incorporation of formerly independent villages into the city in the 1970s.
Currently, Lord Mayor Boris Palmer (Green Party) has set the ambitious goal of increasing the population of Tübingen to reach 100,000 within the next years. To achieve this, the city is closing gaps between buildings within the city proper by allowing new houses there; this is also to counter the tendency of urban sprawl and land consumption that has been endangering the preservation of rural landscapes of Southern Germany.
¹ census result
Tübingen is twinned with:
In November 2009 Tübingen's city council voted to enter into talks with the city of Moshi in Tanzania, with the aim of Moshi becoming Tübingen's eleventh twin city.
For their commitment to their international partnership, the Council of Europe awarded the Europe Prize to Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence in 1965. The city's dedication to a European understanding is also reflected in the naming of several streets and squares, including the large "Europaplatz" (Europe Square) outside the railway station.
By plane: Tübingen is about from the Baden-Württemberg state airport ("Landesflughafen Stuttgart", also called Stuttgart Airport).
By automobile: Tübingen is on the "Bundesstraße 27" (a "federal road") that crosses through Baden-Württemberg, connecting the town with Würzburg, Heilbronn, Stuttgart and the "Landesflughafen" (Stuttgart Airport) to the north and Rottweil and Donaueschingen to the south.
By rail: Tübingen Hauptbahnhof is on the regional train line Neckar-Alb Railway-Bahn ("Neckar-Alb-Bahn") from Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof via Esslingen and Reutlingen to Tübingen. The average time of travel to Stuttgart is 1:01 hrs., with some trains taking only 45 mins. Other regional lines are the "Hohenzollerische Landesbahn", connecting the town with Hechingen and Sigmaringen (so-called Zollernalb Railway), "Zollernalbbahn" and connections to Herrenberg (Ammer Valley Railway, "Ammertalbahn") and Horb (Upper Neckar Railway, "Obere Neckarbahn"). Since 2009, there is also a daily direct Intercity link to Mannheim, Cologne and Düsseldorf as well as to Berlin.
Local public transport: The town, due to its high student population, features an extensive public bus network with more than 20 lines connecting the city districts and places outside of Tübingen such as Ammerbuch, Gomaringen and Nagold. There are also several night bus lines in the early hours every day. A direct bus is available to Stuttgart Airport (via Leinfelden-Echterdingen) as well as to Böblingen and Reutlingen.
The Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen dates from 1477, making it one of the oldest in Germany. The city is also host to several research institutes including the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, The Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the MPG (and formerly the Max Planck Institute for Biology) and the Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research. The university also maintains an excellent botanical garden, the Botanischer Garten der Universität Tübingen.
More than 10,000 children and young adults in Tübingen regularly attend school. There are 30 schools in the town, some of which consist of more than one type of school. Of these, 17 are primary schools while the others are for secondary education: four schools are of the lowest rank, "Hauptschule", three of the middle rank, "Realschule", and six are "Gymnasien" (grammar schools). There also are four vocational schools ("Berufsschule") and three special needs schools.
Primary schools
Hauptschulen
Realschulen
Gymnasien
Vocational schools ("Berufsschulen")
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) (Latin for "Logical Philosophical Treatise" or "Treatise on Logic and Philosophy") is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized by philosophers as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century. G. E. Moore originally suggested the work's Latin title as homage to the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" by Baruch Spinoza.
Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the "Tractatus" while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was first published in German in 1921 as "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung". The "Tractatus" was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann. Bertrand Russell's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" is presented as a working out of ideas that he had learned from Wittgenstein.
The "Tractatus" employs an austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such, but rather consists of declarative statements, or passages, that are meant to be self-evident. The statements are hierarchically numbered, with seven basic propositions at the primary level (numbered 1–7), with each sub-level being a comment on or elaboration of the statement at the next higher level (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13). In all, the Tractatus comprises 526 numbered statements.
Wittgenstein's later works, notably the posthumously published "Philosophical Investigations", criticised many of his earlier ideas in the "Tractatus".
There are seven main propositions in the text. These are:
The first chapter is very brief:
This along with the beginning of two can be taken to be the relevant parts of Wittgenstein's metaphysical view that he will use to support his picture theory of language.
These sections concern Wittgenstein's view that the sensible, changing world we perceive does not consist of substance but of facts. Proposition two begins with a discussion of objects, form and substance.
This epistemic notion is further clarified by a discussion of objects or things as metaphysical substances.
His use of the word "composite" in 2.021 can be taken to mean a combination of form and matter, in the Platonic sense.
The notion of a static unchanging Form and its identity with Substance represents the metaphysical view that has come to be held as an assumption by the vast majority of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato and Aristotle, as it was something they agreed on. is called a form or a substance is not generated." (Z.8 1033b13)
The opposing view states that unalterable Form does not exist, or at least if there is such a thing, it contains an ever changing, relative substance in a constant state of flux. Although this view was held by Greeks like Heraclitus, it has existed only on the fringe of the Western tradition since then. It is commonly known now only in "Eastern" metaphysical views where the primary concept of substance is Qi, or something similar, which persists through and beyond any given Form. The former view is shown to be held by Wittgenstein in what follows:
Although Wittgenstein largely disregarded Aristotle (Ray Monk's biography suggests that he never read Aristotle at all) it seems that they shared some anti-Platonist views on the universal/particular issue regarding primary substances. He attacks universals explicitly in his Blue Book.
"The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful."
And Aristotle agrees: "The universal cannot be a substance in the manner in which an essence is ..." (Z.13 1038b17) as he begins to draw the line and drift away from the concepts of universal Forms held by his teacher Plato.
The concept of Essence, taken alone is a potentiality, and its combination with matter is its actuality. "First, the substance of a thing is peculiar to it and does not belong to any other thing" (Z.13 1038b10), i.e. not universal and we know this is essence. This concept of form/substance/essence, which we've now collapsed into one, being presented as potential is also, apparently, held by Wittgenstein:
Here ends what Wittgenstein deems to be the relevant points of his metaphysical view and he begins in 2.1 to use said view to support his Picture Theory of Language.
"The Tractatus's notion of substance is the modal analogue of Kant's temporal notion. Whereas for Kant, substance is that which 'persists' (i.e., exists at all times), for Wittgenstein it is that which, figuratively speaking, 'persists' through a 'space' of possible worlds."
Whether the Aristotelian notions of substance came to Wittgenstein via Immanuel Kant, or via Bertrand Russell, or even whether Wittgenstein arrived at his notions intuitively, one cannot but see them.
The further thesis of 2. and 3. and their subsidiary propositions is Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of language. This can be summed up as follows:
The 4s are significant as they contain some of Wittgenstein's most explicit statements concerning the nature of philosophy and the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. It is here, for instance, that he first distinguishes between material and grammatical propositions, noting:
A philosophical treatise attempts to "say" something where nothing can properly be said. It is predicated upon the idea that philosophy should be pursued in a way analogous to the natural sciences; that philosophers are looking to construct true theories. This sense of philosophy does not coincide with Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy.
Wittgenstein is to be credited with the invention or at least the popularization of truth tables (4.31) and truth conditions (4.431) which now constitute the standard semantic analysis of first-order sentential logic. The philosophical significance of such a method for Wittgenstein was that it alleviated a confusion, namely the idea that logical inferences are justified by rules. If an argument form is valid, the conjunction of the premises will be logically equivalent to the conclusion and this can be clearly seen in a truth table; it is "displayed". The concept of tautology is thus central to Wittgenstein's Tractarian account of logical consequence, which is strictly deductive.
At the beginning of Proposition 6, Wittgenstein postulates the essential form of all sentences. He uses the notation formula_1, where
Proposition 6 says that any logical sentence can be derived from a series of NOR operations on the totality of atomic propositions. Wittgenstein drew from Henry M. Sheffer's logical theorem making that statement in the context of the propositional calculus. Wittgenstein's N-operator is a broader infinitary analogue of the Sheffer stroke, which applied to a set of propositions produces a proposition that is equivalent to the denial of every member of that set. Wittgenstein shows that this operator can cope with the whole of predicate logic with identity, defining the quantifiers at 5.52, and showing how identity would then be handled at 5.53-5.532.
The subsidiaries of 6. contain more philosophical reflections on logic, connecting to ideas of knowledge, thought, and the "a priori" and transcendental. The final passages argue that logic and mathematics express only tautologies and are transcendental, i.e. they lie outside of the metaphysical subject's world. In turn, a logically "ideal" language cannot supply meaning, it can only reflect the world, and so, sentences in a logical language cannot remain meaningful if they are not merely reflections of the facts.
From Propositions 6.4-6.54, the Tractatus shifts its focus from primarily logical considerations to what may be considered more traditionally philosophical foci (God, ethics, meta-ethics, death, the will) and, less traditionally along with these, the mystical. The philosophy of language presented in the Tractatus attempts to demonstrate just what the limits of language are- to delineate precisely what can and cannot be sensically said. Among the sensibly sayable for Wittgenstein are the propositions of natural science, and to the nonsensical, or unsayable, those subjects associated with philosophy traditionally- ethics and metaphysics, for instance. Curiously, on this score, the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, proposition 6.54, states that once one understands the propositions of the Tractatus, he will recognize that they are senseless, and that they must be thrown away. Proposition 6.54, then, presents a difficult interpretative problem. If the so-called ‘picture theory’ of meaning is correct, and it is impossible to represent logical form, then the theory, by trying to say something about how language and the world must be for there to be meaning, is self-undermining. This is to say that the ‘picture theory’ of meaning itself requires that something be said about the logical form sentences must share with reality for meaning to be possible. This requires doing precisely what the ‘picture theory’ of meaning precludes. It would appear, then, that the metaphysics and the philosophy of language endorsed by the Tractatus give rise to a paradox: for the Tractatus to be true, it will necessarily have to be nonsense by self-application; but for this self-application to render the propositions of the Tractatus nonsense (in the Tractarian sense), then the Tractatus must be true.
There are three primarily dialectical approaches to solving this paradox the traditionalist, or Ineffable-Truths View; 2) the resolute, ‘new Wittgenstein’, or Not-All-Nonsense View; 3) the No-Truths-At-All View. The traditionalist approach to resolving this paradox is to hold that Wittgenstein accepted that philosophical statements could not be made, but that nevertheless, by appealing to the distinction between saying and showing, that these truths can be communicated by showing. On the resolute reading, some of the propositions of the Tractatus are withheld from self-application, they are not themselves nonsense, but point out the nonsensical nature of the Tractatus. This view often appeals to the so-called ‘frame’ of the Tractatus, comprising the preface and propositions 6.54. The No-Truths-At-All View states that Wittgenstein held the propositions of the Tractatus to be ambiguously both true and nonsensical, at once. While the propositions could not be, by self-application of the attendant philosophy of the Tractatus, true (or even sensical), it was only the philosophy of the Tractatus itself that could render them so. This is presumably what made Wittgenstein compelled to accept the philosophy of the Tractatus as specially having solved the problems of philosophy. It is the philosophy of the Tractatus, alone, that can solve the problems. Indeed, the philosophy of the Tractatus is for Wittgenstein, on this view, problematic only when applied to itself.
At the end of the text Wittgenstein uses an analogy from Arthur Schopenhauer, and compares the book to a ladder that must be thrown away after one has climbed it.
As the last line in the book, proposition 7 has no supplementary propositions. It ends the book with the proposition "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ("„Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."")
A prominent view set out in the "Tractatus" is the picture theory, sometimes called the picture theory of language. The picture theory is a proposed explanation of the capacity of language and thought to represent the world. Although something need not be a proposition to represent something in the world, Wittgenstein was largely concerned with the way propositions function as representations.
According to the theory, propositions can "picture" the world as being a certain way, and thus accurately represent it either truly or falsely. If someone thinks the proposition, "There is a tree in the yard," then that proposition accurately pictures the world if and only if there is a tree in the yard. One aspect of pictures which Wittgenstein finds particularly illuminating in comparison with language is the fact that we can directly see in the picture what situation it depicts without knowing if the situation actually obtains. This allows Wittgenstein to explain how false propositions can have meaning (a problem which Russell struggled with for many years): just as we can see directly from the picture the situation which it depicts without knowing if it in fact obtains, analogously, when we understand a proposition we grasp its truth conditions or its sense, that is, we know what the world must be like if it is true, without knowing if it is in fact true (TLP 4.024, 4.431).
It is believed that Wittgenstein was inspired for this theory by the way that traffic courts in Paris reenact automobile accidents. A toy car is a representation of a real car, a toy truck is a representation of a real truck, and dolls are representations of people. In order to convey to a judge what happened in an automobile accident, someone in the courtroom might place the toy cars in a position like the position the real cars were in, and move them in the ways that the real cars moved. In this way, the elements of the picture (the toy cars) are in spatial relation to one another, and this relation itself pictures the spatial relation between the real cars in the automobile accident.
Pictures have what Wittgenstein calls "Form der Abbildung" or pictorial form, which they share with what they depict. This means that all the logically possible arrangements of the pictorial elements in the picture correspond to the possibilities of arranging the things which they depict in reality. Thus if the model for car A stands to the left of the model for car B, it depicts that the cars in the world stand in the same way relative to each other. This picturing relation, Wittgenstein believed, was our key to understanding the relationship a proposition holds to the world. Although language differs from pictures in lacking direct pictorial mode of representation (e.g., it doesn't use colors and shapes to represent colors and shapes), still Wittgenstein believed that propositions are "logical pictures" of the world by virtue of sharing logical form with the reality which they represent (TLP 2.18-2.2). And that he thought, explains how we can understand a proposition without its meaning having been explained to us (TLP 4.02), we can directly see in the proposition what it represents as we see in the picture the situation which it depicts just by virtue of knowing its method of depiction: propositions "show" their sense (TLP 4.022).
However, Wittgenstein claimed that pictures cannot represent their "own" logical form, they cannot "say" what they have in common with reality but can only "show" it (TLP 4.12-4.121). If representation consist in depicting an arrangement of elements in logical space, then logical space itself can't be depicted since it is itself not an arrangement of "anything"; rather logical form is a feature of an arrangement of objects and thus it can be properly expressed (that is depicted) in language by an analogous arrangement of the relevant signs in sentences (which contain the same possibilities of combination as prescribed by logical syntax), hence logical form can only be shown by presenting the logical relations between different sentences.
Wittgenstein's conception of representation as picturing also allows him to derive two striking claims: that no proposition can be known "a priori" - there are no apriori truths (TLP 3.05), and that there is only "logical" necessity (TLP 6.37). Since all propositions, by virtue of being pictures, have sense independently of anything being the case in reality, we cannot see from the proposition alone whether it is true (as would be the case if it could be known apriori), but we must compare it to reality in order to know that it's true (TLP 4.031 "In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment."). And for similar reasons, no proposition is necessarily true except in the limiting case of tautologies, which Wittgenstein say lack sense (TLP 4.461). If a proposition pictures a state of affairs in virtue of being a picture in logical space, then a non-logical or metaphysical "necessary truth" would be a state of affairs which is satisfied by any possible arrangement of objects (since it is true for any possible state of affairs), but this means that the would-be necessary proposition would not depict anything as "being so" but will be true no matter what the world is actually like; but if that's the case, then the proposition cannot say anything about the world or describe any fact in it - it would not be correlated with any particular state of affairs, just like a tautology (TLP 6.37).
Although Wittgenstein did not use the term himself, his metaphysical view throughout the "Tractatus" is commonly referred to as logical atomism. While his logical atomism resembles that of Bertrand Russell, the two views are not strictly the same.
Russell's theory of descriptions is a way of logically analyzing sentences containing definite descriptions without presupposing the existence of an object satisfying the description. According to the theory, a statement like "There is a man to my left" should be analyzed into: "There is some "x" such that "x" is a man and "x" is to my left, and for any "y", if "y" is a man and "y" is to my left, "y" is identical to "x"". If the statement is true, "x" refers to the man to my left.
Whereas Russell believed the names (like "x") in his theory should refer to things we can know directly by virtue of acquaintance, Wittgenstein didn't believe that there are any epistemic constraints on logical analyses: the simple objects are whatever is contained in the elementary propositions which can't be logically analyzed any further.
By "objects", Wittgenstein did not mean physical objects in the world, but the absolute base of logical analysis, that can be combined but not divided (TLP 2.02–2.0201). According to Wittgenstein's logico-atomistic metaphysical system, objects each have a "nature," which is their capacity to combine with other objects. When combined, objects form "states of affairs." A state of affairs that obtains is a "fact." Facts make up the entirety of the world. Facts are logically independent of one another, as are states of affairs. That is, one state of affair's (or fact's) existence does not allow us to infer whether another state of affairs (or fact) exists or does not exist.
Within states of affairs, objects are in particular relations to one another. This is analogous to the spatial relations between toy cars discussed above. The structure of states of affairs comes from the arrangement of their constituent objects (TLP 2.032), and such arrangement is essential to their intelligibility, just as the toy cars must be arranged in a certain way in order to picture the automobile accident.
A fact might be thought of as the obtaining state of affairs that Madison is in Wisconsin, and a possible (but not obtaining) state of affairs might be Madison's being in Utah. These states of affairs are made up of certain arrangements of objects (TLP 2.023). However, Wittgenstein does not specify what objects are. Madison, Wisconsin, and Utah cannot be atomic objects: they are themselves composed of numerous facts. Instead, Wittgenstein believed objects to be the things in the world that would correlate to the smallest parts of a logically analyzed language, such as names like "x". Our language is not sufficiently (i.e., not completely) analyzed for such a correlation, so one cannot "say" what an object is. We can, however, talk about them as "indestructible" and "common to all possible worlds." Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher's job was to discover the structure of language through analysis.
Anthony Kenny provides a useful analogy for understanding Wittgenstein's logical atomism: a slightly modified game of chess. Just like objects in states of affairs, the chess pieces do not alone constitute the game—their arrangements, together with the pieces (objects) themselves, determine the state of affairs.
Through Kenny's chess analogy, we can see the relationship between Wittgenstein's logical atomism and his picture theory of representation. For the sake of this analogy, the chess pieces are objects, they and their positions constitute states of affairs and therefore facts, and the totality of facts is the entire particular game of chess.
We can communicate such a game of chess in the exact way that Wittgenstein says a proposition represents the world. We might say "WR/KR1" to communicate a white rook's being on the square commonly labeled as king's rook 1. Or, to be more thorough, we might make such a report for every piece's position.
The logical form of our reports must be the same logical form of the chess pieces and their arrangement on the board in order to be meaningful. Our communication about the chess game must have as many possibilities for constituents and their arrangement as the game itself. Kenny points out that such logical form need not strictly resemble the chess game. The logical form can be had by the bouncing of a ball (for example, twenty bounces might communicate a white rook's being on the king's rook 1 square). One can bounce a ball as many times as one wishes, which means the ball's bouncing has "logical multiplicity," and can therefore share the logical form of the game. A motionless ball cannot communicate this same information, as it does not have logical multiplicity.
According to traditional reading of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about logic and language led him to believe that some features of language and reality cannot be expressed in senseful language but only "shown" by the form of certain expressions. Thus for example, according to the picture theory, when a proposition is thought or expressed, the proposition represents reality (truly or falsely) by virtue of sharing some features with that reality in common. However, those features themselves is something Wittgenstein claimed we could not "say" anything about, because we cannot describe the relationship that pictures bear to what they depict, but only show it via fact stating propositions (TLP 4.121). Thus we cannot say "that" there is a correspondence between language and reality, but the correspondence itself can only be "shown", since our language is not capable of describing its own logical structure.
However, on the more recent "resolute" interpretation of the Tractatus (see below), the remarks on "showing" were not in fact an attempt by Wittgenstein to gesture at the existence of some ineffable features of language or reality, but rather, as Cora Diamond and James Conant have argued, the distinction was meant to draw a sharp contrast between logic and descriptive discourse. On their reading, Wittgenstein indeed meant that some things are shown when we reflect on the logic of our language, but "what" is shown is not "that" something is the case, as if we could somehow think it (and thus understand what Wittgenstein tries to show us) but for some reason we just couldn't say it. As Diamond and Conant explain:
Similarly, Michael Kremer suggested that Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing could be compared with Gilbert Ryle's famous distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". Just as practical knowledge or skill (such as riding a bike) is not reducible to propositional knowledge according to Ryle, Wittgenstein also thought that the mastery of the logic of our language is a unique practical skill that doesn't involve any sort of propositional "knowing that", but rather is reflected in our ability to operate with senseful sentences and grasping their internal logical relations.
At the time of its publication, Wittgenstein concluded that the "Tractatus" had resolved all philosophical problems. He would later recant this view, leading him to begin work on what would ultimately become the "Philosophical Investigations".
The book was translated into English by C. K. Ogden with help from the teenaged Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey. Ramsey later visited Wittgenstein in Austria. Translation issues make the concepts hard to pinpoint, especially given Wittgenstein's usage of terms and difficulty in translating ideas into words.
The "Tractatus" caught the attention of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle (1921–1933), especially Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick. The group spent many months working through the text out loud, line by line. Schlick eventually convinced Wittgenstein to meet with members of the circle to discuss the "Tractatus" when he returned to Vienna (he was then working as an architect). Although the Vienna Circle's logical positivists appreciated the "Tractatus", they argued that the last few passages, including Proposition 7, are confused. Carnap hailed the book as containing important insights, but encouraged people to ignore the concluding sentences. Wittgenstein responded to Schlick, commenting: "...I cannot imagine that Carnap should have so completely misunderstood the last sentences of the book and hence the fundamental conception of the entire book."
A more recent interpretation comes from The New Wittgenstein family of interpretations under development since 2000. This so-called "resolute reading" is controversial and much debated. The main contention of such readings is that Wittgenstein in the "Tractatus" does not provide a theoretical account of language that relegates ethics and philosophy to a mystical realm of the unsayable. Rather, the book has a therapeutic aim. By working through the propositions of the book the reader comes to realize that language is perfectly suited to all his needs, and that philosophy rests on a confused relation to the logic of our language. The confusion that the "Tractatus" seeks to dispel is not a confused theory, such that a correct theory would be a proper way to clear the confusion, rather the need of any such theory is confused. The method of the "Tractatus" is to make the reader aware of the logic of our language as he is already familiar with it, and the effect of thereby dispelling the need for a theoretical account of the logic of our language spreads to all other areas of philosophy. Thereby the confusion involved in putting forward e.g. ethical and metaphysical theories is cleared in the same "coup".
Wittgenstein would not meet the Vienna Circle proper, but only a few of its members, including Schlick, Carnap, and Waissman. Often, though, he refused to discuss philosophy, and would insist on giving the meetings over to reciting the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore with his chair turned to the wall. He largely broke off formal relations even with these members of the circle after coming to believe Carnap had used some of his ideas without permission.
Alfred Korzybski credits Wittgenstein as an influence in his book, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics".
The "Tractatus" was the theme of a 1992 film by the Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs. The 32-minute production, named "Wittgenstein Tractatus", features citations from the "Tractatus" and other works by Wittgenstein.
In 1989 the Finnish artist M. A. Numminen released a black vinyl album, "The Tractatus Suite", consisting of extracts from the "Tractatus" set to music, on the Forward! label (GN-95). The tracks were [T. 1] "The World is...", [T. 2] "In order to tell", [T. 4] "A thought is...", [T. 5] "A proposition is...", [T. 6] "The general form of a truth-function", and [T. 7] "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann". It was recorded at Finnvox Studios, Helsinki between February and June 1989. The "lyrics" were provided in German, English, Esperanto, French, Finnish and Swedish.
The music was reissued as a CD in 2003, "M.A. Numminen sings Wittgenstein".
The "Tractatus" is the English translation of:
A notable German Edition of the works of Wittgenstein is:
Both English translations of the "Tractatus", as well as the first publication in German from 1921, include an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein revised the Ogden translation.
A manuscript version of the "Tractatus", dubbed and published as the "Prototractatus", was discovered in 1965 by Georg Henrik von Wright.
Online English versions
Online German versions
Visualization graphs
TeX
TeX (, see below), stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system (or a "formatting system") which was designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
TeX is popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatting system, in many Unix installations which use both for different purposes. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other macro packages.
TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces). TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.
When the first paper volume of Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" was published in 1968, it was typeset using hot metal typesetting set by a Monotype machine. This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth. When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior.
Disappointed by the galley proofs of the second edition of the second volume, he was motivated to design his own typesetting system. Knuth saw for the first time the output of a high-quality digital typesetting system, and became interested in digital typography. On 13 May 1977, he wrote a memo to himself describing the basic features of TeX.
He planned to finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but as it happened, the language was not "frozen" (ready to use) until 1989, more than ten years later. Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX. When Steele returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that autumn, he rewrote TeX's input/output (I/O) to run under the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system. The first version of TeX, called TeX78, was written in the SAIL programming language to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford's WAITS operating system.
For later versions of TeX, Knuth invented the concept of literate programming, a way of producing compilable source code and cross-linked documentation typeset in TeX from the same original file. The language used is called WEB and produces programs in DEC PDP-10 Pascal.
TeX82, a new version of TeX which is rewritten from scratch, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang. TeX82 also uses fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating-point, to ensure reproducibility of the results across different computer hardware, and includes a real, Turing-complete programming language, following intense lobbying by Guy Steele. In 1989, Donald Knuth released new versions of TeX and Metafont. Despite his desire to keep the program stable, Knuth realised that 128 different characters for the text input were not enough to accommodate foreign languages; the main change in version 3.0 of TeX (also called TeX90) is thus the ability to work with 8-bit inputs, allowing 256 different characters in the text input.
Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.14159265; it was last updated on January 12, 2014. The design was frozen after version 3.0, and no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes. Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features. Likewise, versions of Metafont after 2.0 asymptotically approach (currently at 2.7182818), and a similar change will be applied after Knuth's death.
Since the source code of TeX is essentially in the public domain (see below), other programmers are allowed (and explicitly encouraged) to improve the system, but are required to use another name to distribute the modified TeX, meaning that the source code can still evolve. For example, the Omega project was developed after 1991, primarily to enhance TeX's multilingual typesetting abilities. Knuth created "unofficial" modified versions, such as TeX-XeT, which allows a user to mix texts written in left-to-right and right-to-left writing systems in the same document.
In several technical fields such as computer science, mathematics, engineering and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX. While many publications in other fields, including dictionaries and legal publications, have been produced using TeX, it has not been as successful as in the more technical fields, as TeX was primarily designed to typeset mathematics.
When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs; instead, he designed many hooks inside the program so that it would be possible to write extensions, and released the source code, hoping that the publishers would design versions tailoring to their own needs. While such extensions have been created (including some by Knuth himself), most people have extended TeX only using macros and it has remained a system associated with technical typesetting.
TeX commands commonly start with a backslash and are grouped with curly braces. Almost all of TeX's syntactic properties can be changed on the fly, which makes TeX input hard to parse by anything but TeX itself. TeX is a macro- and token-based language: many commands, including most user-defined ones, are expanded on the fly until only unexpandable tokens remain, which are then executed. Expansion itself is practically free from side effects. Tail recursion of macros takes no memory, and if-then-else constructs are available. This makes TeX a Turing-complete language even at the expansion level. The system can be divided into four levels: in the first, characters are read from the input file and assigned a category code (sometimes called "catcode", for short). Combinations of a backslash (actually, any character of category zero) followed by letters (characters of category 11) or a single other character are replaced by a control-sequence token. In this sense, this stage is like lexical analysis, although it does not form numbers from digits. In the next stage, expandable control sequences (such as conditionals or defined macros) are replaced by their replacement text. The input for the third stage is then a stream of characters (including the ones with special meaning) and unexpandable control sequences (typically assignments and visual commands). Here, the characters get assembled into a paragraph, and TeX's paragraph breaking algorithm works by optimizing breakpoints over the whole paragraph. The fourth stage breaks the vertical list of lines and other material into pages.
The TeX system has precise knowledge of the sizes of all characters and symbols, and using this information, it computes the optimal arrangement of letters per line and lines per page. It then produces a DVI file ("DeVice Independent") containing the final locations of all characters. This dvi file can then be printed directly given an appropriate printer driver, or it can be converted to other formats. Nowadays, pdfTeX is often used, which bypasses DVI generation altogether. The base TeX system understands about 300 commands, called "primitives". These low-level commands are rarely used directly by users, and most functionality is provided by format files (predumped memory images of TeX after large macro collections have been loaded). Knuth's original default format, which adds about 600 commands, is Plain TeX. The most widely used format is LaTeX, originally developed by Leslie Lamport, which incorporates document styles for books, letters, slides, etc., and adds support for referencing and automatic numbering of sections and equations. Another widely used format, AMS-TeX, is produced by the American Mathematical Society and provides many more user-friendly commands, which can be altered by journals to fit with their house style. Most of the features of AMS-TeX can be used in LaTeX by using the "AMS packages" (e.g., codice_1, codice_2) and the "AMS document classes" (e.g., codice_3, codice_4). This is then referred to as AMS-LaTeX. Other formats include ConTeXt, used primarily for desktop publishing and written mostly by Hans Hagen at Pragma.
A sample Hello world program in plain TeX is:
Hello, World
\bye % marks the end of the file; not shown in the final output
This might be in a file "myfile.tex", as ".tex" is a common file extension for plain TeX files. By default, everything that follows a percent sign on a line is a comment, ignored by TeX. Running TeX on this file (for example, by typing tex myfile.tex in a command-line interpreter, or by calling it from a graphical user interface) will create an output file called "myfile.dvi", representing the content of the page in a device independent format (DVI). A DVI file could then either be viewed on screen or converted to a suitable format for any of the various printers for which a device driver existed (printer support was generally not an operating system feature at the time that TeX was created). Knuth has said that there is nothing inherent in TeX that requires DVI as the output format, and later versions of TeX, notably pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, all support output directly to PDF.
TeX provides a different text syntax specifically for mathematical formulas. For example, the quadratic formula (which is the solution of the quadratic equation) appears as:
The formula is printed in a way a person would write by hand, or typeset the equation. In a document, entering "mathematics mode" is done by starting with a $ symbol, then entering a formula in TeX syntax, and closing again with another of the same symbol. Knuth explained in jest that he chose the dollar sign to indicate the beginning and end of mathematical mode in plain TeX because typesetting mathematics was traditionally supposed to be expensive. "Display mathematics" (mathematics presented centered on a new line) is similar but uses $$ instead of a single $ symbol. For example, the above with the quadratic formula in display math:
The TeX software incorporates several aspects that were not available, or were of lower quality, in other typesetting programs at the time when TeX was released. Some of the innovations are based on interesting algorithms, and have led to several theses for Knuth's students. While some of these discoveries have now been incorporated into other typesetting programs, others, such as the rules for mathematical spacing, are still unique.
Since the primary goal of the TeX language is high-quality typesetting for publishers of books, Knuth gave a lot of attention to the spacing rules for mathematical formulae. He took three bodies of work that he considered to be standards of excellence for mathematical typography: the books typeset by Addison-Wesley Publishing's house (the publisher of "The Art of Computer Programming"), in particular the work of Hans Wolf and Joseph Louis Lagrange (thermodynamics innovation, +1856); editions of the mathematical journal "Acta Mathematica" dating from around 1910; and a copy of "Indagationes Mathematicae", a Dutch mathematics journal. Knuth looked closely at these printed papers to sort out and look for a set of rules for spacing. While TeX provides some basic rules and the tools needed to specify proper spacing, the exact parameters depend on the font used to typeset the formula. For example, the spacing for Knuth's Computer Modern fonts has been precisely fine-tuned over the years and is now set; but when other fonts, such as AMS Euler, were used by Knuth for the first time, new spacing parameters had to be defined.
The typesetting of Math in TeX is not without criticism, particularly with respect to technical details of the font metrics, which were designed in an era when significant attention was paid to storage requirements. This resulted in some "hacks" overloading some fields, which in turn required other "hacks". On an aesthetics level, the rendering of radicals has also been criticized. The OpenType math font specification largely borrows from TeX, but has some new features/enhancements.
In comparison with manual typesetting, the problem of justification is easy to solve with a digital system such as TeX, which, provided that good points for line breaking have been defined, can automatically spread the spaces between words to fill in the line. The problem is thus to find the set of breakpoints that will give the most visually pleasing result. Many line breaking algorithms use a "first-fit" approach, where the breakpoints for each line are determined one after the other, and no breakpoint is changed after it has been chosen. Such a system is not able to define a breakpoint depending on the effect that it will have on the following lines. In comparison, the "total-fit" line breaking algorithm used by TeX and developed by Donald Knuth and Michael Plass considers "all" the possible breakpoints in a paragraph, and finds the combination of line breaks that will produce the most globally pleasing arrangement.
Formally, the algorithm defines a value called "badness" associated with each possible line break; the badness is increased if the spaces on the line must stretch or shrink too much to make the line the correct width. Penalties are added if a breakpoint is particularly undesirable: for example, if a word must be hyphenated, if two lines in a row are hyphenated, or if a very loose line is immediately followed by a very tight line. The algorithm will then find the breakpoints that will minimize the sum of squares of the badness (including penalties) of the resulting lines. If the paragraph contains formula_1 possible breakpoints, the number of situations that must be evaluated naively is formula_2. However, by using the method of dynamic programming, the complexity of the algorithm can be brought down to formula_3 (see Big O notation). Further simplifications (for example, not testing extremely unlikely breakpoints such as a hyphenation in the first word of a paragraph, or very overfull lines) lead to an efficient algorithm whose running time is formula_4, where formula_5 is the width of a line. A similar algorithm is used to determine the best way to break paragraphs across two pages, in order to avoid widows or orphans (lines that appear alone on a page while the rest of the paragraph is on the following or preceding page). However, in general, a thesis by Michael Plass shows how the page breaking problem can be NP-complete because of the added complication of placing figures. TeX's line breaking algorithm has been adopted by several other programs, such as Adobe InDesign (a desktop publishing application) and the GNU fmt Unix command line utility.
If no suitable line break can be found for a line, the system will try to hyphenate a word. The original version of TeX used a hyphenation algorithm based on a set of rules for the removal of prefixes and suffixes of words, and for deciding if it should insert a break between the two consonants in a pattern of the form vowel–consonant–consonant–vowel (which is possible most of the time). TeX82 introduced a new hyphenation algorithm, designed by Frank Liang in 1983, to assign priorities to breakpoints in letter groups. A list of hyphenation patterns is first generated automatically from a corpus of hyphenated words (a list of 50,000 words). If TeX must find the acceptable hyphenation positions in the word "encyclopedia", for example, it will consider all the subwords of the extended word ".encyclopedia.", where "." is a special marker to indicate the beginning or end of the word. The list of subwords includes all the subwords of length 1 (".", "e", "n", "c", "y", etc.), of length 2 (".e", "en", "nc", etc.), etc., up to the subword of length 14, which is the word itself, including the markers. TeX will then look into its list of hyphenation patterns, and find subwords for which it has calculated the desirability of hyphenation at each position. In the case of our word, 11 such patterns can be matched, namely 1c4l4, 1cy, 1d4i3a, 4edi, e3dia, 2i1a, ope5d, 2p2ed, 3pedi, pedia4, y1c. For each position in the word, TeX will calculate the "maximum value" obtained among all matching patterns, yielding en1cy1c4l4o3p4e5d4i3a4. Finally, the acceptable positions are those indicated by an odd number, yielding the acceptable hyphenations "en-cy-clo-pe-di-a". This system based on subwords allows the definition of very general patterns (such as 2i1a), with low indicative numbers (either odd or even), which can then be superseded by more specific patterns (such as 1d4i3a) if necessary. These patterns find about 90% of the hyphens in the original dictionary; more importantly, they do not insert any spurious hyphen. In addition, a list of exceptions (words for which the patterns do not predict the correct hyphenation) are included with the Plain TeX format; additional ones can be specified by the user.
Metafont, not strictly part of TeX, is a font description system which allows the designer to describe characters algorithmically. It uses Bézier curves in a fairly standard way to generate the actual characters to be displayed, but Knuth devotes substantial attention to the rasterizing problem on bitmapped displays. Another thesis, by John Hobby, further explores this problem of digitizing "brush trajectories". This term derives from the fact that Metafont describes characters as having been drawn by abstract brushes (and erasers). It is commonly believed that TeX is based on bitmap fonts but, in fact, these programs "know" nothing about the fonts that they are using other than their dimensions. It is the responsibility of the device driver to appropriately handle fonts of other types, including PostScript Type 1 and TrueType. Computer Modern (commonly known as "the TeX font") is freely available in Type 1 format, as are the AMS math fonts. Users of TeX systems that output directly to PDF, such as pdfTeX, XeTeX, or LuaTeX, generally never use Metafont output at all.
TeX documents are written and programmed using an unusual macro language. Broadly speaking, the running of this macro language involves expansion and execution stages which do not interact directly. Expansion includes both literal expansion of macro definitions as well as conditional branching, and execution involves such tasks as setting variables/registers and the actual typesetting process of adding glyphs to boxes.
The definition of a macro not only includes a list of commands but also the syntax of the call. It differs with most widely used lexical preprocessors like M4, in that the body of a macro gets tokenized at definition time.
The TeX macro language has been used to write larger document production systems, most notably including LaTeX and ConTeXt.
The original source code for the current TeX software is written in WEB, a mixture of documentation written in TeX and a Pascal subset in order to ensure portability. For example, TeX does all of its dynamic allocation itself from fixed-size arrays and uses only fixed-point arithmetic for its internal calculations. As a result, TeX has been ported to almost all operating systems, usually by using the web2c program to convert the source code into C instead of directly compiling the Pascal code. Knuth has kept a very detailed log of all the bugs he has corrected and changes he has made in the program since 1982; , the list contains 427 entries, not including the version modification that should be done after his death as the final change in TeX. Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in TeX. The award per bug started at US$2.56 (one "hexadecimal dollar") and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. Knuth has lost relatively little money as there have been very few bugs claimed. In addition, recipients have been known to frame their check as proof that they found a bug in TeX rather than cashing it.
Due to scammers finding scanned copies of his checks on the internet and using them to try to drain his bank account, Knuth no longer sends out real checks, but those who submit bug reports can get credit at The Bank of San Serriffe instead.
TeX is usually provided in the form of an easy-to-install bundle of TeX itself along with Metafont and all the necessary fonts, documents formats, and utilities needed to use the typesetting system. On UNIX-compatible systems, including Linux and Apple macOS, TeX is distributed as part of the larger TeX Live distribution. (Prior to TeX Live, the teTeX distribution was the de facto standard on UNIX-compatible systems.) On Microsoft Windows, there is the MiKTeX distribution (enhanced by proTeXt) and the Microsoft Windows version of TeX Live.
Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably jadeTeX, which uses TeX as a backend for printing from James Clark's DSSSL Engine, the Arbortext publishing system, and Texinfo, the GNU documentation processing system. TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.
Numerous extensions and companion programs for TeX exist, among them BibTeX for bibliographies (distributed with LaTeX), pdfTeX, a TeX-compatible engine which bypasses DVI and produces output in PDF, XeTeX, a TeX-compatible engine that supports Unicode and OpenType, and LuaTeX, a Unicode-aware extension to TeX that includes a Lua runtime with extensive hooks into the underlying TeX routines and algorithms. Most TeX extensions are available for free from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
There are a variety of :
Donald Knuth has indicated several times that the source code of TeX has been placed into the "public domain", and he strongly encourages modifications or experimentations with this source code. In particular, since Knuth highly values the reproducibility of the output of all versions of TeX, any changed version must not be called TeX, or anything confusingly similar. To enforce this rule, any implementation of the system must pass a test suite called the TRIP test before being allowed to be called TeX. The question of license is somewhat confused by the statements included at the beginning of the TeX source code, which indicate that "all rights are reserved. Copying of this file is authorized only if ... you make absolutely no changes to your copy". This restriction should be interpreted as a prohibition to change the source code "as long as the file is called tex.web". This interpretation is confirmed later in the source code when the TRIP test is mentioned ("If this program is changed, the resulting system should not be called 'TeX). The American Mathematical Society tried in the early 1980s to claim a trademark for TeX. This was rejected because at the time "TEX" (all caps) was registered by Honeywell for the "Text EXecutive" text processing system.
It is possible to use TeX for automatic generation of sophisticated layout for XML data. The differences in syntax between the two description languages can be overcome with the help of TeXML. In the context of XML publication, TeX can thus be considered an alternative to XSL-FO. TeX allowed scientific papers in mathematical disciplines to be reduced to relatively small files that could be rendered client-side, allowing fully typeset scientific papers to be exchanged over the early Internet and emerging World Wide Web, even when sending large files was difficult. This paved the way for the creation of repositories of scientific papers such as arXiv, through which papers could be 'published' without an intermediary publisher.
The name TeX is intended by its developer to be , with the final consonant of "loch" or "Bach." The letters of the name are meant to represent the capital Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi, as TeX is an abbreviation of τέχνη (ΤΕΧΝΗ – "technē"), Greek for both "art" and "craft", which is also the root word of "technical". English speakers often pronounce it , like the first syllable of "technical". Knuth instructs that it be typeset with the "E" below the baseline and reduced spacing between the letters. This is done, as Knuth mentions in his "TeXbook", to distinguish TeX from other system names such as TEX, the Text EXecutive processor (developed by Honeywell Information Systems). Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX"—such as "TeXnician" (user of TeX software), "TeXhacker" (TeX programmer), "TeXmaster" (competent TeX programmer), "TeXhax", and "TeXnique".
Notable entities in the TeX community include the TeX Users Group (TUG), which publishes "TUGboat" and "The PracTeX Journal", covering a wide range of topics in digital typography relevant to TeX. The Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX (DANTE) is a large user group in Germany. The TeX Users Group was founded in 1980 for educational and scientific purposes, provides an organization for those who have an interest in typography and font design, and are users of the TeX typesetting system invented by Knuth. The TeX Users Group represents the interests of TeX users worldwide. The TeX Users Group publishes the journal "TUGboat" three times per year; DANTE publishes "Die TeXnische Komödie" four times per year. Other user groups include DK-TUG in Denmark, GUTenberg in France, GuIT in Italy, and UK-TUG in the United Kingdom; TUG maintains a complete list.
The Big Test
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy is a 1999 history book by Nicholas Lemann .
Tradition
A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes (like lawyers' wigs or military officers' spurs), but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years—the word "tradition" itself derives from the Latin "tradere" literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is commonly assumed that traditions have ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether that be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also use the word in a variety of ways.
The phrase "according to tradition", or "by tradition", usually means that whatever information follows is known only by oral tradition, but is not supported (and perhaps may be refuted) by physical documentation, by a physical artifact, or other quality evidence. "Tradition" is used to indicate the quality of a piece of information being discussed. For example, "According to tradition, Homer was born on Chios, but many other locales have historically claimed him as theirs." This tradition may never be proven or disproven. In another example, "King Arthur, by tradition a true British king, has inspired many well loved stories." Whether they are documented fact or not does not decrease their value as cultural history and literature.
Traditions are a subject of study in several academic fields, especially in social sciences such as folklore studies, anthropology, archaeology, and biology.
The concept of tradition, as the notion of holding on to a previous time, is also found in political and philosophical discourse. For example, it is the basis of the political concept of traditionalism, and also strands of many world religions including traditional Catholicism. In artistic contexts, tradition is used to decide the correct display of an art form. For example, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to guidelines dictating how an art form should be composed are given greater importance than the performer's own preferences. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. In response to this, tradition-preservation attempts have now been started in many countries around the world, focusing on aspects such as traditional languages. Tradition is usually contrasted with the goal of modernity and should be differentiated from customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules and similar concepts.
The English word "tradition" comes from the Latin "traditio" via French, the noun from the verb "tradere" (to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping); it was originally used in Roman law to refer to the concept of legal transfers and inheritance. According to Anthony Giddens and others, the modern meaning of tradition evolved during the Enlightenment period, in opposition to modernity and progress.
As with many other generic terms, there are many definitions of tradition. The concept includes a number of interrelated ideas; the unifying one is that tradition refers to beliefs, objects or customs performed or believed in the past, originating in it, transmitted through time by being taught by one generation to the next, and are performed or believed in the present.
Tradition can also refer to beliefs or customs that are Prehistoric, with lost or arcane origins, existing from "time immemorial". Originally, traditions were passed orally, without the need for a writing system. Tools to aid this process include poetic devices such as rhyme and alliteration. The stories thus preserved are also referred to as tradition, or as part of an oral tradition. Even such traditions, however, are presumed to have originated (been "invented" by humans) at some point. Traditions are often presumed to be ancient, unalterable, and deeply important, though they may sometimes be much less "natural" than is presumed. It is presumed that at least two transmissions over three generations are required for a practice, belief or object to be seen as traditional. Some traditions were deliberately invented for one reason or another, often to highlight or enhance the importance of a certain institution. Traditions may also be adapted to suit the needs of the day, and the changes can become accepted as a part of the ancient tradition. Tradition changes slowly, with changes from one generation to the next being seen as significant. Thus, those carrying out the traditions will not be consciously aware of the change, and even if a tradition undergoes major changes over many generations, it will be seen as unchanged.
There are various origins and fields of tradition; they can refer to:
Many objects, beliefs and customs can be traditional. Rituals of social interaction can be traditional, with phrases and gestures such as saying "thank you", sending birth announcements, greeting cards, etc. Tradition can also refer to larger concepts practiced by groups (family traditions at Christmas), organizations (company's picnic) or societies, such as the practice of national and public holidays. Some of the oldest traditions include monotheism (three millennia) and citizenship (two millennia). It can also include material objects, such as buildings, works of art or tools.
Tradition is often used as an adjective, in contexts such as traditional music, traditional medicine, traditional values and others. In such constructions tradition refers to specific values and materials particular to the discussed context, passed through generations.
The Panhellenic Games were a tradition in Ancient Greece where only Greek men from Greece and Greek colonies could compete.
The term "invention of tradition", introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm, refers to situations when a new practice or object is introduced in a manner that implies a connection with the past that is not necessarily present. A tradition may be deliberately created and promulgated for personal, commercial, political, or national self-interest, as was done in colonial Africa; or it may be adopted rapidly based on a single highly publicized event, rather than developing and spreading organically in a population, as in the case of the white wedding dress, which only became popular after Queen Victoria wore a white gown at her wedding to Albert of Saxe-Coburg.
An example of an invention of tradition is the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (location of the British Parliament) in the Gothic style. Similarly, most of the traditions associated with monarchy of the United Kingdom, seen as rooted deep in history, actually date to 19th century. Other examples include the invention of tradition in Africa and other colonial holdings by the occupying forces. Requiring legitimacy, the colonial power would often invent a "tradition" which they could use to legitimize their own position. For example, a certain succession to a chiefdom might be recognized by a colonial power as traditional in order to favour their own candidates for the job. Often these inventions were based in some form of tradition, but were exaggerated, distorted, or biased toward a particular interpretation.
Invented traditions are a central component of modern national cultures, providing a commonality of experience and promoting the unified national identity espoused by nationalism. Common examples include public holidays (particularly those unique to a particular nation), the singing of national anthems, and traditional national cuisine (see national dish). Expatriate and immigrant communities may continue to practice the national traditions of their home nation.
In science, tradition is often used in the literature in order to define the relationship of an author's thoughts to that of his or her field. In 1948, philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that there should be a "rational theory of tradition" applied to science which was fundamentally sociological. For Popper, each scientist who embarks on a certain research trend inherits the tradition of the scientists before them as he or she inherits their studies and any conclusions that superseded it. Unlike myth, which is a means of explaining the natural world through means other than logical criticism, scientific tradition was inherited from Socrates, who proposed critical discussion, according to Popper. For Thomas Kuhn, who presented his thoughts in a paper presented in 1977, a sense of such a critical inheritance of tradition is, historically, what sets apart the best scientists who change their fields is an embracement of tradition.
Traditions are a subject of study in several academic fields in social sciences—chiefly anthropology, archaeology, and biology—with somewhat different meanings in different fields. It is also used in varying contexts in other fields, such as history, psychology and sociology. Social scientists and others have worked to refine the commonsense concept of tradition to make it into a useful concept for scholarly analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, Edward Shils explored the concept in detail. Since then, a wide variety of social scientists have criticized traditional ideas about tradition; meanwhile, "tradition" has come into usage in biology as applied to nonhuman animals.
Tradition as a concept variously defined in different disciplines should not be confused with various traditions (perspectives, approaches) in those disciplines.
Tradition is one of the key concepts in anthropology; it can be said that anthropology is the study of "tradition in traditional societies". There is however no "theory of tradition", as for most anthropologists the need to discuss what tradition is seems unnecessary, as defining tradition is both unnecessary (everyone can be expected to know what it is) and unimportant (as small differences in definition would be just technical). There are however dissenting views; scholars such as Pascal Boyer argue that defining tradition and developing theories about it are important to the discipline.
In archaeology, the term "tradition" is a set of cultures or industries which appear to develop on from one another over a period of time. The term is especially common in the study of American archaeology.
Biologists, when examining groups of non-humans, have observed repeated behaviors which are taught within communities from one generation to the next. Tradition is defined in biology as "a behavioral practice that is relatively enduring (i.e., is performed repeatedly over a period of time), that is shared among two or more members of a group, that depends in part on socially aided learning for its generation in new practitioners", and has been called a precursor to "culture" in the anthropological sense.
Behavioral traditions have been observed in groups of fish, birds, and mammals. Groups of orangutans and chimpanzees, in particular, may display large numbers of behavioral traditions, and in chimpanzees, transfer of traditional behavior from one group to another (not just within a group) has been observed. Such behavioral traditions may have evolutionary significance, allowing adaptation at a faster rate than genetic change.
In the field of musicology and ethnomusicology tradition refers to the belief systems, repertoire, techniques, style and culture that is passed down through subsequent generations. Tradition in music suggests a historical context with which one can perceive distinguishable patterns. Along with a sense of history, traditions have a fluidity that cause them to evolve and adapt over time.
While both musicology and ethnomusicology are defined by being 'the scholarly study of music' they differ in their methodology and subject of research. 'Tradition, or traditions, can be presented as a context in which to study the work of a specific composer or as a part of a wide-ranging historical perspective.'
The concept of tradition, in early sociological research (around the turn of the 19th and 20th century), referred to that of the traditional society, as contrasted by the more modern industrial society. This approach was most notably portrayed in Max Weber's concepts of traditional authority and modern rational-legal authority. In more modern works, One hundred years later, sociology sees tradition as a social construct used to contrast past with the present and as a form of rationality used to justify certain course of action.
Traditional society is characterized by lack of distinction between family and business, division of labor influenced primarily by age, gender, and status, high position of custom in the system of values, self-sufficiency, preference to saving and accumulation of capital instead of productive investment, relative autarky. Early theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to industrial model are now seen as too simplistic.
In 1981 Edward Shils in his book "Tradition" put forward a definition of tradition that became universally accepted. According to Shils, tradition is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present.
Another important sociological aspect of tradition is the one that relates to rationality. It is also related to the works of Max Weber (see theories of rationality), and were popularized and redefined in 1992 by Raymond Boudon in his book "Action". In this context tradition refers to the mode of thinking and action justified as "it has always been that way". This line of reasoning forms the basis of the logical flaw of the appeal to tradition (or "argumentum ad antiquitatem"), which takes the form "this is right because we've always done it this way." In most cases such an appeal can be refuted on the grounds that the "tradition" being advocated may no longer be desirable, or, indeed, may never have been despite its previous popularity.
The idea of tradition is important in philosophy. Twentieth century philosophy is often divided between an 'analytic' tradition, dominant in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, and a 'continental' tradition, dominant in German and Romance speaking Europe. Increasingly central to continental philosophy is the project of deconstructing what its proponents, following Martin Heidegger, call 'the tradition', which began with Plato and Aristotle. In contrast, some continental philosophers - most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer - have attempted to rehabilitate the tradition of Aristotelianism. This move has been replicated within analytic philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. However, MacIntyre has himself deconstructed the idea of 'the tradition', instead posing Aristotelianism as one philosophical tradition in rivalry with others.
The concepts of tradition and traditional values are frequently used in political and religious discourse to establish the legitimacy of a particular set of values. In the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept of tradition has been used to argue for the centrality and legitimacy of conservative religious values. Similarly, strands of orthodox theological thought from a number of world religions openly identify themselves as wanting a return to tradition. For example, the term "traditionalist Catholic" refers to those, such as Archbishop Lefebvre, who want the worship and practices of the Church to be as they were before the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. Likewise, Sunni Muslims are referred to as "Ahl el-Sunnah wa Al-Jamā‘ah" (), literally "people of the tradition [of Muhammad] and the community", emphasizing their attachment to religious and cultural tradition.
More generally, tradition has been used as a way of determining the political spectrum, with right-wing parties having a stronger affinity to the ways of the past than left-wing ones. Here, the concept of adherence tradition is embodied by the political philosophy of traditionalist conservatism (or simply "traditionalism"), which emphasizes the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, hierarchy and organic unity, agrarianism, classicism and high culture, and the intersecting spheres of loyalty. Traditionalists would therefore reject the notions of individualism, liberalism, modernity, and social progress, but promote cultural and educational renewal, and revive interest in the Church, the family, the State and local community. This view has been criticised for including in its notion of tradition practices which are no longer considered to be desirable, for example, stereotypical views of the place of women in domestic affairs.
In other societies, especially ones experiencing rapid social change, the idea of what is "traditional" may be widely contested, with different groups striving to establish their own values as the legitimate traditional ones. Defining and enacting traditions in some cases can be a means of building unity between subgroups in a diverse society; in other cases, tradition is a means of othering and keeping groups distinct from one another.
In artistic contexts, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to traditional guidelines is of greater importance than performer's preferences. It is often the unchanging form of certain arts that leads to their perception as traditional. For artistic endeavors, tradition has been used as a contrast to "creativity", with traditional and folk art associated with unoriginal imitation or repetition, in contrast to fine art, which is valued for being original and unique. More recent philosophy of art, however, considers interaction with tradition as integral to the development of new artistic expression.
In the social sciences, "tradition" is often contrasted with "modernity", particularly in terms of whole societies. This dichotomy is generally associated with a linear model of social change, in which societies progress from being traditional to being modern. Tradition-oriented societies have been characterized as valuing filial piety, harmony and group welfare, stability, and interdependence, while a society exhibiting modernity would value "individualism (with free will and choice), mobility, and progress." Another author discussing tradition in relationship to modernity, Anthony Giddens, sees tradition as something bound to ritual, where ritual guarantees the continuation of tradition. Gusfield and others, though, criticize this dichotomy as oversimplified, arguing that tradition is dynamic, heterogeneous, and coexists successfully with modernity even within individuals.
Tradition should be differentiated from "customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules" and similar concepts. Whereas tradition is supposed to be invariable, they are seen as more flexible and subject to innovation and change. Whereas justification for tradition is ideological, the justification for other similar concepts is more practical or technical. Over time, customs, routines, conventions, rules and such can evolve into traditions, but that usually requires that they stop having (primarily) a practical purpose. For example, wigs worn by lawyers were at first common and fashionable; spurs worn by military officials were at first practical but now are both impractical and traditional.
The legal protection of tradition includes a number of international agreements and national laws. In addition to the fundamental protection of cultural property, there is also cooperation between the United Nations, UNESCO and Blue Shield International in the protection or recording of traditions and customs. The protection of culture and traditions is becoming increasingly important nationally and internationally. It is also about preserving the cultural heritage of mankind, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets, traditions and languages is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the opponent's identity. It is also intended to address the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, a region or a municipality.
In many countries, concerted attempts are being made to preserve traditions that are at risk of being lost. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. Customary celebrations and lifestyles are among the traditions that are sought to be preserved. Likewise, the concept of tradition has been used to defend the preservation and reintroduction of minority languages such as Cornish under the auspices of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Specifically, the charter holds that these languages "contribute to the maintenance and development of Europe's cultural wealth and traditions". The Charter goes on to call for "the use or adoption... of traditional and correct forms of place-names in regional or minority languages". Similarly, UNESCO includes both "oral tradition" and "traditional manifestations" in its definition of a country's cultural properties and heritage. It therefore works to preserve tradition in countries such as Brazil.
In Japan, certain artworks, structures, craft techniques and performing arts are considered by the Japanese government to be a precious legacy of the Japanese people, and are protected under the Japanese Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. This law also identifies people skilled at traditional arts as "National Living Treasures", and encourages the preservation of their craft.
For native peoples like the Māori in New Zealand, there is conflict between the fluid identity assumed as part of modern society and the traditional identity with the obligations that accompany it; the loss of language heightens the feeling of isolation and damages the ability to perpetuate tradition.
The phrase "traditional cultural expressions" is used by the World Intellectual Property Organization to refer to "any form of artistic and literary expression in which traditional culture and knowledge are embodied. They are transmitted from one generation to the next, and include handmade textiles, paintings, stories, legends, ceremonies, music, songs, rhythms and dance."
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe (sometimes abbreviated as The Globe) is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts, since its creation by Charles H. Taylor in 1872. The newspaper has won a total of 26 Pulitzer Prizes , and had a total paid circulation of about 136,000 in the year ending in August 2016. "The Boston Globe" is the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Boston.
Founded in the late 19th century, the paper was mainly controlled by Irish Catholic interests before being sold to Charles H. Taylor and his family. After being privately held until 1973, it was sold to "The New York Times" in 1993 for $1.1billion, making it one of the most expensive print purchases in U.S. history. The newspaper was purchased in 2013 by Boston Red Sox and Liverpool F.C. owner John W. Henry for $70million from The New York Times Company, having lost 93.64% of its value in twenty years.
Historically, the newspaper has been noted as "one of the nation's most prestigious papers." The paper's coverage of the 2001–2003 Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal received international media attention and served as the basis of the 2015 American drama, "Spotlight". In 1967, "The Globe" became the first major paper in the United States to come out against the Vietnam War.
The chief print rival of "The Boston Globe" is the "Boston Herald"; however, "The Globe" is more than twice the size of the "Boston Herald". , "The Globe" prints and circulates the entire press run of its rival. The editor-in-chief, otherwise known as the editor, of the paper is Brian McGrory who took the helm in December 2012.
"The Boston Globe" was founded in 1872 by six Boston businessmen, including Charles H. Taylor and Eben Jordan, who jointly invested $150,000 (). The first issue was published on March 4, 1872, and sold for four cents (). Originally a morning daily, it began a Sunday edition in 1877, which absorbed the rival Boston Weekly Globe in 1892. In 1878, "The Boston Globe" started an afternoon edition called The Boston Evening Globe, which ceased publication in 1979. By the 1890s, "The Boston Globe" had become a stronghold, with an editorial staff dominated by Irish American Catholics.
In 1912, the "Globe" was one of a cooperative of four newspapers, including the "Chicago Daily News", "The New York Globe", and the "Philadelphia Bulletin", to form the Associated Newspapers syndicate.
In 1965, Thomas Winship succeeded his father, Larry Winship, as editor. The younger Winship transformed "The Globe" from a mediocre local paper into a regional paper of national distinction. He served as editor until 1984, during which time the paper won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, the first in the paper's history.
"The Boston Globe" was a private company until 1973 when it went public under the name Affiliated Publications. It continued to be managed by the descendants of Charles H. Taylor. In 1993, The New York Times Company purchased Affiliated Publications for US$1.1billion, making "The Boston Globe" a wholly owned subsidiary of "The New York Times" parent.
The Jordan and Taylor families received substantial The New York Times Company stock, but the last Taylor family members have since left management.
Boston.com, the online edition of "The Boston Globe", was launched on the World Wide Web in 1995. Consistently ranked among the top ten newspaper websites in America, it has won numerous national awards and took two regional Emmy Awards in 2009 for its video work.
Under the helm of editor Martin Baron and then Brian McGrory, "The Globe" shifted away from coverage of international news in favor of Boston-area news. "Globe" reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer and Walter Robinson and editor Ben Bradlee Jr. were an instrumental part of uncovering the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in 2001–2003, especially in relation to Massachusetts churches. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their work, one of several the paper has received for its investigative journalism, and their work was dramatized in the 2015 Academy Award-winning film "Spotlight", named after the paper's in-depth investigative division.
"The Boston Globe" is credited with allowing Peter Gammons to start his "Notes" section on baseball, which has become a mainstay in all major newspapers nationwide. In 2004, Gammons was selected as the 56th recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing, given by the BBWAA, and was honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 31, 2005.
In 2007, Charlie Savage, whose reports on President Bush's use of signing statements made national news, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
"The Boston Globe" has consistently been ranked in the forefront of American journalism. "Time" magazine listed it as one of the ten best US daily newspapers in 1974 and 1984, and the "Globe" tied for sixth in a national survey of top editors who chose "America's Best Newspapers" in the "Columbia Journalism Review" in 1999.
"The Boston Globe" hosts 28 blogs covering a variety of topics including Boston sports, local politics and a blog made up of posts from the paper's opinion writers.
On April 2, 2009, The New York Times Company threatened to close the paper if its unions did not agree to $20,000,000 of cost savings. Some of the cost savings include reducing union employees' pay by 5%, ending pension contributions, ending certain employees' tenures. "The Boston Globe" eliminated the equivalent of fifty full-time jobs; among buy-outs and layoffs, it swept out most of the part-time employees in the editorial sections. However, early on the morning of May 5, 2009, The New York Times Company announced it had reached a tentative deal with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents most of the "Globe" editorial staff, that allowed it to get the concessions it demanded. The paper's other three major unions had agreed to concessions on May 3, 2009, after The New York Times Company threatened to give the government 60-days notice that it intended to close the paper. Despite the cuts helping to "significantly [improve]" its financial performance by October of that year, "The Globe" parent company indicated that it was considering strategic alternatives for the paper, but did not plan to sell it. In September 2011, "The Boston Globe" launched a dedicated, subscription-based website at bostonglobe.com.
In February 2013, The New York Times Company announced that it would sell the New England Media Group, which encompasses the "Globe"; bids were received by six parties, of them included John Gormally (then-owner of WGGB-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts), another group included members of former "Globe" publishers, the Taylor family, and Boston Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry, who bid for the paper through the New England Sports Network (majority owned by Fenway Sports Group alongside the Boston Bruins). However, after the NESN group dropped out of the running to buy the paper, Henry made his own separate bid to purchase "The Globe" in July 2013. On October 24, 2013, he took ownership of "The Globe", at a $70million purchase price. On January 30, 2014, Henry named himself publisher and named Mike Sheehan, a prominent former Boston ad executive, to be CEO. , Doug Franklin replaced Mike Sheehan as CEO, then Franklin resigned after six months in the position, in July 2017, as a result of strategic conflicts with owner Henry.
In July 2016, the 815,000-square-foot headquarters located in Dorchester was sold to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed price. The "Globe" moved its printing operations in June 2017 to Myles Standish Industrial Park in Taunton, Massachusetts. Also in June 2017, the "Globe" moved its headquarters to Exchange Place in Boston's Financial District.
Between August 10–22, 2018, approximately 14 threatening phone calls were made to "Boston Globe" offices. The caller stated that the "Globe" was the "enemy of the people" and threatened to kill newspaper employees. On August 16, 2018, the "Globe" and more than 400 news outlets from across the United States jointly published editorials in support of free press.
On August 30, 2018, California resident Robert Chain was arrested by an FBI SWAT team and charged with a single count of making a threatening communication in interstate commerce. In May 2019, Chain plead guilty in a US federal court to seven counts of making threatening communications in interstate commerce.
Since 1981, the editorial pages of "The Boston Globe" have been separate from the news operation, as is frequently customary in the news industry. Editorials represent the official view of "The Boston Globe" as a community institution. The publisher reserves the right to veto an editorial and usually determines political endorsements for high office. Ellen Clegg, a long-time "Globe" journalist and former top spokeswoman for the newspaper, was named editor of the Editorial Page in 2015.
Describing the political position of "The Boston Globe" in 2001, former editorial page editor Renée Loth told the Boston University alumni magazine:
The "Globe" has a long tradition of being a progressive institution, and especially on social issues. We are pro-choice; we're against the death penalty; we're for gay rights. But if people read us carefully, they will find that on a whole series of other issues, we are not knee-jerk. We're for charter schools; we're for any number of business-backed tax breaks. We are a lot more nuanced and subtle than that liberal stereotype does justice to.
"The Boston Globe" endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In August 2018, the editorial board launched a coordinated campaign for newspapers nationwide to respond to President Donald Trump's "enemy of the people" attacks and "fake news" rants against the media by publishing locally produced editorial responses on Thursday, August 16. Within a couple of days, an estimated 100+ newspapers had pledged to join the campaign, jumping to roughly 200 a few days later. On Aug. 13, the Radio Television Digital News Association and its Voice of the First Amendment Task Force encouraged its 1,200 member organizations to join the campaign while other media organizations also helped spread the call to action. Even as some right-leaning outlets portrayed the "Globe"s campaign as an attack on the president, rather than his rhetorical attacks on the fourth estate, some newspapers got a head start, releasing content on Wednesday the 15th, including the Virginia-based Connection Newspapers group, the combined "East Bay Times" and "Mercury News", and the "Baltimore Sun". On Thursday the 16th, 350 newspapers participated in the event.
The president responded with a tweet accusing the media of collusion. "The Globe" later received several phone threats with at least one threat mentioning an afternoon bomb. While authorities did not consider the threat to be "super serious", uniformed police nonetheless raised their presence in and around the building, building management notified other tenants, and the FBI was investigating.
Appearing in the Sunday paper almost every week is "The Boston Globe Magazine". , Veronica Chao is the editor.
On October 23, 2006, "The Boston Globe" announced the publication of "Design New England: The Magazine of Splendid Homes and Gardens". This glossy oversized magazine is published six times per year.
Each year in December since 2004, the magazine picks a "Bostonian of the Year". Past winners include Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein (2004), retired judge and Big Dig whistleblower Edward Ginsburg (2005), governor Deval Patrick (2006), Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America founder and CEO Bruce Marks (2007), NBA champion Paul Pierce (2008), professor Elizabeth Warren (2009), Republican politician Scott Brown (2010), U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz and ArtsEmerson executive director Robert Orchard (2011), Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman and Kayla Harrison (2012), three people who were near the Boston Marathon bombing, Dan Marshall, Natalie Stavas, and Larry Hittinger (2013), Market Basket employees (2014), and neuropathologist Ann McKee (2017).
In 1998, columnist Patricia Smith was forced to resign after it was discovered that she had fabricated people and quotations in several of her columns. In August of that year, columnist Mike Barnicle was discovered to have copied material for a column from a George Carlin book, "Brain Droppings". He was suspended for this offense, and his past columns were reviewed. "The Boston Globe" editors found that Barnicle had fabricated a story about two cancer patients, and Barnicle was forced to resign.
In the spring of 2005, "The Boston Globe" retracted a story describing the events of a seal hunt near Halifax, Nova Scotia that took place on April 12, 2005. Written by freelancer Barbara Stewart, a former "The New York Times" staffer, the article described the specific number of boats involved in the hunt and graphically described the killing of seals and the protests that accompanied it. In reality, weather had delayed the hunt, which had not yet begun the day the story had been filed, proving that the details were fabricated.
In 2004, the "Globe" apologized for printing graphic photographs that the article represented as showing U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women during the Iraq War from a city councilor's presentation before they were verified. The photos had already been found by other news organizations to be from an internet pornography site.
"The Boston Globe" maintains two distinct major websites: BostonGlobe.com is a subscriber-supported site with a paywall and content from the printed paper; and Boston.com, one of the first regional news portals, is supported by advertising. Between September 2011 and March 2014, the "Globe" gradually withdrew stories written by "Globe" journalists from Boston.com, making the sites more and more separated. BostonGlobe.com was designed to emphasize a premium experience focusing on content and emulating the visual appearance of "The Boston Globe" newspaper; the site was one of the first major websites to use a responsive design which automatically adapts its layout to a device's screen size. Boston.com followed suit in 2014. The two sites are aimed towards different readers; while Boston.com became targeted towards "casual" readers and local content, the new "Boston Globe" website is targeted towards the audience of the paper itself.
In 2012, the Society for News Design selected BostonGlobe.com as the world's best-designed news website.
In December 2016, the "Globe" reported a total of 72,889 "restricted digital access" subscriptions and this grew to 90,440 by the end of June in 2017. In a memo to the "Globe" staff on New Year's Eve of 2017, editor Brian McGrory said the newspaper was closing in on 95,000 digital subscribers and would pass the 100,000 mark in the first half of 2018. "Globe" spokeswoman Jane Bowman later confirmed that the "Globe" had reached the 100,000 goal. McGrory has stated in the recent past that reaching 200,000 digital subscribers would make the "Globe" self-sustaining.
Boston Globe Media Partners, which owns the "Globe", operates a number of websites covering certain niche subjects. The sites share many resources, like office space, with the "Globe", but are often branded separately from the newspaper:
"Crux" was launched by the "Globe" in September 2014 to focus on news related to the Catholic Church. At the end of March 2016, "The Globe" ended its association with "Crux", transferring ownership of the website to the "Crux" staff. With Allen as the new editor, "Crux" received sponsorship from the Knights of Columbus and several Catholic dioceses.
"Stat", launched in 2015, covers health, medicine and life sciences, with a particular focus on the biotechnology industry based in and around Boston. "Stat" employs journalists in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco.
"The Boston Globe" started the GRANT (Globe Readers And Non-profits Together) in 2013 as a way to give back to the New England community. All "Boston Globe" subscribers receive a GRANT voucher during February, ranging from $25 to $125 of GRANT dollars. The amount depends on length of tenure as a subscriber; the longer one has been subscribed to the "Globe", the more GRANT dollars are received. Anyone who wishes to take part in this program can enter their respective subscriber number online and choose their favorite New England non-profit. The GRANT dollars earned by every non-profit can be redeemed for free advertising space in "The Boston Globe". Organizations usually utilize this advertising space to promote events, fundraise, or simply advertise. Every year, more and more non-profits are recognized and given the opportunity to earn free advertising space. In only three years, "The Boston Globe" donated over $3million of advertising space.
T
T or t is the 20th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is "tee" (pronounced ), plural "tees". It is derived from the Semitic letters taw (ת, ܬ, ت) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in English-language texts.
"Taw" was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic "Taw", Greek alphabet Tαυ ("Tau"), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets.
In English, usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive ( and X-SAMPA: ), as in "tart", "tee", or "ties", often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed vowels.
The digraph often corresponds to the sound (a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant) word-medially when followed by a vowel, as in "nation", "ratio", "negotiation," and "Croatia".
The letter corresponds to the affricate in some words as a result of yod-coalescence (for example, in words ending in "-ture", such as "future").
A common digraph is , which usually represents a dental fricative, but occasionally represents (as in "Thomas" and "thyme".)
In the orthographies of other languages, is often used for , the voiceless dental plosive or similar sounds.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive.
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus ( ; , "Thalēs"; 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, and he is otherwise historically recognized as the first individual in Western civilization known to have entertained and engaged in scientific philosophy.
Thales is recognized for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world and the universe, and instead explaining natural objects and phenomena by naturalistic theories and hypotheses, in a precursor to modern science. Almost all the other pre-Socratic philosophers followed him in explaining nature as deriving from a unity of everything based on the existence of a single ultimate substance, instead of using mythological explanations. Aristotle regarded him as the founder of the Ionian School and reported Thales' hypothesis that the originating principle of nature and the nature of matter was a single material substance: water.
In mathematics, Thales used geometry to calculate the heights of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He is the first known individual to use deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' theorem. He is the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.
The dates of Thales' life are not exactly known, but are roughly established by a few datable events mentioned in the sources. According to Herodotus, Thales predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BC. Diogenes Laërtius quotes the chronicle of Apollodorus of Athens as saying that Thales died at the age of 78 during the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) and attributes his death to heat stroke while watching the games.
Thales was probably born in the city of Miletus around the mid-620s BC. The ancient writer Apollodorus of Athens writing during the 2nd century BC, thought Thales was born about the year 625 BC. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described Thales as "a Phoenician by remote descent". Tim Whitmarsh noted that Thales regarded water as the primal matter, and because "thal" is the Phoenician word for moisture, his name may have derived from this circumstance."
According to the later historian Diogenes Laërtius, in his third century AD "Lives of the Philosophers", references Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus, who all agree "that Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae who are Phoenicians." Their names are indigenous Carian and Greek, respectively. Diogenes then states that "Most writers, however, represent him as a native of Miletus and of a distinguished family." However, his supposed mother Cleobulina has also been described as his companion. Diogenes then delivers more conflicting reports: one that Thales married and either fathered a son (Cybisthus or Cybisthon) or adopted his nephew of the same name; the second that he never married, telling his mother as a young man that it was too early to marry, and as an older man that it was too late. Plutarch had earlier told this version: Solon visited Thales and asked him why he remained single; Thales answered that he did not like the idea of having to worry about children. Nevertheless, several years later, anxious for family, he adopted his nephew Cybisthus.
It has been claimed that he was roughly the professional equivalent of a contemporary option trader.
It is assumed that Thales at one point in his life visited Egypt, where he learned about geometry. Diogenes Laërtius wrote that Thales identifies the Milesians as Athenian colonists.
Thales (who died around 30 years before the time of Pythagoras and 300 years before Euclid, Eudoxus of Cnidus, and Eudemus of Rhodes) is often hailed as "the first Greek mathematician". While some historians, such as Colin R. Fletcher, point out that there could have been a predecessor to Thales who would have been named in Eudemus' lost book "History of Geometry", it is admitted that without the work "the question becomes mere speculation." Fletcher holds that as there is no viable predecessor to the title of first Greek mathematician, the only question is whether Thales qualifies as a practitioner in that field; he holds that "Thales had at his command the techniques of observation, experimentation, superposition and deduction…he has proved himself mathematician."
Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics, "Thales, the founder of this school of philosophy, says the permanent entity is water (which is why he also propounded that the earth floats on water). Presumably he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that heat itself is generated from moisture and depends upon it for its existence (and that from which a thing is generated is always its first principle). He derived his assumption from this; and also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things."
Thales involved himself in many activities, including engineering. Some say that he left no writings. Others say that he wrote "On the Solstice" and "On the Equinox". The "Nautical Star-guide" has been attributed to him, but this was disputed in ancient times. No writing attributed to him has survived. Diogenes Laërtius quotes two letters from Thales: one to Pherecydes of Syros, offering to review his book on religion, and one to Solon, offering to keep him company on his sojourn from Athens.
A story, with different versions, recounts how Thales achieved riches from an olive harvest by prediction of the weather. In one version, he bought all the in Miletus after predicting the weather and a good harvest for a particular year. Another version of the story has Aristotle explain that Thales had reserved presses in advance, at a discount, and could rent them out at a high price when demand peaked, following his prediction of a particularly good harvest. This first version of the story would constitute the first historically known creation and use of futures, whereas the second version would be the first historically known creation and use of options.
Aristotle explains that Thales' objective in doing this was not to enrich himself but to prove to his fellow Milesians that philosophy could be useful, contrary to what they thought, or alternatively, Thales had made his foray into enterprise because of a personal challenge put to him by an individual who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.
Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Thales gained fame as a counselor when he advised the Milesians not to engage in a symmachia, a "fighting together", with the Lydians. This has sometimes been interpreted as an alliance. Another story by Herodotus is that Croesus sent his army to the Persian territory. He was stopped by the river Halys, then unbridged. Thales then got the army across the river by digging a diversion upstream so as to reduce the flow, making it possible to cross the river. While Herodotus reported that most of his fellow Greeks believe that Thales did divert the river Halys to assist King Croesus' military endeavors, he himself finds it doubtful.
Croesus was defeated before the city of Sardis by Cyrus, who subsequently spared Miletus because it had taken no action. Cyrus was so impressed by Croesus’ wisdom and his connection with the sages that he spared him and took his advice on various matters. The Ionian cities should be demoi, or "districts".
Miletus, however, received favorable terms from Cyrus. The others remained in an Ionian League of twelve cities (excluding Miletus), and were subjugated by the Persians.
According to Herodotus, Thales predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BC. Thales also described the position of Ursa Minor, and he thought the constellation might be useful as a guide for navigation at sea. He calculated the duration of the year and the timings of the equinoxes and solstices. He is additionally attributed with the first observation of the Hyades and with calculating the position of the Pleiades. Plutarch indicates that in his day (c. AD 100) there was an extant work, the "Astronomy", composed in verse and attributed to Thales.
Herodotus writes that in the sixth year of the war, the Lydians under King Alyattes and the Medes under Cyaxares were engaged in an indecisive battle when suddenly day turned into night, leading to both parties halting the fighting and negotiating a peace agreement. Herodotus also mentions that the loss of daylight had been predicted by Thales. He does not, however, mention the location of the battle.
However, based on the list of Medean kings and the duration of their reign reported elsewhere by Herodotus, Cyaxares died 10 years before the eclipse.
Diogenes Laërtius tells us that the Seven Sages were created in the archonship of Damasius at Athens about 582 BC and that Thales was the first sage. The same story, however, asserts that Thales emigrated to Miletus. There is also a report that he did not become a student of nature until after his political career. Much as we would like to have a date on the seven sages, we must reject these stories and the tempting date if we are to believe that Thales was a native of Miletus, predicted the eclipse, and was with Croesus in the campaign against Cyrus.
Thales received instruction from an Egyptian priest. It was fairly certain that he came from a wealthy, established family, in a class which customarily provided higher education for their children. Moreover, the ordinary citizen, unless he was a seafaring man or a merchant, could not afford the grand tour in Egypt, and did not consort with noble lawmakers such as Solon.
In Diogenes Laërtius' "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" Chapter 1.39, Laërtius relates the several stories of an expensive object that is to go to the most wise. In one version (that Laërtius credits to Callimachus in his "Iambics") Bathycles of Arcadia states in his will that an expensive bowl "'should be given to him who had done most good by his wisdom.' So it was given to Thales, went the round of all the sages, and came back to Thales again. And he sent it to Apollo at Didyma, with this dedication...'Thales the Milesian, son of Examyas [dedicates this] to Delphinian Apollo after twice winning the prize from all the Greeks.'"
Early Greeks, and other civilizations before them, often invoked idiosyncratic explanations of natural phenomena with reference to the will of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Instead, Thales aimed to explain natural phenomena via rational hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. For example, rather than assuming that earthquakes were the result of supernatural whims, Thales explained them by hypothesizing that the Earth floats on water and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves.
Thales was a hylozoist (one who thinks that matter is alive, i.e. containing soul(s)). Aristotle wrote ("De Anima" 411 a7-8) of Thales: ..."Thales thought all things are full of gods". Aristotle posits the origin of Thales thought on matter generally containing souls, to Thales thinking initially on the fact of, because magnets move iron, the presence of movement of matter indicated this matter contained life.
Thales, according to Aristotle, asked what was the nature (Greek "arche") of the object so that it would behave in its characteristic way. Physis () comes from phyein (), "to grow", related to our word "be". "(G)natura" is the way a thing is "born", again with the stamp of what it is in itself.
Aristotle characterizes most of the philosophers "at first" () as thinking that the "principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things", where "principle" is arche, "matter" is hyle ("wood" or "matter", "material") and "form" is eidos.
"Arche" is translated as "principle", but the two words do not have precisely the same meaning. A principle of something is merely prior (related to pro-) to it either chronologically or logically. An arche (from , "to rule") dominates an object in some way. If the arche is taken to be an origin, then specific causality is implied; that is, B is supposed to be characteristically B just because it comes from A, which dominates it.
The archai that Aristotle had in mind in his well-known passage on the first Greek scientists are not necessarily chronologically prior to their objects, but are constituents of it. For example, in pluralism objects are composed of earth, air, fire and water, but those elements do not disappear with the production of the object. They remain as archai within it, as do the atoms of the atomists.
What Aristotle is really saying is that the first philosophers were trying to define the substance(s) of which all material objects are composed. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what modern scientists are attempting to accomplish in nuclear physics, which is a second reason why Thales is described as the first western scientist, but some contemporary scholars reject this interpretation.
Thales was known for his innovative use of geometry. His understanding was theoretical as well as practical. For example, he said:
Topos is in Newtonian-style space, since the verb, chorei, has the connotation of yielding before things, or spreading out to make room for them, which is extension. Within this extension, things have a position. Points, lines, planes and solids related by distances and angles follow from this presumption.
Thales understood similar triangles and right triangles, and what is more, used that knowledge in practical ways. The story is told in Diogenes Laërtius (loc. cit.) that he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadows at the moment when his own shadow was equal to his height. A right triangle with two equal legs is a 45-degree right triangle, all of which are similar. The length of the pyramid's shadow measured from the center of the pyramid at that moment must have been equal to its height.
This story indicates that he was familiar with the Egyptian "seked", or "seqed", the ratio of the run to the rise of a slope (cotangent). The "seked" is at the base of problems 56, 57, 58, 59 and 60 of the Rhind papyrus — an ancient Egyptian mathematical document.
More practically Thales used the same method to measure the distances of ships at sea, said Eudemus as reported by Proclus ("in Euclidem"). According to Kirk & Raven (reference cited below), all you need for this feat is three straight sticks pinned at one end and knowledge of your altitude. One stick goes vertically into the ground. A second is made level. With the third you sight the ship and calculate the "seked" from the height of the stick and its distance from the point of insertion to the line of sight (Proclus, "In Euclidem", 352).
There are two theorems of Thales in elementary geometry, one known as Thales' theorem having to do with a triangle inscribed in a circle and having the circle's diameter as one leg, the other theorem being also called the intercept theorem. In addition Eudemus attributed to him the discovery that a circle is bisected by its diameter, that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal and that vertical angles are equal. According to a historical Note, when Thales visited Egypt, he observed that whenever the Egyptians drew two intersecting lines, they would measure the vertical angles to make sure that they were equal. Thales concluded that one could prove that all vertical angles are equal if one accepted some general notions such as: all straight angles are equal, equals added to equals are equal, and equals subtracted from equals are equal.
The evidence for the primacy of Thales comes to us from a book by Proclus who wrote a thousand years after Thales but is believed to have had a copy of Eudemus' book. Proclus wrote "Thales was the first to go to Egypt and bring back to Greece this study." He goes on to tell us that in addition to applying the knowledge he gained in Egypt "He himself discovered many propositions and disclosed the underlying principles of many others to his successors, in some case his method being more general, in others more empirical."
Other quotes from Proclus list more of Thales' mathematical achievements:
In addition to Proclus, Hieronymus of Rhodes also cites Thales as the first Greek mathematician. Hieronymus held that Thales was able to measure the height of the pyramids by using a theorem of geometry now known as the intercept theorem, (after gathering data by using his walking-stick and comparing its shadow to those cast by the pyramids). We receive variations of Hieronymus' story through Diogenes Laërtius, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch. According to Hieronymus, historically quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, Thales found the height of pyramids by comparison between the lengths of the shadows cast by a person and by the pyramids.
Due to the variations among testimonies, such as the "story of the sacrifice of an ox on the occasion of the discovery that the angle on a diameter of a circle is a right angle" in the version told by Diogenes Laërtius being accredited to Pythagoras rather than Thales, some historians (such as D. R. Dicks) question whether such anecdotes have any historical worth whatsoever.
Thales' most famous philosophical position was his cosmological thesis, which comes down to us through a passage from Aristotle's "Metaphysics". In the work Aristotle unequivocally reported Thales' hypothesis about the nature of all matter – that the originating principle of nature was a single material substance: water. Aristotle then proceeded to proffer a number of conjectures based on his own observations to lend some credence to why Thales may have advanced this idea (though Aristotle did not hold it himself).
Aristotle laid out his own thinking about matter and form which may shed some light on the ideas of Thales, in "Metaphysics" 983 b6 8–11, 17–21. (The passage contains words that were later adopted by science with quite different meanings.)
In this quote we see Aristotle's depiction of the problem of change and the definition of substance. He asked if an object changes, is it the same or different? In either case how can there be a change from one to the other? The answer is that the substance "is saved", but acquires or loses different qualities (, the things you "experience").
Aristotle conjectured that Thales reached his conclusion by contemplating that the "nourishment of all things is moist and that even the hot is created from the wet and lives by it." While Aristotle's conjecture on why Thales held water as the originating principle of matter is his own thinking, his statement that Thales held it as water is generally accepted as genuinely originating with Thales and he is seen as an incipient matter-and-formist.
Thales thought the Earth must be a flat disk which is floating in an expanse of water.
Heraclitus Homericus states that Thales drew his conclusion from seeing moist substance turn into air, slime and earth. It seems likely that Thales viewed the Earth as solidifying from the water on which it floated and the oceans that surround it.
Writing centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius also states that Thales taught "Water constituted (, 'stood under') the principle of all things."
Aristotle considered Thales’ position to be roughly the equivalent to the later ideas of Anaximenes, who held that everything was composed of air.
The 1870 book "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology" noted:
According to Aristotle, Thales thought lodestones had souls, because iron is attracted to them (by the force of magnetism).
Aristotle defined the soul as the principle of life, that which imbues the matter and makes it live, giving it the animation, or power to act. The idea did not originate with him, as the Greeks in general believed in the distinction between mind and matter, which was ultimately to lead to a distinction not only between body and soul but also between matter and energy. If things were alive, they must have souls. This belief was no innovation, as the ordinary ancient populations of the Mediterranean did believe that natural actions were caused by divinities. Accordingly, Aristotle and other ancient writers state that Thales believed that "all things were full of gods." In their zeal to make him the first in everything some said he was the first to hold the belief, which must have been widely known to be false. However, Thales was looking for something more general, a universal substance of mind. That also was in the polytheism of the times. Zeus was the very personification of supreme mind, dominating all the subordinate manifestations. From Thales on, however, philosophers had a tendency to depersonify or objectify mind, as though it were the substance of animation per se and not actually a god like the other gods. The end result was a total removal of mind from substance, opening the door to a non-divine principle of action.
Classical thought, however, had proceeded only a little way along that path. Instead of referring to the person, Zeus, they talked about the great mind:
The universal mind appears as a Roman belief in Virgil as well:
According to Henry Fielding (1775), Diogenes Laërtius (1.35) affirmed that Thales posed "the independent pre-existence of God from all eternity, stating "that God was the oldest of all beings, for he existed without a previous cause even in the way of generation; that the world was the most beautiful of all things; for it was created by God."
Due to the scarcity of sources concerning Thales and the discrepancies between the accounts given in the sources that have survived, there is a scholarly debate over possible influences on Thales and the Greek mathematicians that came after him.
Historian Roger L. Cooke points out that Proclus does not make any mention of Mesopotamian influence on Thales or Greek geometry, but "is shown clearly in Greek astronomy, in the use of sexagesimal system of measuring angles and in Ptolemy's explicit use of Mesopotamian astronomical observations." Cooke notes that it may possibly also appear in the second book of Euclid's Elements, "which contains geometric constructions equivalent to certain algebraic relations that are frequently encountered in the cuneiform tablets." Cooke notes "This relation, however, is controversial."
Historian B.L. Van der Waerden is among those advocating the idea of Mesopotamian influence, writing "It follows that we have to abandon the traditional belief that the oldest Greek mathematicians discovered geometry entirely by themselves…a belief that was tenable only as long as nothing was known about Babylonian mathematics. This in no way diminishes the stature of Thales; on the contrary, his genius receives only now the honour that is due to it, the honour of having developed a logical structure for geometry, of having introduced proof into geometry."
Some historians, such as D. R. Dicks takes issue with the idea that we can determine from the questionable sources we have, just how influenced Thales was by Babylonian sources. He points out that while Thales is held to have been able to calculate an eclipse using a cycle called the "Saros" held to have been "borrowed from the Babylonians", "The Babylonians, however, did not use cycles to predict solar eclipses, but computed them from observations of the latitude of the moon made shortly before the expected syzygy." Dicks cites historian O. Neugebauer who relates that "No Babylonian theory for predicting solar eclipse existed at 600 B.C., as one can see from the very unsatisfactory situation 400 years later; nor did the Babylonians ever develop any theory which took the influence of geographical latitude into account." Dicks examines the cycle referred to as 'Saros' – which Thales is held to have used and which is believed to stem from the Babylonians. He points out that Ptolemy makes use of this and another cycle in his book "Mathematical Syntaxis" but attributes it to Greek astronomers earlier than Hipparchus and not to Babylonians. Dicks notes Herodotus does relate that Thales made use of a cycle to predict the eclipse, but maintains that "if so, the fulfillment of the 'prediction' was a stroke of pure luck not science". He goes further joining with other historians (F. Martini, J.L. E. Dreyer, O. Neugebauer) in rejecting the historicity of the eclipse story altogether. Dicks links the story of Thales discovering the cause for a solar eclipse with Herodotus' claim that Thales discovered the cycle of the sun with relation to the solstices, and concludes "he could not possibly have possessed this knowledge which neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor his immediate successors possessed." Josephus is the only ancient historian that claims Thales visited Babylonia.
Herodotus wrote that the Greeks learnt the practice of dividing the day into 12 parts, about the "polos", and the gnomon from the Babylonians. (The exact meaning of his use of the word "polos" is unknown, current theories include: "the heavenly dome", "the tip of the axis of the celestial sphere", or a spherical concave sundial.) Yet even Herodotus' claims on Babylonian influence are contested by some modern historians, such as L. Zhmud, who points out that the division of the day into twelve parts (and by analogy the year) was known to the Egyptians already in the second millennium, the gnomon was known to both Egyptians and Babylonians, and the idea of the "heavenly sphere" was not used outside of Greece at this time.
Less controversial than the position that Thales learnt Babylonian mathematics is the claim he was influenced by Egyptians. Pointedly historian S. N. Bychkov holds that the idea that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal likely came from Egypt. This is because, when building a roof for a home – having a cross section be exactly an isosceles triangle isn't crucial (as it's the ridge of the roof that must fit precisely), in contrast a symmetric square pyramid cannot have errors in the base angles of the faces or they will not fit together tightly.
Historian D.R. Dicks agrees that compared to the Greeks in the era of Thales, there was a more advanced state of mathematics among the Babylonians and especially the Egyptians – "both cultures knew the correct formulae for determining the areas and volumes of simple geometrical figures such as triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, etc.; the Egyptians could also calculate correctly the volume of the frustum of a pyramid with a square base (the Babylonians used an incorrect formula for this), and used a formula for the area of a circle...which gives a value for π of 3.1605—a good approximation." Dicks also agrees that this would have had an effect on Thales (whom the most ancient sources agree was interested in mathematics and astronomy) but he holds that tales of Thales' travels in these lands are pure myth.
The ancient civilization and massive monuments of Egypt had "a profound and ineradicable impression on the Greeks". They attributed to Egyptians "an immemorial knowledge of certain subjects" (including geometry) and would claim Egyptian origin for some of their own ideas to try and lend them "a respectable antiquity" (such as the "Hermetic" literature of the Alexandrian period).
Dicks holds that since Thales was a prominent figure in Greek history by the time of Eudemus but "nothing certain was known except that he lived in Miletus". A tradition developed that as "Milesians were in a position to be able to travel widely" Thales must have gone to Egypt. As Herodotus says Egypt was the birthplace of geometry he must have learnt that while there. Since he had to have been there, surely one of the theories on Nile Flooding laid out by Herodotus must have come from Thales. Likewise as he must have been in Egypt he had to have done something with the Pyramids – thus the tale of measuring them. Similar apocryphal stories exist of Pythagoras and Plato traveling to Egypt with no corroborating evidence.
As the Egyptian and Babylonian geometry at the time was "essentially arithmetical", they used actual numbers and "the procedure is then described with explicit instructions as to what to do with these numbers" there was no mention of how the rules of procedure were made, and nothing toward a logically arranged corpus of generalized geometrical knowledge with analytical 'proofs' such as we find in the words of Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius." So even had Thales traveled there he could not have learnt anything about the theorems he is held to have picked up there (especially because there is no evidence that any Greeks of this age could use Egyptian hieroglyphics).
Likewise until around the second century BC and the time of Hipparchus (c. 190–120 BC) the Babylonian general division of the circle into 360 degrees and their sexagesimal system was unknown. Herodotus says almost nothing about Babylonian literature and science, and very little about their history. Some historians, like P. Schnabel, hold that the Greeks only learned more about Babylonian culture from Berossus, a Babylonian priest who is said to have set up a school in Cos around 270 BC (but to what extent this had in the field of geometry is contested).
Dicks points out that the primitive state of Greek mathematics and astronomical ideas exhibited by the peculiar notions of Thales' successors (such as Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus), which historian J. L. Heiberg calls "a mixture of brilliant intuition and childlike analogies", argues against the assertions from writers in late antiquity that Thales discovered and taught advanced concepts in these fields.
John Burnet (1892) noted
In the long sojourn of philosophy, there has existed hardly a philosopher or historian of philosophy who did not mention Thales and try to characterize him in some way. He is generally recognized as having brought something new to human thought. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine already existed. Thales added something to these different collections of knowledge to produce a universality, which, as far as writing tells us, was not in tradition before, but resulted in a new field.
Ever since, interested persons have been asking what that new something is. Answers fall into (at least) two categories, the theory and the method. Once an answer has been arrived at, the next logical step is to ask how Thales compares to other philosophers, which leads to his classification (rightly or wrongly).
The most natural epithets of Thales are "materialist" and "naturalist", which are based on ousia and physis. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Aristotle called him a physiologist, with the meaning "student of nature." On the other hand, he would have qualified as an early physicist, as did Aristotle. They studied corpora, "bodies", the medieval descendants of substances.
Most agree that Thales' stamp on thought is the unity of substance, hence Bertrand Russell:
Russell was only reflecting an established tradition; for example: Nietzsche, in his "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", wrote:
This sort of materialism, however, should not be confused with deterministic materialism. Thales was only trying to explain the unity observed in the free play of the qualities. The arrival of uncertainty in the modern world made possible a return to Thales; for example, John Elof Boodin writes ("God and Creation"):
Boodin defines an "emergent" materialism, in which the objects of sense emerge uncertainly from the substrate. Thales is the innovator of this sort of materialism.
Later scholastic thinkers would maintain that in his choice of water Thales was influenced by Babylonian or Chaldean religion, that held that a god had begun creation by acting upon the pre-existing water. Historian Abraham Feldman holds this does not stand up under closer examination. In Babylonian religion the water is lifeless and sterile until a god acts upon it, but for Thales water itself was divine and creative. He maintained that "All things are full of gods", and to understand the nature of things was to discover the secrets of the deities, and through this knowledge open the possibility that one could be greater than the grandest Olympian.
Feldman points out that while other thinkers recognized the wetness of the world "none of them was inspired to conclude that everything was ultimately aquatic." He further points out that Thales was "a wealthy citizen of the fabulously rich Oriental port of Miletus...a dealer in the staples of antiquity, wine and oil...He certainly handled the shell-fish of the Phoenicians that secreted the dye of imperial purple." Feldman recalls the stories of Thales measuring the distance of boats in the harbor, creating mechanical improvements for ship navigation, giving an explanation for the flooding of the Nile (vital to Egyptian agriculture and Greek trade), and changing the course of the river Halys so an army could ford it. Rather than seeing water as a barrier Thales contemplated the Ionian yearly religious gathering for athletic ritual (held on the promontory of Mycale and believed to be ordained by the ancestral kindred of Poseidon, the god of the sea). He called for the Ionian mercantile states participating in this ritual to convert it into a democratic federation under the protection of Poseidon that would hold off the forces of pastoral Persia. Feldman concludes that Thales saw "that water was a revolutionary leveler and the elemental factor determining the subsistence and business of the world" and "the common channel of states."
Feldman considers Thales' environment and holds that Thales would have seen tears, sweat, and blood as granting value to a person's work and the means how life giving commodities travelled (whether on bodies of water or through the sweat of slaves and pack-animals). He would have seen that minerals could be processed from water such as life-sustaining salt and gold taken from rivers. He would’ve seen fish and other food stuffs gathered from it. Feldman points out that Thales held that the lodestone was alive as it drew metals to itself. He holds that Thales "living ever in sight of his beloved sea" would see water seem to draw all "traffic in wine and oil, milk and honey, juices and dyes" to itself, leading him to "a vision of the universe melting into a single substance that was valueless in itself and still the source of wealth." Feldman concludes that for Thales "...water united all things. The social significance of water in the time of Thales induced him to discern through hardware and dry-goods, through soil and sperm, blood, sweat and tears, one fundamental fluid stuff...water, the most commonplace and powerful material known to him." This combined with his contemporary's idea of "spontaneous generation" allow us to see how Thales could hold that water could be divine and creative.
Feldman points to the lasting association of the theory that "all whatness is wetness" with Thales himself, pointing out that Diogenes Laërtius speaks of a poem, probably a satire, where Thales is snatched to heaven by the sun.
In the West, Thales represents a new kind of inquiring community as well. Edmund Husserl attempts to capture the new movement as follows. Philosophical man is a "new cultural configuration" based in stepping back from "pregiven tradition" and taking up a rational "inquiry into what is true in itself;" that is, an ideal of truth. It begins with isolated individuals such as Thales, but they are supported and cooperated with as time goes on. Finally the ideal transforms the norms of society, leaping across national borders.
The term "Pre-Socratic" derives ultimately from the philosopher Aristotle, who distinguished the early philosophers as concerning themselves with substance.
Diogenes Laërtius on the other hand took a strictly geographic and ethnic approach. Philosophers were either Ionian or Italian. He used "Ionian" in a broader sense, including also the Athenian academics, who were not Pre-Socratics. From a philosophic point of view, any grouping at all would have been just as effective. There is no basis for an Ionian or Italian unity. Some scholars, however, concede to Diogenes' scheme as far as referring to an "Ionian" school. There was no such school in any sense.
The most popular approach refers to a Milesian school, which is more justifiable socially and philosophically. They sought for the substance of phenomena and may have studied with each other. Some ancient writers qualify them as Milesioi, "of Miletus."
Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander's more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.
Many philosophers followed Thales' lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy rather than of myth or of religion.
Looking specifically at Thales' influence during the pre-Socratic era, it is clear that he stood out as one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of "logos" than "mythos". The difference between these two more profound ways of seeing the world is that "mythos" is concentrated around the stories of holy origin, while "logos" is concentrated around the argumentation. When the mythical man wants to explain the world the way he sees it, he explains it based on gods and powers. Mythical thought does not differentiate between things and persons and furthermore it does not differentiate between nature and culture. The way a "logos" thinker would present a world view is radically different from the way of the mythical thinker. In its concrete form, "logos" is a way of thinking not only about individualism, but also the abstract. Furthermore, it focuses on sensible and continuous argumentation. This lays the foundation of philosophy and its way of explaining the world in terms of abstract argumentation, and not in the way of gods and mythical stories.
Because of Thales' elevated status in Greek culture an intense interest and admiration followed his reputation. Due to this following, the oral stories about his life were open to amplification and historical fabrication, even before they were written down generations later. Most modern dissension comes from trying to interpret what we know, in particular, distinguishing legend from fact.
Historian D.R. Dicks and other historians divide the ancient sources about Thales into those before 320 BC and those after that year (some such as Proclus writing in the 5th century C.E. and Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th century C.E. writing nearly a millennium after his era). The first category includes Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Theophrastus among others. The second category includes Plautus, Aetius, Eusebius, Plutarch, Josephus, Iamblichus, Diogenes Laërtius, Theon of Smyrna, Apuleius, Clement of Alexandria, Pliny the Elder, and John Tzetzes among others.
The earliest sources on Thales (living before 320 BC) are often the same for the other Milesian philosophers (Anaximander, and Anaximenes). These sources were either roughly contemporaneous (such as Herodotus) or lived within a few hundred years of his passing. Moreover, they were writing from an oral tradition that was widespread and well known in the Greece of their day.
The latter sources on Thales are several "ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death" which include "anecdotes of varying degrees of plausibility" and in the opinion of some historians (such as D. R. Dicks) of "no historical worth whatsoever". Dicks points out that there is no agreement "among the 'authorities' even on the most fundamental facts of his life—e.g. whether he was a Milesian or a Phoenician, whether he left any writings or not, whether he was married or single-much less on the actual ideas and achievements with which he is credited."
Contrasting the work of the more ancient writers with those of the later, Dicks points out that in the works of the early writers Thales and the other men who would be hailed as "the Seven Sages of Greece" had a different reputation than that which would be assigned to them by later authors. Closer to their own era, Thales, Solon, Bias of Priene, Pittacus of Mytilene and others were hailed as "essentially practical men who played leading roles in the affairs of their respective states, and were far better known to the earlier Greeks as lawgivers and statesmen than as profound thinkers and philosophers." For example, Plato praises him (coupled with Anacharsis) for being the originator of the potter's wheel and the anchor.
Only in the writings of the second group of writers (working after 320 BC) do "we obtain the picture of Thales as the pioneer in Greek scientific thinking, particularly in regard to mathematics and astronomy which he is supposed to have learnt about in Babylonia and Egypt." Rather than "the earlier tradition [where] he is a favourite example of the intelligent man who possesses some technical 'know how'...the later doxographers [such as Dicaearchus in the latter half of the fourth century BC] foist on to him any number of discoveries and achievements, in order to build him up as a figure of superhuman wisdom."
Dicks points out a further problem arises in the surviving information on Thales, for rather than using ancient sources closer to the era of Thales, the authors in later antiquity ("epitomators, excerptors, and compilers") actually "preferred to use one or more intermediaries, so that what we actually read in them comes to us not even at second, but at third or fourth or fifth hand. ...Obviously this use of intermediate sources, copied and recopied from century to century, with each writer adding additional pieces of information of greater or less plausibility from his own knowledge, provided a fertile field for errors in transmission, wrong ascriptions, and fictitious attributions". Dicks points out that "certain doctrines that later commentators invented for Thales...were then accepted into the biographical tradition" being copied by subsequent writers who were then cited by those coming after them "and thus, because they may be repeated by different authors relying on different sources, may produce an illusory impression of genuineness."
Doubts even exist when considering the philosophical positions held to originate in Thales "in reality these stem directly from Aristotle's own interpretations which then became incorporated in the doxographical tradition as erroneous ascriptions to Thales". (The same treatment was given by Aristotle to Anaxagoras.)
Most philosophic analyses of the philosophy of Thales come from Aristotle, a professional philosopher, tutor of Alexander the Great, who wrote 200 years after Thales' death. Aristotle, judging from his surviving books, does not seem to have access to any works by Thales, although he probably had access to works of other authors about Thales, such as Herodotus, Hecataeus, Plato etc., as well as others whose work is now extinct. It was Aristotle's express goal to present Thales' work not because it was significant in itself, but as a prelude to his own work in natural philosophy. Geoffrey Kirk and John Raven, English compilers of the fragments of the Pre-Socratics, assert that Aristotle's "judgments are often distorted by his view of earlier philosophy as a stumbling progress toward the truth that Aristotle himself revealed in his physical doctrines." There was also an extensive oral tradition. Both the oral and the written were commonly read or known by all educated men in the region.
Aristotle's philosophy had a distinct stamp: it professed the theory of matter and form, which modern scholastics have dubbed hylomorphism. Though once very widespread, it was not generally adopted by rationalist and modern science, as it mainly is useful in metaphysical analyses, but does not lend itself to the detail that is of interest to modern science. It is not clear that the theory of matter and form existed as early as Thales, and if it did, whether Thales espoused it.
While some historians, like B. Snell, maintain that Aristotle was relying on a pre-Platonic written record by Hippias rather than oral tradition, this is a controversial position. Representing the scholarly consensus Dicks states that "the tradition about him even as early as the fifth century B.C., was evidently based entirely on hearsay...It would seem that already by Aristotle's time the early Ionians were largely names only to which popular tradition attached various ideas or achievements with greater or less plausibility". He points out that works confirmed to have existed in the sixth century BC by Anaximander and Xenophanes had already disappeared by the fourth century BC, so the chances of Pre-Socratic material surviving to the age of Aristotle is almost nil (even less likely for Aristotle's pupils Theophrastus and Eudemus and less likely still for those following after them).
The main secondary source concerning the details of Thales' life and career is Diogenes Laërtius, ""Lives of Eminent Philosophers"". This is primarily a biographical work, as the name indicates. Compared to Aristotle, Diogenes is not much of a philosopher. He is the one who, in the Prologue to that work, is responsible for the division of the early philosophers into "Ionian" and "Italian", but he places the Academics in the Ionian school and otherwise evidences considerable disarray and contradiction, especially in the long section on forerunners of the "Ionian School". Diogenes quotes two letters attributed to Thales, but Diogenes wrote some eight centuries after Thales' death and that his sources often contained "unreliable or even fabricated information", hence the concern for separating fact from legend in accounts of Thales.
It is due to this use of hearsay and a lack of citing original sources that leads some historians, like Dicks and Werner Jaeger, to look at the late origin of the traditional picture of Pre-Socratic philosophy and view the whole idea as a construct from a later age, "the whole picture that has come down to us of the history of early philosophy was fashioned during the two or three generations from Plato to the immediate pupils of Aristotle".
Tiger
The tiger ("Panthera tigris") is the largest extant cat species and a member of the genus "Panthera". It is most recognisable for its dark vertical stripes on orange-brown fur with a lighter underside. It is an apex predator, primarily preying on ungulates such as deer and wild boar. It is territorial and generally a solitary but social predator, requiring large contiguous areas of habitat, which support its requirements for prey and rearing of its offspring. Tiger cubs stay with their mother for about two years, before they become independent and leave their mother's home range to establish their own.
The tiger once ranged widely from the Eastern Anatolia Region in the west to the Amur River basin, and in the south from the foothills of the Himalayas to Bali in the Sunda islands. Since the early 20th century, tiger populations have lost at least 93% of their historic range and have been extirpated in Western and Central Asia, from the islands of Java and Bali, and in large areas of Southeast and South Asia and China. Today's tiger range is fragmented, stretching from Siberian temperate forests to subtropical and tropical forests on the Indian subcontinent and Sumatra.
The tiger is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. As of 2015, the global wild tiger population was estimated to number between 3,062 and 3,948 mature individuals, down from around 100,000 at the start of the 20th century, with most remaining populations occurring in small pockets isolated from each other. Major reasons for population decline include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching. This, coupled with the fact that it lives in some of the more densely populated places on Earth, has caused significant conflicts with humans.
The tiger is among the most recognisable and popular of the world's charismatic megafauna. It featured prominently in ancient mythology and folklore and continues to be depicted in modern films and literature, appearing on many flags, coats of arms and as mascots for sporting teams. The tiger is the national animal of India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and South Korea.
The Middle English "tigre" and Old English "tigras" derive from Old French "tigre", from Latin "tigris".
This was a borrowing of Classical Greek τίγρις 'tigris', a foreign borrowing of unknown origin meaning 'tiger' as well as the river Tigris.
The origin may have been the Persian word "tigra" meaning 'pointed or sharp', and the Avestan word "tigrhi" 'arrow', perhaps referring to the speed of the tiger's leap, although these words are not known to have any meanings associated with tigers.
The generic name "Panthera" is derived from the Latin word "panthera", and the Ancient Greek word πάνθηρ 'panther'.
The Sanskrit word पाण्डर pāṇḍ-ara means 'pale yellow, whitish, white'.
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus described the tiger in his work "Systema Naturae" and gave it the scientific name "Felis tigris". In 1929, the British taxonomist Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated the species under the genus "Panthera" using the scientific name "Panthera tigris".
Following Linnaeus's first descriptions of the species, several tiger specimens were described and proposed as subspecies. The validity of several tiger subspecies was questioned in 1999. Most putative subspecies described in the 19th and 20th centuries were distinguished on basis of fur length and colouration, striping patterns and body size, hence characteristics that vary widely within populations. Morphologically, tigers from different regions vary little, and gene flow between populations in those regions is considered to have been possible during the Pleistocene. Therefore, it was proposed to recognize only two tiger subspecies as valid, namely "P. t. tigris" in mainland Asia, and "P. t. sondaica" in the Greater Sunda Islands.
Results of craniological analysis of 111 tiger skulls from Southeast Asian range countries indicate that Sumatran tiger skulls differ from Indochinese and Javan tiger skulls, whereas Bali tiger skulls are similar in size to Javan tiger skulls. The authors proposed to classify Sumatran and Javan tiger as distinct species, "P. sumatrae" and "P. sondaica" with Bali tiger as subspecies "P. sondaica balica".
In 2015, morphological, ecological and molecular traits of all putative tiger subspecies were analysed in a combined approach. Results support distinction of the two evolutionary groups continental and Sunda tigers. The authors proposed recognition of only two subspecies, namely "P. t. tigris" comprising the Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, South Chinese, Siberian and Caspian tiger populations, and "P. t. sondaica" comprising the Javan, Bali and Sumatran tiger populations. The authors also noted that this reclassification will affect tiger conservation management. The nominate subspecies "P. t. tigris" constitutes two clades:
One conservation specialist welcomed this proposal as it would make captive breeding programmes and future rewilding of zoo-born tigers easier. One geneticist was sceptical of this study and maintained that the currently recognised nine subspecies can be distinguished genetically.
In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and recognized the tiger populations in continental Asia as "P. t. tigris", and those in the Sunda Islands as "P. t. sondaica".
The following tables are based on the classification of the species "Panthera tigris" provided in "Mammal Species of the World". It also reflects the classification used by the Cat Classification Task Force in 2017:
A study published in 2018 was based on 32 tiger specimens using the whole-genome sequencing approach for analysis. Results support six monophyletic tiger clades corresponding with the living subspecies and indicate that the most recent common ancestor lived about 110,000 years ago.
The tiger's closest living relatives were previously thought to be the "Panthera" species lion, leopard and jaguar. Results of genetic analysis indicate that about 2.88 million years ago, the tiger and the snow leopard lineages diverged from the other "Panthera" species, and that both may be more closely related to each other than to the lion, leopard and jaguar.
The geographic origin of the "Panthera" is most likely northern Central Asia or the Holarctic region. The tiger–snow leopard lineage dispersed in Southeast Asia during the Miocene.
"Panthera zdanskyi" is considered to be a sister taxon of the modern tiger. It lived at the beginning of the Pleistocene about two million years ago, its fossil remains were excavated in Gansu province of northwestern China. It was smaller and more "primitive", but functionally and ecologically similar to the modern tiger. It is disputed as to whether it had the striping pattern. Northwestern China is thought to be the origin of the tiger lineage. Tigers grew in size, possibly in response to adaptive radiations of prey species like deer and bovids, which may have occurred in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene.
"Panthera tigris trinilensis" lived about 1.2 million years ago and is known from fossils excavated near Trinil in Java. The Wanhsien, Ngandong, Trinil and Japanese tigers became extinct in prehistoric times. Tigers reached India and northern Asia in the late Pleistocene, reaching eastern Beringia, Japan, and Sakhalin. Some fossil skulls are morphologically distinct from lion skulls, which could indicate tiger presence in Alaska during the last glacial period, about 100,000 years ago.
In the Philippine island of Palawan, two articulated phalanx bones were found amidst an assemblage of other animal bones and stone tools in Ille Cave near the village of New Ibajay. They were smaller than mainland tiger fossils, possibly due to insular dwarfism. Otherwise, it would appear that early humans had accumulated the bones, so it may be that the tiger parts were imported from elsewhere, or that the tiger colonised Palawan from Borneo before the Holocene, considering the proximity of the two islands. Fossil remains of tigers were also excavated in Sri Lanka, China, Japan and Sarawak (Malaysia) dating to the late Pliocene, Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The Bornean tiger was apparently present in Borneo between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, but whether it went extinct in prehistoric or recent times has not been resolved.
The potential tiger range during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene was predicted applying ecological niche modelling based on more than 500 tiger locality records combined with bioclimatic data. The resulting model shows a contiguous tiger range from southern India to Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum, indicating an unobstructed gene flow between tiger populations in mainland Asia throughout the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. The tiger populations on the Sunda Islands and mainland Asia were possibly separated during interglacial periods. Results of a phylogeographic study indicate that all living tigers had a common ancestor 72,000–108,000 years ago. The tiger's full genome sequence was published in 2013. It was found to have similar repeat composition to other cat genomes and an appreciably conserved synteny.
Captive tigers were bred with lions to create hybrids called liger and tigon. They share physical and behavioural qualities of both parent species. Breeding hybrids is now discouraged due to the emphasis on conservation.
The liger is a cross between a male lion and a tigress. Ligers are typically between in length, and weigh between or more. Because the lion sire passes on a growth-promoting gene, but the corresponding growth-inhibiting gene from the female tiger is absent, ligers grow far larger than either parent species.
The less common tigon is a cross between a lioness and a male tiger. Because the male tiger does not pass on a growth-promoting gene and the lioness passes on a growth inhibiting gene, tigons are around the same size as their parents. Some females are fertile and have occasionally given birth to litigons when mated to a male Asiatic lion.
The tiger has a muscular body with powerful forelimbs, a large head and a tail that is about half the length of its body. Its pelage is dense and heavy, and colouration varies between shades of orange and brown with white ventral areas and distinctive vertical black stripes that are unique in each individual. Stripes are likely advantageous for camouflage in vegetation such as long grass with strong vertical patterns of light and shade. The tiger is one of only a few striped cat species; it is not known why spotted patterns and rosettes are the more common camouflage pattern among felids. The orangish colour may also aid in camouflage as the tiger's prey are dichromats, and thus may perceive the cat as green and blended in with the vegetation. A tiger's coat pattern is still visible when it is shaved. This is not due to skin pigmentation, but to the stubble and hair follicles embedded in the skin, similar to human beards (colloquially ), and is in common with other big cats. They have a mane-like heavy growth of fur around the neck and jaws and long whiskers, especially in males. The pupils are circular with yellow irises. The small, rounded ears have a prominent white spot on the back, surrounded by black. These spots are thought to play an important role in intraspecific communication.
The tiger's skull is similar to a lion's skull, with the frontal region usually less depressed or flattened, and a slightly longer postorbital region. The lion skull shows broader nasal openings. Due to the variation in skull sizes of the two species, the structure of the lower jaw is a reliable indicator for their identification. The tiger has fairly stout teeth; its somewhat curved canines are the longest among living felids with a crown height of up to .
There is a notable sexual dimorphism between male and female tigers, with the latter being consistently smaller. The size difference between them is proportionally greater in the large tiger subspecies, with males weighing up to 1.7 times more than females. Males also have wider forepaw pads, enabling sex to be identified from tracks. It has been hypothesised that body size of different tiger populations may be correlated with climate and be explained by thermoregulation and Bergmann's rule, or by distribution and size of available prey species.
Generally, males vary in total length from and weigh between with skull length ranging from . Females vary in total length from , weigh with skull length ranging from . In either sex, the tail represents about of the total length. The Bengal and Siberian tigers are amongst the tallest cats in shoulder height. They are also ranked among the biggest cats that have ever existed reaching weights of more than . The tigers of the Sunda islands are smaller and less heavy than tigers in mainland Asia, rarely exceeding in weight.
There are three colour variants — white, golden and stripeless snow white — that now rarely occur in the wild due to the reduction of wild tiger populations, but continue in captive populations. The white tiger has white fur and sepia brown stripes. The golden tiger has a pale golden pelage with a blond tone and reddish-brown stripes. The snow white tiger is a morph with extremely faint stripes and a pale reddish-brown ringed tail. Both snow white and golden tigers are homozygous for CORIN gene mutations. A black tiger is a colour variant due to pseudo-melanism. They have thick stripes close together so that the background colour is barely visible between stripes.
The white tiger lacks pheomelanin (which creates the orange colour), and has dark sepia-brown stripes and blue eyes. This altered pigmentation is caused by a mutant gene that is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait, which is determined by a white locus. It is not an albino, as the black pigments are scarcely affected. The mutation changes a single amino acid in the transporter protein SLC45A2. Both parents need to have the allele for whiteness to have white cubs.
Between the early and mid 20th century, white tigers were recorded and shot in the Indian states of Odisha, Bihar, Assam and in the area of Rewa, Madhya Pradesh. The local maharaja started breeding tigers in the early 1950s and kept a white male tiger together with its normal-coloured daughter; they had white cubs.
To preserve this recessive trait, only a few white individuals were used in captive breeding, which led to a high degree of inbreeding. Inbreeding depression is the main reason for many health problems of captive white tigers, including strabismus, stillbirth, deformities and premature death.
Other physical defects include cleft palate and scoliosis.
The Tiger Species Survival Plan has condemned the breeding of white tigers, alleging they are of mixed ancestry and of unknown lineage. The genes responsible for white colouration are represented by 0.001% of the population. The disproportionate growth in numbers of white tigers points to inbreeding among homozygous recessive individuals. This would lead to inbreeding depression and loss of genetic variability.
The tiger historically ranged from eastern Turkey and Transcaucasia to the coast of the Sea of Japan, and from South Asia across Southeast Asia to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali. Since the end of the last glacial period, it was probably restricted by periods of deep snow lasting longer than six months. Currently, it occurs in less than 6% of its historical range, as it has been extirpated from Southwest and Central Asia, large parts of Southeast and East Asia. It now mainly occurs in the Indian subcontinent, the Indochinese Peninsula, Sumatra and the Russian Far East. In China and Myanmar, breeding populations appear to rely on immigration from neighbouring countries while its status in the Korean Peninsula is unknown.
The tiger is essentially associated with forest habitats. Tiger populations thrive where populations of wild cervids, bovids and suids are stable.
Records in Central Asia indicate that it occurred foremost in Tugay riverine forests along the Atrek, Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Hari, Chu and Ili Rivers and their tributaries. In the Caucasus, it inhabited hilly and lowland forests.
Historical records in Iran are known only from the southern coast of the Caspian Sea and adjacent Alborz Mountains. In the Amur-Ussuri region, it inhabits Korean pine and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, where riparian forests provide food and water, and serve as dispersal corridors for both tiger and ungulates.
On the Indian subcontinent, it inhabits mainly tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, moist evergreen forests, tropical dry forests and the swamp forests of the Sundarbans. In the Eastern Himalayas, tigers were documented in subalpine forest up to an elevation of . In Thailand, it lives in deciduous and evergreen forests. In Laos, 14 tigers were documented in semi-evergreen and evergreen forest interspersed with grassland in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area during surveys from 2013 to 2017. In Sumatra, tiger populations range from lowland peat swamp forests to rugged montane forests.
When not subject to human disturbance, the tiger is mainly diurnal. It does not often climb trees but cases have been recorded. It is a strong swimmer and often bathes in ponds, lakes and rivers, thus keeping cool in the heat of the day. Individuals can cross rivers up to wide and can swim up to in a day. During the 1980s, a tiger was observed frequently hunting prey through deep lake water in Ranthambhore National Park.
The tiger is a long-ranging species, and individuals disperse over distances of up to to reach tiger populations in other areas. Radio-collared tigers in Chitwan National Park started dispersing from their natal areas earliest at the age of 19 months. Four females dispersed between , and 10 males between . None of them crossed open cultivated areas that were more than wide, but moved through forested habitat.
Adult tigers lead largely solitary lives. They establish and maintain territories but have much wider home ranges within which they roam. Resident adults of either sex generally confine their movements to their home ranges, within which they satisfy their needs and those of their growing cubs. Individuals sharing the same area are aware of each other's movements and activities. The size of the home range mainly depends on prey abundance, geographic area and sex of the individual. In India, home ranges appear to be while in Manchuria, they range from . In Nepal, defended territories are recorded to be for males and for females.
Young female tigers establish their first territories close to their mother's. The overlap between the female and her mother's territory reduces with time. Males, however, migrate further than their female counterparts and set out at a younger age to mark out their own area. A young male acquires territory either by seeking out an area devoid of other male tigers, or by living as a transient in another male's territory until he is older and strong enough to challenge the resident male. Young males seeking to establish themselves thereby comprise the highest mortality rate (30–35% per year) amongst adult tigers.
To identify his territory, the male marks trees by spraying urine and anal gland secretions, as well as marking trails with scat and marking trees or the ground with their claws. Females also use these "scrapes", as well as urine and scat markings. Scent markings of this type allow an individual to pick up information on another's identity, sex and reproductive status. Females in oestrus will signal their availability by scent marking more frequently and increasing their vocalisations.
Although for the most part avoiding each other, tigers are not always territorial and relationships between individuals can be complex. An adult of either sex will sometimes share its kill with others, even those who may not be related to them. George Schaller observed a male share a kill with two females and four cubs. Unlike male lions, male tigers allow females and cubs to feed on the kill before the male is finished with it; all involved generally seem to behave amicably, in contrast to the competitive behaviour shown by a lion pride. Stephen Mills described a social feeding event in Ranthambhore National Park:
Occasionally, male tigers participate in raising cubs, usually their own, but this is extremely rare and not always well understood. In May 2015, Amur tigers were photographed by camera traps in the Sikhote-Alin Bioshpere Reserve. The photos show a male Amur tiger pass by, followed by a female and three cubs within the span of about two minutes.
In Ranthambore, a male Bengal tiger raised and defended two orphaned female cubs after their mother had died of illness. The cubs remained under his care, he supplied them with food, protected them from his rival and sister, and apparently also trained them.
Male tigers are generally more intolerant of other males within their territories than females are of other females. Territory disputes are usually solved by displays of intimidation rather than outright aggression. Several such incidents have been observed in which the subordinate tiger yielded defeat by rolling onto its back and showing its belly in a submissive posture. Once dominance has been established, a male may tolerate a subordinate within his range, as long as they do not live in too close quarters. The most aggressive disputes tend to occur between two males when a female is in oestrus, and sometimes resulted in the death of one of the males.
Facial expressions include the "defense threat", where an individual bares its teeth, flattens its ears and its pupils enlarge. Both males and females show a flehmen response, a characteristic grimace, when sniffing urine markings, but flehmen is more often associated with males detecting the markings made by tigresses in oestrus. Like other "Panthera", tigers roar, particularly in aggressive situations, during the mating season or when making a kill. There are two different roars: the "true" roar is made using the hyoid apparatus and forced through an open mouth as it progressively closes, and the shorter, harsher "coughing" roar is made with the mouth open and teeth exposed. The "true" roar can be heard at up to away and is sometimes emitted three or four times in succession. When tense, tigers will moan, a sound similar to a roar but more subdued and made when the mouth is partially or completely closed. Moaning can be heard away. Chuffing—soft, low-frequency snorting similar to purring in smaller cats—is heard in more friendly situations. Other vocal communications include grunts, woofs, snarls, miaows, hisses and growls.
In the wild, tigers mostly feed on large and medium-sized mammals, particularly ungulates weighing . Range-wide, sambar deer, Manchurian wapiti, barasingha and wild boar are significantly preferred. Tigers are capable of taking down larger prey like adult gaur but will also opportunistically eat much smaller prey, such as monkeys, peafowl and other ground-based birds, hares, porcupines, and fish. They also prey on other predators, including dogs, leopards, pythons, bears, and crocodiles. Tigers generally do not prey on fully grown adult Asian elephants and Indian rhinoceros but incidents have been reported. More often, it is the more vulnerable small calves that are taken. When in close proximity to humans, tigers will also sometimes prey on such domestic livestock as cattle, horses, and donkeys. Although almost exclusively carnivorous, tigers will occasionally eat vegetation for dietary fibre such as fruit of the slow match tree.
Tigers are thought to be mainly nocturnal predators, but in areas where humans are absent, remote-controlled, hidden camera traps recorded them hunting in daylight. They generally hunt alone and ambush their prey as most other cats do, overpowering them from any angle, using their body size and strength to knock the prey off balance. Successful hunts usually require the tiger to almost simultaneously leap onto its quarry, knock it over, and grab the throat or nape with its teeth. Despite their large size, tigers can reach speeds of about but only in short bursts; consequently, tigers must be close to their prey before they break cover. If the prey catches wind of the tiger's presence before this, the tiger usually abandons the hunt rather than chase prey or battle it head-on. Horizontal leaps of up to have been reported, although leaps of around half this distance are more typical. One in 2 to 20 hunts, including stalking near potential prey, ends in a successful kill.
When hunting larger animals, tigers prefer to bite the throat and use their powerful forelimbs to hold onto the prey, often simultaneously wrestling it to the ground. The tiger remains latched onto the neck until its target dies of strangulation. By this method, gaurs and water buffaloes weighing over a ton have been killed by tigers weighing about a sixth as much. Although they can kill healthy adults, tigers often select the calves or infirm of very large species. Healthy adult prey of this type can be dangerous to tackle, as long, strong horns, legs and tusks are all potentially fatal to the tiger. No other extant land predator routinely takes on prey this large on its own.
With smaller prey, such as monkeys and hares, the tiger bites the nape, often breaking the spinal cord, piercing the windpipe, or severing the jugular vein or common carotid artery. Though rarely observed, some tigers have been recorded to kill prey by swiping with their paws, which are powerful enough to smash the skulls of domestic cattle, and break the backs of sloth bears.
After killing their prey, tigers sometimes drag it to conceal it in vegetative cover, usually pulling it by grasping with their mouths at the site of the killing bite. This, too, can require great physical strength. In one case, after it had killed an adult gaur, a tiger was observed to drag the massive carcass over a distance of . When 13 men simultaneously tried to drag the same carcass later, they were unable to move it. An adult tiger can go for up to two weeks without eating, then gorge on of flesh at one time. In captivity, adult tigers are fed of meat a day.
Tigers usually prefer to eat prey they have caught themselves, but may eat carrion in times of scarcity and may even pirate prey from other large carnivores. Although predators typically avoid one another, if a prey item is under dispute or a serious competitor is encountered, displays of aggression are common. If these are not sufficient, the conflicts may turn violent; tigers may kill competitors as leopards, dholes, striped hyenas, wolves, bears, pythons, and crocodiles on occasion. Tigers may also prey on these competitors. Attacks on smaller predators, such as badgers, lynxes, and foxes, are almost certainly predatory. Crocodiles, bears, and large packs of dholes may win conflicts against tigers and, in the cases of crocodiles and bears, even can kill them.
The considerably smaller leopard avoids competition from tigers by hunting at different times of the day and hunting different prey. In India's Nagarhole National Park, most prey selected by leopards were from against a preference for prey weighing over in the tigers. The average prey weight in the two respective big cats in India was against . With relatively abundant prey, tigers and leopards were seen to successfully coexist without competitive exclusion or interspecies dominance hierarchies that may be more common to the African savanna, where the leopard exists with the lion. Golden jackals may feed on the tiger's kills. Tigers appear to inhabit the deep parts of a forest while smaller predators like leopards and dholes are pushed closer to the fringes.
The tiger mates all year round, but most cubs are born between March and June, with a second peak in September. Gestation ranges from 93 to 114 days, with an average of 103 to 105 days. A female is only receptive for three to six days. Mating is frequent and noisy during that time. The female gives birth in a sheltered location such as in tall grass, in a dense thicket, cave or rocky crevice. The father generally takes no part in rearing. Litters consist of two or three cubs, rarely as many as six. Cubs weigh from each at birth, and are born with eyes closed. They open their eyes when they are six to 14 days old. Their milk teeth break through at the age of about two weeks. They start to eat meat at the age of eight weeks. At around this time, females usually shift them to a new den. They make short ventures with their mother, although they do not travel with her as she roams her territory until they are older. Females lactate for five to six months. Around the time they are weaned, they start to accompany their mother on territorial walks and are taught how to hunt.
A dominant cub emerges in most litters, usually a male. The dominant cub is more active than its siblings and takes the lead in their play, eventually leaving its mother and becoming independent earlier. The cubs start hunting on their own earliest at the age of 11 months, and become independent around 18 to 20 months of age. They separate from their mother at the age of two to two and a half years, but continue to grow until the age of five years. Young females reach sexual maturity at three to four years, whereas males at four to five years. Unrelated wandering male tigers often kill cubs to make the female receptive, since the tigress may give birth to another litter within five months if the cubs of the previous litter are lost. The mortality rate of tiger cubs is about 50% in the first two years. Few other predators attack tiger cubs due to the diligence and ferocity of the mother. Apart from humans and other tigers, common causes of cub mortality are starvation, freezing, and accidents. Generation length of the tiger is about eight years.
The oldest recorded captive tiger lived for 26 years.
In the 1990s, a new approach to tiger conservation was developed: Tiger Conservation Units (TCUs), which are blocks of habitat that have the potential to host tiger populations in 15 habitat types within five bioregions. Altogether 143 TCUs were identified and prioritized based on size and integrity of habitat, poaching pressure and population status. They range in size from .
In 2016, an estimate of a global wild tiger population of approximately 3,890 individuals was presented during the Third Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation. The WWF subsequently declared that the world's count of wild tigers had risen for the first time in a century.
Major threats to the tiger include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching for fur and body parts, which have simultaneously greatly reduced tiger populations in the wild. In India, only 11% of the historical tiger habitat remains due to habitat fragmentation. Demand for tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine has also been cited as a major threat to tiger populations. At the start of the 20th century, it was estimated there were over 100,000 tigers in the wild, but the population has dwindled outside of captivity to between 1,500 and 3,500. Some estimates suggest that there are fewer than 2,500 mature breeding individuals, with no subpopulation containing more than 250 mature breeding individuals. The global wild tiger population was estimated by the World Wide Fund for Nature at 3,200 in 2011 and 3,890 in 2015—"Vox" reported that this was the first increase in a century.
India is home to the world's largest population of wild tigers. A 2014 census estimated a population of 2,226, a 30% increase since 2011. On International Tiger Day 2019, the 'Tiger Estimation Report 2018’ was released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report estimates a population of 2967 tigers in India with 25% increase since 2014. Modi said "India is one of the safest habitats for tigers as it has achieved the target of doubling the tiger population from 1411 in 2011 to 2967 in 2019".
In 1973, India's "Project Tiger", started by Indira Gandhi, established numerous tiger reserves. The project was credited with tripling the number of wild Bengal tigers from some 1,200 in 1973 to over 3,500 in the 1990s, but a 2007 census showed that numbers had dropped back to about 1,400 tigers because of poaching. Following the report, the Indian government pledged $153 million to the initiative, set up measures to combat poaching, promised funds to relocate up to 200,000 villagers in order to reduce human-tiger interactions, and set up eight new tiger reserves. India also reintroduced tigers to the Sariska Tiger Reserve and by 2009 it was claimed that poaching had been effectively countered at Ranthambore National Park.
In the 1940s, the Siberian tiger was on the brink of extinction with only about 40 animals remaining in the wild in Russia. As a result, anti-poaching controls were put in place by the Soviet Union and a network of protected zones (zapovedniks) were instituted, leading to a rise in the population to several hundred. Poaching again became a problem in the 1990s, when the economy of Russia collapsed. The major obstacle in preserving the species is the enormous territory individual tigers require (up to 450 km2 needed by a single female and more for a single male). Current conservation efforts are led by local governments and NGO's in concert with international organisations, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The competitive exclusion of wolves by tigers has been used by Russian conservationists to convince hunters to tolerate the big cats. Tigers have less impact on ungulate populations than do wolves, and are effective in controlling the latter's numbers. In 2005, there were thought to be about 360 animals in Russia, though these exhibited little genetic diversity. However, in a decade later, the Siberian tiger census was estimated from 480 to 540 individuals.
In China, tigers became the target of large-scale ‘anti-pest’ campaigns in the early 1950s, where suitable habitats were fragmented following deforestation and resettlement of people to rural areas, who hunted tigers and prey species. Though tiger hunting was prohibited in 1977, the population continued to decline and is considered extinct in southern China since 2001. In northeastern China's Hunchun National Nature Reserve, camera-traps recorded a tiger with four cubs for the first time in 2012. During subsequent surveys, between 27 and 34 tigers were documented along the China–Russia border. Having earlier rejected the Western-led environmentalist movement, China changed its stance in the 1980s and became a party to the CITES treaty. By 1993 it had banned the trade in tiger parts, and this diminished the use of tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine. The Tibetan people's trade in tiger skins has also been a threat to tigers. The pelts were used in clothing, tiger-skin "chuba" being worn as fashion. In 2006 the 14th Dalai Lama was persuaded to take up the issue. Since then there has been a change of attitude, with some Tibetans publicly burning their chubas.
In 1994, the Indonesian Sumatran Tiger Conservation Strategy addressed the potential crisis that tigers faced in Sumatra. The Sumatran Tiger Project (STP) was initiated in June 1995 in and around the Way Kambas National Park in order to ensure the long-term viability of wild Sumatran tigers and to accumulate data on tiger life-history characteristics vital for the management of wild populations. By August 1999, the teams of the STP had evaluated 52 sites of potential tiger habitat in Lampung Province, of which only 15 these were intact enough to contain tigers. In the framework of the STP a community-based conservation programme was initiated to document the tiger-human dimension in the park in order to enable conservation authorities to resolve tiger-human conflicts based on a comprehensive database rather than anecdotes and opinions.
The Wildlife Conservation Society and Panthera Corporation formed the collaboration "Tigers Forever", with field sites including the world's largest tiger reserve, the Hukaung Valley in Myanmar. Other reserves were in the Western Ghats in India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Russian Far East covering in total about .
Tigers have been studied in the wild using a variety of techniques. Tiger population have been estimated using plaster casts of their pugmarks, although this method was criticized as being inaccurate. More recent techniques include the use of camera traps and studies of DNA from tiger scat, while radio-collaring has been used to track tigers in the wild. Tiger spray has been found to be just as good, or better, as a source of DNA than scat.
The tiger has been one of the big five game animals of Asia. Tiger hunting took place on a large scale in the early 19th and 20th centuries, being a recognised and admired sport by the British in colonial India as well as the maharajas and aristocratic class of the erstwhile princely states of pre-independence India. A single maharaja or English hunter could claim to kill over a hundred tigers in their hunting career. Tiger hunting was done by some hunters on foot; others sat up on "machans" with a goat or buffalo tied out as bait; yet others on elephant-back.
Historically, tigers have been hunted at a large scale so their famous striped skins could be collected. The trade in tiger skins peaked in the 1960s, just before international conservation efforts took effect. By 1977, a tiger skin in an English market was considered to be worth US$4,250.
Tiger parts are commonly used as amulets in South and Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, the fossils in Palawan were found besides stone tools. This, besides the evidence for cuts on the bones, and the use of fire, suggests that early humans had accumulated the bones, and the condition of the tiger subfossils, dated to approximately 12,000 to 9,000 years ago, differed from other fossils in the assemblage, dated to the Upper Paleolithic. The tiger subfossils showed longitudinal fracture of the cortical bone due to weathering, which suggests that they had post-mortem been exposed to light and air. Tiger canines were found in Ambangan sites dating to the 10th to 12th centuries in Butuan, Mindanao.
Many people in China and other parts of Asia have a belief that various tiger parts have medicinal properties, including as pain killers and aphrodisiacs. There is no scientific evidence to support these beliefs. The use of tiger parts in pharmaceutical drugs in China is already banned, and the government has made some offences in connection with tiger poaching punishable by death. Furthermore, all trade in tiger parts is illegal under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and a domestic trade ban has been in place in China since 1993.
However, the trading of tiger parts in Asia has become a major black market industry and governmental and conservation attempts to stop it have been ineffective to date. Almost all black marketers engaged in the trade are based in China and have either been shipped and sold within in their own country or into Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. The Chinese subspecies was almost completely decimated by killing for commerce due to both the parts and skin trades in the 1950s through the 1970s. Contributing to the illegal trade, there are a number of tiger farms in the country specialising in breeding the cats for profit. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 captive-bred, semi-tame animals live in these farms today. However, many tigers for traditional medicine black market are wild ones shot or snared by poachers and may be caught anywhere in the tiger's remaining range (from Siberia to India to the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra). In the Asian black market, a tiger penis can be worth the equivalent of around $300 U.S. dollars. In the years of 1990 through 1992, 27 million products with tiger derivatives were found. In July 2014 at an international convention on endangered species in Geneva, Switzerland, a Chinese representative admitted for the first time his government was aware trading in tiger skins was occurring in China.
Wild tigers that have had no prior contact with humans actively avoid interactions with humans. However, tigers cause more human deaths through direct attack than any other wild mammal. Attacks are occasionally provoked, as tigers lash out after being injured while they themselves are hunted. Attacks can be provoked accidentally, as when a human surprises a tiger or inadvertently comes between a mother and her young, or as in a case in rural India when a postman startled a tiger, used to seeing him on foot, by riding a bicycle. Occasionally tigers come to view people as prey. Such attacks are most common in areas where population growth, logging, and farming have put pressure on tiger habitats and reduced their wild prey. Most man-eating tigers are old, missing teeth, and unable to capture their preferred prey. For example, the Champawat Tiger, a tigress found in Nepal and then India, had two broken canines. She was responsible for an estimated 430 human deaths, the most attacks known to be perpetrated by a single wild animal, by the time she was shot in 1907 by Jim Corbett. According to Corbett, tiger attacks on humans are normally in daytime, when people are working outdoors and are not keeping watch. Early writings tend to describe man-eating tigers as cowardly because of their ambush tactics.
Man-eaters have been a particular problem in recent decades in India and Bangladesh, especially in Kumaon, Garhwal and the Sundarbans mangrove swamps of Bengal, where some healthy tigers have hunted humans. Because of rapid habitat loss attributed to climate change, tiger attacks have increased in the Sundarbans. The Sundarbans area had 129 human deaths from tigers from 1969 to 1971. In the 10 years prior to that period, about 100 attacks per year in the Sundarbans, with a high of around 430 in some years of the 1960s. Unusually, in some years in the Sundarbans, more humans are killed by tigers than vice versa. In 1972, India's production of honey and beeswax dropped by 50% when at least 29 people who gathered these materials were devoured. In 1986 in the Sundarbans, since tigers almost always attack from the rear, masks with human faces were worn on the back of the head, on the theory that tigers usually do not attack if seen by their prey. This decreased the number of attacks only temporarily. All other means to prevent attacks, such as providing more prey or using electrified human dummies, did not work as well.
In Ancient Roman times, tigers were kept in menageries and amphitheatres to be exhibited, trained and paraded, and were often provoked to fight humans and exotic beasts. Since the 17th century, tigers, being rare and ferocious, were sought after to keep at European castles as symbols of their owners' power. Tigers became central zoo and circus exhibits in the 18th century: a tiger could cost up to 4,000 francs in France (for comparison, a professor of the Beaux-Arts at Lyons earned only 3,000 francs a year), or up to $3,500 in the United States, where a lion cost no more than $1,000.
In 2007, over 4,000 captive tigers lived in China, of which 3,000 were held by about 20 larger facilities, with the rest held by some 200 smaller facilities. In 2011, 468 facilities in the USA kept 2,884 tigers. Nineteen US states banned private ownership of tigers, fifteen require a license, and sixteen states have no regulation. Genetic ancestry of 105 captive tigers from fourteen countries and regions showed that forty-nine animals belonged distinctly to five subspecies; fifty-two animals had mixed subspecies origins. Many Siberian tigers in zoos today are actually the result of crosses with Bengal tigers."
Tigers and their superlative qualities have been a source of fascination for mankind since ancient times, and they are routinely visible as important cultural and media motifs. They are also considered one of the charismatic megafauna, and are used as the face of conservation campaigns worldwide. In a 2004 online poll conducted by cable television channel Animal Planet, involving more than 50,000 viewers from 73 countries, the tiger was voted the world's favourite animal with 21% of the vote, narrowly beating the dog.
In Chinese myth and culture, the tiger is one of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Chinese art, the tiger is depicted as an earth symbol and equal rival of the Chinese dragon – the two representing matter and spirit respectively. The Southern Chinese martial art Hung Ga is based on the movements of the tiger and the crane. In Imperial China, a tiger was the personification of war and often represented the highest army general (or present day defense secretary), while the emperor and empress were represented by a dragon and phoenix, respectively. The White Tiger () is one of the Four Symbols of the Chinese constellations. It is sometimes called the White Tiger of the West (), and it represents the west and the autumn season.
The tiger's tail appears in stories from countries including China and Korea, it being generally inadvisable to grasp a tiger by the tail. In Korean myth and culture, the tiger is regarded as a guardian that drives away evil spirits and a sacred creature that brings good luck – the symbol of courage and absolute power. For the people who live in and around the forests of Korea, the tiger considered the symbol of the Mountain Spirit or King of mountain animals. So, Koreans also called the tigers "San Gun" (산군) means Mountain Lord.
In Buddhism, the tiger is one of the Three Senseless Creatures, symbolising anger, with the monkey representing greed and the deer lovesickness. The Tungusic peoples considered the Siberian tiger a near-deity and often referred to it as "Grandfather" or "Old man". The Udege and Nanai called it "Amba". The Manchu considered the Siberian tiger as "Hu Lin," the king. In Hinduism, the god Shiva wears and sits on tiger skin. The ten-armed warrior goddess Durga rides the tigress (or lioness) Damon into battle. In southern India the god Ayyappan was associated with a tiger. In Greco-Roman tradition, the tiger was depicted being ridden by the god Dionysus.
The weretiger replaces the werewolf in shapeshifting folklore in Asia; in India they were evil sorcerers, while in Indonesia and Malaysia they were somewhat more benign. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the tiger is fiercer and more ruthless than the lion.
In William Blake's poem in his "Songs of Experience" (1794), titled "The Tyger", the tiger is a menacing and fearful animal. In Yann Martel's 2001 Man Booker Prize winning novel "Life of Pi", the protagonist, surviving shipwreck for months in a small boat, somehow avoids being eaten by the other survivor, a large Bengal tiger. The story was adapted in Ang Lee's 2012 feature film of the same name. Jim Corbett's 1944 "Man-Eaters of Kumaon" tells ten true stories of his tiger-hunting exploits in what is now the northern Uttarakhand region of India. The book has sold over four million copies, and has been the basis of both fictional and documentary films. In Rudyard Kipling's 1894 "The Jungle Book", the tiger, Shere Khan, is the mortal enemy of the human protagonist, Mowgli. More benign tiger characters include Tigger in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and Hobbes of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes", both of whom are represented as simply stuffed animals come to life.
Tigers are also mascots for various sports teams around the world. Tony the Tiger is a famous mascot for Kellogg's breakfast cereal Frosted Flakes. The Esso (Exxon) brand of petrol was advertised from 1959 onwards with the slogan 'put a tiger in your tank', and a tiger mascot; more than 2.5 million synthetic tiger tails were sold to motorists, who tied them to their petrol tank caps.
The tiger is one of the animals displayed on the Pashupati seal of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The tiger was the emblem of the Chola Dynasty and was depicted on coins, seals and banners. The seals of several Chola copper coins show the tiger, the Pandyan emblem fish and the Chera emblem bow, indicating that the Cholas had achieved political supremacy over the latter two dynasties. Gold coins found in Kavilayadavalli in the Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh have motifs of the tiger, bow and some indistinct marks. The tiger symbol of Chola Empire was later adopted by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the tiger became a symbol of the unrecognised state of Tamil Eelam and Tamil independence movement. The Bengal tiger is the national animal of India and Bangladesh. The Malaysian tiger is the national animal of Malaysia. The Siberian tiger is the national animal of South Korea.
The tyger, a depiction of tigers as they were understood by European artists, is among the creatures used in charges and supporters in European heraldry. This creature has several notable differences from real tigers, including absent stripes, a leonine tufted tail, and a head terminating in large, pointed jaws. A more realistic version of the tiger entered the heraldic armory through the British Empire's expansion into Asia, and is referred to as the Bengal tiger to distinguish it from its older counterpart. The Bengal tiger is not a very common creature in heraldry, but is present as a supporter in the arms of Bombay and emblazoned on the shield of the University of Madras.
Talk radio
Talk radio is a radio format containing discussion about topical issues and consisting entirely or almost entirely of original spoken word content rather than outside music. Most shows are regularly hosted by a single individual, and often feature interviews with a number of different guests. Talk radio typically includes an element of listener participation, usually by broadcasting live conversations between the host and listeners who "call in" (usually via telephone) to the show. Listener contributions are usually screened by a show's producers in order to maximize audience interest and, in the case of commercial talk radio, to attract advertisers. Generally, the shows are organized into segments, each separated by a pause for advertisements; however, in public or non-commercial radio, music is sometimes played in place of commercials to separate the program segments. Variations of talk radio include conservative talk, hot talk, liberal talk (increasingly known as progressive talk) and sports talk.
While talk radio has historically been associated with broadcast radio, starting around 2005 the technology for Internet-based talk-radio shows became cost effective in the form of live Internet website streaming and podcasts. Now, it is possible for an individual to use a variety of services to host an Internet-based talk-radio show without carriage by a traditional radio station. In addition, TV programming from talk and news outlets such as BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Fox is now often available expanding the world of talk radio further. Talk radio listening is enjoyed not only on radios, but a wide variety of other devices and services including PCs using iTunes, station directories such as TuneIn, show directory smartphones with apps such as Stitcher and time-shifting services like DAR.fm.
Talk radio is not limited to the AM band. "Non-commercial", usually referred to as "public radio", which is mainly located in a reserved spectrum of the FM band, also broadcasts talk programs. Commercial all-talk stations can also be found on the FM band in many cities across the US. These shows often rely less on political discussion and analysis than their AM counterparts, and often employ the use of pranks and "bits" for entertainment purposes. In the United States and Canada, satellite radio services offer uncensored "free-wheeling" original programming. ABC News & Talk is an example of "repackaging" for the digital airwaves shows featured on their terrestrial radio stations.
Expressing and debating political opinions has been a staple of radio since the medium's infancy. Aimee Semple McPherson began her radio broadcasts in the early 1920s and even purchased her own station, KFSG which went on the air in February 1924; by the mid-1930s, controversial radio priest Father Charles Coughlin's radio broadcasts were reaching millions per week. There was also a national current events forum called America's Town Meeting of the Air which broadcast once a week starting in 1935. It featured panel discussions from some of the biggest newsmakers and was among the first shows to allow audience participation: members of the studio audience could question the guests or even heckle them.
Talk radio as a listener-participation format has existed since the 1930s. John J. Anthony (1902-70) was an announcer and DJ on New York's WMRJ. It was located in the Merrick Radio Store at 12 New York Boulevard in Jamaica, Long Island. After some marital troubles, refusing to pay alimony and child support, he sought professional help and began his own radio series where listeners would call in with their problems in 1930. Radio historians consider this the first instance of talk radio.
While working for New York's WMCA in 1945, Barry Gray was bored with playing music and put a telephone receiver up to his microphone to talk with bandleader Woody Herman. This was soon followed by listener call-ins and Gray is often billed as "the hot mama of talk radio". Herb Jepko was another pioneer.
Author Bill Cherry proposed George Roy Clough as the first to invite listeners to argue politics on a call-in radio show at KLUF, his station in Galveston, Texas, as a way to bring his own political views into listeners' homes. (He later became Mayor of Galveston.) Cherry gives no specific date, but the context of events and history of the station would seem to place it also in the 1940s, perhaps earlier. The format was the classic mode in which the announcer gave the topic for that day, and listeners called in to debate the issue.
In 1948 Alan Courtney — New York disk jockey and co-composer of the popular song "Joltin' Joe Dimaggio" — began a call-in program for the Storer station in Miami, Florida (WGBS) and then on Miami's WQAM, WINZ and WCKR. The "Alan Courtney Open Phone Forum" flourished as an avowedly conservative and anti-communist political forum with a coverage area over the Southeastern U.S. and Cuba.
Joe Pyne, John Nebel, Jean Shepherd, and Jerry Williams (WMEX-Boston) were among the first to explore the medium in the 1950s.
A major breakthrough in talk radio occurred in 1960 at KLAC in Los Angeles. Alan Henry, a broadcaster in his early thirties, had been hired by John Kluge, president of Metromedia in 1963. Henry had previously worked in such diverse markets as Miami, Florida; Waterloo, Iowa; Hartford, Connecticut; and St. Louis, Missouri. KLAC was dead last in the ratings but Kluge wanted a big Metromedia presence in Los Angeles. He sent Henry from New York to Los Angeles to turn KLAC into a success. The first thing that Henry did was hire the legendary morning team of Lohman and Barkley. Henry had built a strong relationship with programmer Jim Lightfoot, who had joined Henry in Miami. A unique opportunity presented itself when Joe Pyne, who had begun his career as a radio talk personality in Pennsylvania, was fired by KABC in Los Angeles. Speculation was that Pyne was too controversial and confrontational for the ABC corporate culture. Henry hired Pyne on the spot and paid him $25,000 a year, which was then a huge salary for a radio personality. Pyne was given the night show on KLAC. Part of the agreement with Pyne was that Henry and Lightfoot would give him broad control of his program content.
The show was an immediate success. Henry encouraged the confrontation with listeners and guests for which Pyne became famous. Pyne coined the line "Go gargle with razor blades," for guests with whom he disagreed. The Pyne show was the beginning of the confrontational talk format that later spread across the radio spectrum. At one point in the 1960s the Joe Pyne show was syndicated on over 250 radio stations in the United States.
In an odd turn of events, Pyne's radio show led him to television. Henry suggested to John Kluge that Joe Pyne should be put on Metromedia's newly acquired TV station in Los Angeles, KTTV-TV. Kluge told Henry to speak to KTTV-TV general manager Al Kriven, but Henry had already done that, and Kriven had adamantly refused. Kluge telephoned Kriven, and Pyne soon became the nation's first controversial late-night talk television host. "The Joe Pyne Show" on KTTV-TV quickly shot to the top of the ratings. The format later proliferated on cable television with a variety of new hosts, many of them taking on a similar persona to Joe Pyne. Joe Pyne and Alan Henry were major factors in establishing a new trend in radio and television programming. Alan Henry elaborates on the launching of Joe Pyne on KLAC radio and KTTV-TV in his memoir "A Man and His Medium".
Two radio stations—KMOX, 1120 AM in St. Louis, Missouri, and KABC, 790 AM in Los Angeles—adopted an all-talk show format in 1960, and both claim to be the first to have done so. KABC station manager Ben Hoberman and KMOX station manager Robert Hyland independently developed the all-talk format. KTKK, 630 AM in Salt Lake City, then known as KSXX, adopted a full-time talk schedule in 1965 and is the third station in the country to have done so. KSXX started with all local talent, and KTKK, which now airs on 1640 AM, has a larger portion of its schedule featuring local talent than most other stations that run a full schedule of talk.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, as many listeners abandoned AM music formats for the high fidelity sound of FM radio, the talk radio format began to catch on in more large cities. Former music stations such as KLIF (Dallas, Texas), WLW (Cincinnati, Ohio), WHAS (Louisville, Kentucky), WHAM (Rochester, New York), WLS (Chicago, Illinois), KFI (Los Angeles, California), WRKO (Boston, Massachusetts), WKBW (Buffalo, New York), and WABC (New York, New York) made the switch to all-talk as their ratings slumped due to listener migration to the FM band. Since the turn of the 21st century, with many music listeners now migrating to digital platforms such as Pandora Radio, Sirius XM Radio, and the numerous variations of the iPod, talk radio has been expanding on the FM side of the dial as well.
"Hot talk", also called "FM talk" or "shock talk", is a talk radio format geared predominantly to a male demographic between the ages of 18–49. The subject matter generally consists of subjects pertaining to pop culture rather than the political talk found on AM radio. Hosts of hot talk shows are usually known as shock jocks.
Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia - 2015) has a select few hot talk stations under the moniker "Real Radio", while CBS Radio once had a larger chain of hot talkers known as Free FM, though the brand was abandoned after a post-Howard Stern attempt to network the format failed within a year. It is usually found on FM radio active rock, classic rock, and country stations in morning drive, as the actual hot talk formatted stations have only achieved mediocre success as a whole compared to AM or conservative talk radio, or even FM music radio.
In March 2018, CBS Radio's corporate successor Entercom attempted a hot talk format in San Diego with KEGY "97.3 The Machine". It featured a weekday lineup devoted to hot talk programs, San Diego Padres coverage, and blocks of classic rock interspersed with comedy bits during off-peak hours. However, the station attracted controversy later that month, when an advertisement for the station's forthcoming morning show "Kevin Klein Live" (which invited listeners to "jump ... to a new morning show", accompanied by a picture of the Coronado Bridge) was criticized for glorifying suicide by bridge jumping. The ensuing controversy prompted the Padres to scrutinize KEGY's direction; executive Ron Fowler voiced concerns over the team being associated with KEGY's "shock jock" content, threatening to possibly cut ties with the station and Entercom. Kevin Klein's program never premiered, and the hot talk format was ultimately dropped on April 12, 2018, in favor of a conventional sports format.
More recently the genre has been showing up on satellite radio and podcasting, media that are beyond the reach of the FCC's obscenity rules, allowing the hosts of such shows to be as vulgar and outrageous as they desire. Advertising tends to be more limited on these media, because of reliance on subscription revenues (in the case of satellite) and smaller audience and fewer connections to advertisers (in the case of Internet-only shows, which usually lack the full sales departments of terrestrial and satellite broadcasters).
Other U.S. hosts specialize in talk radio comedy, such as Phil Hendrie, who voices his own fictional guests and occasionally does parodies of other programs.
The United States saw dramatic growth in the popularity of talk radio during the 1990s due to the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission's post-war Fairness Doctrine of 1949, in 1987. The mandate of the Fairness Doctrine was to require that audiences were exposed to a diversity of viewpoints.
It had required the holders of broadcast licenses to "present controversial issues of public importance" and to do so in a manner that was, in the commission's view, "honest, equitable and balanced". Its repeal provided an opportunity for a kind of partisan political programming with commercial appeal that had not previously existed.
The most successful pioneer in the early 1990s' talk radio movement in the US was the politically conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh's success demonstrated that there was a nationwide market for passionately delivered conservative polemic on contemporary news, events, and social trends, and changed the face of how the talk radio business was conducted. Unrestrained (by the Fairness Doctrine), cheering for one's political party, and especially against the other, had become popular entertainment which rapidly changed the way politics nationally was discussed, perceived, and conducted.
Other radio talk show hosts (who describe themselves as either conservative or libertarian) have also had success as nationally syndicated hosts, including Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Jon Arthur, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Larry Gaiters and Mark Levin.
The Salem Radio Network syndicates a group of religiously oriented Republican activists, including evangelical Christian Hugh Hewitt and Jewish conservatives Dennis Prager and Michael Medved; these are mostly distributed in a 24-hour network format among Salem's own stations, and they generally earn ratings much less than their syndicated counterparts.
In the summer of 2007, conservative talk show hosts mobilized public opposition to the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill, which eventually failed. Conservative hosts Limbaugh, Ingraham, Bennett, Prager, Hannity, Beck, Levin and Hewitt coalesced around endorsing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for president at the end of January 2008 (after Fred Thompson, the described favorite of some of the hosts, dropped out), in an effort to oppose the nomination of Senator John McCain; however, Romney suspended his campaign in February of the same year, and endorsed McCain. During the primaries, Limbaugh in particular had endorsed a plan to do whatever it took to prolong the Democrats' nomination by encouraging political conservatives to cross over to the Democrats and voting for the trailing candidate, a plan he called "Operation Chaos".
Conservative talk show hosts also lent their unified support for congressional candidate Doug Hoffman, a conservative third-party candidate who was running in New York's 23rd congressional district special election, 2009, against a liberal Republican (Dierdre Scozzafava) and a mainstream Democrat (Bill Owens). The unified support from the conservative base helped propel Hoffman to frontrunner status and effectively killed Scozzafava's campaign, forcing her to drop out of the race several days before the election. This effort backfired on the conservative hosts, as the Democratic candidate Owens won in part thanks to Scozzafava's endorsement of Owens. Local hosts, such as Los Angeles's John and Ken, have also proven effective in influencing the political landscape.
Libertarians such as Dennis Miller (based in Los Angeles), Jon Arthur, host of "Jon Arthur Live!" (based in Florida), Patti Brooks KGMI (based in the Pacific Northwest), Free Talk Live (based in New Hampshire), Penn Jillette (based in Las Vegas), Jay Severin (based in Boston, Massachusetts), and Mark Davis (based in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas) have also achieved some success. Many of these hosts also publish books, write newspaper columns, appear on television, and give public lectures (Limbaugh, again, was a pioneer of this model of multi-media punditry).
There had been some precursors for talk radio show stars, such as the Los Angeles-area controversialist Joe Pyne, who would attack callers on his program in the early 1960s – one of his famous insults was "gargle with razor blades"; the similar Bob Grant in New York City; and Wally George in Southern California.
Talk radio also included personal relationship consultants such as Laura Schlessinger and Barbara De Angelis both heard on KFI AM in Los Angeles. Host Larry Elder on KABC (AM) who was a lawyer prior to entering the talk radio market. (See also lawyer, Norman Goldman, under the progressive talk section.) Not political but certainly prevalent in talk radio is Leo Laporte who offers consumer advice particularly related to technical computer topics. With many talk shows across the opinion spectrum losing ratings and revenues, business/real estate advice shows, paid-for health supplement presentations and religious programming has emerged in addition to sports and news talk.
While politically-oriented talk is still heard on the AM dial (mostly the conservative format), it has seen some expanding onto the FM dial. One notable example was WPGB in Pittsburgh, which switched to a talk format in 2004 after years of having several different music formats, going so far as to brand itself as "FM News Talk 104.7" due to the relative uncommonness of politically-oriented talk on the FM side of the dial even in 2013 while FM talk in general has expanded. (Additionally, at the time WPGB was the only FM radio station in Pittsburgh, the nation's 22nd largest market, to have a talk format.)
Owned by Clear Channel and stylized as one of Clear Channel's typical conservative-leaning AM talk stations, WPGB's ratings were steadily high since during its time as a talk station, whereas the station's numerous music formats were among the lowest in the Pittsburgh market before switching. Clear Channel, which owns WPGB, has been moving away from putting talk radio on the FM dial; WPGB fired its morning show in December 2013 and switched back to music in August 2014, selling the format rights to AM station WJAS.
Paranormal radio shows have had a place on radio for several decades; while the format has never been successful on a full-time basis, it has proven popular in overnight graveyard slot. Long John Nebel's program was one of the first to devote itself to the concept before it was further fleshed out by Art Bell, whose "Coast to Coast AM" went on to have comparable popularity to daytime talk hosts of his era. Bell had a long-running, on-and-off relationship with the show he founded, often leaving the show and returning on an erratic basis, also starting up new shows such as "Dreamland", "Art Bell's Dark Matter" and "Midnight in the Desert" only to quit them a few weeks into their run; Bell died in 2018. "Coast to Coast AM" continues with George Noory as the permanent lead host, with a rotating host on weekends. Clyde Lewis and Jason Hawes also host nationally syndicated paranormal shows.
Politically liberal talk radio aimed at a national audience also emerged in the mid-2000s. Air America, a network featuring "The Al Franken Show", was founded in 2004. It billed itself as a "progressive alternative" to the conservative talk radio shows.
Some prominent examples of liberal talk radio shows either previously or currently in national syndication include: Dial Global talk show hosts Ed Schultz (left his radio show and is currently on MSNBC TV), Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, and Bill Press; Norman Goldman (not with Dial Global and is a self-described independent) is still included on syndication stations - see WCPT (AM). Goldman began as the high-rating fill-in host and "Senior Legal Analyst" for Ed Schultz prior to launching his own show; The Young Turks; Fox former co-host of Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes, First Amendment Radio Network libertarian host Jon Arthur, and Mike Malloy, progressive radio WFTE FM's Dorothy And Dick, and Premiere's Randi Rhodes (not on radio 2015).
In some markets, local liberal hosts have existed for years, such as the British talk host Michael Jackson (who was on the air at KABC in Los Angeles beginning in 1968 and is currently at KSUR); Bernie Ward in San Francisco; Jack Ellery in New Jersey and Tampa; Dave Ross in Seattle, and Marc Germain in Los Angeles. A few earlier syndicated programs were hosted by prominent Democrats who were not experienced broadcasters, such as Jim Hightower, Jerry Brown, Mario Cuomo and Alan Dershowitz; these met with limited success, and Air America has been faced with various legal and financial problems.
Air America was sold to a new owner in March 2007, hired well-known programmer David Bernstein, and began its "re-birth." Bernstein subsequently left in early 2008, but the struggling network remained on the air with a revamped line-up.
On January 21, 2010, Air America radio ceased live programming citing a difficulty with the current economic environment, and announced that it would file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy production and liquidate itself. The network ended operations on January 25, 2010.
Clear Channel/iHeartMedia, with nearly 1,300 radio stations under its ownership – along with other owners – has in recent years added more liberal talk stations to their portfolio. These have primarily come from the conversion of AM facilities, most of which formerly had adult standards formats. Many complaints (all radio stations are required by the FCC to maintain, in their public files, copies of all correspondence from the public relating to station operations – for a period of three years from receipt) have been received from fans of this musical genre (Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, big band music," etc.) – but the left-leaning talk programming leans toward a much younger demographic, a group that advertisers covet. More recently, however, Clear Channel has been dropping liberal formats in favor of their own Fox Sports Radio network. By 2014, most liberal talk stations had abandoned the format, forcing hosts to find other ways to distribute their programming.
Liberal opinion radio has long existed on the Pacifica network, though only available in a small number of major cities, and in formats that more often act as a volunteer-run community forum than as a platform for charismatic hosts who would be likely to attract a large audience. The one major host to become popular on the network is Amy Goodman, whose "Democracy Now!" interview and journalism program is broadcast nationwide.
Conservative critics have long complained that the long-format news programming on National Public Radio (NPR) shows a liberal bias, although this is disputed by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media criticism organization, which found that, for example, "representatives of think tanks to the right of center outnumbered those to the left of center by more than four to one: 62 appearances to 15."
National Public Radio itself denies any partisan agenda. Politically oriented talk programs on the network are in the mold of "Talk of the Nation", which was designed to be a soundboard for the varied opinions of listeners.
Sports talk radio can be found locally and nationally in the US; as of 2013, five national full-time sports talk networks exist. The oldest existing network, dating to 1991, is SB Nation Radio (although it has only been branded as such since 2016). Market leader ESPN Radio followed shortly thereafter in 1992, followed by Fox Sports Radio ca. 2000 and the near-concurrent entries of CBS Sports Radio and NBC Sports Radio in late 2012 and early 2013. Most of these, however, air on weak, low-budget AM stations; the most successful sports talk stations operate primarily with local programs and supplement their programming with broadcasting of sports events, usually involving the local teams in the major professional sports leagues. This adds significant expenses to the station's operations. Local stations may also hire personalities with polarizing opinions about sports topics and athletes to make some kind of national impact that might turn off listeners, and in large markets, sports talk stations may be made up of personalities who pay stations for their show time and their own advertising, disallowing any natural flow between each program, along with in-station competitions about whose show has the most impact.
Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. This audience is mostly male, middle-aged and conservative. Among those who regularly listen to talk radio, 41% are Republican and 28% are Democrats. Furthermore, 45% describe themselves as conservatives, compared with 18% who say they are progressive/liberals. In 2011, the Arbitron portable people meter ratings system, compiled data suggesting that out of 11 nationally rated radio formats, talk radio had lost nearly the most market share and ratings continue to slide. In 2013, Arbitron's executive summary noted that " 92% of consumers aged 12 years and older listen to the radio each week" and "news-talk-information and talk-personality remained number one in PPM markets and number two in the rest of the U.S."
Three of the five most-listened-to radio programs in the United States are talk radio shows or have talk radio elements: "The Rush Limbaugh Show" (#2), "The Sean Hannity Show" (#3 or #4) and "All Things Considered" (#5).
SW Radio Africa was a pro-democracy station that broadcast out of London, England, from 2001 to 2014.
In Australia, talk radio is known as "talkback radio".
The most popular talkback radio station historically was Sydney's 2UE, whose populist programs like "The John Laws Morning Show", were widely syndicated across the continent. In recent years though, 2UE has been eclipsed by its Sydney rival 2GB after the defection of 2UE most popular talkback host, Alan Jones.
As a result, 2UE (now known as Macquarie Sports Radio 954 and owned by the same company as 2GB) abandoned most of its rigid political and hot topic-driven talkback programming in 2016, moving to a less-serious lifestyle and branded content format, although still maintaining a talkback element.
Melbourne, 3AW is the highest rating talkback radio station, and has also been the highest rating Melbourne radio station for several decades in a row.
6PR personality Garry Meadows was the first announcer to use talkback radio in early 1967. 'Talkback' radio, using a seven-second time lapse mechanism, began in Australia in April 1967, simultaneously on 2SM, Sydney (with Mike Walsh) and 3DB, Melbourne (with Barry Jones).
In the 1990s and 2000s, "talkback" on FM was attempted. "The Spoonman" was a program hosted by Brian Carlton on the triple m network in the late 1990s and returned in 2005 for three and a half years, the show wrapping up in 2008. It was a show that covered many topics, but the "hot talk" format in the U.S. would probably be the best way to describe the program.
Talkback radio has historically been an important political forum in Australia and functions much like the cable news televisions in the United States, with live and "saturated" coverage of political issues.
The most important talk radios in Brazil are CBN and Jovem Pan, which has also sports and news broadcasts.
In contrast to talk radio stations in the United States, where syndicated programs tend to make up a significant part of most schedules, privately owned Canadian talk radio stations tend to be predominantly local in programming and focus. There is no Canadian content requirement for talk radio, or "spoken word", programming, unless the individual station's license expressly stipulates such a requirement; most do not. (In Canada, prospective radio stations may propose certain restrictions on their license in order to gain favor with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and have an easier time obtaining a license.)
The only nationally syndicated, politically oriented weekday talk radio show in Canada is "Charles Adler Tonight", hosted by Charles Adler and heard on eleven stations across the country. Until 2006, Peter Warren's "Warren on the Weekend" was heard Saturdays and Sundays. Both programs are or were distributed by the Corus Radio Network and, coincidentally, both hosts had hosted different morning call-in programs in the same time slot on Winnipeg, Manitoba's CJOB 680 before they became nationally syndicated (Adler's show still originates from CJOB and retained its original title, while Warren was based in Victoria, British Columbia.) Prior to "Charles Adler Tonight", Corus had syndicated "Rutherford", hosted by conservative Dave Rutherford and originating from its Calgary station, CHQR. "Rutherford" is no longer syndicated nationally but continues to air in Calgary, Edmonton, and London.
Other Canadian talk radio programs which have been syndicated to different markets include:
The two largest talk radio networks in Canada are the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's English language CBC Radio One and French language Ici Radio-Canada Première. These stations typically produce their own local morning and afternoon programs and regional noon hour programs to go along with the network programming that is aired during the rest of the day. Both networks are commercial-free. CBC Radio One's flagship national talk program is the weekend "Cross Country Checkup", which has been broadcast since 1965.
CFRA (580 AM) in Ottawa (formerly part of the CHUM network, which is now part of CTV) has a large and dedicated listening audience. The station is heard throughout the Ottawa valley and on the Internet. Several key programs focus on local political and world issues. Christina Sgro offers a bit of both worlds on her show, "Christina's Corner", which has been gaining popularity since its inception in 2010.
Privately owned talk radio syndication networks in Canada are generally formed for the purposes of sharing programs across a group of stations with common ownership, although some are formed to distribute their one or two talk radio programs to a number of stations regardless of ownership. The largest of these is the Corus Radio Network. TSN Radio, the successor to the long-defunct the Team, is one of the newest national networks in Canada, with operations in several major markets.
Syndicated programs from the United States which air on Canadian radio stations are typically non-political shows such as "The Kim Komando Show" and "Coast to Coast AM", as well as sports radio shows from the 24-hour networks in the U.S. Traditionally, politically driven talk radio from the United States does not air on Canadian stations, with a few scattered exceptions (e.g. the now-defunct CFBN, which carried political programming such as the "Glenn Beck Program" and Dennis Miller, and the also-discontinued talk format of CHAM, which carried Miller). Top political programs such as "The Rush Limbaugh Show" are never broadcast on Canadian stations, mainly due to high rights fees compared to their relevance to non-American audiences. American stations near the Canadian border can provide many Canadians with access to American talk programs (the signals of Limbaugh affiliates WJR, WBEN and WHAM, for example, cover almost all of Southern Ontario).
A state owned public channel called YLE Puhe. is broadcast throughout the whole country in Finnish language. The programs include sports and news broadcasts. Its weekly listenership is about 550,000. Finland's first commercial talk station, Radio Rapu, started operations on March 1, 2014.
Talk radio is a popular form of radio entertainment in France, exemplified by Europe 1, RTL and RMC, plus state-owned France Inter. A premier English language talk radio in France is the Gascony Show. Launched in early 2011, this show is broadcast weekly to the Gascony region of the south west of France, as well as to the rest of France via Internet streaming.
Radio talk shows are popular in Germany and have a long tradition. The first talk show on public radio was Werner Höfer's , a political talk begun in 1952. The talk show on wheels Hallo Ü-Wagen ran from 1974 to 2010, begun by Carmen Thomas for WDR.
Talk radio in Italy is popular. Radio 24, part of the group Il Sole 24 Ore privately owned by Confindustria, is the most important commercial "news/talk" talk radio station in the country. Its focus is mainly on independent news about Italian and European economy, finance, culture and politics, but it also hosts programs focusing on sports, personal finance, music, health, science, technology and crowdsourced storytelling. State-owned Rai Radio 3 is mainly dedicated to literature, the arts, classical music and general cultural issues. Several regional stations use a format combining that of all-news and talk radio.
In New Zealand the talk radio format is popularly known as talkback radio. The major radio networks broadcasting in the talk radio format are Newstalk ZB and Radio Live. Their sports sister networks, Radio Sport and TAB Trackside also largely broadcast in talk format. Other stations such as Radio New Zealand National have a large component of talk-based content, but do not have talk-back (i.e. listener phone-ins).
Newstalk ZB is the New Zealand market leader, but Radio Live is continuing to try to establish itself with a greater presence in the talk radio market since its inception in 2005.
Almost all AM radio stations are talk stations. A few stations from Radio Mindanao Network and Bombo Radyo are on FM. Radyo 5 News FM is the first talk radio station in the Philippines.
There is two talk radio station in Poland, called TOK FM, which is owned by Agora SA, a Polish media company. Its programmes are broadcast in 10 large cities including Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk, Poznan and Katowice. The programme is also available via Internet and transmitted by the Hot Bird constellation. It was founded in 1998 as "Inforadio"
Second talk radio station called Radio Wnet, which is owned by Radio Wnet sp. z o.o., a Polish media company. Its programmes are broadcast in 2 large cities including Warsaw (87.8 MHz), Cracow (95,2 MHz). The programme is available via Internet. It was founded in 25 May 2009 by Krzysztof Skowroński, Grzegorz Wasowski, Katarzyna Adamiak-Sroczyńska and Monika Makowska-Wasowska, Wojciech Cejrowski and Jerzy Jachowicz.
Talk radio in Spain is very popular, where the most important radio stations are exclusively dedicated to talk shows, such as Cadena Ser, Cadena Cope, Onda Cero, Radio Nacional or Punto Radio. There is a very wide variety of topics, such as politics, sport, comedy and culture.
Sport talk shows are particularly relevant, since football attracts a massive interest in Spain, with a special focus on FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF, and the men's national football team. Typically the programming of main talk radio stations is modified whenever there is a major football event, such as a La Liga or a national team match. Daily late night sport (football) talk shows are also very relevant, with a very intense competition of the radio stations in this time slot, which typically starts around midnight.
Comedy morning talk shows are also very popular in music radio stations (40 principales, M80 radio, Europa FM, and others), where there is strong competition since it is also a very important time slot, when typically people going to the workplace listen to the radio in their cars early in the morning (around 7am to 8am).
As Spain has large English speaking communities from many different countries, it is a natural place for English language talk radio broadcasting.
The first Talk radio station in English was Coastline Radio broadcasting from Nerja, Costa del Sol. It is now a music station. A group of English expats set up OCI International in the early 1990s. Based in Marbella on the Costa del Sol, it was owned by the ONCE National Spanish Network. It provided a link for the English speaking expats living on the coast, as well as some content for Scandinavian expats. OCI was closed down in 2007 to make way for Radio Europa music. In 2004 REM FM began broadcasting, with shows mostly fronted by former OCI presenters. The station closed in 2008.
In 2008, Talk Radio Europe began broadcasting. It offers a 24-hour schedule of news, interviews, discussion and debate and is a World Media Partner with BBC World Service and is affiliated to IRN/SKY News. Talk Radio Europe broadcasts in FM on the Costa del Sol, Costa Almeria, Costa Blanca and across the island of Mallorca in English. It is available on the Internet and on all smartphone platforms.
Talk radio in the United Kingdom is popular, though not as much as music radio. Nationwide talk stations include BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio 4 Extra, Talkradio and Talksport. Regional stations include BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio Wales. Many BBC Local Radio stations and some commercial stations offer a talk format, for example, BBC Radio London, the BBC's flagship local station. Other notable commercial talk stations include London's LBC which pioneered the newstalk format in Europe. LBC currently operates two services – LBC, a newstalk station on FM (London) and via several digital platforms nationally including DAB and Freeview; and LBC News, a rolling news station on AM in London and DAB+ nationally. There are many specialised talk services such as Bloomberg, a financial news station and Asian Radio Live.
Talk radio expanded dramatically when the BBC's monopoly on radio broadcasting was ended in the 1970s with the launch of Independent Local Radio.
Some notable British talk radio presenters include Jenni Murray, John Humphrys, Martha Kearney, Jonathan Dimbleby, Libby Purves, Laurie Taylor, Pam Ayres, Melvyn Bragg, Tommy Boyd, James Whale, Steve Allen, Nick Abbot, Iain Lee, James Stannage, George Galloway, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Ian Collins, John Nicoll, Brian Hayes, Scottie McClue, James O'Brien, Nicky Campbell and Simon Mayo. Pete Price on CityTalk is also known as the DJ who rushed to the aid of a regular caller who died live on air during a call. Previously, he had kept a teenager talking for 45 minutes before meeting him to convince him not to commit suicide.
Thyroid
The thyroid, or thyroid gland, is an endocrine gland in the neck consisting of two connected lobes. The lower two thirds of the lobes are connected by a thin band of tissue called the thyroid isthmus. The thyroid is located at the front of the neck, below the Adam's apple. Microscopically, the functional unit of the thyroid gland is the spherical thyroid follicle, lined with follicular cells (thyrocytes), and occasional parafollicular cells that surround a lumen containing colloid. The thyroid gland secretes three hormones: the two thyroid hormones – triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) – and a peptide hormone, calcitonin. The thyroid hormones influence the metabolic rate and protein synthesis, and in children, growth and development. Calcitonin plays a role in calcium homeostasis. Secretion of the two thyroid hormones is regulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which is secreted from the anterior pituitary gland. TSH is regulated by thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH), which is produced by the hypothalamus.
The thyroid gland develops in the floor of the pharynx at the base of the tongue at 3–4 weeks gestation; it then descends in front of the pharyngeal gut, and ultimately over the next few weeks, it migrates to the base of the neck. During migration, the thyroid remains connected to the tongue by a narrow canal, the thyroglossal duct. At the end of the fifth week the thyroglossal duct degenerates, and over the following two weeks the detached thyroid migrates to its final position.
Thyroid disorders include hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, thyroid inflammation (thyroiditis), thyroid enlargement (goitre), thyroid nodules, and thyroid cancer. Hyperthyroidism is characterized by excessive secretion of thyroid hormones: the most common cause is the autoimmune disorder Graves' disease. Hypothyroidism is characterized by a deficient secretion of thyroid hormones: the most common cause is iodine deficiency. In iodine-deficient regions, hypothyroidism secondary to iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable intellectual disability in children. In iodine-sufficient regions, the most common cause of hypothyroidism is the autoimmune disorder Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
The presence of the thyroid and its various diseases have been noted and treated for thousands of years, although the gland itself has only been described and named since the Renaissance. Knowledge of the thyroid, its biochemistry, and its disorders developed throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many modern treatments and investigative modalities evolved throughout the mid-twentieth century, including refinement of surgical techniques for thyroid removal (thyroidectomy) for the treatment of goitre; the use of radioactive iodine and thiouracil for the treatment of Graves' disease; and fine needle aspiration for diagnosis of thyroid nodules.
The thyroid gland is a butterfly-shaped organ composed of two lobes, left and right, connected by a narrow isthmus. It weighs 25 grams in adults, with each lobe being about 5 cm long, 3 cm wide, and 2 cm thick, and the isthmus about 1.25 cm in height and width. The gland is usually larger in women than in men, and increases in size during pregnancy.
The thyroid is near the front of the neck, lying against and around the front of the larynx and trachea. The thyroid cartilage and cricoid cartilage lie just above the gland, below the Adam's apple. The isthmus extends from the second to third rings of the trachea, with the uppermost part of the lobes extending to the thyroid cartilage and the lowermost around the fourth to sixth tracheal rings. The infrahyoid muscles lie in front of the gland and the sternocleidomastoid muscle to the side. Behind the outer wings of the thyroid lie the two carotid arteries. The trachea, larynx, lower pharynx and esophagus all lie behind the thyroid. In this region, the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the inferior thyroid artery pass next to or in the ligament. Typically, four parathyroid glands, two on each side, lie on each side between the two layers of the thyroid capsule, at the back of the thyroid lobes.
The thyroid gland is covered by a thin fibrous capsule, which has an inner and an outer layer. The inner layer extrudes into the gland and forms the septae that divides the thyroid tissue into microscopic lobules. The outer layer is continuous with the pretracheal fascia, attaching the gland to the cricoid and thyroid cartilages via a thickening of the fascia to form the posterior suspensory ligament of thyroid gland, also known as Berry's ligament. This causes the thyroid to move up and down with the movement of these cartilages when swallowing occurs.
The thyroid is supplied with arterial blood from the superior thyroid artery, a branch of the external carotid artery, and the inferior thyroid artery, a branch of the thyrocervical trunk, and sometimes by an anatomical variant the thyroid ima artery, which has a variable origin. The superior thyroid artery splits into anterior and posterior branches supplying the thyroid, and the inferior thyroid artery splits into superior and inferior branches. The superior and inferior thyroid arteries join together behind the outer part of the thyroid lobes. The venous blood is drained via superior and middle thyroid veins, which drain to the internal jugular vein, and via the inferior thyroid veins. The inferior thyroid veins originate in a network of veins and drain into the left and right brachiocephalic veins. Both arteries and veins form a plexus between the two layers of the capsule of the thyroid gland.
Lymphatic drainage frequently passes the prelaryngeal lymph nodes (located just above the isthmus), and the pretracheal and paratracheal lymph nodes. The gland receives sympathetic nerve supply from the superior, middle and inferior cervical ganglion of the sympathetic trunk. The gland receives parasympathetic nerve supply from the superior laryngeal nerve and the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
There are many variants in the size and shape of the thyroid gland, and in the position of the embedded parathyroid glands.
Sometimes there is a third lobe present called the "pyramidal lobe". When present, this lobe often stretches up the hyoid bone from the thyroid isthmus and may be one to several divided lobes. The presence of this lobe ranges in reported studies from 18.3% to 44.6%. It was shown to more often arise from the left side and occasionally separated. The pyramidal lobe is also known as Lalouette's pyramid. The pyramidal lobe is a remnant of the thyroglossal duct, which usually wastes away during the thyroid gland's descent. Small accessory thyroid glands may in fact occur anywhere along the thyroglossal duct, from the foramen cecum of the tongue to the position of the thyroid in the adult. A small horn at the back of the thyroid lobes, usually close to the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the inferior thyroid artery, is called Zuckerkandl's tubercle.
Other variants include a levator muscle of thyroid gland, connecting the isthmus to the body of the hyoid bone, and the presence of the small thyroid ima artery.
At the microscopic level, there are three primary features of the thyroid—follicles, follicular cells, and parafollicular cells, first discovered by Geoffery Websterson in 1664.
Thyroid follicles are small spherical groupings of cells 0.02–0.9mm in diameter that play the main role in thyroid function. They consist of a rim that has a rich blood supply, nerve and lymphatic presence, that surrounds a core of colloid that consists mostly of thyroid hormone precursor proteins called thyroglobulin, an iodinated glycoprotein.
The core of a follicle is surrounded by a single layer of follicular cells. When stimulated by thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), these secrete the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. They do this by transporting and metabolising the thyroglobulin contained in the colloid. Follicular cells vary in shape from flat to cuboid to columnar, depending on how active they are.
Scattered among follicular cells and in spaces between the spherical follicles are another type of thyroid cell, parafollicular cells. These cells secrete calcitonin and so are also called C cells.
In the development of the embryo, at 3–4 weeks gestational age, the thyroid gland appears as an epithelial proliferation in the floor of the pharynx at the base of the tongue between the tuberculum impar and the copula linguae. The copula soon becomes covered over by the hypopharyngeal eminence at a point later indicated by the foramen cecum. The thyroid then descends in front of the pharyngeal gut as a bilobed diverticulum through the thyroglossal duct. Over the next few weeks, it migrates to the base of the neck, passing in front of the hyoid bone. During migration, the thyroid remains connected to the tongue by a narrow canal, the thyroglossal duct. At the end of the fifth week the thyroglossal duct degenerates, and over the following two weeks the detached thyroid migrates to its final position.
The fetal hypothalamus and pituitary start to secrete thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH). TSH is first measurable at 11 weeks. By 18–20 weeks, the production of thyroxine (T4) reaches a clinically significant and self-sufficient level. Fetal triiodothyronine (T3) remains low, less than 15 ng/dL until 30 weeks, and increases to 50 ng/dL at full-term. The fetus needs to be self-sufficient in thyroid hormones in order to guard against neurodevelopmental disorders that would arise from maternal hypothyroidism. The presence of sufficient iodine is essential for healthy neurodevelopment.
The neuroendocrine parafollicular cells, also known as C cells, responsible for the production of calcitonin, are derived from foregut endoderm. This part of the thyroid then first forms as the ultimopharyngeal body, which begins in the ventral fourth pharyngeal pouch and joins the primordial thyroid gland during its descent to its final location.
Aberrations in prenatal development can result in various forms of thyroid dysgenesis which can cause congenital hypothyroidism, and if untreated this can lead to cretinism.
The primary function of the thyroid is the production of the iodine-containing thyroid hormones, triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) and the peptide hormone calcitonin. The thyroid hormones are created from iodine and tyrosine. T3 is so named because it contains three atoms of iodine per molecule and T4 contains four atoms of iodine per molecule. The thyroid hormones have a wide range of effects on the human body. These include:
After secretion, only a very small proportion of the thyroid hormones travel freely in the blood. Most are bound to thyroxine-binding globulin (about 70%), transthyretin (10%), and albumin (15%). Only the 0.03% of T4 and 0.3% of T3 traveling freely have hormonal activity. In addition, up to 85% of the T3 in blood is produced following conversion from T4 by iodothyronine deiodinases in organs around the body.
Thyroid hormones act by crossing the cell membrane and binding to intracellular nuclear thyroid hormone receptors TR-α1,TR-α2,TR-β1 and TR-β2, which bind with hormone response elements and transcription factors to modulate DNA transcription. In addition to these actions on DNA, the thyroid hormones also act within the cell membrane or within cytoplasm via reactions with enzymes, including calcium ATPase, adenylyl cyclase, and glucose transporters.
The thyroid hormones are created from thyroglobulin. This is a protein within the colloid in the follicular lumen that is originally created within the rough endoplasmic reticulum of follicular cells and then transported into the follicular lumen. Thyroglobulin contains 123 units of tyrosine, which reacts with iodine within the follicular lumen.
Iodine is essential for the production of the thyroid hormones. Iodine (I0) travels in the blood as iodide (I−), which is taken up into the follicular cells by a sodium-iodide symporter. This is an ion channel on the cell membrane which in the same action transports two sodium ions and an iodide ion into the cell. Iodide then travels from within the cell into the lumen, through the action of pendrin, an iodide-chloride antiporter. In the follicular lumen, the iodide is then oxidized to iodine. This makes it more reactive, and the iodine is attached to the active tyrosine units in thyroglobulin by the enzyme thyroid peroxidase. This forms the precursors of thyroid hormones monoiodotyrosine (MIT), and diiodotyrosine (DIT).
When the follicular cells are stimulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone, the follicular cells reabsorb thyroglobulin from the follicular lumen. The iodinated tyrosines are cleaved, forming the thyroid hormones T4, T3, DIT, MIT, and traces of reverse triiodothyronine. T3 and T4 are released into the blood. The hormones secreted from the gland are about 80–90% T4 and about 10–20% T3. Deiodinase enzymes in peripheral tissues remove the iodine from MIT and DIT and convert T4 to T3 and RT3. This is a major source of both RT3 (95%) and T3 (87%) in peripheral tissues.
The production of thyroxine and triiodothyronine is primarily regulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), released by the anterior pituitary gland. TSH release in turn is stimulated by thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRH), released in a pulsatile manner from the hypothalamus. The thyroid hormones provide negative feedback to the thyrotropes TSH and TRH: when the thyroid hormones are high, TSH production is suppressed. This negative feedback also occurs when levels of TSH are high, causing TRH production to be suppressed.
TRH is secreted at an increased rate in situations such as cold exposure in order to stimulate thermogenesis. In addition to being suppressed by the presence of thyroid hormones, TSH production is blunted by dopamine, somatostatin, and glucocorticoids.
The thyroid gland also produces the hormone calcitonin, which helps regulate blood calcium levels. Parafollicular cells produce calcitonin in response to high blood calcium. Calcitonin decreases the release of calcium from bone, by decreasing the activity of osteoclasts, cells which break down bone. Bone is constantly reabsorbed by osteoclasts and created by osteoblasts, so calcitonin effectively stimulates movement of calcium into bone. The effects of calcitonin are opposite those of the parathyroid hormone (PTH) produced in the parathyroid glands. However, calcitonin seems far less essential than PTH, since calcium metabolism remains clinically normal after removal of the thyroid (thyroidectomy), but not the parathyroid glands.
About 20,000 protein coding genes are expressed in human cells: 70% of these genes are expressed in thyroid cells. Two-hundred fifty of these genes are more specifically expressed in the thyroid, and about 20 genes are highly thyroid specific. In the follicular cells, the proteins synthesized by these genes direct thyroid hormone synthesis - thyroglobulin, TPO, and IYD; while in the parafollicular c-cells, they direct calcitonin synthesis - CALCA, and CALCB.
General practitioners, family physicians, and internal medicine specialists play a role in identifying and monitoring the treatment of thyroid disease. Endocrinologists and thyroidologists are thyroid specialists. Thyroid surgeons or otolaryngologists are responsible for the surgical management of thyroid disease.
Excessive production of the thyroid hormones is called hyperthyroidism. Causes include Graves' disease, toxic multinodular goitre, solitary thyroid adenoma, inflammation, and a pituitary adenoma which secretes excess TSH. Another cause is excess iodine availability, either from excess ingestion, induced by the drug amiodarone, or following iodinated contrast imaging.
Hyperthyroidism often causes a variety of non-specific symptoms including weight loss, increased appetite, insomnia, decreased tolerance of heat, tremor, palpitations, anxiety and nervousness. In some cases it can cause chest pain, diarrhoea, hair loss and muscle weakness. Such symptoms may be managed temporarily with drugs such as beta blockers.
Long-term management of hyperthyroidism may include drugs that suppress thyroid function such as propylthiouracil, carbimazole and methimazole. Alternatively, radioactive iodine-131 can be used to destroy thyroid tissue: radioactive iodine is selectively taken up by thyroid cells, which over time destroys them. The chosen first-line treatment will depend on the individual and on the country where being treated. Surgery to remove the thyroid can sometimes be performed as a transoral thyroidectomy, a minimally-invasive procedure. Surgery does however carry a risk of damage to the parathyroid glands and the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which innervates the vocal cords. If the entire thyroid gland is removed, hypothyroidism will inevitably result, and thyroid hormone substitutes will be needed.
An underactive thyroid gland results in hypothyroidism. Typical symptoms are abnormal weight gain, tiredness, constipation, heavy menstrual bleeding, hair loss, cold intolerance, and a slow heart rate. Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of hypothyroidism worldwide, and the autoimmune disease Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common cause in the developed world. Other causes include congenital abnormalities, diseases causing transient inflammation, surgical removal or radioablation of the thyroid, the drugs amiodarone and lithium, amyloidosis, and sarcoidosis. Some forms of hypothyroidism can result in myxedema and severe cases can result in myxedema coma.
Hypothyroidism is managed with replacement of the hormone thyroxine. This is usually given daily as an oral supplement, and may take a few weeks to become effective. Some causes of hypothyroidism, such as Postpartum thyroiditis and Subacute thyroiditis may be transient and pass over time, and other causes such as iodine deficiency may be able to be rectified with dietary supplementation.
Graves' disease is an autoimmune disorder that is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism. In Graves' disease, for an unknown reason autoantibodies develop against the thyroid stimulating hormone receptor. These antibodies activate the receptor, leading to development of a goitre and symptoms of hyperthyroidism, such as heat intolerance, weight loss, diarrhoea and palpitations. Occasionally such antibodies block but do not activate the receptor, leading to symptoms associated with hypothyroidism. In addition, gradual protrusion of the eyes may occur, called Graves' ophthalmopathy, as may swelling of the front of the shins. Graves' disease can be diagnosed by the presence of pathomnomonic features such as involvement of the eyes and shins, or isolation of autoantibodies, or by results of a radiolabelled uptake scan. Graves' disease is treated with anti-thyroid drugs such as propylthiouracil, which decrease the production of thyroid hormones, but hold a high rate of relapse. If there is no involvement of the eyes, then use of radioactive isotopes to ablate the gland may be considered. Surgical removal of the gland with subsequent thyroid hormone replacement may be considered, however this will not control symptoms associated with the eye or skin.
Thyroid nodules are often found on the gland, with a prevalence of 4–7%. The majority of nodules do not cause any symptoms, thyroid hormone secretion is normal, and they are non-cancerous. Non-cancerous cases include simple cysts, colloid nodules, and thyroid adenomas. Malignant nodules, which only occur in about 5% of nodules, include follicular, papillary, medullary carcinomas and metastases from other sites Nodules are more likely in females, those who are exposed to radiation, and in those who are iodine deficient.
When a nodule is present, thyroid function tests determine whether the nodule is secreting excess thyroid hormones, causing hyperthyroidism. When the thyroid function tests are normal, an ultrasound is often used to investigate the nodule, and provide information such as whether the nodule is fluid-filled or a solid mass, and whether the appearance is suggestive of a benign or malignant cancer. A needle aspiration biopsy may then be performed, and the sample undergoes cytology, in which the appearance of cells is viewed to determine whether they resemble normal or cancerous cells.
The presence of multiple nodules is called a multinodular goitre; and if it is associated with hyperthyroidism, it is called a toxic multinodular goitre.
An enlarged thyroid gland is called a goitre. Goitres are present in some form in about 5% of people, and are the result of a large number of causes, including iodine deficiency, autoimmune disease (both Graves' disease and Hashimoto's thyroiditis), infection, inflammation, and infiltrative disease such as sarcoidosis and amyloidosis. Sometimes no cause can be found, a state called "simple goitre".
Some forms of goitre are associated with pain, whereas many do not cause any symptoms. Enlarged goitres may extend beyond the normal position of the thyroid gland to below the sternum, around the airway or esophagus. Goitres may be associated with hyperthyoidism or hypothyroidism, relating to the underlying cause of the goitre. Thyroid function tests may be done to investigate the cause and effects of the goitre. The underlying cause of the goitre may be treated, however many goitres with no associated symptoms are simply monitored.
Inflammation of the thyroid is called thyroiditis, and may cause symptoms of hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism. Two types of thyroiditis initially present with hyperthyroidism and are sometimes followed by a period of hypothyroidism – Hashimoto's thyroiditis and postpartum thyroiditis. There are other disorders that cause inflammation of the thyroid, and these include subacute thyroiditis, acute thyroiditis, silent thyroiditis, Riedel's thyroiditis and traumatic injury, including palpation thyroiditis.
Hashimoto's thyroiditis is an autoimmune disorder in which the thyroid gland is infiltrated by the lymphocytes B-cell and T-cells. These progressively destroy the thyroid gland. In this way, Hasimoto's thyroiditis may have occurred insidiously, and only be noticed when thyroid hormone production decreases, causing symptoms of hypothyroidism. Hashimoto's is more common in females than males, much more common after the age of 60, and has known genetic risk factors. Also more common in individuals with Hashimoto's thyroiditis are type 1 diabetes, pernicious anaemia, Addison's disease vitiligo.
Postpartum thyroiditis occurs in some females following childbirth. After delivery, the gland becomes inflamed and the condition initially presents with a period of hyperthyroidism followed by hypothyroidism and, usually, a return to normal function. The course of the illness takes place over several months, and is characterised by a painless goitre. Antibodies against thyroid peroxidase can be found on testing. The inflammation usually resolves without treatment, although thyroid hormone replacement may be needed during the period of hypothyroidism.
The most common neoplasm affecting the thyroid gland is a benign adenoma, usually presenting as a painless mass in the neck. Malignant thyroid cancers are most often carcinomas, although cancer can occur in any tissue that the thyroid consists of, including cancer of C-cells and lymphomas. Cancers from other sites also rarely lodge in the thyroid. Radiation of the head and neck presents a risk factor for thyroid cancer, and cancer is more common in women than men, occurring at a rate of about 2:1.
In most cases, thyroid cancer presents as a painless mass in the neck. It is very unusual for thyroid cancers to present with other symptoms, although in some cases cancer may cause hyperthyroidism. Most malignant thyroid cancers are papillary, followed by follicular, medullary, and thyroid lymphoma. Because of the prominence of the thyroid gland, cancer is often detected earlier in the course of disease as the cause of a nodule, which may undergo fine needle aspiration. Thyroid function tests will help reveal whether the nodule produces excess thyroid hormones. A radioactive iodine uptake test can help reveal the activity and location of the cancer and metastases.
Thyroid cancers are treated by removing the whole or part of thyroid gland. Radioactive Iodine 131 may be given to radioablate the thyroid. Thyroxine is given to replace the hormones lost and to suppress TSH production, as TSH may stimulate recurrence. With the exception of the rare anaplastic thyroid cancer, which carries a very poor prognosis, most thyroid cancers carry an excellent prognosis and can even be considered curable.
A persistent thyroglossal duct is the most common clinically significant congenital disorder of the thyroid gland. A persistent sinus tract may remain as a vestigial remnant of the tubular development of the thyroid gland. Parts of this tube may be obliterated, leaving small segments to form thyroglossal cysts. Preterm neonates are at risk of hypothyroidism as their thyroid glands are insufficiently developed to meet their postnatal needs. In order to detect hypothyroidism in newborn babies, to prevent growth and development abnormalities in later life, many countries have newborn screening programs at birth.
Infants with thyroid hormone deficiency (congenital hypothyroidism) can manifest problems of physical growth and development as well as brain development, termed cretinism. Children with congenital hypothyroidism are treated supplementally with levothyroxine, which facilitates normal growth and development.
Mucinous, clear secretions may collect within these cysts to form either spherical masses or fusiform swellings, rarely larger than 2 to 3 cm in diameter. These are present in the midline of the neck anterior to the trachea. Segments of the duct and cysts that occur high in the neck are lined by stratified squamous epithelium, which is essentially identical to that covering the posterior portion of the tongue in the region of the foramen cecum. The disorders that occur in the lower neck more proximal to the thyroid gland are lined by epithelium resembling the thyroidal acinar epithelium. Characteristically, next to the lining epithelium, there is an intense lymphocytic infiltrate. Superimposed infection may convert these lesions into abscess cavities, and rarely, give rise to cancers.
Another disorder is that of thyroid dysgenesis which can result in various presentations of one or more misplaced accessory thyroid glands. These can be asymptomatic.
Iodine deficiency, most common in inland and mountainous areas, can predispose to goitre – if widespread, known as endemic goitre. Pregnant women deficient of iodine can give birth to infants with thyroid hormone deficiency. The use of iodised salt to add iodine to the diet has eliminated endemic cretinism in most developed countries, and over 120 countries have made the iodination of salt mandatory.
Because the thyroid concentrates iodine, it also concentrates the various radioactive isotopes of iodine produced by nuclear fission. In the event of large accidental releases of such material into the environment, the uptake of radioactive iodine isotopes by the thyroid can, in theory, be blocked by saturating the uptake mechanism with a large surplus of non-radioactive iodine, taken in the form of potassium iodide tablets. One consequence of the Chernobyl disaster was an increase in thyroid cancers in children in the years following the accident.
Excessive iodine intake is uncommon and usually has no effect on the thyroid function. Sometimes though it may cause hyperthyroidism, and sometimes hypothyroidism with a resulting goitre.
The thyroid is examined by observation of the gland and surrounding neck for swelling or enlargement. It is then felt, usually from behind, and a person is often asked to swallow to better feel the gland against the fingers of the examiner. The gland moves up and down with swallowing because of its attachments to the thyroid and cricoid cartilages. In a healthy person the gland is not visible yet is palpable as a soft mass. Examination of the thyroid gland includes the search for abnormal masses and the assessment of overall thyroid size. The character of the thyroid, swellings, nodules, and their consistency may all be able to be felt. If a goitre is present, an examiner may also feel down the neck consider tapping the upper part of the chest to check for extension. Further tests may include raising the arms (Pemberton's sign), listening to the gland with a stethoscope for bruits, testing of reflexes, and palpation of the lymph nodes in the head and neck.
An examination of the thyroid will also include observation of the person as a whole, to look for systemic signs such as weight gain or loss, hair loss, and signs in other locations – such as protrusion of the eyes or swelling of the calves in Graves' disease.
Thyroid function tests include a battery of blood tests, including the measurement of the thyroid hormones, as well as the measurement of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). They may reveal hyperthyroidism (high T3 and T4), hypothyroidism (low T3, T4), or subclinical hyperthyroidism (normal T3 and T4 with a low TSH).
TSH levels are considered the most sensitive marker of thyroid dysfunction. They are however not always accurate, particularly if the cause of hypothyroidism is thought to be related to insufficient thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRH) secretion, in which case it may be low or falsely normal. In such a case a TRH stimulation test, in which TRH is given and TSH levels are measured at 30 and 60-minutes after, may be conducted.
T3 and T4 can be measured directly. However, as the two thyroid hormones travel bound to other molecules, and it is the "free" component that is biologically active, free T3 and free T4 levels can be measured. T4 is preferred, because in hypothyroidism T3 levels may be normal. The ratio of bound to unbound thyroid hormones is known as the thyroid hormone binding ratio (THBR). It is also possible to measure directly the main carriers of the thyroid hormones, thryoglobulin and throxine-binding globulin. Thyroglobulin will also be measurable in a healthy thyroid, and will increase with inflammation, and may also be used to measure the success of thyroid removal or ablation. If successful, thyroglobulin should be undetectable. Lastly, antibodies against components of the thyroid, particularly anti-TPO and anti-thyroglobulin, can be measured. These may be present in normal individuals but are highly sensitive for autoimmune-related disease.
Ultrasound of the thyroid may be used to reveal whether structures are solid or filled with fluid, helping to differentiate between nodules and goitres and cysts. It may also help differentiate between malignant and benign lesions.
When further imaging is required, a radiolabelled iodine-123 or technetium-99 uptake scan may take place. This can determine the size and shape of lesions, reveal whether nodules or goitres are metabolically active, and reveal and monitor sites of thyroid disease or cancer deposits outside the thyroid.
A fine needle aspiration of a sample of thyroid tissue may be taken in order to evaluate a lesion seen on ultrasound which is then sent for histopathology and cytology.
Computed tomography of the thyroid plays an important role in the evaluation of thyroid cancer. CT scans often incidentally find thyroid abnormalities, and thereby practically becomes the first investigation modality.
The presence and diseases of the thyroid have been noted and treated for thousands of years. In 1600 BCE burnt sponge and seaweed (which contain iodine) were used within China for the treatment of goitres, a practice which has developed in many parts of the world. In Ayurvedic medicine, the book Sushruta Samhita written about 1400 BCE described hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism and goitre. Aristotle and Xenophon in the fifth century BCE describe cases of diffuse toxic goitre. Hippocrates and Plato in the fourth century BCE provided some of the first descriptions of the gland itself, proposing its function as a salivary gland. Pliny the Elder in the first century BCE referred to epidemics of goitre in the Alps and proposed treatment with burnt seaweed, a practice also referred to by Galen in the second century, referred to burnt sponge for the treatment of goitre. The Chinese pharmacology text "Shennong Ben Cao Jing", written ca. 200-250, also refers to goitre.
In 1500 polymath Leonardo da Vinci provided the first illustration of the thyroid. In 1543 anatomist Andreas Vesalius gave the first anatomic description and illustration of the gland. In 1656 the thyroid received its name, by the anatomist Thomas Wharton. The gland was named thyroid, meaning shield, as its shape resembled the shields commonly used in Ancient Greece. The English name "thyroid gland" is derived from the medical Latin used by Wharton – "glandula thyreoidea". "Glandula" means "gland" in Latin, and "thyreoidea" can be traced back to the Ancient Greek word θυρεοειδής, meaning "shield-like"/"shield-shaped".
French chemist Bernard Courtois discovered iodine in 1811, and in 1896 Eugen Baumann documented it as the central ingredient in the thryoid gland. He did this by boiling the thyroid glands of a thousand sheep, and named the precipitate, a combination of the thyroid hormones, 'iodothyrin'. David Marine in 1907 proved that iodine is necessary for thyroid function.
Graves' disease was described by Robert James Graves in 1834. The role of the thyroid gland in metabolism was demonstrated in 1895 by Adolf Magnus-Levy. Thyroxine was first isolated in 1914 and synthesized in 1927, and triiodothyroxine in 1952. The conversion of T4 to T3 was discovered in 1970. The process of discovering TSH took place over the early to mid twentieth century. TRH was discovered by Polish endocrinologist Andrew Schally in 1970, contributing in part to his Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1977.
In the nineteenth century numerous authors described both cretinism and myxedema, and their relationship to the thyroid. Charles Mayo coined the term hyperthyroidism in 1910. Hakaru Hashimoto documented a case of Hashimoto's thyroiditis in 1912, antibodies in this disease were demonstrated in 1956. Knowledge of the thyroid and its conditions developed throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with many modern treatments and investigative modalities evolving throughout the mid twentieth century, including the use of radioactive iodine, thiouracil and fine needle aspiration.
Either Aetius in the sixth century CE or Persian Ali ibn Abbas al-Magusi in 990 CE conducted the first recorded thyroidectomy as a treatment for goitre. Operations remained risky and generally were not successful until the 19th century, when descriptions emerged from a number of authors including Prussian surgeon Theodor Billroth, Swiss surgeon and physiologist Theodor Kocher, American physician Charles Mayo, American surgeons William Halsted and George Crile. These descriptions provided the basis for modern thyroid surgery. Theodor Kocher went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1909 "for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland".
The thyroid gland is found in all vertebrates. In fish, it is usually located below the gills and is not always divided into distinct lobes. However, in some teleosts, patches of thyroid tissue are found elsewhere in the body, associated with the kidneys, spleen, heart, or eyes.
In tetrapods, the thyroid is always found somewhere in the neck region. In most tetrapod species, there are two paired thyroid glands – that is, the right and left lobes are not joined together. However, there is only ever a single thyroid gland in most mammals, and the shape found in humans is common to many other species.
In larval lampreys, the thyroid originates as an exocrine gland, secreting its hormones into the gut, and associated with the larva's filter-feeding apparatus. In the adult lamprey, the gland separates from the gut, and becomes endocrine, but this path of development may reflect the evolutionary origin of the thyroid. For instance, the closest living relatives of vertebrates, the tunicates and "Amphioxus", have a structure very similar to that of larval lampreys (the endostyle), and this also secretes iodine-containing compounds, though not thyroxine.
Thyroxine is critical to metabolic regulation, and growth throughout the animal kingdom. Iodine and T4 trigger the change from a plant-eating water-dwelling tadpole into a meat-eating land-dwelling frog, with better neurological, visuospatial, smell and cognitive abilities for hunting, as seen in other predatory animals. A similar phenomenon happens in the neotenic amphibian salamanders, which, without introducing iodine, don't transform into land-dwelling adults, and live and reproduce in the larval form of aquatic axolotl. Among amphibians, administering a thyroid-blocking agent such as propylthiouracil (PTU) can prevent tadpoles from metamorphosing into frogs; in contrast, administering thyroxine will trigger metamorphosis. In amphibian metamorphosis, thyroxine and iodine also exert a well-studied experimental model of apoptosis on the cells of gills, tail, and fins of tadpoles. Iodine, via iodolipids, has favored the evolution of terrestrial animal species and has likely played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain.
The Singularity (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
"The Singularity" is the eighteenth episode of the third season of the American television series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", based on the Marvel Comics organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), revolving around the character of Phil Coulson and his team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents as they attempt to defeat Hive. It is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), sharing continuity with the films of the franchise. The episode was written by Lauren LeFranc, and directed by Garry A. Brown.
Clark Gregg reprises his role as Coulson from the film series, and is joined by series regulars Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, Elizabeth Henstridge, Henry Simmons, and Luke Mitchell.
"The Singularity" originally aired on ABC on April 26, 2016, and according to Nielsen Media Research, was watched by 3.22 million viewers.
S.H.I.E.L.D. scrambles to repair the damage Daisy did to the base, while Coulson, who sustained a leg injury, resolves to defeat Hive and save Daisy. Fitz, Simmons and Lincoln determine that the effect of Hive's infection will prevent those Inhumans he controls from being sedated. Realizing Alisha would be a powerful asset to Hive, Coulson, May and Lincoln visit her, only to find she has already been infected and has gone with Hive, leaving her duplicates to attack them. After the duplicates are killed, Coulson orders Lincoln to stay out of the field until they have a cure for Hive's infection.
Hive and Daisy approach James, revealing they know he has another Kree artefact connected to the orb, which Hive describes as the only thing that can destroy him. They induce his Terrigenesis, giving him the ability to explosively charge objects (in a similar manner to an Extremis combustion), and Hive enthrals him, learning he buried the companion artifact beneath his home. Daisy's use of her seismokinetic powers to unearth the artefact attracts the attention of SHIELD, and Coulson and May arrive to find the Inhumans already gone, along with the artefact. The hut is destroyed by a planted bomb, but Coulson protects himself and May with an energy shield projected from his robotic hand.
Meanwhile, Fitz, Simmons and Mack decide to seek out Holden Radcliffe, who was in charge of Transia's work against invasive organisms, before he was fired for his transhumanist beliefs. While continuing to discuss how to proceed with their relationship, Fitz and Simmons infiltrate a transhumanist social club to find Radcliffe, under the guise of geneticists wanting to sell him eye prosthetic technology based on those used for Project Deathlok. Upon meeting Radcliffe they reveal their true intentions and ask for his help to devise a cure for Hive's infection, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Hive himself and his Inhuman allies. Alisha abducts Radcliffe, while Daisy subdues Fitz with her powers and warns him of her vision of an agent's death, wanting S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop trying to combat Hive, and avoid that future from coming to pass. Mack narrowly escapes James, and Hive approaches Simmons, speaking to her as Will, using his memories, only for her to shoot him and escape, after deriding him for trying to be someone he murdered. The three agents reconvene at a hotel, where Fitz and Simmons finally consummate their relationship while Mack "goes to the quinjet" (purposely leaving them alone for a while).
Under Coulson's direction, Talbot and the ATCU use information Malick provided before his death to neutralize what is left of Hydra, with the exception of the forces commanded by Hive. So all HYDRA facilities, buildings and stations are bombed and destroyed, with Coulson and May looking on, satisfied.
In an end tag, Hive brings Daisy, Radcliffe, Alisha, and James (who has chosen the moniker 'Hellfire') to a town he bought with Malick's money. Seeking to make Earth 'the home Inhumans deserve', he reveals his intention to recreate the original Kree experiments and convert the entire human race into Inhumans, with Radcliffe's medical and scientific help.
In April 2016, Marvel announced that the eighteenth episode of the season would be titled "The Singularity", to be written by Lauren LeFranc, with Garry A. Brown directing.
In April 2016, Marvel revealed that main cast members Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, Elizabeth Henstridge, Nick Blood, Adrianne Palicki, Henry Simmons, and Luke Mitchell would star as Phil Coulson, Melinda May, Grant Ward, Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons, Lance Hunter, Bobbi Morse, Alphonso "Mack" MacKenzie, and Lincoln Campbell, respectively. It was also revealed that the guest cast for the episode would include Axle Whitehead as James, John Hannah as Holden Radcliffe, Alicia Vela-Bailey as Alisha, Adrian Pasdar as Brigadier General Glenn Talbot, Alexander Wraith as Agent Anderson, Camille De Pazzis as Anon and Rudy Dobrev as bartender. Vela-Bailey, Wraith, and Dobrev did not receive guest star credit in the episode. Whitehead, Vela-Bailey, Pasdar, and Wraith reprise their roles from earlier in the series. Blood and Palicki do not ultimately appear.
For the episode's opening long take shot, the cameraman wore a wire rig usually reserved for actors and stunt doubles so he could be maneuvered around and above the set.
"The Singularity" was first aired in the United States on ABC on April 26, 2016.
In the United States the episode received a 1.0/3 percent share among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, meaning that it was seen by 1.0 percent of all households, and 3 percent of all of those watching television at the time of the broadcast. It was watched by 3.22 million viewers.
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, "Buddenbrooks". His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called "Exilliteratur", German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.
Mann's work influenced many later authors, including and Yukio Mishima.
Paul Thomas Mann was born to a bourgeois family in Lübeck, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant) and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns, a Brazilian woman of German and Portuguese ancestry, who emigrated to Germany with her family when she was seven years old. His mother was Roman Catholic but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran religion. Mann's father died in 1891, and after that his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann first studied science at a Lübeck "gymnasium" (secondary school), then attended the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich as well as the Technical University of Munich, where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history and literature.
Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933 , with the exception of a year spent in Palestrina, Italy, with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich. Thomas worked at the South German Fire Insurance Company in 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for the magazine "Simplicissimus". Mann's first short story, "Little Mr Friedemann" ("Der Kleine Herr Friedemann"), was published in 1898.
In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. She later joined the Lutheran church. The couple had six children.
In 1912, he and his wife moved to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, which was to inspire his 1924 novel "The Magic Mountain". He was also appalled by the risk of international confrontation between Germany and France, following the Agadir Crisis in Morocco, and later by the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden, Memel Territory (now Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony and where he spent the summers of 1930–1932 working on "Joseph and His Brothers". Today the cottage is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition.
In 1933, while travelling in the South of France, Mann heard from his eldest children Klaus and Erika in Munich, that it would not be safe for him to return to Germany. The family (except these two children) emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, but received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936. In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to the United States. He moved to Princeton, New Jersey where he lived on 65 Stockton Road and began to teach at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The Manns were prominent members of the German expatriate community of Los Angeles, and would frequently meet other emigres at the house of Salka and Bertold Viertel in Santa Monica, and at the Villa Aurora, the home of fellow German exile Lion Feuchtwanger. On 23 June 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. The Manns lived in Los Angeles until 1952.
The outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, prompted Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches (in German) to the German people via the BBC. In October 1940 he began monthly broadcasts, recorded in the U.S. and flown to London, where the BBC broadcast them to Germany on the longwave band. In these eight-minute addresses, Mann condemned Hitler and his "paladins" as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture. In one noted speech he said, "The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture."
Mann was one of the few publicly active opponents of Nazism among German expatriates in the U.S. Mann advocated the idea of German collective guilt, stating on a BBC broadcast of 30 December 1945:
With the start of the Cold War he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a 'suspected communist', he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company." He was listed by HUAC as being "affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts." Being in his own words a non-communist rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: "As an American citizen of German birth I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency.' ... That is how it started in Germany." As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found "the media had been closed to him". Finally he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress and in 1952 he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders.
After his 80th birthday, while on vacation, he developed unilateral swelling and pain in his leg. At that time, he was diagnosed with thrombophlebitis by Dr. Mülders from Leiden which was confirmed by Dr. Wilhelm Löffler in Zürich. Soon after, he developed a state of shock (circulatory) much to the surprise of this physicians. In 1955, he died of acute iliac artery dissection in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Only after his death, it was found that he had been misdiagnosed. The pathologic diagnosis, made by Christoph Hedinger, showed that he had, instead, a perforated iliac artery aneurysm resulting in a retroperitoneal hematoma, compression and thrombosis of the iliac vein. At that time, lifesaving vascular surgery had not been developed.
Many institutions are named in his honour, for instance the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.
Blanche Knopf of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house was introduced to Mann by H. L. Mencken while on a book-buying trip to Europe. Knopf became Mann's American publisher, and Blanche hired scholar Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter to translate Mann's books in 1924. Lowe-Porter subsequently translated Mann's complete works. Blanche Knopf continued to look after Mann. After "Buddenbrooks" proved successful in its first year, they sent him an unexpected bonus. Later in the 1930s, Blanche helped arrange for Mann and his family to emigrate to America.
Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, after he had been nominated by Anders Österling, member of the Swedish Academy, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic "Buddenbrooks" (1901), "The Magic Mountain" ("Der Zauberberg", 1924) and his numerous short stories. (Due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only " Buddenbrooks" was cited at any great length.) Based on Mann's own family, "Buddenbrooks" relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. "The Magic Mountain" ("Der Zauberberg", 1924) follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters, who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization. The tetralogy "Joseph and His Brothers" is an epic novel written over a period of sixteen years, and is one of the largest and most significant works in Mann's oeuvre. Later, other novels included "" (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774); "Doctor Faustus" (1947), the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II; and "Confessions of Felix Krull" ("Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull", 1954), which was unfinished at Mann's death.
Throughout his Dostoevsky essay, he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche, he says: "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime." Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoevsky we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity... in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."
Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his homosexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella "Death in Venice" ("Der Tod in Venedig", 1912).
Anthony Heilbut's biography "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature" (1997) uncovered the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work "The Real Tadzio" (2001) describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido of Venice with his wife and brother, when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław (Władzio) Moes, a 10-year-old Polish boy (see also "The real Tadzio" on the "Death in Venice" page). Mann's diary records his attraction to his own 13-year-old son, "Eissi" – Klaus Mann: "Klaus to whom recently I feel very drawn" (22 June). In the background conversations about man-to-man eroticism take place; a long letter is written to Carl Maria Weber on this topic, while the diary reveals: "In love with Klaus during these days" (5 June). "Eissi, who enchants me right now" (11 July). "Delight over Eissi, who in his bath is terribly handsome. Find it very natural that I am in love with my son ... Eissi lay reading in bed with his brown torso naked, which disconcerted me" (25 July). "I heard noise in the boys' room and surprised Eissi completely naked in front of Golo's bed acting foolish. Strong impression of his premasculine, gleaming body. Disquiet" (17 October 1920).
Handling the struggle between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, "Death in Venice" has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann's old enemy, Alfred Kerr, for having made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes, it has been pivotal in introducing the discourse of same-sex desire into general culture. Mann was a friend of the violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg, for whom he had feelings as a young man (at least until around 1903 when there is evidence that those feelings had cooled). The attraction that he felt for Ehrenberg, which is corroborated by notebook entries, caused Mann difficulty and discomfort and may have been an obstacle to his marrying an English woman, Mary Smith, whom he met in 1901. In 1950, Mann met the 19 year old waiter Franz Westermeier, confiding to his diary "Once again this, once again love". In 1975, when Mann's diaries were published, creating a national sensation in Germany, the retired Westermeier was tracked down in the United States: he was flattered to learn he had been the object of Mann's obsession, but also shocked at its depth.
Although Mann had always denied his novels had autobiographical components, the unsealing of his diaries revealing how consumed his life had been with unrequited and sublimated passion resulted in a reappraisal of his work. Klaus Mann had dealt openly from the beginning with his own homosexuality in his literary work, critically referring to his father's "sublimation" in his diary, whereas daughter Erika Mann and younger son Golo Mann came out only later in their lives.
Several literary and other works make reference to Mann's book "The Magic Mountain", including:
Several literary and other works make reference to "Death in Venice", including:
During World War I, Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism, attacked liberalism and supported the war effort, calling the Great War "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope". Yet in "Von Deutscher Republik" (1923) as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in "Die neue Rundschau" in November 1922 in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. Thereafter, his political views gradually shifted toward liberal left and democratic principles.
He initially gave his support to the left-liberal German Democratic Party before shifting further left and urging unity behind the Social Democrats.
In 1930, Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason" in which he strongly denounced Nazism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his strident denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. In contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, Mann's books were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. In 1936, the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship.
During the war, Mann made a series of anti-Nazi radio-speeches, published as "Listen, Germany!". They were recorded on tape in the United States and then sent to Great Britain, where the BBC transmitted them, hoping to reach German listeners.
Mann expressed his belief in the collection of letters written in exile, "Listen, Germany!" ("Deutsche Hörer!"), that equating Russian communism with Nazi-fascism on the basis that both are totalitarian systems was either superficial or insincere in showing a preference for fascism. He clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist, but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future. He said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".
1905: "Fiorenza"
1893: "Vision"
"The Blood of the Walsungs"
"Felix Krull"
"Joseph and His Brothers" ("Joseph und seine Brüder") (1933–43)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a 1957 American science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold based on Richard Matheson's 1956 novel "The Shrinking Man". The film stars Grant Williams as Scott and Randy Stuart as Scott's wife Louise. While relaxing on a boat, Scott is enveloped by strange fog. Months later, he discovers that he appears to be shrinking. By the time Scott has reached the height of a small boy, his condition becomes known to the public. When he learns there is no cure for his condition, he lashes out at his wife. As Scott shrinks to the point he can fit into a doll house, he has a battle with his family cat, which leaves him lost and alone in his basement, where he is now smaller than the average insect.
The film's storyline was expanded by Matheson after he had sold the story to Universal-International Pictures Co., Inc. He also completed the novel upon which the film is based while production was underway. Matheson's script was written in flashbacks, and Richard Alan Simmons rewrote it using a more conventional narrative structure. Director Jack Arnold initially wanted Dan O'Herlihy to play Scott. O'Herlihy turned down the role leading Universal to sign Williams to star in the lead. Filming began on May 31, 1956. Scenes involving special effects were shot throughout production, while others used the large sets of Universal's back lot. Production went over budget and filming had to be extended; certain special effects shots required reshooting. Williams was constantly being injured on set.
Before the film's release in New York City on February 22, 1957, its ending first went to test audiences who felt the character's fate should be changed. The director's original ending remained in the film. The film grossed $1.43 million in the United States and Canada and was among the highest grossing science fiction films of the 1950s. A sequel, "The Fantastic Little Girl", originally penned by Matheson, never went into production. A remake was developed years later, eventually becoming the comedy "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" (1981). Other remakes were planned in the early 2000s, one of which was to star Eddie Murphy in a more comedic variation on the film. A new adaptation was announced in 2013, with Matheson writing the screenplay with his son Richard Christian Matheson.
In the 1950s, Robert Scott Carey, known as "Scott", is on vacation with his wife, Louise, when a strange mist covers him. Six months later, Scott notices his clothes are too large. Scott finds himself continuing to shrink, and seeks medical advice. At first dismissive, Scott's doctor confirms his shrinking with an x-ray. Scott is referred to a medical research institute where it is determined Scott's exposure to the mist, combined with his later exposure to a pesticide, rearranged his molecular structure causing him to shrink. Scott tells Louise in light of his predicament she is free to leave him. Louise promises to stay as Scott's wedding ring falls off his finger.
Scott's condition makes him a national curiosity. Media attention forces Scott into seclusion inside his home. Scott is advised to sell his story and he begins keeping a journal of his experiences. Scott feels humiliated and lashes out at Louise. An antidote is found to arrest Scott's shrinking, but doctors advise he will never return to his former size. Emotionally broken, Scott leaves home and meets a dwarf named Clarice who is in town working in a carnival sideshow. Clarice encourages Scott and he is inspired to continue his journal. Later, Scott notices he has become shorter than Clarice, and runs home.
Scott shrinks small enough to live in a doll house and becomes more tyrannical. When Louise leaves home on an errand, Scott is forced to escape to his basement after Butch, the family cat, attacks him. Louise returns and assumes Butch ate Scott after she finds a bloody scrap of Scott's clothing. Louise prepares to move out and asks her brother, Charlie, to help.
Scott encounters much hardship navigating his basement. The water heater bursts, but when Charlie and Louise come to investigate, Scott is too small for them to hear his screams for help. Scott next battles a large spider while finding food and shelter for himself. He ultimately kills the spider with a straight pin, and collapses in exhaustion. He awakens small enough to escape the basement through the squares in a screen. Scott accepts his fate of shrinking to atomic size. However, he is no longer afraid, concluding that no matter how small he becomes, he will still matter in the universe because God will know he exists.
Cast adapted from the American Film Institute.
Richard Matheson's idea for the original novel was inspired by a scene in the film "Let's Do It Again", where Ray Milland's character leaves an apartment with the wrong hat. It is much too large for Milland and sinks down around his head and ears. Matheson sold the rights to Universal on the condition that he write the screenplay. It was Matheson's first screenplay, a writing format he felt he adapted to quickly. Matheson's initial script followed Scott Carey already shrunken and battling a spider in his basement. His rewrite is told in flashback form, interspersed with scenes of Carey and the spider, while telling the story of Carey's gradual loss in height.
The film was already into its second month of production before the novel was published in May 1956 by Gold Medal Books. Producer Albert Zugsmith added the word "Incredible" to Matheson's title and passed the script to Richard Alan Simmons, who removed the script's flashback structure. Matheson later discussed working with Universal finding that the producer had a "very commercial mind" which make the script weaker in terms of character. In an interview in "Cinefantastique" magazine, Matheson stated he protested sharing a screen credit with Simmons. The screen credits list Matheson as the writer, while the shooting script lists both Matheson and Simmons.
Pre-production was originally set to begin on April 20, 1956, but it started officially on April 24. The cast consisted of mostly unknown actors. Director Jack Arnold phoned Randy Stuart, who was a personal friend, asking if she would be interested in doing the film. Zugsmith initially wanted Dan O'Herlihy to play the role of Scott Carey. O'Herlihy had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in "Robinson Crusoe". After reading the script, he refused to play another isolated character, not wanting to be typecast in that kind of role. Grant Williams was cast because Universal had him pegged to become a star. On April 4, 1956, Williams and Randy Stuart were screen tested and deemed acceptable for the roles of Scott and Louise Carey.
On the first day of production, May 31, Universal's operating committee decided that because of the type of special photography involved in the making of the film, the publicity department would co-operate by publicizing a closed-door policy on the set. On-set photography would not be allowed while the film was shot to stimulate public and trade interest. Shooting took either five or six weeks, including the special effects sequences. The budget ranged between $700,000 and $800,000. Film critic Kim Newman said the budget was "not expensive", with most of it used for special effects.
Some special effects shots were the earliest taken for the picture. For example, shots with Randy Stewart were taken against a black velvet backdrop and then composited with shots of Williams on an enlarged living room set. Their movements were synchronized using negatives from the first exposed scene in the camera gate, with the opposite done for the other scene. Sound production began on May 31. An oversized dollhouse was built for Williams on Stage 28. It had previously been used for "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Dracula". Arnold said he filmed scenes with the cat in a normal studio with an animal trainer who had about 40 identical cats. To coax the cat to approach the dollhouse, Arnold hid food in it so the cat would find a way into the house. Later he timed the cat's reactions and directed Williams accordingly to react to the cat. Arnold's first attempted to follow the novel and use a black widow spider. After preliminary tests he found black widows were too small to use properly in the film. In an interview with Tom Weaver, Randy Stuart said the spiders presented problems. The overhead lamps on the set had to be turned up high leading to the deaths of two dozen tarantulas. They were directed with little puffs of air, a technique which had been used previously in Arnold's film "Tarantula". Despite sources suggesting otherwise, both films did not use the same tarantulas.
Many of the basement scenes were shot on Stage 12 of Universal Studios which, according to Tom Weaver, was one of the largest sound stages in the world at the time. While trying a way to film a scene involving giant raindrops landing, Arnold recalled when he was a child finding condoms in his father's drawer. Not knowing what they were he filled them with water and dropped them. Arnold ordered about 100 condoms and placed them on a treadmill so they would drop in sequence. The flood scene was shot on July 2 and 3. There was a 20-minute delay in filming because of a bad camera cable. There was a further delay from 11:05 am to 11:25 am to allow water to drain so a crane could be used properly. These scenes involved nine-hour workdays. When the actors were not filming, they were sent to have publicity shots taken.
The film was originally shot in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, but midway through filming on June 22 it was decided that the remaining footage would be shot in the 1.75:1. The belief was this would give the film a better look as a narrower frame would allow the production department to scale down the height of certain props for the special effects. During this period, Grant Williams suffered the first of many injuries on set. On June 22 he reported to the studio hospital with a scratched leg, on June 29 he had to leave the set to be treated for an eye condition, and on July 2 he had to be driven to the hospital for further treatment for his eyes. On the same day he was sent to the studio hospital for blisters and scratches from injuries sustained while climbing sets. Due to Williams' injuries and some special effects shots being too bright, the film was four days behind schedule and was $25,000 over budget.
Special effects shots using black velvet trick photography took three weeks of post-production and were scheduled after the film completed production on July 13, 1956. Warren described the special effects as "hard to assign correctly." Clifford Stine, whose field was process work and rear screen projection, is credited with "special photography". The boat scene at the beginning of the film was shot on Universal's process stage which allowed for rear screen projection. Shots of Scott in certain scenes such as his encounter with the mist were shot with him against a black velvet black drop.
The film's score is not an organic score by an individual composer as it draws from different sources. The film's main theme is composed by Irving Gertz and performed by big band leader Ray Anthony. Other music used in the film, such as the scene where the doctor is first examining Scott's x-rays, is drawn from the studio's library music under the supervision of music supervisor Joseph Gershenson.
According to Randy Stuart, the film's ending had Williams return to his original size, which Matheson felt was the wrong ending for the story. Arnold argued with Universal over the ending. The studio wanted a happy ending while he wanted the original ending that had been shot. To decide on which ending to use a test screening was held to judge the audience's reaction. Lucas said audience review cards from a December 7 preview screening in California reacting to the ending included comments such as: "Should've had a different ending, should've grown again." and "What happened at the end?". On the overall quality of the film comments included, "Can't you do any better? This is pretty sad." "You scared my son to death." and "This is an insult to the brain power of my two-year old son". The film was released with Arnold's original ending intact.
"The Incredible Shrinking Man" opened in New York on February 22, 1957. This was followed by a screening in Los Angeles on March 27, 1957, and a wider release in April. Mel Danner, manager of the Circle Theater in Waynoka, Oklahoma, noted the audiences' reaction who felt it was a good film but felt that Carey should have returned to original size at the end. The film was reissued theatrically in 1964. "Variety" reported that by the end of the year the film had grossed $1.43 million. Actress Randy Stuart recalled the film was either "second or third, I think third after "The Ten Commandments"" in terms of how much money it made against what it cost. It was among the highest grossing science fiction films of the decade. In comparison, other 1950s science fiction films grossed more. "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" grossed $8 million, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", grossed $4.8 million, while "The Thing" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" grossed $1.95 million and $1.2 million respectively.
The film felt was among the least re-released of his major films. It was rarely shown on television and screened only occasionally at science fiction conventions. The film was released on laser disc in 1978 and 1991, and on VHS in 1992. It was released on DVD as part of a box set containing a collection of Universal-International's science fiction films. Arrow Video released the film on Blu-ray in 2017.
"The Incredible Shrinking Man"'s initial reception was described by Arnold's biographer Dana M. Reemes as a routine to above average film; its reception has steadily grown ever since. Philip K. Scheuer of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "a fascinating exercise in imagination, as terrifying as it is funny [...] Science-fiction admirers who are accustomed to finding food for thought as well as vicarious thrills in such flights of fancy will not be disappointed, either."
The "Monthly Film Bulletin" praised the film, and declared it a "horrifying story that grips the imagination throughout"; a "straightforward, macabre, and as startlingly original as a vintage Ray Bradbury short story, for all its peaceful and resigned conclusion–opens new vistas of cosmic terror". Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" panned the film, writing that "unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés." "Brog." of "Variety" commented that the film was not thoroughly satisfactory, but had enough good qualities, specifically declaring "unfoldment is inclined to slow down on occasion, resulting in flagging interest here and there." The review noted the special effects and cinematography were "visually effective" but that "portions of the background score are overworked" which distracted from the plot. The film was the first winner of the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1958.
Martin Rubin discussed the film in a 1974 issue of "Film Comment" and compared it to its contemporaries in the genre. He found it did not have the "schoolboy cynicism and moralizing of a Roger Corman film, nor any of the hysteria common to the Red-scare science-fictioners of the Fifties." He felt the story was well-suited to Jack Arnold, noting a "WeIlesian director would have overinflated this film and compromised its sense of the ordinary with shadows and angles, while a more accomplished stylist of almost any other order would have softened it too much-such attitudes are better off in the horror film." Rubin also compared it the other science fiction films Arnold made in the 1950s—"The Creature From the Black Lagoon", "It Came From Outer Space", "Tarantula", "Revenge of the Creature", and "The Space Children"—finding them competitively "interesting in patches" but lacking in comparison to the "unity and clarity" of "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which "totally fulfills its central metaphor without being unduly constricted by it."
Ian Nathan of "Empire" referred to the film as a classic of 1950s science fiction films, and noted how that the everyday objects found at home are "transformed into a terrifying vertiginous world fraught with peril. A confrontation with a 'giant' spider, impressively realised, as are all the effects, for its day, has become one of the iconic image of the entire era." Tim Lucas declared the film "remains one of the perfectly realized science fiction films" noting it was "less about science then a masterful example of the 'what if' branch of speculative human drama".
Jack Arnold commented on science films made after "The Incredible Shrinking Man", saying that since his films were financially successful, American International Pictures and Japanese studios developed similar productions, which he felt lacked in both atmosphere and/or morals and were just stories about monsters. These included "The Amazing Colossal Man" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman". Arnold was unable to sell a science fiction story after these films began appearing and went to England to create "The Mouse That Roared", which he felt was a fantasy film that still had a deeper meaning to it. Arnold later declared "Mouse" as his favourite picture and that he thought "almost as much of" "The Incredible Shrinking Man". Arnold spoke about the film later in life watching a revival screening of it, saying he was happy that audiences enjoyed the film and that they "got all the nuances that I put in. It was a joy to me, just to watch their reaction to the film." Matheson discussed the film in an interview in John Bronsan's "Horror People", where he declared he only enjoyed the film after his son pointed out the films story structure, specifically that "it didn't have the usual story line, the usual happy ending. Actually it had no particular story line, it was very picaresque, it just wandered on." Matheson re-iterated his enjoyment of the film in "Cinefantastique", finding himself able to appreciate the film with subsequent watches, finding the visuals as "truly remarkable" and that Arnold] created "quite a mood in the film." The film was selected for preservation by in the National Film Registry in 2009.
Matheson scripted a sequel to "The Incredible Shrinking Man" titled "The Fantastic Little Girl". The film has Louise Carey certain that Scott is still alive. She returns home and finds herself shrinking and is injected with a new cure. The script also featured Scott in his microscopic world where he encounters strange eel-like creatures. The script was 43 pages long and described as inferior by author Bill Warren compared to the original film. Matheson said that despite the original film making "a lot of money" he was unsure why the sequel was not developed past the script stage. The script in its entirety was published in the book "Unrealized Dreams" in 2005. The reluctance to re-release the film for home video was because Universal intended to develop a pseudo-sequel to the film. This included John Landis developing, writing and directing "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", which was cancelled by Universal after the project's budget was found to be too high. The film was revived by Jane Wagner. Jack Arnold said he "hated" "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", declaring the special effects weak and adding there was "no point of view ... the major fault is that it's not a comedy even though they tried so hard to make it funny...".
Universal were attempting to work with Imagine Entertainment on a remake of the film to be directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and starring Eddie Murphy in 2003. Following this, other directors were attached to the project including Peter Segal and Brett Ratner with Murphy still slated to star in a comedic version of the film. The rights to the source material lapsed by 2012 and were purchased by MGM. A new adaptation of "The Shrinking Man" was announced in 2013, with Matheson writing the screenplay with his son Richard Christian Matheson. The Mathesons commented that the new adaptation would modernise the story and reflect on advancements such as nanotechnology. The elder Matheson died on June 23, 2013.
Geography of Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is an island country in East Asia. The main island of Taiwan, known historically in English as Formosa, makes up 99% of the area controlled by the ROC, measuring and lying some across the Taiwan Strait from the southeastern coast of mainland China. The East China Sea lies to its north, the Philippine Sea to its east, the Luzon Strait directly to its south and the South China Sea to its southwest. Smaller islands include a number in the Taiwan Strait including the Penghu archipelago, the Kinmen and Matsu Islands near the Chinese coast, and some of the South China Sea Islands.
The main island is a tilted fault block, characterized by the contrast between the eastern two-thirds, consisting mostly of five rugged mountain ranges parallel to the east coast, and the flat to gently rolling plains of the western third, where the majority of Taiwan's population reside. There are several peaks over 3,500 m, the highest being Yu Shan at , making Taiwan the world's fourth-highest island. The tectonic boundary that formed these ranges is still active, and the island experiences many earthquakes, a few of them highly destructive. There are also many active submarine volcanoes in the Taiwan Straits.
The climate ranges from tropical in the south to subtropical in the north, and is governed by the East Asian Monsoon. The main island is struck by an average of four typhoons in each year. The eastern mountains are heavily forested and home to a diverse range of wildlife, while land use in the western and northern lowlands is intensive.
The total land area of Taiwan is , making it intermediate in size between Belgium and the Netherlands. It has a coastline of . The ROC claims an exclusive economic zone of with and a territorial sea of .
Taiwan proper, the main island of the archipelago, was known in the West until after World War II as "Formosa", from the Portuguese "Ilha Formosa" (), "beautiful island". It is long and wide, and has an area of . The northernmost point of the island is Cape Fugui in New Taipei's Shimen District. The central point of the island is in Puli Township, Nantou County. The southernmost point on the island is Cape Eluanbi in Hengchun Township, Pingtung County.
The island of Taiwan is separated from the southeast coast of China by the Taiwan Strait, which ranges from at its widest point to at its narrowest. Part of the continental shelf, the Strait is no more than deep, and has become a land bridge during glacial periods.
To the south, the island of Taiwan is separated from the Philippine island of Luzon by the -wide Luzon Strait. The South China Sea lies to the southwest, the East China Sea to the north, and the Philippine Sea to the east. Niushan Island in Nanlai village, Aoqian town, Pingtan County, Fuzhou, Fujian is the closest China (PRC)-administered island to Taiwan (main island).
Smaller islands of the archipelago include the Penghu islands in the Taiwan Strait west of the main island, with an area of , the tiny islet of Xiaoliuqiu off the southwest coast, and Orchid Island and Green Island to the southeast, separated from the northernmost islands of the Philippines by the Bashi Channel. The islands of Kinmen and Matsu near the coast of Fujian across the Taiwan Strait have a total area of ; the Pratas and Taiping islets in the South China Sea are also administered by the ROC, but are not part of the Taiwanese archipelago.
The island of Taiwan was formed approximately 4 to 5 million years ago at a complex convergent boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. In a boundary running the length of the island and continuing southwards in the Luzon Volcanic Arc (including Green Island and Orchid Island), the Eurasian Plate is sliding under the Philippine Sea Plate.
Most of the island comprises a huge fault block tilted to the west.
The western part of the island, and much of the central range, consists of sedimentary deposits scraped from the descending edge of the Eurasian Plate. In the northeast of the island, and continuing eastwards in the Ryukyu Volcanic Arc, the Philippine Sea Plate slides under the Eurasian Plate.
The tectonic boundary remains active, and Taiwan experiences 15,000 to 18,000 earthquakes each year, of which 800 to 1,000 are noticed by people. The most catastrophic recent earthquake was the magnitude-7.3 Chi-Chi earthquake, which occurred in the center of Taiwan on 21 September 1999, killing more than 2,400 people. On 4 March 2010 at about 01:20 UTC, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake hit southwestern Taiwan in the mountainous area of Kaohsiung County.
Another major earthquake occurred on 6 February 2016, with a magnitude of 6.4. Tainan was damaged the most, with 117 deaths, most of them caused by the collapse of a 17-story apartment building.
The terrain in Taiwan is divided into two parts: the flat to gently rolling plains in the west, where 90% of the population lives, and the mostly rugged forest-covered mountains in the eastern two-thirds.
The eastern part of the island is dominated by five mountain ranges, each running from north-northeast to south-southwest, roughly parallel to the east coast of the island. As a group, they extend from north to south and average about from east to west. They include more than two hundred peaks with elevations of over .
The Central Mountain Range extends from Su'ao in the northeast to Eluanbi at the southern tip of the island, forming a ridge of high mountains and serving as the island's principal watershed. The mountains are predominantly composed of hard rock formations resistant to weathering and erosion, although heavy rainfall has deeply scarred the sides with gorges and sharp valleys. The relative relief of the terrain is usually extensive, and the forest-clad mountains with their extreme ruggedness are almost impenetrable. The east side of the Central Mountain Range is the steepest mountain slope in Taiwan, with fault scarps ranging in height from . Taroko National Park, on the steep eastern side of the range, has good examples of mountainous terrain, gorges and erosion caused by a swiftly flowing river.
The East Coast Mountain Range extends down the east coast of the island from the mouth of the Hualien River in the north to Taitung County in the south, and chiefly consist of sandstone and shale. It is separated from the Central Range by the narrow Huatung Valley, at an altitude of . Although Hsinkangshan (新港山), the highest peak, reaches an elevation of , most of the range is composed of large hills. Small streams have developed on the flanks, but only one large river cuts across the range. Badlands are located at the western foot of the range, where the ground water level is the lowest and rock formations are the least resistant to weathering. Raised coral reefs along the east coast and the frequent occurrences of earthquakes in the rift valley indicate that the fault block is still rising.
The ranges to the west of the Central range are divided into two groups separated by the Sun Moon Lake Basin in the centre of the island. The Dadu and Zhuoshui Rivers flow from the western slopes of the Central Range through the basin to the west coast of the island.
The Xueshan Range lies to the northwest of the Central Mountain Range, beginning at Sandiaojiao, the northeast tip of the island, and gaining elevation as it extends southwest towards Nantou County. Xueshan, the main peak, is high.
The Yushan Range runs along the southwestern flank of the Central Range. It includes the island's tallest peak, the Yu Shan ('Jade Mountain') which makes Taiwan the world's fourth-highest island, and is the highest point in the western Pacific region outside of the Kamchatka Peninsula, New Guinea Highlands and Mount Kinabalu.
The Alishan Range lies west of the Yushan Range, across the valley of the south-flowing Kaoping River. The range has major elevations between . The main peak, Data Mountain (大塔山), towers .
Below the western foothills of the ranges, such as the Hsinchu Hills and the Miaoli Hills, lie raised terraces formed of material eroded from the ranges. These include the Linkou Plateau, the Taoyuan Plateau and the Dadu Plateau. About 23% of Taiwan's land area consists of fertile alluvial plains and basins watered by rivers running from the eastern mountains. Over half of this land lies in the Chianan Plain in southwest Taiwan, with lesser areas in the Pingtung Plain, Taichung Basin and Taipei Basin. The only sizable plain on the east coast is the Yilan Plain in the northeast.
The island of Taiwan lies across the Tropic of Cancer, and its climate is influenced by the East Asian Monsoon. Northern Taiwan has a humid subtropical climate, with substantial seasonal variation of temperatures, while parts of central and most of southern has a tropical monsoon climate where seasonal temperature variations are less noticeable with temperatures typically varying from warm to hot. During the winter (November to March), the northeast experiences steady rain, while the central and southern parts of the island are mostly sunny. The summer monsoon (from May to October) accounts for 90% of the annual precipitation in the south, but only 60% in the north. The average rainfall is approximately 2,600 mm per year.
Typhoons are most likely to strike between July and October, with on average about four direct hits per year. Intensive rain from typhoons often leads to disastrous mudslides.
Before extensive human settlement, the vegetation on Taiwan ranged from tropical rainforest in the lowlands through temperate forests, boreal forest and alpine plants with increasing altitude.
Most of the plains and low-lying hills of the west and north of the island have been cleared for agricultural use since the arrival of the Chinese immigrants during the 17th and 18th century. However the mountain forests are very diverse, with several endemic species such as Formosan cypress ("Chamaecyparis formosensis") and Taiwan fir ("Abies kawakamii"), while the camphor laurel ("Cinnamomum camphora") was once also widespread at lower altitudes.
Taiwan is a center of bird endemism (see List of endemic birds of Taiwan).
Prior to the country's industrialization, the mountainous areas held several endemic animal species and subspecies, such as the Swinhoe's pheasant ("Lophura swinhoii"), Taiwan blue magpie ("Urocissa caerulea"), the Formosan sika deer ("Cervus nippon taiwanensis" or "Cervus nippon taiouanus") and the Formosan landlocked salmon ("Oncorhynchus masou formosanus"). A few of these are now extinct, and many others have been designated endangered species.
Taiwan had relatively few carnivores, 11 species in total, of which the Formosan clouded leopard and otter are likely extinct. The largest carnivore is the Formosan black bear ("Selanarctos thibetanus formosanus"), a rare and endangered species.
Nine national parks in Taiwan showcase the diverse terrain, flora and fauna of the archipelago. Kenting National Park on the southern tip of Taiwan contains uplifted coral reefs, moist tropical forest and marine ecosystems. Yushan National Park has alpine terrain, mountain ecology, forest types that vary with altitude, and remains of ancient road. Yangmingshan National Park has volcanic geology, hot springs, waterfalls, and forest. Taroko National Park has marble canyon, cliff, and fold mountains. Shei-Pa National Park has alpine ecosystems, geological terrain, and valley streams. Kinmen National Park has lakes, wetlands, coastal topography, flora and fauna-shaped island. Dongsha Atoll National Park has the Pratas reef atolls for integrity, a unique marine ecology, biodiversity, and is a key habitat for the marine resources of the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
Natural resources on the islands include small deposits of gold, copper, coal, natural gas, limestone, marble, and asbestos. The island is 55% forest and woodland (mostly on the mountains) and 24% arable land (mostly on the plains), with 15% going to other purposes. 5% is permanent pasture and 1% is permanent crops.
Because of the intensive exploitation throughout Taiwan's pre-modern and modern history, the island's mineral resources (e.g. coal, gold, marble), as well as wild animal reserves (e.g. deer), have been virtually exhausted. Moreover, much of its forestry resources, especially firs were harvested during Japanese rule for the construction of shrines and have only recovered slightly since then. To this day, forests do not contribute to significant timber production mainly because of concerns about production costs and environmental regulations.
The few natural resources with significant economic value remaining in Taiwan are essentially agriculture-associated. Sugarcane and rice have been cultivated in western Taiwan since the 17th century. Camphor extraction and sugarcane refining played an important role in Taiwan's exportation from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. The importance of these industries subsequently declined not because of the exhaustion of related natural resources but mainly due to the decline of international demand.
Domestic agriculture (rice being the dominant kind of crop) and fisheries retain importance to a certain degree, but they have been greatly challenged by foreign imports since Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Consequently, upon the decline of subsistent importance, Taiwan's agriculture now relies heavily on the marketing and exportation of specialty crops, such as banana, guava, lychee, bell fruit, and high-mountain tea.
Taiwan has significant coal deposits and some insignificant petroleum and natural gas deposits. , oil accounts for 49.0% of the total energy consumption. Coal comes next with 32.1%, followed by nuclear energy with 8.3%, natural gas (indigenous and liquefied) with 10.2%, and energy from renewable sources with 0.5%. Taiwan has six nuclear reactors and two under construction. Nearly all oil and gas for transportation and power needs must be imported, making Taiwan particularly sensitive to fluctuations in energy prices. Taiwan is rich in wind energy resources, with wind farms both onshore and offshore, though limited land area favors offshore wind resources. By promoting renewable energy, Taiwan's government hopes to also aid the nascent renewable energy manufacturing industry, and develop it into an export market.
Taiwan has a population of over 23 million, the vast majority of whom live in the lowlands near the western coast of the island.
The island is highly urbanized, with nearly 9 million people living in the Taipei–Keelung–Taoyuan metropolitan area at the northern end, and over 2 million each in the urban areas of Kaohsiung and Taichung.
Taiwanese aborigines comprise approximately 2% of the population, and now mostly live in the mountainous eastern part of the island. Most scholars believe their ancestors arrived in Taiwan by sea between 4000 and 3000 BC, probably from the mainland.
Han Chinese make up over 95% of the population. Immigrants from southern Fujian began to farm the area around modern Tainan and Kaohsiung from the 17th century, later spreading across the western and northern plains and absorbing the aboriginal population of those areas. Hakka people from eastern Guangdong arrived later and settled the foothills further inland, but the rugged uplands of the eastern half of the island remained the exclusive preserve of the aborigines until the early 20th century. A further 1.2 million people from throughout mainland China entered Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Some areas in Taiwan with high population density and many factories are affected by heavy pollution. The most notable areas are the southern suburbs of Taipei and the western stretch from Tainan to Lin Yuan, south of Kaohsiung. By the late 20th century, Taipei suffered from extensive vehicle and factory air pollution, but after the government required mandatory use of unleaded petrol and established the Environmental Protection Administration in 1987 to regulate air quality, the air quality of Taiwan has improved dramatically. Motor scooters, especially older or cheaper two-stroke versions, which are ubiquitous in Taiwan, contribute disproportionately to urban air pollution.
Other environmental issues include water pollution from industrial emissions and raw sewage, contamination of drinking water supplies, trade in endangered species, and low-level radioactive waste disposal. Though regulation of sulfate aerosol emissions from petroleum combustion is becoming stringent, acid rain remains a threat to the health of residents and forests. Atmospheric scientists in Taiwan estimate that more than half of the pollutants causing Taiwan's acid rain are carried from mainland China by monsoon winds.
Politics of the Republic of China
The politics of the Republic of China take place in a framework of a representative democratic republic, whereby the President is head of state and the Premier (President of the Executive Yuan) is head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in primarily with the parliament and limited by government. The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The party system is dominated by the Kuomintang (KMT, "Chinese Nationalist Party"), which favors closer links to mainland China, and the Democratic Progressive Party, which favors Taiwanese independence.
The modern-day ROC consists of Taiwan (Formosa) and Penghu (the Pescadores) as well as portions of the Fujian Province (Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu) and several smaller islands. Taiwan's six major cities, Kaohsiung, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, Taipei, and Taoyuan, are special municipalities. The rest of the territories are divided into 3 cities and 13 counties.
The ROC is governed under the Constitution of the Republic of China which was drafted in 1947 before the fall of the Chinese mainland to the Communist Party of China and outlined a government for all of China. Significant amendments were made to the Constitution in 1991, and there have been a number of judicial interpretations made to take into account the fact that the Constitution covers a much smaller area than originally envisioned.
The government in Taipei officially asserts to be the sole legitimate government of all of China, which it defined as including Taiwan, mainland China, and outer Mongolia. In keeping with that claim, when the KMT fled to Taipei in 1949, they re-established the full array of central political bodies, which had existed in mainland China in the de jure capital of Nanjing (Nanking). While much of this structure remains in place, the President Lee Teng-hui in 1991 unofficially abandoned the government's claim of sovereignty over mainland China, stating that they do not "dispute the fact that the Communists control mainland China." However, the National Assembly has not officially changed the national borders, as doing so may be seen as a prelude to formal Taiwanese independence. The People's Republic of China has several times threatened to start a war if the government of Taiwan formalizes independence; as in the Anti-Secession Law. Neither the National Assembly nor the Supreme Court has actually defined what the term "existing national boundaries," as stated in the constitution, actually means. The latter refused to do so claiming that it is a "major political issue".
The original founding of the Republic centered on the Three Principles of the People (): nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood. Nationalism meant the Han Chinese race standing up against Manchu rule and Japanese and Western interference, democracy meant elected rule modeled after Japan's parliament, and people's livelihood or socialism, meant government regulation of the means of production. Another lesser known principle that the Republic was founded upon was "five races under one union"" (五族共和), which emphasized the harmony of the five major ethnic groups in China as represented by the colored stripes of the original Five-Colored Flag of the Republic. However, this five races under one union principle and the corresponding flag were abandoned in 1927.
In reality these three principles were left unrealized. Republican China was marked by warlordism, foreign invasion, and civil war. Although there were elected legislators, from its inception, it was actually a largely one-party dictatorship apart from some minor parties, including the Chinese Youth Party, the National Socialist Party and the Rural Construction Party, with suppression of dissent within the KMT of communists. As the central government was quite weak, little could be done in terms of land reform or redistribution of wealth either. Politics of this era consisted primarily of the political and military struggle between the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC) in between bouts of active resistance against Japanese invasion.
The first national government of the Chinese Republic was established on 1 January 1912, in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as the provisional president. Provincial delegates were sent to confirm the authority of the national government, and they later also formed the first parliament. The power of this national government was both limited and short-lived, with generals controlling all of central and northern China. The limited acts passed by this government included the formal abdication of the Qing dynasty and some economic initiatives.
Shortly after the rise of Yuan Shikai, the parliament's authority became nominal; violations of the Constitution by Yuan were met with half-hearted motions of censure, and KMT members of the parliament that gave up their membership to the KMT were offered 1,000 pounds. Yuan maintained power locally by sending military generals to be provincial governors or by obtaining the allegiance of those already in power. Foreign powers came to recognize Yuan's power as well: when Japan came to China with Twenty-One Demands, it was Yuan that submitted to them, on 25 May 1915.
After the death of Yuan in 1916, the parliament of 1913 was reconvened to give legitimacy to a new government. However, the real power of the time passed to military leaders, forming the warlord period. Still, the powerless government had its use—when World War I began, several Western powers and Japan wanted China to declare war on Germany, in order to liquidate the latter's holdings there.
From the beginning to the end of Republican China, political power was generally exercised through both legal and non-legal means. Yuan ruled as a dictator, remolding the constitution as he saw fit; warlords withdrew from the Republic, ruling through military control; and Chiang based his political power on military power. During this time, Chiang ruled more as a dictator than as a leader of a one-party state. He used white terror tactics and various military campaigns to destroy the CPC, and the police and military apparatus were freely used to attack dissenters. However, Chiang's influence never extended beyond the Yangtze Delta, and the rest of the country was under the effective control of former warlords, and Chiang faced insurrections from them throughout the 1930s, even after the Northern Expedition, which had nominally unified the country. Regional political power remained strong throughout Republican China, and central authority deteriorated continuously until the Second Sino-Japanese War, to the point that Chiang became no more than the "head of a loose coalition," as observed by Albert Wedemeyer.
After the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, Vice President Yen Chia-kan briefly took over from 1975 to 1978, according to the Constitution, but the actual power was in the hands of Premier Chiang Ching-kuo (), who was KMT chairman and a son of Chang Kai-shek. During the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo from 1978 to 1988, Taiwan's political system began to undergo gradual liberalization.
After the lifting of martial law, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨) was formed and allowed to participate overtly in politics. After Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, Vice President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) succeeded him as the first Taiwan-born president and chairman of the KMT. Lee became the first ROC president elected by popular vote in 1996, despite the PRC's missile tests.
In 2000, Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected president, marking the first peaceful democratic transition of power to an opposition party in ROC history and a decisive end to the KMT's monopoly in administration of the central government.
In the 2004 presidential election, the day after being shot while campaigning, Chen was reelected by a narrow margin of 0.2%. The KMT filed lawsuits to demand a recount, alleged voting fraud and staged huge rallies to demand a new election. The courts ruled that the election was accurate and valid.
In both of Chen's terms, the DPP and the independence-leaning Pan-Green Coalition failed to secure a majority in the legislature, losing to the KMT and the pro-unification leaning Pan-Blue Coalition. This has led to many impasses; the president in the ROC system does not have the power of veto, so the legislature does not feel the need to negotiate with the executive branch.
One key issue has been the political status of Taiwan itself. With the diplomatic isolation brought about in the 1970s and 1980s, the notion of "recovering the mainland" by force has been dropped and the Taiwanese localization movement strengthened. The relationship with the People's Republic of China and the related issues of Taiwan independence and Chinese reunification continue to dominate Taiwanese politics.
The political scene in the ROC is divided into two camps, with the pro-unification KMT, People First Party (PFP), and New Party forming the Pan-Blue Coalition; and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and strongly pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) forming the Pan-Green Coalition. Because of the dominance of the reunification-independence issue in Taiwan's political scene, it is difficult to categorise either camp as "right" or "left" on the conventional basis of economic or social policies.
Supporters of the Pan-Green camp tend to favor emphasizing the Republic of China as being a distinct country from the People's Republic of China. Many Pan-Green supporters seek formal Taiwan independence and for dropping the title of the Republic of China. However, more progressive members of the coalition, such as former President Chen Shui-bian, have moderated their views and claim that it is unnecessary to proclaim independence because Taiwan is already "an independent, sovereign country" and that the Republic of China is the same as Taiwan. Some members take a much more extreme view about Taiwan's status, claiming that the ROC is nonexistent and calling for the establishment of an independent "Republic of Taiwan". Supporters of this idea have even gone as far as issuing self-made "passports" for their republic. Attempts to use these "passports" however, have been stopped by officials at Chang Kai-shek International Airport.
While the Pan-Green camp favors Taiwan having an identity separate from that of China, some Pan-Blue members, especially former leaders from the older generation, seem to be strongly supportive of the concept of the Republic of China, which remains an important symbol of their links with China. During his visit to mainland China in April 2005, former KMT Party Chairman Lien Chan reiterated his party's belief in the "One China" policy that states that there is only one China controlled by two governments and that Taiwan is a part of China. PFP Party Chair James Soong expressed the same sentiments during his visit in May. In contrast to the positions of these two leaders of the older generation, the more mainstream Pan-Blue position is to pursue negotiations with the PRC to immediately open direct transportation links with China and to lift investment restrictions. With regards to independence, the mainstream Pan-Blue position is to simply maintain the ROC's current state, and being open to negotiations for unification after China is democratized enough to respect human rights.
For its part, the PRC has indicated that it finds a Republic of China far more acceptable than an independent Taiwan. Ironically, although it views the ROC as an illegitimate entity, it has stated that any effort on Taiwan to formally abolish the ROC or formally renounce its claim over mainland China would result in a strong and possibly military reaction. However, the defense of Taiwan by the US and Japan is likely, so it is not, in reality, clear what the PRC reaction would be. The US's current position is that the Taiwan issue must be resolved peacefully and that it condemns unilateral action by either side, an unprovoked invasion by China or a declaration of formal independence by Taiwan.
The dominant political issue today in the Taiwan Area in the Republic of China (ROC) is its relationship with the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that has jurisdiction over Mainland China. Specifically, many people in Taiwan desire the opening of direct transportation links with mainland China, including direct flights, which would aid many Taiwanese businesses that have opened factories or branches in mainland China. The former DPP administration feared that such links will lead to tighter economic and thus political integration with the PRC, and in the 2006 Lunar New Year Speech, Chen Shui-bian called for managed opening of links.
Mainland China and Taiwan resumed regular direct flights or cross-Strait relations on 4 July 2008, after six decades, as a "new start" in their tense relations. Liu Shaoyong, chair of China Southern Airlines, piloted the first flight from Guangzhou to Taipei (Taoyuan International Airport). Simultaneously, a Taiwan-based China Airlines flight flew to Shanghai. Five mainland Chinese cities will be connected with eight Taiwan airports, with 4 days a week, 36 round-trip flights across the Taiwan Strait, thereby eliminating time-consuming Hong Kong stopovers. Other major political issues include the passage of an arms procurement bill that the United States authorized in 2001. In 2008, however, the United States were reluctant to send over more arms to Taiwan out of fear that it would hinder the recent improvement of ties between China and Taiwan. Another major political issue, is the establishment of a National Communications Commission to take over from the Government Information Office, whose advertising budget exercised great control over the media.
Banking reform, including consumer finance (limiting rates on credit cards) and bank mergers, is also a major issue. Taiwan's financial sector is quite unwieldy, with over 48 banks, none of which have a market share over 10%. In addition, the government controls 50% to 60% of Taiwan's banking assets. The ultimate aim is the creation of large financial institutions that will then have the ability to compete internationally.
The politicians and their parties have themselves become major political issues. Corruption among some DPP administration officials has been exposed. In early 2006, President Chen Shui-bian was linked to possible corruption. The political effect on President Chen Shui-bian was great, causing a divide in the DPP leadership and supporters alike. It eventually led to the creation of a political camp led by ex-DPP leader Shih Ming-teh which believes the president should resign. The KMT assets continue to be another major issue, as it was once the richest political party in the world. Nearing the end of 2006, KMT's chairman Ma Ying-jeou was also hit by corruption controversies, although he has since then been cleared of any wrong-doings by the courts. Since completing his second term as President, Chen Shui-bian has been charged with corruption and money laundering.
The merger of the KMT and People First Party (PFP) was thought to be certain, but a string of defections from the PFP to the KMT have increased tensions within the Pan-Blue camp.
In 2006, due to the Pacific Sogo Department Store scandal, the pro-KMT Pan-Blue Coalition moved to impeach the President but failed to obtain the requisite number of votes in the legislature. This failure led to a "Down Ah-Bian" campaign, which sought to pressure the president to resign from office. The campaign began on 1 September 2006. Campaign organizers claimed that the first day of the strike attracted 300,000 people in Taipei, while the police estimated the number to be closer to 90,000. The "Down Ah-Bian" event was being led by activist and politician Shih Ming-te (施明德) as a peaceful sit-in around the capital, besieging the presidential residence. While the protests have been largely peaceful, there have been isolated incidences of violence associated with the campaign, including fist fights between Pan-Blue and Pan-Green (pro-DPP) legislatures. The "Up Ah-Bian" event was organized to counteract the "Down Ah-Bian" campaign. On 13 October 2006, the Pan-Blue Coalition attempted again to pass a recall motion against the ROC President Chen Shui-bian, which also failed to garner sufficient votes in the legislature.
On 3 November 2006, prosecutors in Taiwan stated that they have enough evidence to indict Chen's wife on corruption charges in connection with her handling of a secret diplomatic fund. According to the prosecutors, while Chen would not be indicted while in office, there is a possibility that he would be indicted after he leaves office.
In February 2007, Mr. Chen Shui-bian said that Taiwan will have to upgrade its weaponry to maintain the military balance with mainland China. He believes that Taiwan's advantage is slipping against mainland China's rising military prowess.
Roughly 84% of Taiwan's population descends from Han Chinese who migrated from mainland China between 1661 and 1895. Another significant fraction descends from Han Chinese who immigrated from mainland China in the 1940s and 1950s. But between 1895 and the present, Taiwan and mainland China have shared a common government for only 4 years. The shared cultural origin combined with several hundred years of geographical separation, some hundred years of political separation and foreign influences, as well as hostility between the rival Taiwan and China have resulted in national identity being a contentious issue with political overtones. Since democratization and the lifting of martial law, a distinct Taiwanese identity (as opposed to Taiwanese identity as a subset of a Chinese identity) is often at the heart of political debates. Its acceptance makes the island distinct from mainland China, and therefore may be seen as a step towards forming a consensus for "de jure" Taiwan independence. The pan-green camp supports a distinct Taiwanese identity, while the pan-blue camp supports a Chinese identity only. The KMT has downplayed this stance in the recent years and now supports a Taiwanese identity as part of a Chinese identity.
According to a survey conducted in March 2009, 49% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese only, and 44% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese and Chinese. 3% consider themselves as only Chinese. Another survey, conducted in Taiwan in July 2009, showed that 82.8% of respondents consider that Taiwan and China are two separate countries developing each on its own. A recent survey conducted in December 2009 showed that 62% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese only, and 22% of the respondents consider themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. 8% consider themselves as only Chinese. The survey also shows that among 18- to 29-year-old respondents, 75% consider themselves as Taiwanese only.
The President is the head of state of the Republic of China and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The president has authority over the five administrative branches (Yuan): Executive, Legislative, Control, Judicial, and Examination.
The National Assembly of the Republic of China was elected in mainland China in 1947 to officially carry out the duties of choosing the president, to amend the constitution, and to exercise the sovereignty of the citizens, but in actuality, the Assembly's role in Taipei seemed to reconfirm the executive powers of President Chang Kai-shek. The National Assembly was re-established on Taiwan when the government moved. Because it was impossible to hold subsequent elections to represent constituencies in mainland China, representatives elected in 1947–48 held these seats "indefinitely." In June 1990, however, the Council of Grand Justices mandated the retirement, effective December 1991, of all remaining "indefinitely" elected members of the National Assembly, Legislative Yuan, and other bodies.
The second National Assembly, elected in 1991, was composed of 325 members. The majority was elected directly; 100 were chosen from party slates in proportion to the popular vote. This National Assembly amended the constitution in 1994, paving the way for the direct election of the president and vice president that was held in March, 1996. The National Assembly retained the authority to amend the constitution, to recall or to impeach the president or vice president, and to ratify select senior-level presidential appointments. In April 2000, the members of the National Assembly voted to permit their terms of office to expire without holding new elections. They also determined that such an election would be called in the event the National Assembly is needed to decide a presidential recall or a constitutional amendment. In recent years, the National Assembly has handed most of its powers to the Legislative Yuan, including the power of impeachment. In 2005, the National Assembly permanently abolished itself by ratifying a constitution amendment passed by the Legislative Yuan.
Amending the ROC constitution now requires the approval of three-fourths of the quorum of members of the Legislative Yuan. This quorum requires at least three-fourths of all members of the Legislature. After passing by the legislature, the amendment needs ratification from at least fifty percent of all eligible voters of the ROC regardless of voter turnout.
The Executive Yuan comprises the premier, vice-premier, and the cabinet members who are responsible for policy and administration. The President of the Republic appoints the Premier, who is officially the President of the Executive Yuan.
The main lawmaking body, the Legislative Yuan (LY), was originally elected in 1947. The first LY had 773 seats and was viewed as a "rubber stamp" institution. Like the National Assembly, representatives elected in 1947–48 held these seats "indefinitely" until the 1991 ruling. The second LY was elected in 1992. The third LY, elected in 1995, had 157 members serving 3-year terms. The fourth LY, elected in 1998, was expanded to 225 members. The LY has greatly enhanced its standing in relation to the Executive Yuan and has established itself as an important player on the central level. Along with increasing strength and size this body is beginning to reflect the recently liberalized political system. In the 1992 and 1995 elections, the main opposition partythe Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)challenged the KMT dominance of the Legislature. In both elections the DPP won a significant share of the LY seats, and the KMT held only half the seats in the LY. In 1998, however, the KMT increased its LY majority from 50% to 55% and continued to play a dominant role in the legislature as the leading opposition party. In the 2001 election, the DPP became the largest party after large losses suffered by the KMT. Control of the Yuan swung back to the KMT after the 2008 elections, while in 2016 the DPP regained the status as the largest party and achieved a majority for the first time in history.
The Judicial Yuan (JY) administers the ROC's court system. It includes a 15-member Council of Grand Justices (COGJ) that interprets the constitution. Grand Justices are appointed by the President, with the consent of the Legislative Yuan, to 8-year terms.
The Control Yuan (CY) monitors the efficiency of public service and investigates instances of corruption. The 29 Control Yuan members are appointed by the president and approved by the Legislative Yuan; they serve 6-year terms. In recent years, the Control Yuan has become more active, and it has conducted several major investigations and impeachments. The current president of the Control Yuan is Chang Po-ya.
The Examination Yuan (ExY) functions as a civil service commission and includes two ministries: the Ministry of Examination, which recruits officials through competitive examination, and the Ministry of Personnel, which manages the civil service. The President appoints the Examination Yuan's President.
The current President of the Examination Yuan is Wu Jin-lin.
As of July 2015, there are 277 officially registered parties in Taiwan. The aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election and the 2001 legislative election left the Taiwan fragmented among several political parties. These parties can be divided into "blue" factions (Pan-Blue Coalition) and "green" factions (Pan-Green Coalition), with the "blue" faction tending toward unification and a national identity that is linked with China and the "green" faction leaning toward a national identity based on Taiwan independence which is separate from the Chinese national identity. The complex structure of the party system in Taiwan was also influenced by the voting system which uses single non-transferable vote for legislative elections and first past the post for executive elections. Starting with the 2008 legislative elections, the SNTV system was discarded in favor of a mixed single member district (SMD) with proportional representation based on national party votes, similar to Japan.
The "blue" faction comes from the color of the KMT and includes the KMT, the People First Party, and the New Party. The "green" faction comes from the color of the Democratic Progressive Party and includes the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
After 1986, the KMT's hold on power was challenged by the emergence of competing political parties. Before 1986, candidates opposing the KMT ran in elections as independents or "nonpartisans." Before the 1986 island-wide elections many "nonpartisans" grouped together to create Taiwan's first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Despite the official ban on forming new political parties, the government authorities did not prohibit the DPP from operating, and in the 1986 elections DPP and independent candidates captured more than 20% of the vote.
The Civic Organizations Law passed in 1989 allowed for the formation of new political parties, thereby legalizing the DPP, and its support and influence increased. In the 1992 Legislative Yuan elections, the DPP won 51 seats in the 161-seat body. While this was only half the number of KMT seats, it made the DPP's voice an important factor in legislative decisions. Winning the Taipei mayor's position in December 1994, significantly enhanced the DPP's image. The DPP continued its strong showing in the 1995 LY race, winning 45 of the 157 seats to the KMT's 81. The DPP for the first time succeeded in outpolling the KMT in the November 1997 local elections, gaining 12 of the 23 magistrate and mayoral seats as opposed to the KMT's 8 and winning 43% of the vote versus the KMT's 41%.
The DPP membership is made up largely of the Hoklo people, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan. The DPP maintains that Taiwan is an entity separate from mainland China and supports an independent "Republic of Taiwan" as part of its platform. The recent downplaying of Taiwan independence by the DPP as a party, however, led to the formation by hard-line advocates of a new political party called the Taiwan Independence Party in December 1996.
Until 1986, Taiwan's political system was effectively controlled by one party, the KMT, the leader of which also was the President. Many top political officials were members of the party. The party claimed over 2 million members, and its net assets were reputed to total more than NT $61.2 billion, making it the richest political party in the world.
A new opposition party was formed in the wake of the March 2000 presidential election by the runner up, a KMT maverick candidate. The People's First Party is composed primarily of former KMT and NP members who supported former KMT Taiwan Provincial Governor James Soong's presidential bid. The PFP currently had 17 members in the LY before the 2001 election, but increased its representation to over 40 in that election.
The New Party was formed in August 1993 by a group made up largely of second-generation mainlander KMT members who were unhappy both with corruption in the KMT and with what they saw as the "Taiwanization" of KMT ideology and leadership. The NP emphasizes "clean government" and the original KMT focus on unification with mainland China. NP influence remains modest and seems on the wane; it won 21 of the 164 LY seats in the 1995 elections but only 11 of 225 seats in 1998. The New Party was almost annihilated in the 2001 election as its members defected to the Peoples First Party.
In 2001, supporters of former President Lee founded the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). Even though Lee did not join this party, he is named its spiritual leader and most believe he endorsed it. The TSU was formed primarily because, as it took power, the DPP had to moderate its standing as regards to Taiwan independence, leaving a hole in the Taiwanese political spectrum. In a bid to help the "green" side achieve control in the Legislative Yuan, the TSU was formed to attract the radical votes left over from DPP and the localist support for KMT. The TSU had often expressed that it wanted to be the "decisive minority".
Other parties than the parties listed above include:
Although some friction between 1949 Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese still exists, it has abated with time, and there has been a gradual melding of the two communities. In 1972, then-Premier Chiang Ching-kuo began a concentrated effort to bring Taiwanese into more senior position in the central administration and the KMT. Upon his accession to the presidency in January 1988, Lee Teng-hui, who is a native Taiwanese, continued this process. Steps by the government to redress past wrongs such as setting up a memorial to the victims of the February 28 Incident have contributed to this process.
Changes in the political process were the result of the liberalizing trend that began in the 1980s under President Chiang Ching-kuo. In 1987, he lifted the emergency decree, which had been in place since 1948 and which had granted virtually unlimited powers to the president for use in the anti-communist campaign. This decree provided the basis for nearly four decades of martial law under which individuals and groups expressing dissenting views were dealt with harshly. Expressing views contrary to the authorities' claim to represent all of China or supporting independent Taiwan independence was treated as sedition. Vice-President Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo as president when Chiang died on 13 January 1988. Lee was elected by the National Assembly to a 6-year term in 1990, marking the final time a president was elected by the National Assembly.
Since ending martial law, the Republic of China has taken dramatic steps to improve respect for human rights and create a democratic political system. Most restrictions on the press have ended, restrictions on personal freedoms have been relaxed, and the prohibition against organizing new political parties has been lifted.
As the National Assembly took action in 1994 to allow for the popular election of the president, the LY in 1994 passed legislation to allow for the direct election of the governor of Taiwan Province and the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung Municipalities. These elections were held in December 1994, with the KMT winning the governor and Kaohsiung mayor posts, and the DPP winning the Taipei mayor's position. In March 1996, Lee Teng-hui was elected president and Lien Chan vice president in the first direct election by Taiwan's voters. In 1998, the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou wrestled back control of the mayorship of Taipei from the opposition DPP's most prominent figure Chen Shui-bian. In the same elections, however, the DPP's Frank Hsieh managed to defeat Kaoshiung's KMT incumbent.
The position of elected governor and many other elements of the Taiwan Provincial Government were eliminated at the end of 1998. The stated purpose of this was to streamline administrative efficiency, but some commentators have argued that this was also intended to weaken the power base of Governor James Soong. In November 1997 local elections, the DPP won 12 of the 23 county magistrate and city mayor contests to the KMT's 8, outpolling the KMT for the first time in a major election.
In March 2000, Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian became the first opposition party candidate to win the presidency. His victory resulted in the first-ever transition of the presidential office from one political party to another in the ROC. The election also had the effect of splitting the KMT's support base. James Soong launched an independent bid for the presidency after failing to be nominated by the party. In response the KMT expelled Soong and his supporters. Soong and his supporters blamed then-KMT Chairman Lee Teng-hui of harboring pro-independence sentiments and purposely trying to aid Chen Shui-bian by splitting the KMT's vote by running the less charismatic Lien Chan along with Soong. After losing the vote narrowly to Chen and ahead of Lien, Soong established the People First Party. Lee Teng-hui was soon forced out of the KMT Chairmanship amid popular protests and riots demanding he take responsibility for the KMT's defeat.
In the months following the 2000 presidential election, Lee Teng-hui's supporters established the Taiwan Solidarity Union, which advocated a more radical brand of Taiwan independence than the DPP. For this, Lee was expelled from the KMT and the KMT gradually moved itself to a more conservative and pro-reunificationist position. This permitted the formation of two rival coalitions that have since dominated Taiwanese politics: the Pan-Blue Coalition formed by the KMT, People First Party, and New Party and the Pan-Green Coalition formed by the Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union.
In the 2001 LY elections, the DPP won a plurality of seats for the first time. However, the Pan-Blue Coalition held a small majority over the Pan-Green Coalition, causing much of President Chen's agenda to be derailed. This also gave independents in the legislature more power, some of whom founded the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union in 2004.
In a hotly contested election on 20 March 2004, President Chen Shui-bian was re-elected by 50.1% of the popular vote to a second term. The election was marred by a shooting incident the day before the election during which President Chen and his running mate Vice President Annette Lu were slightly wounded. While the opposition contested the results and suggested the shooting was staged to win sympathy (as President Chen had previously been slated to lose narrowly), it was the first time that the DPP has won an outright majority in an island-wide election.
The March election also included a "peace referendum". Historically, the issue of referendums has been closely tied to the question of Taiwan independence, and thus has been a sensitive issue in cross Strait relations. There were two referendums before the voters on 20 March 2004. The first asked in light of the PRC missile threat whether the ROC should purchase anti-missile systems. The second asked whether Taiwan should adopt a "peace framework" for addressing cross Strait differences with the PRC. However both referendums failed to obtain support from over 50% of registered voters, as required to be valid. The Pan-Blue Coalition campaigned against the referendum as unnecessary and urged voters to boycott it.
President Chen Shui-bian has called for major constitutional reforms by 2006 aimed at further reducing layers of government, and making other structural changes aimed at improving governance. The People's Republic of China has accused Chen of using the constitution issue to move Taiwan towards independence. He expressed opposition, however, in his 20 May 2004 inaugural address to using constitutional reform to alter the constitution's definition of Taiwan sovereignty.
The Legislative Yuan passed a set of constitutional amendments on 23 August 2004 that halve the number of LY seats and create single-member districts. The revisions also eliminate the role of the National Assembly and permit the public to confirm or reject future revisions passed by the LY. These constitutional amendments were ratified by the National Assembly in 2005.
Prior to the 11 December 2004 elections to the Legislative Yuan, signs indicated that the DPP would for the first time dominate the Legislative Yuan. Polls projected a huge pan-green victory, and the DPP's election tactics were based on them. This over-reliance on polls resulted in a huge setback. The pan-blue opposition managed to maintain their majority status within the Legislative Yuan, winning 114 seats out of the 225 seats. The Pan-Green only managed to win 101 seats. The remaining 10 seats were won by the independent candidates. Although the Pan-Green coalition increased their seats by one and the DPP remained the largest party, because of raised hopes the election was viewed as a disaster, and President Chen resigned his post as Chairman of DPP as a result.
On 3 December 2005, the KMT made major gains in municipal elections, taking 14 of 23 mayor or county magistrate seats, while the DPP retained only six seats of their previous 10. The pan-blue People First Party and New Party each took one seat, and an independent won one seat. The pan-green TSU was completely shut out. DPP chairman Su Tseng-chang had promised to resign to take responsibility for the defeat. This dramatic setback for the DPP and pan-greens was seen as a reaction to recent corruption scandals, and public disapproval of Chen Shui-Bian's apparent refusal to improve cross-strait relations.
A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of "The New York Times" accused China of fostering an "apartheid" policy toward Taiwan. Dr Tan Sun Chen, Taiwan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, asserts that China's obstruction in the international community has led to a "political apartheid" which "harms the human rights, interests, and dignity of Taiwan’s people.".
Despite the differences between Taiwan and mainland China, contact between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has grown significantly over the past decade. The ROC has continued to relax restrictions on unofficial contacts with the PRC, and cross-Strait interaction has mushroomed. Since 1987, when the ban on travel to mainland China was lifted, Taiwan residents have made more than 10 million trips to mainland China. The ROC Bureau of Foreign Trade estimates that indirect trade with mainland China reached about US$61.639 billion, or 18% of the total trade of the ROC, in 2004. This indirect trade runs heavily in Taiwan's favor, providing another outlet for the island's booming economy. In an attempt to facilitate trade, in 1995 the Executive Yuan approved the construction of an offshore transshipment center at the port of Kaohsiung through which direct shipping with the mainland China would be permitted. In April 1997 the first sanctioned direct cross-Strait shipping began between selected mainland China ports and Kaohsiung for cargo being transshipped through Taiwan.
Beijing has expressed a mixed view of these developments. PRC leaders are pleased at the development of economic ties and exchanges, which they believe helps their cause of reunification. However, the increase in contacts, combined with domestic political liberalization on Taiwan, also has resulted in more open discussion in Taiwan of the future of Taiwan, including the option of independence, to which Beijing is strongly opposed.
The trend in cross-Strait interaction is one of steady growth with, so far, only temporary setbacks due to political factors such as the PRC's reaction Lee Teng-hui's private visit to the U.S. in 1995 and the PRC's reaction his 1999 characterization of relations with mainland China as "state-to-state." Taiwan business representatives have concerns about issues such as safety, corruption, and contract disputes, which have led to increased caution and a search for alternative investment venues but not to pulling out from mainland China altogether. President Chen has yet to revise the previous administration's "no haste, be patient" policy regarding Taiwan-mainland China investment to prevent over-dependence on the PRC. As a result of this policy the ROC has placed restrictions on large-scale infrastructure investments on mainland China in 1997. Despite this, billions of dollars have been invested in mainland China by smaller firms.
The development of semiofficial cross-Strait relations has been incremental. Prior to April 1993, when talks were held in Singapore between the heads of two private intermediary organizationsTaiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and the PRC's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS)there had been some lower-level exchanges between the two sides of the Strait. The April 1993 SEF-ARATS talks primarily addressed technical issues relating to cross-Strait interactions. Lower-level talks continued on a fairly regular basis until they were suspended by Beijing in 1995 after President Lee's U.S. visit. Unofficial exchanges resumed in 1997 through informal meetings between personnel of the two sides' unofficial representative organizations. Direct SEF-ARATS contacts resumed in April 1998, and the SEF Chairman visited mainland China in October 1998. A planned visit by ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan to Taiwan in the fall, however, was postponed following statements made by then-President Lee Teng-hui that relations between mainland China and Taiwan should be conducted as "state-to-state" or at least as "special state-to-state relations." Since his 20 May 2000 inauguration, President Chen has called for resuming the cross-Strait dialogue without any preconditions. President Chen has stated that such talks should be conducted on the basis of the "spirit of 1992," a reference to the agreement to hold the 1993 Singapore talks. The PRC, however, has insisted that President Chen must recognize the one China principle before talks can be held.
The Republic of China currently administers the island of Taiwan (Formosa), Penghu (Pescadores), Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu Islands. The whole country is divided into two streamlined provinces (Taiwan and Fukien) and five special municipalities. Since the provinces are streamlined, the cities and counties are directly governed by the central government, namely Executive Yuan. The central governed administrative divisions are listed below | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30044 |
Terbium
Terbium is a chemical element with the symbol Tb and atomic number 65. It is a silvery-white, rare earth metal that is malleable, ductile, and soft enough to be cut with a knife. The ninth member of the lanthanide series, terbium is a fairly electropositive metal that reacts with water, evolving hydrogen gas. Terbium is never found in nature as a free element, but it is contained in many minerals, including cerite, gadolinite, monazite, xenotime, and euxenite.
Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium as a chemical element in 1843. He detected it as an impurity in yttrium oxide, Y2O3. Yttrium and terbium are named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden. Terbium was not isolated in pure form until the advent of ion exchange techniques.
Terbium is used to dope calcium fluoride, calcium tungstate and strontium molybdate, materials that are used in solid-state devices, and as a crystal stabilizer of fuel cells which operate at elevated temperatures. As a component of Terfenol-D (an alloy that expands and contracts when exposed to magnetic fields more than any other alloy), terbium is of use in actuators, in naval sonar systems and in sensors.
Most of the world's terbium supply is used in green phosphors. Terbium oxide is in fluorescent lamps and television and monitor cathode ray tubes (CRTs). Terbium green phosphors are combined with divalent europium blue phosphors and trivalent europium red phosphors to provide trichromatic lighting technology, a high-efficiency white light used for standard illumination in indoor lighting.
Terbium is a silvery-white rare earth metal that is malleable, ductile and soft enough to be cut with a knife. It is relatively stable in air compared to the earlier, more reactive lanthanides in the first half of the lanthanide series. Terbium exists in two crystal allotropes with a transformation temperature of 1289 °C between them. The 65 electrons of a terbium atom are arranged in the electron configuration [Xe]4f96s2; normally, only three electrons can be removed before the nuclear charge becomes too great to allow further ionization, but in the case of terbium, the stability of the half-filled [Xe]4f7 configuration allows further ionization of a fourth electron in the presence of very strong oxidizing agents such as fluorine gas.
The terbium(III) cation is brilliantly fluorescent, in a bright lemon-yellow color that is the result of a strong green emission line in combination with other lines in the orange and red. The yttrofluorite variety of the mineral fluorite owes its creamy-yellow fluorescence in part to terbium. Terbium easily oxidizes, and is therefore used in its elemental form specifically for research. Single terbium atoms have been isolated by implanting them into fullerene molecules.
Terbium has a simple ferromagnetic ordering at temperatures below 219 K. Above 219 K, it turns into a helical antiferromagnetic state in which all of the atomic moments in a particular basal plane layer are parallel, and oriented at a fixed angle to the moments of adjacent layers. This unusual antiferromagnetism transforms into a disordered paramagnetic state at 230 K.
Terbium metal is an electropositive element and oxidizes in the presence of most acids (such as sulfuric acid), all of the halogens, and even water.
Terbium also oxidizes readily in air to form a mixed terbium(III,IV) oxide:
The most common oxidation state of terbium is +3 (trivalent), such as . In the solid state, tetravalent terbium is also known, in compounds such as TbO2 and TbF4. In solution, terbium typically forms trivalent species, but can be oxidized to the tetravalent state with ozone in highly basic aqueous conditions.
The coordination and organometallic chemistry of terbium is similar to other lanthanides. In aqueous conditions, terbium can be coordinated by nine water molecules, which are arranged in a tricapped trigonal prismatic molecular geometry. Complexes of terbium with lower coordination number are also known, typically with bulky ligands like bis(trimethyl-silylamide), which forms the three-coordinate Tb[N(SiMe3)2]3 complex.
Most coordination and organometallic complexes contain terbium in the trivalent oxidation state.
Divalent (Tb2+) complexes are also known, usually with bulky cyclopentadienyl-type ligands. A few coordination compounds containing terbium in its tetravalent state are also known.
Terbium combines with nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, boron, selenium, silicon and arsenic at elevated temperatures, forming various binary compounds such as TbH2, TbH3, TbB2, Tb2S3, TbSe, TbTe and TbN. In those compounds, Tb mostly exhibits the oxidation states +3 and sometimes +2. Terbium(II) halogenides are obtained by annealing Tb(III) halogenides in presence of metallic Tb in tantalum containers. Terbium also forms sesquichloride Tb2Cl3, which can be further reduced to TbCl by annealing at 800 °C. This terbium(I) chloride forms platelets with layered graphite-like structure.
Other compounds include
Terbium(IV) fluoride is a strong fluorinating agent, emitting relatively pure atomic fluorine when heated rather than the mixture of fluoride vapors emitted from CoF3 or CeF4.
Naturally occurring terbium is composed of its only stable isotope, terbium-159; the element is thus mononuclidic and monoisotopic. Thirty-six radioisotopes have been characterized, with the heaviest being terbium-171 (with atomic mass of 170.95330(86) u) and lightest being terbium-135 (exact mass unknown). The most stable synthetic radioisotopes of terbium are terbium-158, with a half-life of 180 years, and terbium-157, with a half-life of 71 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are much less than a quarter of a year, and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than half a minute. The primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, 159Tb, is electron capture, which results in production of gadolinium isotopes, and the primary mode after is beta minus decay, resulting in dysprosium isotopes.
The element also has 27 nuclear isomers, with masses of 141–154, 156, and 158 (not every mass number corresponds to only one isomer). The most stable of them are terbium-156m, with a half-life of 24.4 hours, and terbium-156m2, with a half-life of 22.7 hours; this is longer than half-lives of most ground states of radioactive terbium isotopes, except those with mass numbers 155–161.
Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium in 1843. He detected it as an impurity in yttrium oxide, Y2O3. Yttrium is named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden. Terbium was not isolated in pure form until the advent of ion exchange techniques.
Mosander first separated yttria into three fractions, all named for the ore: yttria, erbia, and terbia. "Terbia" was originally the fraction that contained the pink color, due to the element now known as erbium. "Erbia" (containing what we now call terbium) originally was the fraction that was essentially colorless in solution. The insoluble oxide of this element was noted to be tinged brown.
Later workers had difficulty in observing the minor colorless "erbia", but the soluble pink fraction was impossible to miss. Arguments went back and forth as to whether erbia even existed. In the confusion, the original names got reversed, and the exchange of names stuck, so that the pink fraction referred eventually to the solution containing erbium (which in solution, is pink). It is now thought that workers using double sodium or potassium sulfates to remove ceria from yttria inadvertently lost the terbium into the ceria-containing precipitate. What is now known as terbium was only about 1% of the original yttria, but that was sufficient to impart a yellowish color to the yttrium oxide. Thus, terbium was a minor component in the original fraction containing it, where it was dominated by its immediate neighbors, gadolinium and dysprosium.
Thereafter, whenever other rare earths were teased apart from this mixture, whichever fraction gave the brown oxide retained the terbium name, until at last, the brown oxide of terbium was obtained in pure form. The 19th century investigators did not have the benefit of the UV fluorescence technology to observe the brilliant yellow or green Tb(III) fluorescence that would have made terbium easier to identify in solid mixtures or solutions.
Terbium is contained along with other rare earth elements in many minerals, including monazite ((Ce,La,Th,Nd,Y)PO4 with up to 0.03% terbium), xenotime (YPO4) and euxenite ((Y,Ca,Er,La,Ce,U,Th)(Nb,Ta,Ti)2O6 with 1% or more terbium). The crust abundance of terbium is estimated as 1.2 mg/kg. No terbium-dominant mineral has yet been found.
Currently, the richest commercial sources of terbium are the ion-adsorption clays of southern China; the concentrates with about two-thirds yttrium oxide by weight have about 1% terbia. Small amounts of terbium occur in bastnäsite and monazite; when these are processed by solvent extraction to recover the valuable heavy lanthanides as samarium-europium-gadolinium concentrate, terbium is recovered therein. Due to the large volumes of bastnäsite processed relative to the ion-adsorption clays, a significant proportion of the world's terbium supply comes from bastnäsite.
In 2018, a rich terbium supply was discovered off the coast of Japan's Minamitori Island, with the stated supply being "enough to meet the global demand for 420 years".
Crushed terbium-containing minerals are treated with hot concentrated sulfuric acid to produce water-soluble sulfates of rare earths. The acidic filtrates are partially neutralized with caustic soda to pH 3–4. Thorium precipitates out of solution as hydroxide and is removed. After that the solution is treated with ammonium oxalate to convert rare earths into their insoluble oxalates. The oxalates are decomposed to oxides by heating. The oxides are dissolved in nitric acid that excludes one of the main components, cerium, whose oxide is insoluble in HNO3. Terbium is separated as a double salt with ammonium nitrate by crystallization.
The most efficient separation routine for terbium salt from the rare-earth salt solution is ion exchange. In this process, rare-earth ions are sorbed onto suitable ion-exchange resin by exchange with hydrogen, ammonium or cupric ions present in the resin. The rare earth ions are then selectively washed out by suitable complexing agent. As with other rare earths, terbium metal is produced by reducing the anhydrous chloride or fluoride with calcium metal. Calcium and tantalum impurities can be removed by vacuum remelting, distillation, amalgam formation or zone melting.
Terbium is used as a dopant in calcium fluoride, calcium tungstate, and strontium molybdate, materials that are used in solid-state devices, and as a crystal stabilizer of fuel cells which operate at elevated temperatures, together with ZrO2.
Terbium is also used in alloys and in the production of electronic devices. As a component of Terfenol-D, terbium is used in actuators, in naval sonar systems, sensors, in the SoundBug device (its first commercial application), and other magnetomechanical devices. Terfenol-D is a terbium alloy that expands or contracts in the presence of a magnetic field. It has the highest magnetostriction of any alloy.
Terbium oxide is used in green phosphors in fluorescent lamps and color TV tubes. Sodium terbium borate is used in solid state devices. The brilliant fluorescence allows terbium to be used as a probe in biochemistry, where it somewhat resembles calcium in its behavior. Terbium "green" phosphors (which fluoresce a brilliant lemon-yellow) are combined with divalent europium blue phosphors and trivalent europium red phosphors to provide the trichromatic lighting technology which is by far the largest consumer of the world's terbium supply. Trichromatic lighting provides much higher light output for a given amount of electrical energy than does incandescent lighting.
Terbium is also used to detect endospores, as it acts as an assay of dipicolinic acid based on photoluminescence.
As with the other lanthanides, terbium compounds are of low to moderate toxicity, although their toxicity has not been investigated in detail. Terbium has no known biological role. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30045 |
Tungsten
Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with the symbol W and atomic number 74. The name "tungsten" comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral "scheelite", which means "heavy stone". Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively combined with other elements in chemical compounds rather than alone. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite.
The free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the elements discovered, melting at . It also has the highest boiling point, at . Its density is 19.25 times that of water, comparable with that of uranium and gold, and much higher (about 1.7 times) than that of lead. Polycrystalline tungsten is an intrinsically brittle and hard material (under standard conditions, when uncombined), making it difficult to work. However, pure single-crystalline tungsten is more ductile and can be cut with a hard-steel hacksaw.
Tungsten's many alloys have numerous applications, including incandescent light bulb filaments, X-ray tubes (as both the filament and target), electrodes in gas tungsten arc welding, superalloys, and radiation shielding. Tungsten's hardness and high density give it military applications in penetrating projectiles. Tungsten compounds are also often used as industrial catalysts.
Tungsten is the only metal from the third transition series that is known to occur in biomolecules that are found in a few species of bacteria and archaea. It is the heaviest element known to be essential to any living organism. However, tungsten interferes with molybdenum and copper metabolism and is somewhat toxic to more familiar forms of animal life.
In its raw form, tungsten is a hard steel-grey metal that is often brittle and hard to work. If made very pure, tungsten retains its hardness (which exceeds that of many steels), and becomes malleable enough that it can be worked easily. It is worked by forging, drawing, or extruding but it is more commonly formed by sintering.
Of all metals in pure form, tungsten has the highest melting point (), lowest vapor pressure (at temperatures above ), and the highest tensile strength. Although carbon remains solid at higher temperatures than tungsten, carbon sublimes at atmospheric pressure instead of melting, so it has no melting point. Tungsten has the lowest coefficient of thermal expansion of any pure metal. The low thermal expansion and high melting point and tensile strength of tungsten originate from strong covalent bonds formed between tungsten atoms by the 5d electrons.
Alloying small quantities of tungsten with steel greatly increases its toughness.
Tungsten exists in two major crystalline forms: α and β. The former has a body-centered cubic structure and is the more stable form. The structure of the β phase is called A15 cubic; it is metastable, but can coexist with the α phase at ambient conditions owing to non-equilibrium synthesis or stabilization by impurities. Contrary to the α phase which crystallizes in isometric grains, the β form exhibits a columnar habit. The α phase has one third of the electrical resistivity and a much lower superconducting transition temperature TC relative to the β phase: ca. 0.015 K vs. 1–4 K; mixing the two phases allows obtaining intermediate TC values. The TC value can also be raised by alloying tungsten with another metal (e.g. 7.9 K for W-Tc). Such tungsten alloys are sometimes used in low-temperature superconducting circuits.
Naturally occurring tungsten consists of four stable isotopes (182W, 183W, 184W, and 186W) and one very long-lived radioisotope, 180W. Theoretically, all five can decay into isotopes of element 72 (hafnium) by alpha emission, but only 180W has been observed to do so, with a half-life of years; on average, this yields about two alpha decays of 180W per gram of natural tungsten per year. The other naturally occurring isotopes have not been observed to decay, constraining their half-lives to be at least 4 × 1021 years.
Another 30 artificial radioisotopes of tungsten have been characterized, the most stable of which are 181W with a half-life of 121.2 days, 185W with a half-life of 75.1 days, 188W with a half-life of 69.4 days, 178W with a half-life of 21.6 days, and 187W with a half-life of 23.72 h. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than 3 hours, and most of these have half-lives below 8 minutes. Tungsten also has 11 meta states, with the most stable being 179mW ("t"1/2 6.4 minutes).
Elemental tungsten resists attack by oxygen, acids, and alkalis.
The most common formal oxidation state of tungsten is +6, but it exhibits all oxidation states from −2 to +6. Tungsten typically combines with oxygen to form the yellow tungstic oxide, WO3, which dissolves in aqueous alkaline solutions to form tungstate ions, .
Tungsten carbides (W2C and WC) are produced by heating powdered tungsten with carbon. W2C is resistant to chemical attack, although it reacts strongly with chlorine to form tungsten hexachloride (WCl6).
In aqueous solution, tungstate gives the heteropoly acids and polyoxometalate anions under neutral and acidic conditions. As tungstate is progressively treated with acid, it first yields the soluble, metastable "paratungstate A" anion, , which over time converts to the less soluble "paratungstate B" anion, . Further acidification produces the very soluble metatungstate anion, , after which equilibrium is reached. The metatungstate ion exists as a symmetric cluster of twelve tungsten-oxygen octahedra known as the Keggin anion. Many other polyoxometalate anions exist as metastable species. The inclusion of a different atom such as phosphorus in place of the two central hydrogens in metatungstate produces a wide variety of heteropoly acids, such as phosphotungstic acid H3PW12O40.
Tungsten trioxide can form intercalation compounds with alkali metals. These are known as "bronzes"; an example is sodium tungsten bronze.
In 1781, Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that a new acid, tungstic acid, could be made from scheelite (at the time named tungsten). Scheele and Torbern Bergman suggested that it might be possible to obtain a new metal by reducing this acid. In 1783, José and Fausto Elhuyar found an acid made from wolframite that was identical to tungstic acid. Later that year, at the Royal Basque Society in the town of Bergara, Spain, the brothers succeeded in isolating tungsten by reduction of this acid with charcoal, and they are credited with the discovery of the element (they called it "wolfram" or "volfram").
The strategic value of tungsten came to notice in the early 20th century. British authorities acted in 1912 to free the Carrock mine from the German owned Cumbrian Mining Company and, during World War I, restrict German access elsewhere. In World War II, tungsten played a more significant role in background political dealings. Portugal, as the main European source of the element, was put under pressure from both sides, because of its deposits of wolframite ore at Panasqueira. Tungsten's desirable properties such as resistance to high temperatures, its hardness and density, and its strengthening of alloys made it an important raw material for the arms industry, both as a constituent of weapons and equipment and employed in production itself, e.g., in tungsten carbide cutting tools for machining steel.
Now tungsten is used in many more applications such as aircraft & motorsport ballast weights, darts, anti-vibration tooling, and sporting equipment.
The name "tungsten" (which means "heavy stone" in Swedish) is used in English, French, and many other languages as the name of the element, but not in the Nordic countries. "Tungsten" was the old Swedish name for the mineral scheelite. "Wolfram" (or "volfram") is used in most European (especially Germanic, Spanish and Slavic) languages and is derived from the mineral wolframite, which is the origin of the chemical symbol W. The name "wolframite" is derived from German ""wolf rahm"" ("wolf soot" or "wolf cream"), the name given to tungsten by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius in 1747. This, in turn, derives from Latin ""lupi spuma"", the name Georg Agricola used for the element in 1546, which translates into English as "wolf's froth" and is a reference to the large amounts of tin consumed by the mineral during its extraction.
Tungsten is found mainly in the minerals wolframite (iron–manganese tungstate (Fe,Mn)WO4, which is a solid solution of the two minerals ferberite FeWO4, and hübnerite MnWO4) and scheelite (calcium tungstate (CaWO4). Other tungsten minerals range in their level of abundance from moderate to very rare, and have almost no economical value.
Tungsten forms chemical compounds in oxidation states from -II to VI. Higher oxidation states, always as oxides, are relevant to its terrestrial occurrence and its biological roles, mid-level oxidation states are often associated with metal clusters, and very low oxidation states are typically associated with CO complexes. The chemistries of tungsten and molybdenum show strong similarities to each other, as well as contrasts with their lighter congener, chromium. The relative rarity of tungsten(III), for example, contrasts with the pervasiveness of the chromium(III) compounds. The highest oxidation state is seen in tungsten(VI) oxide (WO3). Molybdenum trioxide, which is volatile at high temperatures, is the precursor to virtually all other Mo compounds as well as alloys. Tungsten(VI) oxide is soluble in aqueous base, forming tungstate (WO42−). This oxyanion condenses at lower pH values, forming polyoxotungstates.
The broad range of oxidation states of tungsten is reflected in it various chlorides:
Organotungsten compounds are numerous and also span a range of oxidation states. Notable examples include the trigonal prismatic W(CH3)6 and octahedral W(CO)6.
The world's reserves of tungsten are 3,200,000 tonnes; they are mostly located in China (1,800,000 t), Canada (290,000 t), Russia (160,000 t), Vietnam (95,000 t) and Bolivia. As of 2017, China, Vietnam and Russia are the leading suppliers with 79,000, 7,200 and 3,100 tonnes, respectively. Canada had ceased production in late 2015 due the closure of its sole tungsten mine. Meanwhile, Vietnam had significantly increased its output in the 2010s, owing to the major optimization of its domestic refining operations, and overtook Russia and Bolivia.
China remains the world's leader not only in production, but also in export and consumption of tungsten products. The tungsten production gradually increases outside China because of the rising demand. Meanwhile, its supply by China is strictly regulated by the Chinese Government, which fights illegal mining and excessive pollution originating from mining and refining processes.
Tungsten is considered to be a conflict mineral due to the unethical mining practices observed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There is a large deposit of tungsten ore on the edge of Dartmoor in the United Kingdom, which was exploited during World War I and World War II as the Hemerdon Mine. Following increases in tungsten prices, this mine was reactivated in 2014, but ceased activities in 2018.
Tungsten is extracted from its ores in several stages. The ore is eventually converted to tungsten(VI) oxide (WO3), which is heated with hydrogen or carbon to produce powdered tungsten. Because of tungsten's high melting point, it is not commercially feasible to cast tungsten ingots. Instead, powdered tungsten is mixed with small amounts of powdered nickel or other metals, and sintered. During the sintering process, the nickel diffuses into the tungsten, producing an alloy.
Tungsten can also be extracted by hydrogen reduction of WF6:
or pyrolytic decomposition:
Tungsten is not traded as a futures contract and cannot be tracked on exchanges like the London Metal Exchange. The tungsten industry often uses independent pricing references such as Argus Media or Metal Bulletin as a basis for contracts. The prices are usually quoted for tungsten concentrate or WO3.
Approximately half of the tungsten is consumed for the production of hard materials – namely tungsten carbide – with the remaining major use being in alloys and steels. Less than 10% is used in other chemical compounds. Because of the high ductile-brittle transition temperature of tungsten, its products are conventionally manufactured through powder metallurgy, spark plasma sintering, chemical vapor deposition, hot isostatic pressing, and thermoplastic routes. A more flexible manufacturing alternative is selective laser melting, which is a form of 3D printing and allows creating complex three-dimensional shapes.
Tungsten is mainly used in the production of hard materials based on tungsten carbide, one of the hardest carbides, with a melting point of 2770 °C. WC is an efficient electrical conductor, but W2C is less so. WC is used to make wear-resistant abrasives, and "carbide" cutting tools such as knives, drills, circular saws, reloading ammunition dies, milling and turning tools used by the metalworking, woodworking, mining, petroleum and construction industries. Carbide tooling is actually a ceramic/metal composite, where metallic cobalt acts as a binding (matrix) material to hold the WC particles in place. This type of industrial use accounts for about 60% of current tungsten consumption.
The jewelry industry makes rings of sintered tungsten carbide, tungsten carbide/metal composites, and also metallic tungsten. WC/metal composite rings use nickel as the metal matrix in place of cobalt because it takes a higher luster when polished. Sometimes manufacturers or retailers refer to tungsten carbide as a metal, but it is a ceramic. Because of tungsten carbide's hardness, rings made of this material are extremely abrasion resistant, and will hold a burnished finish longer than rings made of metallic tungsten. Tungsten carbide rings are brittle, however, and may crack under a sharp blow.
The hardness and density of tungsten are applied in obtaining heavy metal alloys. A good example is high speed steel, which can contain as much as 18% tungsten. Tungsten's high melting point makes tungsten a good material for applications like rocket nozzles, for example in the UGM-27 Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile. Tungsten alloys are used in a wide range of applications, including the aerospace and automotive industries and radiation shielding. Superalloys containing tungsten, such as Hastelloy and Stellite, are used in turbine blades and wear-resistant parts and coatings.
Quenched (martensitic) tungsten steel (approx. 5.5% to 7.0% W with 0.5% to 0.7% C) was used for making hard permanent magnets, due to its high remanence and coercivity, as noted by John Hopkinson (1849–1898) as early as 1886. The magnetic properties of a metal or an alloy are very sensitive to microstructure. For example, while the element tungsten is not ferromagnetic (but iron is), when it is present in steel in these proportions, it stabilizes the martensite phase, which has greater ferromagnetism than the ferrite (iron) phase due to its greater resistance to magnetic domain wall motion.
Tungsten's heat resistance makes it useful in arc welding applications when combined with another highly-conductive metal such as silver or copper. The silver or copper provides the necessary conductivity and the tungsten allows the welding rod to withstand the high temperatures of the arc welding environment.
Tungsten, usually alloyed with nickel and iron or cobalt to form heavy alloys, is used in kinetic energy penetrators as an alternative to depleted uranium, in applications where uranium's radioactivity is problematic even in depleted form, or where uranium's additional pyrophoric properties are not desired (for example, in ordinary small arms bullets designed to penetrate body armor). Similarly, tungsten alloys have also been used in cannon shells, grenades and missiles, to create supersonic shrapnel. Germany used tungsten during World War II to produce shells for anti-tank gun designs using the Gerlich squeeze bore principle to achieve very high muzzle velocity and enhanced armor penetration from comparatively small caliber and light weight field artillery. The weapons were highly effective but a shortage of tungsten used in the shell core limited that effectiveness.
Tungsten has also been used in Dense Inert Metal Explosives, which use it as dense powder to reduce collateral damage while increasing the lethality of explosives within a small radius.
Tungsten(IV) sulfide is a high temperature lubricant and is a component of catalysts for hydrodesulfurization. MoS2 is more commonly used for such applications.
Tungsten oxides are used in ceramic glazes and calcium/magnesium tungstates are used widely in fluorescent lighting. Crystal tungstates are used as scintillation detectors in nuclear physics and nuclear medicine. Other salts that contain tungsten are used in the chemical and tanning industries.
Tungsten oxide (WO3) is incorporated into selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalysts found in coal-fired power plants. These catalysts convert nitrogen oxides (NOx) to nitrogen (N2) and water (H2O) using ammonia (NH3). The tungsten oxide helps with the physical strength of the catalyst and extends catalyst life.
Applications requiring its high density include weights, counterweights, ballast keels for yachts, tail ballast for commercial aircraft, rotor weights for civil and military helicopters, and as ballast in race cars for NASCAR and Formula One. Depleted uranium is also used for these purposes, due to similarly high density. Seventy-five-kg blocks of tungsten were used as "cruise balance mass devices" on the entry vehicle portion of the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft. It is an ideal material to use as a dolly for riveting, where the mass necessary for good results can be achieved in a compact bar. High-density alloys of tungsten with nickel, copper or iron are used in high-quality darts (to allow for a smaller diameter and thus tighter groupings) or for fishing lures (tungsten beads allow the fly to sink rapidly). Tungsten has seen use recently in nozzles for 3D printing; the high wear resistance and thermal conductivity of tungsten carbide improves the printing of abrasive filaments. Some cello C strings are wound with tungsten. The extra density gives this string more projection and often cellists will buy just this string and use it with three strings from a different set. Tungsten is used as an absorber on the electron telescope on the Cosmic Ray System of the two Voyager spacecraft.
Its density, similar to that of gold, allows tungsten to be used in jewelry as an alternative to gold or platinum. Metallic tungsten is hypoallergenic, and is harder than gold alloys (though not as hard as tungsten carbide), making it useful for rings that will resist scratching, especially in designs with a brushed finish.
Because the density is so similar to that of gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), and its price of the order of one-thousandth, tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold, which has been observed since the 1980s, or taking an existing gold bar, drilling holes, and replacing the removed gold with tungsten rods. The densities are not exactly the same, and other properties of gold and tungsten differ, but gold-plated tungsten will pass superficial tests.
Gold-plated tungsten is available commercially from China (the main source of tungsten), both in jewelry and as bars.
Because it retains its strength at high temperatures and has a high melting point, elemental tungsten is used in many high-temperature applications, such as Incandescent light bulb, cathode-ray tube, and vacuum tube filaments, heating elements, and rocket engine nozzles. Its high melting point also makes tungsten suitable for aerospace and high-temperature uses such as electrical, heating, and welding applications, notably in the gas tungsten arc welding process (also called tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding).
Because of its conductive properties and relative chemical inertness, tungsten is also used in electrodes, and in the emitter tips in electron-beam instruments that use field emission guns, such as electron microscopes. In electronics, tungsten is used as an interconnect material in integrated circuits, between the silicon dioxide dielectric material and the transistors. It is used in metallic films, which replace the wiring used in conventional electronics with a coat of tungsten (or molybdenum) on silicon.
The electronic structure of tungsten makes it one of the main sources for X-ray targets, and also for shielding from high-energy radiations (such as in the radiopharmaceutical industry for shielding radioactive samples of FDG). It is also used in gamma imaging as a material from which coded apertures are made, due to its excellent shielding properties. Tungsten powder is used as a filler material in plastic composites, which are used as a nontoxic substitute for lead in bullets, shot, and radiation shields. Since this element's thermal expansion is similar to borosilicate glass, it is used for making glass-to-metal seals. In addition to its high melting point, when tungsten is doped with potassium, it leads to an increased shape stability (compared with non-doped tungsten). This ensures that the filament does not sag, and no undesired changes occur.
Through top-down nanofabrication processes, tungsten nanowires have been fabricated and studied since 2002. Due to a particularly high surface to volume ratio, the formation of a surface oxide layer and the single crystal nature of such material, the mechanical properties differ fundamentally from those of bulk tungsten. Such tungsten nanowires have potential applications in nanoelectronics and importantly as pH probes and gas sensors. In similarity to silicon nanowires, tungsten nanowires are frequently produced from a bulk tungsten precursor followed by a thermal oxidation step to control morphology in terms of length and aspect ratio. Using the Deal–Grove model it is possible to predict the oxidation kinetics of nanowires fabricated through such thermal oxidation processing.
Due to its high melting point and good erosion resistance, tungsten is a lead candidate for the most exposed sections of the plasma-facing inner wall of nuclear fusion reactors. It will be used as the plasma-facing material of the divertor in the ITER reactor, and is currently in use in the JET test reactor.
Tungsten, at atomic number "Z" = 74, is the heaviest element known to be biologically functional. It is used by some bacteria and archaea, but not in eukaryotes. For example, enzymes called oxidoreductases use tungsten similarly to molybdenum by using it in a tungsten-pterin complex with molybdopterin (molybdopterin, despite its name, does not contain molybdenum, but may complex with either molybdenum or tungsten in use by living organisms). Tungsten-using enzymes typically reduce carboxylic acids to aldehydes. The tungsten oxidoreductases may also catalyse oxidations. The first tungsten-requiring enzyme to be discovered also requires selenium, and in this case the tungsten-selenium pair may function analogously to the molybdenum-sulfur pairing of some molybdopterin-requiring enzymes. One of the enzymes in the oxidoreductase family which sometimes employ tungsten (bacterial formate dehydrogenase H) is known to use a selenium-molybdenum version of molybdopterin. Acetylene hydratase is an unusual metalloenzyme in that it catalyzes a hydration reaction. Two reaction mechanisms have been proposed, in one of which there is a direct interaction between the tungsten atom and the C≡C triple bond. Although a tungsten-containing xanthine dehydrogenase from bacteria has been found to contain tungsten-molydopterin and also non-protein bound selenium, a tungsten-selenium molybdopterin complex has not been definitively described.
In soil, tungsten metal oxidizes to the tungstate anion. It can be selectively or non-selectively imported by some prokaryotic organisms and may substitute for molybdate in certain enzymes. Its effect on the action of these enzymes is in some cases inhibitory and in others positive. The soil's chemistry determines how the tungsten polymerizes; alkaline soils cause monomeric tungstates; acidic soils cause polymeric tungstates.
Sodium tungstate and lead have been studied for their effect on earthworms. Lead was found to be lethal at low levels and sodium tungstate was much less toxic, but the tungstate completely inhibited their reproductive ability.
Tungsten has been studied as a biological copper metabolic antagonist, in a role similar to the action of molybdenum. It has been found that tetrathiotungstates may be used as biological copper chelation chemicals, similar to the tetrathiomolybdates.
Tungsten is essential for some archaea. The following tungsten-utilizing enzymes are known:
A "wtp" system is known to selectively transport tungsten in archaea:
Because tungsten is a rare metal and its compounds are generally inert, the effects of tungsten on the environment are limited. The abundance of tungsten in the Earth's crust is thought to be about 1.5 parts per million. It is one of the more rare elements.
It was at first believed to be relatively inert and an only slightly toxic metal, but beginning in the year 2000, the risk presented by tungsten alloys, its dusts and particulates to induce cancer and several other adverse effects in animals as well as humans has been highlighted from in vitro and in vivo experiments.
The median lethal dose LD50 depends strongly on the animal and the method of administration and varies between 59 mg/kg (intravenous, rabbits) and 5000 mg/kg (tungsten metal powder, intraperitoneal, rats).
People can be exposed to tungsten in the workplace by breathing it in, swallowing it, skin contact, and eye contact. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and a short term limit of 10 mg/m3.
Tungsten is unique amongst the elements in that it has been the subject of patent proceedings. In 1928, a US court rejected General Electric's attempt to patent it, overturning granted in 1913 to William D. Coolidge. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30046 |
Thulium
Thulium is a chemical element with the symbol Tm and atomic number 69. It is the thirteenth and third-last element in the lanthanide series. Like the other lanthanides, the most common oxidation state is +3, seen in its oxide, halides and other compounds; because it occurs so late in the series, however, the +2 oxidation state is also stabilized by the nearly full 4f shell that results. In aqueous solution, like compounds of other late lanthanides, soluble thulium compounds form coordination complexes with nine water molecules.
In 1879, the Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve separated from the rare earth oxide erbia another two previously unknown components, which he called holmia and thulia; these were the oxides of holmium and thulium, respectively. A relatively pure sample of thulium metal was first obtained in 1911.
Thulium is the second-least abundant of the lanthanides, after radioactively unstable promethium which is only found in trace quantities on Earth. It is an easily workable metal with a bright silvery-gray luster. It is fairly soft and slowly tarnishes in air. Despite its high price and rarity, thulium is used as the radiation source in portable X-ray devices, and in some solid-state lasers. It has no significant biological role and is not particularly toxic.
Pure thulium metal has a bright, silvery luster, which tarnishes on exposure to air. The metal can be cut with a knife, as it has a Mohs hardness of 2 to 3; it is malleable and ductile. Thulium is ferromagnetic below 32K, antiferromagnetic between 32 and 56K, and paramagnetic above 56K.
Thulium has two major allotropes: the tetragonal α-Tm and the more stable hexagonal β-Tm.
Thulium tarnishes slowly in air and burns readily at 150°C to form thulium(III) oxide:
Thulium is quite electropositive and reacts slowly with cold water and quite quickly with hot water to form thulium hydroxide:
Thulium reacts with all the halogens. Reactions are slow at room temperature, but are vigorous above 200°C:
Thulium dissolves readily in dilute sulfuric acid to form solutions containing the pale green Tm(III) ions, which exist as [Tm(OH2)9]3+ complexes:
Thulium reacts with various metallic and non-metallic elements forming a range of binary compounds, including TmN, TmS, TmC2, Tm2C3, TmH2, TmH3, TmSi2, TmGe3, TmB4, TmB6 and TmB12. In those compounds, thulium exhibits valence states +2 and +3, however, the +3 state is most common and only this state has been observed in thulium solutions. Thulium exists as a Tm3+ ion in solution. In this state, the thulium ion is surrounded by nine molecules of water. Tm3+ ions exhibit a bright blue luminescence.
Thulium's only known oxide is Tm2O3. This oxide is sometimes called "thulia". Reddish-purple thulium(II) compounds can be made by the reduction of thulium(III) compounds. Examples of thulium(II) compounds include the halides (except the fluoride). Some hydrated thulium compounds, such as TmCl3·7H2O and Tm2(C2O4)3·6H2O are green or greenish-white. Thulium dichloride reacts very vigorously with water. This reaction results in hydrogen gas and Tm(OH)3 exhibiting a fading reddish color. Combination of thulium and chalcogens results in thulium chalcogenides.
Thulium reacts with hydrogen chloride to produce hydrogen gas and thulium chloride. With nitric acid it yields thulium nitrate, or Tm(NO3)3.
The isotopes of thulium range from 145Tm to 179Tm. The primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, 169Tm, is electron capture, and the primary mode after is beta emission. The primary decay products before 169Tm are element 68 (erbium) isotopes, and the primary products after are element 70 (ytterbium) isotopes.
Thulium-169 is thulium's only primordial isotope and is the only isotope of thulium that is thought to be stable; it is predicted to undergo alpha decay to holmium-165 with a very long half-life. The longest-lived radioisotopes are thulium-171, which has a half-life of 1.92 years, and thulium-170, which has a half-life of 128.6 days. Most other isotopes have half-lives of a few minutes or less. Thirty-five isotopes and 26 nuclear isomers of thulium have been detected. Most isotopes of thulium lighter than 169 atomic mass units decay via electron capture or beta-plus decay, although some exhibit significant alpha decay or proton emission. Heavier isotopes undergo beta-minus decay.
Thulium was discovered by Swedish chemist Per Teodor Cleve in 1879 by looking for impurities in the oxides of other rare earth elements (this was the same method Carl Gustaf Mosander earlier used to discover some other rare earth elements). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30047 |
Tantalum
Tantalum is a chemical element with the symbol Ta and atomic number 73. Previously known as "tantalium", it is named after "Tantalus", a villain from Greek mythology. Tantalum is a rare, hard, blue-gray, lustrous transition metal that is highly corrosion-resistant. It is part of the refractory metals group, which are widely used as minor components in alloys. The chemical inertness of tantalum makes it a valuable substance for laboratory equipment, and as a substitute for platinum. Its main use today is in tantalum capacitors in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, DVD players, video game systems and computers.
Tantalum, always together with the chemically similar niobium, occurs in the mineral groups tantalite, columbite and coltan (a mix of columbite and tantalite, though not recognised as a separate mineral species). Tantalum is considered a technology-critical element.
Tantalum was discovered in Sweden in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg, in two mineral samples – one from Sweden and the other from Finland. One year earlier, Charles Hatchett had discovered columbium (now niobium), and in 1809 the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston compared its oxide, columbite with a density of 5.918 g/cm3, to that of tantalum, tantalite with a density of 7.935 g/cm3. He concluded that the two oxides, despite their difference in measured density, were identical and kept the name tantalum. After Friedrich Wöhler confirmed these results, it was thought that columbium and tantalum were the same element. This conclusion was disputed in 1846 by the German chemist Heinrich Rose, who argued that there were two additional elements in the tantalite sample, and he named them after the children of Tantalus: niobium (from Niobe, the goddess of tears), and pelopium (from Pelops). The supposed element "pelopium" was later identified as a mixture of tantalum and niobium, and it was found that the niobium was identical to the columbium already discovered in 1801 by Hatchett.
The differences between tantalum and niobium were demonstrated unequivocally in 1864 by Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand, and Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville, as well as by Louis J. Troost, who determined the empirical formulas of some of their compounds in 1865. Further confirmation came from the Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, in 1866, who proved that there were only two elements. These discoveries did not stop scientists from publishing articles about the so-called "ilmenium" until 1871. De Marignac was the first to produce the metallic form of tantalum in 1864, when he reduced tantalum chloride by heating it in an atmosphere of hydrogen. Early investigators had only been able to produce impure tantalum, and the first relatively pure ductile metal was produced by Werner von Bolton in Charlottenburg in 1903. Wires made with metallic tantalum were used for light bulb filaments until tungsten replaced it in widespread use.
The name tantalum was derived from the name of the mythological Tantalus, the father of Niobe in Greek mythology. In the story, he had been punished after death by being condemned to stand knee-deep in water with perfect fruit growing above his head, both of which eternally "tantalized" him. (If he bent to drink the water, it drained below the level he could reach, and if he reached for the fruit, the branches moved out of his grasp.) Anders Ekeberg wrote "This metal I call "tantalum" ... partly in allusion to its incapacity, when immersed in acid, to absorb any and be saturated."
For decades, the commercial technology for separating tantalum from niobium involved the fractional crystallization of potassium heptafluorotantalate away from potassium oxypentafluoroniobate monohydrate, a process that was discovered by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac in 1866. This method has been supplanted by solvent extraction from fluoride-containing solutions of tantalum.
Tantalum is dark (blue-gray), dense, ductile, very hard, easily fabricated, and highly conductive of heat and electricity. The metal is renowned for its resistance to corrosion by acids; in fact, at temperatures below 150 °C tantalum is almost completely immune to attack by the normally aggressive aqua regia. It can be dissolved with hydrofluoric acid or acidic solutions containing the fluoride ion and sulfur trioxide, as well as with a solution of potassium hydroxide. Tantalum's high melting point of 3017 °C (boiling point 5458 °C) is exceeded among the elements only by tungsten, rhenium and osmium for metals, and carbon.
Tantalum exists in two crystalline phases, alpha and beta. The alpha phase is relatively ductile and soft; it has body-centered cubic structure (space group "Im3m", lattice constant "a" = 0.33058 nm), Knoop hardness 200–400 HN and electrical resistivity 15–60 µΩ⋅cm. The beta phase is hard and brittle; its crystal symmetry is tetragonal (space group "P42/mnm", "a" = 1.0194 nm, "c" = 0.5313 nm), Knoop hardness is 1000–1300 HN and electrical resistivity is relatively high at 170–210 µΩ⋅cm. The beta phase is metastable and converts to the alpha phase upon heating to 750–775 °C. Bulk tantalum is almost entirely alpha phase, and the beta phase usually exists as thin films obtained by magnetron
sputtering, chemical vapor deposition or electrochemical deposition from an eutectic molten salt solution.
Natural tantalum consists of two isotopes: 180mTa (0.012%) and 181Ta (99.988%). 181Ta is a stable isotope. 180mTa ("m" denotes a metastable state) is predicted to decay in three ways: isomeric transition to the ground state of 180Ta, beta decay to 180W, or electron capture to 180Hf. However, radioactivity of this nuclear isomer has never been observed, and only a lower limit on its half-life of 2.0 × 1016 years has been set. The ground state of 180Ta has a half-life of only 8 hours. 180mTa is the only naturally occurring nuclear isomer (excluding radiogenic and cosmogenic short-lived nuclides). It is also the rarest primordial isotope in the Universe, taking into account the elemental abundance of tantalum and isotopic abundance of 180mTa in the natural mixture of isotopes (and again excluding radiogenic and cosmogenic short-lived nuclides).
Tantalum has been examined theoretically as a "salting" material for nuclear weapons (cobalt is the better-known hypothetical salting material). An external shell of 181Ta would be irradiated by the intensive high-energy neutron flux from a hypothetical exploding nuclear weapon. This would transmute the tantalum into the radioactive isotope 182Ta, which has a half-life of 114.4 days and produces gamma rays with approximately 1.12 million electron-volts (MeV) of energy apiece, which would significantly increase the radioactivity of the nuclear fallout from the explosion for several months. Such "salted" weapons have never been built or tested, as far as is publicly known, and certainly never used as weapons.
Tantalum can be used as a target material for accelerated proton beams for the production of various short-lived isotopes including 8Li, 80Rb, and 160Yb.
Tantalum forms compounds in oxidation states −III to +V. Most commonly encountered are oxides of Ta(V), which includes all minerals. The chemical properties of Ta and Nb are very similar. In aqueous media, Ta only exhibit the +V oxidation state. Like niobium, tantalum is barely soluble in dilute solutions of hydrochloric, sulfuric, nitric and phosphoric acids due to the precipitation of hydrous Ta(V) oxide. In basic media, Ta can be solubilized due to the formation of polyoxotantalate species.
Tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) is the most important compound from the perspective of applications. Oxides of tantalum in lower oxidation states are numerous, including many defect structures, and are lightly studied or poorly characterized.
Tantalates, compounds containing [TaO4]3− or [TaO3]− are numerous. Lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) adopts a perovskite structure. Lanthanum tantalate (LaTaO4) contains isolated tetrahedra.
As in the cases of other refractory metals, the hardest known compounds of tantalum are nitrides and carbides. Tantalum carbide, TaC, like the more commonly used tungsten carbide, is a hard ceramic that is used in cutting tools. Tantalum(III) nitride is used as a thin film insulator in some microelectronic fabrication processes.
The best studied chalcogenide is TaS2, a layered semiconductor, as seen for other transition metal dichalcogenides. A tantalum-tellurium alloy forms quasicrystals.
Tantalum halides span the oxidation states of +5, +4, and +3. Tantalum pentafluoride (TaF5) is a white solid with a melting point of 97.0 °C. The anion [TaF7]2- is used for its separation from niobium. The chloride , which exists as a dimer, is the main reagent in synthesis of new Ta compounds. It hydrolyzes readily to an oxychloride. The lower halides and , feature Ta-Ta bonds.
Organotantalum compounds include pentamethyltantalum, mixed alkyltantalum chlorides, alkyltantalum hydrides, alkylidene complexes as well as cyclopentadienyl derivatives of the same. Diverse salts and substituted derivatives are known for the hexacarbonyl [Ta(CO)6]− and related isocyanides.
Tantalum is estimated to make up about 1 ppm or 2 ppm of the Earth's crust by weight. There are many species of tantalum minerals, only some of which are so far being used by industry as raw materials: tantalite (a series consisting of tantalite-(Fe), tantalite-(Mn) and tantalite-(Mg)) microlite (now a group name), wodginite, euxenite (actually euxenite-(Y)), and polycrase (actually polycrase-(Y)). Tantalite (Fe, Mn)Ta2O6 is the most important mineral for tantalum extraction. Tantalite has the same mineral structure as columbite (Fe, Mn) (Ta, Nb)2O6; when there is more tantalum than niobium it is called tantalite and when there is more niobium than tantalum is it called columbite (or niobite). The high density of tantalite and other tantalum containing minerals makes the use of gravitational separation the best method. Other minerals include samarskite and fergusonite.
The primary mining of tantalum is in Australia, where the largest producer, Global Advanced Metals, formerly known as Talison Minerals, operates two mines in Western Australia, Greenbushes in the Southwest and Wodgina in the Pilbara region. The Wodgina mine was reopened in January 2011 after mining at the site was suspended in late-2008 due to the global financial crisis. Less than a year after it reopened, Global Advanced Metals announced that due to again "... softening tantalum demand ...", and other factors, tantalum mining operations were to cease at the end of February 2012. Wodgina produces a primary tantalum concentrate which is further upgraded at the Greenbushes operation before being sold to customers. Whereas the large-scale producers of niobium are in Brazil and Canada, the ore there also yields a small percentage of tantalum. Some other countries such as China, Ethiopia, and Mozambique mine ores with a higher percentage of tantalum, and they produce a significant percentage of the world's output of it. Tantalum is also produced in Thailand and Malaysia as a by-product of the tin mining there. During gravitational separation of the ores from placer deposits, not only is cassiterite (SnO2) found, but a small percentage of tantalite also included. The slag from the tin smelters then contains economically useful amounts of tantalum, which is leached from the slag.
World tantalum mine production has undergone an important geographic shift since the start of the 21st century when production was predominantly from Australia and Brazil. Beginning in 2007 and through 2014, the major sources of tantalum production from mines dramatically shifted to the DRC, Rwanda, and some other African countries. Future sources of supply of tantalum, in order of estimated size, are being explored in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greenland, China, Mozambique, Canada, Australia, the United States, Finland, and Brazil.
It is estimated that there are less than 50 years left of tantalum resources, based on extraction at current rates, demonstrating the need for increased recycling.
Tantalum is considered a conflict resource. Coltan, the industrial name for a columbite–tantalite mineral from which niobium and tantalum are extracted, can also be found in Central Africa, which is why tantalum is being linked to warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). According to an October 23, 2003 United Nations report, the smuggling and exportation of coltan has helped fuel the war in the Congo, a crisis that has resulted in approximately 5.4 million deaths since 1998 – making it the world's deadliest documented conflict since World War II. Ethical questions have been raised about responsible corporate behavior, human rights, and endangering wildlife, due to the exploitation of resources such as coltan in the armed conflict regions of the Congo Basin. However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008.
The stated aim of the "Solutions for Hope Tantalum Project" is to "source conflict-free tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo"
Several steps are involved in the extraction of tantalum from tantalite. First, the mineral is crushed and concentrated by gravity separation. This is generally carried out near the mine site.
The refining of tantalum from its ores is one of the more demanding separation processes in industrial metallurgy. The chief problem is that tantalum ores contain significant amounts of niobium, which has chemical properties almost identical to those of Ta. A large number of procedures have been developed to address this challenge.
In modern times, the separation is achieved by hydrometallurgy. Extraction begins with leaching the ore with hydrofluoric acid together with sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid. This step allows the tantalum and niobium to be separated from the various non-metallic impurities in the rock. Although Ta occurs as various minerals, it is conveniently represented as the pentoxide, since most oxides of tantalum(V) behave similarly under these conditions. A simplified equation for its extraction is thus:
Completely analogous reactions occur for the niobium component, but the hexafluoride is typically predominant under the conditions of the extraction.
These equations are simplified: it is suspected that bisulfate (HSO4−) and chloride compete as ligands for the Nb(V) and Ta(V) ions, when sulfuric and hydrochloric acids are used, respectively. The tantalum and niobium fluoride complexes are then removed from the aqueous solution by liquid-liquid extraction into organic solvents, such as cyclohexanone, octanol, and methyl isobutyl ketone. This simple procedure allows the removal of most metal-containing impurities (e.g. iron, manganese, titanium, zirconium), which remain in the aqueous phase in the form of their fluorides and other complexes.
Separation of the tantalum "from" niobium is then achieved by lowering the ionic strength of the acid mixture, which causes the niobium to dissolve in the aqueous phase. It is proposed that oxyfluoride H2[NbOF5] is formed under these conditions. Subsequent to removal of the niobium, the solution of purified H2[TaF7] is neutralised with aqueous ammonia to precipitate hydrated tantalum oxide as a solid, which can be calcined to tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5).
Instead of hydrolysis, the H2[TaF7] can be treated with potassium fluoride to produce potassium heptafluorotantalate:
Unlike H2[TaF7], the potassium salt is readily crystallized and handled as a solid.
K2[TaF7] can be converted to metallic tantalum by reduction with sodium, at approximately 800 °C in molten salt.
In an older method, called the Marignac process, the mixture of H2[TaF7] and H2[NbOF5] was converted to a "mixture" of K2[TaF7] and K2[NbOF5], which was then be separated by fractional crystallization, exploiting their different water solubilities.
Tantalum can also be refined by electrolysis, using a modified version of the Hall–Héroult process. Instead of requiring the input oxide and output metal to be in liquid form, tantalum electrolysis operates on non-liquid powdered oxides. The initial discovery came in 1997 when Cambridge University researchers immersed small samples of certain oxides in baths of molten salt and reduced the oxide with electric current. The cathode uses powdered metal oxide. The anode is made of carbon. The molten salt at is the electrolyte. The first refinery has enough capacity to supply 3–4% of annual global demand.
All welding of tantalum must be done in an inert atmosphere of argon or helium in order to shield it from contamination with atmospheric gases. Tantalum is not solderable. Grinding tantalum is difficult, especially so for annealed tantalum. In the annealed condition, tantalum is extremely ductile and can be readily formed as metal sheets.
The major use for tantalum, as the metal powder, is in the production of electronic components, mainly capacitors and some high-power resistors. Tantalum electrolytic capacitors exploit the tendency of tantalum to form a protective oxide surface layer, using tantalum powder, pressed into a pellet shape, as one "plate" of the capacitor, the oxide as the dielectric, and an electrolytic solution or conductive solid as the other "plate". Because the dielectric layer can be very thin (thinner than the similar layer in, for instance, an aluminium electrolytic capacitor), a high capacitance can be achieved in a small volume. Because of the size and weight advantages, tantalum capacitors are attractive for portable telephones, personal computers, automotive electronics and cameras.
Tantalum is also used to produce a variety of alloys that have high melting points, strength, and ductility. Alloyed with other metals, it is also used in making carbide tools for metalworking equipment and in the production of superalloys for jet engine components, chemical process equipment, nuclear reactors, missile parts, heat exchangers, tanks, and vessels. Because of its ductility, tantalum can be drawn into fine wires or filaments, which are used for evaporating metals such as aluminium. Since it resists attack by body fluids and is nonirritating, tantalum is widely used in making surgical instruments and implants. For example, porous tantalum coatings are used in the construction of orthopedic implants due to tantalum's ability to form a direct bond to hard tissue.
Tantalum is inert against most acids except hydrofluoric acid and hot sulfuric acid, and hot alkaline solutions also cause tantalum to corrode. This property makes it a useful metal for chemical reaction vessels and pipes for corrosive liquids. Heat exchanging coils for the steam heating of hydrochloric acid are made from tantalum. Tantalum was extensively used in the production of ultra high frequency electron tubes for radio transmitters. Tantalum is capable of capturing oxygen and nitrogen by forming nitrides and oxides and therefore helped to sustain the high vacuum needed for the tubes when used for internal parts such as grids and plates.
The high melting point and oxidation resistance lead to the use of the metal in the production of vacuum furnace parts. Tantalum is extremely inert and is therefore formed into a variety of corrosion resistant parts, such as thermowells, valve bodies, and tantalum fasteners. Due to its high density, shaped charge and explosively formed penetrator liners have been constructed from tantalum. Tantalum greatly increases the armor penetration capabilities of a shaped charge due to its high density and high melting point. It is also occasionally used in precious watches e.g. from Audemars Piguet, F.P. Journe, Hublot, Montblanc, Omega, and Panerai. Tantalum is also highly bioinert and is used as an orthopedic implant material. The high stiffness of tantalum makes it necessary to use it as highly porous foam or scaffold with lower stiffness for hip replacement implants to avoid stress shielding. Because tantalum is a non-ferrous, non-magnetic metal, these implants are considered to be acceptable for patients undergoing MRI procedures. The oxide is used to make special high refractive index glass for camera lenses.
Tantalum receives far less attention in the environmental field than it does in other geosciences. Upper Crust Concentrations (UCC) and the Nb/Ta ratio in the upper crust and in minerals are available because these measurements are useful as a geochemical tool. The latest values for UCC and the Nb/Ta(w/w) ratio in the upper crust stand at 0.92 ppm and 12.7 respectively.
Little data is available on tantalum concentrations in the different environmental compartments, especially in natural waters where reliable estimates of ‘dissolved’ tantalum concentrations in seawater and freshwaters have not even been produced. Some values on dissolved concentrations in oceans have been published, but they are contradictory. Values in freshwaters fare little better, but, in all cases, they are probably below 1 ng L−1,since ‘dissolved’ concentrations in natural waters are well below most current analytical capabilities. Analysis requires pre-concentration procedures that, for the moment, do not give consistent results. And in any case, tantalum appears to be present in natural waters mostly as particulate matter rather than dissolved.
Values for concentrations in soils, bed sediments and atmospheric aerosols are easier to come by. Values in soils are close to 1 ppm and thus to UCC values. This indicates detrital origin. For atmospheric aerosols the values available are scattered and limited. When tantalum enrichment is observed, it is probably due to loss of more water-soluble elements in aerosols in the clouds.
Pollution linked to human use of the element has not been detected. Tantalum appears to be a very conservative element in biogeochemical terms, but its cycling and reactivity are still not fully understood.
Compounds containing tantalum are rarely encountered in the laboratory. The metal is highly biocompatible and is used for body implants and coatings, therefore attention may be focused on other elements or the physical nature of the chemical compound.
People can be exposed to tantalum in the workplace by breathing it in, skin contact, or eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for tantalum exposure in the workplace as 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 5 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and a short-term limit of 10 mg/m3. At levels of 2500 mg/m3, tantalum is immediately dangerous to life and health. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30048 |
Torch
A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. In some countries "torch" in modern usage is the term for a battery-operated portable light.
From the Old French ""torche"" meaning "twisted thing", hence "torch formed of twisted tow dipped in wax", probably from Vulgar Latin *"torca", alteration of Late Latin "torqua", variant of classical Latin "torques" "collar of twisted metal", from "torquere" "to twist".
Torch construction has varied through history depending on the torch's purpose. Torches were usually constructed of a wooden stave with one end wrapped in a material which was soaked in a flammable substance. In ancient Rome some torches were made of sulfur mixed with lime. This meant that the fire would not diminish after being plunged into water. Modern procession torches are made from coarse hessian rolled into a tube and soaked in wax. A wooden handle is usually used, and a cardboard collar is attached to deflect any wax droplets. They are an easy, safe and relatively cheap way to hold a flame aloft in a parade or to provide illumination in any after-dark celebration.
Modern torches suitable for juggling are made of a wooden-and-metal or metal-only stave with one end wrapped in a Kevlar wick. This wick is soaked in a flammable liquid, usually paraffin (kerosene).
The torch is a common emblem of both enlightenment and hope. Thus the Statue of Liberty, actually "Liberty Enlightening the World", lifts her torch. Crossed reversed torches were signs of mourning that appear on Greek and Roman funerary monuments—a torch pointed downwards symbolizes death, while a torch held up symbolizes life, truth and the regenerative power of flame. The torch is also a symbol used by political parties, for instance by both Labour (from 1918 to 1980) and the Conservatives (from 1983 to 2006) in the UK, and the Malta Labour Party. In the seals of schools in the Philippines, the torch symbolizes the vision of education to provide enlightenment to all the students.
A torch carried in relay by runners is used to light the Olympic flame which burns without interruption until the end of the Games. These torches and the relay tradition were introduced in the 1936 Summer Olympics by Carl Diem, the chairman of the event because during the duration of the Ancient Olympic Games in Olympia, a sacred flame burnt inside of the temple of Hera, kept in custody by her priestess.
Juggling torches are often used as a prop in toss juggling: they can be flipped into the air in an end-over-end motion while being juggled, in the same manner as juggling clubs or juggling knives, but because of their sound and 'trail of flame', they can appear much more impressive to audiences. To a skilled juggler, there is only a slight chance of being burned, but they are still dangerous.
In former times, liturgical torches were carried in Eucharistic processions simply to give light. The Church eventually adopted their use for Solemn High Masses.
According to Adrian Fortescue, the more correct form of liturgical torches are non-freestanding (i.e. cannot stand up on their own). However, today, even in the Vatican, freestanding, tall candles in ornate candle-stick holders have replaced the former type. The torches are carried by torchbearers, who enter at the Sanctus and leave after Communion.
Anglicans of the High Church and some Lutherans use torches in some of their liturgical celebrations as well.
Torchlight march is a type of illuminated procession which is held after dark so that torches carried by the participants form a spectacle (other types of an illuminated procession involve candles, lanterns etc).
The association of a torch with love may date to the Greek and Roman tradition of a wedding torch,
lit in the bride's hearth on her wedding night, then used to light the hearth in her new home. Such a torch is associated with the Greek god of marriage Hymen.
The idiom to carry a torch (for someone) means to love or to be romantically infatuated with someone, especially when such feelings are not reciprocated. It is often used to characterize a situation in which a romantic relationship has ended, but where one partner still loves the other. It is considered by some to be dated, but still in wide usage. A torch song is typically a sentimental love song in which a singer laments an unrequited love. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30051 |
The Qt Company
The Qt Company (pronounced "cute"; formerly Trolltech; originally Quasar Technologies,) is a software company based in Espoo, Finland. It oversees the development of its Qt application framework within the Qt Project. It was formed following the acquisition of Qt by Digia, but was later spun off into a separate, publicly traded company.
It has core R&D in Oslo, Norway, as well as large engineering teams in Berlin, Germany, and Oulu, Finland. The Qt Company operates in China, Finland, Germany, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India, and the United States.
The company provides software development platforms and frameworks, as well as expert consulting services. Its flagship product is Qt, a multi-platform Graphical User Interface (GUI) framework written in C++. Qt is popular with application developers using C++ but is supported by bindings for other programming languages too, such as Python. Qt also includes packages such as data structures and a networking library. The popular free and cross-platform KDE Plasma desktop environment and software compilation uses the Qt library. The company also employs several KDE developers.
In 2001 Trolltech introduced Qtopia which is based on Qt. Qtopia is an application platform for Linux-based devices such as mobile phones, portable media players, and home media. It is also used in many non-consumer products such as medical instruments and industrial devices. Qtopia Phone Edition was released in 2004, and their Greenphone smartphone is based on this platform.
Trolltech was founded by Eirik Chambe-Eng and Haavard Nord on 4 March 1994. They started writing Qt in 1991, and since then Qt has steadily expanded and improved. Trolltech completed an initial public offering (IPO) on the Oslo Stock Exchange in July, 2006.
On 28 January 2008, Nokia Corporation announced that they had entered into an agreement that Nokia would make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech. The total cost for Nokia was approximately €104 million. On 5 June 2008 Nokia's voluntary tender offer was approved for all the shares in Trolltech. By 17 June 2008, Nokia had completed its acquisition of Trolltech. On 30 September 2008, Trolltech was renamed as Qt Software, and Qtopia was renamed as Qt Extended. On 11 August 2009, the company's name was changed to Qt Development Frameworks.
Nokia sold the commercial licensing business of Qt to Digia in March 2011. The remainder of the assets were subsequently acquired by Digia in 2012.
In September 2014, Digia formed The Qt Company, a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to the development and governance of the Qt platform. In May 2016, the company went public on NASDAQ Helsinki as QTCOM. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30054 |
Trojan horse (computing)
In computing, a Trojan horse, or trojan, is any malware which misleads users of its true intent. The term is derived from the Ancient Greek story of the deceptive Trojan Horse that led to the fall of the city of Troy.
Trojans are generally spread by some form of social engineering, for example where a user is duped into executing an email attachment disguised to appear not suspicious, (e.g., a routine form to be filled in), or by clicking on some fake advertisement on social media or anywhere else. Although their payload can be anything, many modern forms act as a backdoor, contacting a controller which can then have unauthorized access to the affected computer. Trojans may allow an attacker to access users' personal information such as banking information, passwords, or personal identity. It can also delete a user's files or infect other devices connected to the network. Ransomware attacks are often carried out using a trojan.
Unlike computer viruses, worms, and rogue security software, trojans generally do not attempt to inject themselves into other files or otherwise propagate themselves.
It's not clear where or when the concept, and this term for it, was first used, but by 1971 the first Unix manual assumed its readers knew both:
Another early reference is in a US Air Force report in 1974 on the analysis of vulnerability in the Multics computer systems.
It was made popular by Ken Thompson in his 1983 Turing Award acceptance lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust", subtitled: "To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software." He mentioned that he knew about the possible existence of trojans from a report on the security of Multics.
Trojan viruses, in this way, may require interaction with a malicious controller (not necessarily distributing the trojan) to fulfill their purpose. It is possible for those involved with trojans to scan computers on a network to locate any with a trojan installed, which the hacker can then control.
Some trojans take advantage of a security flaw in older versions of Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to use the host computer as an anonymizer proxy to effectively hide Internet usage, enabling the controller to use the Internet for illegal purposes while all potentially incriminating evidence indicates the infected computer or its IP address. The host's computer may or may not show the internet history of the sites viewed using the computer as a proxy. The first generation of anonymizer trojan horses tended to leave their tracks in the page view histories of the host computer. Later generations of the trojan tend to "cover" their tracks more efficiently. Several versions of Sub7 have been widely circulated in the US and Europe and became the most widely distributed examples of this type of trojan.
In German-speaking countries, spyware used or made by the government is sometimes called "govware". Govware is typically a Trojan software used to intercept communications from the target computer. Some countries like Switzerland and Germany have a legal framework governing the use of such software. Examples of govware trojans include the Swiss MiniPanzer and MegaPanzer and the German "state trojan" nicknamed R2D2. German govware works by exploiting security gaps unknown to the general public and accessing smartphone data before it becomes encrypted via other applications.
Due to the popularity of botnets among hackers and the availability of advertising services that permit authors to violate their users' privacy, trojans are becoming more common. According to a survey conducted by BitDefender from January to June 2009, "trojan-type malware is on the rise, accounting for 83% of the global malware detected in the world." Trojans have a relationship with worms, as they spread with the help given by worms and travel across the internet with them. BitDefender has stated that approximately 15% of computers are members of a botnet, usually recruited by a trojan infection.
The term "trojan horse" in computing is derived from the legendary Trojan Horse; itself named after Troy. For this reason "Trojan" is often capitalized. However, while style guides and dictionaries differ, many suggest a lower case "trojan" for normal use. That is the approach taken in this article - apart from when first introducing the word and its derivation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30056 |
Tokyo
Tokyo (; Japanese: , "Tōkyō" ), officially , is the capital and most populous prefecture of Japan. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central Pacific coast of Japan's main island, Honshu. Tokyo is the political and economic center of the country, as well as the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the national government. In 2019, the prefecture had an estimated population of 13,929,280. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents as of 2018.
Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became a prominent political center in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population numbering more than one million. Following the end of the shogunate in 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to the city, which was renamed Tokyo (literally "eastern capital"). Tokyo was devastated by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, and again by Allied bombing raids during World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, the city underwent rapid reconstruction and expansion, going on to lead Japan's post-war economic recovery. Since 1943, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has administered the prefecture's 23 special wards (formerly Tokyo City), various bed towns in the western area, and two outlying island chains.
Tokyo is the largest urban economy in the world by gross domestic product, and is categorized as an Alpha+ city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Part of an industrial region that includes the cities of Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Chiba, Tokyo is Japan's leading center of business and finance. In 2019, it hosted 36 of the "Fortune" Global 500 companies. In 2020, it ranked third on the Global Financial Centres Index, behind New York City and London.
The city has hosted multiple international events, including the 1964 Summer Olympics and three G7 Summits (1979, 1986, and 1993); it was also set to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, which were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tokyo is an international center of research and development and is represented by several major universities, notably the University of Tokyo. Tokyo Station is the central hub for Japan's Shinkansen bullet train system, and the city is served by an extensive network of rail and subways. Notable districts of Tokyo include Chiyoda (the site of the Imperial Palace), Shinjuku (the city's administrative center), and Shibuya (a commercial and business hub).
Tokyo was originally known as , a kanji compound of 江 ("e", "cove, inlet") and 戸 ("to", "entrance, gate, door"). The name, which can be translated as "estuary", is a reference to the original settlement's location at the meeting of the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay. During the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the name of the city was changed to when it became the new imperial capital, in line with the East Asian tradition of including the word capital () in the name of the capital city (like Kyoto (), Beijing () and Nanjing ()). During the early Meiji period, the city was sometimes called "Tōkei", an alternative pronunciation for the same characters representing "Tokyo", making it a kanji homograph. Some surviving official English documents use the spelling "Tokei"; however, this pronunciation is now obsolete.
Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo, in what was formerly part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified by the Edo clan, in the late twelfth century. In 1457, Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred from Mikawa Province (his lifelong base) to Kantō region. When he became "shōgun" in 1603, Edo became the center of his ruling. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century. But Edo was Tokugawa's home and was not capital of Japan. (That was caused by the Meiji Restoration in 1868.) The Emperor himself lived in Kyoto from 794 to 1868 as capital of Japan. During the Edo era, the city enjoyed a prolonged period of peace known as the "Pax Tokugawa", and in the presence of such peace, Edo adopted a stringent policy of seclusion, which helped to perpetuate the lack of any serious military threat to the city. The absence of war-inflicted devastation allowed Edo to devote the majority of its resources to rebuilding in the wake of the consistent fires, earthquakes, and other devastating natural disasters that plagued the city. However, this prolonged period of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Commodore Perry forced the opening of the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, leading to an increase in the demand for new foreign goods and subsequently a severe rise in inflation. Social unrest mounted in the wake of these higher prices and culminated in widespread rebellions and demonstrations, especially in the form of the "smashing" of rice establishments. Meanwhile, supporters of the Meiji Emperor leveraged the disruption that these widespread rebellious demonstrations were causing to further consolidate power by overthrowing the last Tokugawa "shōgun", Yoshinobu, in 1867. After 265 years, the "Pax Tokugawa" came to an end.
In 1869, the 17-year-old Emperor Meiji moved to Edo, and in accordance, the city was renamed Tokyo (meaning Eastern Capital). The city was divided into Yamanote and Shitamachi. Tokyo was already the nation's political and cultural center, and the emperor's residence made it a de facto imperial capital as well, with the former Edo Castle becoming the Imperial Palace. The city of Tokyo was officially established on May 1, 1889.
Central Tokyo, like Osaka, has been designed since about 1900 to be centered on major railway stations in a high-density fashion, so suburban railways were built relatively cheaply at street level and with their own right-of-way. Though expressways have been built in Tokyo, the basic design has not changed.
Tokyo went on to suffer two major catastrophes in the 20th century: the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which left 140,000 dead or missing; and World War II.
In 1943, the city of Tokyo merged with the prefecture of Tokyo to form the "Metropolitan Prefecture" of Tokyo. Since then, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government served as both the prefecture government for Tokyo, as well as administering the special wards of Tokyo, for what had previously been Tokyo City. World War II wreaked widespread destruction of most of the city due to the persistent Allied air raids on Japan and the use of incendiary bombs. The bombing of Tokyo in 1944 and 1945 is estimated to have killed between 75,000 and 200,000 civilians and left more than half of the city destroyed. The deadliest night of the war came on March 9–10, 1945, the night of the American "Operation Meetinghouse" raid; as nearly 700,000 incendiary bombs rained on the eastern half of the city, mainly in heavily residential wards. Two-fifths of the city were completely burned, more than 276,000 buildings were demolished, 100,000 civilians were killed, and 110,000 more were injured. Between 1940 and 1945, the population of Japan's capital city dwindled from 6,700,000 to less than 2,800,000, with the majority of those who lost their homes living in "ramshackle, makeshift huts".
After the war, Tokyo was completely rebuilt and was showcased to the world during the 1964 Summer Olympics. The 1970s brought new high-rise developments such as Sunshine 60, a new and controversial airport at Narita in 1978 (some distance outside city limits), and a population increase to about 11 million (in the metropolitan area).
Tokyo's subway and commuter rail network became one of the busiest in the world as more and more people moved to the area. In the 1980s, real estate prices skyrocketed during a real estate and debt bubble. The bubble burst in the early 1990s, and many companies, banks, and individuals were caught with mortgage-backed debts while real estate was shrinking in value. A major recession followed, making the 1990s Japan's "Lost Decade", from which it is now slowly recovering.
Tokyo still sees new urban developments on large lots of less profitable land. Recent projects include Ebisu Garden Place, Tennōzu Isle, Shiodome, Roppongi Hills, Shinagawa (now also a Shinkansen station), and the Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station. Buildings of significance have been demolished for more up-to-date shopping facilities such as Omotesando Hills.
Land reclamation projects in Tokyo have also been going on for centuries. The most prominent is the Odaiba area, now a major shopping and entertainment center. Various plans have been proposed for transferring national government functions from Tokyo to secondary capitals in other regions of Japan, to slow down rapid development in Tokyo and revitalize economically lagging areas of the country. These plans have been controversial within Japan and have yet to be realized.
The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of the northeastern coast of Honshu was felt in Tokyo. However, due to Tokyo's earthquake-resistant infrastructure, damage in Tokyo was very minor compared to areas directly hit by the tsunami, although activity in the city was largely halted. The subsequent nuclear crisis caused by the tsunami has also largely left Tokyo unaffected, despite occasional spikes in radiation levels.
On September 7, 2013, the IOC selected Tokyo to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. Tokyo will be the first Asian city to host the Olympic Games twice.
The mainland portion of Tokyo lies northwest of Tokyo Bay and measures about east to west and north to south. The average elevation in Tokyo is . Chiba Prefecture borders it to the east, Yamanashi to the west, Kanagawa to the south, and Saitama to the north. Mainland Tokyo is further subdivided into the special wards (occupying the eastern half) and the Tama area () stretching westwards.
Also within the administrative boundaries of Tokyo Metropolis are two island chains in the Pacific Ocean directly south: the Izu Islands, and the Ogasawara Islands, which stretch more than away from the mainland. Because of these islands and the mountainous regions to the west, Tokyo's overall population density figures far under-represent the real figures for the urban and suburban regions of Tokyo.
Under Japanese law, Tokyo is designated as a , translated as "metropolis". Its administrative structure is similar to that of Japan's other prefectures. The , which until 1943 constituted the city of Tokyo, are self-governing municipalities, each having a mayor, a council, and the status of a city.
In addition to these 23 special wards, Tokyo also includes 26 more cities ( -shi), five towns ( -chō or machi), and eight villages ( -son or -mura), each of which has a local government. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government administers the whole metropolis including the 23 special wards and the cities and towns that constitute the prefecture. It is headed by a publicly elected governor and metropolitan assembly. Its headquarters is in Shinjuku Ward.
The of Tokyo comprise the area formerly incorporated as Tokyo City. On July 1, 1943, Tokyo City was merged with forming the current "metropolitan prefecture". As a result, unlike other city wards in Japan, these wards are not conterminous with a larger incorporated city.
While falling under the jurisdiction of Tokyo Metropolitan Government, each ward is also a borough with its own elected leader and council, like other cities of Japan. The special wards use the word "city" in their official English name (e.g. Chiyoda City).
The wards differ from other cities in having a unique administrative relationship with the prefectural government. Certain municipal functions, such as waterworks, sewerage, and fire-fighting, are handled by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. To pay for the added administrative costs, the prefecture collects municipal taxes, which would usually be levied by the city.
The special wards of Tokyo are:
The "three central wards" of Tokyo – Chiyoda, Chūō and Minato – are the business core of the city, with a daytime population more than seven times higher than their nighttime population. Chiyoda Ward is unique in that it is in the very heart of the former Tokyo City, yet is one of the least populated wards. It is occupied by many major Japanese companies and is also the seat of the national government, and the Japanese emperor. It is often called the "political center" of the country. Akihabara, known for being an otaku cultural center and a shopping district for computer goods, is also in Chiyoda.
To the west of the special wards, Tokyo Metropolis consists of cities, towns, and villages that enjoy the same legal status as those elsewhere in Japan.
While serving as "bed towns" for those working in central Tokyo, some of them also have a local commercial and industrial base, such as Tachikawa. Collectively, these are often known as the Tama area or Western Tokyo.
Twenty-six cities lie within the western part of Tokyo:
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has designated Hachiōji, Tachikawa, Machida, Ōme and Tama New Town as regional centers of the Tama area, as part of its plans to relocate urban functions away from central Tokyo.
The far west of the Tama area is occupied by the district ("gun") of Nishi-Tama. Much of this area is mountainous and unsuitable for urbanization. The highest mountain in Tokyo, Mount Kumotori, is high; other mountains in Tokyo include Takanosu (), Odake (), and Mitake (). Lake Okutama, on the Tama River near Yamanashi Prefecture, is Tokyo's largest lake. The district is composed of three towns (Hinode, Mizuho and Okutama) and one village (Hinohara).
Tokyo has numerous outlying islands, which extend as far as from central Tokyo. Because of the islands' distance from the administrative headquarters of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in Shinjuku, local subprefectural branch offices administer them.
The Izu Islands are a group of volcanic islands and form part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. The islands in order from closest to Tokyo are Izu Ōshima, Toshima, Nii-jima, Shikine-jima, Kōzu-shima, Miyake-jima, Mikurajima, Hachijō-jima, and Aogashima. The Izu Islands are grouped into three subprefectures. Izu Ōshima and Hachijojima are towns. The remaining islands are six villages, with Niijima and Shikinejima forming one village.
The Ogasawara Islands include, from north to south, Chichi-jima, Nishinoshima, Haha-jima, Kita Iwo Jima, Iwo Jima, and Minami Iwo Jima. Ogasawara also administers two tiny outlying islands: Minami Torishima, the easternmost point in Japan and at the most distant island from central Tokyo, and Okinotorishima, the southernmost point in Japan. Japan's claim on an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) surrounding Okinotorishima is contested by China and South Korea as they regard Okinotorishima as uninhabitable rocks which have no EEZ. The Iwo chain and the outlying islands have no permanent population, but hosts Japan Self-Defense Forces personnel. Local populations are only found on Chichi-Jima and Haha-Jima. The islands form both Ogasawara Subprefecture and the village of Ogasawara, Tokyo.
As of March 31, 2008, 36% of the total land area of the prefecture was designated as Natural Parks (second only to Shiga Prefecture), namely the Chichibu Tama Kai, Fuji-Hakone-Izu, and Ogasawara National Parks (the last a UNESCO World Heritage Site); Meiji no Mori Takao Quasi-National Park; and Akikawa Kyūryō, Hamura Kusabana Kyūryō, Sayama, Takao Jinba, Takiyama, and Tama Kyūryō Prefectural Natural Parks.
A number of museums are located in Ueno Park: Tokyo National Museum, National Museum of Nature and Science, Shitamachi Museum and National Museum for Western Art, among others. There are also artworks and statues at several places in the park. There is also a zoo in the park, and the park is a popular destination to view cherry blossoms.
Tokyo is near the boundary of three plates, making it an extremely active region for smaller quakes and slippage which frequently affect the urban area with swaying as if in a boat, although epicenters within mainland Tokyo (excluding Tokyo's –long island jurisdiction) are quite rare. It is not uncommon in the metro area to have hundreds of these minor quakes (magnitudes 4–6) that can be felt in a single year, something local residents merely brush off but can be a source of anxiety not only for foreign visitors but for Japanese from elsewhere as well. They rarely cause much damage (sometimes a few injuries) as they are either too small or far away as quakes tend to dance around the region. Particularly active are offshore regions and to a lesser extent Chiba and Ibaraki.
Tokyo has been hit by powerful megathrust earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855, 1923, and much more indirectly (with some liquefaction in landfill zones) in 2011; the frequency of direct and large quakes is a relative rarity. The 1923 earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 8.3, killed 142,000 people, the last time the urban area was directly hit. The 2011 quake focus was hundreds of kilometers away and resulted in no direct deaths in the metropolitan area.
The former city of Tokyo and the majority of mainland Tokyo lie in the humid subtropical climate zone (Köppen climate classification "Cfa"), with hot, humid summers and generally cool winters with cold spells. The region, like much of Japan, experiences a one-month seasonal lag, with the warmest month being August, which averages , and the coolest month being January, averaging . The record low temperature is on January 13, 1876, while the record high is on July 20, 2004.
The record highest low temperature is on August 12, 2013, making Tokyo one of only seven observation sites in Japan that have recorded a low temperature over . Annual rainfall averages nearly , with a wetter summer and a drier winter. Snowfall is sporadic, but does occur almost annually. Tokyo also often sees typhoons every year, though few are strong. The wettest month since records began in 1876 was October 2004, with of rain, including on the ninth of that month; the last of four months on record to observe no precipitation is December 1995. Annual precipitation has ranged from in 1984 to in 1938.
The western mountainous area of mainland Tokyo, Okutama also lies in the humid subtropical climate (Köppen classification "Cfa").
The climates of Tokyo's offshore territories vary significantly from those of the city. The climate of Chichijima in Ogasawara village is on the boundary between the tropical savanna climate (Köppen classification "Aw") and the humid subtropical climate (Köppen classification "Cfa"). It is approximately south of the Greater Tokyo Area resulting in different climatic conditions.
Tokyo's easternmost territory, the island of Minamitorishima in Ogasawara village, is in the tropical savanna climate zone (Köppen classification "Aw"). Tokyo's Izu and Ogasawara islands are affected by an average of 5.4 typhoons a year, compared to 3.1 in mainland Kantō.
Architecture in Tokyo has largely been shaped by Tokyo's history. Twice in recent history has the metropolis been left in ruins: first in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and later after extensive firebombing in World War II. Because of this, Tokyo's urban landscape consists mainly of modern and contemporary architecture, and older buildings are scarce. Tokyo features many internationally famous forms of modern architecture including Tokyo International Forum, Asahi Beer Hall, Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building and Rainbow Bridge. Tokyo also features two distinctive towers: Tokyo Tower, and the new Tokyo Skytree, which is the tallest tower in both Japan and the world, and the second tallest structure in the world after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Mori Building Co started work on Tokyo's new tallest building which is set to be finished on March 2023. The project will cost 580 billion yen ($5.5 billion).
Tokyo also contains numerous parks and gardens. There are four national parks in Tokyo Prefecture, including the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, which includes all of the Izu Islands.
Tokyo has enacted a measure to cut greenhouse gases. Governor Shintaro Ishihara created Japan's first emissions cap system, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emission by a total of 25% by 2020 from the 2000 level. Tokyo is an example of an urban heat island, and the phenomenon is especially serious in its special wards. According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the annual mean temperature has increased by about over the past 100 years. Tokyo has been cited as a "convincing example of the relationship between urban growth and climate".
In 2006, Tokyo enacted the "10 Year Project for Green Tokyo" to be realized by 2016. It set a goal of increasing roadside trees in Tokyo to 1 million (from 480,000), and adding 1,000 ha of green space 88 of which will be a new park named "Umi no Mori" (sea forest) which will be on a reclaimed island in Tokyo Bay which used to be a landfill. From 2007 to 2010, 436 ha of the planned 1,000 ha of green space was created and 220,000 trees were planted bringing the total to 700,000. In 2014, road side trees in Tokyo have increased to 950,000, and a further 300 ha of green space has been added.
As of October 2012, the official intercensal estimate showed 13.506 million people in Tokyo with 9.214 million living within Tokyo's 23 wards. During the daytime, the population swells by over 2.5 million as workers and students commute from adjacent areas. This effect is even more pronounced in the three central wards of Chiyoda, Chūō, and Minato, whose collective population as of the 2005 National Census was 326,000 at night, but 2.4 million during the day.
In the year 1889, the Home Ministry recorded 1,375,937 people in Tokyo City and a total of 1,694,292 people in Tokyo-fu. In the same year, a total of 779 foreign nationals were recorded as residing in Tokyo. The most common nationality was English (209 residents), followed by American nationals (182) and Chinese nationals (137).
Tokyo has the largest metropolitan economy in the world. According to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Greater Tokyo Area (Tokyo-Yokohama) of 38 million people had a total GDP of $2 trillion in 2012 (at purchasing power parity), which topped that list.
Tokyo is a major international finance center; it houses the headquarters of several of the world's largest investment banks and insurance companies, and serves as a hub for Japan's transportation, publishing, electronics and broadcasting industries. During the centralized growth of Japan's economy following World War II, many large firms moved their headquarters from cities such as Osaka (the historical commercial capital) to Tokyo, in an attempt to take advantage of better access to the government. This trend has begun to slow due to ongoing population growth in Tokyo and the high cost of living there.
Tokyo was rated by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the most expensive (highest cost-of-living) city in the world for 14 years in a row ending in 2006.
Tokyo emerged as a leading international financial center (IFC) in the 1960s and has been described as one of the three "command centers" for the world economy, along with New York City and London. In the 2017 Global Financial Centers Index, Tokyo was ranked as having the fifth most competitive financial center in the world (alongside cities such as London, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Sydney, Boston, and Toronto in the top 10), and third most competitive in Asia (after Singapore and Hong Kong). The Japanese financial market opened up slowly in 1984 and accelerated its internationalisation with the "Japanese Big Bang" in 1998. Despite the emergence of Singapore and Hong Kong as competing financial centers, the Tokyo IFC manages to keep a prominent position in Asia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is Japan's largest stock exchange, and third largest in the world by market capitalization and fourth largest by share turnover. In 1990 at the end of the Japanese asset price bubble, it accounted for more than 60% of the world stock market value. Tokyo had 8,460 ha (20,900 acres) of agricultural land as of 2003, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, placing it last among the nation's prefectures. The farmland is concentrated in Western Tokyo. Perishables such as vegetables, fruits, and flowers can be conveniently shipped to the markets in the eastern part of the prefecture. "Komatsuna" and spinach are the most important vegetables; as of 2000, Tokyo supplied 32.5% of the "komatsuna" sold at its central produce market.
With 36% of its area covered by forest, Tokyo has extensive growths of cryptomeria and Japanese cypress, especially in the mountainous western communities of Akiruno, Ōme, Okutama, Hachiōji, Hinode, and Hinohara. Decreases in the price of timber, increases in the cost of production, and advancing old age among the forestry population have resulted in a decline in Tokyo's output. In addition, pollen, especially from cryptomeria, is a major allergen for the nearby population centers. Tokyo Bay was once a major source of fish. Most of Tokyo's fish production comes from the outer islands, such as Izu Ōshima and Hachijō-Jima. Skipjack tuna, nori, and "aji" are among the ocean products.
Tourism in Tokyo is also a contributor to the economy. In 2006, 4.81 million foreigners and 420 million Japanese visits to Tokyo were made; the economic value of these visits totaled 9.4 trillion yen according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Many tourists visit the various downtowns, stores, and entertainment districts throughout the neighborhoods of the special wards of Tokyo; particularly for school children on class trips, a visit to Tokyo Tower is "de rigueur". Cultural offerings include both omnipresent Japanese pop culture and associated districts such as Shibuya and Harajuku, subcultural attractions such as Studio Ghibli anime center, as well as museums like the Tokyo National Museum, which houses 37% of the country's artwork national treasures (87/233).
The Toyosu Market in Tokyo is the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world since it opened in October 11, 2018. It is also one of the largest wholesale food markets of any kind. It is located in the Toyosu area of Kōtō ward. The Toyosu market holds strong to the traditions of its predecessor, the Tsukiji Fish Market and Nihonbashi fish market, and serves some 50,000 buyers and sellers every day. Retailers, whole-sellers, auctioneers, and public citizens alike frequent the market, creating a unique microcosm of organized chaos that still continues to fuel the city and its food supply after over four centuries.
Tokyo, as the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, is Japan's largest domestic and international hub for rail and ground transportation. However, its airspace has been under the US military's exclusive control after World War II. Public transportation within Tokyo is dominated by an extensive network of clean and efficient trains and subways run by a variety of operators, with buses, monorails and trams playing a secondary feeder role. There are up to 62 electric train lines and more than 900 train stations in Tokyo.
As a result of World War II, Japanese planes are generally forbidden to fly over Tokyo. Therefore, Japan constructed airports outside Tokyo. Narita International Airport in Chiba Prefecture is the major gateway for international travelers to Japan. Japan's flag carrier Japan Airlines, as well as All Nippon Airways, have a hub at this airport. Haneda Airport on the reclaimed land at Ōta, offers domestic and international flights. As of 2018, some flight routes into Haneda are permitted through Tokyo airspace.
Various islands governed by Tokyo have their own airports. Hachijō-jima (Hachijojima Airport), Miyakejima (Miyakejima Airport), and Izu Ōshima (Oshima Airport) have services to Tokyo International and other airports.
Rail is the primary mode of transportation in Tokyo, which has the most extensive urban railway network in the world and an equally extensive network of surface lines. JR East operates Tokyo's largest railway network, including the Yamanote Line loop that circles the center of downtown Tokyo. Two different organizations operate the subway network: the private Tokyo Metro and the governmental Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation. The Metropolitan Government and private carriers operate bus routes and one tram route. Local, regional, and national services are available, with major terminals at the giant railroad stations, including Tokyo, Shinagawa, and Shinjuku.
Expressways link the capital to other points in the Greater Tokyo area, the Kantō region, and the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. To build them quickly before the 1964 Summer Olympics, most were constructed above existing roads. Other transportation includes taxis operating in the special wards and the cities and towns. Also, long-distance ferries serve the islands of Tokyo and carry passengers and cargo to domestic and foreign ports.
Tokyo has many universities, junior colleges, and vocational schools. Many of Japan's most prestigious universities are in Tokyo, including University of Tokyo, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Waseda University, Tokyo University of Science, Sophia University, and Keio University. Some of the biggest national universities in Tokyo are:
There is only one non-national public university: Tokyo Metropolitan University. There are also a few universities well known for classes conducted in English and for the teaching of the Japanese language, including the Globis University Graduate School of Management, International Christian University, Sophia University, and Waseda University
Tokyo is also the headquarters of the United Nations University.
Publicly run kindergartens, elementary schools (years 1 through 6), and primary schools (7 through 9) are operated by local wards or municipal offices. Public secondary schools in Tokyo are run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education and are called "Metropolitan High Schools". Tokyo also has many private schools from kindergarten through high school:
Tokyo has many museums. In Ueno Park, there is the Tokyo National Museum, the country's largest museum and specializing in traditional Japanese art; the National Museum of Western Art and Ueno Zoo. Other museums include the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Odaiba; the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Sumida, across the Sumida River from the center of Tokyo; the Nezu Museum in Aoyama; and the National Diet Library, National Archives, and the National Museum of Modern Art, which are near the Imperial Palace.
Tokyo has many theaters for performing arts. These include national and private theaters for traditional forms of Japanese drama. Noteworthy are the National Noh Theatre for noh and the Kabuki-za for Kabuki. Symphony orchestras and other musical organizations perform modern and traditional music. The New National Theater Tokyo in Shibuya is the national center for the performing arts, including opera, ballet, contemporary dance and drama. Tokyo also hosts modern Japanese and international pop, and rock music at venues ranging in size from intimate clubs to internationally known areas such as the Nippon Budokan.
Many different festivals occur throughout Tokyo. Major events include the Sannō at Hie Shrine, the Sanja at Asakusa Shrine, and the biennial Kanda Festivals. The last features a parade with elaborately decorated floats and thousands of people. Annually on the last Saturday of July, an enormous fireworks display over the Sumida River attracts over a million viewers. Once cherry blossoms bloom in spring, many residents gather in Ueno Park, Inokashira Park, and the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden for picnics under the blossoms.
Harajuku, a neighborhood in Shibuya, is known internationally for its youth style, fashion and cosplay.
Cuisine in Tokyo is internationally acclaimed. In November 2007, Michelin released their first guide for fine dining in Tokyo, awarding 191 stars in total, or about twice as many as Tokyo's nearest competitor, Paris. As of 2017, 227 restaurants in Tokyo have been awarded (92 in Paris). Twelve establishments were awarded the maximum of three stars (Paris has 10), 54 received two stars, and 161 earned one star.
Tokyo, with a diverse array of sports, is home to two professional baseball clubs, the Yomiuri Giants who play at the Tokyo Dome and Tokyo Yakult Swallows at Meiji-Jingu Stadium. The Japan Sumo Association is also headquartered in Tokyo at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan sumo arena where three official sumo tournaments are held annually (in January, May, and September). Football clubs in Tokyo include F.C. Tokyo and Tokyo Verdy 1969, both of which play at Ajinomoto Stadium in Chōfu, and FC Machida Zelvia at Nozuta Stadium in Machida. Basketball clubs include the Hitachi SunRockers, Toyota Alvark Tokyo and Tokyo Excellence.
Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, thus becoming the first Asian city to host the Summer Games. The National Stadium, also known as the Olympic Stadium, was host to a number of international sporting events. In 2016, it was to be replaced by the New National Stadium. With a number of world-class sports venues, Tokyo often hosts national and international sporting events such as basketball tournaments, women's volleyball tournaments, tennis tournaments, swim meets, marathons, rugby union and sevens rugby games, football, American football exhibition games, judo, and karate. Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, in Sendagaya, Shibuya, is a large sports complex that includes swimming pools, training rooms, and a large indoor arena. According to Around the Rings, the gymnasium has played host to the October 2011 artistic gymnastics world championships, despite the International Gymnastics Federation's initial doubt in Tokyo's ability to host the championships following the March 11 tsunami. Tokyo was also selected to host a number of games for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and to host the 2020 Summer Olympics and the Paralympics on September 7, 2013.
As the largest population center in Japan and the site of the country's largest broadcasters and studios, Tokyo is frequently the setting for many Japanese movies, television shows, animated series ("anime"), web comics, light novels, video games, and comic books ("manga"). In the "kaiju" (monster movie) genre, landmarks of Tokyo are usually destroyed by giant monsters such as Godzilla and Gamera.
Some Hollywood directors have turned to Tokyo as a backdrop for movies set in Japan. Postwar examples include "Tokyo Joe", "My Geisha", "Tokyo Story" and the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice"; recent examples include "Kill Bill", "", "Lost in Translation", "Babel", "Inception", and "".
Japanese author Haruki Murakami has based some of his novels in Tokyo (including "Norwegian Wood"), and David Mitchell's first two novels "number9dream" and "Ghostwritten" featured the city. Contemporary British painter Carl Randall spent 10 years living in Tokyo as an artist, creating a body of work depicting the city's crowded streets and public spaces.
Tokyo is the founder member of the Asian Network of Major Cities 21 and is a member of the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations. Tokyo was also a founding member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
, Tokyo has twinning or friendship agreements with the following twelve cities and states:
Research and development in Japan and the Japanese space program are globally represented by several of Tokyo's medical and scientific facilities, including the University of Tokyo and other universities in Tokyo, which work in collaboration with many international institutions. Especially with the United States, including NASA and the many private spaceflight companies, Tokyo universities have working relationships with all of the Ivy League institutions (including Harvard, MIT, and Yale University), along with other research universities and development laboratories, such as Stanford and the UC campuses throughout California, as well as UNM and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Other partners worldwide include Oxford University in the United Kingdom, the National University of Singapore in Singapore, the University of Toronto in Canada, and Tsinghua University in China. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30057 |
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War (; ) was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's "Iliad". The core of the "Iliad" (Books II – XXIII) describes a period of four days and two nights in the tenth year of the decade-long siege of Troy; the "Odyssey" describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the war's heroes. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.
The war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, after Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked "for the fairest". Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the "fairest", should receive the apple. In exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Menelaus's brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years because of Paris' insult. After the deaths of many heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse. The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans (except for some of the women and children whom they kept or sold as slaves) and desecrated the temples, thus earning the gods' wrath. Few of the Achaeans returned safely to their homes and many founded colonies in distant shores. The Romans later traced their origin to Aeneas, Aphrodite's son and one of the Trojans, who was said to have led the surviving Trojans to modern-day Italy.
The ancient Greeks believed that Troy was located near the Dardanelles and that the Trojan War was a historical event of the 13th or 12th century BC, but by the mid-19th century AD, both the war and the city were widely seen as non-historical. In 1868, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was a real city at what is now Hisarlik in Turkey. On the basis of excavations conducted by Schliemann and others, this claim is now accepted by most scholars.
Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War remains an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, and the Late Bronze Age collapse.
The events of the Trojan War are found in many works of Greek literature and depicted in numerous works of Greek art. There is no single, authoritative text which tells the entire events of the war. Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources, some of which report contradictory versions of the events. The most important literary sources are the two epic poems traditionally credited to Homer, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", composed sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. Each poem narrates only a part of the war. The "Iliad" covers a short period in the last year of the siege of Troy, while the "Odyssey" concerns Odysseus's return to his home island of Ithaca following the sack of Troy and contains several flashbacks to particular episodes in the war.
Other parts of the Trojan War were told in the poems of the Epic Cycle, also known as the Cyclic Epics: the "Cypria", "Aethiopis", "Little Iliad", "Iliou Persis", "Nostoi", and "Telegony". Though these poems survive only in fragments, their content is known from a summary included in Proclus' "Chrestomathy". The authorship of the Cyclic Epics is uncertain. It is generally thought that the poems were written down in the 7th and 6th century BC, after the composition of the Homeric poems, though it is widely believed that they were based on earlier traditions.
Both the Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle take origin from oral tradition. Even after the composition of the "Iliad", "Odyssey", and the Cyclic Epics, the myths of the Trojan War were passed on orally in many genres of poetry and through non-poetic storytelling. Events and details of the story that are only found in later authors may have been passed on through oral tradition and could be as old as the Homeric poems. Visual art, such as vase painting, was another medium in which myths of the Trojan War circulated.
In later ages playwrights, historians, and other intellectuals would create works inspired by the Trojan War. The three great tragedians of Athens—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—wrote a number of dramas that portray episodes from the Trojan War. Among Roman writers the most important is the 1st century BC poet Virgil; in Book 2 of his "Aeneid", Aeneas narrates the sack of Troy.
The following summary of the Trojan War follows the order of events as given in Proclus' summary, along with the "Iliad", "Odyssey", and "Aeneid", supplemented with details drawn from other authors.
According to Greek mythology, Zeus had become king of the gods by overthrowing his father Cronus; Cronus in turn had overthrown his father Uranus. Zeus was not faithful to his wife and sister Hera, and had many relationships from which many children were born. Since Zeus believed that there were too many people populating the earth, he envisioned Momus or Themis, who was to use the Trojan War as a means to depopulate the Earth, especially of his demigod descendants.
These can be supported by Hesiod's account:Now all the gods were divided through strife; for at that very time Zeus who thunders on high was meditating marvelous deeds, even to mingle storm and tempest over the boundless earth, and already he was hastening to make an utter end of the race of mortal men, declaring that he would destroy the lives of the demi-gods, that the children of the gods should not mate with wretched mortals, seeing their fate with their own eyes; but that the blessed gods henceforth even as aforetime should have their living and their habitations apart from men. But on those who were born of immortals and of mankind verily Zeus laid toil and sorrow upon sorrow.
Zeus came to learn from either Themis or Prometheus, after Heracles had released him from Caucasus, that, like his father Cronus, he would be overthrown by one of his sons. Another prophecy stated that a son of the sea-nymph Thetis, with whom Zeus fell in love after gazing upon her in the oceans off the Greek coast, would become greater than his father. Possibly for one or both of these reasons, Thetis was betrothed to an elderly human king, Peleus son of Aeacus, either upon Zeus' orders, or because she wished to please Hera, who had raised her.
All of the gods were invited to Peleus and Thetis' wedding and brought many gifts, except Eris (the goddess of discord), who was stopped at the door by Hermes, on Zeus' order. Insulted, she threw from the door a gift of her own: a golden apple (το μήλον της έριδος) on which was inscribed the word καλλίστῃ "Kallistēi" ("To the fairest"). The apple was claimed by Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They quarreled bitterly over it, and none of the other gods would venture an opinion favoring one, for fear of earning the enmity of the other two. Eventually, Zeus ordered Hermes to lead the three goddesses to Paris, a prince of Troy, who, unaware of his ancestry, was being raised as a shepherd in Mount Ida, because of a prophecy that he would be the downfall of Troy. After bathing in the spring of Ida, the goddesses appeared to him naked, either for the sake of winning or at Paris' request. Paris was unable to decide between them, so the goddesses resorted to bribes. Athena offered Paris wisdom, skill in battle, and the abilities of the greatest warriors; Hera offered him political power and control of all of Asia; and Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite, and, after several adventures, returned to Troy, where he was recognized by his royal family.
Peleus and Thetis bore a son, whom they named Achilles. It was foretold that he would either die of old age after an uneventful life, or die young in a battlefield and gain immortality through poetry. Furthermore, when Achilles was nine years old, Calchas had prophesied that Troy could not again fall without his help. A number of sources credit Thetis with attempting to make Achilles immortal when he was an infant. Some of these state that she held him over fire every night to burn away his mortal parts and rubbed him with ambrosia during the day, but Peleus discovered her actions and stopped her. According to some versions of this story, Thetis had already killed several sons in this manner, and Peleus' action therefore saved his son's life. Other sources state that Thetis bathed Achilles in the Styx, the river that runs to the underworld, making him invulnerable wherever he was touched by the water. Because she had held him by the heel, it was not immersed during the bathing and thus the heel remained mortal and vulnerable to injury (hence the expression "Achilles heel" for an isolated weakness). He grew up to be the greatest of all mortal warriors. After Calchas' prophesy, Thetis hid Achilles in Skyros at the court of King Lycomedes, where he was disguised as a girl. At a crucial point in the war, she assists her son by providing weapons divinely forged by Hephaestus (see below).
The most beautiful woman in the world was Helen, one of the daughters of Tyndareus, King of Sparta. Her mother was Leda, who had been either raped or seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan. Accounts differ over which of Leda's four children, two pairs of twins, were fathered by Zeus and which by Tyndareus. However, Helen is usually credited as Zeus' daughter, and sometimes Nemesis is credited as her mother. Helen had scores of suitors, and her father was unwilling to choose one for fear the others would retaliate violently.
Finally, one of the suitors, Odysseus of Ithaca, proposed a plan to solve the dilemma. In exchange for Tyndareus' support of his own suit towards Penelope, he suggested that Tyndareus require all of Helen's suitors to promise that they would defend the marriage of Helen, regardless of whom he chose. The suitors duly swore the required oath on the severed pieces of a horse, although not without a certain amount of grumbling.
Tyndareus chose Menelaus. Menelaus was a political choice on her father's part. He had wealth and power. He had humbly not petitioned for her himself, but instead sent his brother Agamemnon on his behalf. He had promised Aphrodite a hecatomb, a sacrifice of 100 oxen, if he won Helen, but forgot about it and earned her wrath. Menelaus inherited Tyndareus' throne of Sparta with Helen as his queen when her brothers, Castor and Pollux, became gods, and when Agamemnon married Helen's sister Clytemnestra and took back the throne of Mycenae.
Paris, under the guise of a supposed diplomatic mission, went to Sparta to get Helen and bring her back to Troy. Before Helen could look up to see him enter the palace, she was shot with an arrow from Eros, otherwise known as Cupid, and fell in love with Paris when she saw him, as promised by Aphrodite. Menelaus had left for Crete to bury his uncle, Crateus.
According to one account, Hera, still jealous over the judgement of Paris, sent a storm. The storm caused the lovers to land in Egypt, where the gods replaced Helen with a likeness of her made of clouds, Nephele. The myth of Helen being switched is attributed to the 6th century BC Sicilian poet Stesichorus. For Homer the true Helen was in Troy. The ship then landed in Sidon before reaching Troy. Paris, fearful of getting caught, spent some time there and then sailed to Troy.
Paris' abduction of Helen had several precedents. Io was taken from Mycenae, Europa was taken from Phoenicia, Jason took Medea from Colchis, and the Trojan princess Hesione had been taken by Heracles, who gave her to Telamon of Salamis. According to Herodotus, Paris was emboldened by these examples to steal himself a wife from Greece, and expected no retribution, since there had been none in the other cases.
According to Homer, Menelaus and his ally, Odysseus, traveled to Troy, where they unsuccessfully sought to recover Helen by diplomatic means.
Menelaus then asked Agamemnon to uphold his oath, which, as one of Helen's suitors, was to defend her marriage regardless of which suitor had been chosen. Agamemnon agreed and sent emissaries to all the Achaean kings and princes to call them to observe their oaths and retrieve Helen.
Since Menelaus's wedding, Odysseus had married Penelope and fathered a son, Telemachus. In order to avoid the war, he feigned madness and sowed his fields with salt. Palamedes outwitted him by placing his infant son in front of the plough's path, and Odysseus turned aside, unwilling to kill his son, so revealing his sanity and forcing him to join the war.
According to Homer, however, Odysseus supported the military adventure from the beginning, and traveled the region with Pylos' king, Nestor, to recruit forces.
At Skyros, Achilles had an affair with the king's daughter Deidamia, resulting in a child, Neoptolemus. Odysseus, Telamonian Ajax, and Achilles' tutor Phoenix went to retrieve Achilles. Achilles' mother disguised him as a woman so that he would not have to go to war, but, according to one story, they blew a horn, and Achilles revealed himself by seizing a spear to fight intruders, rather than fleeing. According to another story, they disguised themselves as merchants bearing trinkets and weaponry, and Achilles was marked out from the other women for admiring weaponry instead of clothes and jewelry.
Pausanias said that, according to Homer, Achilles did not hide in Skyros, but rather conquered the island, as part of the Trojan War.
The Achaean forces first gathered at Aulis. All the suitors sent their forces except King Cinyras of Cyprus. Though he sent breastplates to Agamemnon and promised to send 50 ships, he sent only one real ship, led by the son of Mygdalion, and 49 ships made of clay. Idomeneus was willing to lead the Cretan contingent in Mycenae's war against Troy, but only as a co-commander, which he was granted. The last commander to arrive was Achilles, who was then 15 years old.
Following a sacrifice to Apollo, a snake slithered from the altar to a sparrow's nest in a plane tree nearby. It ate the mother and her nine chicks, then was turned to stone. Calchas interpreted this as a sign that Troy would fall in the tenth year of the war.
When the Achaeans left for the war, they did not know the way, and accidentally landed in Mysia, ruled by King Telephus, son of Heracles, who had led a contingent of Arcadians to settle there. In the battle, Achilles wounded Telephus, who had killed Thersander. Because the wound would not heal, Telephus asked an oracle, "What will happen to the wound?". The oracle responded, "he that wounded shall heal". The Achaean fleet then set sail and was scattered by a storm. Achilles landed in Scyros and married Deidamia. A new gathering was set again in Aulis.
Telephus went to Aulis, and either pretended to be a beggar, asking Agamemnon to help heal his wound, or kidnapped Orestes and held him for ransom, demanding the wound be healed. Achilles refused, claiming to have no medical knowledge. Odysseus reasoned that the spear that had inflicted the wound must be able to heal it. Pieces of the spear were scraped off onto the wound, and Telephus was healed. Telephus then showed the Achaeans the route to Troy.
Some scholars have regarded the expedition against Telephus and its resolution as a derivative reworking of elements from the main story of the Trojan War, but it has also been seen as fitting the story-pattern of the "preliminary adventure" that anticipates events and themes from the main narrative, and therefore as likely to be "early and integral".
Eight years after the storm had scattered them, the fleet of more than a thousand ships was gathered again. But when they had all reached Aulis, the winds ceased. The prophet Calchas stated that the goddess Artemis was punishing Agamemnon for killing either a sacred deer or a deer in a sacred grove, and boasting that he was a better hunter than she. The only way to appease Artemis, he said, was to sacrifice Iphigenia, who was either the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, or of Helen and Theseus entrusted to Clytemnestra when Helen married Menelaus. Agamemnon refused, and the other commanders threatened to make Palamedes commander of the expedition. According to some versions, Agamemnon relented and performed the sacrifice, but others claim that he sacrificed a deer in her place, or that at the last moment, Artemis took pity on the girl, and took her to be a maiden in one of her temples, substituting a lamb. Hesiod says that Iphigenia became the goddess Hecate.
The Achaean forces are described in detail in the Catalogue of Ships, in the second book of the "Iliad". They consisted of 28 contingents from mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, the Dodecanese islands, Crete, and Ithaca, comprising 1186 pentekonters, ships with 50 rowers. Thucydides says that according to tradition there were about 1200 ships, and that the Boeotian ships had 120 men, while Philoctetes' ships only had the fifty rowers, these probably being maximum and minimum. These numbers would mean a total force of 70,000 to 130,000 men. Another catalogue of ships is given by the "Bibliotheca" that differs somewhat but agrees in numbers. Some scholars have claimed that Homer's catalogue is an original Bronze Age document, possibly the Achaean commander's order of operations. Others believe it was a fabrication of Homer.
The second book of the "Iliad" also lists the Trojan allies, consisting of the Trojans themselves, led by Hector, and various allies listed as Dardanians led by Aeneas, Zeleians, Adrasteians, Percotians, Pelasgians, Thracians, Ciconian spearmen, Paionian archers, Halizones, Mysians, Phrygians, Maeonians, Miletians, Lycians led by Sarpedon and Carians. Nothing is said of the Trojan language; the Carians are specifically said to be barbarian-speaking, and the allied contingents are said to have spoken many languages, requiring orders to be translated by their individual commanders. The Trojans and Achaeans in the "Iliad" share the same religion, same culture and the enemy heroes speak to each other in the same language, though this could be dramatic effect.
Philoctetes was Heracles' friend, and because he lit Heracles's funeral pyre when no one else would, he received Heracles' bow and arrows. He sailed with seven ships full of men to the Trojan War, where he was planning on fighting for the Achaeans. They stopped either at Chryse Island for supplies, or in Tenedos, along with the rest of the fleet. Philoctetes was then bitten by a snake. The wound festered and had a foul smell; on Odysseus's advice, the Atreidae ordered Philoctetes to stay on Lemnos. Medon took control of Philoctetes's men. While landing on Tenedos, Achilles killed king Tenes, son of Apollo, despite a warning by his mother that if he did so he would be killed himself by Apollo. From Tenedos, Agamemnon sent an embassy to Priam, composed of Menelaus, Odysseus, and Palamedes, asking for Helen's return. The embassy was refused.
Philoctetes stayed on Lemnos for ten years, which was a deserted island according to Sophocles' tragedy "Philoctetes", but according to earlier tradition was populated by Minyans.
Calchas had prophesied that the first Achaean to walk on land after stepping off a ship would be the first to die. Thus even the leading Greeks hesitated to land. Finally, Protesilaus, leader of the Phylaceans, landed first. Odysseus had tricked him, in throwing his own shield down to land on, so that while he was first to leap off his ship, he was not the first to land on Trojan soil. Hector killed Protesilaus in single combat, though the Trojans conceded the beach. In the second wave of attacks, Achilles killed Cycnus, son of Poseidon. The Trojans then fled to the safety of the walls of their city. The walls served as sturdy fortifications for defense against the Greeks; the build of the walls was so impressive that legend held that they had been built by Poseidon and Apollo during a year of forced service to Trojan King Laomedon. Protesilaus had killed many Trojans but was killed by Hector in most versions of the story, though others list Aeneas, Achates, or Ephorbus as his slayer. The Achaeans buried him as a god on the Thracian peninsula, across the Troad. After Protesilaus' death, his brother, Podarces, took command of his troops.
The Achaeans besieged Troy for nine years. This part of the war is the least developed among surviving sources, which prefer to talk about events in the last year of the war. After the initial landing the army was gathered in its entirety again only in the tenth year. Thucydides deduces that this was due to lack of money. They raided the Trojan allies and spent time farming the Thracian peninsula. Troy was never completely besieged, thus it maintained communications with the interior of Asia Minor. Reinforcements continued to come until the very end. The Achaeans controlled only the entrance to the Dardanelles, and Troy and her allies controlled the shortest point at Abydos and Sestus and communicated with allies in Europe.
Achilles and Ajax were the most active of the Achaeans, leading separate armies to raid lands of Trojan allies. According to Homer, Achilles conquered 11 cities and 12 islands. According to Apollodorus, he raided the land of Aeneas in the Troad region and stole his cattle. He also captured Lyrnassus, Pedasus, and many of the neighbouring cities, and killed Troilus, son of Priam, who was still a youth; it was said that if he reached 20 years of age, Troy would not fall. According to Apollodorus,
He also took Lesbos and Phocaea, then Colophon, and Smyrna, and Clazomenae, and Cyme; and afterwards Aegialus and Tenos, the so-called Hundred Cities; then, in order, Adramytium and Side; then Endium, and Linaeum, and Colone. He took also Hypoplacian Thebes and Lyrnessus, and further Antandrus, and many other cities.
Kakrides comments that the list is wrong in that it extends too far into the south. Other sources talk of Achilles taking Pedasus, Monenia, Mythemna (in Lesbos), and Peisidice.
Among the loot from these cities was Briseis, from Lyrnessus, who was awarded to him, and Chryseis, from Hypoplacian Thebes, who was awarded to Agamemnon. Achilles captured Lycaon, son of Priam, while he was cutting branches in his father's orchards. Patroclus sold him as a slave in Lemnos, where he was bought by Eetion of Imbros and brought back to Troy. Only 12 days later Achilles slew him, after the death of Patroclus.
Ajax son of Telamon laid waste the Thracian peninsula of which Polymestor, a son-in-law of Priam, was king. Polymestor surrendered Polydorus, one of Priam's children, whom he had custody. He then attacked the town of the Phrygian king Teleutas, killed him in single combat and carried off his daughter Tecmessa. Ajax also hunted the Trojan flocks, both on Mount Ida and in the countryside.
Numerous paintings on pottery have suggested a tale not mentioned in the literary traditions. At some point in the war Achilles and Ajax were playing a board game ("petteia"). They were absorbed in the game and oblivious to the surrounding battle. The Trojans attacked and reached the heroes, who were only saved by an intervention of Athena.
Odysseus was sent to Thrace to return with grain, but came back empty-handed. When scorned by Palamedes, Odysseus challenged him to do better. Palamedes set out and returned with a shipload of grain.
Odysseus had never forgiven Palamedes for threatening the life of his son. In revenge, Odysseus conceived a plot where an incriminating letter was forged, from Priam to Palamedes, and gold was planted in Palamedes' quarters. The letter and gold were "discovered", and Agamemnon had Palamedes stoned to death for treason.
However, Pausanias, quoting the "Cypria", says that Odysseus and Diomedes drowned Palamedes, while he was fishing, and Dictys says that Odysseus and Diomedes lured Palamedes into a well, which they said contained gold, then stoned him to death.
Palamedes' father Nauplius sailed to the Troad and asked for justice, but was refused. In revenge, Nauplius traveled among the Achaean kingdoms and told the wives of the kings that they were bringing Trojan concubines to dethrone them. Many of the Greek wives were persuaded to betray their husbands, most significantly Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, who was seduced by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes.
Near the end of the ninth year since the landing, the Achaean army, tired from the fighting and from the lack of supplies, mutinied against their leaders and demanded to return to their homes. According to the Cypria, Achilles forced the army to stay. According to Apollodorus, Agamemnon brought the Wine Growers, daughters of Anius, son of Apollo, who had the gift of producing by touch wine, wheat, and oil from the earth, in order to relieve the supply problem of the army.
Chryses, a priest of Apollo and father of Chryseis, came to Agamemnon to ask for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refused, and insulted Chryses, who prayed to Apollo to avenge his ill-treatment. Enraged, Apollo afflicted the Achaean army with plague. Agamemnon was forced to return Chryseis to end the plague, and took Achilles' concubine Briseis as his own. Enraged at the dishonour Agamemnon had inflicted upon him, Achilles decided he would no longer fight. He asked his mother, Thetis, to intercede with Zeus, who agreed to give the Trojans success in the absence of Achilles, the best warrior of the Achaeans.
After the withdrawal of Achilles, the Achaeans were initially successful. Both armies gathered in full for the first time since the landing. Menelaus and Paris fought a duel, which ended when Aphrodite snatched the beaten Paris from the field. With the truce broken, the armies began fighting again. Diomedes won great renown amongst the Achaeans, killing the Trojan hero Pandaros and nearly killing Aeneas, who was only saved by his mother, Aphrodite. With the assistance of Athena, Diomedes then wounded the gods Aphrodite and Ares. During the next days, however, the Trojans drove the Achaeans back to their camp and were stopped at the Achaean wall by Poseidon. The next day, though, with Zeus' help, the Trojans broke into the Achaean camp and were on the verge of setting fire to the Achaean ships. An earlier appeal to Achilles to return was rejected, but after Hector burned Protesilaus' ship, he allowed his relative and best friend Patroclus to go into battle wearing Achilles' armour and lead his army. Patroclus drove the Trojans all the way back to the walls of Troy, and was only prevented from storming the city by the intervention of Apollo. Patroclus was then killed by Hector, who took Achilles' armour from the body of Patroclus.
Achilles, maddened with grief over the death of Patroclus, swore to kill Hector in revenge. The exact nature of Achilles' relationship to Patroclus is the subject of some debate. Although certainly very close, Achilles and Patroclus are never explicitly cast as lovers by Homer, but they were depicted as such in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato. He was reconciled with Agamemnon and received Briseis back, untouched by Agamemnon. He received a new set of arms, forged by the god Hephaestus, and returned to the battlefield. He slaughtered many Trojans, and nearly killed Aeneas, who was saved by Poseidon. Achilles fought with the river god Scamander, and a battle of the gods followed. The Trojan army returned to the city, except for Hector, who remained outside the walls because he was tricked by Athena. Achilles killed Hector, and afterwards he dragged Hector's body from his chariot and refused to return the body to the Trojans for burial. The body nevertheless remained unscathed as it was preserved from all injury by Apollo and Aphrodite. The Achaeans then conducted funeral games for Patroclus. Afterwards, Priam came to Achilles' tent, guided by Hermes, and asked Achilles to return Hector's body. The armies made a temporary truce to allow the burial of the dead. The "Iliad" ends with the funeral of Hector.
Shortly after the burial of Hector, Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, arrived with her warriors. Penthesilea, daughter of Otrere and Ares, had accidentally killed her sister Hippolyte. She was purified from this action by Priam, and in exchange she fought for him and killed many, including Machaon (according to Pausanias, Machaon was killed by Eurypylus), and according to one version, Achilles himself, who was resurrected at the request of Thetis. In another version, Penthesilia was killed by Achilles who fell in love with her beauty after her death. Thersites, a simple soldier and the ugliest Achaean, taunted Achilles over his love and gouged out Penthesilea's eyes. Achilles slew Thersites, and after a dispute sailed to Lesbos, where he was purified for his murder by Odysseus after sacrificing to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto.
While they were away, Memnon of Ethiopia, son of Tithonus and Eos, came with his host to help his stepbrother Priam. He did not come directly from Ethiopia, but either from Susa in Persia, conquering all the peoples in between, or from the Caucasus, leading an army of Ethiopians and Indians. Like Achilles, he wore armour made by Hephaestus. In the ensuing battle, Memnon killed Antilochus, who took one of Memnon's blows to save his father Nestor. Achilles and Memnon then fought. Zeus weighed the fate of the two heroes; the weight containing that of Memnon sank, and he was slain by Achilles. Achilles chased the Trojans to their city, which he entered. The gods, seeing that he had killed too many of their children, decided that it was his time to die. He was killed after Paris shot a poisoned arrow that was guided by Apollo. In another version he was killed by a knife to the back (or heel) by Paris, while marrying Polyxena, daughter of Priam, in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo, the site where he had earlier killed Troilus. Both versions conspicuously deny the killer any sort of valour, saying Achilles remained undefeated on the battlefield. His bones were mingled with those of Patroclus, and funeral games were held. Like Ajax, he is represented as living after his death in the island of Leuke, at the mouth of the Danube River, where he is married to Helen.
A great battle raged around the dead Achilles. Ajax held back the Trojans, while Odysseus carried the body away. When Achilles' armour was offered to the smartest warrior, the two that had saved his body came forward as competitors. Agamemnon, unwilling to undertake the invidious duty of deciding between the two competitors, referred the dispute to the decision of the Trojan prisoners, inquiring of them which of the two heroes had done most harm to the Trojans. Alternatively, the Trojans and Pallas Athena were the judges in that, following Nestor's advice, spies were sent to the walls to overhear what was said. A girl said that Ajax was braver:
For Aias took up and carried out of the strife the hero, Peleus'
son: this great Odysseus cared not to do.
To this another replied by Athena's contrivance:
Why, what is this you say? A thing against reason and untrue!
Even a woman could carry a load once a man had put it on her
shoulder; but she could not fight. For she would fail with fear
if she should fight. (Scholiast on Aristophanes, Knights 1056 and Aristophanes ib)
According to Pindar, the decision was made by secret ballot among the Achaeans. In all story versions, the arms were awarded to Odysseus. Driven mad with grief, Ajax desired to kill his comrades, but Athena caused him to mistake the cattle and their herdsmen for the Achaean warriors. In his frenzy he scourged two rams, believing them to be Agamemnon and Menelaus. In the morning, he came to his senses and killed himself by jumping on the sword that had been given to him by Hector, so that it pierced his armpit, his only vulnerable part. According to an older tradition, he was killed by the Trojans who, seeing he was invulnerable, attacked him with clay until he was covered by it and could no longer move, thus dying of starvation.
After the tenth year, it was prophesied that Troy could not fall without Heracles' bow, which was with Philoctetes in Lemnos. Odysseus and Diomedes retrieved Philoctetes, whose wound had healed. Philoctetes then shot and killed Paris.
According to Apollodorus, Paris' brothers Helenus and Deiphobus vied over the hand of Helen. Deiphobus prevailed, and Helenus abandoned Troy for Mt. Ida. Calchas said that Helenus knew the prophecies concerning the fall of Troy, so Odysseus waylaid Helenus. Under coercion, Helenus told the Achaeans that they would win if they retrieved Pelops' bones, persuaded Achilles' son Neoptolemus to fight for them, and stole the Trojan Palladium.
The Greeks retrieved Pelop's bones, and sent Odysseus to retrieve Neoptolemus, who was hiding from the war in King Lycomedes's court in Scyros. Odysseus gave him his father's arms. Eurypylus, son of Telephus, leading, according to Homer, a large force of "Kêteioi", or Hittites or Mysians according to Apollodorus, arrived to aid the Trojans. He killed Machaon and Peneleos, but was slain by Neoptolemus.
Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus went to spy inside Troy, but was recognized by Helen. Homesick, Helen plotted with Odysseus. Later, with Helen's help, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium.
The end of the war came with one final plan. Odysseus devised a new ruse—a giant hollow wooden horse, an animal that was sacred to the Trojans. It was built by Epeius and guided by Athena, from the wood of a cornel tree grove sacred to Apollo, with the inscription:
The hollow horse was filled with soldiers led by Odysseus. The rest of the army burned the camp and sailed for Tenedos.
When the Trojans discovered that the Greeks were gone, believing the war was over, they "joyfully dragged the horse inside the city", while they debated what to do with it. Some thought they ought to hurl it down from the rocks, others thought they should burn it, while others said they ought to dedicate it to Athena.
Both Cassandra and Laocoön warned against keeping the horse. While Cassandra had been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, she was also cursed by Apollo never to be believed. Serpents then came out of the sea and devoured either Laocoön and one of his two sons, Laocoön and both his sons, or only his sons, a portent which so alarmed the followers of Aeneas that they withdrew to Ida. The Trojans decided to keep the horse and turned to a night of mad revelry and celebration. Sinon, an Achaean spy, signaled the fleet stationed at Tenedos when "it was midnight and the clear moon was rising" and the soldiers from inside the horse emerged and killed the guards.
The Achaeans entered the city and killed the sleeping population. A great massacre followed which continued into the day.
Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth,
As Trojans and their alien helpers died.
Here were men lying quelled by bitter death
All up and down the city in their blood.
The Trojans, fuelled with desperation, fought back fiercely, despite being disorganized and leaderless. With the fighting at its height, some donned fallen enemies' attire and launched surprise counterattacks in the chaotic street fighting. Other defenders hurled down roof tiles and anything else heavy down on the rampaging attackers. The outlook was grim though, and eventually the remaining defenders were destroyed along with the whole city.
Neoptolemus killed Priam, who had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus of the Courtyard. Menelaus killed Deiphobus, Helen's husband after Paris' death, and also intended to kill Helen, but, overcome by her beauty, threw down his sword and took her to the ships.
Ajax the Lesser raped Cassandra on Athena's altar while she was clinging to her statue. Because of Ajax's impiety, the Acheaens, urged by Odysseus, wanted to stone him to death, but he fled to Athena's altar, and was spared.
Antenor, who had given hospitality to Menelaus and Odysseus when they asked for the return of Helen, and who had advocated so, was spared, along with his family. Aeneas took his father on his back and fled, and, according to Apollodorus, was allowed to go because of his piety.
The Greeks then burned the city and divided the spoils. Cassandra was awarded to Agamemnon. Neoptolemus got Andromache, wife of Hector, and Odysseus was given Hecuba, Priam's wife.
The Achaeans threw Hector's infant son Astyanax down from the walls of Troy, either out of cruelty and hate or to end the royal line, and the possibility of a son's revenge. They (by usual tradition Neoptolemus) also sacrificed the Trojan princess Polyxena on the grave of Achilles as demanded by his ghost, either as part of his spoil or because she had betrayed him.
Aethra, Theseus' mother, and one of Helen's handmaids, was rescued by her grandsons, Demophon and Acamas.
The gods were very angry over the destruction of their temples and other sacrilegious acts by the Achaeans, and decided that most would not return home. A storm fell on the returning fleet off Tenos island. Additionally, Nauplius, in revenge for the murder of his son Palamedes, set up false lights in Cape Caphereus (also known today as Cavo D'Oro, in Euboea) and many were shipwrecked.
According to the "Odyssey", Menelaus's fleet was blown by storms to Crete and Egypt, where they were unable to sail away because the winds were calm. Only five of his ships survived. Menelaus had to catch Proteus, a shape-shifting sea god, to find out what sacrifices to which gods he would have to make to guarantee safe passage. According to some stories the Helen who was taken by Paris was a fake, and the real Helen was in Egypt, where she was reunited with Menelaus. Proteus also told Menelaus that he was destined for Elysium (Heaven) after his death. Menelaus returned to Sparta with Helen eight years after he had left Troy.
Agamemnon returned home with Cassandra to Argos. His wife Clytemnestra (Helen's sister) was having an affair with Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, Agamemnon's cousin who had conquered Argos before Agamemnon himself retook it. Possibly out of vengeance for the death of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra plotted with her lover to kill Agamemnon. Cassandra foresaw this murder, and warned Agamemnon, but he disregarded her. He was killed, either at a feast or in his bath, according to different versions. Cassandra was also killed. Agamemnon's son Orestes, who had been away, returned and conspired with his sister Electra to avenge their father. He killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and succeeded to his father's throne.
Odysseus' ten-year journey home to Ithaca was told in Homer's "Odyssey". Odysseus and his men were blown far off course to lands unknown to the Achaeans; there Odysseus had many adventures, including the famous encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, and an audience with the seer Teiresias in Hades. On the island of Thrinacia, Odysseus' men ate the cattle sacred to the sun-god Helios. For this sacrilege Odysseus' ships were destroyed, and all his men perished. Odysseus had not eaten the cattle, and was allowed to live; he washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, and lived there with the nymph Calypso. After seven years, the gods decided to send Odysseus home; on a small raft, he sailed to Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians, who gave him passage to Ithaca.
Once in his home land, Odysseus traveled disguised as an old beggar. He was recognised by his dog, Argos, who died in his lap. He then discovered that his wife, Penelope, had been faithful to him during the 20 years he was absent, despite the countless suitors that were eating his food and spending his property. With the help of his son Telemachus, Athena, and Eumaeus, the swineherd, he killed all of them except Medon, who had been polite to Penelope, and Phemius, a local singer who had only been forced to help the suitors against Penelope. Penelope tested Odysseus and made sure it was him, and he forgave her. The next day the suitors' relatives tried to take revenge on him but they were stopped by Athena.
The "Telegony" picks up where the "Odyssey" leaves off, beginning with the burial of the dead suitors, and continues until the death of Odysseus. Some years after Odysseus' return, Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, came to Ithaca and plundered the island. Odysseus, attempting to fight off the attack, was killed by his unrecognized son. After Telegonus realized he had killed his father, he brought the body to his mother Circe, along with Telemachus and Penelope. Circe made them immortal; then Telegonus married Penelope and Telemachus married Circe.
The journey of the Trojan survivor Aeneas and his resettling of Trojan refugees in Italy are the subject of the Latin epic poem "The Aeneid" by Virgil. Writing during the time of Augustus, Virgil has his hero give a first-person account of the fall of Troy in the second of the "Aeneid" 's twelve books; the Trojan Horse, which does not appear in "The Iliad", became legendary from Virgil's account.
Aeneas leads a group of survivors away from the city, among them his son Ascanius (also known as Iulus), his trumpeter Misenus, father Anchises, the healer Iapyx, his faithful sidekick Achates, and Mimas as a guide. His wife Creusa is killed during the sack of the city. Aeneas also carries the Lares and Penates of Troy, which the historical Romans claimed to preserve as guarantees of Rome's own security.
The Trojan survivors escape with a number of ships, seeking to establish a new homeland elsewhere. They land in several nearby countries that prove inhospitable, and are finally told by an oracle that they must return to the land of their forebears. They first try to establish themselves in Crete, where Dardanus had once settled, but find it ravaged by the same plague that had driven Idomeneus away. They find the colony led by Helenus and Andromache, but decline to remain. After seven years they arrive in Carthage, where Aeneas has an affair with Queen Dido. (Since according to tradition Carthage was founded in 814 BC, the arrival of Trojan refugees a few hundred years earlier exposes chronological difficulties within the mythic tradition.) Eventually the gods order Aeneas to continue onward, and he and his people arrive at the mouth of the Tiber River in Italy. Dido commits suicide, and Aeneas's betrayal of her was regarded as an element in the long enmity between Rome and Carthage that expressed itself in the Punic Wars and led to Roman hegemony.
At Cumae, the Sibyl leads Aeneas on an archetypal descent to the underworld, where the shade of his dead father serves as a guide; this book of the "Aeneid" directly influenced Dante, who has Virgil act as his narrator's guide. Aeneas is given a vision of the future majesty of Rome, which it was his duty to found, and returns to the world of the living. He negotiates a settlement with the local king, Latinus, and was wed to his daughter, Lavinia. This triggered a war with other local tribes, which culminated in the founding of the settlement of Alba Longa, ruled by Aeneas and Lavinia's son Silvius. Roman myth attempted to reconcile two different founding myths: three hundred years later, in the more famous tradition, Romulus founded Rome after murdering his brother Remus. The Trojan origins of Rome became particularly important in the propaganda of Julius Caesar, whose family claimed descent from Venus through Aeneas's son Iulus (hence the Latin "gens" name "Iulius"), and during the reign of Augustus; see for instance the "Tabulae Iliacae" and the "Troy Game" presented frequently by the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Since this war was considered among the ancient Greeks as either the last event of the mythical age or the first event of the historical age, several dates are given for the fall of Troy. They usually derive from genealogies of kings. Ephorus gives 1135 BC, Sosibius 1172 BC, Eratosthenes 1184 BC/1183 BC, Timaeus 1193 BC, the Parian marble 1209 BC/1208 BC, Dicaearchus 1212 BC, Herodotus around 1250 BC, Eretes 1291 BC, while Douris 1334 BC. As for the exact day Ephorus gives 23/24 Thargelion (May 6 or 7), Hellanicus 12 Thargelion (May 26) while others give the 23rd of Sciroforion (July 7) or the 23rd of Ponamos (October 7).
The glorious and rich city Homer describes was believed to be Troy VI by many twentieth century authors, and destroyed about
1275 BC, probably by an earthquake. Its successor, Troy VIIa, was destroyed by fire around 1180 BC; it was long considered a poorer city, and dismissed as a candidate for Homeric Troy, but since the excavation campaign of 1988, it has come to be regarded as the most likely candidate.
The historicity of the Trojan War is still subject to debate. Most classical Greeks thought that the war was a historical event, but many believed that the Homeric poems had exaggerated the events to suit the demands of poetry. For instance, the historian Thucydides, who is known for being critical, considers it a true event but doubts that 1,186 ships were sent to Troy. Euripides started changing Greek myths at will, including those of the Trojan War. Near year 100 AD, Dio Chrysostom argued that while the war was historical, it ended with the Trojans winning, and the Greeks attempted to hide that fact. Around 1870 it was generally agreed in Western Europe that the Trojan War had never happened and Troy never existed. Then Heinrich Schliemann popularized his excavations at Hisarlik, Canakkale, which he and others believed to be Troy, and of the Mycenaean cities of Greece. Today many scholars agree that the Trojan War is based on a historical core of a Greek expedition against the city of Troy, but few would argue that the Homeric poems faithfully represent the actual events of the war.
In November 2001, geologist John C. Kraft and classicist John V. Luce presented the results of investigations into the geology of the region that had started in 1977. The geologists compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the "Iliad" and other classical sources, notably Strabo's "Geographia". Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as identified by Schliemann (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topography and accounts of the battle in the "Iliad".
In the twentieth century scholars have attempted to draw conclusions based on Hittite and Egyptian texts that date to the time of the Trojan War. While they give a general description of the political situation in the region at the time, their information on whether this particular conflict took place is limited. Andrew Dalby notes that while the Trojan War most likely did take place in some form and is therefore grounded in history, its true nature is and will be unknown. The Tawagalawa letter mentions a kingdom of "Ahhiyawa" (Achaea, or Greece) that lies beyond the sea (that would be the Aegean) and controls Milliwanda, which is identified with Miletus. Also mentioned in this and other letters is the Assuwa confederation made of 22 cities and countries which included the city of "Wilusa" (Ilios or Ilium). The Milawata letter implies this city lies on the north of the Assuwa confederation, beyond the Seha river. While the identification of Wilusa with Ilium (that is, Troy) is always controversial, in the 1990s it gained majority acceptance. In the Alaksandu treaty (c. 1280 BC) the king of the city is named Alaksandu, and Paris's name in the "Iliad" (among other works) is Alexander. The Tawagalawa letter (dated c. 1250 BC) which is addressed to the king of Ahhiyawa actually says: "Now as we have come to an agreement on Wilusa over which we went to war ..."
Formerly under the Hittites, the Assuwa confederation defected after the battle of Kadesh between Egypt and the Hittites (c. 1274 BC). In 1230 BC Hittite king Tudhaliya IV (c. 1240–1210 BC) campaigned against this federation. Under Arnuwanda III (c. 1210–1205 BC) the Hittites were forced to abandon the lands they controlled in the coast of the Aegean. It is possible that the Trojan War was a conflict between the king of Ahhiyawa and the Assuwa confederation. This view has been supported in that the entire war includes the landing in Mysia (and Telephus' wounding), Achilles's campaigns in the North Aegean and Telamonian Ajax's campaigns in Thrace and Phrygia. Most of these regions were part of Assuwa.
That most Achaean heroes did not return to their homes and founded colonies elsewhere was interpreted by Thucydides as being due to their long absence. Nowadays the interpretation followed by most scholars is that the Achaean leaders driven out of their lands by the turmoil at the end of the Mycenaean era preferred to claim descent from exiles of the Trojan War.
The inspiration provided by these events produced many literary works, far more than can be listed here. The siege of Troy provided inspiration for many works of art, most famously Homer's "Iliad", set in the last year of the siege. Some of the others include "Troades" by Euripides, "Troilus and Criseyde" by Geoffrey Chaucer, "Troilus and Cressida" by William Shakespeare, "Iphigenia" and "Polyxena" by Samuel Coster, "Palamedes" by Joost van den Vondel and "Les Troyens" by Hector Berlioz.
Films based on the Trojan War include "Helen of Troy" (1956), "The Trojan Horse" (1961) and "Troy" (2004). The war has also been featured in many books, television series, and other creative works. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30058 |
Troy
Troy (, "Troía", , "Ílion" or , "Ílios"; and ; Hittite: 𒌷𒃾𒇻𒊭 "Wilusa" or 𒋫𒊒𒄿𒊭 "Truwisa"; ) was a city in the northwest of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), southwest of the Canakkale Strait, south of the mouth of the Dardanelles and northwest of Mount Ida. The location in the present day is the hill of Hisarlik and its immediate vicinity. In modern scholarly nomenclature, the Ridge of Troy (including Hisarlik) borders the Plain of Troy, flat agricultural land, which conducts the lower Scamander River to the strait. Troy was the setting of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle, in particular in the "Iliad", one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer. Metrical evidence from the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" suggests that the name ("Ilion") formerly began with a digamma: ("Wilion"); this is also supported by the Hittite name for what is thought to be the same city, Wilusa.
After a destruction at the end of the Bronze Age, believed to represent the end of the Trojan War, and a period of abandonment or near-abandonment during the subsequent Dark Age, the site acquired a new population of Greek-speakers, who built a classical city that became along with the rest of Anatolia a part of the Persian Empire. The Troad was liberated by Alexander the Great, an admirer of Achilles, who he believed had the same type of glorious (but short-lived) destiny. After the Roman conquest of this now Hellenistic Greek-speaking world, a new capital called Ilium (from Greek: Ἴλιον, "Ilion") was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, became a bishopric, was abandoned, repopulated for a few centuries in the Byzantine era, was abandoned again, and is now a Latin Catholic titular see. Most recently it has risen to prominence as an archaeological site.
In the mid-19th century the Calvert family, wealthy Levantine English settlers of the Troad, occupying a working farm a few miles from Hisarlik, purchased much of the hill in the belief that it contained the ruins of Troy. They were antiquarians. Two of the family, Frederick and especially the youngest, Frank, surveyed the Troad and conducted a number of trial excavations there. In 1865, Frank Calvert excavated trial trenches on the hill, discovering the Roman settlement. Realizing he did not have the funds for a full excavation, he attempted to recruit the British Museum, and was refused. A chance meeting with Calvert in Çanakkale and a visit to the site by Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman and archaeologist, also looking for Troy, offered a second opportunity for funding. Schliemann had been at first skeptical about the identification of Hisarlik with Troy, but was persuaded by Calvert. As Schliemann was about to leave the area, Calvert wrote to him asking him to take over the entire excavation. Schliemann agreed. The Calverts, who made their money in the diplomatic service, expedited the acquisition of a Turkish firman. In 1868, Schliemann excavated an initial deep trench across the mound called today "Schliemann's trench." These excavations revealed several cities built in succession. Subsequent excavations by following archaeologists elaborated on the number and dates of the cities.
Today a small village near the ruins, Tevfikiye, supports the tourist trade visiting the Troia archaeological site. It lies within the province of Çanakkale, some south-west of the provincial capital, also called Çanakkale. The current map shows Ilium a little way inland from the Scamander estuary across the plain of Troy. According to Korfmann, due to Troy's location near the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea, it was a central hub for military activities and trade, and the chief site of a culture he calls the "Maritime Troja Culture," which extended over the region between the Black and Aegean Seas.
Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
Homeric Troy refers primarily to the city described in the Iliad, the earliest literary work in Europe. This is a long originally oral poem in its own dialect of ancient Greek in dactylic hexameter, in tradition composed by a blind poet of the Anatolian Greek coast, Homer. It covers the 10th year of a war against Troy conducted by a coalition of Achaean, or Greek, states under the leadership of a high king, Agamemnon of Mycenae. The city was defended by a coalition of states in the Dardanelles and West Anatolian region under another high king, Priam, whose capital was Troy. The cause of the war was the elopement of Agamemnon's brother's wife, Helen, with Paris, a prince of Troy.
After the literary time of the poem, the city was destroyed when the Greeks pretended to leave after secreting a squad of soldiers in a gigantic wooden horse monument, which the Trojans brought inside the walls. In the dead of night they exited the horse and opened the gates to the Achaeans nearby. Troy was burned and the population slaughtered, although many had other fates.
Besides the "Iliad", there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the "Odyssey", as well as in other ancient Greek literature (such as Aeschylus's Oresteia). The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his "Aeneid". The fall of Troy with the story of the Trojan Horse and the sacrifice of Polyxena, Priam's youngest daughter, is the subject of a later Greek epic by Quintus Smyrnaeus ("Quintus of Smyrna").
The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War and the identity of Homeric Troy with a site in Anatolia on a peninsula called the Troad (Biga Peninsula). Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and there made sacrifices at tombs associated with the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus. In Piri Reis book "Kitab-ı Bahriye" (Book of the Sea, 1521) which details many ports and islands of the Mediterranean, the description of the island called Tenedos mentions Troy and its ruins, lying on the shore opposite of the island.
The fact that the topography around the site matches the topographic detail of the poem gives to the poem a life-like quality not equaled by other epics. In the "Iliad", the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the River Scamander (modern Karamenderes), where they beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city is some from the coast today, but 3,000 years ago the mouths of Scamander were much closer to the city, discharging into a large bay that formed a natural harbor, which has since been filled with alluvial material. Recent geological findings have permitted the identification of the ancient Trojan coastline, and the results largely confirm the accuracy of the Homeric geography of Troy.
In November 2001, the geologist John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and the classicist John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin, presented the results of investigations, begun in 1977, into the geology of the region. They compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the "Iliad" and other classical sources, notably Strabo's "Geographia", and concluded that there is a regular consistency between the location of Schliemann's Troy and other locations such as the Greek camp, the geological evidence, descriptions of the topography and accounts of the battle in the "Iliad".
The Dark Age following the fall of Troy is called so because for a time writing in Greece disappeared. There are consequently no historians from the period. Writing reappeared in the Archaic Period, after which, in the Classical Period, many historians turned their pens to record such histories of the Trojan War as had survived in oral tradition. They offer a span of about two centuries from the 1334 BC date of Duris of Samos to the 1135 BC date of Ephoros of Kyme in Aeolis. Blegen preferred the 1184 BC date of Eratosthenes, which was in his day the most favored. Whether or not the archaeology matched this span and these dates was to be determined by excavation.
With the rise of critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to legend. However, not everyone agreed with this view. The dissidents were to become the first archaeologists at Troy. The true location of ancient Troy had for centuries remained the subject of interest and speculation. Travellers in Anatolia looked for possible locations. Because of its name, the Troad peninsula was highly suspect.
Early modern travellers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including Pierre Belon and Pietro Della Valle, had identified Troy with Alexandria Troas, a ruined town approximately south of the currently accepted location. In the late 18th century, Jean Baptiste LeChevalier identified a location near the village of , a mound approximately south of the currently accepted location. Published in his "Voyage de la Troade", it was the most commonly accepted theory for almost a century.
In 1822, the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren was the first to identify with confidence the position of the city as it is now known. In the second half of the 19th century archaeological excavation of the site believed to have been Homeric Troy began. As the Iliad is taught in every Greek language curriculum in the world, interest in the site has been unflagging. Homeric experts often memorize large parts of the poem. Literary quotes are commonplace. Since the Calvert family began excavation at Hisarlik, hundreds of interested persons have excavated there. Fortunately all excavation has been conducted under the management of key persons termed its "archaeologists." Their courses of excavation have been divided into the phases described below. Sometimes there have been decades between phases. Today interest in the site is as strong as ever. Further plans for excavation have no end in the foreseeable future.
Frank Calvert was born into an English Levantine family on Malta in 1828. He was the youngest of six sons and one daughter born to James Calvert and his wife, the former Louisa Lander, the sister of Charles Alexander Lander, James' business partner. In social standing they were of the aristocracy. James was a distant relative of the Calverts who founded Baltimore, Maryland, and Louisa was a direct descendant of the Campbells of Argyll (Scottish clansmen). Not having inherited any wealth, they took to the colonies, married in Ottoman Smyrna in 1815, and settled in Malta, which had changed hands from the French to the British Empire with the Treaty of Paris (1814). They associated with the "privileged" social circles of Malta, but they were poor. James clerked in the mail and grain offices of the Civil Service.
The family regarded itself as a single enterprise. They shared property, assisted each other, lived together and had common interests, one of which was the antiquities of the Troad. They did not do well in Malta, but in 1829 the Dardanelles region underwent an upswing of its business cycle due to historical circumstances. The Greek War of Independence was about to be concluded in favor of an independent state by the Treaty of Constantinople (1832). The Levant Company, which had had a monopoly on trade through the Dardanelles, was terminated. The price in pounds of the Turkish piastre fell. A manyfold increase in British traffic through straits was anticipated. A new type of job suddenly appeared: British Consul in the Dardanelles, which brought wealth with it.
Charles Lander applied, and was made British Consul of the Dardanelles in 1829. He spoke five languages, knew the region well, and had the best connections. A row of new consular offices was being constructed in Çanakkale along the shore of the strait. He was at first poor. In 1833 he bought a house in town ample enough to invite his sister's sons to join him in the enterprise. Without exception they left home at 16 to be tutored in the trade at their uncle's house and placed in lucrative consular positions. Frederick, the eldest, stayed on to assist Charles. The youngest, Frank, at school in Athens, arrived last, but his interest in archaeology led him into a different career.
Çanakkale was a boom town. In 1831 Lander married Adele, a brief but idyllic relationship that gave them three daughters in quick succession. When the Calverts began to arrive, finding quarters in the crowded town proved to be difficult. The Turkish building code requiring buildings of wood, conflagrations were frequent. The family escaped one fire with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Lander's collection of books on the Troad was totally destroyed. In 1840 Lander suffered a tragedy when his wife, Adele, died in her 40's, leaving three small children. He chose this time to settle his estate, making Frederick his legal heir, guardian of his children, and co-executor (along with himself).
Lander dedicated himself to the consular service, leaving the details of the estate and its reponsibilites to Frederick. The family grew wealthy on the fees paid by the ships they serviced. When Frank arrived in 1845 with his sister he had nothing much to do. By this time the family had a new library. Using its books Frank explored the Troad. He and Lander became collectors. The women in the family took a supportive role as well.
Lander died in 1846 of a fever endemic to the region, leaving Frederick as executor of the will and head of the family. In 1847 he assumed his uncle's consular position. He was also an agent of Lloyd's of London, which insured ship cargos. Despite Frank's youth he began to play an important role in the family consular business, especially when Frederick was away. A few years prior to the death of Lander, the population of Çanakkale was on the rise, from 10,000 in 1800 to 11,000 in 1842. The British numbered about 40 families. The increase in ship traffic meant prosperity for the Calverts, who expedited the ships of several nations, including the United States. They had other ambitions: James William Whittall, British consul in Smyrna, was spreading his doctrine of the "Trojan Colonization Society," (never more than an idea) which was influential on the Calverts, whom he visited.
In 1847 Frederick invested the profits of the family business in two large tracts in the Troad, amounting to many thousands of acres. He founded a company, Calvert Bros. and Co., an "extended family company." The first purchase was a farm at Erenkőy, on the coast about half-way between Çanakkale and Troy. Frederick used it as a station for ships that could not make Çanakkale. The area was a target for Greek immigration. The family became money-lenders, lending only to Greeks at rates considered high (20%).
Frederick also bought a farm he intended to work, the Batak Farm (named for the Batak wetlands), later changed by Frank to Thymbra Farm, because he believed it was the site of Homeric Thymbra, after which the Thymbra Gate of Homeric Troy had been named. It was located at an abandoned village called Akça Köy, 4 mi. to the southeast of Hisarlik. The farm was the last of the village. It harvested and marketed the cups and acorns of Quercus macrolepis, the Valonia Oak, from which valonia, a compound used in dying and tanning, is extracted. The farm also raised cotton and wheat and bred horses. Frederick introduced the English plough and drained the wetlands. The farm eventually became famous as a way station for archaeologists and the home of the Calvert collection of antiquities, which Frank kept locked in a hidden room. The main house, featuring multiple guest bedrooms, was situated on a low ridge in a compound with several outbuildings. It was more of a manor, operated by farm workers and domestic servants.
In 1850–1852 Frederick solved the residence problem by having a mansion built for him in Çanakkale. Two Turkish houses were said to have been put together, but Turkish houses were required to be of wood. This one was of massive stone, which was permitted to foreigners, and was placed partly on fill jetting into the straits. It probably was the length of two Turkish houses. It remained the major building of the town until it was removed in 1942, due to earlier earthquake damage. The last of the Calvert descendants still in the region had ceded it to the town in 1939. The Town Hall was then built on the site. The mansion's extensive gardens became a public park.
The entire family of the times took up permanent residence in the mansion, which was never finished. It was almost always occupied by visitors and social events. The Calverts began a tour-guide business, conducting visitors throughout the Troad. Frank was the chief guide. The women held musicales and sang in the salons. The house attracted a stream of distinguished visitors, each with a theory about the location of Troy. Frederick, however, was not there for the opening of the house. After a fall from a horse in 1851, complications forced him to seek medical care in London for 18 months, the first of a series of disasters. He was back by 1853.
The Crimean War began in October 1853 and lasted through February 1856. Russia had arbitrarily occupied the Danube frontier of the Ottoman Empire including the Crimea, and Britain and France were providing military assistance to the Ottomans. The rear of the conflict was Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Britain relied heavily on the Levantine families for interfacing, intelligence, and guidance. Edmund Calvert was a British agent, but this was not Frederick's calling. Not long after his return the initial British expeditionary force of 10,000 men was held up in ships in the straits, with no place to bivouac, no supplies, and a commissariat of four non-Turkish speakers.
The British Army had reached a low point of efficiency since Wellington. Although it was the responsibility of Parliament, the fact that the crown retained the prerogative of command made them hesitate to update it, for fear of its being used against them. One of the major problems was the fragmentation of the administration into "a number of separate, distinct, and mutually independent authorities," with little centralization. There were always issues of who was in command and what they commanded. A Supply Corps as such did not exist. The immediate needs of the soldiers were supplied by the Commissariat Department, responsible to the Treasury. Commissaries were assigned to units as needed, but they acted to solve supply problems ad hoc. They had no idea beforehand what the army needed, or what it had, or where it was located.
All the needs were given to contractors, who usually required money in advance. They were allowed to borrow from recommended banks. The Commissariat then paid the banks, but should it fail to do so, the debts were still incumbent on the debtors. Contractors were allowed to charge a percentage for their services, and also to include a percentage given to their suppliers as enticement. The Commissariat could thus build entire impromptu supply departments on the basis of immediate need, which is what Frederick did for them.
The logistics problems were of the same type customarily undertaken by the consular staff, but of larger scale. Frederick was able to perform critical services for the army. Within several days he had all the men billeted ashore and had developed an organization of local suppliers on short notice. He secured their immediate attention by offering higher interest rates, to which the Commissary did not then object. He was so successful that he was given the problem of transporting men and supplies to the front. For that he developed his own transport division of contractors paid as direct employees of his own company. He also advised the Medical Department in their choice of a site near Erenköy for a military hospital, named Renkioi Hospital.
The army, arriving at Gallipoli in April, 1854, did well at first, thanks to the efforts of Frederick Calvert and his peers. They were contracted by Deputy Assistant Commander-General of the Commissariat, John William Smith, on the instruction of the Commander-General, William Filder, who had given Smith their names in advance, especially that of Frederick Calvert. Frederick was waiting for the fleet in Gallipoli. By June the army was doing badly. The Commissary seemed to have no understanding of military schedules. Needed supplies were not getting to their destinations for a number of reasons: perishables were spoiled through delay, cargos were lost or abandoned because there was no tracking system, or cut because a commissary speculated that they should be, etc. Frederick attempted to carry on by using his own resources in the expectation of collecting the money later by due process. By the end of the war his bill to the Commissary would be several thousand pounds. He had had to mortgage family properties in the Troad.
By June it was obvious to Parliament that the cabinet position of “Secretary of State for War and the Colonies” was beyond the ability of only one minister. He was divested of his colonial duties, leaving him as Secretary of State for War, but the Commissary was still not in his domain. In August, Frederick purchased the winter feed for the animals and left it on the dock at Salonica. Filder had adopted a policy of purchasing hay from London and having it pressed for land transport, even though chopped hay was readily available at a much cheaper price around the Dardanelles. The Commissariat was supposed to inspect and accept it at Salonica, but the presses had been set up in the wrong location. By the time they were ready for the hay, most of it had spoiled, so they did not accept any of it.
The winter was especially severe. The animals starved, and without transport, so did the men, trying to make do without food, clothing, shelter or medical supplies. Estimates of the death rate were as high as 35%, 42% in the field hospitals. Florence Nightingale on the scene sounded the alarm to the general public. A scandal ensued; Prince Albert wrote to the Prime Minister. The folly of an army dying because not allowed to help itself while its Commissariat was not efficient enough to move even the minimum of supplies became manifest to the whole nation. In December Parliament placed the Commissariat under the army and opened an investigation. In January, 1855, the government resigned, to be replaced shortly by another determined to do whatever was necessary to obtain a functional supply corps.
The army found that it could not after all dispense with the Treasury or its system of payment. The first investigation went before Parliament in April, 1855. Filder’s defense was that he had conformed strictly to regulations, and that he was not responsible for accidental events, which were “the visitations of God.” John William Smith, Frederick’s handler in the Commissariat, included a number of favorable statements about him in the report, such as “the Commissariat would have been perfectly helpless without Mr. Calvert.” Parliament exonerated the Commissariat, finding “no one in the Crimea was to blame.”
Anticipating this result, the new government started a secret investigation of its own under J. McNeill, a civilian physician, and a milItary officer, Colonel A.M. Tulloch, which it outed in April after the acquittal. The new investigation lasted until January, 1856, and had nothing favorable to say. Losses higher than any battle could produce, and higher than those of any of the allies, were not to be dismissed as accidental.
The new commissioners attacked the system: “the system hitherto relied on as sufficient to provide for every emergency, had totally failed.” The blow fell mainly on Filder. He had plenty of alternatives, Tulloch asserted, which he might have been expected to take. Chopped hay and cattle were readily and cheaply available in the Constantinople region. Filder had some cattle transports at his command in October. Once the supplies had been transported to the Crimea, they could have been carried inland by the troops themselves. Of Filder, Tulloch said: “He was highly paid — not to do merely what he was ordered, but in the expectation that, when difficulties arose, he would show himself equal to the emergency, by ... exercising that discretion and intelligence which the public has a right to expect ...”
Filder was retired by the medical board because of age and sent home. Meanwhile the Commissary had introduced the word "profiteering" in a effort to cast the blame from itself. The decisions had been made by greedy contractors charging high interest rates, who had introduced delays to push the price up. John William Smith recanted what he had said about Frederick, now claiming that Frederick had put private interests before the public, without clarifying what he meant. The insinuation was enough to brand him as a profiteer.. The entire Commissariat took it up as a theme, the banks refusing to honor contractor claims. Restrictions on loans tightened; cash flow problems developed. The inflated economy of the Troad began to collapse. The report was released in January. By then most contractors were in bankruptcy. British troops went home at the end of the war in February, having turned the Turkish merchants in the Troad against the English.
The cost of living remained high. Frederick was no longer trusted as a consular agent and had trouble finding work. His friend, John Brunton, head of the military hospital near Erenköy, was ordered to dismantle and sell the facility. He suggested that Brunton sell the medical supplies to him as surplus at a discount, so that he could recoup some of his estate by reselling them. Turning on him, as Smith had done, Brunton denounced him publicly.
Criminal charges were brought against Frederick for non-payment of debt to the War Office by the Supreme Consular Court of Istanbul in March, 1857. Due to difficulty in proving their case, it went on for months, being finally transferred to London, where Frederick joined it in February, 1858. In 1859 he served a prison term of ten weeks on one debt. Subsequently the Foreign Office stepped in to manage his appeal. The military had not understood how the interest system worked. He won his case before Parliament, with commendation and thanks, and payment of the several thousand plus backpay and interest, arriving home 2.5 years after he had left it, to rescue the estate.
During the 1860s Frederick Calvert's life and career were mainly consumed by a case of insurance fraud termed by the press the “Possidhon affair." An attempt was made to defraud Lloyd's of London of payments to an imaginary person claiming to own an imaginary ship, the Possidhon, that had gone to the bottom when its imaginary cargo burned, a claim made through Frederick. The perpetrators of the fraud, originally the witnesses of the fire, named Frederick as their ringleader. The trial was not a proper one, and Frederick was convicted on technicalities. He protested that he was the victim of an Ottoman frame-up, and was supported in that plea by his brother, Frank. There were a number of circumstances that remain historically unexplained. Modern historians who think he was guilty characterize him as a charismatic profiteer of shady ethics, while those who think he was innocent point to his patriotic motives in helping the British Army to the detriment of his own estate and his acquittal by Parliament.
Having returned from London in October, 1860, with enough money to restore the family estate, Frederick now turned his attention to the family avocation, archaeology, rejecting a lucrative job offer as a Consul in Syria. Frank, now age 32, had long been the master of the estate and of the business. By this time he was also a skilled and respected archaeologist. He spent all of his spare time investigating and excavating the numerous habitation and burial sites of the Troad. He was an invaluable consultant to specialists in many areas from plants to coins. Frederick joined him in this life by choice. For a few years he was able to work with Frank in expanding Lander’s library and collection, and in exploring and excavating ancient sites.
In 1846 Frederick married Eveline, an heiress of the wealthy Abbotts, owners of some mines in Turkey. They had at least five known children.
Frederick’s wife’s uncle, William Abbott, had gone with him to London, where they purchased a house for mutual residence. Frederick set him up in a few different businesses, the last being Abbott Brothers, dealers in firewood. His son, however, William George Abbott, a junior partner of Frederick in the consular business, remained in the Dardanelles to handle business there as acting consul. In January, 1861, the consular office was approached by a Turkish merchant, Hussein Aga, requesting 12000 £. ($} of insurance from Lloyd’s on the cargo of the Possidhon, which was olive oil. He claimed to be a broker marketing the oil produced by certain pashas and now wished to sell it in Britain.
Frederick requested William in London to borrow money as Abbot Brothers to finance the premiums. The debt was to be paid when the cargo was sold. It isn’t clear whether Abbott was to sell it, and if so, in whose name. The cargo, being insured by him, was consigned to him. A loan of 1500 £ ($) was effected on April 11, and the premiums were paid.
The ship, cleared to sail from Edremit to Britain by Frederick’s office on April 4, sailed on the 6th. Frederick was to have inspected it before issuing the clearance, but he did not. On April 28 Frederick notified Lloyd’s by telegram that the vessel had been seen burning off Lemnos in a heavy wind on April 8, which is peculiar, because it ought to have been far from Lemnos by then. When it had not arrived months later the creditors for the premiums requested their money. Frederick submitted a claim through Abbott for a total loss. He suggested Greek pirates and collaboration of the crew as causes, implicating Hussein Aga, who had not been seen since then. Lloyd’s requested documents giving testimony of the loss, turning the case over to Lloyd's Salvage Association.
Frederick forwarded to Abbott in London four affadavits from British consular agents on Tenedos and Samos of visual sightings of the ship. Conspicuously absent were any Turkish documents that should have been examined before permission to sail was granted. An investigator from Lloyd’s Salvage working from Constantinople finding no record of either Aga or the ship concluded to a fraud. Simultaneouly Frederick, conducting his own investigation, reached a similar conclusion. He had been duped by a person pretending to be a fictional Hussein Aga. The witnesses produced a confession, naming Frederick as mastermind of the scheme. The Salvage Association turned the matter over to the Foreign Office. M. Tolmides, consular agent at Tenedos, admitted to signing the affadavits. His defense was that he had given Frederick blank signed forms.
The Foreign Office issued a public statement questioning Frederick's credibility. He requested permission to leave his post to travel to London to defend himself. Permission was denied. On April 30 he issued a statement that he had been set up and was being framed by an unknown agent, for whom he was conducting an unsuccessful search at Smyrna. He found some support in the British ambassador, Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer, a liberal and a freemason, who accepted him as credible, and noted the hostility of Turkish officialdom against him. However, unless Frederick could produce some evidence of the conspiracy, he affirmed, he would officially have to side with the insurance company. The matter became international. Turkish harbor officials claimed, via Lloyd’s agents, that Frederick had submitted forged documents to them. The Ottoman Porte compalined. The Prince of Wales scheduled a visit. Fredrick was going to be brought before a consular court, an agency with a reputation for corruption; in particular, bribability.
Due to the publicity skills of Heinrich Schliemann and the public discreditation of Frederick as a convicted felon, the contributions mainly of Frank to the excavation of Troy remained unknown and unappreciated until the end of the 20th century, when the Calverts became an object of special study. A number of misunderstandings still cling to them. One is that Schliemann discovered Troy on land he had the foresight to purchase from the Calverts. To the contrary, it was Frank who convinced Frederick to purchase Hissarlik as the probable site of Troy, and Frank who convinced Schliemann that it was there, and to partner with him in its excavation. The Calverts did not hand anything over; they remained on site excavating with him and attempting to advise and manage him. Frank was often a sharp critic. Frank is sometimes called "self-taught." Educationally this was not true. He did not attend university, but there would have been no point, as archaeology was not yet taught there. Frank was the first modern (19th century) to excavate in the Troad. He knew more than all the visitors he tutored.
In 1866, Frank Calvert, the brother of the United States' consular agent in the region, made extensive surveys and published in scholarly journals his identification of the hill of New Ilium (which was on farmland owned by his family) on the same site. The hill, near the city of Çanakkale, was known as Hisarlik.
The British diplomat, considered a pioneer for the contributions he made to the archaeology of Troy, spent more than 60 years in the Troad (modern day Biga peninsula, Turkey) conducting field work. As Calvert was a principal authority on field archaeology in the region, his findings supplied evidence that Homeric Troy might have existed on the hill, and played a major role in convincing Heinrich Schliemann to dig at Hisarlik.
In 1868, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann visited Calvert and secured permission to excavate Hisarlik. He sincerely believed that the literary events of the works of Homer could be verified archaeologically. A divorced man in his 40's who had acquired some wealth as a merchant in Russia, he decided to use the wealth to follow his boyhood interest in finding and verifying the city of Troy. Leaving his former life behind, he advertised for a wife whose skills and interest were on a par with his own, Sophia. She was 17 at the time but together they excavated Troy, sparing no expense.
Heinrich began by excavating a trench across the mound of Hisarlik to the depth of the settlements, today called "Schliemann's Trench." In 1871–73 and 1878–79, he discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. He declared one of these cities—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time. Subsequent archaeologists at the site were to revise the date upward; nevertheless, the main identification of Troy as the city of the Iliad, and the scheme of the layers, have been kept.
Some of Schliemann's portable finds at Hisarlik have become known as Priam's Treasure, such as the jewelry photographed displayed on Sophia. The artifacts were acquired from him by the Berlin museums. As Sophia matured she became an invaluable assistant to Schliemann, whom he employed especially in social situations requiring the use of modern Greek. After his death she became caretaker of his funds and publications, continuing to advocate for his beliefs. She was a respected socialite in Athens.
Wilhelm Dörpfeld joined the excavation at the request of Schliemann. After Schliemann left, he inherited the management of it. His chief contribution was the detailing of Troy VI. He published his findings separately.
Carl Blegen, professor at the University of Cincinnati, managed the site 1932–38. These archaeologists, though following Schliemann's lead, added a professional approach not available to Schliemann. He showed that there were at least nine cities. In his research, Blegen came to a conclusion that Troy's nine levels could be further divided into forty-six sublevels, which he published in his main report.
In 1988, excavations were resumed by a team from the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati under the direction of Professor Manfred Korfmann, with Professor Brian Rose overseeing Post-Bronze Age (Greek, Roman, Byzantine) excavation along the coast of the Aegean Sea at the Bay of Troy. Possible evidence of a battle was found in the form of bronze arrowheads and fire-damaged human remains buried in layers dated to the early 12th century BC. The question of Troy's status in the Bronze-Age world has been the subject of a sometimes acerbic debate between Korfmann and the Tübingen historian Frank Kolb in 2001–2002.
Korfmann proposed that the location of the city (close to the Dardanelles) indicated a commercially oriented city that would have been at the center of a vibrant trade between the Black Sea, Aegean, Anatolian and Eastern Mediterranean regions. Kolb disputed this thesis, calling it "unfounded" in a 2004 paper. He argues that archaeological evidence shows that economic trade during the Late Bronze Age was quite limited in the Aegean region compared with later periods in antiquity. On the other hand, the Eastern Mediterranean economy was more active during this time, allowing for commercial cities to develop only in the Levant. Kolb also noted the lack of evidence for trade with the Hittite Empire.
In August 1993, following a magnetic imaging survey of the fields below the fort, a deep ditch was located and excavated among the ruins of a later Greek and Roman city. Remains found in the ditch were dated to the late Bronze Age, the alleged time of Homeric Troy. Among these remains are arrowheads and charred remains. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once marked the outer defenses of a much larger city than had previously been suspected. In the olive groves surrounding the citadel, there are portions of land that were difficult to plow, suggesting that there are undiscovered portions of the city lying there. The latter city has been dated by his team to about 1250 BC, and it has been also suggested—based on recent archeological evidence uncovered by Professor Manfred Korfmann's team—that this was indeed the Homeric city of Troy.
Helmut Becker utilized magnetometry in the area surrounding Hisarlik. He was conducting an excavation in 1992 to locate outer walls of the ancient city. Becker used a caesium magnetometer. In his and his team's search, they discovered a "'burnt mudbrick wall' about 400 metres south of the Troy VI fortress wall." After dating their find, it was deemed to have been from the late Bronze Age, which would put it either in Troy VI or early Troy VII. This discovery of an outer wall away from the tell proves that Troy could have housed many more inhabitants than Schliemann originally thought.
In summer 2006, the excavations continued under the direction of Korfmann's colleague Ernst Pernicka, with a new digging permit.
In 2013, an international team made up of cross-disciplinary experts led by William Aylward, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was to carry out new excavations. This activity was to be conducted under the auspices of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University and was to use the new technique of "molecular archaeology". A few days before the Wisconsin team was to leave, Turkey cancelled about 100 excavation permits, including Wisconsin's.
In March 2014, it was announced that a new excavation would take place to be sponsored by a private company and carried out by Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. This will be the first Turkish team to excavate and is planned as a 12-month excavation led by associate professor Rüstem Aslan. The University's rector stated that "Pieces unearthed in Troy will contribute to Çanakkale’s culture and tourism. Maybe it will become one of Turkey’s most important frequented historical places.”
The Turkish government created the Historical National Park at Troy on September 30, 1996. It contains to include Troy and its vicinity, centered on Troy. The purpose of the park is to protect the historical sites and monuments within it, as well as the ecology of the region. In 1998 the park was accepted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In 2015 a Term Development Revision Plan was applied to the park. Its intent was to develop the park into a major tourist site. Plans included marketing research to determine the features most of interest to the public, the training of park personnel in tourism management, and the construction of campsites and facilities for those making day trips. These latter were concentrated in the village of Tevfikiye, which shares Troy Ridge with Troy.
Public access to the ancient site is along the road from the vicinity of the museum in Tevfikiye to the east side of Hisarlik. Some parking is available. Typically visitors come by bus, which disembarks its passengers into a large plaza ornamented with flowers and trees and some objects from the excavation. In its square is a large wooden horse monument, with a ladder and internal chambers for use of the public. Bordering the square is the gate to the site. The public passes through turnstiles. Admission is usually not free. Within the site the visitors tour the features on dirt roads or for access to more precipitous features on railed boardwalks. There are many overlooks with multilingual boards explaining the feature. Most are outdoors, but a permanent canopy covers the site of an early megaron and wall.
The archaeological site of Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
For a site to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it must be claimed to have Outstanding Universal Value. This means that it must be historically, culturally, or scientifically significant to all peoples of the world in some manner. According to the UNESCO site on Troy, its historical significance was gained because the site displays some of the "first contact between...Anatolia and the Mediterranean world". The site's cultural significance is gained from the multitudes of literature regarding the famed city and history over centuries. Many of the structures dating to the Bronze Age and the Roman and Greek periods are still standing at Hisarlik. These give archeological significance to the site as well.
More information on the UNESCO qualifications of Troy can be found on the UNESCO website.
In 2018 the Troy Museum (Turkish Troya Müzesi) was opened at Tevfikiye village east of the excavation. A design contest for the architecture had been won by Yalin Mimarlik in 2011. The cube-shaped building with extensive underground galleries holds more than 40,000 portable artifacts, 2000 of which are on display. Artifacts were moved here from a few other former museums in the region. The range is the entire prehistoric Troad. Displays are multi-lingual. In many cases the original contexts are reproduced.
Some of the most notable artifacts uncovered at Hisarlik are known as Priam's Treasure. Most of these pieces were crafted from gold and other precious metals. Heinrich Schliemann put this assemblage together from his first excavation site, which he thought to be the remains of Homeric Troy. He gave them this name after King Priam, who is said in the ancient literature to have ruled during the Trojan War. However, the site that housed the treasure was later identified as Troy II, whereas Priam's Troy would most likely have been Troy VIIa (Blegen) or Troy VIi (Korfmann). One of the most famous photographs of Sophia made not long after the discovery depicts her wearing a golden headdress, which is known as the "Jewels of Helen" (see under Schliemann above).
Other pieces that are a part of this collection are:
Literary Troy was characterized by high walls and towers, summarized by the epithet "lofty Ilium." Some other epithets were "well-walled," "with lofty gates," "with fine towers." Any archaeological candidate for being the literary city would therefore have to show evidence for the walls and towers. Schliemann's Troy fits this qualification very well. High walls and towers are in evidence at every hand. Hisarlik, the name of the hill on which Troy is situated, is Turkish for "the fortress."
The walls of Troy, first erected in the Bronze Age between at least 3000 and 2600 BC, were its main defense, as is true of almost any ancient city of urban size. Whether Troy Zero featured walls is not yet known. Some of the known walls were placed on virgin soil (see the archaeology section below). The early date of the walls suggests that defense was important and warfare was a looming possibility right from the beginning.
The walls surround the citadel, extending for several hundred meters, and at the time they were built were over tall. They were made of limestone, with watchtowers and brick ramparts, or elevated mounds that served as protective barriers.
The second run of excavations, under Korfmann, revealed that the walls of the first run were not the entire suite of walls for the city, and only partially represent the citadel. According to Korfmann, "There was also a lower city that went with the Late Bronze Age Troja...1750-1200 BCE." This city had a perimeter 0f end enclosed an area 16 times that of the citadel. It was protected by a ditch surmounted by a wall of mud brick and wood. Moreover, the citadel walls were surmounted by structures of mud brick. The stone part of the walls currently in evidence were "...five meters thick and at least eight meters high - and over that a mudbrick superstructure several meters high...," which totals to about for the citadel walls at about the time of the Trojan War. The present-day walls of Troy, then, portray little of the ancient city's appearance, any more than bare foundations characterize a building.
What Schliemann actually found as he excavated the hill of Hisarlik somewhat haphazardly were contexts in the soil parallel to the contexts of geologic layers in rock. Exposed rock displays layers of a similar composition and fossil content within a layer discontinuous with other layers above and below it. The layer represents an accumulation of detritus over a continuous time, different from the times of the other layers.
Similarly Schliemann found layers of distinctive soil each containing more or less distinctive artifacts differing often markedly from other layers. He had no ready explanation for the discontinuity between layers, such as "destruction," although this interpretation has sometimes been applied. Presumably "destruction" is to be interpreted to mean some sort of malicious event perpetrated by humans or a natural disaster, such as an earthquake. In most cases no such disaster can be proved. On the contrary, the "many layers illustrate the gradual development of civilization in northwestern Asia Minor."
The discontinuities of culture in different layers might be explained in a number of ways. A settlement might have been abandoned for peaceful reasons, or it might have undergone a renovation phase. These are hypotheses that must be ruled in or ruled out by evidence, or simply be left unruled until evidence should be discovered.
What Schliemann found is that the area now called "the citadel" or "the upper city" was apparently placed on virgin soil. It was protected by fortifications right from the start. The layering effect was caused in part by the placement of new fortifications and new houses over the old. Schliemann called these fortified enclosures "cities" (rightly or wrongly). In his mind the site was composed of successive cities. Like everyone else, he speculated whether a new city represented a different population, and what its relationship to the old was. He numbered the cities I, II, etc., I being on the bottom. Subsequent archaeologists turned the "cities" into layers (rightly or wrongly), named according to the new archaeological naming conventions then being developed.
The layers of ruins in the citadel at Hisarlik are numbered Troy ITroy IX, with various subdivisions.
Until the late 20th century, these layers represented only the layers on the hill of Hisarlik. Archaeologists following Schliemann picked up the trail of his researches adopting the same fundamental assumptions, culminating in the work and writings of Carl Blegen in the mid-20th century. In a definitive work, "Troy and the Trojans", he summarized the layers names and the dates he had adopted for them. Without further excavation, Blegen's was the last word. There were, however, some persistent criticisms not answered to general satisfaction. Hisarlik, about the size of a football field, was not large enough to have been the mighty city of history. It was also far inland, yet the general historical tradition suggested it must have been close to the sea.
The issues finally devolved on the necessity for further excavation, which was undertaken by Korfmann starting 1988. He concentrated on the Roman city, which was not suspected as being over Bronze Age remains. A Bronze Age city, at low elevations, was discovered beneath it. As it is unlikely that there were two Troys side by side, the lower city must have been the main seat of residence, to which the upper city served as citadel. Korfman now referred to the layers of the lower city as associated with the layers of the citadel. The same layering scheme was applicable. The lower city was many times the size of the citadel, answering the size objection.
Meanwhile independent geoarchaeological research conducted by taking ground cores over a wide area of the Troad were demonstrating that, in the time of Troy I, "... the sea was right at the foot of 'Schliemann's Trench' during the earliest periods of Troja." A few thousand years earlier the ridge of Troy was partly surrounded by an inlet of the sea occupying the now agricultural area of the lower Scamander River. Troy was founded as an apparently maritime city on the shore of this inlet, which persisted throughout the early layers and was present to a lesser degree, farther away, subsequently. The harbor at Troy, however, was always small, shallow, and partially blocked by wetlands. It was never a "great harbor" able to collect maritime traffic through the Dardanelles. The current water table depends on the degree of irrigation of the now agricultural lands. Trench flooding has slowed investigation of the lower levels in the lower city.
The whole course of archaeological investigation at Troy has resulted in no single chronological table of layers. Moreover, due to limitations on the accuracy of C14 dating, the tables remain relative; i.e., absolute, or calendar dates, cannot be precisely assigned. In regions of the Earth where both history and C14 dating are available, there is often a gap between them, termed by Renfrew a chronological or archaeological "fault line." The two models, historical and archaeological, do not correspond, just as the contexts on either side of a geologic fault line do not correspond. "This line divides all Europe except the Aegean from the Near East."
The table below concentrates on two systems of dates: Blegen's from "Troy and the Trojans",, representing the last of the trend from Schliemann to the mid-20th century, and Korfmann's, from "Troia in Light of New Research" in the early years of the 21st century, after he had had a chance to establish a new trend and new excavations.
Prior to Korfmann's excavations, the nine-layer model was considered comprehensive of all the material at Troy. Korfmann discovered that the city was not placed on virgin soil, as Schliemann had concluded. There is no reason not to think that, in the areas he tested, Schliemann did find that Troy I was on virgin soil. Korfmann discovered a layer previous to Troy I under a gate to Troy II. He dated it 3500 BC to 2920 BC, but did not assign a name. The current director of excavation at Troy, Rüstem Aslan, is calling it Troy 0 (zero). Roman numerals have no zero, but zero is one number less than I.
Troy 0 has been omitted from the table below, due to the uncertainty of its general status. Archaeologists at the site before Korfmann had thought that Troy I began with the Bronze Age at 3000 BC. Troy zero is before this date. The remains of the layer are not very substantial. Whether the layer is to be counted as part of the preceding Chalcolithic, or whether the dates of the Bronze Age are to be changed, has not been decided through the regular channel of journal articles. One 2016 PhD Thesis complained: "... the stratigraphic sequence of the renewed excavations is presented differently by different collaborators of Korfmann ... So, until an agreed stratigraphy of Korfmann’s cycle is published, the employment of Troy as a yardstick for the whole of the Anatolian EBA remains problematic."
For example, in Korfmann elaborates beyond the chronology of Cobet's table to make new proposals regarding the layer, Troy VIIa (which he also presents in the "Guidebook"): "Troia VIIa should be assigned culturally to
Troia VI," asserting that "there were no substantial differences in the material culture between the two periods." He suggests that Dőrpfeld's classification of the material subsequently in VIIa as VIi should be restored, claiming that, regarding the details, Blegen had been "entirely in agreement" even though his chronology featured Troy VIIa. He then laments "the old terminology has, unfortunately, been retained. Confusion is to be avoided at all costs." As this view has not yet been tested in the journals and is not universal, it is mainly omitted from the table (Cobet's chart, however, includes Korfmann's VIIb 3.) This new and yet unresolved material, including Troy Zero, may, however, be included in the sections and links below reporting on specific layers
Korfmann also found that Troy IX was not the end of the settlements. Regardless of whether the city was abandoned at 450 AD, a population was back for the Middle Ages, which, for those times, was under the Byzantine Empire. As with Troy Zero, no conventional scholarly classification has been tested in the journals. The literature mentions Troy X, and even Troy XI, without solid definition. The table below therefore omits them.
The sequence of archaeological layering at one site evidences the relative positions of the corresponding periods at that site; however, these layers often have a position relative to periods at other sites. It is possible to define relative periods over a wide region of sites and for a larger slice of time. Determining wider correspondences is a major objective of archaeology. The establishment of a "yardstick," or reliable sequence, such as the elusive one mentioned above, is a desirable outcome of archaeological analysis.
The table below states the broader connections under "General Period." It references primarily the chronologies presented in the educational site created and maintained by Jeremy Rutter and team and published by Dartmouth College, entitled "Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology". The time period is generally "the Bronze Age," which has an early (EB or EBA), a middle (MB or MBA), and a late (LB or LBA). The sites are distributed over Crete ("Minoan," or M), the Cyclades ("Cycladic," or C), the Greek mainland ("Helladic," or H), and Western Turkey ("Western Anatolian," no abbreviation).
The first city on the site was founded in the 3rd millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the site seems to have been a flourishing mercantile city, since its location allowed for complete control of the Dardanelles, through which every merchant ship from the Aegean Sea heading for the Black Sea had to pass. Cities to the east of Troy were destroyed, and although Troy was not burned, the next period shows a change of culture indicating a new people had taken over Troy. The first phase of the city is characterized by a smaller citadel, around 300 ft in diameter, with 20 rectangular houses surrounded by massive walls, towers, and gateways. Troy II doubled in size and had a lower town and the upper citadel, with the walls protecting the upper acropolis which housed the megaron-style palace for the king. The second phase was destroyed by a large fire, but the Trojans rebuilt, creating a fortified citadel larger than Troy II, but which had smaller and more condensed houses, suggesting an economic decline. This trend of making a larger circuit, or extent of the walls, continued with each rebuild, for Troy III, IV, and V. Therefore, even in the face of economic troubles, the walls remained as elaborate as before, indicating their focus on defense and protection.
When Schliemann came across Troy II, in 1871, he believed he had found Homer's city. Schliemann and his team unearthed a large feature he dubbed the Scaean Gate, a western gate unlike the three previously found leading to the Pergamos. This gate, as he describes, was the gate that Homer had featured. As Schliemann states in his publication "Troja":
"I have proved that in a remote antiquity there was in the plain of Troy a large city, destroyed of old by a fearful catastrophe, which had on the hill of Hisarlık only its Acropolis with its temples and a few other large edifices, southerly, and westerly direction on the site of the later Ilium; and that, consequently, this city answers perfectly to the Homeric description of the sacred site of Ilios."Also, he uncovered what he referred to as The Palace of Priam, after the king during the Trojan War. This reference is incorrect because Priam lived nearly a thousand years after Troy II.
Troy VI was destroyed around 1250 BC, probably by an earthquake. Only a single arrowhead was found in this layer, and no remains of bodies. However, the town quickly recovered and was rebuilt in a layout that was more orderly. This rebuild continued the trend of having a heavily fortified citadel to preserve the outer rim of the city in the face of earthquakes and sieges of the central city.
Troy VI can be characterized by the construction of the pillars at the south gate. There appears to be no structural use for the pillars. The pillars have an altar-like base and an impressive magnitude. This provides some clues, and they most likely were used as a symbol for the religious cults of the city. Another characterizing feature of Troy VI is the tightly packed housing near the Citadel and construction of many cobble streets. Although only few homes could be uncovered, this is due to reconstruction of Troy VIIa over the tops of them.
Also, discovered in 1890, in this layer of Troy VI was Mycenaean pottery. This pottery suggests that during Troy IV, the Trojans still had trade with the Greeks and the Aegean. Furthermore, there were cremation burials discovered 400m south of the citadel wall. This provided evidence of a small lower city south of the Hellenistic city walls. Although the size of this city is unknown due to erosion and regular building activities, there is significant evidence that was uncovered by Blegen in 1953 during an excavation of the site. This evidence included settlements just above bedrock and a ditch thought to be used for defense. Furthermore, the small settlement itself, south of the wall, could have also been used as an obstacle to defend the main city walls and the citadel.
The topic still under debate is whether Troy was primarily an Anatolian-oriented or Aegean-oriented metropolis. While it is true that the city would have had a presence in the Aegean, pottery finds and architecture strongly hint at an Anatolian orientation. Only about one percent of the pottery discovered during excavation of Troy VI was Mycenaean. The large walls and gates of the city are closely related to many other Anatolian designs. Furthermore, the practice of cremation is Anatolian. Cremation is never seen in the Mycenaean world. Anatolian hieroglyphic writing along with bronze seals marked with Anatolian hieroglyphic Luwian were also uncovered in 1995. These seals have been seen in approximately 20 other Anatolian and Syrian cities from the time (1280 - 1175 BC).
Still, Troy VI was dominated by long distance trade. Troy VI during the height of its establishment held anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 people. At its time, Troy would have been a large and significant city. The location of Troy was extremely practical in the Early Bronze Age (2000–1500 BC). It acted as a middle ground for long distance trade with regions as far distant as Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, the Baltic region, Egypt, and the western Mediterranean in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Earlier trade connections during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages provided Troy VI with favorable power in the long distance trade industry of the region. The amount of objects thought to be going through Troy VI would have been quite large, obtaining metals from the east and various objects from the west including perfumes and oils. This is known due to the findings of hundreds of shipwrecks off the Turkish coast. Found in these ships was an abundance of goods. Some of these ships carried over 15 tons in goods. The goods discovered in these wrecks included copper ingots, tin ingots, glass ingots, bronze tools and weapons, ebony and ivory, ostrich egg shells, jewelry and large amounts of pottery from across the Mediterranean.
There have been 210 shipwrecks discovered in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age. Of these 210, 63 were discovered off the Turkish coastline. This provides a great deal of evidence for Troy VI being a prominent trading center for the region. But, the evidence at the site of Troy itself is minimal. Looking at the layers of Troy VI, we discover that there is little documentation of the excavation of this layer, and little documentation of the goods discovered in this layer. We also know that there were few trading centers during the Late Bronze Age. This is due to the low volume of trade during this period. The trading centers would have most likely been directly along trade routes. Troy is just north of most major long-distance trade routes. It may be unfair to classify Troy VI as a trading center but we do know that Troy VI was a prominent metropolis that did contribute to the trade of the region.
Troy VIIa can be highlighted by most of the population of Troy moving within the walls of the Citadel. This is most likely due to the threat from the Mycenaeans. Troy VI is believed to have been destroyed by an earthquake. This would not have been uncommon. Earthquakes are common throughout the region. Troy VIIa is believed to be built over the ruined Troy VI, which makes the excavation process of Troy difficult.
Troy VIIa, which has been dated to the mid-to-late-13th century BC, is the most often cited candidate for the Troy of Homer. Troy VIIa appears to have been destroyed by war. The evidence of fire and slaughter around 1184 BC, which brought Troy VIIa to a close, led to this phase being identified with the city besieged by the Greeks during the Trojan War. This was immortalized in the "Iliad" written by Homer.
Initially, the layers of Troy VI and VII were overlooked entirely, because Schliemann favoured the burnt city of Troy II. It was not until the need to close "Calvert's Thousand Year Gap" arose—from Dörpfeld's discovery of Troy VI—that archaeology turned away from Schliemann's Troy and began working towards finding Homeric Troy once more.
"Calvert's Thousand Year Gap" (1800–800 BC) was a period not accounted for by Schliemann's archaeology and thus constituted a hole in the Trojan timeline. In Homer's description of the city, a section of one side of the wall is said to be weaker than the rest. During his excavation of more than three hundred yards of the wall, Dörpfeld came across a section very closely resembling the Homeric description of the weaker section. Dörpfeld was convinced he had found the walls of Homer's city, and now he would excavate the city itself. Within the walls of this stratum (Troy VI), much Mycenaean pottery dating from Late Helladic (LH) periods III A and III B (c. 1400–c. 1200 BC) was uncovered, suggesting a relation between the Trojans and Mycenaeans. The great tower along the walls seemed likely to be the "Great Tower of Ilios".
The evidence seemed to indicate that Dörpfeld had stumbled upon Ilios, the city of Homer's epics. Schliemann himself had conceded that Troy VI was more likely to be the Homeric city, but he never published anything stating so. The only counter-argument, confirmed initially by Dörpfeld (who was as passionate as Schliemann about finding Troy), was that the city appeared to have been destroyed by an earthquake, not by men. There was little doubt that this was the Troy of which the Mycenaeans would have known.
The archaeologists of Troy concerned themselves mainly with prehistory; however, not all the archaeology performed there falls into the category of prehistoric archaeology. Troy VIII and Troy IX are dated to historical periods. Historical archaeology illuminates history. In the LBA records mentioning Troy begin to appear in other cultures. This type of evidence is termed protohistory. The literary characters and events must be classified as legendary. Prehistoric Troy is also legendary Troy. The legends are not history or protohistory, as they are not records. It was the question of their historicity that attracted the interest of such archaeologists as Calvert and Schliemann. After many decades of archaeology, there are still no answers. There is still a "fault line" between history or legend and archaeology.
If Homeric Troy is not a fantasy woven in the 8th century by Greek oral poets passing on a tradition of innovating new poems at festivals, as most archaeologists hoped it was not, then the question must be asked, what archaeological level represents Homeric Troy? Only two credible answers are available, which are the same answer: Troy VIIa in the Blegen scheme, identical to Troy VIi in the scheme suggested by Korfmann. After an earthquake brought down the walls of the city at its floruit about 1300 BC, the same people rebuilt the city even more magnificent than before. This event is considered the start of the LBA, and Homeric Troy is considered to be LBA Troy.
Both Blegen and Korfmann endorse a starting date of about 1300 BC. Blegen has it ending early at 1260 BC, but Korfmann runs it up to 1190 BC (or 1180 BC elsewhere). He abolishes VIIa, and substitutes for it VIi, more in keeping with the splendor of VI; after all, they were the same people. He estimates the population at 10,000. The end of the period is marked by weapons left laying around, skeletons, and burnt objects, considered the result of the Trojan War. Coincidentally this is the very period referenced by Egyptian and Hittite records of Troy. They hold out some hope of a protohistorical connection.
In the 1920s, the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer proposed that the placenames Wilusa and Taruisa found in Hittite texts should be identified with Ilion and Troia, respectively. He further noted that the name of Alaksandu, a king of Wilusa mentioned in a Hittite treaty, is quite similar to Homer's Paris, whose birthname was Alexandros. These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable. However, Trevor Bryce championed them in his 1998 book "The Kingdom of the Hittites", citing a piece of the Manapa-Tarhunda letter referring to the kingdom of Wilusa as beyond the land of the Seha River (the classical Caicus and modern Bakırçay) and near the land of "Lazpa" (Lesbos).
The excavation of the lower city uncovered a water distribution system containing of tunnels tapping sources higher up on the ridge. Dates from the floor deposits obtained by the Uranium-thorium dating method indicate that water was flowing through the tunnels "as early as the third millenium BC;" thus the early city made sure that it had an internal water supply. In 1280 BC a treaty between the reigning monarchs of the Hittite and Trojan states, Muwatalli II and Alaksandu of Wilusa respectively, invoked the water god, KASKAL_KUR, who was associated with an underground tunnel, adding weight to the theory that Wilusa is identical to archaeological Troy.
Among the documents mentioning Troy are the Tawagalawa letter (CTH 181) was found to document an unnamed Hittite king's correspondence to the king of the Ahhiyawa, referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. The Hittite king was long held to be Mursili II (c. 1321–1296), but, since the 1980s, his son Hattusili III (1265–1240) is commonly preferred, although his other son Muwatalli (c. 1296–1272) remains a possibility.
Inscriptions of the New Kingdom of Egypt also record a nation T-R-S as one of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt during the XIX and XX Dynasties. An inscription at Deir el-Medina records a victory of Ramesses III over the Sea Peoples, including one named "Tursha" (Egyptian: ["twrš3"]). It is probably the same as the earlier "Teresh" (Egyptian: ["trš.w"]) on the stele commemorating Merneptah's victory in a Libyan campaign around 1220 BC.
The identifications of Wilusa with Troy and of the Ahhiyawa with Homer's Achaeans remain somewhat controversial but gained enough popularity during the 1990s to be considered majority opinion. That agrees with metrical evidence in the Iliad that the name ᾽Ιλιον (Ilion) for Troy was formerly Ϝιλιον (Wilion) with a digamma.
From the beginning of the archaeology, the question of what language was spoken by the Trojans was prominent. Various proposals were made, but they remained pure speculation. No evidence seemed to have survived whatever. That they might be Greek was considered. However, if they were, the question of why they were not in the Achaean domain, but were opposed to the Achaeans. was an even greater mystery. Passages from the "Iliad" suggested that, not only were the Trojans not Greek, but the army defending Troy was composed of different language speakers arrayed by nationality.
Finally in the middle of the 20th century Linear B was deciphered and a large number of documentary tablets were able to be read. The language is an early dialect of Greek, even earlier than the Homeric dialect. Many Greek words were in the early stage of formation. The digamma abounds. Linear B tablets have been found at the major centers of the Achaean domain. None, however, come from Troy.
The documents in Linear B basically inventory the assets of Mycenaean palace-states: foods, textiles, ceramics, weapons, lands, and above all manpower, especially people held in some sort of servitude. Civilizations of the times were slave societies. The terms of servitude, however, varied widely. A study by Efkleidou in 2004 detailed the types of servitude mentioned in the Linear B tablets. To her way of thinking, the main elements of servitude are that servants are outsiders, not part of the customary social structure, and that they are coerced into their positions. Someone has authority over them, whom she calls a "superior," designated in Greek by the genitive case: "servant of ..." One of the categories of Mycenaean servant is the do-er-o (masc) and do-er-a (fem), Greek doulos, pl douloi, and doula, pl doulai. A specific type of doulos is the te-o-jo do-er-o, theoio doulos, "servant of God," a temple assistant of some sort, whose superior was the deity. These two categories were not badly off, being palace artisans, and receiving land for their services. In addition were the ra-wi-ja-ja, the lawiaiai, "captives." These were kept in groups and performed what would be termed today "factory work." The tablets, being ephemeral in nature, do not always classify these types, but they are detectable from the naming conventions, or lack of them, and the type of work. Efkleidou uses the term "dependent." In all she tallied 5233 dependents in the tablets.
Perhaps most relevant to the times are named groups of women, the group name being an ethnic or a craft name. One such group called just "captives" gives a hint to their class of servitude. The ethnic names show that western Anatolia and the islands off it are being favored. Other groups implicitly from the region are named after the type of work they do, especially the textile workers: finishers, spinners, and a group of flax handlers (ri-ne-ja, or lineiai) composed of 82 women with 61 female children and 56 male. Other groups are male bronzesmiths, house and ship builders. The majority of the females were textile workers, a development foreshadowed in the initial scene of the "Iliad", in which the priest, Chryses, entreats Agamemnon to ransom his daughter, Chryseis, only to be refused with the statement that she would be frequenting his bed and working his loom far away in Argos.
In the tablets, the coast of Anatolia is under attack by Mycenaean centers of the Achaeans, especially the center at Pylos (pu-ro). Since the tablets, which were manufactured ad hoc of fresh clay and immediately engraved with writing, only survived by being baked in the fires that destroyed the palaces, their dates depend on the those dates of destruction. The Pylos tablets record the dispatch of a fleet of "rowers" and soldiers under a "commander" to the Gulf of Corinth, and then the palace is gone, burned in its own oil. If pu-ro is the Homeric Pylos, then the date is after the Trojan War, as the legendary Pylos survived it intact. None of the names of the important men at these centers are anything like the names of the Homeric legends. Presumably, the latter had all died in their time and had been replaced by men unknown to legend, but profiting from the fall of Troy. A second possibility would be that the legends are totally imaginary, contrary to the hopes and expectations of the first archaeologists.
This time between the Trojan War and the burning of the palaces fits into another historical period, the time of the Sea Peoples. These were ethnicities from Achaea, Dardania, Etruria, Sicilia, Sardinia, and elsewhere, who, abandoning the norms of civilization, took to a life of marauding and piracy, disrupting trade, transportation, peace, and security. They placed colonies as bases. The eastern Mediterranean became a wilderness. Cities withdrew from the coast. Isolation set in.
Surprisingly, Trojan names began turning up in the archives of ancient Pylos, capital of the legendary Nestor. They were of persons kept in a servile capacity, from which the universal conclusion was that they were descended from slaves taken at Troy. Etymological analysis by linguists revealed that they were not native Greek names, suggesting that the Trojans were not Greek.
A theory began to gain influence based on the Aeneid that the Trojans were Etruscan. This theory purported to explain how the Etruscans arrived in Italy. During the 20th century, however, Etruscan archaeology investigated thousands of Etruscan sites over most of Italy, except for the Greek regions in south Italy and the Italic regions of central Italy. Moreover, Etruscan inscriptions were found in at least one valley leading to a pass over the Alps. The sites dated as early as the Bronze Age. It was soon clear that the theory of a general Etruscan migration from Troy to most of Italy was the least likely scenario. The Etruscan theory died slowly. Its advocates looked for hidden pockets of Etruscans in the backlands of Anatolia and looked for hope in some shallow genetic studies purporting to relate the inhabitants of Tuscany to the inhabitants of Turkey.
Meanwhile a greater question came to the fore. Throughout the Bronze Age the greatest power in Anatolia was the Hittites, with capital in central Anatolia. Why were there no links to them? How could the coastal states have avoided them? Anatolian studies expanded in the late 20th century. Those states had not avoided them, they were subject to them. Previously unknown scripts were found to be in Anatolian languages. The dominant one on the coast was Luwian. In the Luwian range west of the Hittite capital there was no room for any Etruscans. Whatever he was, Aeneas was not Etruscan, and whatever the ancestry of the imperial family at Rome was, which knew Etruscan and was counted as Tuscan, it derived no authority from ancient Troy.
The 1995 discovery of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy sparked heated debate over the language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen argued that the name of Priam, king of Troy at the time of the Trojan War, is related to the Luwian compound "Priimuua", which means "exceptionally courageous". Starke adds: "The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community," although it is not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or in daily colloquial use.. The tablet was discovered in the lower city, archaeologically out of the way until now, but undoubtedly more populous and frequented than the citadel. It is possible that the major archive site has yet to be discovered at Troy, if any survived.
B.W. Fortson, IV, defines the Greek Dark Ages as "The period from the demise of Mycenaean civilization to the earliest appearance of alphabetic Greek in the eighth century ..." The idea is that in the breakdown of peace and stability suffered by the Mycenaean kingdoms they entered a period of fear, isolation, and economic depression in which their writing system was lost causing a subsequent deficit of written records, interpreted by later historians as "darkness." The view is too simple, however.
While it is true that the palaces were destroyed by fire, it is untrue that they were all burned in the same year or even the same decade by a single wave of Dorian tribes from the region later known as Macedonia. The dates of the destructions differ by as much as a generation. Chadwick asks, "... where were all the Dorians during the Mycenaean period? And why were they content to wait in the wings until the time was right for this intrusion?" His own theory was that the Mycenaeans were incendiary to each other's palaces in a rash of infradynastic conflicts. These would have occupied the entire 11th century BC. There was no sudden influx of all the Dorians in one great invasion, but rather an insistent occupation of the Peloponnesus over a century or more. It has to be counted as Dorian from the 10th century BC on. Most of the former Achaean inhabitants escaped to the now depopulated coast of Anatolia as Ionians and Aeolians. Athens remained firm.
Among the Achaeans of Cyprus, on the edge of the Greek world, writing failed to disappear. They continued to write their own conservative dialect, Arcadocypriot Greek, in a few scripts of Cypriote syllabary, which they had innovated on the model of Linear A and Linear B. They were fairly isolated from their former homeland by the spread of Dorians to Crete, the southern Cyclades, and southern Anatolia. When the concept of a Greek alphabet arrived, they innovated with the Phoenician alphabet to make it fit their language, and the two systems continued side-by-side until Hellenistic times, when Attic became the common dialect. Meanwhile their dialect continued in the hills of Arcadia, but it had no writing system there. This dark age interlude in Greece is not generally interpreted as a return to prehistoric times. It is a historic age with gaps in its history, which is how the archaeologists treat it.
In both Blegen and Korfmann, Homeric Troy ends at the end of Blegen's Troy VIIa, Korfmann's VIi, with the burning of the city, presumably by Achaeans. Legend has the Trojans vanishing away, either escaping, as did Aeneas and his very large band, being slaughtered, as were Priam and his wife, or being carted off into slavery, as were the literary Trojan women. Apparently, no Trojans seem to have been left. Their enemies would have cleared them entirely away, leaving the ruined city vacant and non-dangerous.
The archaeology suggests that the literary implication of a deserted city is probably not true. After a suitable interval of hiding somewhere else in the region, perhaps with the Dardanians, who were not defeated, but appeared as marauders among the sea peoples, or further inland with the Hittites, the Trojan remnants returned to Troy to rebuild Troy VIIb, which, according to Blegen, "... obviously represents a direct survival of the culture that prevailed in Troy VIIa." The initial VIIb period is VIIb1, which Korfmann suggests should be VIj. and regards as "transitional to the Early Iron Age." As yet, however, it is contemporary with LHIIIC (LBA) pottery on the mainland. The reconstruction does not appear to have been opposed by the palaces, such as at Pylos, which were still standing. The return to a simpler pottery causes Korfmann to hypothesize a "humble folk" investment of the ruins.
Troy VIIb2 begins contemporaneously with LHIIIC, but at about 1050 BC the last of IIIC disappears, to be replaced by Sub-Mycenaean pottery, a short-lived Mycenaean-like pottery with geometric motifs, considered transitional to Geometric pottery, the ware characteristic everywhere in the Greek world of the Dark Age. The palaces can be counted as vanished, as the last pottery at Pylos was LH IIIC. Apparently, the city of the "humble Trojans" could not maintain itself, but was overrun or replaced. The latter part of Troy IIIb2 sees the replacement of their pottery with wares, such as "Knobbed Ware," characteristic of the Balkan-Black Sea region. The Luwian seal presents a problem, as it is dated Troy VIIb2. Luwian speakers would not have been as far away as the northern Black Sea. If the seal is from early VIIb2, however, it can represent the last of the Luwian speakers at Troy. A mixed culture was certainly possible. Priam's wife, Hecuba, had been a Phrygian.
Blegen ends his tale of Troy VII with VIIb2 around 1100 BC. The city was burned one last time, an event contemporaneous with the general destruction of the Mycenaean palaces. This would be the ethnical end of the Trojans at Troy by abandonment, but Blegen has a final suggestion. Troy VI was characterized by what Blegen calls "Grey Minyan Ware," now Anatolian Minyan ware. or Anatolian Grey Ware. After the abandonment of the city, the ware appears in the highlands, leading Blegen to conjecture that the Trojans gradually withdrew in that direction.
The more recent excavations turned up additional information. In the lower city was pottery from the early and middle Proto-geometric period, characteristic of the Dark Age. The Trojans may have escaped to the hills, but their burned city was occupied by their incendiary opponents, whoever they were. They brought iron with them, relying on the superior strength of iron weapons for their victory. Korfmann creates a new period for them, Troy VIIb3, 1020-950 BC.
For reasons unknown, the Iron-age people left their settlement about 950 BC, leaving it abandoned. Korfmann calls this interval a hiatus, meaning of residential occupation. A Greek colony arrived there to plant a new city about 750 BC, archaeological Troy VIII. They leveled the top of the mound to construct a temple to Athena, thus identifying themselves as being in the Attic-Ionic culture, as opposed to the Aeolic Greeks (Boeotia) who had previously been settling the north coast of Anatolia. The leveling process destroyed the previous structures at the center of the citadel. As Homeric Troy had been called "sacred Ilium," Korfmann asserts that a temple district may have been maintained there during the apparent abandonment period, but whose is not known.
In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes sacrificed 1,000 cattle at the sanctuary of Athena Ilias while marching through the Hellespontine region towards Greece. Following the Persian defeat in 480–479, Ilion and its territory became part of the continental possessions of Mytilene and remained under Mytilenaean control until the unsuccessful Mytilenean revolt in 428–427. Athens liberated the so-called Actaean cities including Ilion and enrolled these communities in the Delian League. Athenian influence in the Hellespont waned following the oligarchic coup of 411, and in that year the Spartan general Mindaros emulated Xerxes by likewise sacrificing to Athena Ilias. From c. 410–399, Ilion was within the sphere of influence of the local dynasts at Lampsacus (Zenis, his wife Mania, and the usurper Meidias) who administered the region on behalf of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus.
In 399, the Spartan general Dercylidas expelled the Greek garrison at Ilion who were controlling the city on behalf of the Lampsacene dynasts during a campaign which rolled back Persian influence throughout the Troad. Ilion remained outside the control of the Persian satrapal administration at Dascylium until the Peace of Antalcidas in 387–386. In this period of renewed Persian control c. 387–367, a statue of Ariobarzanes, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, was erected in front of the temple of Athena Ilias. In 360–359 the city was briefly controlled by Charidemus of Oreus, a Euboean mercenary leader who occasionally worked for the Athenians. In 359, he was expelled by the Athenian Menelaos son of Arrabaios, whom the Ilians honoured with a grant of proxeny—this is recorded in the earliest civic decree to survive from Ilion. In May 334 Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont and came to the city, where he visited the temple of Athena Ilias, made sacrifices at the tombs of the Homeric heroes, and made the city free and exempt from taxes. According to the so-called 'Last Plans' of Alexander which became known after his death in June 323, he had planned to rebuild the temple of Athena Ilias on a scale that would have surpassed every other temple in the known world.
Antigonus Monophthalmus took control of the Troad in 311 and created the new city of Antigoneia Troas which was a synoikism of the cities of Skepsis, Kebren, Neandreia, Hamaxitos, Larisa, and Kolonai. In c. 311–306 the "koinon "of Athena Ilias was founded from the remaining cities in the Troad and along the Asian coast of the Dardanelles and soon after succeeded in securing a guarantee from Antigonus that he would respect their autonomy and freedom (he had not respected the autonomy of the cities which were synoikized to create Antigoneia). The "koinon "continued to function until at least the 1st century AD and primarily consisted of cities from the Troad, although for a time in the second half of the 3rd century it also included Myrlea and Chalcedon from the eastern Propontis. The governing body of the "koinon "was the "synedrion" on which each city was represented by two delegates. The day-to-day running of the "synedrion", especially in relation to its finances, was left to a college of five "agonothetai", on which no city ever had more than one representative. This system of equal (rather than proportional) representation ensured that no one city could politically dominate the "koinon". The primary purpose of the "koinon "was to organize the annual Panathenaia festival which was held at the sanctuary of Athena Ilias. The festival brought huge numbers of pilgrims to Ilion for the duration of the festival as well as creating an enormous market (the "panegyris") which attracted traders from across the region. In addition, the "koinon "financed new building projects at Ilion, for example a new theatre c. 306 and the expansion of the sanctuary and temple of Athena Ilias in the 3rd century, in order to make the city a suitable venue for such a large festival.
In the period 302–281, Ilion and the Troad were part of the kingdom of Lysimachus, who during this time helped Ilion synoikize several nearby communities, thus expanding the city's population and territory. Lysimachus was defeated at the Battle of Corupedium in February 281 by Seleucus I Nikator, thus handing the Seleucid kingdom control of Asia Minor, and in August or September 281 when Seleucus passed through the Troad on his way to Lysimachia in the nearby Thracian Chersonese Ilion passed a decree in honour of him, indicating the city's new loyalties. In September Seleucus was assassinated at Lysimachia by Ptolemy Keraunos, making his successor, Antiochus I Soter, the new king. In 280 or soon after Ilion passed a long decree lavishly honouring Antiochus in order to cement their relationship with him. During this period Ilion still lacked proper city walls except for the crumbling Troy VI fortifications around the citadel, and in 278 during the Gallic invasion the city was easily sacked. Ilion enjoyed a close relationship with Antiochus for the rest of his reign: for example, in 274 Antiochus granted land to his friend Aristodikides of Assos which for tax purposes was to be attached to the territory of Ilion, and c. 275–269 Ilion passed a decree in honour of Metrodoros of Amphipolis who had successfully treated the king for a wound he received in battle.
A new city called Ilium (from Greek Ilion) was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, became a bishopric in the Roman province Hellespontus (civil Diocese of Asia), but declined gradually in the Byzantine era.
The city was destroyed by Sulla's rival, the Roman general Fimbria, in 85 BC following an eleven-day siege. Later that year when Sulla had defeated Fimbria he bestowed benefactions on Ilion for its loyalty which helped with the city's rebuilding. Ilion reciprocated this act of generosity by instituting a new civic calendar which took 85 BC as its first year. However, the city remained in financial distress for several decades, despite its favoured status with Rome. In the 80s BC, Roman "publicani" illegally levied taxes on the sacred estates of Athena Ilias and the city was required to call on L. Julius Caesar for restitution; while in 80 BC, the city suffered an attack by pirates. In 77 BC the costs of running the annual festival of the "koinon" of Athena Ilias became too pressing for both Ilion and the other members of the "koinon" and L. Julius Caesar was once again required to arbitrate, this time reforming the festival so that it would be less of a financial burden. In 74 BC the Ilians once again demonstrated their loyalty to Rome by siding with the Roman general Lucullus against Mithridates VI. Following the final defeat of Mithridates in 63–62, Pompey rewarded the city's loyalty by becoming the benefactor of Ilion and patron of Athena Ilias. In 48 BC, Julius Caesar likewise bestowed benefactions on the city, recalling the city's loyalty during the Mithridatic Wars, the city's connection with his cousin L. Julius Caesar, and the family's claim that they were ultimately descended from Venus through the Trojan prince Aeneas and therefore shared kinship with the Ilians.
In 20 BC, the Emperor Augustus visited Ilion and stayed in the house of a leading citizen, Melanippides son of Euthydikos. As a result of his visit, he also financed the restoration and rebuilding of the sanctuary of Athena Ilias, the bouleuterion (council house) and the theatre. Soon after work on the theatre was completed in 12–11 BC, Melanippides dedicated a statue Augustus in the theatre to record this benefaction.
No later than the 4th century, it was a suffragan of the provincial capital's Metropolitan Archdiocese of Cyzicus, in the sway of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Several bishops are historically documented:
The diocese was nominally restored no later than 1926 as Latin Titular bishopric of Ilium (Latin) / Ilio (Curiate Italian) / Ilien(sis) (Latin adjective).
It has been vacant for decades, having had the following incumbents, so far of the fitting Episcopal (lowest) rank:
A small minority of contemporary writers argue that Homeric Troy was not at the Hisarlik site, but elsewhere in Anatolia or outside it—e.g. in England, Pergamum, Scandinavia, or Herzegovina. These proposals have not been accepted by mainstream scholarship.
Such was the fame of the Epic Cycle in Roman and Medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various founding myths of national origins. The most influential, Virgil's "Aeneid", traces the journeys of the Trojan prince Aeneas, supposed ancestor of the founders of Rome and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In a later era, the heroes of Troy, both those noted in Homer and those invented for the purpose, often continued to appear in the origin stories of the nations of Early Medieval Europe. The "Roman de Troie" was common cultural ground for European dynasties, as a Trojan pedigree was both gloriously ancient and established an equality with the ruling class of Rome. A Trojan pedigree could justify the occupation of parts of Rome's former territories.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes that the Trojans were Greek people who were originally from the Peloponnese.
On that basis, the Franks filled the lacunae of their legendary origins with Trojan and pseudo-Trojan names: in Fredegar's 7th-century chronicle of Frankish history, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks. The Trojan origin of France was such an established article of faith that in 1714, the learned Nicolas Fréret was Bastilled for showing through historical criticism that the Franks had been Germanic, a sore point counter to Valois and Bourbon propaganda.
In similar manner, Geoffrey of Monmouth reworked earlier material such as the "Historia Brittonum" to trace the legendary kings of the Britons from a supposed descendant of Aeneas called Brutus.
Likewise, Snorri Sturluson, in the prologue to his Icelandic "Prose Edda", traced the genealogy of the ancestral figures in Norse mythology to characters appearing at Troy in Homer's epic, notably making Thor to be the son of Memnon. Sturluson referred to these figures as having made a journey across Europe towards Scandinavia, setting up kingdoms as they went. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30059 |
Tübingen
Tübingen (, , Swabian: "Dibenga") is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three of the 90,000 people living in Tübingen is a student. As of the 2018/2019 winter semester, 27,665 students attend the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. The city has the lowest median age in Germany, in part due to its status as a university town; as of December 31, 2015, the average age of a citizen of Tübingen is 39.1 years.
Immediately north of the city lies the Schönbuch, a densely wooded nature park. The Swabian Alb mountains rise about (beeline Tübingen City to Roßberg - 869 m) to the southeast of Tübingen.
The Ammer and Steinlach rivers are tributaries of the Neckar river, which flows in an easterly direction through the city, just south of the medieval old town. Large parts of the city are hilly, with the Schlossberg and the Österberg in the city centre and the Schnarrenberg and Herrlesberg, among others, rising immediately adjacent to the inner city.
The highest point is at about above sea level near Bebenhausen in the Schönbuch forest, while the lowest point is in the town's eastern Neckar valley. The geographical centre of the state of Baden-Württemberg is in a small forest called Elysium, near the Botanical Gardens of the city's university.
Tübingen is the capital of an eponymous district and an eponymous administrative region ("Regierungsbezirk"), before 1973 called "Südwürttemberg-Hohenzollern".
Tübingen is, with nearby Reutlingen (about east), one of the two centre cities of the Neckar-Alb region.
Administratively, it is not part of the Stuttgart Region, bordering it to the north and west (Esslingen district in the north and Böblingen district in the west). However, the city and northern parts of its district can be regarded as belonging to that region in a wider regional and cultural context.
The area was probably first settled by ancient humans in the 12th millennium BC. The Romans left some traces here in AD 85, when they built a limes frontier wall at the Neckar River. Tübingen dates from the 6th or 7th century, when the region was populated by the Alamanni people. Some historians argue that the Battle of Solicinium was fought at Spitzberg, a mountain in Tübingen, in AD 367, although there is no evidence for this.
Tübingen first appears in official records in 1191. The local castle, "Hohentübingen", has records going back to 1078, when it was besieged by Henry IV, king of Germany. Its name was transcribed in Medieval Latin as "Tuingia" and "Twingia".
From 1146, Count Hugo V (1125–52) was promoted to count palatine as Hugo I. Tübingen was established as the capital of a County Palatine of Tübingen. By 1231, Tübingen was a "civitas," indicating recognition by the Crown of civil liberties and a court system.
In 1262, an Augustinian monastery was established by Pope Alexander IV in Tübingen; in 1272, a Franciscan monastery was founded. In 1300, a Latin school (today's Uhland-Gymnasium) was founded. During the Protestant Reformation, which Duke Ulrich of Würtemmberg converted to, he disestablished the Franciscan monastery in 1535.
In 1342, the county palatine was sold to Ulrich III, Count of Württemberg and incorporated into the County of Württemberg.
Between 1470 and 1483, St. George's Collegiate Church was built. The collegiate church offices provided the opportunity for what soon afterwards became the most significant event in Tübingen's history: the founding of the Eberhard Karls University by Duke Eberhard im Bart of Württemberg in 1477, thus making it one of the oldest universities in Central Europe. It became soon renowned as one of the most influential places of learning in the Holy Roman Empire, especially for theology (a Protestant faculty, Tübinger Stift, was established in 1535 in the former Augustinian monastery). Today, the university is still the biggest source of income for the residents of the city and one of the biggest universities in Germany with more than 26,000 students.
Between 1622 and 1625, the Catholic League occupied Lutheran Württemberg in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In the summer of 1631, the city was raided. In 1635/36 the city was hit by the Plague. In 1638, Swedish troops conquered Tübingen. Towards the end of the war, French troops occupied the city from 1647 until 1649.
In 1789, parts of the old town burned down, but were later rebuilt in the original style. In 1798 the "Allgemeine Zeitung", a leading newspaper in early 19th-century Germany, was founded in Tübingen by Johann Friedrich Cotta. From 1807 until 1843, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin lived in Tübingen in a tower overlooking the Neckar.
In the Nazi era, the Tübingen Synagogue was burned in the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. The Second World War left the city largely unscathed, mainly because of the peace initiative of a local doctor, Theodor Dobler. It was occupied by the French army and became part of the French occupational zone. From 1946 to 1952, Tübingen was the capital of the newly formed state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern (as ), before the state of Baden-Württemberg was created by merging Baden, Württemberg-Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern. The French troops had a garrison stationed in the south of the city until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
In the 1960s, Tübingen was one of the centres of the German student movement and the Protests of 1968 and has ever since shaped left and green political views. Some radicalized Tübingen students supported the leftist Rote Armee Fraktion terrorist group, with active member Gudrun Ensslin, a local and a Tübingen student from 1960 to 1963, joining the group in 1968.
Although noticing such things today is largely impossible, as recently as the 1950s, Tübingen was a very socioeconomically divided city, with poor local farmers and tradesmen living along the "Stadtgraben" (City Canal) and students and academics residing around the "Alte Aula" and the "Burse", the old university buildings. There, hanging on the "Cottahaus", a sign commemorates Goethe's stay of a few weeks while visiting his publisher. The German tendency to memorialize every minor presence of its historical greats (comparable to the statement "Washington slept here" in the United States) is parodied on the building next door. This simple building, once a dormitory, features a plain sign with the words ""Hier kotzte Goethe"" (lit.: "Goethe puked here").
In the second half of the 20th century, Tübingen's administrative area was extended beyond what is now called the "core town" to include several outlying small towns and villages. Most notable among these is Bebenhausen, a village clustered around a castle and Bebenhausen Abbey, a Cistercian cloister about north of Tübingen.
, the city had 89,000 inhabitants. Life in the city is dominated by its roughly 25,800 students. Tübingen is best described as a mixture of old and distinguished academic flair, including liberal and green politics on one hand and traditional German-style student fraternities on the other, with rural-agricultural environs and shaped by typical Lutheran-Pietist characteristics, such as austerity and a Protestant work ethic, and traditional Swabian elements, such as frugality, order, and tidiness. The city is home to many picturesque buildings from previous centuries and lies on the River Neckar.
, the German weekly magazine "Focus" published a national survey according to which Tübingen had the highest quality of life of all cities in Germany. Factors taken into consideration included the infrastructure, the integration of bicycle lanes into the road system, a bus system connecting surrounding hills and valleys, late-night services, areas of the town that can be reached on foot, the pedestrianised old town, and other amenities and cultural events offered by the university. Tübingen is the city with the youngest average population in Germany.
In central Tübingen, the Neckar divides briefly into two streams, forming the elongated "Neckarinsel" (Neckar Island), famous for its "Platanenallee" with high plane trees, some of which are more than 200 years old. Pedestrians can reach the island via stairs on the narrow ends leading down from a bridge spanning the Neckar. During the summer, the "Neckarinsel" is occasionally the venue for concerts, plays, and literary readings. The row of historical houses across one side of the elongated "Neckarinsel" is called the "Neckarfront" and includes the house with adjoining tower where poet Friedrich Hölderlin stayed for the last 36 years of his life, as he struggled with mental instability.
Tübingen's "Altstadt" (old town) survived the Second World War due to the city's lack of heavy industry. The result is a growing domestic tourism business. as visitors come to wander through one of the few completely intact historic "Altstädte" in Germany. The highlights of Tübingen include its crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow-stair alleyways picking their way through the hilly terrain, streets lined with canals, and well-maintained traditional half-timbered houses.
Old town landmarks include the "Rathaus" (City Hall) on "Marktplatz" (Market Square) and the castle, "Schloß Hohentübingen", now part of the University of Tübingen. The central landmark is the "Stiftskirche" (Collegiate Church). Along with the rest of the city, the Stiftskirche was one of the first to convert to Martin Luther's protestant church. As such, it maintains (and carefully defends) several "Roman Catholic" features, such as patron saints. Below the "Rathaus" is a quiet, residential street called the "Judengasse", the former Jewish neighborhood of Tübingen until the town's Jews were expelled in 1477. On the street corner is a plaque commemorating the fate of Tübingen's Jews.
The centre of Tübingen is the site of weekly and seasonal events, including regular market days on the "Holzmarkt" by the Stiftskirche and the "Marktplatz" by the Rathaus, an outdoor cinema in winter and summer, festive autumn and Christmas markets and Europe's largest Afro-Brazilian festival.
Students and tourists also come to the Neckar River in the summer to visit beer gardens or go boating in "Stocherkähne", the Tübingen equivalent of Oxford and Cambridge punts, only slimmer. A "Stocherkahn" carries up to 20 people. On the second Thursday of June, all "Stocherkahn" punts take part in a major race, the "Stocherkahnrennen".
Bebenhausen Abbey lies in the village of Bebenhausen, a district of Tübingen. A subdivision of the pilgrimage route known as the Way of St. James starts here and runs through Tübingen.
Tübingen has a notable arts culture as well as nightlife. In addition to the full roster of official and unofficial university events that range from presentations by the university's official poet in residence to parties hosted by the student associations of each faculty, the town can boast of several choirs, theatre companies and nightclubs. Also, Tübingen's "Kunsthalle" (art exhibition hall), on the "Wanne", houses two or three exhibits of international note each year.
There are several festivals and open air markets on a regular basis:
Tigers Tübingen are the city's only professional sports team, playing basketball.
Notable Tübingen residents and scholars included the poets Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike and Ludwig Uhland, the neurologist Alois Alzheimer from whom Alzheimer's disease takes its name, and Friedrich Miescher who was the first to discover nucleic acids. Wilhelm Schickard who was the main precursor to the mechanical calculator, was born in nearby Herrenberg. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, David Friedrich Strauss, and Johannes Kepler studied in Tübingen at the Tübinger Stift, and Joseph Alois Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) held a chair in dogmatic theology at the University. Hermann Hesse worked in Tübingen as a bookseller trainee from 1895 to 1899.
Tübingen also is the home of scholars of international renown such as the Idealist philosopher Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, the theologian Hans Küng, textual criticism pioneer F.C. Baur, jurisprudent Gerhard Anschütz, famous author Walter Jens, and developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Slovene refugee Protestant preacher Primož Trubar, who published the first two books in the Slovene language and is regarded as the key consolidator of the Slovene identity, lived in Tübingen and its suburb Derendingen and is buried there. Martin Luther's companion Philipp Melanchthon, called "Praeceptor Germaniae" (Teacher of Germany), studied here from 1512 to 1514.
Former President of Germany Horst Köhler is a Tübingen alumnus as well, as was former Chancellor of Germany Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Nobel laureate and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer published his PhD thesis in Tübingen in 1899.
Tübingen is also the hometown of former track and field athlete Dieter Baumann, winner of the 5000m at the 1992 Summer Olympics. In 1990, the award-winning Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer accepted a teaching position in Tübingen and has resided there since then.
American soccer coach Sigi Schmid, who has won Major League Soccer championships with the Los Angeles Galaxy and Columbus Crew and was an assistant coach for the U.S. at the 1994 FIFA World Cup, was born in Tübingen and moved to Torrance, California as a child.
Sung Yuri, a South Korean top actress and the youngest member of the K-Pop girl group Fin.K.L., was born in Tübingen in 1981. Her father, Sung Chong Hyon, received his doctorate degree in theology from Tübingen University and is currently a professor of New Testament at the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea.
Greek singer Despina Vandi was born in Tübingen, although her family moved back to Greece when Vandi was six years old.
Tübingen is divided into 22 districts, a town core of twelve districts (population of about 51,000) and ten outer districts (suburbs) (population of about 31,000):
Core city districts:
Outer districts:
Since World War II, Tübingen's population has almost doubled from about 45,000 to the current 88,000, also due to the incorporation of formerly independent villages into the city in the 1970s.
Currently, Lord Mayor Boris Palmer (Green Party) has set the ambitious goal of increasing the population of Tübingen to reach 100,000 within the next years. To achieve this, the city is closing gaps between buildings within the city proper by allowing new houses there; this is also to counter the tendency of urban sprawl and land consumption that has been endangering the preservation of rural landscapes of Southern Germany.
¹ census result
Tübingen is twinned with:
In November 2009 Tübingen's city council voted to enter into talks with the city of Moshi in Tanzania, with the aim of Moshi becoming Tübingen's eleventh twin city.
For their commitment to their international partnership, the Council of Europe awarded the Europe Prize to Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence in 1965. The city's dedication to a European understanding is also reflected in the naming of several streets and squares, including the large "Europaplatz" (Europe Square) outside the railway station.
By plane: Tübingen is about from the Baden-Württemberg state airport ("Landesflughafen Stuttgart", also called Stuttgart Airport).
By automobile: Tübingen is on the "Bundesstraße 27" (a "federal road") that crosses through Baden-Württemberg, connecting the town with Würzburg, Heilbronn, Stuttgart and the "Landesflughafen" (Stuttgart Airport) to the north and Rottweil and Donaueschingen to the south.
By rail: Tübingen Hauptbahnhof is on the regional train line Neckar-Alb Railway-Bahn ("Neckar-Alb-Bahn") from Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof via Esslingen and Reutlingen to Tübingen. The average time of travel to Stuttgart is 1:01 hrs., with some trains taking only 45 mins. Other regional lines are the "Hohenzollerische Landesbahn", connecting the town with Hechingen and Sigmaringen (so-called Zollernalb Railway), "Zollernalbbahn" and connections to Herrenberg (Ammer Valley Railway, "Ammertalbahn") and Horb (Upper Neckar Railway, "Obere Neckarbahn"). Since 2009, there is also a daily direct Intercity link to Mannheim, Cologne and Düsseldorf as well as to Berlin.
Local public transport: The town, due to its high student population, features an extensive public bus network with more than 20 lines connecting the city districts and places outside of Tübingen such as Ammerbuch, Gomaringen and Nagold. There are also several night bus lines in the early hours every day. A direct bus is available to Stuttgart Airport (via Leinfelden-Echterdingen) as well as to Böblingen and Reutlingen.
The Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen dates from 1477, making it one of the oldest in Germany. The city is also host to several research institutes including the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, The Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the MPG (and formerly the Max Planck Institute for Biology) and the Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research. The university also maintains an excellent botanical garden, the Botanischer Garten der Universität Tübingen.
More than 10,000 children and young adults in Tübingen regularly attend school. There are 30 schools in the town, some of which consist of more than one type of school. Of these, 17 are primary schools while the others are for secondary education: four schools are of the lowest rank, "Hauptschule", three of the middle rank, "Realschule", and six are "Gymnasien" (grammar schools). There also are four vocational schools ("Berufsschule") and three special needs schools.
Primary schools
Hauptschulen
Realschulen
Gymnasien
Vocational schools ("Berufsschulen") | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30061 |
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) (Latin for "Logical Philosophical Treatise" or "Treatise on Logic and Philosophy") is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized by philosophers as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century. G. E. Moore originally suggested the work's Latin title as homage to the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" by Baruch Spinoza.
Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the "Tractatus" while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was first published in German in 1921 as "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung". The "Tractatus" was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann. Bertrand Russell's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" is presented as a working out of ideas that he had learned from Wittgenstein.
The "Tractatus" employs an austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such, but rather consists of declarative statements, or passages, that are meant to be self-evident. The statements are hierarchically numbered, with seven basic propositions at the primary level (numbered 1–7), with each sub-level being a comment on or elaboration of the statement at the next higher level (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13). In all, the Tractatus comprises 526 numbered statements.
Wittgenstein's later works, notably the posthumously published "Philosophical Investigations", criticised many of his earlier ideas in the "Tractatus".
There are seven main propositions in the text. These are:
The first chapter is very brief:
This along with the beginning of two can be taken to be the relevant parts of Wittgenstein's metaphysical view that he will use to support his picture theory of language.
These sections concern Wittgenstein's view that the sensible, changing world we perceive does not consist of substance but of facts. Proposition two begins with a discussion of objects, form and substance.
This epistemic notion is further clarified by a discussion of objects or things as metaphysical substances.
His use of the word "composite" in 2.021 can be taken to mean a combination of form and matter, in the Platonic sense.
The notion of a static unchanging Form and its identity with Substance represents the metaphysical view that has come to be held as an assumption by the vast majority of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato and Aristotle, as it was something they agreed on. is called a form or a substance is not generated." (Z.8 1033b13)
The opposing view states that unalterable Form does not exist, or at least if there is such a thing, it contains an ever changing, relative substance in a constant state of flux. Although this view was held by Greeks like Heraclitus, it has existed only on the fringe of the Western tradition since then. It is commonly known now only in "Eastern" metaphysical views where the primary concept of substance is Qi, or something similar, which persists through and beyond any given Form. The former view is shown to be held by Wittgenstein in what follows:
Although Wittgenstein largely disregarded Aristotle (Ray Monk's biography suggests that he never read Aristotle at all) it seems that they shared some anti-Platonist views on the universal/particular issue regarding primary substances. He attacks universals explicitly in his Blue Book.
"The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful."
And Aristotle agrees: "The universal cannot be a substance in the manner in which an essence is ..." (Z.13 1038b17) as he begins to draw the line and drift away from the concepts of universal Forms held by his teacher Plato.
The concept of Essence, taken alone is a potentiality, and its combination with matter is its actuality. "First, the substance of a thing is peculiar to it and does not belong to any other thing" (Z.13 1038b10), i.e. not universal and we know this is essence. This concept of form/substance/essence, which we've now collapsed into one, being presented as potential is also, apparently, held by Wittgenstein:
Here ends what Wittgenstein deems to be the relevant points of his metaphysical view and he begins in 2.1 to use said view to support his Picture Theory of Language.
"The Tractatus's notion of substance is the modal analogue of Kant's temporal notion. Whereas for Kant, substance is that which 'persists' (i.e., exists at all times), for Wittgenstein it is that which, figuratively speaking, 'persists' through a 'space' of possible worlds."
Whether the Aristotelian notions of substance came to Wittgenstein via Immanuel Kant, or via Bertrand Russell, or even whether Wittgenstein arrived at his notions intuitively, one cannot but see them.
The further thesis of 2. and 3. and their subsidiary propositions is Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of language. This can be summed up as follows:
The 4s are significant as they contain some of Wittgenstein's most explicit statements concerning the nature of philosophy and the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. It is here, for instance, that he first distinguishes between material and grammatical propositions, noting:
A philosophical treatise attempts to "say" something where nothing can properly be said. It is predicated upon the idea that philosophy should be pursued in a way analogous to the natural sciences; that philosophers are looking to construct true theories. This sense of philosophy does not coincide with Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy.
Wittgenstein is to be credited with the invention or at least the popularization of truth tables (4.31) and truth conditions (4.431) which now constitute the standard semantic analysis of first-order sentential logic. The philosophical significance of such a method for Wittgenstein was that it alleviated a confusion, namely the idea that logical inferences are justified by rules. If an argument form is valid, the conjunction of the premises will be logically equivalent to the conclusion and this can be clearly seen in a truth table; it is "displayed". The concept of tautology is thus central to Wittgenstein's Tractarian account of logical consequence, which is strictly deductive.
At the beginning of Proposition 6, Wittgenstein postulates the essential form of all sentences. He uses the notation formula_1, where
Proposition 6 says that any logical sentence can be derived from a series of NOR operations on the totality of atomic propositions. Wittgenstein drew from Henry M. Sheffer's logical theorem making that statement in the context of the propositional calculus. Wittgenstein's N-operator is a broader infinitary analogue of the Sheffer stroke, which applied to a set of propositions produces a proposition that is equivalent to the denial of every member of that set. Wittgenstein shows that this operator can cope with the whole of predicate logic with identity, defining the quantifiers at 5.52, and showing how identity would then be handled at 5.53-5.532.
The subsidiaries of 6. contain more philosophical reflections on logic, connecting to ideas of knowledge, thought, and the "a priori" and transcendental. The final passages argue that logic and mathematics express only tautologies and are transcendental, i.e. they lie outside of the metaphysical subject's world. In turn, a logically "ideal" language cannot supply meaning, it can only reflect the world, and so, sentences in a logical language cannot remain meaningful if they are not merely reflections of the facts.
From Propositions 6.4-6.54, the Tractatus shifts its focus from primarily logical considerations to what may be considered more traditionally philosophical foci (God, ethics, meta-ethics, death, the will) and, less traditionally along with these, the mystical. The philosophy of language presented in the Tractatus attempts to demonstrate just what the limits of language are- to delineate precisely what can and cannot be sensically said. Among the sensibly sayable for Wittgenstein are the propositions of natural science, and to the nonsensical, or unsayable, those subjects associated with philosophy traditionally- ethics and metaphysics, for instance. Curiously, on this score, the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, proposition 6.54, states that once one understands the propositions of the Tractatus, he will recognize that they are senseless, and that they must be thrown away. Proposition 6.54, then, presents a difficult interpretative problem. If the so-called ‘picture theory’ of meaning is correct, and it is impossible to represent logical form, then the theory, by trying to say something about how language and the world must be for there to be meaning, is self-undermining. This is to say that the ‘picture theory’ of meaning itself requires that something be said about the logical form sentences must share with reality for meaning to be possible. This requires doing precisely what the ‘picture theory’ of meaning precludes. It would appear, then, that the metaphysics and the philosophy of language endorsed by the Tractatus give rise to a paradox: for the Tractatus to be true, it will necessarily have to be nonsense by self-application; but for this self-application to render the propositions of the Tractatus nonsense (in the Tractarian sense), then the Tractatus must be true.
There are three primarily dialectical approaches to solving this paradox the traditionalist, or Ineffable-Truths View; 2) the resolute, ‘new Wittgenstein’, or Not-All-Nonsense View; 3) the No-Truths-At-All View. The traditionalist approach to resolving this paradox is to hold that Wittgenstein accepted that philosophical statements could not be made, but that nevertheless, by appealing to the distinction between saying and showing, that these truths can be communicated by showing. On the resolute reading, some of the propositions of the Tractatus are withheld from self-application, they are not themselves nonsense, but point out the nonsensical nature of the Tractatus. This view often appeals to the so-called ‘frame’ of the Tractatus, comprising the preface and propositions 6.54. The No-Truths-At-All View states that Wittgenstein held the propositions of the Tractatus to be ambiguously both true and nonsensical, at once. While the propositions could not be, by self-application of the attendant philosophy of the Tractatus, true (or even sensical), it was only the philosophy of the Tractatus itself that could render them so. This is presumably what made Wittgenstein compelled to accept the philosophy of the Tractatus as specially having solved the problems of philosophy. It is the philosophy of the Tractatus, alone, that can solve the problems. Indeed, the philosophy of the Tractatus is for Wittgenstein, on this view, problematic only when applied to itself.
At the end of the text Wittgenstein uses an analogy from Arthur Schopenhauer, and compares the book to a ladder that must be thrown away after one has climbed it.
As the last line in the book, proposition 7 has no supplementary propositions. It ends the book with the proposition "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ("„Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."")
A prominent view set out in the "Tractatus" is the picture theory, sometimes called the picture theory of language. The picture theory is a proposed explanation of the capacity of language and thought to represent the world. Although something need not be a proposition to represent something in the world, Wittgenstein was largely concerned with the way propositions function as representations.
According to the theory, propositions can "picture" the world as being a certain way, and thus accurately represent it either truly or falsely. If someone thinks the proposition, "There is a tree in the yard," then that proposition accurately pictures the world if and only if there is a tree in the yard. One aspect of pictures which Wittgenstein finds particularly illuminating in comparison with language is the fact that we can directly see in the picture what situation it depicts without knowing if the situation actually obtains. This allows Wittgenstein to explain how false propositions can have meaning (a problem which Russell struggled with for many years): just as we can see directly from the picture the situation which it depicts without knowing if it in fact obtains, analogously, when we understand a proposition we grasp its truth conditions or its sense, that is, we know what the world must be like if it is true, without knowing if it is in fact true (TLP 4.024, 4.431).
It is believed that Wittgenstein was inspired for this theory by the way that traffic courts in Paris reenact automobile accidents. A toy car is a representation of a real car, a toy truck is a representation of a real truck, and dolls are representations of people. In order to convey to a judge what happened in an automobile accident, someone in the courtroom might place the toy cars in a position like the position the real cars were in, and move them in the ways that the real cars moved. In this way, the elements of the picture (the toy cars) are in spatial relation to one another, and this relation itself pictures the spatial relation between the real cars in the automobile accident.
Pictures have what Wittgenstein calls "Form der Abbildung" or pictorial form, which they share with what they depict. This means that all the logically possible arrangements of the pictorial elements in the picture correspond to the possibilities of arranging the things which they depict in reality. Thus if the model for car A stands to the left of the model for car B, it depicts that the cars in the world stand in the same way relative to each other. This picturing relation, Wittgenstein believed, was our key to understanding the relationship a proposition holds to the world. Although language differs from pictures in lacking direct pictorial mode of representation (e.g., it doesn't use colors and shapes to represent colors and shapes), still Wittgenstein believed that propositions are "logical pictures" of the world by virtue of sharing logical form with the reality which they represent (TLP 2.18-2.2). And that he thought, explains how we can understand a proposition without its meaning having been explained to us (TLP 4.02), we can directly see in the proposition what it represents as we see in the picture the situation which it depicts just by virtue of knowing its method of depiction: propositions "show" their sense (TLP 4.022).
However, Wittgenstein claimed that pictures cannot represent their "own" logical form, they cannot "say" what they have in common with reality but can only "show" it (TLP 4.12-4.121). If representation consist in depicting an arrangement of elements in logical space, then logical space itself can't be depicted since it is itself not an arrangement of "anything"; rather logical form is a feature of an arrangement of objects and thus it can be properly expressed (that is depicted) in language by an analogous arrangement of the relevant signs in sentences (which contain the same possibilities of combination as prescribed by logical syntax), hence logical form can only be shown by presenting the logical relations between different sentences.
Wittgenstein's conception of representation as picturing also allows him to derive two striking claims: that no proposition can be known "a priori" - there are no apriori truths (TLP 3.05), and that there is only "logical" necessity (TLP 6.37). Since all propositions, by virtue of being pictures, have sense independently of anything being the case in reality, we cannot see from the proposition alone whether it is true (as would be the case if it could be known apriori), but we must compare it to reality in order to know that it's true (TLP 4.031 "In the proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment."). And for similar reasons, no proposition is necessarily true except in the limiting case of tautologies, which Wittgenstein say lack sense (TLP 4.461). If a proposition pictures a state of affairs in virtue of being a picture in logical space, then a non-logical or metaphysical "necessary truth" would be a state of affairs which is satisfied by any possible arrangement of objects (since it is true for any possible state of affairs), but this means that the would-be necessary proposition would not depict anything as "being so" but will be true no matter what the world is actually like; but if that's the case, then the proposition cannot say anything about the world or describe any fact in it - it would not be correlated with any particular state of affairs, just like a tautology (TLP 6.37).
Although Wittgenstein did not use the term himself, his metaphysical view throughout the "Tractatus" is commonly referred to as logical atomism. While his logical atomism resembles that of Bertrand Russell, the two views are not strictly the same.
Russell's theory of descriptions is a way of logically analyzing sentences containing definite descriptions without presupposing the existence of an object satisfying the description. According to the theory, a statement like "There is a man to my left" should be analyzed into: "There is some "x" such that "x" is a man and "x" is to my left, and for any "y", if "y" is a man and "y" is to my left, "y" is identical to "x"". If the statement is true, "x" refers to the man to my left.
Whereas Russell believed the names (like "x") in his theory should refer to things we can know directly by virtue of acquaintance, Wittgenstein didn't believe that there are any epistemic constraints on logical analyses: the simple objects are whatever is contained in the elementary propositions which can't be logically analyzed any further.
By "objects", Wittgenstein did not mean physical objects in the world, but the absolute base of logical analysis, that can be combined but not divided (TLP 2.02–2.0201). According to Wittgenstein's logico-atomistic metaphysical system, objects each have a "nature," which is their capacity to combine with other objects. When combined, objects form "states of affairs." A state of affairs that obtains is a "fact." Facts make up the entirety of the world. Facts are logically independent of one another, as are states of affairs. That is, one state of affair's (or fact's) existence does not allow us to infer whether another state of affairs (or fact) exists or does not exist.
Within states of affairs, objects are in particular relations to one another. This is analogous to the spatial relations between toy cars discussed above. The structure of states of affairs comes from the arrangement of their constituent objects (TLP 2.032), and such arrangement is essential to their intelligibility, just as the toy cars must be arranged in a certain way in order to picture the automobile accident.
A fact might be thought of as the obtaining state of affairs that Madison is in Wisconsin, and a possible (but not obtaining) state of affairs might be Madison's being in Utah. These states of affairs are made up of certain arrangements of objects (TLP 2.023). However, Wittgenstein does not specify what objects are. Madison, Wisconsin, and Utah cannot be atomic objects: they are themselves composed of numerous facts. Instead, Wittgenstein believed objects to be the things in the world that would correlate to the smallest parts of a logically analyzed language, such as names like "x". Our language is not sufficiently (i.e., not completely) analyzed for such a correlation, so one cannot "say" what an object is. We can, however, talk about them as "indestructible" and "common to all possible worlds." Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher's job was to discover the structure of language through analysis.
Anthony Kenny provides a useful analogy for understanding Wittgenstein's logical atomism: a slightly modified game of chess. Just like objects in states of affairs, the chess pieces do not alone constitute the game—their arrangements, together with the pieces (objects) themselves, determine the state of affairs.
Through Kenny's chess analogy, we can see the relationship between Wittgenstein's logical atomism and his picture theory of representation. For the sake of this analogy, the chess pieces are objects, they and their positions constitute states of affairs and therefore facts, and the totality of facts is the entire particular game of chess.
We can communicate such a game of chess in the exact way that Wittgenstein says a proposition represents the world. We might say "WR/KR1" to communicate a white rook's being on the square commonly labeled as king's rook 1. Or, to be more thorough, we might make such a report for every piece's position.
The logical form of our reports must be the same logical form of the chess pieces and their arrangement on the board in order to be meaningful. Our communication about the chess game must have as many possibilities for constituents and their arrangement as the game itself. Kenny points out that such logical form need not strictly resemble the chess game. The logical form can be had by the bouncing of a ball (for example, twenty bounces might communicate a white rook's being on the king's rook 1 square). One can bounce a ball as many times as one wishes, which means the ball's bouncing has "logical multiplicity," and can therefore share the logical form of the game. A motionless ball cannot communicate this same information, as it does not have logical multiplicity.
According to traditional reading of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about logic and language led him to believe that some features of language and reality cannot be expressed in senseful language but only "shown" by the form of certain expressions. Thus for example, according to the picture theory, when a proposition is thought or expressed, the proposition represents reality (truly or falsely) by virtue of sharing some features with that reality in common. However, those features themselves is something Wittgenstein claimed we could not "say" anything about, because we cannot describe the relationship that pictures bear to what they depict, but only show it via fact stating propositions (TLP 4.121). Thus we cannot say "that" there is a correspondence between language and reality, but the correspondence itself can only be "shown", since our language is not capable of describing its own logical structure.
However, on the more recent "resolute" interpretation of the Tractatus (see below), the remarks on "showing" were not in fact an attempt by Wittgenstein to gesture at the existence of some ineffable features of language or reality, but rather, as Cora Diamond and James Conant have argued, the distinction was meant to draw a sharp contrast between logic and descriptive discourse. On their reading, Wittgenstein indeed meant that some things are shown when we reflect on the logic of our language, but "what" is shown is not "that" something is the case, as if we could somehow think it (and thus understand what Wittgenstein tries to show us) but for some reason we just couldn't say it. As Diamond and Conant explain:
Similarly, Michael Kremer suggested that Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing could be compared with Gilbert Ryle's famous distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". Just as practical knowledge or skill (such as riding a bike) is not reducible to propositional knowledge according to Ryle, Wittgenstein also thought that the mastery of the logic of our language is a unique practical skill that doesn't involve any sort of propositional "knowing that", but rather is reflected in our ability to operate with senseful sentences and grasping their internal logical relations.
At the time of its publication, Wittgenstein concluded that the "Tractatus" had resolved all philosophical problems. He would later recant this view, leading him to begin work on what would ultimately become the "Philosophical Investigations".
The book was translated into English by C. K. Ogden with help from the teenaged Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey. Ramsey later visited Wittgenstein in Austria. Translation issues make the concepts hard to pinpoint, especially given Wittgenstein's usage of terms and difficulty in translating ideas into words.
The "Tractatus" caught the attention of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle (1921–1933), especially Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick. The group spent many months working through the text out loud, line by line. Schlick eventually convinced Wittgenstein to meet with members of the circle to discuss the "Tractatus" when he returned to Vienna (he was then working as an architect). Although the Vienna Circle's logical positivists appreciated the "Tractatus", they argued that the last few passages, including Proposition 7, are confused. Carnap hailed the book as containing important insights, but encouraged people to ignore the concluding sentences. Wittgenstein responded to Schlick, commenting: "...I cannot imagine that Carnap should have so completely misunderstood the last sentences of the book and hence the fundamental conception of the entire book."
A more recent interpretation comes from The New Wittgenstein family of interpretations under development since 2000. This so-called "resolute reading" is controversial and much debated. The main contention of such readings is that Wittgenstein in the "Tractatus" does not provide a theoretical account of language that relegates ethics and philosophy to a mystical realm of the unsayable. Rather, the book has a therapeutic aim. By working through the propositions of the book the reader comes to realize that language is perfectly suited to all his needs, and that philosophy rests on a confused relation to the logic of our language. The confusion that the "Tractatus" seeks to dispel is not a confused theory, such that a correct theory would be a proper way to clear the confusion, rather the need of any such theory is confused. The method of the "Tractatus" is to make the reader aware of the logic of our language as he is already familiar with it, and the effect of thereby dispelling the need for a theoretical account of the logic of our language spreads to all other areas of philosophy. Thereby the confusion involved in putting forward e.g. ethical and metaphysical theories is cleared in the same "coup".
Wittgenstein would not meet the Vienna Circle proper, but only a few of its members, including Schlick, Carnap, and Waissman. Often, though, he refused to discuss philosophy, and would insist on giving the meetings over to reciting the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore with his chair turned to the wall. He largely broke off formal relations even with these members of the circle after coming to believe Carnap had used some of his ideas without permission.
Alfred Korzybski credits Wittgenstein as an influence in his book, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics".
The "Tractatus" was the theme of a 1992 film by the Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs. The 32-minute production, named "Wittgenstein Tractatus", features citations from the "Tractatus" and other works by Wittgenstein.
In 1989 the Finnish artist M. A. Numminen released a black vinyl album, "The Tractatus Suite", consisting of extracts from the "Tractatus" set to music, on the Forward! label (GN-95). The tracks were [T. 1] "The World is...", [T. 2] "In order to tell", [T. 4] "A thought is...", [T. 5] "A proposition is...", [T. 6] "The general form of a truth-function", and [T. 7] "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann". It was recorded at Finnvox Studios, Helsinki between February and June 1989. The "lyrics" were provided in German, English, Esperanto, French, Finnish and Swedish.
The music was reissued as a CD in 2003, "M.A. Numminen sings Wittgenstein".
The "Tractatus" is the English translation of:
A notable German Edition of the works of Wittgenstein is:
Both English translations of the "Tractatus", as well as the first publication in German from 1921, include an introduction by Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein revised the Ogden translation.
A manuscript version of the "Tractatus", dubbed and published as the "Prototractatus", was discovered in 1965 by Georg Henrik von Wright.
Online English versions
Online German versions
Visualization graphs | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30062 |
TeX
TeX (, see below), stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system (or a "formatting system") which was designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
TeX is popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatting system, in many Unix installations which use both for different purposes. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other macro packages.
TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces). TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.
When the first paper volume of Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" was published in 1968, it was typeset using hot metal typesetting set by a Monotype machine. This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth. When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior.
Disappointed by the galley proofs of the second edition of the second volume, he was motivated to design his own typesetting system. Knuth saw for the first time the output of a high-quality digital typesetting system, and became interested in digital typography. On 13 May 1977, he wrote a memo to himself describing the basic features of TeX.
He planned to finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but as it happened, the language was not "frozen" (ready to use) until 1989, more than ten years later. Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX. When Steele returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that autumn, he rewrote TeX's input/output (I/O) to run under the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system. The first version of TeX, called TeX78, was written in the SAIL programming language to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford's WAITS operating system.
For later versions of TeX, Knuth invented the concept of literate programming, a way of producing compilable source code and cross-linked documentation typeset in TeX from the same original file. The language used is called WEB and produces programs in DEC PDP-10 Pascal.
TeX82, a new version of TeX which is rewritten from scratch, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang. TeX82 also uses fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating-point, to ensure reproducibility of the results across different computer hardware, and includes a real, Turing-complete programming language, following intense lobbying by Guy Steele. In 1989, Donald Knuth released new versions of TeX and Metafont. Despite his desire to keep the program stable, Knuth realised that 128 different characters for the text input were not enough to accommodate foreign languages; the main change in version 3.0 of TeX (also called TeX90) is thus the ability to work with 8-bit inputs, allowing 256 different characters in the text input.
Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.14159265; it was last updated on January 12, 2014. The design was frozen after version 3.0, and no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes. Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features. Likewise, versions of Metafont after 2.0 asymptotically approach (currently at 2.7182818), and a similar change will be applied after Knuth's death.
Since the source code of TeX is essentially in the public domain (see below), other programmers are allowed (and explicitly encouraged) to improve the system, but are required to use another name to distribute the modified TeX, meaning that the source code can still evolve. For example, the Omega project was developed after 1991, primarily to enhance TeX's multilingual typesetting abilities. Knuth created "unofficial" modified versions, such as TeX-XeT, which allows a user to mix texts written in left-to-right and right-to-left writing systems in the same document.
In several technical fields such as computer science, mathematics, engineering and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX. While many publications in other fields, including dictionaries and legal publications, have been produced using TeX, it has not been as successful as in the more technical fields, as TeX was primarily designed to typeset mathematics.
When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs; instead, he designed many hooks inside the program so that it would be possible to write extensions, and released the source code, hoping that the publishers would design versions tailoring to their own needs. While such extensions have been created (including some by Knuth himself), most people have extended TeX only using macros and it has remained a system associated with technical typesetting.
TeX commands commonly start with a backslash and are grouped with curly braces. Almost all of TeX's syntactic properties can be changed on the fly, which makes TeX input hard to parse by anything but TeX itself. TeX is a macro- and token-based language: many commands, including most user-defined ones, are expanded on the fly until only unexpandable tokens remain, which are then executed. Expansion itself is practically free from side effects. Tail recursion of macros takes no memory, and if-then-else constructs are available. This makes TeX a Turing-complete language even at the expansion level. The system can be divided into four levels: in the first, characters are read from the input file and assigned a category code (sometimes called "catcode", for short). Combinations of a backslash (actually, any character of category zero) followed by letters (characters of category 11) or a single other character are replaced by a control-sequence token. In this sense, this stage is like lexical analysis, although it does not form numbers from digits. In the next stage, expandable control sequences (such as conditionals or defined macros) are replaced by their replacement text. The input for the third stage is then a stream of characters (including the ones with special meaning) and unexpandable control sequences (typically assignments and visual commands). Here, the characters get assembled into a paragraph, and TeX's paragraph breaking algorithm works by optimizing breakpoints over the whole paragraph. The fourth stage breaks the vertical list of lines and other material into pages.
The TeX system has precise knowledge of the sizes of all characters and symbols, and using this information, it computes the optimal arrangement of letters per line and lines per page. It then produces a DVI file ("DeVice Independent") containing the final locations of all characters. This dvi file can then be printed directly given an appropriate printer driver, or it can be converted to other formats. Nowadays, pdfTeX is often used, which bypasses DVI generation altogether. The base TeX system understands about 300 commands, called "primitives". These low-level commands are rarely used directly by users, and most functionality is provided by format files (predumped memory images of TeX after large macro collections have been loaded). Knuth's original default format, which adds about 600 commands, is Plain TeX. The most widely used format is LaTeX, originally developed by Leslie Lamport, which incorporates document styles for books, letters, slides, etc., and adds support for referencing and automatic numbering of sections and equations. Another widely used format, AMS-TeX, is produced by the American Mathematical Society and provides many more user-friendly commands, which can be altered by journals to fit with their house style. Most of the features of AMS-TeX can be used in LaTeX by using the "AMS packages" (e.g., codice_1, codice_2) and the "AMS document classes" (e.g., codice_3, codice_4). This is then referred to as AMS-LaTeX. Other formats include ConTeXt, used primarily for desktop publishing and written mostly by Hans Hagen at Pragma.
A sample Hello world program in plain TeX is:
Hello, World
\bye % marks the end of the file; not shown in the final output
This might be in a file "myfile.tex", as ".tex" is a common file extension for plain TeX files. By default, everything that follows a percent sign on a line is a comment, ignored by TeX. Running TeX on this file (for example, by typing tex myfile.tex in a command-line interpreter, or by calling it from a graphical user interface) will create an output file called "myfile.dvi", representing the content of the page in a device independent format (DVI). A DVI file could then either be viewed on screen or converted to a suitable format for any of the various printers for which a device driver existed (printer support was generally not an operating system feature at the time that TeX was created). Knuth has said that there is nothing inherent in TeX that requires DVI as the output format, and later versions of TeX, notably pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, all support output directly to PDF.
TeX provides a different text syntax specifically for mathematical formulas. For example, the quadratic formula (which is the solution of the quadratic equation) appears as:
The formula is printed in a way a person would write by hand, or typeset the equation. In a document, entering "mathematics mode" is done by starting with a $ symbol, then entering a formula in TeX syntax, and closing again with another of the same symbol. Knuth explained in jest that he chose the dollar sign to indicate the beginning and end of mathematical mode in plain TeX because typesetting mathematics was traditionally supposed to be expensive. "Display mathematics" (mathematics presented centered on a new line) is similar but uses $$ instead of a single $ symbol. For example, the above with the quadratic formula in display math:
The TeX software incorporates several aspects that were not available, or were of lower quality, in other typesetting programs at the time when TeX was released. Some of the innovations are based on interesting algorithms, and have led to several theses for Knuth's students. While some of these discoveries have now been incorporated into other typesetting programs, others, such as the rules for mathematical spacing, are still unique.
Since the primary goal of the TeX language is high-quality typesetting for publishers of books, Knuth gave a lot of attention to the spacing rules for mathematical formulae. He took three bodies of work that he considered to be standards of excellence for mathematical typography: the books typeset by Addison-Wesley Publishing's house (the publisher of "The Art of Computer Programming"), in particular the work of Hans Wolf and Joseph Louis Lagrange (thermodynamics innovation, +1856); editions of the mathematical journal "Acta Mathematica" dating from around 1910; and a copy of "Indagationes Mathematicae", a Dutch mathematics journal. Knuth looked closely at these printed papers to sort out and look for a set of rules for spacing. While TeX provides some basic rules and the tools needed to specify proper spacing, the exact parameters depend on the font used to typeset the formula. For example, the spacing for Knuth's Computer Modern fonts has been precisely fine-tuned over the years and is now set; but when other fonts, such as AMS Euler, were used by Knuth for the first time, new spacing parameters had to be defined.
The typesetting of Math in TeX is not without criticism, particularly with respect to technical details of the font metrics, which were designed in an era when significant attention was paid to storage requirements. This resulted in some "hacks" overloading some fields, which in turn required other "hacks". On an aesthetics level, the rendering of radicals has also been criticized. The OpenType math font specification largely borrows from TeX, but has some new features/enhancements.
In comparison with manual typesetting, the problem of justification is easy to solve with a digital system such as TeX, which, provided that good points for line breaking have been defined, can automatically spread the spaces between words to fill in the line. The problem is thus to find the set of breakpoints that will give the most visually pleasing result. Many line breaking algorithms use a "first-fit" approach, where the breakpoints for each line are determined one after the other, and no breakpoint is changed after it has been chosen. Such a system is not able to define a breakpoint depending on the effect that it will have on the following lines. In comparison, the "total-fit" line breaking algorithm used by TeX and developed by Donald Knuth and Michael Plass considers "all" the possible breakpoints in a paragraph, and finds the combination of line breaks that will produce the most globally pleasing arrangement.
Formally, the algorithm defines a value called "badness" associated with each possible line break; the badness is increased if the spaces on the line must stretch or shrink too much to make the line the correct width. Penalties are added if a breakpoint is particularly undesirable: for example, if a word must be hyphenated, if two lines in a row are hyphenated, or if a very loose line is immediately followed by a very tight line. The algorithm will then find the breakpoints that will minimize the sum of squares of the badness (including penalties) of the resulting lines. If the paragraph contains formula_1 possible breakpoints, the number of situations that must be evaluated naively is formula_2. However, by using the method of dynamic programming, the complexity of the algorithm can be brought down to formula_3 (see Big O notation). Further simplifications (for example, not testing extremely unlikely breakpoints such as a hyphenation in the first word of a paragraph, or very overfull lines) lead to an efficient algorithm whose running time is formula_4, where formula_5 is the width of a line. A similar algorithm is used to determine the best way to break paragraphs across two pages, in order to avoid widows or orphans (lines that appear alone on a page while the rest of the paragraph is on the following or preceding page). However, in general, a thesis by Michael Plass shows how the page breaking problem can be NP-complete because of the added complication of placing figures. TeX's line breaking algorithm has been adopted by several other programs, such as Adobe InDesign (a desktop publishing application) and the GNU fmt Unix command line utility.
If no suitable line break can be found for a line, the system will try to hyphenate a word. The original version of TeX used a hyphenation algorithm based on a set of rules for the removal of prefixes and suffixes of words, and for deciding if it should insert a break between the two consonants in a pattern of the form vowel–consonant–consonant–vowel (which is possible most of the time). TeX82 introduced a new hyphenation algorithm, designed by Frank Liang in 1983, to assign priorities to breakpoints in letter groups. A list of hyphenation patterns is first generated automatically from a corpus of hyphenated words (a list of 50,000 words). If TeX must find the acceptable hyphenation positions in the word "encyclopedia", for example, it will consider all the subwords of the extended word ".encyclopedia.", where "." is a special marker to indicate the beginning or end of the word. The list of subwords includes all the subwords of length 1 (".", "e", "n", "c", "y", etc.), of length 2 (".e", "en", "nc", etc.), etc., up to the subword of length 14, which is the word itself, including the markers. TeX will then look into its list of hyphenation patterns, and find subwords for which it has calculated the desirability of hyphenation at each position. In the case of our word, 11 such patterns can be matched, namely 1c4l4, 1cy, 1d4i3a, 4edi, e3dia, 2i1a, ope5d, 2p2ed, 3pedi, pedia4, y1c. For each position in the word, TeX will calculate the "maximum value" obtained among all matching patterns, yielding en1cy1c4l4o3p4e5d4i3a4. Finally, the acceptable positions are those indicated by an odd number, yielding the acceptable hyphenations "en-cy-clo-pe-di-a". This system based on subwords allows the definition of very general patterns (such as 2i1a), with low indicative numbers (either odd or even), which can then be superseded by more specific patterns (such as 1d4i3a) if necessary. These patterns find about 90% of the hyphens in the original dictionary; more importantly, they do not insert any spurious hyphen. In addition, a list of exceptions (words for which the patterns do not predict the correct hyphenation) are included with the Plain TeX format; additional ones can be specified by the user.
Metafont, not strictly part of TeX, is a font description system which allows the designer to describe characters algorithmically. It uses Bézier curves in a fairly standard way to generate the actual characters to be displayed, but Knuth devotes substantial attention to the rasterizing problem on bitmapped displays. Another thesis, by John Hobby, further explores this problem of digitizing "brush trajectories". This term derives from the fact that Metafont describes characters as having been drawn by abstract brushes (and erasers). It is commonly believed that TeX is based on bitmap fonts but, in fact, these programs "know" nothing about the fonts that they are using other than their dimensions. It is the responsibility of the device driver to appropriately handle fonts of other types, including PostScript Type 1 and TrueType. Computer Modern (commonly known as "the TeX font") is freely available in Type 1 format, as are the AMS math fonts. Users of TeX systems that output directly to PDF, such as pdfTeX, XeTeX, or LuaTeX, generally never use Metafont output at all.
TeX documents are written and programmed using an unusual macro language. Broadly speaking, the running of this macro language involves expansion and execution stages which do not interact directly. Expansion includes both literal expansion of macro definitions as well as conditional branching, and execution involves such tasks as setting variables/registers and the actual typesetting process of adding glyphs to boxes.
The definition of a macro not only includes a list of commands but also the syntax of the call. It differs with most widely used lexical preprocessors like M4, in that the body of a macro gets tokenized at definition time.
The TeX macro language has been used to write larger document production systems, most notably including LaTeX and ConTeXt.
The original source code for the current TeX software is written in WEB, a mixture of documentation written in TeX and a Pascal subset in order to ensure portability. For example, TeX does all of its dynamic allocation itself from fixed-size arrays and uses only fixed-point arithmetic for its internal calculations. As a result, TeX has been ported to almost all operating systems, usually by using the web2c program to convert the source code into C instead of directly compiling the Pascal code. Knuth has kept a very detailed log of all the bugs he has corrected and changes he has made in the program since 1982; , the list contains 427 entries, not including the version modification that should be done after his death as the final change in TeX. Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in TeX. The award per bug started at US$2.56 (one "hexadecimal dollar") and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. Knuth has lost relatively little money as there have been very few bugs claimed. In addition, recipients have been known to frame their check as proof that they found a bug in TeX rather than cashing it.
Due to scammers finding scanned copies of his checks on the internet and using them to try to drain his bank account, Knuth no longer sends out real checks, but those who submit bug reports can get credit at The Bank of San Serriffe instead.
TeX is usually provided in the form of an easy-to-install bundle of TeX itself along with Metafont and all the necessary fonts, documents formats, and utilities needed to use the typesetting system. On UNIX-compatible systems, including Linux and Apple macOS, TeX is distributed as part of the larger TeX Live distribution. (Prior to TeX Live, the teTeX distribution was the de facto standard on UNIX-compatible systems.) On Microsoft Windows, there is the MiKTeX distribution (enhanced by proTeXt) and the Microsoft Windows version of TeX Live.
Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably jadeTeX, which uses TeX as a backend for printing from James Clark's DSSSL Engine, the Arbortext publishing system, and Texinfo, the GNU documentation processing system. TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.
Numerous extensions and companion programs for TeX exist, among them BibTeX for bibliographies (distributed with LaTeX), pdfTeX, a TeX-compatible engine which bypasses DVI and produces output in PDF, XeTeX, a TeX-compatible engine that supports Unicode and OpenType, and LuaTeX, a Unicode-aware extension to TeX that includes a Lua runtime with extensive hooks into the underlying TeX routines and algorithms. Most TeX extensions are available for free from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
There are a variety of :
Donald Knuth has indicated several times that the source code of TeX has been placed into the "public domain", and he strongly encourages modifications or experimentations with this source code. In particular, since Knuth highly values the reproducibility of the output of all versions of TeX, any changed version must not be called TeX, or anything confusingly similar. To enforce this rule, any implementation of the system must pass a test suite called the TRIP test before being allowed to be called TeX. The question of license is somewhat confused by the statements included at the beginning of the TeX source code, which indicate that "all rights are reserved. Copying of this file is authorized only if ... you make absolutely no changes to your copy". This restriction should be interpreted as a prohibition to change the source code "as long as the file is called tex.web". This interpretation is confirmed later in the source code when the TRIP test is mentioned ("If this program is changed, the resulting system should not be called 'TeX). The American Mathematical Society tried in the early 1980s to claim a trademark for TeX. This was rejected because at the time "TEX" (all caps) was registered by Honeywell for the "Text EXecutive" text processing system.
It is possible to use TeX for automatic generation of sophisticated layout for XML data. The differences in syntax between the two description languages can be overcome with the help of TeXML. In the context of XML publication, TeX can thus be considered an alternative to XSL-FO. TeX allowed scientific papers in mathematical disciplines to be reduced to relatively small files that could be rendered client-side, allowing fully typeset scientific papers to be exchanged over the early Internet and emerging World Wide Web, even when sending large files was difficult. This paved the way for the creation of repositories of scientific papers such as arXiv, through which papers could be 'published' without an intermediary publisher.
The name TeX is intended by its developer to be , with the final consonant of "loch" or "Bach." The letters of the name are meant to represent the capital Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi, as TeX is an abbreviation of τέχνη (ΤΕΧΝΗ – "technē"), Greek for both "art" and "craft", which is also the root word of "technical". English speakers often pronounce it , like the first syllable of "technical". Knuth instructs that it be typeset with the "E" below the baseline and reduced spacing between the letters. This is done, as Knuth mentions in his "TeXbook", to distinguish TeX from other system names such as TEX, the Text EXecutive processor (developed by Honeywell Information Systems). Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX"—such as "TeXnician" (user of TeX software), "TeXhacker" (TeX programmer), "TeXmaster" (competent TeX programmer), "TeXhax", and "TeXnique".
Notable entities in the TeX community include the TeX Users Group (TUG), which publishes "TUGboat" and "The PracTeX Journal", covering a wide range of topics in digital typography relevant to TeX. The Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX (DANTE) is a large user group in Germany. The TeX Users Group was founded in 1980 for educational and scientific purposes, provides an organization for those who have an interest in typography and font design, and are users of the TeX typesetting system invented by Knuth. The TeX Users Group represents the interests of TeX users worldwide. The TeX Users Group publishes the journal "TUGboat" three times per year; DANTE publishes "Die TeXnische Komödie" four times per year. Other user groups include DK-TUG in Denmark, GUTenberg in France, GuIT in Italy, and UK-TUG in the United Kingdom; TUG maintains a complete list. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30065 |
Tradition
A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes (like lawyers' wigs or military officers' spurs), but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years—the word "tradition" itself derives from the Latin "tradere" literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is commonly assumed that traditions have ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether that be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also use the word in a variety of ways.
The phrase "according to tradition", or "by tradition", usually means that whatever information follows is known only by oral tradition, but is not supported (and perhaps may be refuted) by physical documentation, by a physical artifact, or other quality evidence. "Tradition" is used to indicate the quality of a piece of information being discussed. For example, "According to tradition, Homer was born on Chios, but many other locales have historically claimed him as theirs." This tradition may never be proven or disproven. In another example, "King Arthur, by tradition a true British king, has inspired many well loved stories." Whether they are documented fact or not does not decrease their value as cultural history and literature.
Traditions are a subject of study in several academic fields, especially in social sciences such as folklore studies, anthropology, archaeology, and biology.
The concept of tradition, as the notion of holding on to a previous time, is also found in political and philosophical discourse. For example, it is the basis of the political concept of traditionalism, and also strands of many world religions including traditional Catholicism. In artistic contexts, tradition is used to decide the correct display of an art form. For example, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to guidelines dictating how an art form should be composed are given greater importance than the performer's own preferences. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. In response to this, tradition-preservation attempts have now been started in many countries around the world, focusing on aspects such as traditional languages. Tradition is usually contrasted with the goal of modernity and should be differentiated from customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules and similar concepts.
The English word "tradition" comes from the Latin "traditio" via French, the noun from the verb "tradere" (to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping); it was originally used in Roman law to refer to the concept of legal transfers and inheritance. According to Anthony Giddens and others, the modern meaning of tradition evolved during the Enlightenment period, in opposition to modernity and progress.
As with many other generic terms, there are many definitions of tradition. The concept includes a number of interrelated ideas; the unifying one is that tradition refers to beliefs, objects or customs performed or believed in the past, originating in it, transmitted through time by being taught by one generation to the next, and are performed or believed in the present.
Tradition can also refer to beliefs or customs that are Prehistoric, with lost or arcane origins, existing from "time immemorial". Originally, traditions were passed orally, without the need for a writing system. Tools to aid this process include poetic devices such as rhyme and alliteration. The stories thus preserved are also referred to as tradition, or as part of an oral tradition. Even such traditions, however, are presumed to have originated (been "invented" by humans) at some point. Traditions are often presumed to be ancient, unalterable, and deeply important, though they may sometimes be much less "natural" than is presumed. It is presumed that at least two transmissions over three generations are required for a practice, belief or object to be seen as traditional. Some traditions were deliberately invented for one reason or another, often to highlight or enhance the importance of a certain institution. Traditions may also be adapted to suit the needs of the day, and the changes can become accepted as a part of the ancient tradition. Tradition changes slowly, with changes from one generation to the next being seen as significant. Thus, those carrying out the traditions will not be consciously aware of the change, and even if a tradition undergoes major changes over many generations, it will be seen as unchanged.
There are various origins and fields of tradition; they can refer to:
Many objects, beliefs and customs can be traditional. Rituals of social interaction can be traditional, with phrases and gestures such as saying "thank you", sending birth announcements, greeting cards, etc. Tradition can also refer to larger concepts practiced by groups (family traditions at Christmas), organizations (company's picnic) or societies, such as the practice of national and public holidays. Some of the oldest traditions include monotheism (three millennia) and citizenship (two millennia). It can also include material objects, such as buildings, works of art or tools.
Tradition is often used as an adjective, in contexts such as traditional music, traditional medicine, traditional values and others. In such constructions tradition refers to specific values and materials particular to the discussed context, passed through generations.
The Panhellenic Games were a tradition in Ancient Greece where only Greek men from Greece and Greek colonies could compete.
The term "invention of tradition", introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm, refers to situations when a new practice or object is introduced in a manner that implies a connection with the past that is not necessarily present. A tradition may be deliberately created and promulgated for personal, commercial, political, or national self-interest, as was done in colonial Africa; or it may be adopted rapidly based on a single highly publicized event, rather than developing and spreading organically in a population, as in the case of the white wedding dress, which only became popular after Queen Victoria wore a white gown at her wedding to Albert of Saxe-Coburg.
An example of an invention of tradition is the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (location of the British Parliament) in the Gothic style. Similarly, most of the traditions associated with monarchy of the United Kingdom, seen as rooted deep in history, actually date to 19th century. Other examples include the invention of tradition in Africa and other colonial holdings by the occupying forces. Requiring legitimacy, the colonial power would often invent a "tradition" which they could use to legitimize their own position. For example, a certain succession to a chiefdom might be recognized by a colonial power as traditional in order to favour their own candidates for the job. Often these inventions were based in some form of tradition, but were exaggerated, distorted, or biased toward a particular interpretation.
Invented traditions are a central component of modern national cultures, providing a commonality of experience and promoting the unified national identity espoused by nationalism. Common examples include public holidays (particularly those unique to a particular nation), the singing of national anthems, and traditional national cuisine (see national dish). Expatriate and immigrant communities may continue to practice the national traditions of their home nation.
In science, tradition is often used in the literature in order to define the relationship of an author's thoughts to that of his or her field. In 1948, philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that there should be a "rational theory of tradition" applied to science which was fundamentally sociological. For Popper, each scientist who embarks on a certain research trend inherits the tradition of the scientists before them as he or she inherits their studies and any conclusions that superseded it. Unlike myth, which is a means of explaining the natural world through means other than logical criticism, scientific tradition was inherited from Socrates, who proposed critical discussion, according to Popper. For Thomas Kuhn, who presented his thoughts in a paper presented in 1977, a sense of such a critical inheritance of tradition is, historically, what sets apart the best scientists who change their fields is an embracement of tradition.
Traditions are a subject of study in several academic fields in social sciences—chiefly anthropology, archaeology, and biology—with somewhat different meanings in different fields. It is also used in varying contexts in other fields, such as history, psychology and sociology. Social scientists and others have worked to refine the commonsense concept of tradition to make it into a useful concept for scholarly analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, Edward Shils explored the concept in detail. Since then, a wide variety of social scientists have criticized traditional ideas about tradition; meanwhile, "tradition" has come into usage in biology as applied to nonhuman animals.
Tradition as a concept variously defined in different disciplines should not be confused with various traditions (perspectives, approaches) in those disciplines.
Tradition is one of the key concepts in anthropology; it can be said that anthropology is the study of "tradition in traditional societies". There is however no "theory of tradition", as for most anthropologists the need to discuss what tradition is seems unnecessary, as defining tradition is both unnecessary (everyone can be expected to know what it is) and unimportant (as small differences in definition would be just technical). There are however dissenting views; scholars such as Pascal Boyer argue that defining tradition and developing theories about it are important to the discipline.
In archaeology, the term "tradition" is a set of cultures or industries which appear to develop on from one another over a period of time. The term is especially common in the study of American archaeology.
Biologists, when examining groups of non-humans, have observed repeated behaviors which are taught within communities from one generation to the next. Tradition is defined in biology as "a behavioral practice that is relatively enduring (i.e., is performed repeatedly over a period of time), that is shared among two or more members of a group, that depends in part on socially aided learning for its generation in new practitioners", and has been called a precursor to "culture" in the anthropological sense.
Behavioral traditions have been observed in groups of fish, birds, and mammals. Groups of orangutans and chimpanzees, in particular, may display large numbers of behavioral traditions, and in chimpanzees, transfer of traditional behavior from one group to another (not just within a group) has been observed. Such behavioral traditions may have evolutionary significance, allowing adaptation at a faster rate than genetic change.
In the field of musicology and ethnomusicology tradition refers to the belief systems, repertoire, techniques, style and culture that is passed down through subsequent generations. Tradition in music suggests a historical context with which one can perceive distinguishable patterns. Along with a sense of history, traditions have a fluidity that cause them to evolve and adapt over time.
While both musicology and ethnomusicology are defined by being 'the scholarly study of music' they differ in their methodology and subject of research. 'Tradition, or traditions, can be presented as a context in which to study the work of a specific composer or as a part of a wide-ranging historical perspective.'
The concept of tradition, in early sociological research (around the turn of the 19th and 20th century), referred to that of the traditional society, as contrasted by the more modern industrial society. This approach was most notably portrayed in Max Weber's concepts of traditional authority and modern rational-legal authority. In more modern works, One hundred years later, sociology sees tradition as a social construct used to contrast past with the present and as a form of rationality used to justify certain course of action.
Traditional society is characterized by lack of distinction between family and business, division of labor influenced primarily by age, gender, and status, high position of custom in the system of values, self-sufficiency, preference to saving and accumulation of capital instead of productive investment, relative autarky. Early theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to industrial model are now seen as too simplistic.
In 1981 Edward Shils in his book "Tradition" put forward a definition of tradition that became universally accepted. According to Shils, tradition is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present.
Another important sociological aspect of tradition is the one that relates to rationality. It is also related to the works of Max Weber (see theories of rationality), and were popularized and redefined in 1992 by Raymond Boudon in his book "Action". In this context tradition refers to the mode of thinking and action justified as "it has always been that way". This line of reasoning forms the basis of the logical flaw of the appeal to tradition (or "argumentum ad antiquitatem"), which takes the form "this is right because we've always done it this way." In most cases such an appeal can be refuted on the grounds that the "tradition" being advocated may no longer be desirable, or, indeed, may never have been despite its previous popularity.
The idea of tradition is important in philosophy. Twentieth century philosophy is often divided between an 'analytic' tradition, dominant in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, and a 'continental' tradition, dominant in German and Romance speaking Europe. Increasingly central to continental philosophy is the project of deconstructing what its proponents, following Martin Heidegger, call 'the tradition', which began with Plato and Aristotle. In contrast, some continental philosophers - most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer - have attempted to rehabilitate the tradition of Aristotelianism. This move has been replicated within analytic philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. However, MacIntyre has himself deconstructed the idea of 'the tradition', instead posing Aristotelianism as one philosophical tradition in rivalry with others.
The concepts of tradition and traditional values are frequently used in political and religious discourse to establish the legitimacy of a particular set of values. In the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept of tradition has been used to argue for the centrality and legitimacy of conservative religious values. Similarly, strands of orthodox theological thought from a number of world religions openly identify themselves as wanting a return to tradition. For example, the term "traditionalist Catholic" refers to those, such as Archbishop Lefebvre, who want the worship and practices of the Church to be as they were before the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. Likewise, Sunni Muslims are referred to as "Ahl el-Sunnah wa Al-Jamā‘ah" (), literally "people of the tradition [of Muhammad] and the community", emphasizing their attachment to religious and cultural tradition.
More generally, tradition has been used as a way of determining the political spectrum, with right-wing parties having a stronger affinity to the ways of the past than left-wing ones. Here, the concept of adherence tradition is embodied by the political philosophy of traditionalist conservatism (or simply "traditionalism"), which emphasizes the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, hierarchy and organic unity, agrarianism, classicism and high culture, and the intersecting spheres of loyalty. Traditionalists would therefore reject the notions of individualism, liberalism, modernity, and social progress, but promote cultural and educational renewal, and revive interest in the Church, the family, the State and local community. This view has been criticised for including in its notion of tradition practices which are no longer considered to be desirable, for example, stereotypical views of the place of women in domestic affairs.
In other societies, especially ones experiencing rapid social change, the idea of what is "traditional" may be widely contested, with different groups striving to establish their own values as the legitimate traditional ones. Defining and enacting traditions in some cases can be a means of building unity between subgroups in a diverse society; in other cases, tradition is a means of othering and keeping groups distinct from one another.
In artistic contexts, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to traditional guidelines is of greater importance than performer's preferences. It is often the unchanging form of certain arts that leads to their perception as traditional. For artistic endeavors, tradition has been used as a contrast to "creativity", with traditional and folk art associated with unoriginal imitation or repetition, in contrast to fine art, which is valued for being original and unique. More recent philosophy of art, however, considers interaction with tradition as integral to the development of new artistic expression.
In the social sciences, "tradition" is often contrasted with "modernity", particularly in terms of whole societies. This dichotomy is generally associated with a linear model of social change, in which societies progress from being traditional to being modern. Tradition-oriented societies have been characterized as valuing filial piety, harmony and group welfare, stability, and interdependence, while a society exhibiting modernity would value "individualism (with free will and choice), mobility, and progress." Another author discussing tradition in relationship to modernity, Anthony Giddens, sees tradition as something bound to ritual, where ritual guarantees the continuation of tradition. Gusfield and others, though, criticize this dichotomy as oversimplified, arguing that tradition is dynamic, heterogeneous, and coexists successfully with modernity even within individuals.
Tradition should be differentiated from "customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules" and similar concepts. Whereas tradition is supposed to be invariable, they are seen as more flexible and subject to innovation and change. Whereas justification for tradition is ideological, the justification for other similar concepts is more practical or technical. Over time, customs, routines, conventions, rules and such can evolve into traditions, but that usually requires that they stop having (primarily) a practical purpose. For example, wigs worn by lawyers were at first common and fashionable; spurs worn by military officials were at first practical but now are both impractical and traditional.
The legal protection of tradition includes a number of international agreements and national laws. In addition to the fundamental protection of cultural property, there is also cooperation between the United Nations, UNESCO and Blue Shield International in the protection or recording of traditions and customs. The protection of culture and traditions is becoming increasingly important nationally and internationally. It is also about preserving the cultural heritage of mankind, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets, traditions and languages is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the opponent's identity. It is also intended to address the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, a region or a municipality.
In many countries, concerted attempts are being made to preserve traditions that are at risk of being lost. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. Customary celebrations and lifestyles are among the traditions that are sought to be preserved. Likewise, the concept of tradition has been used to defend the preservation and reintroduction of minority languages such as Cornish under the auspices of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Specifically, the charter holds that these languages "contribute to the maintenance and development of Europe's cultural wealth and traditions". The Charter goes on to call for "the use or adoption... of traditional and correct forms of place-names in regional or minority languages". Similarly, UNESCO includes both "oral tradition" and "traditional manifestations" in its definition of a country's cultural properties and heritage. It therefore works to preserve tradition in countries such as Brazil.
In Japan, certain artworks, structures, craft techniques and performing arts are considered by the Japanese government to be a precious legacy of the Japanese people, and are protected under the Japanese Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. This law also identifies people skilled at traditional arts as "National Living Treasures", and encourages the preservation of their craft.
For native peoples like the Māori in New Zealand, there is conflict between the fluid identity assumed as part of modern society and the traditional identity with the obligations that accompany it; the loss of language heightens the feeling of isolation and damages the ability to perpetuate tradition.
The phrase "traditional cultural expressions" is used by the World Intellectual Property Organization to refer to "any form of artistic and literary expression in which traditional culture and knowledge are embodied. They are transmitted from one generation to the next, and include handmade textiles, paintings, stories, legends, ceremonies, music, songs, rhythms and dance." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30067 |
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe (sometimes abbreviated as The Globe) is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts, since its creation by Charles H. Taylor in 1872. The newspaper has won a total of 26 Pulitzer Prizes , and had a total paid circulation of about 136,000 in the year ending in August 2016. "The Boston Globe" is the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Boston.
Founded in the late 19th century, the paper was mainly controlled by Irish Catholic interests before being sold to Charles H. Taylor and his family. After being privately held until 1973, it was sold to "The New York Times" in 1993 for $1.1billion, making it one of the most expensive print purchases in U.S. history. The newspaper was purchased in 2013 by Boston Red Sox and Liverpool F.C. owner John W. Henry for $70million from The New York Times Company, having lost 93.64% of its value in twenty years.
Historically, the newspaper has been noted as "one of the nation's most prestigious papers." The paper's coverage of the 2001–2003 Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal received international media attention and served as the basis of the 2015 American drama, "Spotlight". In 1967, "The Globe" became the first major paper in the United States to come out against the Vietnam War.
The chief print rival of "The Boston Globe" is the "Boston Herald"; however, "The Globe" is more than twice the size of the "Boston Herald". , "The Globe" prints and circulates the entire press run of its rival. The editor-in-chief, otherwise known as the editor, of the paper is Brian McGrory who took the helm in December 2012.
"The Boston Globe" was founded in 1872 by six Boston businessmen, including Charles H. Taylor and Eben Jordan, who jointly invested $150,000 (). The first issue was published on March 4, 1872, and sold for four cents (). Originally a morning daily, it began a Sunday edition in 1877, which absorbed the rival Boston Weekly Globe in 1892. In 1878, "The Boston Globe" started an afternoon edition called The Boston Evening Globe, which ceased publication in 1979. By the 1890s, "The Boston Globe" had become a stronghold, with an editorial staff dominated by Irish American Catholics.
In 1912, the "Globe" was one of a cooperative of four newspapers, including the "Chicago Daily News", "The New York Globe", and the "Philadelphia Bulletin", to form the Associated Newspapers syndicate.
In 1965, Thomas Winship succeeded his father, Larry Winship, as editor. The younger Winship transformed "The Globe" from a mediocre local paper into a regional paper of national distinction. He served as editor until 1984, during which time the paper won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, the first in the paper's history.
"The Boston Globe" was a private company until 1973 when it went public under the name Affiliated Publications. It continued to be managed by the descendants of Charles H. Taylor. In 1993, The New York Times Company purchased Affiliated Publications for US$1.1billion, making "The Boston Globe" a wholly owned subsidiary of "The New York Times" parent.
The Jordan and Taylor families received substantial The New York Times Company stock, but the last Taylor family members have since left management.
Boston.com, the online edition of "The Boston Globe", was launched on the World Wide Web in 1995. Consistently ranked among the top ten newspaper websites in America, it has won numerous national awards and took two regional Emmy Awards in 2009 for its video work.
Under the helm of editor Martin Baron and then Brian McGrory, "The Globe" shifted away from coverage of international news in favor of Boston-area news. "Globe" reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer and Walter Robinson and editor Ben Bradlee Jr. were an instrumental part of uncovering the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in 2001–2003, especially in relation to Massachusetts churches. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their work, one of several the paper has received for its investigative journalism, and their work was dramatized in the 2015 Academy Award-winning film "Spotlight", named after the paper's in-depth investigative division.
"The Boston Globe" is credited with allowing Peter Gammons to start his "Notes" section on baseball, which has become a mainstay in all major newspapers nationwide. In 2004, Gammons was selected as the 56th recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing, given by the BBWAA, and was honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 31, 2005.
In 2007, Charlie Savage, whose reports on President Bush's use of signing statements made national news, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
"The Boston Globe" has consistently been ranked in the forefront of American journalism. "Time" magazine listed it as one of the ten best US daily newspapers in 1974 and 1984, and the "Globe" tied for sixth in a national survey of top editors who chose "America's Best Newspapers" in the "Columbia Journalism Review" in 1999.
"The Boston Globe" hosts 28 blogs covering a variety of topics including Boston sports, local politics and a blog made up of posts from the paper's opinion writers.
On April 2, 2009, The New York Times Company threatened to close the paper if its unions did not agree to $20,000,000 of cost savings. Some of the cost savings include reducing union employees' pay by 5%, ending pension contributions, ending certain employees' tenures. "The Boston Globe" eliminated the equivalent of fifty full-time jobs; among buy-outs and layoffs, it swept out most of the part-time employees in the editorial sections. However, early on the morning of May 5, 2009, The New York Times Company announced it had reached a tentative deal with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents most of the "Globe" editorial staff, that allowed it to get the concessions it demanded. The paper's other three major unions had agreed to concessions on May 3, 2009, after The New York Times Company threatened to give the government 60-days notice that it intended to close the paper. Despite the cuts helping to "significantly [improve]" its financial performance by October of that year, "The Globe" parent company indicated that it was considering strategic alternatives for the paper, but did not plan to sell it. In September 2011, "The Boston Globe" launched a dedicated, subscription-based website at bostonglobe.com.
In February 2013, The New York Times Company announced that it would sell the New England Media Group, which encompasses the "Globe"; bids were received by six parties, of them included John Gormally (then-owner of WGGB-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts), another group included members of former "Globe" publishers, the Taylor family, and Boston Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry, who bid for the paper through the New England Sports Network (majority owned by Fenway Sports Group alongside the Boston Bruins). However, after the NESN group dropped out of the running to buy the paper, Henry made his own separate bid to purchase "The Globe" in July 2013. On October 24, 2013, he took ownership of "The Globe", at a $70million purchase price. On January 30, 2014, Henry named himself publisher and named Mike Sheehan, a prominent former Boston ad executive, to be CEO. , Doug Franklin replaced Mike Sheehan as CEO, then Franklin resigned after six months in the position, in July 2017, as a result of strategic conflicts with owner Henry.
In July 2016, the 815,000-square-foot headquarters located in Dorchester was sold to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed price. The "Globe" moved its printing operations in June 2017 to Myles Standish Industrial Park in Taunton, Massachusetts. Also in June 2017, the "Globe" moved its headquarters to Exchange Place in Boston's Financial District.
Between August 10–22, 2018, approximately 14 threatening phone calls were made to "Boston Globe" offices. The caller stated that the "Globe" was the "enemy of the people" and threatened to kill newspaper employees. On August 16, 2018, the "Globe" and more than 400 news outlets from across the United States jointly published editorials in support of free press.
On August 30, 2018, California resident Robert Chain was arrested by an FBI SWAT team and charged with a single count of making a threatening communication in interstate commerce. In May 2019, Chain plead guilty in a US federal court to seven counts of making threatening communications in interstate commerce.
Since 1981, the editorial pages of "The Boston Globe" have been separate from the news operation, as is frequently customary in the news industry. Editorials represent the official view of "The Boston Globe" as a community institution. The publisher reserves the right to veto an editorial and usually determines political endorsements for high office. Ellen Clegg, a long-time "Globe" journalist and former top spokeswoman for the newspaper, was named editor of the Editorial Page in 2015.
Describing the political position of "The Boston Globe" in 2001, former editorial page editor Renée Loth told the Boston University alumni magazine:
The "Globe" has a long tradition of being a progressive institution, and especially on social issues. We are pro-choice; we're against the death penalty; we're for gay rights. But if people read us carefully, they will find that on a whole series of other issues, we are not knee-jerk. We're for charter schools; we're for any number of business-backed tax breaks. We are a lot more nuanced and subtle than that liberal stereotype does justice to.
"The Boston Globe" endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In August 2018, the editorial board launched a coordinated campaign for newspapers nationwide to respond to President Donald Trump's "enemy of the people" attacks and "fake news" rants against the media by publishing locally produced editorial responses on Thursday, August 16. Within a couple of days, an estimated 100+ newspapers had pledged to join the campaign, jumping to roughly 200 a few days later. On Aug. 13, the Radio Television Digital News Association and its Voice of the First Amendment Task Force encouraged its 1,200 member organizations to join the campaign while other media organizations also helped spread the call to action. Even as some right-leaning outlets portrayed the "Globe"s campaign as an attack on the president, rather than his rhetorical attacks on the fourth estate, some newspapers got a head start, releasing content on Wednesday the 15th, including the Virginia-based Connection Newspapers group, the combined "East Bay Times" and "Mercury News", and the "Baltimore Sun". On Thursday the 16th, 350 newspapers participated in the event.
The president responded with a tweet accusing the media of collusion. "The Globe" later received several phone threats with at least one threat mentioning an afternoon bomb. While authorities did not consider the threat to be "super serious", uniformed police nonetheless raised their presence in and around the building, building management notified other tenants, and the FBI was investigating.
Appearing in the Sunday paper almost every week is "The Boston Globe Magazine". , Veronica Chao is the editor.
On October 23, 2006, "The Boston Globe" announced the publication of "Design New England: The Magazine of Splendid Homes and Gardens". This glossy oversized magazine is published six times per year.
Each year in December since 2004, the magazine picks a "Bostonian of the Year". Past winners include Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein (2004), retired judge and Big Dig whistleblower Edward Ginsburg (2005), governor Deval Patrick (2006), Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America founder and CEO Bruce Marks (2007), NBA champion Paul Pierce (2008), professor Elizabeth Warren (2009), Republican politician Scott Brown (2010), U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz and ArtsEmerson executive director Robert Orchard (2011), Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman and Kayla Harrison (2012), three people who were near the Boston Marathon bombing, Dan Marshall, Natalie Stavas, and Larry Hittinger (2013), Market Basket employees (2014), and neuropathologist Ann McKee (2017).
In 1998, columnist Patricia Smith was forced to resign after it was discovered that she had fabricated people and quotations in several of her columns. In August of that year, columnist Mike Barnicle was discovered to have copied material for a column from a George Carlin book, "Brain Droppings". He was suspended for this offense, and his past columns were reviewed. "The Boston Globe" editors found that Barnicle had fabricated a story about two cancer patients, and Barnicle was forced to resign.
In the spring of 2005, "The Boston Globe" retracted a story describing the events of a seal hunt near Halifax, Nova Scotia that took place on April 12, 2005. Written by freelancer Barbara Stewart, a former "The New York Times" staffer, the article described the specific number of boats involved in the hunt and graphically described the killing of seals and the protests that accompanied it. In reality, weather had delayed the hunt, which had not yet begun the day the story had been filed, proving that the details were fabricated.
In 2004, the "Globe" apologized for printing graphic photographs that the article represented as showing U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women during the Iraq War from a city councilor's presentation before they were verified. The photos had already been found by other news organizations to be from an internet pornography site.
"The Boston Globe" maintains two distinct major websites: BostonGlobe.com is a subscriber-supported site with a paywall and content from the printed paper; and Boston.com, one of the first regional news portals, is supported by advertising. Between September 2011 and March 2014, the "Globe" gradually withdrew stories written by "Globe" journalists from Boston.com, making the sites more and more separated. BostonGlobe.com was designed to emphasize a premium experience focusing on content and emulating the visual appearance of "The Boston Globe" newspaper; the site was one of the first major websites to use a responsive design which automatically adapts its layout to a device's screen size. Boston.com followed suit in 2014. The two sites are aimed towards different readers; while Boston.com became targeted towards "casual" readers and local content, the new "Boston Globe" website is targeted towards the audience of the paper itself.
In 2012, the Society for News Design selected BostonGlobe.com as the world's best-designed news website.
In December 2016, the "Globe" reported a total of 72,889 "restricted digital access" subscriptions and this grew to 90,440 by the end of June in 2017. In a memo to the "Globe" staff on New Year's Eve of 2017, editor Brian McGrory said the newspaper was closing in on 95,000 digital subscribers and would pass the 100,000 mark in the first half of 2018. "Globe" spokeswoman Jane Bowman later confirmed that the "Globe" had reached the 100,000 goal. McGrory has stated in the recent past that reaching 200,000 digital subscribers would make the "Globe" self-sustaining.
Boston Globe Media Partners, which owns the "Globe", operates a number of websites covering certain niche subjects. The sites share many resources, like office space, with the "Globe", but are often branded separately from the newspaper:
"Crux" was launched by the "Globe" in September 2014 to focus on news related to the Catholic Church. At the end of March 2016, "The Globe" ended its association with "Crux", transferring ownership of the website to the "Crux" staff. With Allen as the new editor, "Crux" received sponsorship from the Knights of Columbus and several Catholic dioceses.
"Stat", launched in 2015, covers health, medicine and life sciences, with a particular focus on the biotechnology industry based in and around Boston. "Stat" employs journalists in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco.
"The Boston Globe" started the GRANT (Globe Readers And Non-profits Together) in 2013 as a way to give back to the New England community. All "Boston Globe" subscribers receive a GRANT voucher during February, ranging from $25 to $125 of GRANT dollars. The amount depends on length of tenure as a subscriber; the longer one has been subscribed to the "Globe", the more GRANT dollars are received. Anyone who wishes to take part in this program can enter their respective subscriber number online and choose their favorite New England non-profit. The GRANT dollars earned by every non-profit can be redeemed for free advertising space in "The Boston Globe". Organizations usually utilize this advertising space to promote events, fundraise, or simply advertise. Every year, more and more non-profits are recognized and given the opportunity to earn free advertising space. In only three years, "The Boston Globe" donated over $3million of advertising space. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30068 |
Thales of Miletus
Thales of Miletus ( ; , "Thalēs"; 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, and he is otherwise historically recognized as the first individual in Western civilization known to have entertained and engaged in scientific philosophy.
Thales is recognized for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world and the universe, and instead explaining natural objects and phenomena by naturalistic theories and hypotheses, in a precursor to modern science. Almost all the other pre-Socratic philosophers followed him in explaining nature as deriving from a unity of everything based on the existence of a single ultimate substance, instead of using mythological explanations. Aristotle regarded him as the founder of the Ionian School and reported Thales' hypothesis that the originating principle of nature and the nature of matter was a single material substance: water.
In mathematics, Thales used geometry to calculate the heights of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He is the first known individual to use deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' theorem. He is the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.
The dates of Thales' life are not exactly known, but are roughly established by a few datable events mentioned in the sources. According to Herodotus, Thales predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BC. Diogenes Laërtius quotes the chronicle of Apollodorus of Athens as saying that Thales died at the age of 78 during the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) and attributes his death to heat stroke while watching the games.
Thales was probably born in the city of Miletus around the mid-620s BC. The ancient writer Apollodorus of Athens writing during the 2nd century BC, thought Thales was born about the year 625 BC. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described Thales as "a Phoenician by remote descent". Tim Whitmarsh noted that Thales regarded water as the primal matter, and because "thal" is the Phoenician word for moisture, his name may have derived from this circumstance."
According to the later historian Diogenes Laërtius, in his third century AD "Lives of the Philosophers", references Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus, who all agree "that Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae who are Phoenicians." Their names are indigenous Carian and Greek, respectively. Diogenes then states that "Most writers, however, represent him as a native of Miletus and of a distinguished family." However, his supposed mother Cleobulina has also been described as his companion. Diogenes then delivers more conflicting reports: one that Thales married and either fathered a son (Cybisthus or Cybisthon) or adopted his nephew of the same name; the second that he never married, telling his mother as a young man that it was too early to marry, and as an older man that it was too late. Plutarch had earlier told this version: Solon visited Thales and asked him why he remained single; Thales answered that he did not like the idea of having to worry about children. Nevertheless, several years later, anxious for family, he adopted his nephew Cybisthus.
It has been claimed that he was roughly the professional equivalent of a contemporary option trader.
It is assumed that Thales at one point in his life visited Egypt, where he learned about geometry. Diogenes Laërtius wrote that Thales identifies the Milesians as Athenian colonists.
Thales (who died around 30 years before the time of Pythagoras and 300 years before Euclid, Eudoxus of Cnidus, and Eudemus of Rhodes) is often hailed as "the first Greek mathematician". While some historians, such as Colin R. Fletcher, point out that there could have been a predecessor to Thales who would have been named in Eudemus' lost book "History of Geometry", it is admitted that without the work "the question becomes mere speculation." Fletcher holds that as there is no viable predecessor to the title of first Greek mathematician, the only question is whether Thales qualifies as a practitioner in that field; he holds that "Thales had at his command the techniques of observation, experimentation, superposition and deduction…he has proved himself mathematician."
Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics, "Thales, the founder of this school of philosophy, says the permanent entity is water (which is why he also propounded that the earth floats on water). Presumably he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that heat itself is generated from moisture and depends upon it for its existence (and that from which a thing is generated is always its first principle). He derived his assumption from this; and also from the fact that the seeds of everything have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things."
Thales involved himself in many activities, including engineering. Some say that he left no writings. Others say that he wrote "On the Solstice" and "On the Equinox". The "Nautical Star-guide" has been attributed to him, but this was disputed in ancient times. No writing attributed to him has survived. Diogenes Laërtius quotes two letters from Thales: one to Pherecydes of Syros, offering to review his book on religion, and one to Solon, offering to keep him company on his sojourn from Athens.
A story, with different versions, recounts how Thales achieved riches from an olive harvest by prediction of the weather. In one version, he bought all the in Miletus after predicting the weather and a good harvest for a particular year. Another version of the story has Aristotle explain that Thales had reserved presses in advance, at a discount, and could rent them out at a high price when demand peaked, following his prediction of a particularly good harvest. This first version of the story would constitute the first historically known creation and use of futures, whereas the second version would be the first historically known creation and use of options.
Aristotle explains that Thales' objective in doing this was not to enrich himself but to prove to his fellow Milesians that philosophy could be useful, contrary to what they thought, or alternatively, Thales had made his foray into enterprise because of a personal challenge put to him by an individual who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.
Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Thales gained fame as a counselor when he advised the Milesians not to engage in a symmachia, a "fighting together", with the Lydians. This has sometimes been interpreted as an alliance. Another story by Herodotus is that Croesus sent his army to the Persian territory. He was stopped by the river Halys, then unbridged. Thales then got the army across the river by digging a diversion upstream so as to reduce the flow, making it possible to cross the river. While Herodotus reported that most of his fellow Greeks believe that Thales did divert the river Halys to assist King Croesus' military endeavors, he himself finds it doubtful.
Croesus was defeated before the city of Sardis by Cyrus, who subsequently spared Miletus because it had taken no action. Cyrus was so impressed by Croesus’ wisdom and his connection with the sages that he spared him and took his advice on various matters. The Ionian cities should be demoi, or "districts".
Miletus, however, received favorable terms from Cyrus. The others remained in an Ionian League of twelve cities (excluding Miletus), and were subjugated by the Persians.
According to Herodotus, Thales predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BC. Thales also described the position of Ursa Minor, and he thought the constellation might be useful as a guide for navigation at sea. He calculated the duration of the year and the timings of the equinoxes and solstices. He is additionally attributed with the first observation of the Hyades and with calculating the position of the Pleiades. Plutarch indicates that in his day (c. AD 100) there was an extant work, the "Astronomy", composed in verse and attributed to Thales.
Herodotus writes that in the sixth year of the war, the Lydians under King Alyattes and the Medes under Cyaxares were engaged in an indecisive battle when suddenly day turned into night, leading to both parties halting the fighting and negotiating a peace agreement. Herodotus also mentions that the loss of daylight had been predicted by Thales. He does not, however, mention the location of the battle.
However, based on the list of Medean kings and the duration of their reign reported elsewhere by Herodotus, Cyaxares died 10 years before the eclipse.
Diogenes Laërtius tells us that the Seven Sages were created in the archonship of Damasius at Athens about 582 BC and that Thales was the first sage. The same story, however, asserts that Thales emigrated to Miletus. There is also a report that he did not become a student of nature until after his political career. Much as we would like to have a date on the seven sages, we must reject these stories and the tempting date if we are to believe that Thales was a native of Miletus, predicted the eclipse, and was with Croesus in the campaign against Cyrus.
Thales received instruction from an Egyptian priest. It was fairly certain that he came from a wealthy, established family, in a class which customarily provided higher education for their children. Moreover, the ordinary citizen, unless he was a seafaring man or a merchant, could not afford the grand tour in Egypt, and did not consort with noble lawmakers such as Solon.
In Diogenes Laërtius' "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" Chapter 1.39, Laërtius relates the several stories of an expensive object that is to go to the most wise. In one version (that Laërtius credits to Callimachus in his "Iambics") Bathycles of Arcadia states in his will that an expensive bowl "'should be given to him who had done most good by his wisdom.' So it was given to Thales, went the round of all the sages, and came back to Thales again. And he sent it to Apollo at Didyma, with this dedication...'Thales the Milesian, son of Examyas [dedicates this] to Delphinian Apollo after twice winning the prize from all the Greeks.'"
Early Greeks, and other civilizations before them, often invoked idiosyncratic explanations of natural phenomena with reference to the will of anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Instead, Thales aimed to explain natural phenomena via rational hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. For example, rather than assuming that earthquakes were the result of supernatural whims, Thales explained them by hypothesizing that the Earth floats on water and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves.
Thales was a hylozoist (one who thinks that matter is alive, i.e. containing soul(s)). Aristotle wrote ("De Anima" 411 a7-8) of Thales: ..."Thales thought all things are full of gods". Aristotle posits the origin of Thales thought on matter generally containing souls, to Thales thinking initially on the fact of, because magnets move iron, the presence of movement of matter indicated this matter contained life.
Thales, according to Aristotle, asked what was the nature (Greek "arche") of the object so that it would behave in its characteristic way. Physis () comes from phyein (), "to grow", related to our word "be". "(G)natura" is the way a thing is "born", again with the stamp of what it is in itself.
Aristotle characterizes most of the philosophers "at first" () as thinking that the "principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things", where "principle" is arche, "matter" is hyle ("wood" or "matter", "material") and "form" is eidos.
"Arche" is translated as "principle", but the two words do not have precisely the same meaning. A principle of something is merely prior (related to pro-) to it either chronologically or logically. An arche (from , "to rule") dominates an object in some way. If the arche is taken to be an origin, then specific causality is implied; that is, B is supposed to be characteristically B just because it comes from A, which dominates it.
The archai that Aristotle had in mind in his well-known passage on the first Greek scientists are not necessarily chronologically prior to their objects, but are constituents of it. For example, in pluralism objects are composed of earth, air, fire and water, but those elements do not disappear with the production of the object. They remain as archai within it, as do the atoms of the atomists.
What Aristotle is really saying is that the first philosophers were trying to define the substance(s) of which all material objects are composed. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what modern scientists are attempting to accomplish in nuclear physics, which is a second reason why Thales is described as the first western scientist, but some contemporary scholars reject this interpretation.
Thales was known for his innovative use of geometry. His understanding was theoretical as well as practical. For example, he said:
Topos is in Newtonian-style space, since the verb, chorei, has the connotation of yielding before things, or spreading out to make room for them, which is extension. Within this extension, things have a position. Points, lines, planes and solids related by distances and angles follow from this presumption.
Thales understood similar triangles and right triangles, and what is more, used that knowledge in practical ways. The story is told in Diogenes Laërtius (loc. cit.) that he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadows at the moment when his own shadow was equal to his height. A right triangle with two equal legs is a 45-degree right triangle, all of which are similar. The length of the pyramid's shadow measured from the center of the pyramid at that moment must have been equal to its height.
This story indicates that he was familiar with the Egyptian "seked", or "seqed", the ratio of the run to the rise of a slope (cotangent). The "seked" is at the base of problems 56, 57, 58, 59 and 60 of the Rhind papyrus — an ancient Egyptian mathematical document.
More practically Thales used the same method to measure the distances of ships at sea, said Eudemus as reported by Proclus ("in Euclidem"). According to Kirk & Raven (reference cited below), all you need for this feat is three straight sticks pinned at one end and knowledge of your altitude. One stick goes vertically into the ground. A second is made level. With the third you sight the ship and calculate the "seked" from the height of the stick and its distance from the point of insertion to the line of sight (Proclus, "In Euclidem", 352).
There are two theorems of Thales in elementary geometry, one known as Thales' theorem having to do with a triangle inscribed in a circle and having the circle's diameter as one leg, the other theorem being also called the intercept theorem. In addition Eudemus attributed to him the discovery that a circle is bisected by its diameter, that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal and that vertical angles are equal. According to a historical Note, when Thales visited Egypt, he observed that whenever the Egyptians drew two intersecting lines, they would measure the vertical angles to make sure that they were equal. Thales concluded that one could prove that all vertical angles are equal if one accepted some general notions such as: all straight angles are equal, equals added to equals are equal, and equals subtracted from equals are equal.
The evidence for the primacy of Thales comes to us from a book by Proclus who wrote a thousand years after Thales but is believed to have had a copy of Eudemus' book. Proclus wrote "Thales was the first to go to Egypt and bring back to Greece this study." He goes on to tell us that in addition to applying the knowledge he gained in Egypt "He himself discovered many propositions and disclosed the underlying principles of many others to his successors, in some case his method being more general, in others more empirical."
Other quotes from Proclus list more of Thales' mathematical achievements:
In addition to Proclus, Hieronymus of Rhodes also cites Thales as the first Greek mathematician. Hieronymus held that Thales was able to measure the height of the pyramids by using a theorem of geometry now known as the intercept theorem, (after gathering data by using his walking-stick and comparing its shadow to those cast by the pyramids). We receive variations of Hieronymus' story through Diogenes Laërtius, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch. According to Hieronymus, historically quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, Thales found the height of pyramids by comparison between the lengths of the shadows cast by a person and by the pyramids.
Due to the variations among testimonies, such as the "story of the sacrifice of an ox on the occasion of the discovery that the angle on a diameter of a circle is a right angle" in the version told by Diogenes Laërtius being accredited to Pythagoras rather than Thales, some historians (such as D. R. Dicks) question whether such anecdotes have any historical worth whatsoever.
Thales' most famous philosophical position was his cosmological thesis, which comes down to us through a passage from Aristotle's "Metaphysics". In the work Aristotle unequivocally reported Thales' hypothesis about the nature of all matter – that the originating principle of nature was a single material substance: water. Aristotle then proceeded to proffer a number of conjectures based on his own observations to lend some credence to why Thales may have advanced this idea (though Aristotle did not hold it himself).
Aristotle laid out his own thinking about matter and form which may shed some light on the ideas of Thales, in "Metaphysics" 983 b6 8–11, 17–21. (The passage contains words that were later adopted by science with quite different meanings.)
In this quote we see Aristotle's depiction of the problem of change and the definition of substance. He asked if an object changes, is it the same or different? In either case how can there be a change from one to the other? The answer is that the substance "is saved", but acquires or loses different qualities (, the things you "experience").
Aristotle conjectured that Thales reached his conclusion by contemplating that the "nourishment of all things is moist and that even the hot is created from the wet and lives by it." While Aristotle's conjecture on why Thales held water as the originating principle of matter is his own thinking, his statement that Thales held it as water is generally accepted as genuinely originating with Thales and he is seen as an incipient matter-and-formist.
Thales thought the Earth must be a flat disk which is floating in an expanse of water.
Heraclitus Homericus states that Thales drew his conclusion from seeing moist substance turn into air, slime and earth. It seems likely that Thales viewed the Earth as solidifying from the water on which it floated and the oceans that surround it.
Writing centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius also states that Thales taught "Water constituted (, 'stood under') the principle of all things."
Aristotle considered Thales’ position to be roughly the equivalent to the later ideas of Anaximenes, who held that everything was composed of air.
The 1870 book "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology" noted:
According to Aristotle, Thales thought lodestones had souls, because iron is attracted to them (by the force of magnetism).
Aristotle defined the soul as the principle of life, that which imbues the matter and makes it live, giving it the animation, or power to act. The idea did not originate with him, as the Greeks in general believed in the distinction between mind and matter, which was ultimately to lead to a distinction not only between body and soul but also between matter and energy. If things were alive, they must have souls. This belief was no innovation, as the ordinary ancient populations of the Mediterranean did believe that natural actions were caused by divinities. Accordingly, Aristotle and other ancient writers state that Thales believed that "all things were full of gods." In their zeal to make him the first in everything some said he was the first to hold the belief, which must have been widely known to be false. However, Thales was looking for something more general, a universal substance of mind. That also was in the polytheism of the times. Zeus was the very personification of supreme mind, dominating all the subordinate manifestations. From Thales on, however, philosophers had a tendency to depersonify or objectify mind, as though it were the substance of animation per se and not actually a god like the other gods. The end result was a total removal of mind from substance, opening the door to a non-divine principle of action.
Classical thought, however, had proceeded only a little way along that path. Instead of referring to the person, Zeus, they talked about the great mind:
The universal mind appears as a Roman belief in Virgil as well:
According to Henry Fielding (1775), Diogenes Laërtius (1.35) affirmed that Thales posed "the independent pre-existence of God from all eternity, stating "that God was the oldest of all beings, for he existed without a previous cause even in the way of generation; that the world was the most beautiful of all things; for it was created by God."
Due to the scarcity of sources concerning Thales and the discrepancies between the accounts given in the sources that have survived, there is a scholarly debate over possible influences on Thales and the Greek mathematicians that came after him.
Historian Roger L. Cooke points out that Proclus does not make any mention of Mesopotamian influence on Thales or Greek geometry, but "is shown clearly in Greek astronomy, in the use of sexagesimal system of measuring angles and in Ptolemy's explicit use of Mesopotamian astronomical observations." Cooke notes that it may possibly also appear in the second book of Euclid's Elements, "which contains geometric constructions equivalent to certain algebraic relations that are frequently encountered in the cuneiform tablets." Cooke notes "This relation, however, is controversial."
Historian B.L. Van der Waerden is among those advocating the idea of Mesopotamian influence, writing "It follows that we have to abandon the traditional belief that the oldest Greek mathematicians discovered geometry entirely by themselves…a belief that was tenable only as long as nothing was known about Babylonian mathematics. This in no way diminishes the stature of Thales; on the contrary, his genius receives only now the honour that is due to it, the honour of having developed a logical structure for geometry, of having introduced proof into geometry."
Some historians, such as D. R. Dicks takes issue with the idea that we can determine from the questionable sources we have, just how influenced Thales was by Babylonian sources. He points out that while Thales is held to have been able to calculate an eclipse using a cycle called the "Saros" held to have been "borrowed from the Babylonians", "The Babylonians, however, did not use cycles to predict solar eclipses, but computed them from observations of the latitude of the moon made shortly before the expected syzygy." Dicks cites historian O. Neugebauer who relates that "No Babylonian theory for predicting solar eclipse existed at 600 B.C., as one can see from the very unsatisfactory situation 400 years later; nor did the Babylonians ever develop any theory which took the influence of geographical latitude into account." Dicks examines the cycle referred to as 'Saros' – which Thales is held to have used and which is believed to stem from the Babylonians. He points out that Ptolemy makes use of this and another cycle in his book "Mathematical Syntaxis" but attributes it to Greek astronomers earlier than Hipparchus and not to Babylonians. Dicks notes Herodotus does relate that Thales made use of a cycle to predict the eclipse, but maintains that "if so, the fulfillment of the 'prediction' was a stroke of pure luck not science". He goes further joining with other historians (F. Martini, J.L. E. Dreyer, O. Neugebauer) in rejecting the historicity of the eclipse story altogether. Dicks links the story of Thales discovering the cause for a solar eclipse with Herodotus' claim that Thales discovered the cycle of the sun with relation to the solstices, and concludes "he could not possibly have possessed this knowledge which neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor his immediate successors possessed." Josephus is the only ancient historian that claims Thales visited Babylonia.
Herodotus wrote that the Greeks learnt the practice of dividing the day into 12 parts, about the "polos", and the gnomon from the Babylonians. (The exact meaning of his use of the word "polos" is unknown, current theories include: "the heavenly dome", "the tip of the axis of the celestial sphere", or a spherical concave sundial.) Yet even Herodotus' claims on Babylonian influence are contested by some modern historians, such as L. Zhmud, who points out that the division of the day into twelve parts (and by analogy the year) was known to the Egyptians already in the second millennium, the gnomon was known to both Egyptians and Babylonians, and the idea of the "heavenly sphere" was not used outside of Greece at this time.
Less controversial than the position that Thales learnt Babylonian mathematics is the claim he was influenced by Egyptians. Pointedly historian S. N. Bychkov holds that the idea that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal likely came from Egypt. This is because, when building a roof for a home – having a cross section be exactly an isosceles triangle isn't crucial (as it's the ridge of the roof that must fit precisely), in contrast a symmetric square pyramid cannot have errors in the base angles of the faces or they will not fit together tightly.
Historian D.R. Dicks agrees that compared to the Greeks in the era of Thales, there was a more advanced state of mathematics among the Babylonians and especially the Egyptians – "both cultures knew the correct formulae for determining the areas and volumes of simple geometrical figures such as triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, etc.; the Egyptians could also calculate correctly the volume of the frustum of a pyramid with a square base (the Babylonians used an incorrect formula for this), and used a formula for the area of a circle...which gives a value for π of 3.1605—a good approximation." Dicks also agrees that this would have had an effect on Thales (whom the most ancient sources agree was interested in mathematics and astronomy) but he holds that tales of Thales' travels in these lands are pure myth.
The ancient civilization and massive monuments of Egypt had "a profound and ineradicable impression on the Greeks". They attributed to Egyptians "an immemorial knowledge of certain subjects" (including geometry) and would claim Egyptian origin for some of their own ideas to try and lend them "a respectable antiquity" (such as the "Hermetic" literature of the Alexandrian period).
Dicks holds that since Thales was a prominent figure in Greek history by the time of Eudemus but "nothing certain was known except that he lived in Miletus". A tradition developed that as "Milesians were in a position to be able to travel widely" Thales must have gone to Egypt. As Herodotus says Egypt was the birthplace of geometry he must have learnt that while there. Since he had to have been there, surely one of the theories on Nile Flooding laid out by Herodotus must have come from Thales. Likewise as he must have been in Egypt he had to have done something with the Pyramids – thus the tale of measuring them. Similar apocryphal stories exist of Pythagoras and Plato traveling to Egypt with no corroborating evidence.
As the Egyptian and Babylonian geometry at the time was "essentially arithmetical", they used actual numbers and "the procedure is then described with explicit instructions as to what to do with these numbers" there was no mention of how the rules of procedure were made, and nothing toward a logically arranged corpus of generalized geometrical knowledge with analytical 'proofs' such as we find in the words of Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius." So even had Thales traveled there he could not have learnt anything about the theorems he is held to have picked up there (especially because there is no evidence that any Greeks of this age could use Egyptian hieroglyphics).
Likewise until around the second century BC and the time of Hipparchus (c. 190–120 BC) the Babylonian general division of the circle into 360 degrees and their sexagesimal system was unknown. Herodotus says almost nothing about Babylonian literature and science, and very little about their history. Some historians, like P. Schnabel, hold that the Greeks only learned more about Babylonian culture from Berossus, a Babylonian priest who is said to have set up a school in Cos around 270 BC (but to what extent this had in the field of geometry is contested).
Dicks points out that the primitive state of Greek mathematics and astronomical ideas exhibited by the peculiar notions of Thales' successors (such as Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus), which historian J. L. Heiberg calls "a mixture of brilliant intuition and childlike analogies", argues against the assertions from writers in late antiquity that Thales discovered and taught advanced concepts in these fields.
John Burnet (1892) noted
In the long sojourn of philosophy, there has existed hardly a philosopher or historian of philosophy who did not mention Thales and try to characterize him in some way. He is generally recognized as having brought something new to human thought. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine already existed. Thales added something to these different collections of knowledge to produce a universality, which, as far as writing tells us, was not in tradition before, but resulted in a new field.
Ever since, interested persons have been asking what that new something is. Answers fall into (at least) two categories, the theory and the method. Once an answer has been arrived at, the next logical step is to ask how Thales compares to other philosophers, which leads to his classification (rightly or wrongly).
The most natural epithets of Thales are "materialist" and "naturalist", which are based on ousia and physis. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Aristotle called him a physiologist, with the meaning "student of nature." On the other hand, he would have qualified as an early physicist, as did Aristotle. They studied corpora, "bodies", the medieval descendants of substances.
Most agree that Thales' stamp on thought is the unity of substance, hence Bertrand Russell:
Russell was only reflecting an established tradition; for example: Nietzsche, in his "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks", wrote:
This sort of materialism, however, should not be confused with deterministic materialism. Thales was only trying to explain the unity observed in the free play of the qualities. The arrival of uncertainty in the modern world made possible a return to Thales; for example, John Elof Boodin writes ("God and Creation"):
Boodin defines an "emergent" materialism, in which the objects of sense emerge uncertainly from the substrate. Thales is the innovator of this sort of materialism.
Later scholastic thinkers would maintain that in his choice of water Thales was influenced by Babylonian or Chaldean religion, that held that a god had begun creation by acting upon the pre-existing water. Historian Abraham Feldman holds this does not stand up under closer examination. In Babylonian religion the water is lifeless and sterile until a god acts upon it, but for Thales water itself was divine and creative. He maintained that "All things are full of gods", and to understand the nature of things was to discover the secrets of the deities, and through this knowledge open the possibility that one could be greater than the grandest Olympian.
Feldman points out that while other thinkers recognized the wetness of the world "none of them was inspired to conclude that everything was ultimately aquatic." He further points out that Thales was "a wealthy citizen of the fabulously rich Oriental port of Miletus...a dealer in the staples of antiquity, wine and oil...He certainly handled the shell-fish of the Phoenicians that secreted the dye of imperial purple." Feldman recalls the stories of Thales measuring the distance of boats in the harbor, creating mechanical improvements for ship navigation, giving an explanation for the flooding of the Nile (vital to Egyptian agriculture and Greek trade), and changing the course of the river Halys so an army could ford it. Rather than seeing water as a barrier Thales contemplated the Ionian yearly religious gathering for athletic ritual (held on the promontory of Mycale and believed to be ordained by the ancestral kindred of Poseidon, the god of the sea). He called for the Ionian mercantile states participating in this ritual to convert it into a democratic federation under the protection of Poseidon that would hold off the forces of pastoral Persia. Feldman concludes that Thales saw "that water was a revolutionary leveler and the elemental factor determining the subsistence and business of the world" and "the common channel of states."
Feldman considers Thales' environment and holds that Thales would have seen tears, sweat, and blood as granting value to a person's work and the means how life giving commodities travelled (whether on bodies of water or through the sweat of slaves and pack-animals). He would have seen that minerals could be processed from water such as life-sustaining salt and gold taken from rivers. He would’ve seen fish and other food stuffs gathered from it. Feldman points out that Thales held that the lodestone was alive as it drew metals to itself. He holds that Thales "living ever in sight of his beloved sea" would see water seem to draw all "traffic in wine and oil, milk and honey, juices and dyes" to itself, leading him to "a vision of the universe melting into a single substance that was valueless in itself and still the source of wealth." Feldman concludes that for Thales "...water united all things. The social significance of water in the time of Thales induced him to discern through hardware and dry-goods, through soil and sperm, blood, sweat and tears, one fundamental fluid stuff...water, the most commonplace and powerful material known to him." This combined with his contemporary's idea of "spontaneous generation" allow us to see how Thales could hold that water could be divine and creative.
Feldman points to the lasting association of the theory that "all whatness is wetness" with Thales himself, pointing out that Diogenes Laërtius speaks of a poem, probably a satire, where Thales is snatched to heaven by the sun.
In the West, Thales represents a new kind of inquiring community as well. Edmund Husserl attempts to capture the new movement as follows. Philosophical man is a "new cultural configuration" based in stepping back from "pregiven tradition" and taking up a rational "inquiry into what is true in itself;" that is, an ideal of truth. It begins with isolated individuals such as Thales, but they are supported and cooperated with as time goes on. Finally the ideal transforms the norms of society, leaping across national borders.
The term "Pre-Socratic" derives ultimately from the philosopher Aristotle, who distinguished the early philosophers as concerning themselves with substance.
Diogenes Laërtius on the other hand took a strictly geographic and ethnic approach. Philosophers were either Ionian or Italian. He used "Ionian" in a broader sense, including also the Athenian academics, who were not Pre-Socratics. From a philosophic point of view, any grouping at all would have been just as effective. There is no basis for an Ionian or Italian unity. Some scholars, however, concede to Diogenes' scheme as far as referring to an "Ionian" school. There was no such school in any sense.
The most popular approach refers to a Milesian school, which is more justifiable socially and philosophically. They sought for the substance of phenomena and may have studied with each other. Some ancient writers qualify them as Milesioi, "of Miletus."
Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander's more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.
Many philosophers followed Thales' lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy rather than of myth or of religion.
Looking specifically at Thales' influence during the pre-Socratic era, it is clear that he stood out as one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of "logos" than "mythos". The difference between these two more profound ways of seeing the world is that "mythos" is concentrated around the stories of holy origin, while "logos" is concentrated around the argumentation. When the mythical man wants to explain the world the way he sees it, he explains it based on gods and powers. Mythical thought does not differentiate between things and persons and furthermore it does not differentiate between nature and culture. The way a "logos" thinker would present a world view is radically different from the way of the mythical thinker. In its concrete form, "logos" is a way of thinking not only about individualism, but also the abstract. Furthermore, it focuses on sensible and continuous argumentation. This lays the foundation of philosophy and its way of explaining the world in terms of abstract argumentation, and not in the way of gods and mythical stories.
Because of Thales' elevated status in Greek culture an intense interest and admiration followed his reputation. Due to this following, the oral stories about his life were open to amplification and historical fabrication, even before they were written down generations later. Most modern dissension comes from trying to interpret what we know, in particular, distinguishing legend from fact.
Historian D.R. Dicks and other historians divide the ancient sources about Thales into those before 320 BC and those after that year (some such as Proclus writing in the 5th century C.E. and Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th century C.E. writing nearly a millennium after his era). The first category includes Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Theophrastus among others. The second category includes Plautus, Aetius, Eusebius, Plutarch, Josephus, Iamblichus, Diogenes Laërtius, Theon of Smyrna, Apuleius, Clement of Alexandria, Pliny the Elder, and John Tzetzes among others.
The earliest sources on Thales (living before 320 BC) are often the same for the other Milesian philosophers (Anaximander, and Anaximenes). These sources were either roughly contemporaneous (such as Herodotus) or lived within a few hundred years of his passing. Moreover, they were writing from an oral tradition that was widespread and well known in the Greece of their day.
The latter sources on Thales are several "ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death" which include "anecdotes of varying degrees of plausibility" and in the opinion of some historians (such as D. R. Dicks) of "no historical worth whatsoever". Dicks points out that there is no agreement "among the 'authorities' even on the most fundamental facts of his life—e.g. whether he was a Milesian or a Phoenician, whether he left any writings or not, whether he was married or single-much less on the actual ideas and achievements with which he is credited."
Contrasting the work of the more ancient writers with those of the later, Dicks points out that in the works of the early writers Thales and the other men who would be hailed as "the Seven Sages of Greece" had a different reputation than that which would be assigned to them by later authors. Closer to their own era, Thales, Solon, Bias of Priene, Pittacus of Mytilene and others were hailed as "essentially practical men who played leading roles in the affairs of their respective states, and were far better known to the earlier Greeks as lawgivers and statesmen than as profound thinkers and philosophers." For example, Plato praises him (coupled with Anacharsis) for being the originator of the potter's wheel and the anchor.
Only in the writings of the second group of writers (working after 320 BC) do "we obtain the picture of Thales as the pioneer in Greek scientific thinking, particularly in regard to mathematics and astronomy which he is supposed to have learnt about in Babylonia and Egypt." Rather than "the earlier tradition [where] he is a favourite example of the intelligent man who possesses some technical 'know how'...the later doxographers [such as Dicaearchus in the latter half of the fourth century BC] foist on to him any number of discoveries and achievements, in order to build him up as a figure of superhuman wisdom."
Dicks points out a further problem arises in the surviving information on Thales, for rather than using ancient sources closer to the era of Thales, the authors in later antiquity ("epitomators, excerptors, and compilers") actually "preferred to use one or more intermediaries, so that what we actually read in them comes to us not even at second, but at third or fourth or fifth hand. ...Obviously this use of intermediate sources, copied and recopied from century to century, with each writer adding additional pieces of information of greater or less plausibility from his own knowledge, provided a fertile field for errors in transmission, wrong ascriptions, and fictitious attributions". Dicks points out that "certain doctrines that later commentators invented for Thales...were then accepted into the biographical tradition" being copied by subsequent writers who were then cited by those coming after them "and thus, because they may be repeated by different authors relying on different sources, may produce an illusory impression of genuineness."
Doubts even exist when considering the philosophical positions held to originate in Thales "in reality these stem directly from Aristotle's own interpretations which then became incorporated in the doxographical tradition as erroneous ascriptions to Thales". (The same treatment was given by Aristotle to Anaxagoras.)
Most philosophic analyses of the philosophy of Thales come from Aristotle, a professional philosopher, tutor of Alexander the Great, who wrote 200 years after Thales' death. Aristotle, judging from his surviving books, does not seem to have access to any works by Thales, although he probably had access to works of other authors about Thales, such as Herodotus, Hecataeus, Plato etc., as well as others whose work is now extinct. It was Aristotle's express goal to present Thales' work not because it was significant in itself, but as a prelude to his own work in natural philosophy. Geoffrey Kirk and John Raven, English compilers of the fragments of the Pre-Socratics, assert that Aristotle's "judgments are often distorted by his view of earlier philosophy as a stumbling progress toward the truth that Aristotle himself revealed in his physical doctrines." There was also an extensive oral tradition. Both the oral and the written were commonly read or known by all educated men in the region.
Aristotle's philosophy had a distinct stamp: it professed the theory of matter and form, which modern scholastics have dubbed hylomorphism. Though once very widespread, it was not generally adopted by rationalist and modern science, as it mainly is useful in metaphysical analyses, but does not lend itself to the detail that is of interest to modern science. It is not clear that the theory of matter and form existed as early as Thales, and if it did, whether Thales espoused it.
While some historians, like B. Snell, maintain that Aristotle was relying on a pre-Platonic written record by Hippias rather than oral tradition, this is a controversial position. Representing the scholarly consensus Dicks states that "the tradition about him even as early as the fifth century B.C., was evidently based entirely on hearsay...It would seem that already by Aristotle's time the early Ionians were largely names only to which popular tradition attached various ideas or achievements with greater or less plausibility". He points out that works confirmed to have existed in the sixth century BC by Anaximander and Xenophanes had already disappeared by the fourth century BC, so the chances of Pre-Socratic material surviving to the age of Aristotle is almost nil (even less likely for Aristotle's pupils Theophrastus and Eudemus and less likely still for those following after them).
The main secondary source concerning the details of Thales' life and career is Diogenes Laërtius, ""Lives of Eminent Philosophers"". This is primarily a biographical work, as the name indicates. Compared to Aristotle, Diogenes is not much of a philosopher. He is the one who, in the Prologue to that work, is responsible for the division of the early philosophers into "Ionian" and "Italian", but he places the Academics in the Ionian school and otherwise evidences considerable disarray and contradiction, especially in the long section on forerunners of the "Ionian School". Diogenes quotes two letters attributed to Thales, but Diogenes wrote some eight centuries after Thales' death and that his sources often contained "unreliable or even fabricated information", hence the concern for separating fact from legend in accounts of Thales.
It is due to this use of hearsay and a lack of citing original sources that leads some historians, like Dicks and Werner Jaeger, to look at the late origin of the traditional picture of Pre-Socratic philosophy and view the whole idea as a construct from a later age, "the whole picture that has come down to us of the history of early philosophy was fashioned during the two or three generations from Plato to the immediate pupils of Aristotle". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30072 |
Tiger
The tiger ("Panthera tigris") is the largest extant cat species and a member of the genus "Panthera". It is most recognisable for its dark vertical stripes on orange-brown fur with a lighter underside. It is an apex predator, primarily preying on ungulates such as deer and wild boar. It is territorial and generally a solitary but social predator, requiring large contiguous areas of habitat, which support its requirements for prey and rearing of its offspring. Tiger cubs stay with their mother for about two years, before they become independent and leave their mother's home range to establish their own.
The tiger once ranged widely from the Eastern Anatolia Region in the west to the Amur River basin, and in the south from the foothills of the Himalayas to Bali in the Sunda islands. Since the early 20th century, tiger populations have lost at least 93% of their historic range and have been extirpated in Western and Central Asia, from the islands of Java and Bali, and in large areas of Southeast and South Asia and China. Today's tiger range is fragmented, stretching from Siberian temperate forests to subtropical and tropical forests on the Indian subcontinent and Sumatra.
The tiger is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. As of 2015, the global wild tiger population was estimated to number between 3,062 and 3,948 mature individuals, down from around 100,000 at the start of the 20th century, with most remaining populations occurring in small pockets isolated from each other. Major reasons for population decline include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching. This, coupled with the fact that it lives in some of the more densely populated places on Earth, has caused significant conflicts with humans.
The tiger is among the most recognisable and popular of the world's charismatic megafauna. It featured prominently in ancient mythology and folklore and continues to be depicted in modern films and literature, appearing on many flags, coats of arms and as mascots for sporting teams. The tiger is the national animal of India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and South Korea.
The Middle English "tigre" and Old English "tigras" derive from Old French "tigre", from Latin "tigris".
This was a borrowing of Classical Greek τίγρις 'tigris', a foreign borrowing of unknown origin meaning 'tiger' as well as the river Tigris.
The origin may have been the Persian word "tigra" meaning 'pointed or sharp', and the Avestan word "tigrhi" 'arrow', perhaps referring to the speed of the tiger's leap, although these words are not known to have any meanings associated with tigers.
The generic name "Panthera" is derived from the Latin word "panthera", and the Ancient Greek word πάνθηρ 'panther'.
The Sanskrit word पाण्डर pāṇḍ-ara means 'pale yellow, whitish, white'.
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus described the tiger in his work "Systema Naturae" and gave it the scientific name "Felis tigris". In 1929, the British taxonomist Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated the species under the genus "Panthera" using the scientific name "Panthera tigris".
Following Linnaeus's first descriptions of the species, several tiger specimens were described and proposed as subspecies. The validity of several tiger subspecies was questioned in 1999. Most putative subspecies described in the 19th and 20th centuries were distinguished on basis of fur length and colouration, striping patterns and body size, hence characteristics that vary widely within populations. Morphologically, tigers from different regions vary little, and gene flow between populations in those regions is considered to have been possible during the Pleistocene. Therefore, it was proposed to recognize only two tiger subspecies as valid, namely "P. t. tigris" in mainland Asia, and "P. t. sondaica" in the Greater Sunda Islands.
Results of craniological analysis of 111 tiger skulls from Southeast Asian range countries indicate that Sumatran tiger skulls differ from Indochinese and Javan tiger skulls, whereas Bali tiger skulls are similar in size to Javan tiger skulls. The authors proposed to classify Sumatran and Javan tiger as distinct species, "P. sumatrae" and "P. sondaica" with Bali tiger as subspecies "P. sondaica balica".
In 2015, morphological, ecological and molecular traits of all putative tiger subspecies were analysed in a combined approach. Results support distinction of the two evolutionary groups continental and Sunda tigers. The authors proposed recognition of only two subspecies, namely "P. t. tigris" comprising the Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, South Chinese, Siberian and Caspian tiger populations, and "P. t. sondaica" comprising the Javan, Bali and Sumatran tiger populations. The authors also noted that this reclassification will affect tiger conservation management. The nominate subspecies "P. t. tigris" constitutes two clades:
One conservation specialist welcomed this proposal as it would make captive breeding programmes and future rewilding of zoo-born tigers easier. One geneticist was sceptical of this study and maintained that the currently recognised nine subspecies can be distinguished genetically.
In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and recognized the tiger populations in continental Asia as "P. t. tigris", and those in the Sunda Islands as "P. t. sondaica".
The following tables are based on the classification of the species "Panthera tigris" provided in "Mammal Species of the World". It also reflects the classification used by the Cat Classification Task Force in 2017:
A study published in 2018 was based on 32 tiger specimens using the whole-genome sequencing approach for analysis. Results support six monophyletic tiger clades corresponding with the living subspecies and indicate that the most recent common ancestor lived about 110,000 years ago.
The tiger's closest living relatives were previously thought to be the "Panthera" species lion, leopard and jaguar. Results of genetic analysis indicate that about 2.88 million years ago, the tiger and the snow leopard lineages diverged from the other "Panthera" species, and that both may be more closely related to each other than to the lion, leopard and jaguar.
The geographic origin of the "Panthera" is most likely northern Central Asia or the Holarctic region. The tiger–snow leopard lineage dispersed in Southeast Asia during the Miocene.
"Panthera zdanskyi" is considered to be a sister taxon of the modern tiger. It lived at the beginning of the Pleistocene about two million years ago, its fossil remains were excavated in Gansu province of northwestern China. It was smaller and more "primitive", but functionally and ecologically similar to the modern tiger. It is disputed as to whether it had the striping pattern. Northwestern China is thought to be the origin of the tiger lineage. Tigers grew in size, possibly in response to adaptive radiations of prey species like deer and bovids, which may have occurred in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene.
"Panthera tigris trinilensis" lived about 1.2 million years ago and is known from fossils excavated near Trinil in Java. The Wanhsien, Ngandong, Trinil and Japanese tigers became extinct in prehistoric times. Tigers reached India and northern Asia in the late Pleistocene, reaching eastern Beringia, Japan, and Sakhalin. Some fossil skulls are morphologically distinct from lion skulls, which could indicate tiger presence in Alaska during the last glacial period, about 100,000 years ago.
In the Philippine island of Palawan, two articulated phalanx bones were found amidst an assemblage of other animal bones and stone tools in Ille Cave near the village of New Ibajay. They were smaller than mainland tiger fossils, possibly due to insular dwarfism. Otherwise, it would appear that early humans had accumulated the bones, so it may be that the tiger parts were imported from elsewhere, or that the tiger colonised Palawan from Borneo before the Holocene, considering the proximity of the two islands. Fossil remains of tigers were also excavated in Sri Lanka, China, Japan and Sarawak (Malaysia) dating to the late Pliocene, Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The Bornean tiger was apparently present in Borneo between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, but whether it went extinct in prehistoric or recent times has not been resolved.
The potential tiger range during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene was predicted applying ecological niche modelling based on more than 500 tiger locality records combined with bioclimatic data. The resulting model shows a contiguous tiger range from southern India to Siberia at the Last Glacial Maximum, indicating an unobstructed gene flow between tiger populations in mainland Asia throughout the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. The tiger populations on the Sunda Islands and mainland Asia were possibly separated during interglacial periods. Results of a phylogeographic study indicate that all living tigers had a common ancestor 72,000–108,000 years ago. The tiger's full genome sequence was published in 2013. It was found to have similar repeat composition to other cat genomes and an appreciably conserved synteny.
Captive tigers were bred with lions to create hybrids called liger and tigon. They share physical and behavioural qualities of both parent species. Breeding hybrids is now discouraged due to the emphasis on conservation.
The liger is a cross between a male lion and a tigress. Ligers are typically between in length, and weigh between or more. Because the lion sire passes on a growth-promoting gene, but the corresponding growth-inhibiting gene from the female tiger is absent, ligers grow far larger than either parent species.
The less common tigon is a cross between a lioness and a male tiger. Because the male tiger does not pass on a growth-promoting gene and the lioness passes on a growth inhibiting gene, tigons are around the same size as their parents. Some females are fertile and have occasionally given birth to litigons when mated to a male Asiatic lion.
The tiger has a muscular body with powerful forelimbs, a large head and a tail that is about half the length of its body. Its pelage is dense and heavy, and colouration varies between shades of orange and brown with white ventral areas and distinctive vertical black stripes that are unique in each individual. Stripes are likely advantageous for camouflage in vegetation such as long grass with strong vertical patterns of light and shade. The tiger is one of only a few striped cat species; it is not known why spotted patterns and rosettes are the more common camouflage pattern among felids. The orangish colour may also aid in camouflage as the tiger's prey are dichromats, and thus may perceive the cat as green and blended in with the vegetation. A tiger's coat pattern is still visible when it is shaved. This is not due to skin pigmentation, but to the stubble and hair follicles embedded in the skin, similar to human beards (colloquially ), and is in common with other big cats. They have a mane-like heavy growth of fur around the neck and jaws and long whiskers, especially in males. The pupils are circular with yellow irises. The small, rounded ears have a prominent white spot on the back, surrounded by black. These spots are thought to play an important role in intraspecific communication.
The tiger's skull is similar to a lion's skull, with the frontal region usually less depressed or flattened, and a slightly longer postorbital region. The lion skull shows broader nasal openings. Due to the variation in skull sizes of the two species, the structure of the lower jaw is a reliable indicator for their identification. The tiger has fairly stout teeth; its somewhat curved canines are the longest among living felids with a crown height of up to .
There is a notable sexual dimorphism between male and female tigers, with the latter being consistently smaller. The size difference between them is proportionally greater in the large tiger subspecies, with males weighing up to 1.7 times more than females. Males also have wider forepaw pads, enabling sex to be identified from tracks. It has been hypothesised that body size of different tiger populations may be correlated with climate and be explained by thermoregulation and Bergmann's rule, or by distribution and size of available prey species.
Generally, males vary in total length from and weigh between with skull length ranging from . Females vary in total length from , weigh with skull length ranging from . In either sex, the tail represents about of the total length. The Bengal and Siberian tigers are amongst the tallest cats in shoulder height. They are also ranked among the biggest cats that have ever existed reaching weights of more than . The tigers of the Sunda islands are smaller and less heavy than tigers in mainland Asia, rarely exceeding in weight.
There are three colour variants — white, golden and stripeless snow white — that now rarely occur in the wild due to the reduction of wild tiger populations, but continue in captive populations. The white tiger has white fur and sepia brown stripes. The golden tiger has a pale golden pelage with a blond tone and reddish-brown stripes. The snow white tiger is a morph with extremely faint stripes and a pale reddish-brown ringed tail. Both snow white and golden tigers are homozygous for CORIN gene mutations. A black tiger is a colour variant due to pseudo-melanism. They have thick stripes close together so that the background colour is barely visible between stripes.
The white tiger lacks pheomelanin (which creates the orange colour), and has dark sepia-brown stripes and blue eyes. This altered pigmentation is caused by a mutant gene that is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait, which is determined by a white locus. It is not an albino, as the black pigments are scarcely affected. The mutation changes a single amino acid in the transporter protein SLC45A2. Both parents need to have the allele for whiteness to have white cubs.
Between the early and mid 20th century, white tigers were recorded and shot in the Indian states of Odisha, Bihar, Assam and in the area of Rewa, Madhya Pradesh. The local maharaja started breeding tigers in the early 1950s and kept a white male tiger together with its normal-coloured daughter; they had white cubs.
To preserve this recessive trait, only a few white individuals were used in captive breeding, which led to a high degree of inbreeding. Inbreeding depression is the main reason for many health problems of captive white tigers, including strabismus, stillbirth, deformities and premature death.
Other physical defects include cleft palate and scoliosis.
The Tiger Species Survival Plan has condemned the breeding of white tigers, alleging they are of mixed ancestry and of unknown lineage. The genes responsible for white colouration are represented by 0.001% of the population. The disproportionate growth in numbers of white tigers points to inbreeding among homozygous recessive individuals. This would lead to inbreeding depression and loss of genetic variability.
The tiger historically ranged from eastern Turkey and Transcaucasia to the coast of the Sea of Japan, and from South Asia across Southeast Asia to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali. Since the end of the last glacial period, it was probably restricted by periods of deep snow lasting longer than six months. Currently, it occurs in less than 6% of its historical range, as it has been extirpated from Southwest and Central Asia, large parts of Southeast and East Asia. It now mainly occurs in the Indian subcontinent, the Indochinese Peninsula, Sumatra and the Russian Far East. In China and Myanmar, breeding populations appear to rely on immigration from neighbouring countries while its status in the Korean Peninsula is unknown.
The tiger is essentially associated with forest habitats. Tiger populations thrive where populations of wild cervids, bovids and suids are stable.
Records in Central Asia indicate that it occurred foremost in Tugay riverine forests along the Atrek, Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Hari, Chu and Ili Rivers and their tributaries. In the Caucasus, it inhabited hilly and lowland forests.
Historical records in Iran are known only from the southern coast of the Caspian Sea and adjacent Alborz Mountains. In the Amur-Ussuri region, it inhabits Korean pine and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, where riparian forests provide food and water, and serve as dispersal corridors for both tiger and ungulates.
On the Indian subcontinent, it inhabits mainly tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, moist evergreen forests, tropical dry forests and the swamp forests of the Sundarbans. In the Eastern Himalayas, tigers were documented in subalpine forest up to an elevation of . In Thailand, it lives in deciduous and evergreen forests. In Laos, 14 tigers were documented in semi-evergreen and evergreen forest interspersed with grassland in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area during surveys from 2013 to 2017. In Sumatra, tiger populations range from lowland peat swamp forests to rugged montane forests.
When not subject to human disturbance, the tiger is mainly diurnal. It does not often climb trees but cases have been recorded. It is a strong swimmer and often bathes in ponds, lakes and rivers, thus keeping cool in the heat of the day. Individuals can cross rivers up to wide and can swim up to in a day. During the 1980s, a tiger was observed frequently hunting prey through deep lake water in Ranthambhore National Park.
The tiger is a long-ranging species, and individuals disperse over distances of up to to reach tiger populations in other areas. Radio-collared tigers in Chitwan National Park started dispersing from their natal areas earliest at the age of 19 months. Four females dispersed between , and 10 males between . None of them crossed open cultivated areas that were more than wide, but moved through forested habitat.
Adult tigers lead largely solitary lives. They establish and maintain territories but have much wider home ranges within which they roam. Resident adults of either sex generally confine their movements to their home ranges, within which they satisfy their needs and those of their growing cubs. Individuals sharing the same area are aware of each other's movements and activities. The size of the home range mainly depends on prey abundance, geographic area and sex of the individual. In India, home ranges appear to be while in Manchuria, they range from . In Nepal, defended territories are recorded to be for males and for females.
Young female tigers establish their first territories close to their mother's. The overlap between the female and her mother's territory reduces with time. Males, however, migrate further than their female counterparts and set out at a younger age to mark out their own area. A young male acquires territory either by seeking out an area devoid of other male tigers, or by living as a transient in another male's territory until he is older and strong enough to challenge the resident male. Young males seeking to establish themselves thereby comprise the highest mortality rate (30–35% per year) amongst adult tigers.
To identify his territory, the male marks trees by spraying urine and anal gland secretions, as well as marking trails with scat and marking trees or the ground with their claws. Females also use these "scrapes", as well as urine and scat markings. Scent markings of this type allow an individual to pick up information on another's identity, sex and reproductive status. Females in oestrus will signal their availability by scent marking more frequently and increasing their vocalisations.
Although for the most part avoiding each other, tigers are not always territorial and relationships between individuals can be complex. An adult of either sex will sometimes share its kill with others, even those who may not be related to them. George Schaller observed a male share a kill with two females and four cubs. Unlike male lions, male tigers allow females and cubs to feed on the kill before the male is finished with it; all involved generally seem to behave amicably, in contrast to the competitive behaviour shown by a lion pride. Stephen Mills described a social feeding event in Ranthambhore National Park:
Occasionally, male tigers participate in raising cubs, usually their own, but this is extremely rare and not always well understood. In May 2015, Amur tigers were photographed by camera traps in the Sikhote-Alin Bioshpere Reserve. The photos show a male Amur tiger pass by, followed by a female and three cubs within the span of about two minutes.
In Ranthambore, a male Bengal tiger raised and defended two orphaned female cubs after their mother had died of illness. The cubs remained under his care, he supplied them with food, protected them from his rival and sister, and apparently also trained them.
Male tigers are generally more intolerant of other males within their territories than females are of other females. Territory disputes are usually solved by displays of intimidation rather than outright aggression. Several such incidents have been observed in which the subordinate tiger yielded defeat by rolling onto its back and showing its belly in a submissive posture. Once dominance has been established, a male may tolerate a subordinate within his range, as long as they do not live in too close quarters. The most aggressive disputes tend to occur between two males when a female is in oestrus, and sometimes resulted in the death of one of the males.
Facial expressions include the "defense threat", where an individual bares its teeth, flattens its ears and its pupils enlarge. Both males and females show a flehmen response, a characteristic grimace, when sniffing urine markings, but flehmen is more often associated with males detecting the markings made by tigresses in oestrus. Like other "Panthera", tigers roar, particularly in aggressive situations, during the mating season or when making a kill. There are two different roars: the "true" roar is made using the hyoid apparatus and forced through an open mouth as it progressively closes, and the shorter, harsher "coughing" roar is made with the mouth open and teeth exposed. The "true" roar can be heard at up to away and is sometimes emitted three or four times in succession. When tense, tigers will moan, a sound similar to a roar but more subdued and made when the mouth is partially or completely closed. Moaning can be heard away. Chuffing—soft, low-frequency snorting similar to purring in smaller cats—is heard in more friendly situations. Other vocal communications include grunts, woofs, snarls, miaows, hisses and growls.
In the wild, tigers mostly feed on large and medium-sized mammals, particularly ungulates weighing . Range-wide, sambar deer, Manchurian wapiti, barasingha and wild boar are significantly preferred. Tigers are capable of taking down larger prey like adult gaur but will also opportunistically eat much smaller prey, such as monkeys, peafowl and other ground-based birds, hares, porcupines, and fish. They also prey on other predators, including dogs, leopards, pythons, bears, and crocodiles. Tigers generally do not prey on fully grown adult Asian elephants and Indian rhinoceros but incidents have been reported. More often, it is the more vulnerable small calves that are taken. When in close proximity to humans, tigers will also sometimes prey on such domestic livestock as cattle, horses, and donkeys. Although almost exclusively carnivorous, tigers will occasionally eat vegetation for dietary fibre such as fruit of the slow match tree.
Tigers are thought to be mainly nocturnal predators, but in areas where humans are absent, remote-controlled, hidden camera traps recorded them hunting in daylight. They generally hunt alone and ambush their prey as most other cats do, overpowering them from any angle, using their body size and strength to knock the prey off balance. Successful hunts usually require the tiger to almost simultaneously leap onto its quarry, knock it over, and grab the throat or nape with its teeth. Despite their large size, tigers can reach speeds of about but only in short bursts; consequently, tigers must be close to their prey before they break cover. If the prey catches wind of the tiger's presence before this, the tiger usually abandons the hunt rather than chase prey or battle it head-on. Horizontal leaps of up to have been reported, although leaps of around half this distance are more typical. One in 2 to 20 hunts, including stalking near potential prey, ends in a successful kill.
When hunting larger animals, tigers prefer to bite the throat and use their powerful forelimbs to hold onto the prey, often simultaneously wrestling it to the ground. The tiger remains latched onto the neck until its target dies of strangulation. By this method, gaurs and water buffaloes weighing over a ton have been killed by tigers weighing about a sixth as much. Although they can kill healthy adults, tigers often select the calves or infirm of very large species. Healthy adult prey of this type can be dangerous to tackle, as long, strong horns, legs and tusks are all potentially fatal to the tiger. No other extant land predator routinely takes on prey this large on its own.
With smaller prey, such as monkeys and hares, the tiger bites the nape, often breaking the spinal cord, piercing the windpipe, or severing the jugular vein or common carotid artery. Though rarely observed, some tigers have been recorded to kill prey by swiping with their paws, which are powerful enough to smash the skulls of domestic cattle, and break the backs of sloth bears.
After killing their prey, tigers sometimes drag it to conceal it in vegetative cover, usually pulling it by grasping with their mouths at the site of the killing bite. This, too, can require great physical strength. In one case, after it had killed an adult gaur, a tiger was observed to drag the massive carcass over a distance of . When 13 men simultaneously tried to drag the same carcass later, they were unable to move it. An adult tiger can go for up to two weeks without eating, then gorge on of flesh at one time. In captivity, adult tigers are fed of meat a day.
Tigers usually prefer to eat prey they have caught themselves, but may eat carrion in times of scarcity and may even pirate prey from other large carnivores. Although predators typically avoid one another, if a prey item is under dispute or a serious competitor is encountered, displays of aggression are common. If these are not sufficient, the conflicts may turn violent; tigers may kill competitors as leopards, dholes, striped hyenas, wolves, bears, pythons, and crocodiles on occasion. Tigers may also prey on these competitors. Attacks on smaller predators, such as badgers, lynxes, and foxes, are almost certainly predatory. Crocodiles, bears, and large packs of dholes may win conflicts against tigers and, in the cases of crocodiles and bears, even can kill them.
The considerably smaller leopard avoids competition from tigers by hunting at different times of the day and hunting different prey. In India's Nagarhole National Park, most prey selected by leopards were from against a preference for prey weighing over in the tigers. The average prey weight in the two respective big cats in India was against . With relatively abundant prey, tigers and leopards were seen to successfully coexist without competitive exclusion or interspecies dominance hierarchies that may be more common to the African savanna, where the leopard exists with the lion. Golden jackals may feed on the tiger's kills. Tigers appear to inhabit the deep parts of a forest while smaller predators like leopards and dholes are pushed closer to the fringes.
The tiger mates all year round, but most cubs are born between March and June, with a second peak in September. Gestation ranges from 93 to 114 days, with an average of 103 to 105 days. A female is only receptive for three to six days. Mating is frequent and noisy during that time. The female gives birth in a sheltered location such as in tall grass, in a dense thicket, cave or rocky crevice. The father generally takes no part in rearing. Litters consist of two or three cubs, rarely as many as six. Cubs weigh from each at birth, and are born with eyes closed. They open their eyes when they are six to 14 days old. Their milk teeth break through at the age of about two weeks. They start to eat meat at the age of eight weeks. At around this time, females usually shift them to a new den. They make short ventures with their mother, although they do not travel with her as she roams her territory until they are older. Females lactate for five to six months. Around the time they are weaned, they start to accompany their mother on territorial walks and are taught how to hunt.
A dominant cub emerges in most litters, usually a male. The dominant cub is more active than its siblings and takes the lead in their play, eventually leaving its mother and becoming independent earlier. The cubs start hunting on their own earliest at the age of 11 months, and become independent around 18 to 20 months of age. They separate from their mother at the age of two to two and a half years, but continue to grow until the age of five years. Young females reach sexual maturity at three to four years, whereas males at four to five years. Unrelated wandering male tigers often kill cubs to make the female receptive, since the tigress may give birth to another litter within five months if the cubs of the previous litter are lost. The mortality rate of tiger cubs is about 50% in the first two years. Few other predators attack tiger cubs due to the diligence and ferocity of the mother. Apart from humans and other tigers, common causes of cub mortality are starvation, freezing, and accidents. Generation length of the tiger is about eight years.
The oldest recorded captive tiger lived for 26 years.
In the 1990s, a new approach to tiger conservation was developed: Tiger Conservation Units (TCUs), which are blocks of habitat that have the potential to host tiger populations in 15 habitat types within five bioregions. Altogether 143 TCUs were identified and prioritized based on size and integrity of habitat, poaching pressure and population status. They range in size from .
In 2016, an estimate of a global wild tiger population of approximately 3,890 individuals was presented during the Third Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation. The WWF subsequently declared that the world's count of wild tigers had risen for the first time in a century.
Major threats to the tiger include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and poaching for fur and body parts, which have simultaneously greatly reduced tiger populations in the wild. In India, only 11% of the historical tiger habitat remains due to habitat fragmentation. Demand for tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine has also been cited as a major threat to tiger populations. At the start of the 20th century, it was estimated there were over 100,000 tigers in the wild, but the population has dwindled outside of captivity to between 1,500 and 3,500. Some estimates suggest that there are fewer than 2,500 mature breeding individuals, with no subpopulation containing more than 250 mature breeding individuals. The global wild tiger population was estimated by the World Wide Fund for Nature at 3,200 in 2011 and 3,890 in 2015—"Vox" reported that this was the first increase in a century.
India is home to the world's largest population of wild tigers. A 2014 census estimated a population of 2,226, a 30% increase since 2011. On International Tiger Day 2019, the 'Tiger Estimation Report 2018’ was released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report estimates a population of 2967 tigers in India with 25% increase since 2014. Modi said "India is one of the safest habitats for tigers as it has achieved the target of doubling the tiger population from 1411 in 2011 to 2967 in 2019".
In 1973, India's "Project Tiger", started by Indira Gandhi, established numerous tiger reserves. The project was credited with tripling the number of wild Bengal tigers from some 1,200 in 1973 to over 3,500 in the 1990s, but a 2007 census showed that numbers had dropped back to about 1,400 tigers because of poaching. Following the report, the Indian government pledged $153 million to the initiative, set up measures to combat poaching, promised funds to relocate up to 200,000 villagers in order to reduce human-tiger interactions, and set up eight new tiger reserves. India also reintroduced tigers to the Sariska Tiger Reserve and by 2009 it was claimed that poaching had been effectively countered at Ranthambore National Park.
In the 1940s, the Siberian tiger was on the brink of extinction with only about 40 animals remaining in the wild in Russia. As a result, anti-poaching controls were put in place by the Soviet Union and a network of protected zones (zapovedniks) were instituted, leading to a rise in the population to several hundred. Poaching again became a problem in the 1990s, when the economy of Russia collapsed. The major obstacle in preserving the species is the enormous territory individual tigers require (up to 450 km2 needed by a single female and more for a single male). Current conservation efforts are led by local governments and NGO's in concert with international organisations, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The competitive exclusion of wolves by tigers has been used by Russian conservationists to convince hunters to tolerate the big cats. Tigers have less impact on ungulate populations than do wolves, and are effective in controlling the latter's numbers. In 2005, there were thought to be about 360 animals in Russia, though these exhibited little genetic diversity. However, in a decade later, the Siberian tiger census was estimated from 480 to 540 individuals.
In China, tigers became the target of large-scale ‘anti-pest’ campaigns in the early 1950s, where suitable habitats were fragmented following deforestation and resettlement of people to rural areas, who hunted tigers and prey species. Though tiger hunting was prohibited in 1977, the population continued to decline and is considered extinct in southern China since 2001. In northeastern China's Hunchun National Nature Reserve, camera-traps recorded a tiger with four cubs for the first time in 2012. During subsequent surveys, between 27 and 34 tigers were documented along the China–Russia border. Having earlier rejected the Western-led environmentalist movement, China changed its stance in the 1980s and became a party to the CITES treaty. By 1993 it had banned the trade in tiger parts, and this diminished the use of tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine. The Tibetan people's trade in tiger skins has also been a threat to tigers. The pelts were used in clothing, tiger-skin "chuba" being worn as fashion. In 2006 the 14th Dalai Lama was persuaded to take up the issue. Since then there has been a change of attitude, with some Tibetans publicly burning their chubas.
In 1994, the Indonesian Sumatran Tiger Conservation Strategy addressed the potential crisis that tigers faced in Sumatra. The Sumatran Tiger Project (STP) was initiated in June 1995 in and around the Way Kambas National Park in order to ensure the long-term viability of wild Sumatran tigers and to accumulate data on tiger life-history characteristics vital for the management of wild populations. By August 1999, the teams of the STP had evaluated 52 sites of potential tiger habitat in Lampung Province, of which only 15 these were intact enough to contain tigers. In the framework of the STP a community-based conservation programme was initiated to document the tiger-human dimension in the park in order to enable conservation authorities to resolve tiger-human conflicts based on a comprehensive database rather than anecdotes and opinions.
The Wildlife Conservation Society and Panthera Corporation formed the collaboration "Tigers Forever", with field sites including the world's largest tiger reserve, the Hukaung Valley in Myanmar. Other reserves were in the Western Ghats in India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Russian Far East covering in total about .
Tigers have been studied in the wild using a variety of techniques. Tiger population have been estimated using plaster casts of their pugmarks, although this method was criticized as being inaccurate. More recent techniques include the use of camera traps and studies of DNA from tiger scat, while radio-collaring has been used to track tigers in the wild. Tiger spray has been found to be just as good, or better, as a source of DNA than scat.
The tiger has been one of the big five game animals of Asia. Tiger hunting took place on a large scale in the early 19th and 20th centuries, being a recognised and admired sport by the British in colonial India as well as the maharajas and aristocratic class of the erstwhile princely states of pre-independence India. A single maharaja or English hunter could claim to kill over a hundred tigers in their hunting career. Tiger hunting was done by some hunters on foot; others sat up on "machans" with a goat or buffalo tied out as bait; yet others on elephant-back.
Historically, tigers have been hunted at a large scale so their famous striped skins could be collected. The trade in tiger skins peaked in the 1960s, just before international conservation efforts took effect. By 1977, a tiger skin in an English market was considered to be worth US$4,250.
Tiger parts are commonly used as amulets in South and Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, the fossils in Palawan were found besides stone tools. This, besides the evidence for cuts on the bones, and the use of fire, suggests that early humans had accumulated the bones, and the condition of the tiger subfossils, dated to approximately 12,000 to 9,000 years ago, differed from other fossils in the assemblage, dated to the Upper Paleolithic. The tiger subfossils showed longitudinal fracture of the cortical bone due to weathering, which suggests that they had post-mortem been exposed to light and air. Tiger canines were found in Ambangan sites dating to the 10th to 12th centuries in Butuan, Mindanao.
Many people in China and other parts of Asia have a belief that various tiger parts have medicinal properties, including as pain killers and aphrodisiacs. There is no scientific evidence to support these beliefs. The use of tiger parts in pharmaceutical drugs in China is already banned, and the government has made some offences in connection with tiger poaching punishable by death. Furthermore, all trade in tiger parts is illegal under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and a domestic trade ban has been in place in China since 1993.
However, the trading of tiger parts in Asia has become a major black market industry and governmental and conservation attempts to stop it have been ineffective to date. Almost all black marketers engaged in the trade are based in China and have either been shipped and sold within in their own country or into Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. The Chinese subspecies was almost completely decimated by killing for commerce due to both the parts and skin trades in the 1950s through the 1970s. Contributing to the illegal trade, there are a number of tiger farms in the country specialising in breeding the cats for profit. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 captive-bred, semi-tame animals live in these farms today. However, many tigers for traditional medicine black market are wild ones shot or snared by poachers and may be caught anywhere in the tiger's remaining range (from Siberia to India to the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra). In the Asian black market, a tiger penis can be worth the equivalent of around $300 U.S. dollars. In the years of 1990 through 1992, 27 million products with tiger derivatives were found. In July 2014 at an international convention on endangered species in Geneva, Switzerland, a Chinese representative admitted for the first time his government was aware trading in tiger skins was occurring in China.
Wild tigers that have had no prior contact with humans actively avoid interactions with humans. However, tigers cause more human deaths through direct attack than any other wild mammal. Attacks are occasionally provoked, as tigers lash out after being injured while they themselves are hunted. Attacks can be provoked accidentally, as when a human surprises a tiger or inadvertently comes between a mother and her young, or as in a case in rural India when a postman startled a tiger, used to seeing him on foot, by riding a bicycle. Occasionally tigers come to view people as prey. Such attacks are most common in areas where population growth, logging, and farming have put pressure on tiger habitats and reduced their wild prey. Most man-eating tigers are old, missing teeth, and unable to capture their preferred prey. For example, the Champawat Tiger, a tigress found in Nepal and then India, had two broken canines. She was responsible for an estimated 430 human deaths, the most attacks known to be perpetrated by a single wild animal, by the time she was shot in 1907 by Jim Corbett. According to Corbett, tiger attacks on humans are normally in daytime, when people are working outdoors and are not keeping watch. Early writings tend to describe man-eating tigers as cowardly because of their ambush tactics.
Man-eaters have been a particular problem in recent decades in India and Bangladesh, especially in Kumaon, Garhwal and the Sundarbans mangrove swamps of Bengal, where some healthy tigers have hunted humans. Because of rapid habitat loss attributed to climate change, tiger attacks have increased in the Sundarbans. The Sundarbans area had 129 human deaths from tigers from 1969 to 1971. In the 10 years prior to that period, about 100 attacks per year in the Sundarbans, with a high of around 430 in some years of the 1960s. Unusually, in some years in the Sundarbans, more humans are killed by tigers than vice versa. In 1972, India's production of honey and beeswax dropped by 50% when at least 29 people who gathered these materials were devoured. In 1986 in the Sundarbans, since tigers almost always attack from the rear, masks with human faces were worn on the back of the head, on the theory that tigers usually do not attack if seen by their prey. This decreased the number of attacks only temporarily. All other means to prevent attacks, such as providing more prey or using electrified human dummies, did not work as well.
In Ancient Roman times, tigers were kept in menageries and amphitheatres to be exhibited, trained and paraded, and were often provoked to fight humans and exotic beasts. Since the 17th century, tigers, being rare and ferocious, were sought after to keep at European castles as symbols of their owners' power. Tigers became central zoo and circus exhibits in the 18th century: a tiger could cost up to 4,000 francs in France (for comparison, a professor of the Beaux-Arts at Lyons earned only 3,000 francs a year), or up to $3,500 in the United States, where a lion cost no more than $1,000.
In 2007, over 4,000 captive tigers lived in China, of which 3,000 were held by about 20 larger facilities, with the rest held by some 200 smaller facilities. In 2011, 468 facilities in the USA kept 2,884 tigers. Nineteen US states banned private ownership of tigers, fifteen require a license, and sixteen states have no regulation. Genetic ancestry of 105 captive tigers from fourteen countries and regions showed that forty-nine animals belonged distinctly to five subspecies; fifty-two animals had mixed subspecies origins. Many Siberian tigers in zoos today are actually the result of crosses with Bengal tigers."
Tigers and their superlative qualities have been a source of fascination for mankind since ancient times, and they are routinely visible as important cultural and media motifs. They are also considered one of the charismatic megafauna, and are used as the face of conservation campaigns worldwide. In a 2004 online poll conducted by cable television channel Animal Planet, involving more than 50,000 viewers from 73 countries, the tiger was voted the world's favourite animal with 21% of the vote, narrowly beating the dog.
In Chinese myth and culture, the tiger is one of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Chinese art, the tiger is depicted as an earth symbol and equal rival of the Chinese dragon – the two representing matter and spirit respectively. The Southern Chinese martial art Hung Ga is based on the movements of the tiger and the crane. In Imperial China, a tiger was the personification of war and often represented the highest army general (or present day defense secretary), while the emperor and empress were represented by a dragon and phoenix, respectively. The White Tiger () is one of the Four Symbols of the Chinese constellations. It is sometimes called the White Tiger of the West (), and it represents the west and the autumn season.
The tiger's tail appears in stories from countries including China and Korea, it being generally inadvisable to grasp a tiger by the tail. In Korean myth and culture, the tiger is regarded as a guardian that drives away evil spirits and a sacred creature that brings good luck – the symbol of courage and absolute power. For the people who live in and around the forests of Korea, the tiger considered the symbol of the Mountain Spirit or King of mountain animals. So, Koreans also called the tigers "San Gun" (산군) means Mountain Lord.
In Buddhism, the tiger is one of the Three Senseless Creatures, symbolising anger, with the monkey representing greed and the deer lovesickness. The Tungusic peoples considered the Siberian tiger a near-deity and often referred to it as "Grandfather" or "Old man". The Udege and Nanai called it "Amba". The Manchu considered the Siberian tiger as "Hu Lin," the king. In Hinduism, the god Shiva wears and sits on tiger skin. The ten-armed warrior goddess Durga rides the tigress (or lioness) Damon into battle. In southern India the god Ayyappan was associated with a tiger. In Greco-Roman tradition, the tiger was depicted being ridden by the god Dionysus.
The weretiger replaces the werewolf in shapeshifting folklore in Asia; in India they were evil sorcerers, while in Indonesia and Malaysia they were somewhat more benign. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the tiger is fiercer and more ruthless than the lion.
In William Blake's poem in his "Songs of Experience" (1794), titled "The Tyger", the tiger is a menacing and fearful animal. In Yann Martel's 2001 Man Booker Prize winning novel "Life of Pi", the protagonist, surviving shipwreck for months in a small boat, somehow avoids being eaten by the other survivor, a large Bengal tiger. The story was adapted in Ang Lee's 2012 feature film of the same name. Jim Corbett's 1944 "Man-Eaters of Kumaon" tells ten true stories of his tiger-hunting exploits in what is now the northern Uttarakhand region of India. The book has sold over four million copies, and has been the basis of both fictional and documentary films. In Rudyard Kipling's 1894 "The Jungle Book", the tiger, Shere Khan, is the mortal enemy of the human protagonist, Mowgli. More benign tiger characters include Tigger in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and Hobbes of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes", both of whom are represented as simply stuffed animals come to life.
Tigers are also mascots for various sports teams around the world. Tony the Tiger is a famous mascot for Kellogg's breakfast cereal Frosted Flakes. The Esso (Exxon) brand of petrol was advertised from 1959 onwards with the slogan 'put a tiger in your tank', and a tiger mascot; more than 2.5 million synthetic tiger tails were sold to motorists, who tied them to their petrol tank caps.
The tiger is one of the animals displayed on the Pashupati seal of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The tiger was the emblem of the Chola Dynasty and was depicted on coins, seals and banners. The seals of several Chola copper coins show the tiger, the Pandyan emblem fish and the Chera emblem bow, indicating that the Cholas had achieved political supremacy over the latter two dynasties. Gold coins found in Kavilayadavalli in the Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh have motifs of the tiger, bow and some indistinct marks. The tiger symbol of Chola Empire was later adopted by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the tiger became a symbol of the unrecognised state of Tamil Eelam and Tamil independence movement. The Bengal tiger is the national animal of India and Bangladesh. The Malaysian tiger is the national animal of Malaysia. The Siberian tiger is the national animal of South Korea.
The tyger, a depiction of tigers as they were understood by European artists, is among the creatures used in charges and supporters in European heraldry. This creature has several notable differences from real tigers, including absent stripes, a leonine tufted tail, and a head terminating in large, pointed jaws. A more realistic version of the tiger entered the heraldic armory through the British Empire's expansion into Asia, and is referred to as the Bengal tiger to distinguish it from its older counterpart. The Bengal tiger is not a very common creature in heraldry, but is present as a supporter in the arms of Bombay and emblazoned on the shield of the University of Madras. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30075 |
Talk radio
Talk radio is a radio format containing discussion about topical issues and consisting entirely or almost entirely of original spoken word content rather than outside music. Most shows are regularly hosted by a single individual, and often feature interviews with a number of different guests. Talk radio typically includes an element of listener participation, usually by broadcasting live conversations between the host and listeners who "call in" (usually via telephone) to the show. Listener contributions are usually screened by a show's producers in order to maximize audience interest and, in the case of commercial talk radio, to attract advertisers. Generally, the shows are organized into segments, each separated by a pause for advertisements; however, in public or non-commercial radio, music is sometimes played in place of commercials to separate the program segments. Variations of talk radio include conservative talk, hot talk, liberal talk (increasingly known as progressive talk) and sports talk.
While talk radio has historically been associated with broadcast radio, starting around 2005 the technology for Internet-based talk-radio shows became cost effective in the form of live Internet website streaming and podcasts. Now, it is possible for an individual to use a variety of services to host an Internet-based talk-radio show without carriage by a traditional radio station. In addition, TV programming from talk and news outlets such as BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Fox is now often available expanding the world of talk radio further. Talk radio listening is enjoyed not only on radios, but a wide variety of other devices and services including PCs using iTunes, station directories such as TuneIn, show directory smartphones with apps such as Stitcher and time-shifting services like DAR.fm.
Talk radio is not limited to the AM band. "Non-commercial", usually referred to as "public radio", which is mainly located in a reserved spectrum of the FM band, also broadcasts talk programs. Commercial all-talk stations can also be found on the FM band in many cities across the US. These shows often rely less on political discussion and analysis than their AM counterparts, and often employ the use of pranks and "bits" for entertainment purposes. In the United States and Canada, satellite radio services offer uncensored "free-wheeling" original programming. ABC News & Talk is an example of "repackaging" for the digital airwaves shows featured on their terrestrial radio stations.
Expressing and debating political opinions has been a staple of radio since the medium's infancy. Aimee Semple McPherson began her radio broadcasts in the early 1920s and even purchased her own station, KFSG which went on the air in February 1924; by the mid-1930s, controversial radio priest Father Charles Coughlin's radio broadcasts were reaching millions per week. There was also a national current events forum called America's Town Meeting of the Air which broadcast once a week starting in 1935. It featured panel discussions from some of the biggest newsmakers and was among the first shows to allow audience participation: members of the studio audience could question the guests or even heckle them.
Talk radio as a listener-participation format has existed since the 1930s. John J. Anthony (1902-70) was an announcer and DJ on New York's WMRJ. It was located in the Merrick Radio Store at 12 New York Boulevard in Jamaica, Long Island. After some marital troubles, refusing to pay alimony and child support, he sought professional help and began his own radio series where listeners would call in with their problems in 1930. Radio historians consider this the first instance of talk radio.
While working for New York's WMCA in 1945, Barry Gray was bored with playing music and put a telephone receiver up to his microphone to talk with bandleader Woody Herman. This was soon followed by listener call-ins and Gray is often billed as "the hot mama of talk radio". Herb Jepko was another pioneer.
Author Bill Cherry proposed George Roy Clough as the first to invite listeners to argue politics on a call-in radio show at KLUF, his station in Galveston, Texas, as a way to bring his own political views into listeners' homes. (He later became Mayor of Galveston.) Cherry gives no specific date, but the context of events and history of the station would seem to place it also in the 1940s, perhaps earlier. The format was the classic mode in which the announcer gave the topic for that day, and listeners called in to debate the issue.
In 1948 Alan Courtney — New York disk jockey and co-composer of the popular song "Joltin' Joe Dimaggio" — began a call-in program for the Storer station in Miami, Florida (WGBS) and then on Miami's WQAM, WINZ and WCKR. The "Alan Courtney Open Phone Forum" flourished as an avowedly conservative and anti-communist political forum with a coverage area over the Southeastern U.S. and Cuba.
Joe Pyne, John Nebel, Jean Shepherd, and Jerry Williams (WMEX-Boston) were among the first to explore the medium in the 1950s.
A major breakthrough in talk radio occurred in 1960 at KLAC in Los Angeles. Alan Henry, a broadcaster in his early thirties, had been hired by John Kluge, president of Metromedia in 1963. Henry had previously worked in such diverse markets as Miami, Florida; Waterloo, Iowa; Hartford, Connecticut; and St. Louis, Missouri. KLAC was dead last in the ratings but Kluge wanted a big Metromedia presence in Los Angeles. He sent Henry from New York to Los Angeles to turn KLAC into a success. The first thing that Henry did was hire the legendary morning team of Lohman and Barkley. Henry had built a strong relationship with programmer Jim Lightfoot, who had joined Henry in Miami. A unique opportunity presented itself when Joe Pyne, who had begun his career as a radio talk personality in Pennsylvania, was fired by KABC in Los Angeles. Speculation was that Pyne was too controversial and confrontational for the ABC corporate culture. Henry hired Pyne on the spot and paid him $25,000 a year, which was then a huge salary for a radio personality. Pyne was given the night show on KLAC. Part of the agreement with Pyne was that Henry and Lightfoot would give him broad control of his program content.
The show was an immediate success. Henry encouraged the confrontation with listeners and guests for which Pyne became famous. Pyne coined the line "Go gargle with razor blades," for guests with whom he disagreed. The Pyne show was the beginning of the confrontational talk format that later spread across the radio spectrum. At one point in the 1960s the Joe Pyne show was syndicated on over 250 radio stations in the United States.
In an odd turn of events, Pyne's radio show led him to television. Henry suggested to John Kluge that Joe Pyne should be put on Metromedia's newly acquired TV station in Los Angeles, KTTV-TV. Kluge told Henry to speak to KTTV-TV general manager Al Kriven, but Henry had already done that, and Kriven had adamantly refused. Kluge telephoned Kriven, and Pyne soon became the nation's first controversial late-night talk television host. "The Joe Pyne Show" on KTTV-TV quickly shot to the top of the ratings. The format later proliferated on cable television with a variety of new hosts, many of them taking on a similar persona to Joe Pyne. Joe Pyne and Alan Henry were major factors in establishing a new trend in radio and television programming. Alan Henry elaborates on the launching of Joe Pyne on KLAC radio and KTTV-TV in his memoir "A Man and His Medium".
Two radio stations—KMOX, 1120 AM in St. Louis, Missouri, and KABC, 790 AM in Los Angeles—adopted an all-talk show format in 1960, and both claim to be the first to have done so. KABC station manager Ben Hoberman and KMOX station manager Robert Hyland independently developed the all-talk format. KTKK, 630 AM in Salt Lake City, then known as KSXX, adopted a full-time talk schedule in 1965 and is the third station in the country to have done so. KSXX started with all local talent, and KTKK, which now airs on 1640 AM, has a larger portion of its schedule featuring local talent than most other stations that run a full schedule of talk.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, as many listeners abandoned AM music formats for the high fidelity sound of FM radio, the talk radio format began to catch on in more large cities. Former music stations such as KLIF (Dallas, Texas), WLW (Cincinnati, Ohio), WHAS (Louisville, Kentucky), WHAM (Rochester, New York), WLS (Chicago, Illinois), KFI (Los Angeles, California), WRKO (Boston, Massachusetts), WKBW (Buffalo, New York), and WABC (New York, New York) made the switch to all-talk as their ratings slumped due to listener migration to the FM band. Since the turn of the 21st century, with many music listeners now migrating to digital platforms such as Pandora Radio, Sirius XM Radio, and the numerous variations of the iPod, talk radio has been expanding on the FM side of the dial as well.
"Hot talk", also called "FM talk" or "shock talk", is a talk radio format geared predominantly to a male demographic between the ages of 18–49. The subject matter generally consists of subjects pertaining to pop culture rather than the political talk found on AM radio. Hosts of hot talk shows are usually known as shock jocks.
Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia - 2015) has a select few hot talk stations under the moniker "Real Radio", while CBS Radio once had a larger chain of hot talkers known as Free FM, though the brand was abandoned after a post-Howard Stern attempt to network the format failed within a year. It is usually found on FM radio active rock, classic rock, and country stations in morning drive, as the actual hot talk formatted stations have only achieved mediocre success as a whole compared to AM or conservative talk radio, or even FM music radio.
In March 2018, CBS Radio's corporate successor Entercom attempted a hot talk format in San Diego with KEGY "97.3 The Machine". It featured a weekday lineup devoted to hot talk programs, San Diego Padres coverage, and blocks of classic rock interspersed with comedy bits during off-peak hours. However, the station attracted controversy later that month, when an advertisement for the station's forthcoming morning show "Kevin Klein Live" (which invited listeners to "jump ... to a new morning show", accompanied by a picture of the Coronado Bridge) was criticized for glorifying suicide by bridge jumping. The ensuing controversy prompted the Padres to scrutinize KEGY's direction; executive Ron Fowler voiced concerns over the team being associated with KEGY's "shock jock" content, threatening to possibly cut ties with the station and Entercom. Kevin Klein's program never premiered, and the hot talk format was ultimately dropped on April 12, 2018, in favor of a conventional sports format.
More recently the genre has been showing up on satellite radio and podcasting, media that are beyond the reach of the FCC's obscenity rules, allowing the hosts of such shows to be as vulgar and outrageous as they desire. Advertising tends to be more limited on these media, because of reliance on subscription revenues (in the case of satellite) and smaller audience and fewer connections to advertisers (in the case of Internet-only shows, which usually lack the full sales departments of terrestrial and satellite broadcasters).
Other U.S. hosts specialize in talk radio comedy, such as Phil Hendrie, who voices his own fictional guests and occasionally does parodies of other programs.
The United States saw dramatic growth in the popularity of talk radio during the 1990s due to the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission's post-war Fairness Doctrine of 1949, in 1987. The mandate of the Fairness Doctrine was to require that audiences were exposed to a diversity of viewpoints.
It had required the holders of broadcast licenses to "present controversial issues of public importance" and to do so in a manner that was, in the commission's view, "honest, equitable and balanced". Its repeal provided an opportunity for a kind of partisan political programming with commercial appeal that had not previously existed.
The most successful pioneer in the early 1990s' talk radio movement in the US was the politically conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh's success demonstrated that there was a nationwide market for passionately delivered conservative polemic on contemporary news, events, and social trends, and changed the face of how the talk radio business was conducted. Unrestrained (by the Fairness Doctrine), cheering for one's political party, and especially against the other, had become popular entertainment which rapidly changed the way politics nationally was discussed, perceived, and conducted.
Other radio talk show hosts (who describe themselves as either conservative or libertarian) have also had success as nationally syndicated hosts, including Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Jon Arthur, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Larry Gaiters and Mark Levin.
The Salem Radio Network syndicates a group of religiously oriented Republican activists, including evangelical Christian Hugh Hewitt and Jewish conservatives Dennis Prager and Michael Medved; these are mostly distributed in a 24-hour network format among Salem's own stations, and they generally earn ratings much less than their syndicated counterparts.
In the summer of 2007, conservative talk show hosts mobilized public opposition to the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill, which eventually failed. Conservative hosts Limbaugh, Ingraham, Bennett, Prager, Hannity, Beck, Levin and Hewitt coalesced around endorsing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for president at the end of January 2008 (after Fred Thompson, the described favorite of some of the hosts, dropped out), in an effort to oppose the nomination of Senator John McCain; however, Romney suspended his campaign in February of the same year, and endorsed McCain. During the primaries, Limbaugh in particular had endorsed a plan to do whatever it took to prolong the Democrats' nomination by encouraging political conservatives to cross over to the Democrats and voting for the trailing candidate, a plan he called "Operation Chaos".
Conservative talk show hosts also lent their unified support for congressional candidate Doug Hoffman, a conservative third-party candidate who was running in New York's 23rd congressional district special election, 2009, against a liberal Republican (Dierdre Scozzafava) and a mainstream Democrat (Bill Owens). The unified support from the conservative base helped propel Hoffman to frontrunner status and effectively killed Scozzafava's campaign, forcing her to drop out of the race several days before the election. This effort backfired on the conservative hosts, as the Democratic candidate Owens won in part thanks to Scozzafava's endorsement of Owens. Local hosts, such as Los Angeles's John and Ken, have also proven effective in influencing the political landscape.
Libertarians such as Dennis Miller (based in Los Angeles), Jon Arthur, host of "Jon Arthur Live!" (based in Florida), Patti Brooks KGMI (based in the Pacific Northwest), Free Talk Live (based in New Hampshire), Penn Jillette (based in Las Vegas), Jay Severin (based in Boston, Massachusetts), and Mark Davis (based in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas) have also achieved some success. Many of these hosts also publish books, write newspaper columns, appear on television, and give public lectures (Limbaugh, again, was a pioneer of this model of multi-media punditry).
There had been some precursors for talk radio show stars, such as the Los Angeles-area controversialist Joe Pyne, who would attack callers on his program in the early 1960s – one of his famous insults was "gargle with razor blades"; the similar Bob Grant in New York City; and Wally George in Southern California.
Talk radio also included personal relationship consultants such as Laura Schlessinger and Barbara De Angelis both heard on KFI AM in Los Angeles. Host Larry Elder on KABC (AM) who was a lawyer prior to entering the talk radio market. (See also lawyer, Norman Goldman, under the progressive talk section.) Not political but certainly prevalent in talk radio is Leo Laporte who offers consumer advice particularly related to technical computer topics. With many talk shows across the opinion spectrum losing ratings and revenues, business/real estate advice shows, paid-for health supplement presentations and religious programming has emerged in addition to sports and news talk.
While politically-oriented talk is still heard on the AM dial (mostly the conservative format), it has seen some expanding onto the FM dial. One notable example was WPGB in Pittsburgh, which switched to a talk format in 2004 after years of having several different music formats, going so far as to brand itself as "FM News Talk 104.7" due to the relative uncommonness of politically-oriented talk on the FM side of the dial even in 2013 while FM talk in general has expanded. (Additionally, at the time WPGB was the only FM radio station in Pittsburgh, the nation's 22nd largest market, to have a talk format.)
Owned by Clear Channel and stylized as one of Clear Channel's typical conservative-leaning AM talk stations, WPGB's ratings were steadily high since during its time as a talk station, whereas the station's numerous music formats were among the lowest in the Pittsburgh market before switching. Clear Channel, which owns WPGB, has been moving away from putting talk radio on the FM dial; WPGB fired its morning show in December 2013 and switched back to music in August 2014, selling the format rights to AM station WJAS.
Paranormal radio shows have had a place on radio for several decades; while the format has never been successful on a full-time basis, it has proven popular in overnight graveyard slot. Long John Nebel's program was one of the first to devote itself to the concept before it was further fleshed out by Art Bell, whose "Coast to Coast AM" went on to have comparable popularity to daytime talk hosts of his era. Bell had a long-running, on-and-off relationship with the show he founded, often leaving the show and returning on an erratic basis, also starting up new shows such as "Dreamland", "Art Bell's Dark Matter" and "Midnight in the Desert" only to quit them a few weeks into their run; Bell died in 2018. "Coast to Coast AM" continues with George Noory as the permanent lead host, with a rotating host on weekends. Clyde Lewis and Jason Hawes also host nationally syndicated paranormal shows.
Politically liberal talk radio aimed at a national audience also emerged in the mid-2000s. Air America, a network featuring "The Al Franken Show", was founded in 2004. It billed itself as a "progressive alternative" to the conservative talk radio shows.
Some prominent examples of liberal talk radio shows either previously or currently in national syndication include: Dial Global talk show hosts Ed Schultz (left his radio show and is currently on MSNBC TV), Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, and Bill Press; Norman Goldman (not with Dial Global and is a self-described independent) is still included on syndication stations - see WCPT (AM). Goldman began as the high-rating fill-in host and "Senior Legal Analyst" for Ed Schultz prior to launching his own show; The Young Turks; Fox former co-host of Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes, First Amendment Radio Network libertarian host Jon Arthur, and Mike Malloy, progressive radio WFTE FM's Dorothy And Dick, and Premiere's Randi Rhodes (not on radio 2015).
In some markets, local liberal hosts have existed for years, such as the British talk host Michael Jackson (who was on the air at KABC in Los Angeles beginning in 1968 and is currently at KSUR); Bernie Ward in San Francisco; Jack Ellery in New Jersey and Tampa; Dave Ross in Seattle, and Marc Germain in Los Angeles. A few earlier syndicated programs were hosted by prominent Democrats who were not experienced broadcasters, such as Jim Hightower, Jerry Brown, Mario Cuomo and Alan Dershowitz; these met with limited success, and Air America has been faced with various legal and financial problems.
Air America was sold to a new owner in March 2007, hired well-known programmer David Bernstein, and began its "re-birth." Bernstein subsequently left in early 2008, but the struggling network remained on the air with a revamped line-up.
On January 21, 2010, Air America radio ceased live programming citing a difficulty with the current economic environment, and announced that it would file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy production and liquidate itself. The network ended operations on January 25, 2010.
Clear Channel/iHeartMedia, with nearly 1,300 radio stations under its ownership – along with other owners – has in recent years added more liberal talk stations to their portfolio. These have primarily come from the conversion of AM facilities, most of which formerly had adult standards formats. Many complaints (all radio stations are required by the FCC to maintain, in their public files, copies of all correspondence from the public relating to station operations – for a period of three years from receipt) have been received from fans of this musical genre (Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, big band music," etc.) – but the left-leaning talk programming leans toward a much younger demographic, a group that advertisers covet. More recently, however, Clear Channel has been dropping liberal formats in favor of their own Fox Sports Radio network. By 2014, most liberal talk stations had abandoned the format, forcing hosts to find other ways to distribute their programming.
Liberal opinion radio has long existed on the Pacifica network, though only available in a small number of major cities, and in formats that more often act as a volunteer-run community forum than as a platform for charismatic hosts who would be likely to attract a large audience. The one major host to become popular on the network is Amy Goodman, whose "Democracy Now!" interview and journalism program is broadcast nationwide.
Conservative critics have long complained that the long-format news programming on National Public Radio (NPR) shows a liberal bias, although this is disputed by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media criticism organization, which found that, for example, "representatives of think tanks to the right of center outnumbered those to the left of center by more than four to one: 62 appearances to 15."
National Public Radio itself denies any partisan agenda. Politically oriented talk programs on the network are in the mold of "Talk of the Nation", which was designed to be a soundboard for the varied opinions of listeners.
Sports talk radio can be found locally and nationally in the US; as of 2013, five national full-time sports talk networks exist. The oldest existing network, dating to 1991, is SB Nation Radio (although it has only been branded as such since 2016). Market leader ESPN Radio followed shortly thereafter in 1992, followed by Fox Sports Radio ca. 2000 and the near-concurrent entries of CBS Sports Radio and NBC Sports Radio in late 2012 and early 2013. Most of these, however, air on weak, low-budget AM stations; the most successful sports talk stations operate primarily with local programs and supplement their programming with broadcasting of sports events, usually involving the local teams in the major professional sports leagues. This adds significant expenses to the station's operations. Local stations may also hire personalities with polarizing opinions about sports topics and athletes to make some kind of national impact that might turn off listeners, and in large markets, sports talk stations may be made up of personalities who pay stations for their show time and their own advertising, disallowing any natural flow between each program, along with in-station competitions about whose show has the most impact.
Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. This audience is mostly male, middle-aged and conservative. Among those who regularly listen to talk radio, 41% are Republican and 28% are Democrats. Furthermore, 45% describe themselves as conservatives, compared with 18% who say they are progressive/liberals. In 2011, the Arbitron portable people meter ratings system, compiled data suggesting that out of 11 nationally rated radio formats, talk radio had lost nearly the most market share and ratings continue to slide. In 2013, Arbitron's executive summary noted that " 92% of consumers aged 12 years and older listen to the radio each week" and "news-talk-information and talk-personality remained number one in PPM markets and number two in the rest of the U.S."
Three of the five most-listened-to radio programs in the United States are talk radio shows or have talk radio elements: "The Rush Limbaugh Show" (#2), "The Sean Hannity Show" (#3 or #4) and "All Things Considered" (#5).
SW Radio Africa was a pro-democracy station that broadcast out of London, England, from 2001 to 2014.
In Australia, talk radio is known as "talkback radio".
The most popular talkback radio station historically was Sydney's 2UE, whose populist programs like "The John Laws Morning Show", were widely syndicated across the continent. In recent years though, 2UE has been eclipsed by its Sydney rival 2GB after the defection of 2UE most popular talkback host, Alan Jones.
As a result, 2UE (now known as Macquarie Sports Radio 954 and owned by the same company as 2GB) abandoned most of its rigid political and hot topic-driven talkback programming in 2016, moving to a less-serious lifestyle and branded content format, although still maintaining a talkback element.
Melbourne, 3AW is the highest rating talkback radio station, and has also been the highest rating Melbourne radio station for several decades in a row.
6PR personality Garry Meadows was the first announcer to use talkback radio in early 1967. 'Talkback' radio, using a seven-second time lapse mechanism, began in Australia in April 1967, simultaneously on 2SM, Sydney (with Mike Walsh) and 3DB, Melbourne (with Barry Jones).
In the 1990s and 2000s, "talkback" on FM was attempted. "The Spoonman" was a program hosted by Brian Carlton on the triple m network in the late 1990s and returned in 2005 for three and a half years, the show wrapping up in 2008. It was a show that covered many topics, but the "hot talk" format in the U.S. would probably be the best way to describe the program.
Talkback radio has historically been an important political forum in Australia and functions much like the cable news televisions in the United States, with live and "saturated" coverage of political issues.
The most important talk radios in Brazil are CBN and Jovem Pan, which has also sports and news broadcasts.
In contrast to talk radio stations in the United States, where syndicated programs tend to make up a significant part of most schedules, privately owned Canadian talk radio stations tend to be predominantly local in programming and focus. There is no Canadian content requirement for talk radio, or "spoken word", programming, unless the individual station's license expressly stipulates such a requirement; most do not. (In Canada, prospective radio stations may propose certain restrictions on their license in order to gain favor with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and have an easier time obtaining a license.)
The only nationally syndicated, politically oriented weekday talk radio show in Canada is "Charles Adler Tonight", hosted by Charles Adler and heard on eleven stations across the country. Until 2006, Peter Warren's "Warren on the Weekend" was heard Saturdays and Sundays. Both programs are or were distributed by the Corus Radio Network and, coincidentally, both hosts had hosted different morning call-in programs in the same time slot on Winnipeg, Manitoba's CJOB 680 before they became nationally syndicated (Adler's show still originates from CJOB and retained its original title, while Warren was based in Victoria, British Columbia.) Prior to "Charles Adler Tonight", Corus had syndicated "Rutherford", hosted by conservative Dave Rutherford and originating from its Calgary station, CHQR. "Rutherford" is no longer syndicated nationally but continues to air in Calgary, Edmonton, and London.
Other Canadian talk radio programs which have been syndicated to different markets include:
The two largest talk radio networks in Canada are the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's English language CBC Radio One and French language Ici Radio-Canada Première. These stations typically produce their own local morning and afternoon programs and regional noon hour programs to go along with the network programming that is aired during the rest of the day. Both networks are commercial-free. CBC Radio One's flagship national talk program is the weekend "Cross Country Checkup", which has been broadcast since 1965.
CFRA (580 AM) in Ottawa (formerly part of the CHUM network, which is now part of CTV) has a large and dedicated listening audience. The station is heard throughout the Ottawa valley and on the Internet. Several key programs focus on local political and world issues. Christina Sgro offers a bit of both worlds on her show, "Christina's Corner", which has been gaining popularity since its inception in 2010.
Privately owned talk radio syndication networks in Canada are generally formed for the purposes of sharing programs across a group of stations with common ownership, although some are formed to distribute their one or two talk radio programs to a number of stations regardless of ownership. The largest of these is the Corus Radio Network. TSN Radio, the successor to the long-defunct the Team, is one of the newest national networks in Canada, with operations in several major markets.
Syndicated programs from the United States which air on Canadian radio stations are typically non-political shows such as "The Kim Komando Show" and "Coast to Coast AM", as well as sports radio shows from the 24-hour networks in the U.S. Traditionally, politically driven talk radio from the United States does not air on Canadian stations, with a few scattered exceptions (e.g. the now-defunct CFBN, which carried political programming such as the "Glenn Beck Program" and Dennis Miller, and the also-discontinued talk format of CHAM, which carried Miller). Top political programs such as "The Rush Limbaugh Show" are never broadcast on Canadian stations, mainly due to high rights fees compared to their relevance to non-American audiences. American stations near the Canadian border can provide many Canadians with access to American talk programs (the signals of Limbaugh affiliates WJR, WBEN and WHAM, for example, cover almost all of Southern Ontario).
A state owned public channel called YLE Puhe. is broadcast throughout the whole country in Finnish language. The programs include sports and news broadcasts. Its weekly listenership is about 550,000. Finland's first commercial talk station, Radio Rapu, started operations on March 1, 2014.
Talk radio is a popular form of radio entertainment in France, exemplified by Europe 1, RTL and RMC, plus state-owned France Inter. A premier English language talk radio in France is the Gascony Show. Launched in early 2011, this show is broadcast weekly to the Gascony region of the south west of France, as well as to the rest of France via Internet streaming.
Radio talk shows are popular in Germany and have a long tradition. The first talk show on public radio was Werner Höfer's , a political talk begun in 1952. The talk show on wheels Hallo Ü-Wagen ran from 1974 to 2010, begun by Carmen Thomas for WDR.
Talk radio in Italy is popular. Radio 24, part of the group Il Sole 24 Ore privately owned by Confindustria, is the most important commercial "news/talk" talk radio station in the country. Its focus is mainly on independent news about Italian and European economy, finance, culture and politics, but it also hosts programs focusing on sports, personal finance, music, health, science, technology and crowdsourced storytelling. State-owned Rai Radio 3 is mainly dedicated to literature, the arts, classical music and general cultural issues. Several regional stations use a format combining that of all-news and talk radio.
In New Zealand the talk radio format is popularly known as talkback radio. The major radio networks broadcasting in the talk radio format are Newstalk ZB and Radio Live. Their sports sister networks, Radio Sport and TAB Trackside also largely broadcast in talk format. Other stations such as Radio New Zealand National have a large component of talk-based content, but do not have talk-back (i.e. listener phone-ins).
Newstalk ZB is the New Zealand market leader, but Radio Live is continuing to try to establish itself with a greater presence in the talk radio market since its inception in 2005.
Almost all AM radio stations are talk stations. A few stations from Radio Mindanao Network and Bombo Radyo are on FM. Radyo 5 News FM is the first talk radio station in the Philippines.
There is two talk radio station in Poland, called TOK FM, which is owned by Agora SA, a Polish media company. Its programmes are broadcast in 10 large cities including Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk, Poznan and Katowice. The programme is also available via Internet and transmitted by the Hot Bird constellation. It was founded in 1998 as "Inforadio"
Second talk radio station called Radio Wnet, which is owned by Radio Wnet sp. z o.o., a Polish media company. Its programmes are broadcast in 2 large cities including Warsaw (87.8 MHz), Cracow (95,2 MHz). The programme is available via Internet. It was founded in 25 May 2009 by Krzysztof Skowroński, Grzegorz Wasowski, Katarzyna Adamiak-Sroczyńska and Monika Makowska-Wasowska, Wojciech Cejrowski and Jerzy Jachowicz.
Talk radio in Spain is very popular, where the most important radio stations are exclusively dedicated to talk shows, such as Cadena Ser, Cadena Cope, Onda Cero, Radio Nacional or Punto Radio. There is a very wide variety of topics, such as politics, sport, comedy and culture.
Sport talk shows are particularly relevant, since football attracts a massive interest in Spain, with a special focus on FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF, and the men's national football team. Typically the programming of main talk radio stations is modified whenever there is a major football event, such as a La Liga or a national team match. Daily late night sport (football) talk shows are also very relevant, with a very intense competition of the radio stations in this time slot, which typically starts around midnight.
Comedy morning talk shows are also very popular in music radio stations (40 principales, M80 radio, Europa FM, and others), where there is strong competition since it is also a very important time slot, when typically people going to the workplace listen to the radio in their cars early in the morning (around 7am to 8am).
As Spain has large English speaking communities from many different countries, it is a natural place for English language talk radio broadcasting.
The first Talk radio station in English was Coastline Radio broadcasting from Nerja, Costa del Sol. It is now a music station. A group of English expats set up OCI International in the early 1990s. Based in Marbella on the Costa del Sol, it was owned by the ONCE National Spanish Network. It provided a link for the English speaking expats living on the coast, as well as some content for Scandinavian expats. OCI was closed down in 2007 to make way for Radio Europa music. In 2004 REM FM began broadcasting, with shows mostly fronted by former OCI presenters. The station closed in 2008.
In 2008, Talk Radio Europe began broadcasting. It offers a 24-hour schedule of news, interviews, discussion and debate and is a World Media Partner with BBC World Service and is affiliated to IRN/SKY News. Talk Radio Europe broadcasts in FM on the Costa del Sol, Costa Almeria, Costa Blanca and across the island of Mallorca in English. It is available on the Internet and on all smartphone platforms.
Talk radio in the United Kingdom is popular, though not as much as music radio. Nationwide talk stations include BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio 4 Extra, Talkradio and Talksport. Regional stations include BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio Wales. Many BBC Local Radio stations and some commercial stations offer a talk format, for example, BBC Radio London, the BBC's flagship local station. Other notable commercial talk stations include London's LBC which pioneered the newstalk format in Europe. LBC currently operates two services – LBC, a newstalk station on FM (London) and via several digital platforms nationally including DAB and Freeview; and LBC News, a rolling news station on AM in London and DAB+ nationally. There are many specialised talk services such as Bloomberg, a financial news station and Asian Radio Live.
Talk radio expanded dramatically when the BBC's monopoly on radio broadcasting was ended in the 1970s with the launch of Independent Local Radio.
Some notable British talk radio presenters include Jenni Murray, John Humphrys, Martha Kearney, Jonathan Dimbleby, Libby Purves, Laurie Taylor, Pam Ayres, Melvyn Bragg, Tommy Boyd, James Whale, Steve Allen, Nick Abbot, Iain Lee, James Stannage, George Galloway, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Ian Collins, John Nicoll, Brian Hayes, Scottie McClue, James O'Brien, Nicky Campbell and Simon Mayo. Pete Price on CityTalk is also known as the DJ who rushed to the aid of a regular caller who died live on air during a call. Previously, he had kept a teenager talking for 45 minutes before meeting him to convince him not to commit suicide. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30077 |
Thyroid
The thyroid, or thyroid gland, is an endocrine gland in the neck consisting of two connected lobes. The lower two thirds of the lobes are connected by a thin band of tissue called the thyroid isthmus. The thyroid is located at the front of the neck, below the Adam's apple. Microscopically, the functional unit of the thyroid gland is the spherical thyroid follicle, lined with follicular cells (thyrocytes), and occasional parafollicular cells that surround a lumen containing colloid. The thyroid gland secretes three hormones: the two thyroid hormones – triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) – and a peptide hormone, calcitonin. The thyroid hormones influence the metabolic rate and protein synthesis, and in children, growth and development. Calcitonin plays a role in calcium homeostasis. Secretion of the two thyroid hormones is regulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), which is secreted from the anterior pituitary gland. TSH is regulated by thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH), which is produced by the hypothalamus.
The thyroid gland develops in the floor of the pharynx at the base of the tongue at 3–4 weeks gestation; it then descends in front of the pharyngeal gut, and ultimately over the next few weeks, it migrates to the base of the neck. During migration, the thyroid remains connected to the tongue by a narrow canal, the thyroglossal duct. At the end of the fifth week the thyroglossal duct degenerates, and over the following two weeks the detached thyroid migrates to its final position.
Thyroid disorders include hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, thyroid inflammation (thyroiditis), thyroid enlargement (goitre), thyroid nodules, and thyroid cancer. Hyperthyroidism is characterized by excessive secretion of thyroid hormones: the most common cause is the autoimmune disorder Graves' disease. Hypothyroidism is characterized by a deficient secretion of thyroid hormones: the most common cause is iodine deficiency. In iodine-deficient regions, hypothyroidism secondary to iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable intellectual disability in children. In iodine-sufficient regions, the most common cause of hypothyroidism is the autoimmune disorder Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
The presence of the thyroid and its various diseases have been noted and treated for thousands of years, although the gland itself has only been described and named since the Renaissance. Knowledge of the thyroid, its biochemistry, and its disorders developed throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many modern treatments and investigative modalities evolved throughout the mid-twentieth century, including refinement of surgical techniques for thyroid removal (thyroidectomy) for the treatment of goitre; the use of radioactive iodine and thiouracil for the treatment of Graves' disease; and fine needle aspiration for diagnosis of thyroid nodules.
The thyroid gland is a butterfly-shaped organ composed of two lobes, left and right, connected by a narrow isthmus. It weighs 25 grams in adults, with each lobe being about 5 cm long, 3 cm wide, and 2 cm thick, and the isthmus about 1.25 cm in height and width. The gland is usually larger in women than in men, and increases in size during pregnancy.
The thyroid is near the front of the neck, lying against and around the front of the larynx and trachea. The thyroid cartilage and cricoid cartilage lie just above the gland, below the Adam's apple. The isthmus extends from the second to third rings of the trachea, with the uppermost part of the lobes extending to the thyroid cartilage and the lowermost around the fourth to sixth tracheal rings. The infrahyoid muscles lie in front of the gland and the sternocleidomastoid muscle to the side. Behind the outer wings of the thyroid lie the two carotid arteries. The trachea, larynx, lower pharynx and esophagus all lie behind the thyroid. In this region, the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the inferior thyroid artery pass next to or in the ligament. Typically, four parathyroid glands, two on each side, lie on each side between the two layers of the thyroid capsule, at the back of the thyroid lobes.
The thyroid gland is covered by a thin fibrous capsule, which has an inner and an outer layer. The inner layer extrudes into the gland and forms the septae that divides the thyroid tissue into microscopic lobules. The outer layer is continuous with the pretracheal fascia, attaching the gland to the cricoid and thyroid cartilages via a thickening of the fascia to form the posterior suspensory ligament of thyroid gland, also known as Berry's ligament. This causes the thyroid to move up and down with the movement of these cartilages when swallowing occurs.
The thyroid is supplied with arterial blood from the superior thyroid artery, a branch of the external carotid artery, and the inferior thyroid artery, a branch of the thyrocervical trunk, and sometimes by an anatomical variant the thyroid ima artery, which has a variable origin. The superior thyroid artery splits into anterior and posterior branches supplying the thyroid, and the inferior thyroid artery splits into superior and inferior branches. The superior and inferior thyroid arteries join together behind the outer part of the thyroid lobes. The venous blood is drained via superior and middle thyroid veins, which drain to the internal jugular vein, and via the inferior thyroid veins. The inferior thyroid veins originate in a network of veins and drain into the left and right brachiocephalic veins. Both arteries and veins form a plexus between the two layers of the capsule of the thyroid gland.
Lymphatic drainage frequently passes the prelaryngeal lymph nodes (located just above the isthmus), and the pretracheal and paratracheal lymph nodes. The gland receives sympathetic nerve supply from the superior, middle and inferior cervical ganglion of the sympathetic trunk. The gland receives parasympathetic nerve supply from the superior laryngeal nerve and the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
There are many variants in the size and shape of the thyroid gland, and in the position of the embedded parathyroid glands.
Sometimes there is a third lobe present called the "pyramidal lobe". When present, this lobe often stretches up the hyoid bone from the thyroid isthmus and may be one to several divided lobes. The presence of this lobe ranges in reported studies from 18.3% to 44.6%. It was shown to more often arise from the left side and occasionally separated. The pyramidal lobe is also known as Lalouette's pyramid. The pyramidal lobe is a remnant of the thyroglossal duct, which usually wastes away during the thyroid gland's descent. Small accessory thyroid glands may in fact occur anywhere along the thyroglossal duct, from the foramen cecum of the tongue to the position of the thyroid in the adult. A small horn at the back of the thyroid lobes, usually close to the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the inferior thyroid artery, is called Zuckerkandl's tubercle.
Other variants include a levator muscle of thyroid gland, connecting the isthmus to the body of the hyoid bone, and the presence of the small thyroid ima artery.
At the microscopic level, there are three primary features of the thyroid—follicles, follicular cells, and parafollicular cells, first discovered by Geoffery Websterson in 1664.
Thyroid follicles are small spherical groupings of cells 0.02–0.9mm in diameter that play the main role in thyroid function. They consist of a rim that has a rich blood supply, nerve and lymphatic presence, that surrounds a core of colloid that consists mostly of thyroid hormone precursor proteins called thyroglobulin, an iodinated glycoprotein.
The core of a follicle is surrounded by a single layer of follicular cells. When stimulated by thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), these secrete the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. They do this by transporting and metabolising the thyroglobulin contained in the colloid. Follicular cells vary in shape from flat to cuboid to columnar, depending on how active they are.
Scattered among follicular cells and in spaces between the spherical follicles are another type of thyroid cell, parafollicular cells. These cells secrete calcitonin and so are also called C cells.
In the development of the embryo, at 3–4 weeks gestational age, the thyroid gland appears as an epithelial proliferation in the floor of the pharynx at the base of the tongue between the tuberculum impar and the copula linguae. The copula soon becomes covered over by the hypopharyngeal eminence at a point later indicated by the foramen cecum. The thyroid then descends in front of the pharyngeal gut as a bilobed diverticulum through the thyroglossal duct. Over the next few weeks, it migrates to the base of the neck, passing in front of the hyoid bone. During migration, the thyroid remains connected to the tongue by a narrow canal, the thyroglossal duct. At the end of the fifth week the thyroglossal duct degenerates, and over the following two weeks the detached thyroid migrates to its final position.
The fetal hypothalamus and pituitary start to secrete thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH). TSH is first measurable at 11 weeks. By 18–20 weeks, the production of thyroxine (T4) reaches a clinically significant and self-sufficient level. Fetal triiodothyronine (T3) remains low, less than 15 ng/dL until 30 weeks, and increases to 50 ng/dL at full-term. The fetus needs to be self-sufficient in thyroid hormones in order to guard against neurodevelopmental disorders that would arise from maternal hypothyroidism. The presence of sufficient iodine is essential for healthy neurodevelopment.
The neuroendocrine parafollicular cells, also known as C cells, responsible for the production of calcitonin, are derived from foregut endoderm. This part of the thyroid then first forms as the ultimopharyngeal body, which begins in the ventral fourth pharyngeal pouch and joins the primordial thyroid gland during its descent to its final location.
Aberrations in prenatal development can result in various forms of thyroid dysgenesis which can cause congenital hypothyroidism, and if untreated this can lead to cretinism.
The primary function of the thyroid is the production of the iodine-containing thyroid hormones, triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) and the peptide hormone calcitonin. The thyroid hormones are created from iodine and tyrosine. T3 is so named because it contains three atoms of iodine per molecule and T4 contains four atoms of iodine per molecule. The thyroid hormones have a wide range of effects on the human body. These include:
After secretion, only a very small proportion of the thyroid hormones travel freely in the blood. Most are bound to thyroxine-binding globulin (about 70%), transthyretin (10%), and albumin (15%). Only the 0.03% of T4 and 0.3% of T3 traveling freely have hormonal activity. In addition, up to 85% of the T3 in blood is produced following conversion from T4 by iodothyronine deiodinases in organs around the body.
Thyroid hormones act by crossing the cell membrane and binding to intracellular nuclear thyroid hormone receptors TR-α1,TR-α2,TR-β1 and TR-β2, which bind with hormone response elements and transcription factors to modulate DNA transcription. In addition to these actions on DNA, the thyroid hormones also act within the cell membrane or within cytoplasm via reactions with enzymes, including calcium ATPase, adenylyl cyclase, and glucose transporters.
The thyroid hormones are created from thyroglobulin. This is a protein within the colloid in the follicular lumen that is originally created within the rough endoplasmic reticulum of follicular cells and then transported into the follicular lumen. Thyroglobulin contains 123 units of tyrosine, which reacts with iodine within the follicular lumen.
Iodine is essential for the production of the thyroid hormones. Iodine (I0) travels in the blood as iodide (I−), which is taken up into the follicular cells by a sodium-iodide symporter. This is an ion channel on the cell membrane which in the same action transports two sodium ions and an iodide ion into the cell. Iodide then travels from within the cell into the lumen, through the action of pendrin, an iodide-chloride antiporter. In the follicular lumen, the iodide is then oxidized to iodine. This makes it more reactive, and the iodine is attached to the active tyrosine units in thyroglobulin by the enzyme thyroid peroxidase. This forms the precursors of thyroid hormones monoiodotyrosine (MIT), and diiodotyrosine (DIT).
When the follicular cells are stimulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone, the follicular cells reabsorb thyroglobulin from the follicular lumen. The iodinated tyrosines are cleaved, forming the thyroid hormones T4, T3, DIT, MIT, and traces of reverse triiodothyronine. T3 and T4 are released into the blood. The hormones secreted from the gland are about 80–90% T4 and about 10–20% T3. Deiodinase enzymes in peripheral tissues remove the iodine from MIT and DIT and convert T4 to T3 and RT3. This is a major source of both RT3 (95%) and T3 (87%) in peripheral tissues.
The production of thyroxine and triiodothyronine is primarily regulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), released by the anterior pituitary gland. TSH release in turn is stimulated by thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRH), released in a pulsatile manner from the hypothalamus. The thyroid hormones provide negative feedback to the thyrotropes TSH and TRH: when the thyroid hormones are high, TSH production is suppressed. This negative feedback also occurs when levels of TSH are high, causing TRH production to be suppressed.
TRH is secreted at an increased rate in situations such as cold exposure in order to stimulate thermogenesis. In addition to being suppressed by the presence of thyroid hormones, TSH production is blunted by dopamine, somatostatin, and glucocorticoids.
The thyroid gland also produces the hormone calcitonin, which helps regulate blood calcium levels. Parafollicular cells produce calcitonin in response to high blood calcium. Calcitonin decreases the release of calcium from bone, by decreasing the activity of osteoclasts, cells which break down bone. Bone is constantly reabsorbed by osteoclasts and created by osteoblasts, so calcitonin effectively stimulates movement of calcium into bone. The effects of calcitonin are opposite those of the parathyroid hormone (PTH) produced in the parathyroid glands. However, calcitonin seems far less essential than PTH, since calcium metabolism remains clinically normal after removal of the thyroid (thyroidectomy), but not the parathyroid glands.
About 20,000 protein coding genes are expressed in human cells: 70% of these genes are expressed in thyroid cells. Two-hundred fifty of these genes are more specifically expressed in the thyroid, and about 20 genes are highly thyroid specific. In the follicular cells, the proteins synthesized by these genes direct thyroid hormone synthesis - thyroglobulin, TPO, and IYD; while in the parafollicular c-cells, they direct calcitonin synthesis - CALCA, and CALCB.
General practitioners, family physicians, and internal medicine specialists play a role in identifying and monitoring the treatment of thyroid disease. Endocrinologists and thyroidologists are thyroid specialists. Thyroid surgeons or otolaryngologists are responsible for the surgical management of thyroid disease.
Excessive production of the thyroid hormones is called hyperthyroidism. Causes include Graves' disease, toxic multinodular goitre, solitary thyroid adenoma, inflammation, and a pituitary adenoma which secretes excess TSH. Another cause is excess iodine availability, either from excess ingestion, induced by the drug amiodarone, or following iodinated contrast imaging.
Hyperthyroidism often causes a variety of non-specific symptoms including weight loss, increased appetite, insomnia, decreased tolerance of heat, tremor, palpitations, anxiety and nervousness. In some cases it can cause chest pain, diarrhoea, hair loss and muscle weakness. Such symptoms may be managed temporarily with drugs such as beta blockers.
Long-term management of hyperthyroidism may include drugs that suppress thyroid function such as propylthiouracil, carbimazole and methimazole. Alternatively, radioactive iodine-131 can be used to destroy thyroid tissue: radioactive iodine is selectively taken up by thyroid cells, which over time destroys them. The chosen first-line treatment will depend on the individual and on the country where being treated. Surgery to remove the thyroid can sometimes be performed as a transoral thyroidectomy, a minimally-invasive procedure. Surgery does however carry a risk of damage to the parathyroid glands and the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which innervates the vocal cords. If the entire thyroid gland is removed, hypothyroidism will inevitably result, and thyroid hormone substitutes will be needed.
An underactive thyroid gland results in hypothyroidism. Typical symptoms are abnormal weight gain, tiredness, constipation, heavy menstrual bleeding, hair loss, cold intolerance, and a slow heart rate. Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of hypothyroidism worldwide, and the autoimmune disease Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common cause in the developed world. Other causes include congenital abnormalities, diseases causing transient inflammation, surgical removal or radioablation of the thyroid, the drugs amiodarone and lithium, amyloidosis, and sarcoidosis. Some forms of hypothyroidism can result in myxedema and severe cases can result in myxedema coma.
Hypothyroidism is managed with replacement of the hormone thyroxine. This is usually given daily as an oral supplement, and may take a few weeks to become effective. Some causes of hypothyroidism, such as Postpartum thyroiditis and Subacute thyroiditis may be transient and pass over time, and other causes such as iodine deficiency may be able to be rectified with dietary supplementation.
Graves' disease is an autoimmune disorder that is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism. In Graves' disease, for an unknown reason autoantibodies develop against the thyroid stimulating hormone receptor. These antibodies activate the receptor, leading to development of a goitre and symptoms of hyperthyroidism, such as heat intolerance, weight loss, diarrhoea and palpitations. Occasionally such antibodies block but do not activate the receptor, leading to symptoms associated with hypothyroidism. In addition, gradual protrusion of the eyes may occur, called Graves' ophthalmopathy, as may swelling of the front of the shins. Graves' disease can be diagnosed by the presence of pathomnomonic features such as involvement of the eyes and shins, or isolation of autoantibodies, or by results of a radiolabelled uptake scan. Graves' disease is treated with anti-thyroid drugs such as propylthiouracil, which decrease the production of thyroid hormones, but hold a high rate of relapse. If there is no involvement of the eyes, then use of radioactive isotopes to ablate the gland may be considered. Surgical removal of the gland with subsequent thyroid hormone replacement may be considered, however this will not control symptoms associated with the eye or skin.
Thyroid nodules are often found on the gland, with a prevalence of 4–7%. The majority of nodules do not cause any symptoms, thyroid hormone secretion is normal, and they are non-cancerous. Non-cancerous cases include simple cysts, colloid nodules, and thyroid adenomas. Malignant nodules, which only occur in about 5% of nodules, include follicular, papillary, medullary carcinomas and metastases from other sites Nodules are more likely in females, those who are exposed to radiation, and in those who are iodine deficient.
When a nodule is present, thyroid function tests determine whether the nodule is secreting excess thyroid hormones, causing hyperthyroidism. When the thyroid function tests are normal, an ultrasound is often used to investigate the nodule, and provide information such as whether the nodule is fluid-filled or a solid mass, and whether the appearance is suggestive of a benign or malignant cancer. A needle aspiration biopsy may then be performed, and the sample undergoes cytology, in which the appearance of cells is viewed to determine whether they resemble normal or cancerous cells.
The presence of multiple nodules is called a multinodular goitre; and if it is associated with hyperthyroidism, it is called a toxic multinodular goitre.
An enlarged thyroid gland is called a goitre. Goitres are present in some form in about 5% of people, and are the result of a large number of causes, including iodine deficiency, autoimmune disease (both Graves' disease and Hashimoto's thyroiditis), infection, inflammation, and infiltrative disease such as sarcoidosis and amyloidosis. Sometimes no cause can be found, a state called "simple goitre".
Some forms of goitre are associated with pain, whereas many do not cause any symptoms. Enlarged goitres may extend beyond the normal position of the thyroid gland to below the sternum, around the airway or esophagus. Goitres may be associated with hyperthyoidism or hypothyroidism, relating to the underlying cause of the goitre. Thyroid function tests may be done to investigate the cause and effects of the goitre. The underlying cause of the goitre may be treated, however many goitres with no associated symptoms are simply monitored.
Inflammation of the thyroid is called thyroiditis, and may cause symptoms of hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism. Two types of thyroiditis initially present with hyperthyroidism and are sometimes followed by a period of hypothyroidism – Hashimoto's thyroiditis and postpartum thyroiditis. There are other disorders that cause inflammation of the thyroid, and these include subacute thyroiditis, acute thyroiditis, silent thyroiditis, Riedel's thyroiditis and traumatic injury, including palpation thyroiditis.
Hashimoto's thyroiditis is an autoimmune disorder in which the thyroid gland is infiltrated by the lymphocytes B-cell and T-cells. These progressively destroy the thyroid gland. In this way, Hasimoto's thyroiditis may have occurred insidiously, and only be noticed when thyroid hormone production decreases, causing symptoms of hypothyroidism. Hashimoto's is more common in females than males, much more common after the age of 60, and has known genetic risk factors. Also more common in individuals with Hashimoto's thyroiditis are type 1 diabetes, pernicious anaemia, Addison's disease vitiligo.
Postpartum thyroiditis occurs in some females following childbirth. After delivery, the gland becomes inflamed and the condition initially presents with a period of hyperthyroidism followed by hypothyroidism and, usually, a return to normal function. The course of the illness takes place over several months, and is characterised by a painless goitre. Antibodies against thyroid peroxidase can be found on testing. The inflammation usually resolves without treatment, although thyroid hormone replacement may be needed during the period of hypothyroidism.
The most common neoplasm affecting the thyroid gland is a benign adenoma, usually presenting as a painless mass in the neck. Malignant thyroid cancers are most often carcinomas, although cancer can occur in any tissue that the thyroid consists of, including cancer of C-cells and lymphomas. Cancers from other sites also rarely lodge in the thyroid. Radiation of the head and neck presents a risk factor for thyroid cancer, and cancer is more common in women than men, occurring at a rate of about 2:1.
In most cases, thyroid cancer presents as a painless mass in the neck. It is very unusual for thyroid cancers to present with other symptoms, although in some cases cancer may cause hyperthyroidism. Most malignant thyroid cancers are papillary, followed by follicular, medullary, and thyroid lymphoma. Because of the prominence of the thyroid gland, cancer is often detected earlier in the course of disease as the cause of a nodule, which may undergo fine needle aspiration. Thyroid function tests will help reveal whether the nodule produces excess thyroid hormones. A radioactive iodine uptake test can help reveal the activity and location of the cancer and metastases.
Thyroid cancers are treated by removing the whole or part of thyroid gland. Radioactive Iodine 131 may be given to radioablate the thyroid. Thyroxine is given to replace the hormones lost and to suppress TSH production, as TSH may stimulate recurrence. With the exception of the rare anaplastic thyroid cancer, which carries a very poor prognosis, most thyroid cancers carry an excellent prognosis and can even be considered curable.
A persistent thyroglossal duct is the most common clinically significant congenital disorder of the thyroid gland. A persistent sinus tract may remain as a vestigial remnant of the tubular development of the thyroid gland. Parts of this tube may be obliterated, leaving small segments to form thyroglossal cysts. Preterm neonates are at risk of hypothyroidism as their thyroid glands are insufficiently developed to meet their postnatal needs. In order to detect hypothyroidism in newborn babies, to prevent growth and development abnormalities in later life, many countries have newborn screening programs at birth.
Infants with thyroid hormone deficiency (congenital hypothyroidism) can manifest problems of physical growth and development as well as brain development, termed cretinism. Children with congenital hypothyroidism are treated supplementally with levothyroxine, which facilitates normal growth and development.
Mucinous, clear secretions may collect within these cysts to form either spherical masses or fusiform swellings, rarely larger than 2 to 3 cm in diameter. These are present in the midline of the neck anterior to the trachea. Segments of the duct and cysts that occur high in the neck are lined by stratified squamous epithelium, which is essentially identical to that covering the posterior portion of the tongue in the region of the foramen cecum. The disorders that occur in the lower neck more proximal to the thyroid gland are lined by epithelium resembling the thyroidal acinar epithelium. Characteristically, next to the lining epithelium, there is an intense lymphocytic infiltrate. Superimposed infection may convert these lesions into abscess cavities, and rarely, give rise to cancers.
Another disorder is that of thyroid dysgenesis which can result in various presentations of one or more misplaced accessory thyroid glands. These can be asymptomatic.
Iodine deficiency, most common in inland and mountainous areas, can predispose to goitre – if widespread, known as endemic goitre. Pregnant women deficient of iodine can give birth to infants with thyroid hormone deficiency. The use of iodised salt to add iodine to the diet has eliminated endemic cretinism in most developed countries, and over 120 countries have made the iodination of salt mandatory.
Because the thyroid concentrates iodine, it also concentrates the various radioactive isotopes of iodine produced by nuclear fission. In the event of large accidental releases of such material into the environment, the uptake of radioactive iodine isotopes by the thyroid can, in theory, be blocked by saturating the uptake mechanism with a large surplus of non-radioactive iodine, taken in the form of potassium iodide tablets. One consequence of the Chernobyl disaster was an increase in thyroid cancers in children in the years following the accident.
Excessive iodine intake is uncommon and usually has no effect on the thyroid function. Sometimes though it may cause hyperthyroidism, and sometimes hypothyroidism with a resulting goitre.
The thyroid is examined by observation of the gland and surrounding neck for swelling or enlargement. It is then felt, usually from behind, and a person is often asked to swallow to better feel the gland against the fingers of the examiner. The gland moves up and down with swallowing because of its attachments to the thyroid and cricoid cartilages. In a healthy person the gland is not visible yet is palpable as a soft mass. Examination of the thyroid gland includes the search for abnormal masses and the assessment of overall thyroid size. The character of the thyroid, swellings, nodules, and their consistency may all be able to be felt. If a goitre is present, an examiner may also feel down the neck consider tapping the upper part of the chest to check for extension. Further tests may include raising the arms (Pemberton's sign), listening to the gland with a stethoscope for bruits, testing of reflexes, and palpation of the lymph nodes in the head and neck.
An examination of the thyroid will also include observation of the person as a whole, to look for systemic signs such as weight gain or loss, hair loss, and signs in other locations – such as protrusion of the eyes or swelling of the calves in Graves' disease.
Thyroid function tests include a battery of blood tests, including the measurement of the thyroid hormones, as well as the measurement of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). They may reveal hyperthyroidism (high T3 and T4), hypothyroidism (low T3, T4), or subclinical hyperthyroidism (normal T3 and T4 with a low TSH).
TSH levels are considered the most sensitive marker of thyroid dysfunction. They are however not always accurate, particularly if the cause of hypothyroidism is thought to be related to insufficient thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRH) secretion, in which case it may be low or falsely normal. In such a case a TRH stimulation test, in which TRH is given and TSH levels are measured at 30 and 60-minutes after, may be conducted.
T3 and T4 can be measured directly. However, as the two thyroid hormones travel bound to other molecules, and it is the "free" component that is biologically active, free T3 and free T4 levels can be measured. T4 is preferred, because in hypothyroidism T3 levels may be normal. The ratio of bound to unbound thyroid hormones is known as the thyroid hormone binding ratio (THBR). It is also possible to measure directly the main carriers of the thyroid hormones, thryoglobulin and throxine-binding globulin. Thyroglobulin will also be measurable in a healthy thyroid, and will increase with inflammation, and may also be used to measure the success of thyroid removal or ablation. If successful, thyroglobulin should be undetectable. Lastly, antibodies against components of the thyroid, particularly anti-TPO and anti-thyroglobulin, can be measured. These may be present in normal individuals but are highly sensitive for autoimmune-related disease.
Ultrasound of the thyroid may be used to reveal whether structures are solid or filled with fluid, helping to differentiate between nodules and goitres and cysts. It may also help differentiate between malignant and benign lesions.
When further imaging is required, a radiolabelled iodine-123 or technetium-99 uptake scan may take place. This can determine the size and shape of lesions, reveal whether nodules or goitres are metabolically active, and reveal and monitor sites of thyroid disease or cancer deposits outside the thyroid.
A fine needle aspiration of a sample of thyroid tissue may be taken in order to evaluate a lesion seen on ultrasound which is then sent for histopathology and cytology.
Computed tomography of the thyroid plays an important role in the evaluation of thyroid cancer. CT scans often incidentally find thyroid abnormalities, and thereby practically becomes the first investigation modality.
The presence and diseases of the thyroid have been noted and treated for thousands of years. In 1600 BCE burnt sponge and seaweed (which contain iodine) were used within China for the treatment of goitres, a practice which has developed in many parts of the world. In Ayurvedic medicine, the book Sushruta Samhita written about 1400 BCE described hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism and goitre. Aristotle and Xenophon in the fifth century BCE describe cases of diffuse toxic goitre. Hippocrates and Plato in the fourth century BCE provided some of the first descriptions of the gland itself, proposing its function as a salivary gland. Pliny the Elder in the first century BCE referred to epidemics of goitre in the Alps and proposed treatment with burnt seaweed, a practice also referred to by Galen in the second century, referred to burnt sponge for the treatment of goitre. The Chinese pharmacology text "Shennong Ben Cao Jing", written ca. 200-250, also refers to goitre.
In 1500 polymath Leonardo da Vinci provided the first illustration of the thyroid. In 1543 anatomist Andreas Vesalius gave the first anatomic description and illustration of the gland. In 1656 the thyroid received its name, by the anatomist Thomas Wharton. The gland was named thyroid, meaning shield, as its shape resembled the shields commonly used in Ancient Greece. The English name "thyroid gland" is derived from the medical Latin used by Wharton – "glandula thyreoidea". "Glandula" means "gland" in Latin, and "thyreoidea" can be traced back to the Ancient Greek word θυρεοειδής, meaning "shield-like"/"shield-shaped".
French chemist Bernard Courtois discovered iodine in 1811, and in 1896 Eugen Baumann documented it as the central ingredient in the thryoid gland. He did this by boiling the thyroid glands of a thousand sheep, and named the precipitate, a combination of the thyroid hormones, 'iodothyrin'. David Marine in 1907 proved that iodine is necessary for thyroid function.
Graves' disease was described by Robert James Graves in 1834. The role of the thyroid gland in metabolism was demonstrated in 1895 by Adolf Magnus-Levy. Thyroxine was first isolated in 1914 and synthesized in 1927, and triiodothyroxine in 1952. The conversion of T4 to T3 was discovered in 1970. The process of discovering TSH took place over the early to mid twentieth century. TRH was discovered by Polish endocrinologist Andrew Schally in 1970, contributing in part to his Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1977.
In the nineteenth century numerous authors described both cretinism and myxedema, and their relationship to the thyroid. Charles Mayo coined the term hyperthyroidism in 1910. Hakaru Hashimoto documented a case of Hashimoto's thyroiditis in 1912, antibodies in this disease were demonstrated in 1956. Knowledge of the thyroid and its conditions developed throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with many modern treatments and investigative modalities evolving throughout the mid twentieth century, including the use of radioactive iodine, thiouracil and fine needle aspiration.
Either Aetius in the sixth century CE or Persian Ali ibn Abbas al-Magusi in 990 CE conducted the first recorded thyroidectomy as a treatment for goitre. Operations remained risky and generally were not successful until the 19th century, when descriptions emerged from a number of authors including Prussian surgeon Theodor Billroth, Swiss surgeon and physiologist Theodor Kocher, American physician Charles Mayo, American surgeons William Halsted and George Crile. These descriptions provided the basis for modern thyroid surgery. Theodor Kocher went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1909 "for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland".
The thyroid gland is found in all vertebrates. In fish, it is usually located below the gills and is not always divided into distinct lobes. However, in some teleosts, patches of thyroid tissue are found elsewhere in the body, associated with the kidneys, spleen, heart, or eyes.
In tetrapods, the thyroid is always found somewhere in the neck region. In most tetrapod species, there are two paired thyroid glands – that is, the right and left lobes are not joined together. However, there is only ever a single thyroid gland in most mammals, and the shape found in humans is common to many other species.
In larval lampreys, the thyroid originates as an exocrine gland, secreting its hormones into the gut, and associated with the larva's filter-feeding apparatus. In the adult lamprey, the gland separates from the gut, and becomes endocrine, but this path of development may reflect the evolutionary origin of the thyroid. For instance, the closest living relatives of vertebrates, the tunicates and "Amphioxus", have a structure very similar to that of larval lampreys (the endostyle), and this also secretes iodine-containing compounds, though not thyroxine.
Thyroxine is critical to metabolic regulation, and growth throughout the animal kingdom. Iodine and T4 trigger the change from a plant-eating water-dwelling tadpole into a meat-eating land-dwelling frog, with better neurological, visuospatial, smell and cognitive abilities for hunting, as seen in other predatory animals. A similar phenomenon happens in the neotenic amphibian salamanders, which, without introducing iodine, don't transform into land-dwelling adults, and live and reproduce in the larval form of aquatic axolotl. Among amphibians, administering a thyroid-blocking agent such as propylthiouracil (PTU) can prevent tadpoles from metamorphosing into frogs; in contrast, administering thyroxine will trigger metamorphosis. In amphibian metamorphosis, thyroxine and iodine also exert a well-studied experimental model of apoptosis on the cells of gills, tail, and fins of tadpoles. Iodine, via iodolipids, has favored the evolution of terrestrial animal species and has likely played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30078 |
The Singularity (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
"The Singularity" is the eighteenth episode of the third season of the American television series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", based on the Marvel Comics organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), revolving around the character of Phil Coulson and his team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents as they attempt to defeat Hive. It is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), sharing continuity with the films of the franchise. The episode was written by Lauren LeFranc, and directed by Garry A. Brown.
Clark Gregg reprises his role as Coulson from the film series, and is joined by series regulars Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, Elizabeth Henstridge, Henry Simmons, and Luke Mitchell.
"The Singularity" originally aired on ABC on April 26, 2016, and according to Nielsen Media Research, was watched by 3.22 million viewers.
S.H.I.E.L.D. scrambles to repair the damage Daisy did to the base, while Coulson, who sustained a leg injury, resolves to defeat Hive and save Daisy. Fitz, Simmons and Lincoln determine that the effect of Hive's infection will prevent those Inhumans he controls from being sedated. Realizing Alisha would be a powerful asset to Hive, Coulson, May and Lincoln visit her, only to find she has already been infected and has gone with Hive, leaving her duplicates to attack them. After the duplicates are killed, Coulson orders Lincoln to stay out of the field until they have a cure for Hive's infection.
Hive and Daisy approach James, revealing they know he has another Kree artefact connected to the orb, which Hive describes as the only thing that can destroy him. They induce his Terrigenesis, giving him the ability to explosively charge objects (in a similar manner to an Extremis combustion), and Hive enthrals him, learning he buried the companion artifact beneath his home. Daisy's use of her seismokinetic powers to unearth the artefact attracts the attention of SHIELD, and Coulson and May arrive to find the Inhumans already gone, along with the artefact. The hut is destroyed by a planted bomb, but Coulson protects himself and May with an energy shield projected from his robotic hand.
Meanwhile, Fitz, Simmons and Mack decide to seek out Holden Radcliffe, who was in charge of Transia's work against invasive organisms, before he was fired for his transhumanist beliefs. While continuing to discuss how to proceed with their relationship, Fitz and Simmons infiltrate a transhumanist social club to find Radcliffe, under the guise of geneticists wanting to sell him eye prosthetic technology based on those used for Project Deathlok. Upon meeting Radcliffe they reveal their true intentions and ask for his help to devise a cure for Hive's infection, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Hive himself and his Inhuman allies. Alisha abducts Radcliffe, while Daisy subdues Fitz with her powers and warns him of her vision of an agent's death, wanting S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop trying to combat Hive, and avoid that future from coming to pass. Mack narrowly escapes James, and Hive approaches Simmons, speaking to her as Will, using his memories, only for her to shoot him and escape, after deriding him for trying to be someone he murdered. The three agents reconvene at a hotel, where Fitz and Simmons finally consummate their relationship while Mack "goes to the quinjet" (purposely leaving them alone for a while).
Under Coulson's direction, Talbot and the ATCU use information Malick provided before his death to neutralize what is left of Hydra, with the exception of the forces commanded by Hive. So all HYDRA facilities, buildings and stations are bombed and destroyed, with Coulson and May looking on, satisfied.
In an end tag, Hive brings Daisy, Radcliffe, Alisha, and James (who has chosen the moniker 'Hellfire') to a town he bought with Malick's money. Seeking to make Earth 'the home Inhumans deserve', he reveals his intention to recreate the original Kree experiments and convert the entire human race into Inhumans, with Radcliffe's medical and scientific help.
In April 2016, Marvel announced that the eighteenth episode of the season would be titled "The Singularity", to be written by Lauren LeFranc, with Garry A. Brown directing.
In April 2016, Marvel revealed that main cast members Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, Elizabeth Henstridge, Nick Blood, Adrianne Palicki, Henry Simmons, and Luke Mitchell would star as Phil Coulson, Melinda May, Grant Ward, Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons, Lance Hunter, Bobbi Morse, Alphonso "Mack" MacKenzie, and Lincoln Campbell, respectively. It was also revealed that the guest cast for the episode would include Axle Whitehead as James, John Hannah as Holden Radcliffe, Alicia Vela-Bailey as Alisha, Adrian Pasdar as Brigadier General Glenn Talbot, Alexander Wraith as Agent Anderson, Camille De Pazzis as Anon and Rudy Dobrev as bartender. Vela-Bailey, Wraith, and Dobrev did not receive guest star credit in the episode. Whitehead, Vela-Bailey, Pasdar, and Wraith reprise their roles from earlier in the series. Blood and Palicki do not ultimately appear.
For the episode's opening long take shot, the cameraman wore a wire rig usually reserved for actors and stunt doubles so he could be maneuvered around and above the set.
"The Singularity" was first aired in the United States on ABC on April 26, 2016.
In the United States the episode received a 1.0/3 percent share among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, meaning that it was seen by 1.0 percent of all households, and 3 percent of all of those watching television at the time of the broadcast. It was watched by 3.22 million viewers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30084 |
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, "Buddenbrooks". His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called "Exilliteratur", German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.
Mann's work influenced many later authors, including and Yukio Mishima.
Paul Thomas Mann was born to a bourgeois family in Lübeck, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant) and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns, a Brazilian woman of German and Portuguese ancestry, who emigrated to Germany with her family when she was seven years old. His mother was Roman Catholic but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran religion. Mann's father died in 1891, and after that his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann first studied science at a Lübeck "gymnasium" (secondary school), then attended the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich as well as the Technical University of Munich, where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history and literature.
Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933 , with the exception of a year spent in Palestrina, Italy, with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich. Thomas worked at the South German Fire Insurance Company in 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for the magazine "Simplicissimus". Mann's first short story, "Little Mr Friedemann" ("Der Kleine Herr Friedemann"), was published in 1898.
In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. She later joined the Lutheran church. The couple had six children.
In 1912, he and his wife moved to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, which was to inspire his 1924 novel "The Magic Mountain". He was also appalled by the risk of international confrontation between Germany and France, following the Agadir Crisis in Morocco, and later by the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden, Memel Territory (now Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony and where he spent the summers of 1930–1932 working on "Joseph and His Brothers". Today the cottage is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition.
In 1933, while travelling in the South of France, Mann heard from his eldest children Klaus and Erika in Munich, that it would not be safe for him to return to Germany. The family (except these two children) emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, but received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936. In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to the United States. He moved to Princeton, New Jersey where he lived on 65 Stockton Road and began to teach at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The Manns were prominent members of the German expatriate community of Los Angeles, and would frequently meet other emigres at the house of Salka and Bertold Viertel in Santa Monica, and at the Villa Aurora, the home of fellow German exile Lion Feuchtwanger. On 23 June 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. The Manns lived in Los Angeles until 1952.
The outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, prompted Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches (in German) to the German people via the BBC. In October 1940 he began monthly broadcasts, recorded in the U.S. and flown to London, where the BBC broadcast them to Germany on the longwave band. In these eight-minute addresses, Mann condemned Hitler and his "paladins" as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture. In one noted speech he said, "The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture."
Mann was one of the few publicly active opponents of Nazism among German expatriates in the U.S. Mann advocated the idea of German collective guilt, stating on a BBC broadcast of 30 December 1945:
With the start of the Cold War he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a 'suspected communist', he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company." He was listed by HUAC as being "affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts." Being in his own words a non-communist rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: "As an American citizen of German birth I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency.' ... That is how it started in Germany." As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found "the media had been closed to him". Finally he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress and in 1952 he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders.
After his 80th birthday, while on vacation, he developed unilateral swelling and pain in his leg. At that time, he was diagnosed with thrombophlebitis by Dr. Mülders from Leiden which was confirmed by Dr. Wilhelm Löffler in Zürich. Soon after, he developed a state of shock (circulatory) much to the surprise of this physicians. In 1955, he died of acute iliac artery dissection in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Only after his death, it was found that he had been misdiagnosed. The pathologic diagnosis, made by Christoph Hedinger, showed that he had, instead, a perforated iliac artery aneurysm resulting in a retroperitoneal hematoma, compression and thrombosis of the iliac vein. At that time, lifesaving vascular surgery had not been developed.
Many institutions are named in his honour, for instance the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.
Blanche Knopf of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house was introduced to Mann by H. L. Mencken while on a book-buying trip to Europe. Knopf became Mann's American publisher, and Blanche hired scholar Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter to translate Mann's books in 1924. Lowe-Porter subsequently translated Mann's complete works. Blanche Knopf continued to look after Mann. After "Buddenbrooks" proved successful in its first year, they sent him an unexpected bonus. Later in the 1930s, Blanche helped arrange for Mann and his family to emigrate to America.
Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, after he had been nominated by Anders Österling, member of the Swedish Academy, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic "Buddenbrooks" (1901), "The Magic Mountain" ("Der Zauberberg", 1924) and his numerous short stories. (Due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only " Buddenbrooks" was cited at any great length.) Based on Mann's own family, "Buddenbrooks" relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. "The Magic Mountain" ("Der Zauberberg", 1924) follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters, who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization. The tetralogy "Joseph and His Brothers" is an epic novel written over a period of sixteen years, and is one of the largest and most significant works in Mann's oeuvre. Later, other novels included "" (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774); "Doctor Faustus" (1947), the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II; and "Confessions of Felix Krull" ("Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull", 1954), which was unfinished at Mann's death.
Throughout his Dostoevsky essay, he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche, he says: "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime." Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoevsky we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity... in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."
Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his homosexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella "Death in Venice" ("Der Tod in Venedig", 1912).
Anthony Heilbut's biography "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature" (1997) uncovered the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work "The Real Tadzio" (2001) describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido of Venice with his wife and brother, when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław (Władzio) Moes, a 10-year-old Polish boy (see also "The real Tadzio" on the "Death in Venice" page). Mann's diary records his attraction to his own 13-year-old son, "Eissi" – Klaus Mann: "Klaus to whom recently I feel very drawn" (22 June). In the background conversations about man-to-man eroticism take place; a long letter is written to Carl Maria Weber on this topic, while the diary reveals: "In love with Klaus during these days" (5 June). "Eissi, who enchants me right now" (11 July). "Delight over Eissi, who in his bath is terribly handsome. Find it very natural that I am in love with my son ... Eissi lay reading in bed with his brown torso naked, which disconcerted me" (25 July). "I heard noise in the boys' room and surprised Eissi completely naked in front of Golo's bed acting foolish. Strong impression of his premasculine, gleaming body. Disquiet" (17 October 1920).
Handling the struggle between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, "Death in Venice" has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann's old enemy, Alfred Kerr, for having made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes, it has been pivotal in introducing the discourse of same-sex desire into general culture. Mann was a friend of the violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg, for whom he had feelings as a young man (at least until around 1903 when there is evidence that those feelings had cooled). The attraction that he felt for Ehrenberg, which is corroborated by notebook entries, caused Mann difficulty and discomfort and may have been an obstacle to his marrying an English woman, Mary Smith, whom he met in 1901. In 1950, Mann met the 19 year old waiter Franz Westermeier, confiding to his diary "Once again this, once again love". In 1975, when Mann's diaries were published, creating a national sensation in Germany, the retired Westermeier was tracked down in the United States: he was flattered to learn he had been the object of Mann's obsession, but also shocked at its depth.
Although Mann had always denied his novels had autobiographical components, the unsealing of his diaries revealing how consumed his life had been with unrequited and sublimated passion resulted in a reappraisal of his work. Klaus Mann had dealt openly from the beginning with his own homosexuality in his literary work, critically referring to his father's "sublimation" in his diary, whereas daughter Erika Mann and younger son Golo Mann came out only later in their lives.
Several literary and other works make reference to Mann's book "The Magic Mountain", including:
Several literary and other works make reference to "Death in Venice", including:
During World War I, Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism, attacked liberalism and supported the war effort, calling the Great War "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope". Yet in "Von Deutscher Republik" (1923) as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in "Die neue Rundschau" in November 1922 in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. Thereafter, his political views gradually shifted toward liberal left and democratic principles.
He initially gave his support to the left-liberal German Democratic Party before shifting further left and urging unity behind the Social Democrats.
In 1930, Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason" in which he strongly denounced Nazism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his strident denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. In contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, Mann's books were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. In 1936, the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship.
During the war, Mann made a series of anti-Nazi radio-speeches, published as "Listen, Germany!". They were recorded on tape in the United States and then sent to Great Britain, where the BBC transmitted them, hoping to reach German listeners.
Mann expressed his belief in the collection of letters written in exile, "Listen, Germany!" ("Deutsche Hörer!"), that equating Russian communism with Nazi-fascism on the basis that both are totalitarian systems was either superficial or insincere in showing a preference for fascism. He clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist, but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future. He said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".
1905: "Fiorenza"
1893: "Vision"
"The Blood of the Walsungs"
"Felix Krull"
"Joseph and His Brothers" ("Joseph und seine Brüder") (1933–43) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30085 |
The Incredible Shrinking Man
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a 1957 American science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold based on Richard Matheson's 1956 novel "The Shrinking Man". The film stars Grant Williams as Scott and Randy Stuart as Scott's wife Louise. While relaxing on a boat, Scott is enveloped by strange fog. Months later, he discovers that he appears to be shrinking. By the time Scott has reached the height of a small boy, his condition becomes known to the public. When he learns there is no cure for his condition, he lashes out at his wife. As Scott shrinks to the point he can fit into a doll house, he has a battle with his family cat, which leaves him lost and alone in his basement, where he is now smaller than the average insect.
The film's storyline was expanded by Matheson after he had sold the story to Universal-International Pictures Co., Inc. He also completed the novel upon which the film is based while production was underway. Matheson's script was written in flashbacks, and Richard Alan Simmons rewrote it using a more conventional narrative structure. Director Jack Arnold initially wanted Dan O'Herlihy to play Scott. O'Herlihy turned down the role leading Universal to sign Williams to star in the lead. Filming began on May 31, 1956. Scenes involving special effects were shot throughout production, while others used the large sets of Universal's back lot. Production went over budget and filming had to be extended; certain special effects shots required reshooting. Williams was constantly being injured on set.
Before the film's release in New York City on February 22, 1957, its ending first went to test audiences who felt the character's fate should be changed. The director's original ending remained in the film. The film grossed $1.43 million in the United States and Canada and was among the highest grossing science fiction films of the 1950s. A sequel, "The Fantastic Little Girl", originally penned by Matheson, never went into production. A remake was developed years later, eventually becoming the comedy "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" (1981). Other remakes were planned in the early 2000s, one of which was to star Eddie Murphy in a more comedic variation on the film. A new adaptation was announced in 2013, with Matheson writing the screenplay with his son Richard Christian Matheson.
In the 1950s, Robert Scott Carey, known as "Scott", is on vacation with his wife, Louise, when a strange mist covers him. Six months later, Scott notices his clothes are too large. Scott finds himself continuing to shrink, and seeks medical advice. At first dismissive, Scott's doctor confirms his shrinking with an x-ray. Scott is referred to a medical research institute where it is determined Scott's exposure to the mist, combined with his later exposure to a pesticide, rearranged his molecular structure causing him to shrink. Scott tells Louise in light of his predicament she is free to leave him. Louise promises to stay as Scott's wedding ring falls off his finger.
Scott's condition makes him a national curiosity. Media attention forces Scott into seclusion inside his home. Scott is advised to sell his story and he begins keeping a journal of his experiences. Scott feels humiliated and lashes out at Louise. An antidote is found to arrest Scott's shrinking, but doctors advise he will never return to his former size. Emotionally broken, Scott leaves home and meets a dwarf named Clarice who is in town working in a carnival sideshow. Clarice encourages Scott and he is inspired to continue his journal. Later, Scott notices he has become shorter than Clarice, and runs home.
Scott shrinks small enough to live in a doll house and becomes more tyrannical. When Louise leaves home on an errand, Scott is forced to escape to his basement after Butch, the family cat, attacks him. Louise returns and assumes Butch ate Scott after she finds a bloody scrap of Scott's clothing. Louise prepares to move out and asks her brother, Charlie, to help.
Scott encounters much hardship navigating his basement. The water heater bursts, but when Charlie and Louise come to investigate, Scott is too small for them to hear his screams for help. Scott next battles a large spider while finding food and shelter for himself. He ultimately kills the spider with a straight pin, and collapses in exhaustion. He awakens small enough to escape the basement through the squares in a screen. Scott accepts his fate of shrinking to atomic size. However, he is no longer afraid, concluding that no matter how small he becomes, he will still matter in the universe because God will know he exists.
Cast adapted from the American Film Institute.
Richard Matheson's idea for the original novel was inspired by a scene in the film "Let's Do It Again", where Ray Milland's character leaves an apartment with the wrong hat. It is much too large for Milland and sinks down around his head and ears. Matheson sold the rights to Universal on the condition that he write the screenplay. It was Matheson's first screenplay, a writing format he felt he adapted to quickly. Matheson's initial script followed Scott Carey already shrunken and battling a spider in his basement. His rewrite is told in flashback form, interspersed with scenes of Carey and the spider, while telling the story of Carey's gradual loss in height.
The film was already into its second month of production before the novel was published in May 1956 by Gold Medal Books. Producer Albert Zugsmith added the word "Incredible" to Matheson's title and passed the script to Richard Alan Simmons, who removed the script's flashback structure. Matheson later discussed working with Universal finding that the producer had a "very commercial mind" which make the script weaker in terms of character. In an interview in "Cinefantastique" magazine, Matheson stated he protested sharing a screen credit with Simmons. The screen credits list Matheson as the writer, while the shooting script lists both Matheson and Simmons.
Pre-production was originally set to begin on April 20, 1956, but it started officially on April 24. The cast consisted of mostly unknown actors. Director Jack Arnold phoned Randy Stuart, who was a personal friend, asking if she would be interested in doing the film. Zugsmith initially wanted Dan O'Herlihy to play the role of Scott Carey. O'Herlihy had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in "Robinson Crusoe". After reading the script, he refused to play another isolated character, not wanting to be typecast in that kind of role. Grant Williams was cast because Universal had him pegged to become a star. On April 4, 1956, Williams and Randy Stuart were screen tested and deemed acceptable for the roles of Scott and Louise Carey.
On the first day of production, May 31, Universal's operating committee decided that because of the type of special photography involved in the making of the film, the publicity department would co-operate by publicizing a closed-door policy on the set. On-set photography would not be allowed while the film was shot to stimulate public and trade interest. Shooting took either five or six weeks, including the special effects sequences. The budget ranged between $700,000 and $800,000. Film critic Kim Newman said the budget was "not expensive", with most of it used for special effects.
Some special effects shots were the earliest taken for the picture. For example, shots with Randy Stewart were taken against a black velvet backdrop and then composited with shots of Williams on an enlarged living room set. Their movements were synchronized using negatives from the first exposed scene in the camera gate, with the opposite done for the other scene. Sound production began on May 31. An oversized dollhouse was built for Williams on Stage 28. It had previously been used for "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Dracula". Arnold said he filmed scenes with the cat in a normal studio with an animal trainer who had about 40 identical cats. To coax the cat to approach the dollhouse, Arnold hid food in it so the cat would find a way into the house. Later he timed the cat's reactions and directed Williams accordingly to react to the cat. Arnold's first attempted to follow the novel and use a black widow spider. After preliminary tests he found black widows were too small to use properly in the film. In an interview with Tom Weaver, Randy Stuart said the spiders presented problems. The overhead lamps on the set had to be turned up high leading to the deaths of two dozen tarantulas. They were directed with little puffs of air, a technique which had been used previously in Arnold's film "Tarantula". Despite sources suggesting otherwise, both films did not use the same tarantulas.
Many of the basement scenes were shot on Stage 12 of Universal Studios which, according to Tom Weaver, was one of the largest sound stages in the world at the time. While trying a way to film a scene involving giant raindrops landing, Arnold recalled when he was a child finding condoms in his father's drawer. Not knowing what they were he filled them with water and dropped them. Arnold ordered about 100 condoms and placed them on a treadmill so they would drop in sequence. The flood scene was shot on July 2 and 3. There was a 20-minute delay in filming because of a bad camera cable. There was a further delay from 11:05 am to 11:25 am to allow water to drain so a crane could be used properly. These scenes involved nine-hour workdays. When the actors were not filming, they were sent to have publicity shots taken.
The film was originally shot in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, but midway through filming on June 22 it was decided that the remaining footage would be shot in the 1.75:1. The belief was this would give the film a better look as a narrower frame would allow the production department to scale down the height of certain props for the special effects. During this period, Grant Williams suffered the first of many injuries on set. On June 22 he reported to the studio hospital with a scratched leg, on June 29 he had to leave the set to be treated for an eye condition, and on July 2 he had to be driven to the hospital for further treatment for his eyes. On the same day he was sent to the studio hospital for blisters and scratches from injuries sustained while climbing sets. Due to Williams' injuries and some special effects shots being too bright, the film was four days behind schedule and was $25,000 over budget.
Special effects shots using black velvet trick photography took three weeks of post-production and were scheduled after the film completed production on July 13, 1956. Warren described the special effects as "hard to assign correctly." Clifford Stine, whose field was process work and rear screen projection, is credited with "special photography". The boat scene at the beginning of the film was shot on Universal's process stage which allowed for rear screen projection. Shots of Scott in certain scenes such as his encounter with the mist were shot with him against a black velvet black drop.
The film's score is not an organic score by an individual composer as it draws from different sources. The film's main theme is composed by Irving Gertz and performed by big band leader Ray Anthony. Other music used in the film, such as the scene where the doctor is first examining Scott's x-rays, is drawn from the studio's library music under the supervision of music supervisor Joseph Gershenson.
According to Randy Stuart, the film's ending had Williams return to his original size, which Matheson felt was the wrong ending for the story. Arnold argued with Universal over the ending. The studio wanted a happy ending while he wanted the original ending that had been shot. To decide on which ending to use a test screening was held to judge the audience's reaction. Lucas said audience review cards from a December 7 preview screening in California reacting to the ending included comments such as: "Should've had a different ending, should've grown again." and "What happened at the end?". On the overall quality of the film comments included, "Can't you do any better? This is pretty sad." "You scared my son to death." and "This is an insult to the brain power of my two-year old son". The film was released with Arnold's original ending intact.
"The Incredible Shrinking Man" opened in New York on February 22, 1957. This was followed by a screening in Los Angeles on March 27, 1957, and a wider release in April. Mel Danner, manager of the Circle Theater in Waynoka, Oklahoma, noted the audiences' reaction who felt it was a good film but felt that Carey should have returned to original size at the end. The film was reissued theatrically in 1964. "Variety" reported that by the end of the year the film had grossed $1.43 million. Actress Randy Stuart recalled the film was either "second or third, I think third after "The Ten Commandments"" in terms of how much money it made against what it cost. It was among the highest grossing science fiction films of the decade. In comparison, other 1950s science fiction films grossed more. "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" grossed $8 million, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", grossed $4.8 million, while "The Thing" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" grossed $1.95 million and $1.2 million respectively.
The film felt was among the least re-released of his major films. It was rarely shown on television and screened only occasionally at science fiction conventions. The film was released on laser disc in 1978 and 1991, and on VHS in 1992. It was released on DVD as part of a box set containing a collection of Universal-International's science fiction films. Arrow Video released the film on Blu-ray in 2017.
"The Incredible Shrinking Man"'s initial reception was described by Arnold's biographer Dana M. Reemes as a routine to above average film; its reception has steadily grown ever since. Philip K. Scheuer of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "a fascinating exercise in imagination, as terrifying as it is funny [...] Science-fiction admirers who are accustomed to finding food for thought as well as vicarious thrills in such flights of fancy will not be disappointed, either."
The "Monthly Film Bulletin" praised the film, and declared it a "horrifying story that grips the imagination throughout"; a "straightforward, macabre, and as startlingly original as a vintage Ray Bradbury short story, for all its peaceful and resigned conclusion–opens new vistas of cosmic terror". Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" panned the film, writing that "unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés." "Brog." of "Variety" commented that the film was not thoroughly satisfactory, but had enough good qualities, specifically declaring "unfoldment is inclined to slow down on occasion, resulting in flagging interest here and there." The review noted the special effects and cinematography were "visually effective" but that "portions of the background score are overworked" which distracted from the plot. The film was the first winner of the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1958.
Martin Rubin discussed the film in a 1974 issue of "Film Comment" and compared it to its contemporaries in the genre. He found it did not have the "schoolboy cynicism and moralizing of a Roger Corman film, nor any of the hysteria common to the Red-scare science-fictioners of the Fifties." He felt the story was well-suited to Jack Arnold, noting a "WeIlesian director would have overinflated this film and compromised its sense of the ordinary with shadows and angles, while a more accomplished stylist of almost any other order would have softened it too much-such attitudes are better off in the horror film." Rubin also compared it the other science fiction films Arnold made in the 1950s—"The Creature From the Black Lagoon", "It Came From Outer Space", "Tarantula", "Revenge of the Creature", and "The Space Children"—finding them competitively "interesting in patches" but lacking in comparison to the "unity and clarity" of "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which "totally fulfills its central metaphor without being unduly constricted by it."
Ian Nathan of "Empire" referred to the film as a classic of 1950s science fiction films, and noted how that the everyday objects found at home are "transformed into a terrifying vertiginous world fraught with peril. A confrontation with a 'giant' spider, impressively realised, as are all the effects, for its day, has become one of the iconic image of the entire era." Tim Lucas declared the film "remains one of the perfectly realized science fiction films" noting it was "less about science then a masterful example of the 'what if' branch of speculative human drama".
Jack Arnold commented on science films made after "The Incredible Shrinking Man", saying that since his films were financially successful, American International Pictures and Japanese studios developed similar productions, which he felt lacked in both atmosphere and/or morals and were just stories about monsters. These included "The Amazing Colossal Man" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman". Arnold was unable to sell a science fiction story after these films began appearing and went to England to create "The Mouse That Roared", which he felt was a fantasy film that still had a deeper meaning to it. Arnold later declared "Mouse" as his favourite picture and that he thought "almost as much of" "The Incredible Shrinking Man". Arnold spoke about the film later in life watching a revival screening of it, saying he was happy that audiences enjoyed the film and that they "got all the nuances that I put in. It was a joy to me, just to watch their reaction to the film." Matheson discussed the film in an interview in John Bronsan's "Horror People", where he declared he only enjoyed the film after his son pointed out the films story structure, specifically that "it didn't have the usual story line, the usual happy ending. Actually it had no particular story line, it was very picaresque, it just wandered on." Matheson re-iterated his enjoyment of the film in "Cinefantastique", finding himself able to appreciate the film with subsequent watches, finding the visuals as "truly remarkable" and that Arnold] created "quite a mood in the film." The film was selected for preservation by in the National Film Registry in 2009.
Matheson scripted a sequel to "The Incredible Shrinking Man" titled "The Fantastic Little Girl". The film has Louise Carey certain that Scott is still alive. She returns home and finds herself shrinking and is injected with a new cure. The script also featured Scott in his microscopic world where he encounters strange eel-like creatures. The script was 43 pages long and described as inferior by author Bill Warren compared to the original film. Matheson said that despite the original film making "a lot of money" he was unsure why the sequel was not developed past the script stage. The script in its entirety was published in the book "Unrealized Dreams" in 2005. The reluctance to re-release the film for home video was because Universal intended to develop a pseudo-sequel to the film. This included John Landis developing, writing and directing "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", which was cancelled by Universal after the project's budget was found to be too high. The film was revived by Jane Wagner. Jack Arnold said he "hated" "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", declaring the special effects weak and adding there was "no point of view ... the major fault is that it's not a comedy even though they tried so hard to make it funny...".
Universal were attempting to work with Imagine Entertainment on a remake of the film to be directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and starring Eddie Murphy in 2003. Following this, other directors were attached to the project including Peter Segal and Brett Ratner with Murphy still slated to star in a comedic version of the film. The rights to the source material lapsed by 2012 and were purchased by MGM. A new adaptation of "The Shrinking Man" was announced in 2013, with Matheson writing the screenplay with his son Richard Christian Matheson. The Mathesons commented that the new adaptation would modernise the story and reflect on advancements such as nanotechnology. The elder Matheson died on June 23, 2013. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30086 |
Geography of Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is an island country in East Asia. The main island of Taiwan, known historically in English as Formosa, makes up 99% of the area controlled by the ROC, measuring and lying some across the Taiwan Strait from the southeastern coast of mainland China. The East China Sea lies to its north, the Philippine Sea to its east, the Luzon Strait directly to its south and the South China Sea to its southwest. Smaller islands include a number in the Taiwan Strait including the Penghu archipelago, the Kinmen and Matsu Islands near the Chinese coast, and some of the South China Sea Islands.
The main island is a tilted fault block, characterized by the contrast between the eastern two-thirds, consisting mostly of five rugged mountain ranges parallel to the east coast, and the flat to gently rolling plains of the western third, where the majority of Taiwan's population reside. There are several peaks over 3,500 m, the highest being Yu Shan at , making Taiwan the world's fourth-highest island. The tectonic boundary that formed these ranges is still active, and the island experiences many earthquakes, a few of them highly destructive. There are also many active submarine volcanoes in the Taiwan Straits.
The climate ranges from tropical in the south to subtropical in the north, and is governed by the East Asian Monsoon. The main island is struck by an average of four typhoons in each year. The eastern mountains are heavily forested and home to a diverse range of wildlife, while land use in the western and northern lowlands is intensive.
The total land area of Taiwan is , making it intermediate in size between Belgium and the Netherlands. It has a coastline of . The ROC claims an exclusive economic zone of with and a territorial sea of .
Taiwan proper, the main island of the archipelago, was known in the West until after World War II as "Formosa", from the Portuguese "Ilha Formosa" (), "beautiful island". It is long and wide, and has an area of . The northernmost point of the island is Cape Fugui in New Taipei's Shimen District. The central point of the island is in Puli Township, Nantou County. The southernmost point on the island is Cape Eluanbi in Hengchun Township, Pingtung County.
The island of Taiwan is separated from the southeast coast of China by the Taiwan Strait, which ranges from at its widest point to at its narrowest. Part of the continental shelf, the Strait is no more than deep, and has become a land bridge during glacial periods.
To the south, the island of Taiwan is separated from the Philippine island of Luzon by the -wide Luzon Strait. The South China Sea lies to the southwest, the East China Sea to the north, and the Philippine Sea to the east. Niushan Island in Nanlai village, Aoqian town, Pingtan County, Fuzhou, Fujian is the closest China (PRC)-administered island to Taiwan (main island).
Smaller islands of the archipelago include the Penghu islands in the Taiwan Strait west of the main island, with an area of , the tiny islet of Xiaoliuqiu off the southwest coast, and Orchid Island and Green Island to the southeast, separated from the northernmost islands of the Philippines by the Bashi Channel. The islands of Kinmen and Matsu near the coast of Fujian across the Taiwan Strait have a total area of ; the Pratas and Taiping islets in the South China Sea are also administered by the ROC, but are not part of the Taiwanese archipelago.
The island of Taiwan was formed approximately 4 to 5 million years ago at a complex convergent boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. In a boundary running the length of the island and continuing southwards in the Luzon Volcanic Arc (including Green Island and Orchid Island), the Eurasian Plate is sliding under the Philippine Sea Plate.
Most of the island comprises a huge fault block tilted to the west.
The western part of the island, and much of the central range, consists of sedimentary deposits scraped from the descending edge of the Eurasian Plate. In the northeast of the island, and continuing eastwards in the Ryukyu Volcanic Arc, the Philippine Sea Plate slides under the Eurasian Plate.
The tectonic boundary remains active, and Taiwan experiences 15,000 to 18,000 earthquakes each year, of which 800 to 1,000 are noticed by people. The most catastrophic recent earthquake was the magnitude-7.3 Chi-Chi earthquake, which occurred in the center of Taiwan on 21 September 1999, killing more than 2,400 people. On 4 March 2010 at about 01:20 UTC, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake hit southwestern Taiwan in the mountainous area of Kaohsiung County.
Another major earthquake occurred on 6 February 2016, with a magnitude of 6.4. Tainan was damaged the most, with 117 deaths, most of them caused by the collapse of a 17-story apartment building.
The terrain in Taiwan is divided into two parts: the flat to gently rolling plains in the west, where 90% of the population lives, and the mostly rugged forest-covered mountains in the eastern two-thirds.
The eastern part of the island is dominated by five mountain ranges, each running from north-northeast to south-southwest, roughly parallel to the east coast of the island. As a group, they extend from north to south and average about from east to west. They include more than two hundred peaks with elevations of over .
The Central Mountain Range extends from Su'ao in the northeast to Eluanbi at the southern tip of the island, forming a ridge of high mountains and serving as the island's principal watershed. The mountains are predominantly composed of hard rock formations resistant to weathering and erosion, although heavy rainfall has deeply scarred the sides with gorges and sharp valleys. The relative relief of the terrain is usually extensive, and the forest-clad mountains with their extreme ruggedness are almost impenetrable. The east side of the Central Mountain Range is the steepest mountain slope in Taiwan, with fault scarps ranging in height from . Taroko National Park, on the steep eastern side of the range, has good examples of mountainous terrain, gorges and erosion caused by a swiftly flowing river.
The East Coast Mountain Range extends down the east coast of the island from the mouth of the Hualien River in the north to Taitung County in the south, and chiefly consist of sandstone and shale. It is separated from the Central Range by the narrow Huatung Valley, at an altitude of . Although Hsinkangshan (新港山), the highest peak, reaches an elevation of , most of the range is composed of large hills. Small streams have developed on the flanks, but only one large river cuts across the range. Badlands are located at the western foot of the range, where the ground water level is the lowest and rock formations are the least resistant to weathering. Raised coral reefs along the east coast and the frequent occurrences of earthquakes in the rift valley indicate that the fault block is still rising.
The ranges to the west of the Central range are divided into two groups separated by the Sun Moon Lake Basin in the centre of the island. The Dadu and Zhuoshui Rivers flow from the western slopes of the Central Range through the basin to the west coast of the island.
The Xueshan Range lies to the northwest of the Central Mountain Range, beginning at Sandiaojiao, the northeast tip of the island, and gaining elevation as it extends southwest towards Nantou County. Xueshan, the main peak, is high.
The Yushan Range runs along the southwestern flank of the Central Range. It includes the island's tallest peak, the Yu Shan ('Jade Mountain') which makes Taiwan the world's fourth-highest island, and is the highest point in the western Pacific region outside of the Kamchatka Peninsula, New Guinea Highlands and Mount Kinabalu.
The Alishan Range lies west of the Yushan Range, across the valley of the south-flowing Kaoping River. The range has major elevations between . The main peak, Data Mountain (大塔山), towers .
Below the western foothills of the ranges, such as the Hsinchu Hills and the Miaoli Hills, lie raised terraces formed of material eroded from the ranges. These include the Linkou Plateau, the Taoyuan Plateau and the Dadu Plateau. About 23% of Taiwan's land area consists of fertile alluvial plains and basins watered by rivers running from the eastern mountains. Over half of this land lies in the Chianan Plain in southwest Taiwan, with lesser areas in the Pingtung Plain, Taichung Basin and Taipei Basin. The only sizable plain on the east coast is the Yilan Plain in the northeast.
The island of Taiwan lies across the Tropic of Cancer, and its climate is influenced by the East Asian Monsoon. Northern Taiwan has a humid subtropical climate, with substantial seasonal variation of temperatures, while parts of central and most of southern has a tropical monsoon climate where seasonal temperature variations are less noticeable with temperatures typically varying from warm to hot. During the winter (November to March), the northeast experiences steady rain, while the central and southern parts of the island are mostly sunny. The summer monsoon (from May to October) accounts for 90% of the annual precipitation in the south, but only 60% in the north. The average rainfall is approximately 2,600 mm per year.
Typhoons are most likely to strike between July and October, with on average about four direct hits per year. Intensive rain from typhoons often leads to disastrous mudslides.
Before extensive human settlement, the vegetation on Taiwan ranged from tropical rainforest in the lowlands through temperate forests, boreal forest and alpine plants with increasing altitude.
Most of the plains and low-lying hills of the west and north of the island have been cleared for agricultural use since the arrival of the Chinese immigrants during the 17th and 18th century. However the mountain forests are very diverse, with several endemic species such as Formosan cypress ("Chamaecyparis formosensis") and Taiwan fir ("Abies kawakamii"), while the camphor laurel ("Cinnamomum camphora") was once also widespread at lower altitudes.
Taiwan is a center of bird endemism (see List of endemic birds of Taiwan).
Prior to the country's industrialization, the mountainous areas held several endemic animal species and subspecies, such as the Swinhoe's pheasant ("Lophura swinhoii"), Taiwan blue magpie ("Urocissa caerulea"), the Formosan sika deer ("Cervus nippon taiwanensis" or "Cervus nippon taiouanus") and the Formosan landlocked salmon ("Oncorhynchus masou formosanus"). A few of these are now extinct, and many others have been designated endangered species.
Taiwan had relatively few carnivores, 11 species in total, of which the Formosan clouded leopard and otter are likely extinct. The largest carnivore is the Formosan black bear ("Selanarctos thibetanus formosanus"), a rare and endangered species.
Nine national parks in Taiwan showcase the diverse terrain, flora and fauna of the archipelago. Kenting National Park on the southern tip of Taiwan contains uplifted coral reefs, moist tropical forest and marine ecosystems. Yushan National Park has alpine terrain, mountain ecology, forest types that vary with altitude, and remains of ancient road. Yangmingshan National Park has volcanic geology, hot springs, waterfalls, and forest. Taroko National Park has marble canyon, cliff, and fold mountains. Shei-Pa National Park has alpine ecosystems, geological terrain, and valley streams. Kinmen National Park has lakes, wetlands, coastal topography, flora and fauna-shaped island. Dongsha Atoll National Park has the Pratas reef atolls for integrity, a unique marine ecology, biodiversity, and is a key habitat for the marine resources of the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
Natural resources on the islands include small deposits of gold, copper, coal, natural gas, limestone, marble, and asbestos. The island is 55% forest and woodland (mostly on the mountains) and 24% arable land (mostly on the plains), with 15% going to other purposes. 5% is permanent pasture and 1% is permanent crops.
Because of the intensive exploitation throughout Taiwan's pre-modern and modern history, the island's mineral resources (e.g. coal, gold, marble), as well as wild animal reserves (e.g. deer), have been virtually exhausted. Moreover, much of its forestry resources, especially firs were harvested during Japanese rule for the construction of shrines and have only recovered slightly since then. To this day, forests do not contribute to significant timber production mainly because of concerns about production costs and environmental regulations.
The few natural resources with significant economic value remaining in Taiwan are essentially agriculture-associated. Sugarcane and rice have been cultivated in western Taiwan since the 17th century. Camphor extraction and sugarcane refining played an important role in Taiwan's exportation from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. The importance of these industries subsequently declined not because of the exhaustion of related natural resources but mainly due to the decline of international demand.
Domestic agriculture (rice being the dominant kind of crop) and fisheries retain importance to a certain degree, but they have been greatly challenged by foreign imports since Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Consequently, upon the decline of subsistent importance, Taiwan's agriculture now relies heavily on the marketing and exportation of specialty crops, such as banana, guava, lychee, bell fruit, and high-mountain tea.
Taiwan has significant coal deposits and some insignificant petroleum and natural gas deposits. , oil accounts for 49.0% of the total energy consumption. Coal comes next with 32.1%, followed by nuclear energy with 8.3%, natural gas (indigenous and liquefied) with 10.2%, and energy from renewable sources with 0.5%. Taiwan has six nuclear reactors and two under construction. Nearly all oil and gas for transportation and power needs must be imported, making Taiwan particularly sensitive to fluctuations in energy prices. Taiwan is rich in wind energy resources, with wind farms both onshore and offshore, though limited land area favors offshore wind resources. By promoting renewable energy, Taiwan's government hopes to also aid the nascent renewable energy manufacturing industry, and develop it into an export market.
Taiwan has a population of over 23 million, the vast majority of whom live in the lowlands near the western coast of the island.
The island is highly urbanized, with nearly 9 million people living in the Taipei–Keelung–Taoyuan metropolitan area at the northern end, and over 2 million each in the urban areas of Kaohsiung and Taichung.
Taiwanese aborigines comprise approximately 2% of the population, and now mostly live in the mountainous eastern part of the island. Most scholars believe their ancestors arrived in Taiwan by sea between 4000 and 3000 BC, probably from the mainland.
Han Chinese make up over 95% of the population. Immigrants from southern Fujian began to farm the area around modern Tainan and Kaohsiung from the 17th century, later spreading across the western and northern plains and absorbing the aboriginal population of those areas. Hakka people from eastern Guangdong arrived later and settled the foothills further inland, but the rugged uplands of the eastern half of the island remained the exclusive preserve of the aborigines until the early 20th century. A further 1.2 million people from throughout mainland China entered Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Some areas in Taiwan with high population density and many factories are affected by heavy pollution. The most notable areas are the southern suburbs of Taipei and the western stretch from Tainan to Lin Yuan, south of Kaohsiung. By the late 20th century, Taipei suffered from extensive vehicle and factory air pollution, but after the government required mandatory use of unleaded petrol and established the Environmental Protection Administration in 1987 to regulate air quality, the air quality of Taiwan has improved dramatically. Motor scooters, especially older or cheaper two-stroke versions, which are ubiquitous in Taiwan, contribute disproportionately to urban air pollution.
Other environmental issues include water pollution from industrial emissions and raw sewage, contamination of drinking water supplies, trade in endangered species, and low-level radioactive waste disposal. Though regulation of sulfate aerosol emissions from petroleum combustion is becoming stringent, acid rain remains a threat to the health of residents and forests. Atmospheric scientists in Taiwan estimate that more than half of the pollutants causing Taiwan's acid rain are carried from mainland China by monsoon winds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30089 |
Politics of the Republic of China
The politics of the Republic of China take place in a framework of a representative democratic republic, whereby the President is head of state and the Premier (President of the Executive Yuan) is head of government, and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in primarily with the parliament and limited by government. The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The party system is dominated by the Kuomintang (KMT, "Chinese Nationalist Party"), which favors closer links to mainland China, and the Democratic Progressive Party, which favors Taiwanese independence.
The modern-day ROC consists of Taiwan (Formosa) and Penghu (the Pescadores) as well as portions of the Fujian Province (Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu) and several smaller islands. Taiwan's six major cities, Kaohsiung, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, Taipei, and Taoyuan, are special municipalities. The rest of the territories are divided into 3 cities and 13 counties.
The ROC is governed under the Constitution of the Republic of China which was drafted in 1947 before the fall of the Chinese mainland to the Communist Party of China and outlined a government for all of China. Significant amendments were made to the Constitution in 1991, and there have been a number of judicial interpretations made to take into account the fact that the Constitution covers a much smaller area than originally envisioned.
The government in Taipei officially asserts to be the sole legitimate government of all of China, which it defined as including Taiwan, mainland China, and outer Mongolia. In keeping with that claim, when the KMT fled to Taipei in 1949, they re-established the full array of central political bodies, which had existed in mainland China in the de jure capital of Nanjing (Nanking). While much of this structure remains in place, the President Lee Teng-hui in 1991 unofficially abandoned the government's claim of sovereignty over mainland China, stating that they do not "dispute the fact that the Communists control mainland China." However, the National Assembly has not officially changed the national borders, as doing so may be seen as a prelude to formal Taiwanese independence. The People's Republic of China has several times threatened to start a war if the government of Taiwan formalizes independence; as in the Anti-Secession Law. Neither the National Assembly nor the Supreme Court has actually defined what the term "existing national boundaries," as stated in the constitution, actually means. The latter refused to do so claiming that it is a "major political issue".
The original founding of the Republic centered on the Three Principles of the People (): nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood. Nationalism meant the Han Chinese race standing up against Manchu rule and Japanese and Western interference, democracy meant elected rule modeled after Japan's parliament, and people's livelihood or socialism, meant government regulation of the means of production. Another lesser known principle that the Republic was founded upon was "five races under one union"" (五族共和), which emphasized the harmony of the five major ethnic groups in China as represented by the colored stripes of the original Five-Colored Flag of the Republic. However, this five races under one union principle and the corresponding flag were abandoned in 1927.
In reality these three principles were left unrealized. Republican China was marked by warlordism, foreign invasion, and civil war. Although there were elected legislators, from its inception, it was actually a largely one-party dictatorship apart from some minor parties, including the Chinese Youth Party, the National Socialist Party and the Rural Construction Party, with suppression of dissent within the KMT of communists. As the central government was quite weak, little could be done in terms of land reform or redistribution of wealth either. Politics of this era consisted primarily of the political and military struggle between the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC) in between bouts of active resistance against Japanese invasion.
The first national government of the Chinese Republic was established on 1 January 1912, in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as the provisional president. Provincial delegates were sent to confirm the authority of the national government, and they later also formed the first parliament. The power of this national government was both limited and short-lived, with generals controlling all of central and northern China. The limited acts passed by this government included the formal abdication of the Qing dynasty and some economic initiatives.
Shortly after the rise of Yuan Shikai, the parliament's authority became nominal; violations of the Constitution by Yuan were met with half-hearted motions of censure, and KMT members of the parliament that gave up their membership to the KMT were offered 1,000 pounds. Yuan maintained power locally by sending military generals to be provincial governors or by obtaining the allegiance of those already in power. Foreign powers came to recognize Yuan's power as well: when Japan came to China with Twenty-One Demands, it was Yuan that submitted to them, on 25 May 1915.
After the death of Yuan in 1916, the parliament of 1913 was reconvened to give legitimacy to a new government. However, the real power of the time passed to military leaders, forming the warlord period. Still, the powerless government had its use—when World War I began, several Western powers and Japan wanted China to declare war on Germany, in order to liquidate the latter's holdings there.
From the beginning to the end of Republican China, political power was generally exercised through both legal and non-legal means. Yuan ruled as a dictator, remolding the constitution as he saw fit; warlords withdrew from the Republic, ruling through military control; and Chiang based his political power on military power. During this time, Chiang ruled more as a dictator than as a leader of a one-party state. He used white terror tactics and various military campaigns to destroy the CPC, and the police and military apparatus were freely used to attack dissenters. However, Chiang's influence never extended beyond the Yangtze Delta, and the rest of the country was under the effective control of former warlords, and Chiang faced insurrections from them throughout the 1930s, even after the Northern Expedition, which had nominally unified the country. Regional political power remained strong throughout Republican China, and central authority deteriorated continuously until the Second Sino-Japanese War, to the point that Chiang became no more than the "head of a loose coalition," as observed by Albert Wedemeyer.
After the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, Vice President Yen Chia-kan briefly took over from 1975 to 1978, according to the Constitution, but the actual power was in the hands of Premier Chiang Ching-kuo (), who was KMT chairman and a son of Chang Kai-shek. During the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo from 1978 to 1988, Taiwan's political system began to undergo gradual liberalization.
After the lifting of martial law, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨) was formed and allowed to participate overtly in politics. After Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, Vice President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) succeeded him as the first Taiwan-born president and chairman of the KMT. Lee became the first ROC president elected by popular vote in 1996, despite the PRC's missile tests.
In 2000, Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected president, marking the first peaceful democratic transition of power to an opposition party in ROC history and a decisive end to the KMT's monopoly in administration of the central government.
In the 2004 presidential election, the day after being shot while campaigning, Chen was reelected by a narrow margin of 0.2%. The KMT filed lawsuits to demand a recount, alleged voting fraud and staged huge rallies to demand a new election. The courts ruled that the election was accurate and valid.
In both of Chen's terms, the DPP and the independence-leaning Pan-Green Coalition failed to secure a majority in the legislature, losing to the KMT and the pro-unification leaning Pan-Blue Coalition. This has led to many impasses; the president in the ROC system does not have the power of veto, so the legislature does not feel the need to negotiate with the executive branch.
One key issue has been the political status of Taiwan itself. With the diplomatic isolation brought about in the 1970s and 1980s, the notion of "recovering the mainland" by force has been dropped and the Taiwanese localization movement strengthened. The relationship with the People's Republic of China and the related issues of Taiwan independence and Chinese reunification continue to dominate Taiwanese politics.
The political scene in the ROC is divided into two camps, with the pro-unification KMT, People First Party (PFP), and New Party forming the Pan-Blue Coalition; and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and strongly pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) forming the Pan-Green Coalition. Because of the dominance of the reunification-independence issue in Taiwan's political scene, it is difficult to categorise either camp as "right" or "left" on the conventional basis of economic or social policies.
Supporters of the Pan-Green camp tend to favor emphasizing the Republic of China as being a distinct country from the People's Republic of China. Many Pan-Green supporters seek formal Taiwan independence and for dropping the title of the Republic of China. However, more progressive members of the coalition, such as former President Chen Shui-bian, have moderated their views and claim that it is unnecessary to proclaim independence because Taiwan is already "an independent, sovereign country" and that the Republic of China is the same as Taiwan. Some members take a much more extreme view about Taiwan's status, claiming that the ROC is nonexistent and calling for the establishment of an independent "Republic of Taiwan". Supporters of this idea have even gone as far as issuing self-made "passports" for their republic. Attempts to use these "passports" however, have been stopped by officials at Chang Kai-shek International Airport.
While the Pan-Green camp favors Taiwan having an identity separate from that of China, some Pan-Blue members, especially former leaders from the older generation, seem to be strongly supportive of the concept of the Republic of China, which remains an important symbol of their links with China. During his visit to mainland China in April 2005, former KMT Party Chairman Lien Chan reiterated his party's belief in the "One China" policy that states that there is only one China controlled by two governments and that Taiwan is a part of China. PFP Party Chair James Soong expressed the same sentiments during his visit in May. In contrast to the positions of these two leaders of the older generation, the more mainstream Pan-Blue position is to pursue negotiations with the PRC to immediately open direct transportation links with China and to lift investment restrictions. With regards to independence, the mainstream Pan-Blue position is to simply maintain the ROC's current state, and being open to negotiations for unification after China is democratized enough to respect human rights.
For its part, the PRC has indicated that it finds a Republic of China far more acceptable than an independent Taiwan. Ironically, although it views the ROC as an illegitimate entity, it has stated that any effort on Taiwan to formally abolish the ROC or formally renounce its claim over mainland China would result in a strong and possibly military reaction. However, the defense of Taiwan by the US and Japan is likely, so it is not, in reality, clear what the PRC reaction would be. The US's current position is that the Taiwan issue must be resolved peacefully and that it condemns unilateral action by either side, an unprovoked invasion by China or a declaration of formal independence by Taiwan.
The dominant political issue today in the Taiwan Area in the Republic of China (ROC) is its relationship with the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that has jurisdiction over Mainland China. Specifically, many people in Taiwan desire the opening of direct transportation links with mainland China, including direct flights, which would aid many Taiwanese businesses that have opened factories or branches in mainland China. The former DPP administration feared that such links will lead to tighter economic and thus political integration with the PRC, and in the 2006 Lunar New Year Speech, Chen Shui-bian called for managed opening of links.
Mainland China and Taiwan resumed regular direct flights or cross-Strait relations on 4 July 2008, after six decades, as a "new start" in their tense relations. Liu Shaoyong, chair of China Southern Airlines, piloted the first flight from Guangzhou to Taipei (Taoyuan International Airport). Simultaneously, a Taiwan-based China Airlines flight flew to Shanghai. Five mainland Chinese cities will be connected with eight Taiwan airports, with 4 days a week, 36 round-trip flights across the Taiwan Strait, thereby eliminating time-consuming Hong Kong stopovers. Other major political issues include the passage of an arms procurement bill that the United States authorized in 2001. In 2008, however, the United States were reluctant to send over more arms to Taiwan out of fear that it would hinder the recent improvement of ties between China and Taiwan. Another major political issue, is the establishment of a National Communications Commission to take over from the Government Information Office, whose advertising budget exercised great control over the media.
Banking reform, including consumer finance (limiting rates on credit cards) and bank mergers, is also a major issue. Taiwan's financial sector is quite unwieldy, with over 48 banks, none of which have a market share over 10%. In addition, the government controls 50% to 60% of Taiwan's banking assets. The ultimate aim is the creation of large financial institutions that will then have the ability to compete internationally.
The politicians and their parties have themselves become major political issues. Corruption among some DPP administration officials has been exposed. In early 2006, President Chen Shui-bian was linked to possible corruption. The political effect on President Chen Shui-bian was great, causing a divide in the DPP leadership and supporters alike. It eventually led to the creation of a political camp led by ex-DPP leader Shih Ming-teh which believes the president should resign. The KMT assets continue to be another major issue, as it was once the richest political party in the world. Nearing the end of 2006, KMT's chairman Ma Ying-jeou was also hit by corruption controversies, although he has since then been cleared of any wrong-doings by the courts. Since completing his second term as President, Chen Shui-bian has been charged with corruption and money laundering.
The merger of the KMT and People First Party (PFP) was thought to be certain, but a string of defections from the PFP to the KMT have increased tensions within the Pan-Blue camp.
In 2006, due to the Pacific Sogo Department Store scandal, the pro-KMT Pan-Blue Coalition moved to impeach the President but failed to obtain the requisite number of votes in the legislature. This failure led to a "Down Ah-Bian" campaign, which sought to pressure the president to resign from office. The campaign began on 1 September 2006. Campaign organizers claimed that the first day of the strike attracted 300,000 people in Taipei, while the police estimated the number to be closer to 90,000. The "Down Ah-Bian" event was being led by activist and politician Shih Ming-te (施明德) as a peaceful sit-in around the capital, besieging the presidential residence. While the protests have been largely peaceful, there have been isolated incidences of violence associated with the campaign, including fist fights between Pan-Blue and Pan-Green (pro-DPP) legislatures. The "Up Ah-Bian" event was organized to counteract the "Down Ah-Bian" campaign. On 13 October 2006, the Pan-Blue Coalition attempted again to pass a recall motion against the ROC President Chen Shui-bian, which also failed to garner sufficient votes in the legislature.
On 3 November 2006, prosecutors in Taiwan stated that they have enough evidence to indict Chen's wife on corruption charges in connection with her handling of a secret diplomatic fund. According to the prosecutors, while Chen would not be indicted while in office, there is a possibility that he would be indicted after he leaves office.
In February 2007, Mr. Chen Shui-bian said that Taiwan will have to upgrade its weaponry to maintain the military balance with mainland China. He believes that Taiwan's advantage is slipping against mainland China's rising military prowess.
Roughly 84% of Taiwan's population descends from Han Chinese who migrated from mainland China between 1661 and 1895. Another significant fraction descends from Han Chinese who immigrated from mainland China in the 1940s and 1950s. But between 1895 and the present, Taiwan and mainland China have shared a common government for only 4 years. The shared cultural origin combined with several hundred years of geographical separation, some hundred years of political separation and foreign influences, as well as hostility between the rival Taiwan and China have resulted in national identity being a contentious issue with political overtones. Since democratization and the lifting of martial law, a distinct Taiwanese identity (as opposed to Taiwanese identity as a subset of a Chinese identity) is often at the heart of political debates. Its acceptance makes the island distinct from mainland China, and therefore may be seen as a step towards forming a consensus for "de jure" Taiwan independence. The pan-green camp supports a distinct Taiwanese identity, while the pan-blue camp supports a Chinese identity only. The KMT has downplayed this stance in the recent years and now supports a Taiwanese identity as part of a Chinese identity.
According to a survey conducted in March 2009, 49% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese only, and 44% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese and Chinese. 3% consider themselves as only Chinese. Another survey, conducted in Taiwan in July 2009, showed that 82.8% of respondents consider that Taiwan and China are two separate countries developing each on its own. A recent survey conducted in December 2009 showed that 62% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese only, and 22% of the respondents consider themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. 8% consider themselves as only Chinese. The survey also shows that among 18- to 29-year-old respondents, 75% consider themselves as Taiwanese only.
The President is the head of state of the Republic of China and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The president has authority over the five administrative branches (Yuan): Executive, Legislative, Control, Judicial, and Examination.
The National Assembly of the Republic of China was elected in mainland China in 1947 to officially carry out the duties of choosing the president, to amend the constitution, and to exercise the sovereignty of the citizens, but in actuality, the Assembly's role in Taipei seemed to reconfirm the executive powers of President Chang Kai-shek. The National Assembly was re-established on Taiwan when the government moved. Because it was impossible to hold subsequent elections to represent constituencies in mainland China, representatives elected in 1947–48 held these seats "indefinitely." In June 1990, however, the Council of Grand Justices mandated the retirement, effective December 1991, of all remaining "indefinitely" elected members of the National Assembly, Legislative Yuan, and other bodies.
The second National Assembly, elected in 1991, was composed of 325 members. The majority was elected directly; 100 were chosen from party slates in proportion to the popular vote. This National Assembly amended the constitution in 1994, paving the way for the direct election of the president and vice president that was held in March, 1996. The National Assembly retained the authority to amend the constitution, to recall or to impeach the president or vice president, and to ratify select senior-level presidential appointments. In April 2000, the members of the National Assembly voted to permit their terms of office to expire without holding new elections. They also determined that such an election would be called in the event the National Assembly is needed to decide a presidential recall or a constitutional amendment. In recent years, the National Assembly has handed most of its powers to the Legislative Yuan, including the power of impeachment. In 2005, the National Assembly permanently abolished itself by ratifying a constitution amendment passed by the Legislative Yuan.
Amending the ROC constitution now requires the approval of three-fourths of the quorum of members of the Legislative Yuan. This quorum requires at least three-fourths of all members of the Legislature. After passing by the legislature, the amendment needs ratification from at least fifty percent of all eligible voters of the ROC regardless of voter turnout.
The Executive Yuan comprises the premier, vice-premier, and the cabinet members who are responsible for policy and administration. The President of the Republic appoints the Premier, who is officially the President of the Executive Yuan.
The main lawmaking body, the Legislative Yuan (LY), was originally elected in 1947. The first LY had 773 seats and was viewed as a "rubber stamp" institution. Like the National Assembly, representatives elected in 1947–48 held these seats "indefinitely" until the 1991 ruling. The second LY was elected in 1992. The third LY, elected in 1995, had 157 members serving 3-year terms. The fourth LY, elected in 1998, was expanded to 225 members. The LY has greatly enhanced its standing in relation to the Executive Yuan and has established itself as an important player on the central level. Along with increasing strength and size this body is beginning to reflect the recently liberalized political system. In the 1992 and 1995 elections, the main opposition partythe Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)challenged the KMT dominance of the Legislature. In both elections the DPP won a significant share of the LY seats, and the KMT held only half the seats in the LY. In 1998, however, the KMT increased its LY majority from 50% to 55% and continued to play a dominant role in the legislature as the leading opposition party. In the 2001 election, the DPP became the largest party after large losses suffered by the KMT. Control of the Yuan swung back to the KMT after the 2008 elections, while in 2016 the DPP regained the status as the largest party and achieved a majority for the first time in history.
The Judicial Yuan (JY) administers the ROC's court system. It includes a 15-member Council of Grand Justices (COGJ) that interprets the constitution. Grand Justices are appointed by the President, with the consent of the Legislative Yuan, to 8-year terms.
The Control Yuan (CY) monitors the efficiency of public service and investigates instances of corruption. The 29 Control Yuan members are appointed by the president and approved by the Legislative Yuan; they serve 6-year terms. In recent years, the Control Yuan has become more active, and it has conducted several major investigations and impeachments. The current president of the Control Yuan is Chang Po-ya.
The Examination Yuan (ExY) functions as a civil service commission and includes two ministries: the Ministry of Examination, which recruits officials through competitive examination, and the Ministry of Personnel, which manages the civil service. The President appoints the Examination Yuan's President.
The current President of the Examination Yuan is Wu Jin-lin.
As of July 2015, there are 277 officially registered parties in Taiwan. The aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election and the 2001 legislative election left the Taiwan fragmented among several political parties. These parties can be divided into "blue" factions (Pan-Blue Coalition) and "green" factions (Pan-Green Coalition), with the "blue" faction tending toward unification and a national identity that is linked with China and the "green" faction leaning toward a national identity based on Taiwan independence which is separate from the Chinese national identity. The complex structure of the party system in Taiwan was also influenced by the voting system which uses single non-transferable vote for legislative elections and first past the post for executive elections. Starting with the 2008 legislative elections, the SNTV system was discarded in favor of a mixed single member district (SMD) with proportional representation based on national party votes, similar to Japan.
The "blue" faction comes from the color of the KMT and includes the KMT, the People First Party, and the New Party. The "green" faction comes from the color of the Democratic Progressive Party and includes the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
After 1986, the KMT's hold on power was challenged by the emergence of competing political parties. Before 1986, candidates opposing the KMT ran in elections as independents or "nonpartisans." Before the 1986 island-wide elections many "nonpartisans" grouped together to create Taiwan's first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Despite the official ban on forming new political parties, the government authorities did not prohibit the DPP from operating, and in the 1986 elections DPP and independent candidates captured more than 20% of the vote.
The Civic Organizations Law passed in 1989 allowed for the formation of new political parties, thereby legalizing the DPP, and its support and influence increased. In the 1992 Legislative Yuan elections, the DPP won 51 seats in the 161-seat body. While this was only half the number of KMT seats, it made the DPP's voice an important factor in legislative decisions. Winning the Taipei mayor's position in December 1994, significantly enhanced the DPP's image. The DPP continued its strong showing in the 1995 LY race, winning 45 of the 157 seats to the KMT's 81. The DPP for the first time succeeded in outpolling the KMT in the November 1997 local elections, gaining 12 of the 23 magistrate and mayoral seats as opposed to the KMT's 8 and winning 43% of the vote versus the KMT's 41%.
The DPP membership is made up largely of the Hoklo people, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan. The DPP maintains that Taiwan is an entity separate from mainland China and supports an independent "Republic of Taiwan" as part of its platform. The recent downplaying of Taiwan independence by the DPP as a party, however, led to the formation by hard-line advocates of a new political party called the Taiwan Independence Party in December 1996.
Until 1986, Taiwan's political system was effectively controlled by one party, the KMT, the leader of which also was the President. Many top political officials were members of the party. The party claimed over 2 million members, and its net assets were reputed to total more than NT $61.2 billion, making it the richest political party in the world.
A new opposition party was formed in the wake of the March 2000 presidential election by the runner up, a KMT maverick candidate. The People's First Party is composed primarily of former KMT and NP members who supported former KMT Taiwan Provincial Governor James Soong's presidential bid. The PFP currently had 17 members in the LY before the 2001 election, but increased its representation to over 40 in that election.
The New Party was formed in August 1993 by a group made up largely of second-generation mainlander KMT members who were unhappy both with corruption in the KMT and with what they saw as the "Taiwanization" of KMT ideology and leadership. The NP emphasizes "clean government" and the original KMT focus on unification with mainland China. NP influence remains modest and seems on the wane; it won 21 of the 164 LY seats in the 1995 elections but only 11 of 225 seats in 1998. The New Party was almost annihilated in the 2001 election as its members defected to the Peoples First Party.
In 2001, supporters of former President Lee founded the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). Even though Lee did not join this party, he is named its spiritual leader and most believe he endorsed it. The TSU was formed primarily because, as it took power, the DPP had to moderate its standing as regards to Taiwan independence, leaving a hole in the Taiwanese political spectrum. In a bid to help the "green" side achieve control in the Legislative Yuan, the TSU was formed to attract the radical votes left over from DPP and the localist support for KMT. The TSU had often expressed that it wanted to be the "decisive minority".
Other parties than the parties listed above include:
Although some friction between 1949 Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese still exists, it has abated with time, and there has been a gradual melding of the two communities. In 1972, then-Premier Chiang Ching-kuo began a concentrated effort to bring Taiwanese into more senior position in the central administration and the KMT. Upon his accession to the presidency in January 1988, Lee Teng-hui, who is a native Taiwanese, continued this process. Steps by the government to redress past wrongs such as setting up a memorial to the victims of the February 28 Incident have contributed to this process.
Changes in the political process were the result of the liberalizing trend that began in the 1980s under President Chiang Ching-kuo. In 1987, he lifted the emergency decree, which had been in place since 1948 and which had granted virtually unlimited powers to the president for use in the anti-communist campaign. This decree provided the basis for nearly four decades of martial law under which individuals and groups expressing dissenting views were dealt with harshly. Expressing views contrary to the authorities' claim to represent all of China or supporting independent Taiwan independence was treated as sedition. Vice-President Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo as president when Chiang died on 13 January 1988. Lee was elected by the National Assembly to a 6-year term in 1990, marking the final time a president was elected by the National Assembly.
Since ending martial law, the Republic of China has taken dramatic steps to improve respect for human rights and create a democratic political system. Most restrictions on the press have ended, restrictions on personal freedoms have been relaxed, and the prohibition against organizing new political parties has been lifted.
As the National Assembly took action in 1994 to allow for the popular election of the president, the LY in 1994 passed legislation to allow for the direct election of the governor of Taiwan Province and the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung Municipalities. These elections were held in December 1994, with the KMT winning the governor and Kaohsiung mayor posts, and the DPP winning the Taipei mayor's position. In March 1996, Lee Teng-hui was elected president and Lien Chan vice president in the first direct election by Taiwan's voters. In 1998, the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou wrestled back control of the mayorship of Taipei from the opposition DPP's most prominent figure Chen Shui-bian. In the same elections, however, the DPP's Frank Hsieh managed to defeat Kaoshiung's KMT incumbent.
The position of elected governor and many other elements of the Taiwan Provincial Government were eliminated at the end of 1998. The stated purpose of this was to streamline administrative efficiency, but some commentators have argued that this was also intended to weaken the power base of Governor James Soong. In November 1997 local elections, the DPP won 12 of the 23 county magistrate and city mayor contests to the KMT's 8, outpolling the KMT for the first time in a major election.
In March 2000, Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian became the first opposition party candidate to win the presidency. His victory resulted in the first-ever transition of the presidential office from one political party to another in the ROC. The election also had the effect of splitting the KMT's support base. James Soong launched an independent bid for the presidency after failing to be nominated by the party. In response the KMT expelled Soong and his supporters. Soong and his supporters blamed then-KMT Chairman Lee Teng-hui of harboring pro-independence sentiments and purposely trying to aid Chen Shui-bian by splitting the KMT's vote by running the less charismatic Lien Chan along with Soong. After losing the vote narrowly to Chen and ahead of Lien, Soong established the People First Party. Lee Teng-hui was soon forced out of the KMT Chairmanship amid popular protests and riots demanding he take responsibility for the KMT's defeat.
In the months following the 2000 presidential election, Lee Teng-hui's supporters established the Taiwan Solidarity Union, which advocated a more radical brand of Taiwan independence than the DPP. For this, Lee was expelled from the KMT and the KMT gradually moved itself to a more conservative and pro-reunificationist position. This permitted the formation of two rival coalitions that have since dominated Taiwanese politics: the Pan-Blue Coalition formed by the KMT, People First Party, and New Party and the Pan-Green Coalition formed by the Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union.
In the 2001 LY elections, the DPP won a plurality of seats for the first time. However, the Pan-Blue Coalition held a small majority over the Pan-Green Coalition, causing much of President Chen's agenda to be derailed. This also gave independents in the legislature more power, some of whom founded the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union in 2004.
In a hotly contested election on 20 March 2004, President Chen Shui-bian was re-elected by 50.1% of the popular vote to a second term. The election was marred by a shooting incident the day before the election during which President Chen and his running mate Vice President Annette Lu were slightly wounded. While the opposition contested the results and suggested the shooting was staged to win sympathy (as President Chen had previously been slated to lose narrowly), it was the first time that the DPP has won an outright majority in an island-wide election.
The March election also included a "peace referendum". Historically, the issue of referendums has been closely tied to the question of Taiwan independence, and thus has been a sensitive issue in cross Strait relations. There were two referendums before the voters on 20 March 2004. The first asked in light of the PRC missile threat whether the ROC should purchase anti-missile systems. The second asked whether Taiwan should adopt a "peace framework" for addressing cross Strait differences with the PRC. However both referendums failed to obtain support from over 50% of registered voters, as required to be valid. The Pan-Blue Coalition campaigned against the referendum as unnecessary and urged voters to boycott it.
President Chen Shui-bian has called for major constitutional reforms by 2006 aimed at further reducing layers of government, and making other structural changes aimed at improving governance. The People's Republic of China has accused Chen of using the constitution issue to move Taiwan towards independence. He expressed opposition, however, in his 20 May 2004 inaugural address to using constitutional reform to alter the constitution's definition of Taiwan sovereignty.
The Legislative Yuan passed a set of constitutional amendments on 23 August 2004 that halve the number of LY seats and create single-member districts. The revisions also eliminate the role of the National Assembly and permit the public to confirm or reject future revisions passed by the LY. These constitutional amendments were ratified by the National Assembly in 2005.
Prior to the 11 December 2004 elections to the Legislative Yuan, signs indicated that the DPP would for the first time dominate the Legislative Yuan. Polls projected a huge pan-green victory, and the DPP's election tactics were based on them. This over-reliance on polls resulted in a huge setback. The pan-blue opposition managed to maintain their majority status within the Legislative Yuan, winning 114 seats out of the 225 seats. The Pan-Green only managed to win 101 seats. The remaining 10 seats were won by the independent candidates. Although the Pan-Green coalition increased their seats by one and the DPP remained the largest party, because of raised hopes the election was viewed as a disaster, and President Chen resigned his post as Chairman of DPP as a result.
On 3 December 2005, the KMT made major gains in municipal elections, taking 14 of 23 mayor or county magistrate seats, while the DPP retained only six seats of their previous 10. The pan-blue People First Party and New Party each took one seat, and an independent won one seat. The pan-green TSU was completely shut out. DPP chairman Su Tseng-chang had promised to resign to take responsibility for the defeat. This dramatic setback for the DPP and pan-greens was seen as a reaction to recent corruption scandals, and public disapproval of Chen Shui-Bian's apparent refusal to improve cross-strait relations.
A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of "The New York Times" accused China of fostering an "apartheid" policy toward Taiwan. Dr Tan Sun Chen, Taiwan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, asserts that China's obstruction in the international community has led to a "political apartheid" which "harms the human rights, interests, and dignity of Taiwan’s people.".
Despite the differences between Taiwan and mainland China, contact between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has grown significantly over the past decade. The ROC has continued to relax restrictions on unofficial contacts with the PRC, and cross-Strait interaction has mushroomed. Since 1987, when the ban on travel to mainland China was lifted, Taiwan residents have made more than 10 million trips to mainland China. The ROC Bureau of Foreign Trade estimates that indirect trade with mainland China reached about US$61.639 billion, or 18% of the total trade of the ROC, in 2004. This indirect trade runs heavily in Taiwan's favor, providing another outlet for the island's booming economy. In an attempt to facilitate trade, in 1995 the Executive Yuan approved the construction of an offshore transshipment center at the port of Kaohsiung through which direct shipping with the mainland China would be permitted. In April 1997 the first sanctioned direct cross-Strait shipping began between selected mainland China ports and Kaohsiung for cargo being transshipped through Taiwan.
Beijing has expressed a mixed view of these developments. PRC leaders are pleased at the development of economic ties and exchanges, which they believe helps their cause of reunification. However, the increase in contacts, combined with domestic political liberalization on Taiwan, also has resulted in more open discussion in Taiwan of the future of Taiwan, including the option of independence, to which Beijing is strongly opposed.
The trend in cross-Strait interaction is one of steady growth with, so far, only temporary setbacks due to political factors such as the PRC's reaction Lee Teng-hui's private visit to the U.S. in 1995 and the PRC's reaction his 1999 characterization of relations with mainland China as "state-to-state." Taiwan business representatives have concerns about issues such as safety, corruption, and contract disputes, which have led to increased caution and a search for alternative investment venues but not to pulling out from mainland China altogether. President Chen has yet to revise the previous administration's "no haste, be patient" policy regarding Taiwan-mainland China investment to prevent over-dependence on the PRC. As a result of this policy the ROC has placed restrictions on large-scale infrastructure investments on mainland China in 1997. Despite this, billions of dollars have been invested in mainland China by smaller firms.
The development of semiofficial cross-Strait relations has been incremental. Prior to April 1993, when talks were held in Singapore between the heads of two private intermediary organizationsTaiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and the PRC's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS)there had been some lower-level exchanges between the two sides of the Strait. The April 1993 SEF-ARATS talks primarily addressed technical issues relating to cross-Strait interactions. Lower-level talks continued on a fairly regular basis until they were suspended by Beijing in 1995 after President Lee's U.S. visit. Unofficial exchanges resumed in 1997 through informal meetings between personnel of the two sides' unofficial representative organizations. Direct SEF-ARATS contacts resumed in April 1998, and the SEF Chairman visited mainland China in October 1998. A planned visit by ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan to Taiwan in the fall, however, was postponed following statements made by then-President Lee Teng-hui that relations between mainland China and Taiwan should be conducted as "state-to-state" or at least as "special state-to-state relations." Since his 20 May 2000 inauguration, President Chen has called for resuming the cross-Strait dialogue without any preconditions. President Chen has stated that such talks should be conducted on the basis of the "spirit of 1992," a reference to the agreement to hold the 1993 Singapore talks. The PRC, however, has insisted that President Chen must recognize the one China principle before talks can be held.
The Republic of China currently administers the island of Taiwan (Formosa), Penghu (Pescadores), Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu Islands. The whole country is divided into two streamlined provinces (Taiwan and Fukien) and five special municipalities. Since the provinces are streamlined, the cities and counties are directly governed by the central government, namely Executive Yuan. The central governed administrative divisions are listed below | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30091 |
Television
Television (TV), sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black and white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television show, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports.
Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax and VHS tapes, high-capacity hard disk drives, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 2013, 79% of the world's households owned a television set. The replacement of early bulky, high-voltage cathode ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED), OLED displays, and plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most TV sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel, mainly LEDs. Major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. In the near future, LEDs are expected to be gradually replaced by OLEDs. Also, major manufacturers have announced that they will increasingly produce smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s.
Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber, satellite systems and, since the 2000s via the Internet. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television is expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television.
The word "television" comes . The first documented usage of the term dates back to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it in a paper that he presented in French at the 1st International Congress of Electricity, which ran from 18 to 25 August 1900 during the International World Fair in Paris. The Anglicised version of the term is first attested in 1907, when it was still "...a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires". It was "...formed in English or borrowed from French télévision." In the 19th century and early 20th century, other "...proposals for the name of a then-hypothetical technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote (1880) and televista (1904)." The abbreviation "TV" is from 1948. The use of the term to mean "a television set" dates from 1941. The use of the term to mean "television as a medium" dates from 1927. The slang term "telly" is more common in the UK. The slang term "the tube" or the "boob tube" derives from the bulky cathode ray tube used on most TVs until the advent of flat-screen TVs. Another slang term for the TV is "idiot box". Also, in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, during the early rapid growth of television programming and television-set ownership in the United States, another slang term became widely used in that period and continues to be used today to distinguish productions originally created for broadcast on television from films developed for presentation in movie theaters. The "small screen", as both a compound adjective and noun, became specific references to television, while the "big screen" was used to identify productions made for theatrical release.
Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced the facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. Willoughby Smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873. As a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884. This was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of the image. Although he never built a working model of the system, variations of Nipkow's spinning-disk "image rasterizer" became exceedingly common. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word "television" in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on 24 August 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others. However, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology by Lee de Forest and Arthur Korn, among others, made the design practical.
The first demonstration of the live transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. A matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator, served as an electronic retina. In the receiver, a type of Kerr cell modulated the light and a series of variously angled mirrors attached to the edge of a rotating disc scanned the modulated beam onto the display screen. A separate circuit regulated synchronization. The 8x8 pixel resolution in this proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. An updated image was transmitted "several times" each second.
In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created a system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the "Braun tube" (cathode ray tube or "CRT") in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner: "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".
In 1921, Edouard Belin sent the first image via radio waves with his belinograph.
By the 1920s, when amplification made television practical, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird employed the Nipkow disk in his prototype video systems. On 25 March 1925, Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at Selfridge's Department Store in London. Since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill", whose painted face had higher contrast, talking and moving. By 26 January 1926, he demonstrated the transmission of the image of a face in motion by radio. This is widely regarded as the first television demonstration. The subject was Baird's business partner Oliver Hutchinson. Baird's system used the Nipkow disk for both scanning the image and displaying it. A bright light shining through a spinning Nipkow disk set with lenses projected a bright spot of light which swept across the subject. A Selenium photoelectric tube detected the light reflected from the subject and converted it into a proportional electrical signal. This was transmitted by AM radio waves to a receiver unit, where the video signal was applied to a neon light behind a second Nipkow disk rotating synchronized with the first. The brightness of the neon lamp was varied in proportion to the brightness of each spot on the image. As each hole in the disk passed by, one scan line of the image was reproduced. Baird's disk had 30 holes, producing an image with only 30 scan lines, just enough to recognize a human face. In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over of telephone line between London and Glasgow.
In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company/Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission. In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental mechanical television service in Germany. In November of the same year, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathé established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. In 1931, he made the first outdoor remote broadcast, of The Derby. In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's mechanical system reached a peak of 240-lines of resolution on BBC television broadcasts in 1936, though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. Instead a 17.5mm film was shot, rapidly developed and then scanned while the film was still wet.
An American inventor, Charles Francis Jenkins, also pioneered the television. He published an article on "Motion Pictures by Wireless" in 1913, but it was not until December 1923 that he transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses; and it was on 13 June 1925, that he publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures. In 1925 Jenkins used the Nipkow disk and transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of 5 miles (8 km), from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, D.C., using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution. He was granted U.S. Patent No. 1,544,156 (Transmitting Pictures over Wireless) on 30 June 1925 (filed 13 March 1922).
Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray of Bell Telephone Laboratories gave a dramatic demonstration of mechanical television on 7 April 1927. Their reflected-light television system included both small and large viewing screens. The small receiver had a 2-inch-wide by 2.5-inch-high screen (5 by 6 cm). The large receiver had a screen 24 inches wide by 30 inches high (60 by 75 cm). Both sets were capable of reproducing reasonably accurate, monochromatic, moving images. Along with the pictures, the sets received synchronized sound. The system transmitted images over two paths: first, a copper wire link from Washington to New York City, then a radio link from Whippany, New Jersey. Comparing the two transmission methods, viewers noted no difference in quality. Subjects of the telecast included Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. A flying-spot scanner beam illuminated these subjects. The scanner that produced the beam had a 50-aperture disk. The disc revolved at a rate of 18 frames per second, capturing one frame about every 56 milliseconds. (Today's systems typically transmit 30 or 60 frames per second, or one frame every 33.3 or 16.7 milliseconds respectively.) Television historian Albert Abramson underscored the significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: "It was in fact the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality."
In 1928, WRGB, then W2XB, was started as the world's first television station. It broadcast from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY. It was popularly known as "WGY Television". Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Léon Theremin had been developing a mirror drum-based television, starting with 16 lines resolution in 1925, then 32 lines and eventually 64 using interlacing in 1926. As part of his thesis, on 7 May 1926, he electrically transmitted, and then projected, near-simultaneous moving images on a screen.
By 1927, Theremin had achieved an image of 100 lines, a resolution that was not surpassed until May 1932 by RCA, with 120 lines.
On 25 December 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a television system with a 40-line resolution that employed a Nipkow disk scanner and CRT display at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan. This prototype is still on display at the Takayanagi Memorial Museum in Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu Campus. His research in creating a production model was halted by the SCAP after World War II.
Because only a limited number of holes could be made in the disks, and disks beyond a certain diameter became impractical, image resolution on mechanical television broadcasts was relatively low, ranging from about 30 lines up to 120 or so. Nevertheless, the image quality of 30-line transmissions steadily improved with technical advances, and by 1933 the UK broadcasts using the Baird system were remarkably clear. A few systems ranging into the 200-line region also went on the air. Two of these were the 180-line system that Compagnie des Compteurs (CDC) installed in Paris in 1935, and the 180-line system that Peck Television Corp. started in 1935 at station VE9AK in Montreal. The advancement of all-electronic television (including image dissectors and other camera tubes and cathode ray tubes for the reproducer) marked the beginning of the end for mechanical systems as the dominant form of television. Mechanical television, despite its inferior image quality and generally smaller picture, would remain the primary television technology until the 1930s. The last mechanical television broadcasts ended in 1939 at stations run by a handful of public universities in the United States.
In 1897, English physicist J. J. Thomson was able, in his three famous experiments, to deflect cathode rays, a fundamental function of the modern cathode ray tube (CRT). The earliest version of the CRT was invented by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun in 1897 and is also known as the "Braun" tube. It was a cold-cathode diode, a modification of the Crookes tube, with a phosphor-coated screen. In 1906 the Germans Max Dieckmann and Gustav Glage produced raster images for the first time in a CRT. In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used a CRT in the receiving end of an experimental video signal to form a picture. He managed to display simple geometric shapes onto the screen.
In 1908 Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), published a letter in the scientific journal "Nature" in which he described how "distant electric vision" could be achieved by using a cathode ray tube, or Braun tube, as both a transmitting and receiving device, He expanded on his vision in a speech given in London in 1911 and reported in "The Times" and the Journal of the Röntgen Society. In a letter to "Nature" published in October 1926, Campbell-Swinton also announced the results of some "not very successful experiments" he had conducted with G. M. Minchin and J. C. M. Stanton. They had attempted to generate an electrical signal by projecting an image onto a selenium-coated metal plate that was simultaneously scanned by a cathode ray beam. These experiments were conducted before March 1914, when Minchin died, but they were later repeated by two different teams in 1937, by H. Miller and J. W. Strange from EMI, and by H. Iams and A. Rose from RCA. Both teams succeeded in transmitting "very faint" images with the original Campbell-Swinton's selenium-coated plate. Although others had experimented with using a cathode ray tube as a receiver, the concept of using one as a transmitter was novel. The first cathode ray tube to use a hot cathode was developed by John B. Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson noise) and Harry Weiner Weinhart of Western Electric, and became a commercial product in 1922.
In 1926, Hungarian engineer Kálmán Tihanyi designed a television system utilizing fully electronic scanning and display elements and employing the principle of "charge storage" within the scanning (or "camera") tube. The problem of low sensitivity to light resulting in low electrical output from transmitting or "camera" tubes would be solved with the introduction of charge-storage technology by Kálmán Tihanyi beginning in 1924. His solution was a camera tube that accumulated and stored electrical charges ("photoelectrons") within the tube throughout each scanning cycle. The device was first described in a patent application he filed in Hungary in March 1926 for a television system he dubbed "Radioskop". After further refinements included in a 1928 patent application, Tihanyi's patent was declared void in Great Britain in 1930, so he applied for patents in the United States. Although his breakthrough would be incorporated into the design of RCA's "iconoscope" in 1931, the U.S. patent for Tihanyi's transmitting tube would not be granted until May 1939. The patent for his receiving tube had been granted the previous October. Both patents had been purchased by RCA prior to their approval. Charge storage remains a basic principle in the design of imaging devices for television to the present day. On 25 December 1926, at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan, Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a TV system with a 40-line resolution that employed a CRT display. This was the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver. Takayanagi did not apply for a patent.
On 7 September 1927, American inventor Philo Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. By 3 September 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. This is widely regarded as the first electronic television demonstration. In 1929, the system was improved further by the elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images with his system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Elma ("Pem") with her eyes closed (possibly due to the bright lighting required).
Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with the cathode ray tube to create and show images. While working for Westinghouse Electric in 1923, he began to develop an electronic camera tube. But in a 1925 demonstration, the image was dim, had low contrast, and poor definition, and was stationary. Zworykin's imaging tube never got beyond the laboratory stage. But RCA, which acquired the Westinghouse patent, asserted that the patent for Farnsworth's 1927 image dissector was written so broadly that it would exclude any other electronic imaging device. Thus RCA, on the basis of Zworykin's 1923 patent application, filed a patent interference suit against Farnsworth. The U.S. Patent Office examiner disagreed in a 1935 decision, finding priority of invention for Farnsworth against Zworykin. Farnsworth claimed that Zworykin's 1923 system would be unable to produce an electrical image of the type to challenge his patent. Zworykin received a patent in 1928 for a color transmission version of his 1923 patent application; he also divided his original application in 1931. Zworykin was unable or unwilling to introduce evidence of a working model of his tube that was based on his 1923 patent application. In September 1939, after losing an appeal in the courts, and determined to go forward with the commercial manufacturing of television equipment, RCA agreed to pay Farnsworth US$1 million over a ten-year period, in addition to license payments, to use his patents.
In 1933, RCA introduced an improved camera tube that relied on Tihanyi's charge storage principle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29831 |
Americas
The Americas (also collectively called America; , , Portuguese and Spanish: "América") comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America. Together, they make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.
Along with their associated islands, they cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area. The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera, a long chain of mountains that runs the length of the west coast. The flatter eastern side of the Americas is dominated by large river basins, such as the Amazon, St. Lawrence River / Great Lakes basin, Mississippi, and La Plata. Since the Americas extend from north to south, the climate and ecology vary widely, from the arctic tundra of Northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, to the tropical rain forests in Central America and South America.
Humans first settled the Americas from Asia between 42,000 and 17,000 years ago. A second migration of Na-Dene speakers followed later from Asia. The subsequent migration of the Inuit into the neoarctic around 3500 BCE completed what is generally regarded as the settlement by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The first known European settlement in the Americas was by the Norse explorer Leif Erikson. However, the colonization never became permanent and was later abandoned. The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1502 resulted in permanent contact with European (and subsequently, other Old World) powers, which eventually led to the Columbian exchange and inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization whose effects and consequences persist to the present. The Spanish presence involved the enslavement of large numbers of the indigenous population of America.
Diseases introduced from Europe and West Africa devastated the indigenous peoples, and the European powers colonized the Americas. Mass emigration from Europe, including large numbers of indentured servants, and importation of African slaves largely replaced the indigenous peoples.
Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution in the 1770s and largely ended with the Spanish–American War in the late 1890s. Currently, almost all of the population of the Americas resides in independent countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the use of Indo-European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.
The Americas are home to over a billion inhabitants, two-thirds of whom reside in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico. It is home to eight megacities (metropolitan areas with ten million inhabitants or more): New York City (23.9 million), Mexico City (21.2 million), São Paulo (21.2 million), Los Angeles (18.8 million), Buenos Aires (15.6 million), Rio de Janeiro (13.0 million), Bogotá (10.4 million), and Lima (10.1 million).
The name America was first recorded in 1507. A two-dimensional globe created by Martin Waldseemüller was the earliest recorded use of the term. The name was also used (together with the related term "Amerigen") in the "Cosmographiae Introductio", apparently written by Matthias Ringmann, in reference to South America. It was applied to both North and South America by Gerardus Mercator in 1538. America derives from "Americus", the Latin version of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci's first name. The feminine form "America" accorded with the feminine names of Asia, Africa, and Europa.
In modern English, North and South America are generally considered separate continents, and taken together are called "America" or "the Americas" in the plural. When conceived as a unitary continent, the form is generally "the continent of America" in the singular. However, without a clarifying context, singular "America" in English commonly refers to the United States of America.
Historically, in the English-speaking world, the term America usually referred to a single continent until the 1950s (as in Van Loon's "Geography" of 1937): According to historians Kären Wigen and Martin W. Lewis,
The first inhabitants migrated into the Americas from Asia. Habitation sites are known in Alaska and the Yukon from at least 20,000 years ago, with suggested ages of up to 40,000 years.
Beyond that, the specifics of the Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion. Widespread habitation of the Americas occurred during the late glacial maximum, from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago.
The traditional theory has been that these early migrants moved into the Beringia land bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska around 40,000–17,000 years ago, when sea levels were significantly lowered during the Quaternary glaciation. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct pleistocene megafauna along "ice-free corridors" that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific coast to South America. Evidence of the latter would since have been covered by a sea level rise of hundreds of meters following the last ice age. Both routes may have been taken, although the genetic evidences suggests a single founding population. The micro-satellite diversity and distributions specific to South American Indigenous people indicates that certain populations have been isolated since the initial colonization of the region.
A second migration occurred after the initial peopling of the Americas; Na Dene speakers found predominantly in North American groups at varying genetic rates with the highest frequency found among the Athabaskans at 42% derive from this second wave. Linguists and biologists have reached a similar conclusion based on analysis of Amerindian language groups and ABO blood group system distributions. Then the people of the Arctic small tool tradition a broad cultural entity that developed along the Alaska Peninsula, around Bristol Bay, and on the eastern shores of the Bering Strait around 2,500 BCE (4,500 years ago) moved into North America. The Arctic small tool tradition, a Paleo-Eskimo culture branched off into two cultural variants, including the Pre-Dorset, and the Independence traditions of Greenland. The descendants of the Pre-Dorset cultural group, the Dorset culture was displaced by the final migrants from the Bering sea coast line the ancestors of modern Inuit, the Thule people by 1000 Common Era (CE). Around the same time as the Inuit migrated into Greenland, Viking settlers began arriving in Greenland in 982 and Vinland shortly thereafter, establishing a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, near the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. The Viking settlers quickly abandoned Vinland, and disappeared from Greenland by 1500.
The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization during the Early Modern period. The term "Pre-Columbian" is used especially often in the context of the great indigenous civilizations of the Americas, such as those of Mesoamerica (the Olmec, the Toltec, the Teotihuacano, the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Aztec, and the Maya) and the Andes (Inca, Moche, Muisca, Cañaris).
Many pre-Columbian civilizations established characteristics and hallmarks which included permanent or urban settlements, agriculture, civic and monumental architecture, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first permanent European arrivals (c. late 15th–early 16th centuries), and are known only through archeological investigations. Others were contemporary with this period, and are also known from historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Maya, had their own written records. However, most Europeans of the time viewed such texts as pagan, and much was destroyed in Christian pyres. Only a few hidden documents remain today, leaving modern historians with glimpses of ancient culture and knowledge.
Although there had been previous trans-oceanic contact, large-scale European colonization of the Americas began with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The first Spanish settlement in the Americas was La Isabela in northern Hispaniola. This town was abandoned shortly after in favor of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, founded in 1496, the oldest American city of European foundation. This was the base from which the Spanish monarchy administered its new colonies and their expansion. Santo Domingo was subject to frequent raids by English and French pirates. On the continent, Panama City on the Pacific coast of Central America, founded on August 15, 1519, played an important role, being the base for the Spanish conquest of South America. Conquistador Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón established San Miguel de Guadalupe, the first European settlement in what is now the United States, on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. During the first half of the 16th century, Spanish colonists conducted raids throughout the Caribbean Basin, bringing captives from Central America, northern South America, and Florida back to Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements.
France, led by Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazano, focused primarily on North America. English explorations of the Americas were led by Giovanni Caboto and Sir Walter Raleigh. The Dutch in New Netherland confined their operations to Manhattan Island, Long Island, the Hudson River Valley, and what later became New Jersey. The spread of new diseases brought by Europeans and African slaves killed many of the inhabitants of North America and South America, with a general population crash of Native Americans occurring in the mid-16th century, often well ahead of European contact. One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox.
European immigrants were often part of state-sponsored attempts to found colonies in the Americas. Migration continued as people moved to the Americas fleeing religious persecution or seeking economic opportunities. Millions of individuals were forcibly transported to the Americas as slaves, prisoners or indentured servants.
Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s. This was followed by numerous Latin American wars of independence in the early 1800s. Between 1811 and 1825, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of Central America, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia gained independence from Spain and Portugal in armed revolutions. After the Dominican Republic won independence from Haiti, it was re-annexed by Spain in 1861, but reclaimed its independence in 1865 at the conclusion of the Dominican Restoration War. The last violent episode of decolonization was the Cuban War of Independence which became the Spanish–American War, which resulted in the independence of Cuba in 1898, and the transfer of sovereignty over Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States.
Peaceful decolonization began with the purchase by the United States of Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819, of Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the Danish West Indies from Denmark in 1916. Canada became independent of the United Kingdom, starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1926, Statute of Westminster 1931, and ending with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. The Dominion of Newfoundland similarly achieved partial independence under the Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster, but was re-absorbed into the United Kingdom in 1934. It was subsequently confederated with Canada in 1949.
The remaining European colonies in the Caribbean began to achieve peaceful independence well after World War II. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, and Guyana and Barbados both achieved independence in 1966. In the 1970s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines all became independent of the United Kingdom, and Suriname became independent of the Netherlands. Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis achieved independence from the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's western hemisphere. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29833 |
The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 and written as a frame narrative. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.
"The Time Machine" has been adapted into three feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions and many comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions.
Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in a short story titled "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888). This work, published in his college newspaper, was the foundation for "The Time Machine".
Wells frequently stated that he had thought of using some of this material in a series of articles in the "Pall Mall Gazette" until the publisher asked him if he could instead write a serial novel on the same theme. Wells readily agreed and was paid £100 (equal to about £ today) on its publication by Heinemann in 1895, which first published the story in serial form in the January to May numbers of "The New Review" (newly under the nominal editorship of W. E. Henley). Henry Holt and Company published the first book edition (possibly prepared from a different manuscript) on 7 May 1895; Heinemann published an English edition on 29 May. These two editions are different textually and are commonly referred to as the "Holt text" and "Heinemann text", respectively. Nearly all modern reprints reproduce the Heinemann text.
The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is also influenced by Ray Lankester's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel "Vril, the Power of the Coming Race" (1871). Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy's novel "Looking Backward: 2000-1887" (1888) and the later film "Metropolis" (1927), dealt with similar themes.
Based on Wells's personal experiences and childhood, the working class literally spent a lot of their time underground. His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father's shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper's apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end.
This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre. The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red also places "The Time Machine" within the realm of eschatology, i.e. the study of the end times, the end of the world, and the ultimate destiny of humankind.
The book's protagonist is a Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, identified by a narrator simply as the "Time Traveller". Similarly, with but one exception (a man named Filby) none of the dinner guests present are ever identified by name, but rather by profession (for example, "the Psychologist") or physical description (for example, "the Very Young Man").
The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension and demonstrates a tabletop model machine for travelling through the fourth dimension. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator.
In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device. At first he thinks nothing has happened but soon finds out he went five hours into the future. He continues forward and sees his house disappear and turn into a lush garden. The Time Traveller stops in A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, and adhere to a fruit-based diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline. They appear happy and carefree but fear the dark, and particularly moonless nights. Observing them, he finds that they give no response to mysterious nocturnal disappearances, possibly because the thought of it alone frightens them into silence. He speculates that they are a peaceful society. After exploring the area around the Eloi's residences, the Time Traveller reaches the top of a hill overlooking London. He concludes that the entire planet has become a garden, with little trace of human society or engineering from the hundreds of thousands of years prior.
Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing and eventually concludes that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, he had removed the machine's levers before leaving it (the time machine being unable to travel through time without them). Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks.
Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.
Meanwhile, he saves an Eloi named Weena from drowning as none of the other Eloi take any notice of her plight, and they develop an innocently affectionate relationship over the course of several days. He takes Weena with him on an expedition to a distant structure dubbed "The Palace of Green Porcelain", which turns out to be a derelict museum. Here, the Time Traveller finds a fresh supply of matches and fashions a crude weapon against Morlocks, whom he must fight to get back his machine. He plans to take Weena back to his own time. Because the long and tiring journey back to Weena's home is too much for them, they stop in the forest for the night. They are then overcome by Morlocks in the night, whereby Weena faints. The Traveller escapes when a small fire he had left behind them to distract the Morlocks catches up to them as a forest fire; Weena and the pursuing Morlocks are lost in the fire and the Time Traveller is devastated over his loss.
The Morlocks open the Sphinx and use the time machine as bait to capture the Traveller, not understanding that he will use it to escape. He reattaches the levers before he travels further ahead to roughly 30 million years from his own time. There he sees some of the last living things on a dying Earth: Menacing reddish crab-like creatures slowly wandering the blood-red beaches chasing enormous butterflies, in a world covered in simple lichenous vegetation. He continues to make jumps forward through time, seeing Earth's rotation gradually cease and the sun grow larger, redder, and dimmer, and the world falling silent and freezing as the last degenerate living things die out.
Overwhelmed, he goes back to the machine and returns to his own time, arriving at the laboratory just three hours after he originally left. He arrives late to his own dinner party, whereupon, after eating, the Time Traveller relates his adventures to his disbelieving visitors, producing as evidence two strange white flowers Weena had put in his pocket.
The original narrator then takes over and relates that he returned to the Time Traveller's house the next day, finding him preparing for another journey and promising to return in a short time. However, the narrator reveals that he has waited three years before writing and stating the Time Traveller has not returned from his journey.
A section from the eleventh chapter of the serial published in "New Review" (May 1895) was deleted from the book. It was drafted at the suggestion of Wells's editor, William Ernest Henley, who wanted Wells to "oblige your editor" by lengthening the text with, among other things, an illustration of "the ultimate degeneracy" of humanity. "There was a slight struggle," Wells later recalled, "between the writer and W. E. Henley who wanted, he said, to put a little 'writing' into the tale. But the writer was in reaction from that sort of thing, the Henley interpolations were cut out again, and he had his own way with his text." This portion of the story was published elsewhere as "". The deleted text was also published by Forrest J Ackerman in an issue of the American edition of "Perry Rhodan".
The deleted text recounts an incident immediately after the Traveller's escape from the Morlocks. He finds himself in the distant future of an unrecognisable Earth, populated with furry, hopping herbivores resembling kangaroos. He stuns or kills one with a rock, and upon closer examination realises they are probably the descendants of humans / Eloi / Morlocks. A gigantic, centipede-like arthropod approaches and the Traveller flees into the next day, finding that the creature has apparently eaten the tiny humanoid. The Dover Press and Easton Press editions of the novella restore this deleted segment.
Significant scholarly commentary on "The Time Machine" began from the early 1960s, initially contained in various broad studies of Wells's early novels (such as Bernard Bergonzi's "The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances") and studies of utopias/dystopias in science fiction (such as Mark R. Hillegas's "The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians"). Much critical and textual work was done in the 1970s, including the tracing of the very complex publication history of the text, its drafts, and unpublished fragments.
A further resurgence in scholarship came around the time of the novella's centenary in 1995, and a major outcome of this was the 1995 conference and substantial anthology of academic papers, which was collected in print as "H.G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine". This publication then allowed the development of a guide-book for academic study at Master's and Ph.D. level: "H.G. Wells's The Time Machine: A Reference Guide".
The scholarly journal "The Wellsian" has published around twenty articles on "The Time Machine", and a U.S. academic journal "The Undying Fire", devoted to H.G. Wells studies, has published three articles since its inception in 2002.
The name "Eloi" is the Hebrew plural for Elohim, or lesser gods, in the Old Testament.
Wells's source for the name "Morlock" is less clear. It may refer to the Canaanite god Moloch associated with child sacrifice. The name Morlock may also be a play on "mollocks" – what miners might call themselves – or a Scots word for rubbish, or a reference to the Morlacchi community in Dalmatia.
"The Time Machine" can be read as a symbolic novel. The time machine itself can be viewed as a symbol, and there are several symbols in the narrative, including the Sphinx, flowers, and fire.
The CBS radio anthology "Escape" adapted "The Time Machine" twice, in 1948 starring Jeff Corey, and again in 1950 starring Lawrence Dobkin as the traveller. A script adapted by Irving Ravetch was used in both episodes. The Time Traveller was named Dudley and was accompanied by his skeptical friend Fowler as they traveled to the year 100,080.
In 1994, an audio drama was released on cassette and CD by Alien Voices, starring Leonard Nimoy as the Time Traveller (named John in this adaptation) and John de Lancie as David Filby. John de Lancie's children, Owen de Lancie and Keegan de Lancie, played the parts of the Eloi. The drama is approximately two hours long and is more faithful to the story than several of the film adaptations. Some changes are made to reflect modern language and knowledge of science.
In 2000, Alan Young read "The Time Machine" for 7th Voyage Productions, Inc., in 2016 to celebrate the 120th Anniversary of H.G. Wells's novella.
Robert Glenister starred as the Time Traveller, with William Gaunt as H. G. Wells in a new 100-minute radio dramatisation by Philip Osment, directed by Jeremy Mortimer as part of a BBC Radio Science Fiction season. This was the first adaptation of the novella for British radio. It was first broadcast on 22 February 2009 on BBC Radio 3 and later published as a 2-CD BBC audio book.
The other cast members were:
The adaptation retained the nameless status of the Time Traveller and set it as a true story told to the young Wells by the time traveller, which Wells then re-tells as an older man to the American journalist, Martha, whilst firewatching on the roof of Broadcasting House during the Blitz. It also retained the deleted ending from the novella as a recorded message sent back to Wells from the future by the traveller using a prototype of his machine, with the traveller escaping the anthropoid creatures to 30 million AD at the end of the universe before disappearing or dying there.
On 5 September 2017, Big Finish Productions released an adaptation of "The Time Machine". This adaptation was written by Marc Platt, and starred Ben Miles as the Time Traveller.
Platt explained in an interview that adapting The Time Machine to audio was not much different from writing Doctor Who, and that he could see where some of the roots of early Doctor Who came from.
The first visual adaptation of the book was a live teleplay broadcast from Alexandra Palace on 25 January 1949 by the BBC, which starred Russell Napier as the Time Traveller and Mary Donn as Weena. No recording of this live broadcast was made; the only record of the production is the script and a few black and white still photographs. A reading of the script, however, suggests that this teleplay remained fairly faithful to the book.
In 1960, the novella was made into an American science fiction film, also known promotionally as "H.G. Wells's The Time Machine". The film starred Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux. The film was produced and directed by George Pal, who also filmed a 1953 version of Wells's "The War of the Worlds". The film won an Academy Award for time-lapse photographic effects showing the world changing rapidly.
In 1993, Rod Taylor hosted "" reuniting him with Alan Young and Whit Bissell, featuring the only sequel to Mr. Pal's classic film, written by the original screenwriter, David Duncan. In the special were Academy Award-winners special effect artists Wah Chang and Gene Warren.
Sunn Classic Pictures produced a television film version of "The Time Machine" as a part of their "Classics Illustrated" series in 1978. It was a modernization of the Wells's story, making the Time Traveller a 1970s scientist working for a fictional US defence contractor, "the Mega Corporation". Dr. Neil Perry (John Beck), the Time Traveller, is described as one of Mega's most reliable contributors by his senior co-worker Branly (Whit Bissell, an alumnus of the 1960 adaptation). Perry's skill is demonstrated by his rapid reprogramming of an off-course missile, averting a disaster that could destroy Los Angeles. His reputation secures a grant of $20 million for his time machine project. Although nearing completion, the corporation wants Perry to put the project on hold so that he can head a military weapon development project. Perry accelerates work on the time machine, permitting him to test it before being forced to work on the new project.
The 1960 film was remade in 2002, starring Guy Pearce as the Time Traveller, a mechanical engineering professor named Alexander Hartdegen, Mark Addy as his colleague David Filby, Sienna Guillory as Alex's ill-fated fiancée Emma, Phyllida Law as Mrs. Watchit, and Jeremy Irons as the Uber-Morlock. Playing a quick cameo as a shopkeeper was Alan Young, who featured in the 1960 film. (H.G. Wells himself can also be said to have a "cameo" appearance, in the form of a photograph on the wall of Alex's home, near the front door.)
The film was directed by Wells's great-grandson Simon Wells, with an even more revised plot that incorporated the ideas of paradoxes and changing the past. The place is changed from Richmond, Surrey, to downtown New York City, where the Time Traveller moves forward in time to find answers to his questions on 'Practical Application of Time Travel;' first in 2030 New York, to witness an orbital lunar catastrophe in 2037, before moving on to 802,701 for the main plot. He later briefly finds himself in 635,427,810 with toxic clouds and a world laid waste (presumably by the Morlocks) with devastation and Morlock artifacts stretching out to the horizon.
It was met with mixed reviews and earned $56 million before VHS/DVD sales. The Time Machine used a design that was very reminiscent of the one in the Pal film but was much larger and employed polished turned brass construction, along with rotating glass reminiscent of the Fresnel lenses common to lighthouses. (In Wells's original book, the Time Traveller mentioned his 'scientific papers on optics'). Hartdegen becomes involved with a female Eloi named Mara, played by Samantha Mumba, who essentially takes the place of Weena, from the earlier versions of the story. In this film, the Eloi have, as a tradition, preserved a "stone language" that is identical to English. The Morlocks are much more barbaric and agile, and the Time Traveller has a direct impact on the plot.
In "Time After Time", H.G. Wells invents a time machine and shows it to some friends in a manner similar to the first part of the novella. He does not know that one of his friends is Jack The Ripper. The Ripper, fleeing police, escapes to the future (1979), but without a key which prevents the machine from remaining in the future. When it does return home, Wells follows him in order to protect the future (which he imagines to be a utopia) from the Ripper. In turn, the film inspired a 2017 TV series of the same name.
"Classics Illustrated" was the first to adapt "The Time Machine" into a comic book format, issuing an American edition in July 1956.
The Classics Illustrated version was published in French by "Classiques Illustres" in Dec 1957, and "Classics Illustrated" Strato Publications (Australian) in 1957, and "Kuvitettuja Klassikkoja" (a Finnish edition) in November 1957. There were also "Classics Illustrated" Greek editions in 1976, Swedish in 1987, German in 1992 and 2001, and a Canadian reprint of the English edition in 2008.
In 1976, Marvel Comics published a new version of "The Time Machine", as #2 in their "Marvel Classics Comics" series, with art by Alex Niño. (This adaptation was originally published in 1973 by Pendulum Press as part of their "Pendulum Now Age Classics" series; it was colorized and reprinted by Marvel in 1976.) From April 1990, Eternity Comics published a three-issue miniseries adaptation of "The Time Machine", written by Bill Spangler and illustrated by John Ross — this was collected as a trade paperback graphic novel in 1991.
Wells's novella has become one of the cornerstones of science-fiction literature. As a result, it has spawned many offspring. Works expanding on Wells's story include:
Although the Time Traveller's real name is never given in the original novella, other sources have named him: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29834 |
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips (embouchure) cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Unlike most other brass instruments, which have valves that, when pressed, alter the pitch of the instrument, trombones instead have a telescoping slide mechanism that varies the length of the instrument to change the pitch. However, many modern trombone models "also" use a valve attachment to lower the pitch of the instrument. Variants such as the valve trombone and superbone have three valves similar to those on the trumpet.
The word "trombone" derives from Italian "tromba" (trumpet) and "-one" (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name means "large trumpet". The trombone has a predominantly cylindrical bore like its valved counterpart, the baritone, in contrast to its conical valved counterparts: the cornet, the euphonium, and the French horn. The most frequently encountered trombones are the tenor trombone and bass trombone. The most common variant, the tenor, is a non-transposing instrument pitched in B, an octave below the B trumpet and an octave above the pedal B tuba. The once common E alto trombone became less widely used as improvements in technique extended the upper range of the tenor, but it is now resurging due to its lighter sonority which is appreciated in many classical and early romantic works. Trombone music is usually written in concert pitch in either bass or tenor clef, although exceptions do occur, notably in British brass-band music where the tenor trombone is presented as a B transposing instrument, written in treble clef.
A person who plays the trombone is called a trombonist or trombone player.
The trombone is a predominantly cylindrical tube bent into an elongated "S" shape. Rather than being completely cylindrical from end to end, the tube is a complex series of tapers with the smallest at the mouthpiece receiver and the largest just before the bell flare. The design of these tapers affects the intonation of the instrument. As with other brass instruments, sound is produced by blowing air through pursed lips producing a vibration that creates a standing wave in the instrument.
The detachable cup-shaped mouthpiece is similar to that of the baritone horn and closely related to that of the trumpet. It has the venturi: a small constriction of the air column that adds resistance greatly affecting the tone of the instrument and is inserted into the mouthpiece receiver in the slide section. The slide section consists of a leadpipe, the inner and outer slide tubes, and the bracing, or "stays". Modern stays are soldered, while sackbuts (medieval precursors to trombones) were made with loose, unsoldered stays.
The 'slide', the most distinctive feature of the trombone (cf. valve trombone), allows the player to extend the length of the air column, lowering the pitch. To prevent friction from slowing the action of the slide, additional sleeves known as stockings were developed during the Renaissance. These "stockings" were soldered onto the ends of the inner slide tubes. Nowadays, the stockings are incorporated into the manufacturing process of the inner slide tubes and represent a fractional widening of the tube to accommodate the necessary method of alleviating friction. This part of the slide must be lubricated frequently. Additional tubing connects the slide to the bell of the instrument through a neckpipe, and bell or back bow (U-bend). The joint connecting the slide and bell sections is furnished with a threaded collar to secure the connection of the two parts of the instrument, though older models from the early 20th century and before were usually equipped with friction joints and no ancillary mechanism to tighten the joint.
The adjustment of intonation is most often accomplished with a short tuning slide between the neckpipe and the bell incorporating the bell bow (U-bend); this device was designed by the French maker François Riedlocker during the early 19th century and applied to French and British designs and later in the century to German and American models, though German trombones were built without tuning slides well into the 20th century. However, trombonists, unlike other instrumentalists, are not subject to the intonation issues resulting from valved or keyed instruments, since they can adjust intonation "on the fly" by subtly altering slide positions when necessary. For example, second position "A" is not in exactly the same place on the slide as second position "E". Many types of trombone also include one or more rotary valves used to increase the length of the instrument (and therefore lower its pitch) by directing the air flow through additional tubing. This allows the instrument to reach notes that are otherwise not possible without the valve as well as play other notes in alternate positions.
Like the trumpet, the trombone is considered a cylindrical bore instrument since it has extensive sections of tubing, principally in the slide section, that are of unchanging diameter. Tenor trombones typically have a bore of (small bore) to (large or "orchestral" bore) after the leadpipe and through the slide. The bore expands through the gooseneck to the bell, which is typically between . A number of common variations on trombone construction are noted below.
"Trombone" comes from the Italian word "tromba" (trumpet) plus the suffix "-one" (big), meaning "big trumpet".
During the Renaissance, the equivalent English term was "sackbut". The word first appears in court records in 1495 as ""shakbusshe"" at about the time King Henry VII married a Portuguese princess who brought musicians with her. ""Shakbusshe"" is similar to ""sacabuche"", attested in Spain as early as 1478. The French equivalent ""saqueboute"" appears in 1466.
The German ""Posaune"" long predates the invention of the slide and could refer to a natural trumpet as late as the early fifteenth century.
Both towns and courts sponsored bands of shawms and trombone. The most famous and influential served the Duke of Burgundy. The trombone's principal role was the contratenor part in a dance band. The sackbut was used extensively across Europe, from its appearance in the 15th century to a decline in most places by the mid-late 17th century. It was used in outdoor events, in concert, and in liturgical settings. With trumpeters, trombonists in German city-states were employed as civil officials. As officials, these trombonists were often relegated to standing watch in the city towers but would also herald the arrival of important people to the city. This is similar to the role of a military bugler and was used as a sign of wealth and strength in 16th century German cities.
However, these trombonists were often viewed separately from the more skilled trombonists who played in groups such as the alta capella wind ensembles and the first orchestral ensembles. These performed in religious settings, such as St Mark's Basilica in Venice in the early 17th century.
Composers who wrote for trombone during this period include Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, Giovanni Gabrieli and his uncle Andrea Gabrieli. The trombone doubled voice parts in sacred works, but there are also solo pieces written for trombone in the early 17th century.
When the sackbut returned to common use in England in the 18th century, Italian music was so influential that the instrument became known as the "trombone", although in some countries the same name has been applied throughout its history, viz. Italian and German . The 17th-century trombone was built in slightly smaller dimensions than modern trombones and had a bell that was more conical and less flared.
During the later Baroque period, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel used trombones on a few occasions. Bach called for a "tromba di tirarsi" to double the cantus firmus in some of his liturgical cantatas, which may be a form of the closely related slide trumpet. Bach also employed a choir of four trombones to double the chorus in three of his cantatas (BWV 2, BWV 21 and BWV 38), and also a quartet of three trombones and one cornett in the cantata BWV 25. Handel used it in the "Death March" from "Saul", "Samson", and "Israel in Egypt". All were examples of an oratorio style popular during the early 18th century. Score notations are rare because only a few professional "Stadtpfeiffer" or alta cappella musicians were available. Handel, for instance, had to import trombones to England from a Royal court in Hanover, Germany, to perform one of his larger compositions. Therefore, trombone parts were rather seldom given "solo" roles that were not interchangeable with other instruments.
Christoph Willibald Gluck was the first major composer to use the trombone in an opera overture, "Alceste "(1767), but he also used it in operas such as "Orfeo ed Euridice", "Iphigénie en Tauride "(1779) and "Echo et Narcisse".
The construction of the trombone changed relatively little between the Baroque and Classical period. The most obvious change was in the bell, slightly more flared.
The first use of the trombone as an independent instrument in a symphony was in the Symphony in E (1807) by Swedish composer Joachim Nicolas Eggert. But the composer usually credited with the trombone's introduction into the symphony orchestra was Ludwig van Beethoven in Symphony No. 5 in C minor (1808). Beethoven also used trombones in his Symphony No. 6 in F major ("Pastoral") and Symphony No. 9 ("Choral").
Trombones were often included in compositions, operas, and symphonies by composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Franz Berwald, Charles Gounod, Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner among others.
Although the trombone trio had been paired with one or two cornets during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, the disappearance of the cornet as a partner and replacement by oboe and clarinet left unchanged the trombone's purpose: to support the alto, tenor, and bass voices of the chorus (usually in ecclesiastical settings) where harmonic moving lines were more difficult to pick out than the melodic soprano line. But the introduction of trombones into the orchestra allied them more closely with trumpets, and soon an additional tenor trombone replaced alto. The Germans and Austrians kept alto trombone somewhat longer than the French, who preferred a section of three tenor trombones until after the Second World War. In other countries, the trio of two tenor trombones and one bass became standard by about the mid 19th century.
Trombonists were employed less by court orchestras and cathedrals and so were expected to provide their own instrument. Military musicians were provided with instruments, and instruments like the long F or E bass trombone remained in military use until around the First World War. But orchestral musicians adopted the tenor trombone, the most versatile trombone that could play in the ranges of any of the three trombone parts that typically appeared in orchestral scores.
Valve trombones in the mid-19th century did little to alter the make-up of the orchestral trombone section; although it was ousted from orchestras in Germany and France, the valve trombone remained popular almost to the exclusion of the slide instrument in countries such as Italy and Bohemia. Composers such as Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Bedřich Smetana, and Antonín Dvořák scored for a valve trombone section.
With the ophicleide or later, the tuba subjoined to the trombone trio during the 19th century, parts scored for the bass trombone rarely descended as low as parts scored before the addition of either of these new low brass instruments. Only in the early 20th century did it regain a degree of independence. Experiments with the trombone section included Richard Wagner's addition of a contrabass trombone in "Der Ring des Nibelungen" and Gustav Mahler's and Richard Strauss' augmentation by adding a second bass trombone to the usual trio of two tenor trombones and one bass trombone. The majority of orchestral works are still scored for the usual mid- to late-19th-century low brass section of two tenor trombones, one bass trombone, and one tuba.
Trombones have been a part of the large wind band since its inception as an ensemble during the French Revolution of 1791. During the 19th century wind band traditions were established, including circus bands, military bands, brass bands (primarily in the UK), and town bands (primarily in the US). Some of these, especially military bands in Europe, used rear-facing trombones where the bell section pointed behind the player's left shoulder. These bands played a limited repertoire, with few original compositions, that consisted mainly of orchestral transcriptions, arrangements of popular and patriotic tunes, and feature pieces for soloists (usually cornetists, singers, and violinists). A notable work for wind band is Berlioz's 1840 Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, which uses a trombone solo for the entire second movement.
Toward the end of the 19th century, trombone virtuosi began appearing as soloists in American wind bands. The most notable was Arthur Pryor, who played with the John Philip Sousa band and formed his own.
In the Romantic era, Leipzig became a center of trombone pedagogy. The trombone began to be taught at the Musikhochschule founded by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The Paris Conservatory and its yearly exhibition also contributed to trombone education. At the Leipzig academy, Mendelssohn's bass trombonist, Karl Traugott Queisser, was the first in a long line of distinguished professors of trombone. Several composers wrote works for Quiesser, including Ferdinand David (Mendelssohn's concertmaster) who wrote in 1837 the "Concertino for Trombone and Orchestra", Ernst Sachse and Friedrich August Belcke, whose solo works remain popular in Germany. Queisser helped reestablish the reputation of the trombone in Germany. He championed and popularized Christian Friedrich Sattler's tenorbass trombone during the 1840s, leading to its widespread use in orchestras throughout Germany and Austria.
Sattler had a great influence on trombone design. He introduced a significant widening of the bore (the most important since the Renaissance), the innovations of "Schlangenverzierungen" (snake decorations), the bell garland, and the wide bell flare—features still found on German-made trombones that were widely copied during the 19th century.
The trombone was further improved in the 19th century with the addition of "stockings" at the end of the inner slide to reduce friction, the development of the water key to expel condensation from the horn, and the occasional addition of a valve that, intentionally, only was to be set on or off but later was to become the regular F-valve. Additionally, the valve trombone came around the 1850s shortly after the invention of valves, and was in common use in Italy and Austria in the second half of the century.
In the 20th century the trombone maintained its important place in the orchestra in works by Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Edward Elgar, George Gershwin, Gustav Holst, Leos Janacek, Gustav Mahler, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, Carl Nielsen, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, Ottorino Respighi, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and William Walton.
With the rise of recorded music and music schools, orchestral trombone sections around the world began to have a more consistent idea of a standard trombone sound. British orchestras abandoned the use of small bore tenors and G basses in favor of an American/German approach of large bore tenors and B basses in the 1940s. French orchestras did the same in the 1960s.
During the first half of the century, touring and community concert bands lost their popularity in the United States and were greatly reduced in number. However, with the development of music education in the public school system, high school, and university concert bands and marching bands and became ubiquitous in the US. A typical concert band trombone section consists of two tenor trombones and one bass trombone, but using multiple players per part is common practice, especially in public-school settings.
In the 1900s the trombone assisted the bass or tuba player's job of outlining chords for the other instruments by playing a bass line for the higher-pitched instruments to improvise over. It was not until the swing era of the mid-1920s that the trombone began to be used as a solo instrument. Examples of early trombone soloists are Jack Teagarden and J.J. Johnson.
Changes in construction have occurred during the 20th century, such as the use of different materials; increases in mouthpiece, bore, and bell dimensions; and in types of mutes and valves. Despite the universal switch to a larger horn, many European trombone makers prefer a slightly smaller bore than their American counterparts.
One of the most significant changes is the popularity of the F-Attachment trigger. Through the mid-20th century, orchestral trombonists used instruments that lacked a trigger because there was no need for one. But as 20th century composers such as Mahler became popular, tenor trombone parts began to extend down into lower ranges that required a trigger. Although some trombonists prefer "straight" trombone models without triggers, most have added them for convenience and versatility.
The trombone can be found in symphony orchestras, concert bands, marching bands, military bands, brass bands, and brass choirs. In chamber music, it is used in brass quintets, quartets, or trios, or trombone trios, quartets, or choirs. The size of a trombone choir can vary from five or six to twenty or more members. Trombones are also common in swing, jazz, merengue, salsa, R&B, ska, and New Orleans brass bands.
The most frequently encountered type of trombone today is the tenor, followed by the bass, though as with many other Renaissance instruments the trombone has been built in sizes from piccolo to contrabass. Trombones are usually constructed with a slide that is used to change the pitch. Valve trombones use three valves (singly or in combination) instead of the slide. The valves follow the same schema as other valved instruments-the first valve lowers the pitch by one step, the second valve by a half-step, and the third valve by one and a half steps.
A superbone uses a full set of valves "and" a slide. These differ from trombones with triggers. Some slide trombones have one or (less frequently) two rotary valves operated by a left-hand thumb trigger. The single rotary valve is part of the "F attachment", which adds a length of tubing to lower the instrument's fundamental pitch from B to F. Some bass trombones have a second trigger with a different length of tubing. The second trigger facilitates playing the otherwise problematic low B. A buccin is a trombone with a round, zoomorphic bell section. They were common in 19th-century military bands.
The modern system has seven chromatic slide positions on a tenor trombone in B. It was first described by Andre Braun circa 1795.
In 1811 Joseph Fröhlich wrote on the differences between the modern system and an old system where four diatonic slide positions were used and the trombone was usually keyed to A. To compare between the two styles the chart below may be helpful (take note for example, in the old system contemporary 1st-position was considered "drawn past" then current 1st). In the modern system, each successive position outward (approximately ) will produce a note which is one semitone lower when played in the same partial. Tightening and loosening the lips will allow the player to "bend" the note up or down by a semitone without changing position, so a slightly out-of-position slide may be compensated for by ear.
As with all brass instruments, progressive tightening of the lips and increased air pressure allow the player to move to different partial in the harmonic series. In the first position (also called closed position) on a B trombone, the notes in the harmonic series begin with B2 (one octave higher than the pedal B1), F3 (a perfect fifth higher than the previous partial), B3 (a perfect fourth higher), D4 (a major third higher), and F4 (a minor third higher).
F4 marks the sixth partial, or the fifth overtone. Notes on the next partial, for example A4 (a minor third higher) in first position, tend to be out of tune in regards to the twelve-tone equal temperament scale. A4 in particular, which is at the seventh partial (sixth overtone) is nearly always 31 cents, or about one third of a semitone, flat of the minor seventh. On the slide trombone, such deviations from intonation are corrected for by slightly adjusting the slide or by using an alternate position. Although much of Western music has adopted the even-tempered scale, it has been the practice in Germany and Austria to play these notes in position, where they will have just intonation (see harmonic seventh as well for A4).
The next higher partials—B4 (a major second higher), C5 (a major second higher), D5 (a major second higher)—do not require much adjustment for even-tempered intonation, but E5 (a minor second higher) is almost exactly a quarter tone higher than it would be in twelve-tone equal temperament. E5 and F5 (a major second higher) at the next partial are very high notes; a very skilled player with a highly developed facial musculature and diaphragm can go even higher to G5, A5, B5 and beyond.
The higher in the harmonic series any two successive notes are, the closer they tend to be (as evidenced by the progressively smaller intervals noted above). A byproduct of this is the relatively few motions needed to move between notes in the higher ranges of the trombone. In the lower range, significant movement of the slide is required between positions, which becomes more exaggerated on lower pitched trombones, but for higher notes the player need only use the first four positions of the slide since the partials are closer together, allowing higher notes in alternate positions. As an example, F4 (at the bottom of the treble clef) may be played in first, fourth or sixth position on a B trombone. The note E1 (or the lowest E on a standard 88-key piano keyboard) is the lowest attainable note on a B tenor trombone, requiring a full of tubing. On trombones without an F attachment, there is a gap between B1 (the fundamental in first position) and E2 (the first harmonic in seventh position). Skilled players can produce "falset" notes between these, but the sound is relatively weak and not usually used in performance. The addition of an F attachment allows for intermediate notes to be played with more clarity.
The pedal tone on B is frequently seen in commercial scoring but much less often in symphonic music while notes below that are called for only rarely as they "become increasingly difficult to produce and insecure in quality" with A or G being the bottom limit for most tenor trombonists. Some contemporary orchestral writing, movie or video game scoring, trombone ensemble and solo works will call for notes as low as a pedal C, B, or even double pedal B on the bass trombone.
The trombone is one of the few wind instruments that can produce a true glissando, by moving the slide without interrupting the airflow or sound production. Every pitch in a glissando must have the same harmonic number, and a tritone is the largest interval that can be performed as a glissando.
'Harmonic', 'inverted', 'broken' or 'false' glissandos are those that cross one or more harmonic series, requiring a simulated or faked glissando effect.
Trills, though generally simple with valves, are difficult on the slide trombone. Trills tend to be easiest and most effective higher in the harmonic series because the distance between notes is much smaller and slide movement is minimal. For example, a trill on B3/C4 is virtually impossible as the slide must move two positions (either 1st-to-3rd or 5th-to-3rd), however at an octave higher (B4/C5) the notes can both be achieved in 1st position as a lip trill. Thus, the most convincing trills tend to be above the first octave and a half of the tenor's range. Trills are most commonly found in early Baroque and Classical music for the trombone as a means of ornamentation, however, some more modern pieces will call for trills as well.
Unlike most other brass instruments in an orchestral setting, the trombone is not usually considered a transposing instrument. Prior to the invention of valve systems, most brass instruments were limited to playing one overtone series at a time; altering the pitch of the instrument required manually replacing a section of tubing (called a "crook") or picking up an instrument of different length. Their parts were transposed according to which crook or length-of-instrument they used at any given time, so that a particular note on the staff always corresponded to a particular partial on the instrument. Trombones, on the other hand, have used slides since their inception. As such, they have always been fully chromatic, so no such tradition took hold, and trombone parts have always been notated at concert pitch (with one exception, discussed below). Also, it was quite common for trombones to double choir parts; reading in concert pitch meant there was no need for dedicated trombone parts. Note that while the fundamental sounding pitch (slide fully retracted) has remained quite consistent, the conceptual pitch of trombones has changed since their origin ("e.g." Baroque A tenor = modern B-flat tenor).
Trombone parts are typically notated in bass clef, though sometimes also written in tenor clef or alto clef. The use of alto clef is usually confined to orchestral first trombone parts, with the second trombone part written in tenor clef and the third (bass) part in bass clef. As the alto trombone declined in popularity during the 19th century, this practice was gradually abandoned and first trombone parts came to be notated in the tenor or bass clef. Some Russian and Eastern European composers wrote first and second tenor trombone parts on one alto clef staff (the German Robert Schumann was the first to do this). Examples of this practice are evident in scores by Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich. Trombone parts in band music are nearly exclusively notated in bass clef. The rare exceptions are in contemporary works intended for high-level wind bands.
An accomplished performer today is expected to be proficient in reading parts notated in bass clef, tenor clef, alto clef, and (more rarely) treble clef in C, with the British brass-band performer expected to handle treble clef in B as well.
A variety of mutes can be used with the trombone to alter its timbre. Many are held in place with the use of cork grips, including the straight, cup, harmon and pixie mutes. Some fit over the bell, like the bucket mute. In addition to this, mutes can be held in front of the bell and moved to cover more or less area for a wah-wah effect. Mutes used in this way include the "hat" (a metal mute shaped like a bowler hat) and plunger (which looks like, and often is, the rubber suction cup from a sink or toilet plunger), a sound featured as the voices of adults in the "Peanuts" cartoons.
Trombone bells (and sometimes slides) may be constructed of different brass mixtures. The most common material is yellow brass (70% copper, 30% zinc), but other materials include rose brass (85% copper, 15% zinc) and red brass (90% copper, 10% zinc). Some manufacturers offer interchangeable bells. Tenor trombone bells are usually between in diameter, the most common being sizes from . The smallest sizes are found in small jazz trombones and older narrow-bore instruments, while the larger sizes are common in orchestral models. Bass trombone bells can be as large as or more, though usually either in diameter. The bell may be constructed out of two separate brass sheets or out of one single piece of metal and hammered on a mandrel until the part is shaped correctly. The edge of the bell may be finished with or without a piece of bell wire to secure it, which also affects the tone quality; most bells are built with bell wire. Occasionally, trombone bells are made from solid sterling silver.
Many trombones have valve attachments to aid in increasing the range of the instrument while also allowing alternate slide positions for difficult music passages. In addition, valve attachments make trills much easier. Valve attachments appear on alto, tenor, bass, and contrabass trombones. It is rare on the alto, but when the instrument does have it, the valve attachment changes the key of the instrument from E to B, allowing the alto trombone to play in the tenor trombone range. Tenor trombones commonly have valve attachments, the most common being the F-attachment, which changes the pitch of the instrument from B to F, increasing the range of the instrument downward and allowing alternate slide positions for notes in 6th or 7th position.
Bass trombones also very commonly have F-attachments, which serve exactly the same function as on the tenor trombone. Some single valve bass trombones have E-attachments instead of F-attachments, or sometimes there is extra tubing on the F-attachment to allow it to be used as an E-attachment if desired. However, many bass trombones have a second valve attachment instead, which increases their range downward even more. The most common second valve attachment is the G-attachment, which changes the instrument's key to D when used in combination with the F-attachment (or D if used with the less common E-attachment). There are other configurations other than the G-attachment however.
The two valves on a bass trombone can either be independent or dependent. Double rotor dependent valve bass trombones were created in the late 1950s, and double rotor independent valve bass trombones were created in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Dependent means that the second valve only works when used in combination with the first, as it is located directly on the F- or E-attachment tubing. Newer bass trombones have independent (in-line) valves instead, meaning that the second valve is located on the neckpipe of the instrument and can therefore operate independently of the other. Contrabass trombones also can have valve attachments. Contrabass trombones in the key of F typically have two valves tuned to C and D respectively. Contrabass trombones in B on the other hand typically only have one valve, which is tuned to F, though some have a second valve tuned to G.
The most common type of valve seen for valve attachments is the rotary valve. Some trombones have piston valves used instead of rotary valves for valve attachments, but it is very rare and is today considered unconventional. Many variations of the rotary valve have been invented in the past half-century, such as the Thayer valve (or axial flow valve), the Hagmann valve, the Greenhoe rotor, and several others, all of which were designed to give the trombone a more open, free sound than a conventional rotary valve would allow due to the 90° bend in most conventional rotary valve designs. Many of these new trombone valve designs have enjoyed great success on the market, but the standard rotary valve remains the most common for trombone valve attachments.
Some trombones have valves instead of a slide (see valve trombone). These are usually rotary valves, or piston valves.
More often than not, tenor trombones with an F attachment, or trigger, have a larger bore through the attachment than through the 'straight' section (the portion of the trombone through which the air flows when the attachment is not engaged). Typically, for orchestral instruments, the slide bore is and the attachment tubing bore is . A wide variety of valve attachments and combinations are available. Valve attachment tubing usually incorporates a small tuning slide so that the attachment tubing can be tuned separately from the rest of the instrument. Most B/F tenor and bass trombones include a tuning slide long enough to lower the pitch to E with the valve tubing engaged, enabling the production of B2.
Whereas older instruments fitted with valve attachments usually had the tubing coiled rather tightly in the bell section ("closed wrap " or "traditional wrap"), modern instruments usually have the tubing kept as free as possible of tight bends in the tubing ("open wrap"), resulting in a freer response with the valve attachment tubing engaged. While open-wrap tubing does offer a more open sound, the tubing sticks out from behind the bell and is more vulnerable to damage. For that reason, closed-wrap tubing remains more popular in trombones used in marching bands or other ensembles where the trombone may be more prone to damage.
Some trombones are tuned through a mechanism in the slide section rather than via a separate tuning slide in the bell section. This method preserves a smoother expansion from the start of the bell section to the bell flare. The tuning slide in the bell section requires two portions of cylindrical tubing in an otherwise conical part of the instrument, which affects the tone quality. Tuning the trombone enables it to play with other instruments which is essential for the trombone.
Common and popular bore sizes for trombone slides are for tenor trombones, and for bass trombones. The slide may also be built with a "dual-bore" configuration, in which the bore of the second leg of the slide is slightly larger than the bore of the first leg, producing a stepwise conical effect. The most common dual-bore combinations are , , , , for tenor trombones, and for bass trombones.
The mouthpiece is a separate part of the trombone and can be interchanged between similarly sized trombones from different manufacturers. Available mouthpieces for trombone (as with all brass instruments) vary in material composition, length, diameter, rim shape, cup depth, throat entrance, venturi aperture, venturi profile, outside design and other factors. Variations in mouthpiece construction affect the individual player's ability to make a lip seal and produce a reliable tone, the timbre of that tone, its volume, the instrument's intonation tendencies, the player's subjective level of comfort, and the instrument's playability in a given pitch range.
Mouthpiece selection is a highly personal decision. Thus, a symphonic trombonist might prefer a mouthpiece with a deeper cup and sharper inner rim shape in order to produce a rich symphonic tone quality, while a jazz trombonist might choose a shallower cup for brighter tone and easier production of higher notes. Further, for certain compositions, these choices between two such performers could easily be reversed. Some mouthpiece makers now offer mouthpieces that feature removable rims, cups, and shanks allowing players to further customize and adjust their mouthpieces to their preference.
Instruments made mostly from plastic, including the pBone and the Tromba plastic trombone, emerged in the 2010s as a cheaper and more robust alternative to brass. Plastic instruments could come in almost any colour but the sound plastic instruments produce is different from that of brass. While originally seen as a gimmick, these plastic models have found increasing popularity of the last decade and are now viewed as practice tools that make for more convenient travel as well as a cheaper option for beginning players not wishing to invest so much money in a trombone right away. Manufacturers now produce large-bore models with triggers as well as smaller alto models.
German trombones have been built in a wide variety of bore and bell sizes. The traditional German "Konzertposaune" can differ substantially from American designs in many aspects. The mouthpiece is typically rather small and is placed into a slide section with a very long leadpipe of at least . The whole instrument is often made of gold brass, and its sound is usually darker compared with British, French or American designs. While their bore sizes were considered large in the 19th century, German trombones have altered very little over the last 150 years and are now typically somewhat smaller than their American counterparts. Bell sizes remain very large in all sizes of German trombone and a bass trombone bell may exceed in diameter.
Valve attachments in tenor and bass trombones were first seen in the mid 19th century, originally on the tenor B trombone. Before 1850, bass trombone parts were mostly played on a slightly longer F-bass trombone (a fourth lower). The first valve was simply a fourth-valve, or in German "Quart-ventil", built onto a B tenor trombone, to allow playing in low F. This valve was first built without a return spring, and was only intended to set the instrument in B or F for extended passages. Since the mid-20th century, modern instruments use a trigger to engage the valve while playing.
As with other German and Austrian brass instruments, rotary valves are used to the exclusion of almost all other types of valve, even in valve trombones. Other features often found on German trombones include long water keys and snake decorations on the slide and bell U-bows.
Since around 1925, when jazz music became popular, Germany has been selling "American trombones" as well. Most trombones played in Germany today, especially by amateurs, are built in the American fashion, as those are much more widely available, and thus far cheaper.
French trombones were built in the very smallest bore sizes up to the end of the Second World War and whilst other sizes were made there, the French usually preferred the tenor trombone to any other size. French music, therefore, usually employed a section of three tenor trombones up to the mid–20th century. Tenor trombones produced in France during the 19th and early 20th centuries featured bore sizes of around , small bells of not more than in diameter, as well as a funnel-shaped mouthpiece slightly larger than that of the cornet or horn. French tenor trombones were built in both C and B, altos in D, sopranos in F, piccolos in high B, basses in G and E, contrabasses in B.
Several makers have begun to market compact B/C trombones that are especially well suited for young children learning to play the trombone who cannot reach the outer slide positions of full-length instruments. The fundamental note of the unenhanced length is C, but the short valved attachment that puts the instrument in B is "open" when the trigger is "not" depressed. While such instruments have no seventh slide position, C and B natural may be comfortably accessed on the first and second positions by using the trigger. A similar design ("Preacher model") was marketed by C.G. Conn in the 1920s, also under the Wurlitzer label. Currently, B/C trombones are available from many manufacturers, including German makers Günter Frost, Thein and Helmut Voigt, as well as the Yamaha Corporation.
Trombones in slide and valve configuration have been made by a vast array of musical instrument manufacturers. For the brass bands of the late 19th and early 20th century, prominent American manufacturers included Graves and Sons, E. G. Wright and Company, Boston Musical Instrument Company, E. A. Couturier, H. N. White Company/King Musical Instruments, J. W. York, and C.G. Conn. In the 21st century, leading mainstream manufacturers of trombones include Vincent Bach, Conn, Courtois, Edwards, Getzen, Greenhoe, Jupiter, Kanstul, King, Michael Rath, Schilke, S.E. Shires, Thein and Yamaha. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29837 |
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical depiction of working-class life, epitomized by the Simpson family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield and parodies American culture and society, television, and the human condition.
The family was conceived by Groening shortly before a solicitation for a series of animated shorts with producer James L. Brooks. Groening created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after his own family members, substituting Bart for his own name, he thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word "simp" in it, which is short for "simpleton". The shorts became a part of "The Tracey Ullman Show" on April 19, 1987. After three seasons, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and became Fox's first series to land in the Top 30 ratings in a season (1989–1990).
Since its debut on December 17, 1989, episodes of "The Simpsons" have been broadcast. It is the longest-running American sitcom, and the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, both in terms of seasons and number of episodes. A feature-length film, "The Simpsons Movie", was released in theaters worldwide on July 27, 2007, and grossed over $527 million. Then on October 30, 2007, a video game was released. "The Simpsons" was renewed on February 6, 2019 for a thirty-first and thirty-second season. The former began airing September 29, 2019 and concluded on May 17, 2020, and the latter of which will contain the 700th episode. "The Simpsons" is a joint production by Gracie Films and 20th Century Fox Television and syndicated by 20th Television.
"The Simpsons" received acclaim throughout its first nine or ten seasons, which are generally considered its "Golden Age". "Time" named it the 20th century's best television series, and Erik Adams of "The A.V. Club" named it "television's crowning achievement regardless of format". On January 14, 2000, the Simpson family was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It has won dozens of awards since it debuted as a series, including 34 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 Annie Awards, and 2 Peabody Awards. Homer's exclamatory catchphrase "D'oh!" has been adopted into the English language, while "The Simpsons" has influenced many other later adult-oriented animated sitcoms. However, it has also been criticized for a perceived decline in quality over the years.
"The Simpsons" is known for its wide ensemble of main and supporting characters (ensemble cast).
The main characters are the Simpson family, who live in a fictional "Middle America" town of Springfield. Homer, the father, works as a safety inspector at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, a position at odds with his careless, buffoonish personality. He is married to Marge Bouvier, a stereotypical American housewife and mother. They have three children: Bart, a ten-year-old troublemaker and prankster; Lisa, a precocious eight-year-old activist; and Maggie, the baby of the family who rarely speaks, but communicates by sucking on a pacifier. Although the family is dysfunctional, many episodes examine their relationships and bonds with each other and they are often shown to care about one another. Homer's dad Grampa Simpson lives in the Springfield Retirement Home after Homer forced his dad to sell his house so that his family could buy theirs. Grampa Simpson has had starring roles in several episodes.
The family also owns a dog, Santa's Little Helper, and a cat, Snowball V, renamed Snowball II in "I, (Annoyed Grunt)-Bot". Both pets have had starring roles in several episodes.
The show includes an array of quirky supporting characters, which include Homer's co-workers (also friends) Lenny Leonard and Carl Carlson, the school principal Seymour Skinner and teachers Edna Krabappel and Elizabeth Hoover, neighbor Ned Flanders, friends Barney Gumble, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Moe Szyslak, Milhouse Van Houten, and Nelson Muntz, extended relatives Patty and Selma Bouvier, townspeople such as Mayor Quimby, Chief Clancy Wiggum, tycoon Charles Montgomery Burns and his executive assistant Waylon Smithers, and local celebrities Krusty the Clown and news reporter Kent Brockman.
The creators originally intended many of these characters as one-time jokes or for fulfilling needed functions in the town. A number of them have gained expanded roles and subsequently starred in their own episodes. According to Matt Groening, the show adopted the concept of a large supporting cast from the comedy show "SCTV".
Despite the depiction of yearly milestones such as holidays or birthdays passing, the characters do not age between episodes (either physically or in stated age), and generally appear just as they did when the series began. The series uses a floating timeline in which episodes generally take place in the year the episode is produced even though the characters do not age. Flashbacks and flashforwards do occasionally depict the characters at other points in their lives, with the timeline of these depictions also generally floating relative to the year the episode is produced. For example, in the 1991 episode "I Married Marge", Bart (who is always 10 years old) appears to be born in 1980 or 1981. But in the 1995 episode "And Maggie Makes Three", Maggie (who always appears to be around 1 year old) appears to be born in 1993 or 1994. In the 1992 episode "Lisa's First Word", Lisa (who is always 8) is shown to have been born in 1984.
A canon of the show does exist, although "Treehouse of Horror" episodes and any fictional story told within the series are typically non-canon. However, continuity is inconsistent and limited in "The Simpsons". For example, Krusty the Clown may be able to read in one episode, but may not be able to read in another - however he is consistently portrayed as being Jewish and that his Rabbi father has since died. Lessons learned by the family in one episode may be forgotten in the next. Some examples of limited continuity include Sideshow Bob's appearances where Bart and Lisa flashback at all the crimes he committed in Springfield or when the characters try to remember things that happened in previous episodes.
"The Simpsons" takes place in the fictional American town of Springfield in an unknown and impossible-to-determine U.S. state. The show is intentionally evasive in regard to Springfield's location. Springfield's geography, and that of its surroundings, contains coastlines, deserts, vast farmland, tall mountains, or whatever the story or joke requires. Groening has said that Springfield has much in common with Portland, Oregon, the city where he grew up. The name "Springfield" is a common one in America and appears in at least 29 states. Groening has said that he named it after Springfield, Oregon, and the fictitious Springfield which was the setting of the series "Father Knows Best". He "figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, 'This will be cool; everyone will think it's their Springfield.' And they do."
When producer James L. Brooks was working on the television variety show "The Tracey Ullman Show", he decided to include small animated sketches before and after the commercial breaks. Having seen one of cartoonist Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" comic strips, Brooks asked Groening to pitch an idea for a series of animated shorts. Groening initially intended to present an animated version of his "Life in Hell" series. However, Groening later realized that animating "Life in Hell" would require the rescinding of publication rights for his life's work. He therefore chose another approach while waiting in the lobby of Brooks's office for the pitch meeting, hurriedly formulating his version of a dysfunctional family that became the Simpsons. He named the characters after his own family members, substituting "Bart" for his own name, adopting an anagram of the word "brat".
The Simpson family first appeared as shorts in "The Tracey Ullman Show" on April 19, 1987. Groening submitted only basic sketches to the animators and assumed that the figures would be cleaned up in production. However, the animators merely re-traced his drawings, which led to the crude appearance of the characters in the initial shorts. The animation was produced domestically at Klasky Csupo, with Wes Archer, David Silverman, and Bill Kopp being animators for the first season. Colorist Georgie Peluse was the person who decided to make the characters yellow.
In 1989, a team of production companies adapted "The Simpsons" into a half-hour series for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The team included the Klasky Csupo animation house. Brooks negotiated a provision in the contract with the Fox network that prevented Fox from interfering with the show's content. Groening said his goal in creating the show was to offer the audience an alternative to what he called "the mainstream trash" that they were watching. The half-hour series premiered on December 17, 1989, with "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire". "Some Enchanted Evening" was the first full-length episode produced, but it did not broadcast until May 1990, as the last episode of the first season, because of animation problems. In 1992, Tracey Ullman filed a lawsuit against Fox, claiming that her show was the source of the series' success. The suit said she should receive a share of the profits of "The Simpsons"—a claim rejected by the courts.
List of showrunners throughout the series' run:
Matt Groening and James L. Brooks have served as executive producers during the show's entire history, and also function as creative consultants. Sam Simon, described by former "Simpsons" director Brad Bird as "the unsung hero" of the show, served as creative supervisor for the first four seasons. He was constantly at odds with Groening, Brooks and the show's production company Gracie Films and left in 1993. Before leaving, he negotiated a deal that sees him receive a share of the profits every year, and an executive producer credit despite not having worked on the show since 1993, at least until his passing in 2015. A more involved position on the show is the showrunner, who acts as head writer and manages the show's production for an entire season.
The first team of writers, assembled by Sam Simon, consisted of John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, George Meyer, Jeff Martin, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky. Newer "Simpsons" writing teams typically consist of sixteen writers who propose episode ideas at the beginning of each December. The main writer of each episode writes the first draft. Group rewriting sessions develop final scripts by adding or removing jokes, inserting scenes, and calling for re-readings of lines by the show's vocal performers. Until 2004, George Meyer, who had developed the show since the first season, was active in these sessions. According to long-time writer Jon Vitti, Meyer usually invented the best lines in a given episode, even though other writers may receive script credits. Each episode takes six months to produce so the show rarely comments on current events.
Credited with sixty episodes, John Swartzwelder is the most prolific writer on "The Simpsons". One of the best-known former writers is Conan O'Brien, who contributed to several episodes in the early 1990s before replacing David Letterman as host of the talk show "Late Night". English comedian Ricky Gervais wrote the episode "Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife", becoming the first celebrity to both write and guest star in the same episode. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, writers of the film "Superbad", wrote the episode "Homer the Whopper", with Rogen voicing a character in it.
At the end of 2007, the writers of "The Simpsons" went on strike together with the other members of the Writers Guild of America, East. The show's writers had joined the guild in 1998.
"The Simpsons" has six main cast members: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, and Harry Shearer. Castellaneta voices Homer Simpson, Grampa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, Barney Gumble, and other adult, male characters. Julie Kavner voices Marge Simpson and Patty and Selma, as well as several minor characters. Castellaneta and Kavner had been a part of "The Tracey Ullman Show" cast and were given the parts so that new actors would not be needed. Cartwright voices Bart Simpson, Nelson Muntz, Ralph Wiggum and other children. Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson, is the only cast member who regularly voices only one character, although she occasionally plays other episodic characters. The producers decided to hold casting for the roles of Bart and Lisa. Smith had initially been asked to audition for the role of Bart, but casting director Bonita Pietila believed her voice was too high, so she was given the role of Lisa instead. Cartwright was originally brought in to voice Lisa, but upon arriving at the audition, she found that Lisa was simply described as the "middle child" and at the time did not have much personality. Cartwright became more interested in the role of Bart, who was described as "devious, underachieving, school-hating, irreverent, [and] clever". Groening let her try out for the part instead, and upon hearing her read, gave her the job on the spot. Cartwright is the only one of the six main "Simpsons" cast members who had been professionally trained in voice acting prior to working on the show. Azaria and Shearer do not voice members of the title family, but play a majority of the male townspeople. Azaria, who has been a part of the "Simpsons" regular voice cast since the second season, voices recurring characters such as Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and Professor Frink. Shearer provides voices for Mr. Burns, Mr. Smithers, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, Reverend Lovejoy and Dr. Hibbert. Every main cast member has won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
With one exception, episode credits list only the voice actors, and not the characters they voice. Both Fox and the production crew wanted to keep their identities secret during the early seasons and, therefore, closed most of the recording sessions while refusing to publish photos of the recording artists. However, the network eventually revealed which roles each actor performed in the episode "Old Money", because the producers said the voice actors should receive credit for their work. In 2003, the cast appeared in an episode of "Inside the Actors Studio", doing live performances of their characters' voices.
The six main actors were paid $30,000 per episode until 1998, when they were involved in a pay dispute with Fox. The company threatened to replace them with new actors, even going as far as preparing for casting of new voices, but series creator Groening supported the actors in their action. The issue was soon resolved and, from 1998 to 2004, they were paid $125,000 per episode. The show's revenue continued to rise through syndication and DVD sales, and in April 2004 the main cast stopped appearing for script readings, demanding they be paid $360,000 per episode. The strike was resolved a month later and their salaries were increased to something between $250,000 and $360,000 per episode. In 2008, production for the twentieth season was put on hold due to new contract negotiations with the voice actors, who wanted a "healthy bump" in salary to an amount close to $500,000 per episode. The negotiations were soon completed, and the actors' salary was raised to $400,000 per episode. Three years later, with Fox threatening to cancel the series unless production costs were cut, the cast members accepted a 30 percent pay cut, down to just over $300,000 per episode.
In addition to the main cast, Pamela Hayden, Tress MacNeille, Marcia Wallace, Maggie Roswell, and Russi Taylor voice supporting characters. From 1999 to 2002, Roswell's characters were voiced by Marcia Mitzman Gaven. Karl Wiedergott has also appeared in minor roles, but does not voice any recurring characters. Wiedergott left the show in 2010, and since then Chris Edgerly has appeared regularly to voice minor characters. Repeat "special guest" cast members include Albert Brooks, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Joe Mantegna, Maurice LaMarche, and Kelsey Grammer. Following Hartman's death in 1998, the characters he voiced (Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz) were retired; Wallace's character of Edna Krabappel was retired as well after her death in 2013. Following Taylor's death in 2019, her characters (including Sherri, Terri, and Martin Prince) are now voiced by Grey Griffin.
Episodes will quite often feature guest voices from a wide range of professions, including actors, athletes, authors, bands, musicians and scientists. In the earlier seasons, most of the guest stars voiced characters, but eventually more started appearing as themselves. Tony Bennett was the first guest star to appear as himself, appearing briefly in the season two episode "Dancin' Homer". "The Simpsons" holds the world record for "Most Guest Stars Featured in a Television Series".
"The Simpsons" has been dubbed into several other languages, including Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. It is also one of the few programs dubbed in both standard French and Quebec French. The show has been broadcast in Arabic, but due to Islamic customs, numerous aspects of the show have been changed. For example, Homer drinks soda instead of beer and eats Egyptian beef sausages instead of hot dogs. Because of such changes, the Arabized version of the series met with a negative reaction from the lifelong "Simpsons" fans in the area.
Several different U.S. and international studios animate "The Simpsons". Throughout the run of the animated shorts on "The Tracey Ullman Show," the animation was produced domestically at Klasky Csupo. With the debut of the series, because of an increased workload, Fox subcontracted production to several local and foreign studios. These are AKOM, Anivision, Rough Draft Studios, USAnimation, and Toonzone Entertainment.
For the first three seasons, Klasky Csupo animated "The Simpsons" in the United States. In 1992, the show's production company, Gracie Films, switched domestic production to Film Roman, who continued to animate the show until 2016. In Season 14, production switched from traditional cel animation to digital ink and paint. The first episode to experiment with digital coloring was "Radioactive Man" in 1995. Animators used digital ink and paint during production of the season 12 episode "Tennis the Menace", but Gracie Films delayed the regular use of digital ink and paint until two seasons later. The already completed "Tennis the Menace" was broadcast as made.
The production staff at the U.S. animation studio, Film Roman, draws storyboards, designs new characters, backgrounds, props and draws character and background layouts, which in turn become animatics to be screened for the writers at Gracie Films for any changes to be made before the work is shipped overseas. The overseas studios then draw the inbetweens, ink and paint, and render the animation to tape before it is shipped back to the United States to be delivered to Fox three to four months later.
The series began high-definition production in Season 20; the first episode, "Take My Life, Please", aired February 15, 2009. The move to HDTV included a new opening sequence. Matt Groening called it a complicated change because it affected the timing and composition of animation.
"The Simpsons" uses the standard setup of a situational comedy, or sitcom, as its premise. The series centers on a family and their life in a typical American town, serving as a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle. However, because of its animated nature, "The Simpsons" scope is larger than that of a regular sitcom. The town of Springfield acts as a complete universe in which characters can explore the issues faced by modern society. By having Homer work in a nuclear power plant, the show can comment on the state of the environment. Through Bart and Lisa's days at Springfield Elementary School, the show's writers illustrate pressing or controversial issues in the field of education. The town features a vast array of media channels—from kids' television programming to local news, which enables the producers to make jokes about themselves and the entertainment industry.
Some commentators say the show is political in nature and susceptible to a left-wing bias. Al Jean acknowledged in an interview that "We [the show] are of liberal bent." The writers often evince an appreciation for progressive leanings, but the show makes jokes across the political spectrum. The show portrays government and large corporations as evil entities that take advantage of the common worker. Thus, the writers often portray authority figures in an unflattering or negative light. In "The Simpsons", politicians are corrupt, ministers such as Reverend Lovejoy are dismissive to churchgoers, and the local police force is incompetent. Religion also figures as a recurring theme. In times of crisis, the family often turns to God, and the show has dealt with most of the major religions.
"The Simpsons" opening sequence is one of the show's most memorable hallmarks. The standard opening has gone through three iterations (a replacement of some shots at the start of the second season, and a brand new sequence when the show switched to high-definition in 2009).
Each has the same basic sequence of events: the camera zooms through cumulus clouds, through the show's title towards the town of Springfield. The camera then follows the members of the family on their way home. Upon entering their house, the Simpsons settle down on their couch to watch television. The original opening was created by David Silverman, and was the first task he did when production began on the show. The series' distinctive theme song was composed by musician Danny Elfman in 1989, after Groening approached him requesting a retro style piece. This piece has been noted by Elfman as the most popular of his career.
One of the most distinctive aspects of the opening is that three of its elements change from episode to episode: Bart writes different things on the school chalkboard, Lisa plays different solos on her saxophone (or occasionally a different instrument), and different gags accompany the family as they enter their living room to sit on the couch.
The special Halloween episode has become an annual tradition. "Treehouse of Horror" first broadcast in 1990 as part of season two and established the pattern of three separate, self-contained stories in each Halloween episode. These pieces usually involve the family in some horror, science fiction, or supernatural setting and often parody or pay homage to a famous piece of work in those genres. They always take place outside the normal continuity of the show. Although the "Treehouse" series is meant to be seen on Halloween, this changed by the 2000s, when new installments have premiered after Halloween due to Fox's current contract with Major League Baseball's World Series, however, since 2011, every "Treehouse of Horror" episode has aired in October.
The show's humor turns on cultural references that cover a wide spectrum of society so that viewers from all generations can enjoy the show. Such references, for example, come from movies, television, music, literature, science, and history. The animators also regularly add jokes or sight gags into the show's background via humorous or incongruous bits of text in signs, newspapers, billboards, and elsewhere. The audience may often not notice the visual jokes in a single viewing. Some are so fleeting that they become apparent only by pausing a video recording of the show or viewing it in slow motion. Kristin Thompson argues that "The Simpsons" uses a "flurry of cultural references, intentionally inconsistent characterization, and considerable self-reflexivity about television conventions and the status of the programme as a television show."
One of Bart's early hallmarks was his prank calls to Moe's Tavern owner Moe Szyslak in which Bart calls Moe and asks for a gag name. Moe tries to find that person in the bar, but soon realizes it is a prank call and angrily threatens Bart. These calls were apparently based on a series of prank calls known as the Tube Bar recordings, though Groening has denied any causal connection.
Moe was based partly on Tube Bar owner Louis "Red" Deutsch, whose often profane responses inspired Moe's violent side. As the series progressed, it became more difficult for the writers to come up with a fake name and to write Moe's angry response, and the pranks were dropped as a regular joke during the fourth season. "The Simpsons" also often includes self-referential humor. The most common form is jokes about Fox Broadcasting. For example, the episode "She Used to Be My Girl" included a scene in which a Fox News Channel van drove down the street while displaying a large "Bush Cheney 2004" banner and playing Queen's "We Are the Champions", in reference to the 2004 U.S. presidential election and claims of conservative bias in Fox News.
The show uses catchphrases, and most of the primary and secondary characters have at least one each. Notable expressions include Homer's annoyed grunt "D'oh!", Mr. Burns' "Excellent" and Nelson Muntz's ""Ha"-ha!" Some of Bart's catchphrases, such as ""¡Ay, caramba!"", "Don't have a cow, man!" and "Eat my shorts!" appeared on T-shirts in the show's early days. However, Bart rarely used the latter two phrases until after they became popular through the merchandising. The use of many of these catchphrases has declined in recent seasons. The episode "Bart Gets Famous" mocks catchphrase-based humor, as Bart achieves fame on the "Krusty the Clown Show" solely for saying "I didn't do it."
"The Simpsons" has gained notoriety for jokes that eventually became reality. Perhaps the most famous example comes from the episode "Bart to the Future", which mentions billionaire Donald Trump having been President of the United States at one time and leaving the nation broke. The episode first aired in 2000, sixteen years before Trump was elected. Another episode, "When You Dish Upon a Star", lampooned 20th Century Fox as a division of The Walt Disney Company. Nineteen years later, Disney purchased Fox. Other examples of "The Simpsons" predicting the future include the introduction of the Smartwatch, video chat services, autocorrection technology, and Lady Gaga's acrobatic performance at the Super Bowl LI halftime show. Conversely, some fact-checking sources such as Snopes have debunked many of these claims, including the aforementioned Lady Gaga one.
A number of neologisms that originated on "The Simpsons" have entered popular vernacular. Mark Liberman, director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, remarked, ""The Simpsons" has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions." The most famous catchphrase is Homer's annoyed grunt: "D'oh!" So ubiquitous is the expression that it is now listed in the "Oxford English Dictionary", but without the apostrophe. Dan Castellaneta says he borrowed the phrase from James Finlayson, an actor in many Laurel and Hardy comedies, who pronounced it in a more elongated and whining tone. The staff of "The Simpsons" told Castellaneta to shorten the noise, and it went on to become the well-known exclamation in the television series.
Groundskeeper Willie's description of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" was used by "National Review" columnist Jonah Goldberg in 2003, after France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. The phrase quickly spread to other journalists. "" and "embiggen", words used in "Lisa the Iconoclast", have since appeared in the Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon, and scientific journals respectively. "Kwyjibo", a fake Scrabble word invented by Bart in "Bart the Genius", was used as one of the aliases of the creator of the Melissa worm. "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords", was used by Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer" and has become a snowclone, with variants of the utterance used to express obsequious submission. It has been used in media, such as "New Scientist" magazine. The dismissive term "Meh", believed to have been popularized by the show, entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2008. Other words credited as stemming from the show include "yoink" and "craptacular".
"The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations" includes several quotations from the show. As well as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", Homer's lines, "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try", from "Burns' Heir" (season five, 1994) as well as "Kids are the best, Apu. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically raise themselves, what with the Internet and all", from "Eight Misbehavin'" (season 11, 1999), entered the dictionary in August 2007.
Many quotes/scenes have become popular internet memes, including Jasper Beardley‘s quote "That's a paddlin’" from The PTA Disbands (season 6, 1995) and Steamed Hams from 22 Short Films About Springfield (season 7, 1996).
"The Simpsons" was the first successful animated program in American prime time since "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home" in the 1970s. During most of the 1980s, US pundits considered animated shows as appropriate only for children, and animating a show was too expensive to achieve a quality suitable for prime-time television. "The Simpsons" changed this perception, initially leading to a short period where networks attempted to recreate prime-time cartoon success with shows like "Capitol Critters", "Fish Police", and "Family Dog", which were expensive and unsuccessful. "The Simpsons" use of Korean animation studios for tweening, coloring, and filming made the episodes cheaper. The success of "The Simpsons" and the lower production cost prompted US television networks to take chances on other adult animated series. This development led US producers to a 1990s boom in new, animated prime-time shows for adults, such as "Beavis and Butt-Head", "South Park", "Family Guy", "King of the Hill", "Futurama" and "The Critic". For "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, ""The Simpsons" created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years ... As far as I'm concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium."
"The Simpsons" has had crossovers with four other shows. In the episode "A Star Is Burns", Marge invites Jay Sherman, the main character of "The Critic", to be a judge for a film festival in Springfield. Matt Groening had his name removed from the episode since he had no involvement with "The Critic". "South Park" later paid homage to "The Simpsons" with the episode "Simpsons Already Did It". In "Simpsorama", the Planet Express crew from "Futurama" come to Springfield in the present to prevent the Simpsons from destroying the future. In the "Family Guy" episode "The Simpsons Guy", the Griffins visit Springfield and meet the Simpsons.
"The Simpsons" has also influenced live-action shows like "Malcolm in the Middle", which featured the use of sight gags and did not use a laugh track unlike most sitcoms. "Malcolm in the Middle" debuted January 9, 2000, in the time slot after "The Simpsons". Ricky Gervais called "The Simpsons" an influence on "The Office", and fellow British sitcom "Spaced" was, according to its director Edgar Wright, "an attempt to do a live-action "The Simpsons"." In Georgia, the animated television sitcom "The Samsonadzes", launched in November 2009, has been noted for its very strong resemblance with "The Simpsons", which its creator Shalva Ramishvili has acknowledged.
"The Simpsons" was the Fox network's first television series to rank among a season's top 30 highest-rated shows. In 1990, Bart quickly became one of the most popular characters on television in what was termed "Bartmania". He became the most prevalent "Simpsons" character on memorabilia, such as T-shirts. In the early 1990s, millions of T-shirts featuring Bart were sold; as many as one million were sold on some days. Believing Bart to be a bad role model, several American public schools banned T-shirts featuring Bart next to captions such as "I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?" and "Underachiever ('And proud of it, man!')". "The Simpsons" merchandise sold well and generated $2 billion in revenue during the first 14 months of sales. Because of his popularity, Bart was often the most promoted member of the Simpson family in advertisements for the show, even for episodes in which he was not involved in the main plot.
Due to the show's success, over the summer of 1990 the Fox Network decided to switch "The Simpsons" time slot from 8:00 p.m. ET on Sunday night to the same time on Thursday, where it competed with "The Cosby Show" on NBC, the number one show at the time. Through the summer, several news outlets published stories about the supposed "Bill vs. Bart" rivalry. "Bart Gets an F" (season two, 1990) was the first episode to air against "The Cosby Show", and it received a lower Nielsen ratings, tying for eighth behind "The Cosby Show", which had an 18.5 rating. The rating is based on the number of household televisions that were tuned into the show, but Nielsen Media Research estimated that 33.6 million viewers watched the episode, making it the number one show in terms of actual viewers that week. At the time, it was the most watched episode in the history of the Fox Network, and it is still the highest rated episode in the history of "The Simpsons". The show moved back to its Sunday slot in 1994 and has remained there ever since.
"The Simpsons" has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics, and it has been noted for being described as "the most irreverent and unapologetic show on the air." In a 1990 review of the show, Ken Tucker of "Entertainment Weekly" described it as "the American family at its most complicated, drawn as simple cartoons. It's this neat paradox that makes millions of people turn away from the three big networks on Sunday nights to concentrate on The Simpsons." Tucker also described the show as a "pop-cultural phenomenon, a prime-time cartoon show that appeals to the entire family."
On February 9, 1997, "The Simpsons" surpassed "The Flintstones" with the episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" as the longest-running prime-time animated series in the United States. In 2004, "The Simpsons" replaced "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (1952 to 1966) as the longest-running sitcom (animated or live action) in the United States. In 2009, "The Simpsons" surpassed "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet"s record of 435 episodes and is now recognized by "Guinness World Records" as the world's longest running sitcom (in terms of episode count). In October 2004, "Scooby-Doo" briefly overtook "The Simpsons" as the American animated show with the highest number of episodes (albeit under several different iterations). However, network executives in April 2005 again cancelled "Scooby-Doo", which finished with 371 episodes, and "The Simpsons" reclaimed the title with 378 episodes at the end of their seventeenth season. In May 2007, "The Simpsons" reached their 400th episode at the end of the eighteenth season. While "The Simpsons" has the record for the number of episodes by an American animated show, other animated series have surpassed "The Simpsons". For example, the Japanese anime series "Sazae-san" has over 7,000 episodes to its credit.
In 2009, Fox began a year-long celebration of the show titled "Best. 20 Years. Ever." to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the premiere of "The Simpsons". One of the first parts of the celebration is the "Unleash Your Yellow" contest in which entrants must design a poster for the show. The celebration ended on January 10, 2010 (almost 20 years after "Bart the Genius" aired on January 14, 1990), with "The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special – In 3-D! On Ice!", a documentary special by documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock that examines the "cultural phenomenon of "The Simpsons"".
As of the twenty-first season (2009–2010), "The Simpsons" became the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, having surpassed the 1955–1975 run of "Gunsmoke". On April 29, 2018, "The Simpsons" also surpassed "Gunsmoke"s 635-episode count with the episode "Forgive and Regret."
On February 6, 2019, it was announced that "The Simpsons" has been renewed for Seasons 31 and 32.
"The Simpsons" has won dozens of awards since it debuted as a series, including 34 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. In a 1999 issue celebrating the 20th century's greatest achievements in arts and entertainment, "Time" magazine named "The Simpsons" the century's best television series. In that same issue, "Time" included Bart Simpson in the "", the publication's list of the century's 100 most influential people. Bart was the only fictional character on the list. On January 14, 2000, the Simpsons were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Also in 2000, "Entertainment Weekly" magazine TV critic Ken Tucker named "The Simpsons" the greatest television show of the 1990s. Furthermore, viewers of the UK television channel Channel 4 have voted "The Simpsons" at the top of two polls: 2001's 100 Greatest Kids' TV shows, and 2005's The 100 Greatest Cartoons, with Homer Simpson voted into first place in 2001's 100 Greatest TV Characters. Homer also placed ninth on "Entertainment Weekly" list of the "50 Greatest TV icons". In 2002, "The Simpsons" ranked #8 on "TV Guide"s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, and was ranked the #6 cult show in 2004. In 2007, it moved to #8 on TV Guide's cult shows list and was included in "Time" list of the "100 Best TV Shows of All Time". In 2008 the show was placed in first on "Entertainment Weekly" "Top 100 Shows of the Past 25 Years". "Empire" named it the greatest TV show of all time. In 2010, "Entertainment Weekly" named Homer "the greatest character of the last 20 years", while in 2013 the Writers Guild of America listed "The Simpsons" as the 11th "best written" series in television history. In 2013, TV Guide ranked "The Simpsons" as the greatest TV cartoon of all time and the tenth greatest show of all time. A 2015 "The Hollywood Reporter" survey of 2,800 actors, producers, directors, and other industry people named it as their #10 favorite show. In 2015, British newspaper "The Telegraph" named "The Simpsons" as one of the 10 best TV sitcoms of all time. Television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz ranked "The Simpsons" as the greatest American TV series of all time in their 2016 book "".
Bart's rebellious, bad boy nature, which underlies his misbehavior and rarely leads to any punishment, led some people to characterize him as a poor role model for children. In schools, educators claimed that Bart was a "threat to learning" because of his "underachiever and proud of it" attitude and negative attitude regarding his education. Others described him as "egotistical, aggressive and mean-spirited". In a 1991 interview, Bill Cosby described Bart as a bad role model for children, calling him "angry, confused, frustrated". In response, Matt Groening said, "That sums up Bart, all right. Most people are in a struggle to be normal [and] he thinks normal is very boring, and does things that others just wished they dare do." On January 27, 1992, then-President George H. W. Bush said, "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." The writers rushed out a tongue-in-cheek reply in the form of a short segment which aired three days later before a rerun of "Stark Raving Dad" in which Bart replied, "Hey, we're just like the Waltons. We're praying for an end to the Depression, too."
Various episodes of the show have generated controversy. The Simpsons visit Australia in "Bart vs. Australia" (season six, 1995) and Brazil in "Blame It on Lisa" (season 13, 2002) and both episodes generated controversy and negative reaction in the visited countries. In the latter case, Rio de Janeiro's tourist board—which claimed that the city was portrayed as having rampant street crime, kidnappings, slums, and monkey and rat infestations—went so far as to threaten Fox with legal action. Groening was a fierce and vocal critic of the episode "A Star Is Burns" (season six, 1995) which featured a crossover with "The Critic". He felt that it was just an advertisement for "The Critic", and that people would incorrectly associate the show with him. When he was unsuccessful in getting the episode pulled, he had his name removed from the credits and went public with his concerns, openly criticizing James L. Brooks and saying the episode "violates the Simpsons' universe." In response, Brooks said, "I am furious with Matt, ... he's allowed his opinion, but airing this publicly in the press is going too far. ... his behavior right now is rotten."
"The Principal and the Pauper" (season nine, 1997) is one of the most controversial episodes of "The Simpsons". Many fans and critics reacted negatively to the revelation that Seymour Skinner, a recurring character since the first season, was an impostor. The episode has been criticized by Groening and by Harry Shearer, who provides the voice of Skinner. In a 2001 interview, Shearer recalled that after reading the script, he told the writers, "That's "so" wrong. You're taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we've done before with other characters. It's so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it's disrespectful to the audience." In a subsequent interview in 2006, Shearer added, "Now, the writers refuse to talk about it. They realize it was a horrible mistake. They never mention it. It's like they're punishing the audience for paying attention."
The show has reportedly been taken off the air in several countries. China banned it from prime-time television in August 2006, "in an effort to protect China's struggling animation studios." In 2008, Venezuela barred the show from airing on morning television as it was deemed "unsuitable for children". The same year, several Russian Pentecostal churches demanded that "The Simpsons", "South Park" and some other Western cartoons be removed from broadcast schedules "for propaganda of various vices" and the broadcaster's license to be revoked. However, the court decision later dismissed this request.
Critics' reviews of early "Simpsons" episodes praised the show for its sassy humor, wit, realism, and intelligence. However, in the late 1990s, around the airing of season 10, the tone and emphasis of the show began to change. Some critics started calling the show "tired". By 2000, some long-term fans had become disillusioned with the show, and pointed to its shift from character-driven plots to what they perceived as an overemphasis on zany antics. Jim Schembri of "The Sydney Morning Herald" attributed the decline in quality to an abandonment of character-driven storylines in favor of celebrity cameo appearances and references to popular culture. Schembri wrote in 2011: "The central tragedy of "The Simpsons" is that it has gone from commanding attention to merely being attention-seeking. It began by proving that cartoon characters don't have to be caricatures; they can be invested with real emotions. Now the show has in essence fermented into a limp parody of itself. Memorable story arcs have been sacrificed for the sake of celebrity walk-ons and punchline-hungry dialogue."
In 2010, the BBC noted "the common consensus is that "The Simpsons" golden era ended after season nine", and Todd Leopold of CNN, in an article looking at its perceived decline, stated "for many fans ... the glory days are long past." Similarly, Tyler Wilson of "Coeur d'Alene Press" has referred to seasons one to nine as the show's "golden age", and Ian Nathan of "Empire" described the show's classic era as being "say, the first ten seasons." Jon Heacock of LucidWorks stated that "for the first ten years [seasons], the show was consistently at the top of its game", with "so many moments, quotations, and references – both epic and obscure – that helped turn the Simpson family into the cultural icons that they remain to this day."
Mike Scully, who was showrunner during seasons nine through twelve, has been the subject of criticism. Chris Suellentrop of "Slate" wrote that "under Scully's tenure, "The Simpsons" became, well, a cartoon ... Episodes that once would have ended with Homer and Marge bicycling into the sunset now end with Homer blowing a tranquilizer dart into Marge's neck. The show's still funny, but it hasn't been touching in years." When asked in 2007 how the series' longevity is sustained, Scully joked: "Lower your quality standards. Once you've done that you can go on forever."
Al Jean, showrunner since season thirteen, has also been the subject of criticism, with some arguing that the show has continued to decline in quality under his tenure. Former writers have complained that under Jean, the show is "on auto-pilot", "too sentimental", and the episodes are "just being cranked out." Some critics believe that the show has "entered a steady decline under Jean and is no longer really funny." John Ortved, author of "", characterized the Jean era as "toothless", and criticized what he perceived as the show's increase in social and political commentary. Jean responded: "Well, it's possible that we've declined. But honestly, I've been here the whole time and I do remember in season two people saying, 'It's gone downhill.' If we'd listened to that then we would have stopped after episode 13. I'm glad we didn't."
In 2004, cast member Harry Shearer criticized what he perceived as the show's declining quality: "I rate the last three seasons as among the worst, so season four looks very good to me now." Cast member Dan Castellaneta responded: "I don't agree, ... I think Harry's issue is that the show isn't as grounded as it was in the first three or four seasons, that it's gotten crazy or a little more madcap. I think it organically changes to stay fresh." Also in 2004 author Douglas Coupland described claims of declining quality in the series as "hogwash", saying ""The Simpsons" hasn't fumbled the ball in fourteen years, it's hardly likely to fumble it now." In an April 2006 interview, Groening said: "I honestly don't see any end in sight. I think it's possible that the show will get too financially cumbersome ... but right now, the show is creatively, I think, as good or better than it's ever been. The animation is incredibly detailed and imaginative, the stories do things that we haven't done before, so creatively there's no reason to quit."
In 2016, popular culture writer Anna Leszkiewicz suggested that even though "The Simpsons" still holds cultural relevance, contemporary appeal is only for the first ten seasons, with recent episodes only garnering mainstream attention when a favorite character from the golden era is killed off, or when new information and shock twists are given for old characters. The series' ratings have also declined; while the first season enjoyed an average of 13.4 million viewing households per episode in the U.S., the twenty-first season had an average of 7.2 million viewers.
Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz argued in their 2016 book titled "TV (The Book)" that the peak of "The Simpsons" are "roughly seasons [three through twelve]", and that despite the decline, episodes from the later seasons such as "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind" and "Holidays of Future Passed" could be considered on par with the earlier classic episodes, further stating that "even if you want to call the show today a thin shadow of its former self, think about how mind-boggingly great its former self had to be for so-diminished a version to be watchable at all."
In a 2020 article, Uproxx writer Josh Kurp stated that while he agrees with the sentiment that "The Simpsons" is not as good as it used to be, it is because "it was working at a level of comedy and characterization that no show ever has" and that there were still many reasons to watch the series, among them was his opinion that the series was "still capable of quality television, and even the occasional new classic." and the fact that the show was willing to experiment, giving examples such as bringing on guest animators like Don Hertzfeldt and Sylvain Chomet to produce couch gags and guest writers like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Pete Holmes and Megan Amram to write episodes.
The stereotypical nature of the character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon has long been the subject of controversy. This was particularly highlighted by Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu's 2017 documentary "The Problem with Apu". In the film, Kondabolu states that as a child he was a fan of "The Simpsons" and liked Apu, but he now finds the character's stereotypical nature troublesome. Defenders of the character responded that the show is built on comical stereotypes, with creator Matt Groening saying, "that's the nature of cartooning." He added that he was "proud of what we do on the show", and "it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended". In response to the controversy, Apu's voice actor, Hank Azaria, said he was willing to step aside from his role as Apu: "The most important thing is to listen to South Asian people, Indian people in this country when they talk about what they feel and how they think about this character." In February 2020, he confirmed that he would no longer voice Apu. Groening stated at the same time that the character would remain in the show.
The criticisms were referenced in the season 29 episode "No Good Read Goes Unpunished", when Lisa breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience by saying, "Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?" to which Marge replies, "Some things will be addressed at a later date." Lisa adds, "If at all." This reference was clarified by the fact that there was a framed photo of Apu with the caption on the photo saying "Don't have a cow, Apu", a play on Bart's catchphrase "Don't have a cow, man," as well as the fact that Hindus do not eat cows as they are considered sacred. In October 2018, it was reported that Apu would be written out of the show, which Groening denied.
On June 26, 2020, in light of the various Black Lives Matter protests, Fox announced that non-white characters (such as Carl Carlson and Dr. Hibbert among others) will no longer be voiced by white actors.
Numerous Simpson-related comic books have been released over the years. So far, nine comic book series have been published by Bongo Comics since 1993. The first comic strips based on "The Simpsons" appeared in 1991 in the magazine "Simpsons Illustrated", which was a companion magazine to the show. The comic strips were popular and a one-shot comic book titled "Simpsons Comics and Stories", containing four different stories, was released in 1993 for the fans. The book was a success and due to this, the creator of "The Simpsons", Matt Groening, and his companions Bill Morrison, Mike Rote, Steve Vance and Cindy Vance created the publishing company Bongo Comics. Issues of "Simpsons Comics", "Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror" and "Bart Simpson" have been collected and reprinted in trade paperbacks in the United States by HarperCollins.
20th Century Fox, Gracie Films, and Film Roman produced "The Simpsons Movie", an animated film that was released on July 27, 2007. The film was directed by long-time "Simpsons" producer David Silverman and written by a team of "Simpsons" writers comprising Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Al Jean, George Meyer, Mike Reiss, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, David Mirkin, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, and Ian Maxtone-Graham. Production of the film occurred alongside continued writing of the series despite long-time claims by those involved in the show that a film would enter production only after the series had concluded. There had been talk of a possible feature-length "Simpsons" film ever since the early seasons of the series. James L. Brooks originally thought that the story of the episode "Kamp Krusty" was suitable for a film, but he encountered difficulties in trying to expand the script to feature-length. For a long time, difficulties such as lack of a suitable story and an already fully engaged crew of writers delayed the project.
On August 10, 2018, 20th Century Fox announced that a sequel is in development.
Collections of original music featured in the series have been released on the albums "Songs in the Key of Springfield", "Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons" and "". Several songs have been recorded with the purpose of a single or album release and have not been featured on the show. The album "The Simpsons Sing the Blues" was released in September 1990 and was a success, peaking at #3 on the "Billboard" 200 and becoming certified 2× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The first single from the album was the pop rap song "Do the Bartman", performed by Nancy Cartwright and released on November 20, 1990. The song was written by Michael Jackson, although he did not receive any credit. "The Yellow Album" was released in 1998, but received poor reception and did not chart in any country.
In 2007, it was officially announced that "The Simpsons" Ride, a simulator ride, would be implemented into the Universal Studios Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood. It officially opened May 15, 2008 in Florida and May 19, 2008, in Hollywood. In the ride, patrons are introduced to a cartoon theme park called Krustyland built by Krusty the Clown. However, Sideshow Bob is loose from prison to get revenge on Krusty and the Simpson family. It features more than 24 regular characters from "The Simpsons" and features the voices of the regular cast members, as well as Pamela Hayden, Russi Taylor and Kelsey Grammer. Harry Shearer did not participate in the ride, so none of his characters has vocal parts.
Numerous video games based on the show have been produced. Some of the early games include Konami's arcade game "The Simpsons" (1991) and Acclaim Entertainment's "" (1991). More modern games include "" (2001), "" (2003) and "The Simpsons Game" (2007). Electronic Arts, which produced "The Simpsons Game", has owned the exclusive rights to create video games based on the show since 2005. In 2010, they released a game called "The Simpsons Arcade" for iOS. Another EA-produced mobile game, "", was released in 2012 for iOS users, then in 2013 for Android and Kindle users. Two "Simpsons" pinball machines have been produced: one that was available briefly after the first season, and another in 2007, both out of production.
The cable television network FXX has exclusive cable and digital syndication rights for "The Simpsons." Original contracts had previously stated that syndication rights for "The Simpsons" would not be sold to cable until the series conclusion, at a time when cable syndication deals were highly rare. The series has been syndicated to local broadcast stations in nearly all markets throughout the United States since September 1993.
FXX premiered "The Simpsons" on their network on August 21, 2014 by starting a twelve-day marathon which featured the first 552 episodes (every single episode that had already been released at the time) aired chronologically, including "The Simpsons Movie", which FX Networks had already owned the rights to air. It was the longest continuous marathon in the history of television (until VH1 Classic aired a 433-hour, nineteen-day, marathon of "Saturday Night Live" in 2015; celebrating that program's 40th anniversary). The first day of the marathon was the highest rated broadcast day in the history of the network so far, the ratings more than tripled that those of regular prime time programming for FXX. Ratings during the first six nights of the marathon grew night after night, with the network ranking within the top 5 networks in basic cable each night. In Australia, a marathon of every episode of the show (at the time) aired from 16 December 2019 to 5 January 2020 on Fox8 (a cable network operated on pay TV provider Foxtel and a corporate sibling to the American Fox network).
On May 14, 2019, it was announced that FX Networks would share "The Simpsons" with Freeform starting October 2, 2019.
On October 21, 2014, a digital service courtesy of the FXNOW app, called "Simpsons World", launched. "Simpsons World" with every episode of the series accessible to authenticated FX subscribers, and is available on game consoles such as Xbox One, streaming devices such as Roku and Apple TV, and online via web browser. There was early criticism of both wrong aspect ratios for earlier episodes and the length of commercial breaks on the streaming service, but that problem was soon amended with fewer commercial breaks during individual episodes. Later it was announced that "Simpsons World" would now let users watch all of the SD episodes in their original format. "Simpsons World" was discontinued after the launch of Disney+ on November 12, 2019, where the series streams exclusively. Initially, the series was only available cropped to without the option to view the original versions, reigniting criticisms of cropping old episodes. In response, Disney announced that "...in early 2020, Disney+ will make the first 19 seasons (and some episodes from Season 20) of "The Simpsons" available in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, giving subscribers a choice of how they prefer to view the popular series." On May 28, 2020, Disney+ made the first 19 seasons, along with some episodes from season 20, of "The Simpsons" available in both 16:9 and the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
The season 3 premiere "Stark Raving Dad", which features Michael Jackson as the voice of Leon Kompowsky, was pulled out of rotation in 2019 by Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and Al Jean after HBO aired the documentary "Leaving Neverland", in which two men share details into how Jackson allegedly abused them as children. It is therefore unavailable on Disney+. However, the episode is still available on "The Complete Third Season" DVD box set released on August 26, 2003.
In July 2017, all episodes from seasons 4 to 19 were made available for purchase on the iTunes Store in Canada.
The popularity of "The Simpsons" has made it a billion-dollar merchandising industry. The title family and supporting characters appear on everything from T-shirts to posters. "The Simpsons" has been used as a theme for special editions of well-known board games, including Clue, Scrabble, Monopoly, Operation, and The Game of Life, as well as the trivia games What Would Homer Do? and Simpsons "Jeopardy!". Several card games such as trump cards and The Simpsons Trading Card Game have also been released. Many official or unofficial "Simpsons" books such as episode guides have been published. Many episodes of the show have been released on DVD and VHS over the years. When the first season DVD was released in 2001, it quickly became the best-selling television DVD in history, although it was later overtaken by the first season of "Chappelle's Show". In particular, seasons one through seventeen were released on DVD for 13 years between September 2001 to December 2014 in the U.S./Canada (Region 1), Europe (Region 2) and Australia/New Zealand/Latin America (Region 4). However, on April 19, 2015, Al Jean announced that the Season 17 DVD would be the last one ever produced, leaving the collection from Seasons 1 to 17, Season 20 (released out of order in 2010), with Seasons 18, 19, and 21 onwards unreleased. Jean also stated that the deleted scenes and commentaries would try to be released to the Simpsons World app, and that they were pushing for Simpsons World to be expanded outside of the U.S. Two years later, however, on July 22, 2017, it was announced that Season 18 would be released on December 5, 2017 on DVD. Another two years later, on July 20, 2019, it was announced that Season 19 would be released on December 3, 2019 on DVD.
In 2003, about 500 companies around the world were licensed to use "Simpsons" characters in their advertising. As a promotion for "The Simpsons Movie", twelve 7-Eleven stores were transformed into Kwik-E-Marts and sold "The Simpsons" related products. These included "Buzz Cola", "Krusty-O" cereal, pink doughnuts with sprinkles, and "Squishees".
In 2008, consumers around the world spent $750 million on merchandise related to "The Simpsons", with half of the amount originating from the United States. By 2009, 20th Century Fox had greatly increased merchandising efforts. On April 9, 2009, the United States Postal Service unveiled a series of five 44-cent stamps featuring Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, to commemorate the show's twentieth anniversary. "The Simpsons" is the first television series still in production to receive this recognition. The stamps, designed by Matt Groening, were made available for purchase on May 7, 2009. Approximately one billion were printed, but only 318 million were sold, costing the Postal Service $1.2 million. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29838 |
Television (band)
Television is an American rock band from New York City, most notably active in the 1970s. The group was founded by Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, and Richard Hell. An early fixture of CBGB and the 1970s New York rock scene, the band is considered influential in the development of punk and alternative music.
Although they recorded in a stripped-down, guitar-based manner similar to their punk contemporaries, Television's music was by comparison clean, improvisational, and technically proficient, drawing influence from avant-garde jazz and 1960s rock. The group's debut album, "Marquee Moon", is often considered one of the defining releases of the post-punk era.
Television's roots can be traced to the teenage friendship between Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. The duo met at Sanford School in Hockessin, Delaware, from which they ran away. Both moved to New York, separately, in the early 1970s, aspiring to be poets.
Their first group together was the Neon Boys, consisting of Verlaine on guitar and vocals, Hell on bass and vocals and Billy Ficca on drums. The group lasted from late 1972 to late 1973. A 7-inch record featuring "That's All I Know (Right Now)" and "Love Comes in Spurts" was released in 1980.
In late 1973 the group reformed, calling themselves Television and recruiting Richard Lloyd as a second guitarist. Their first gig was at the Townhouse Theatre, on March 2, 1974. Their manager, Terry Ork, persuaded CBGB owner Hilly Kristal to give the band a regular gig at his club, where they reportedly constructed their first stage. After playing several gigs at CBGB in early 1974, they played at Max's Kansas City and other clubs, returning to CBGB in January 1975, where they established a significant cult following.
Initially, songwriting was split almost evenly between Hell and Verlaine, Lloyd being an infrequent contributor as well. However, friction began to develop as Verlaine, Lloyd, and Ficca became increasingly confident and adept with both instruments and composition, while Hell remained defiantly untrained in his approach. Verlaine, feeling that Hell's frenzied onstage demeanor was upstaging his songs, reportedly told him to "stop jumping around" during the songs and occasionally refused to play Hell's songs, such as "Blank Generation", in concert. This conflict, as well as one of their songs being picked up by Island Records, led Hell to leave the group and take some of his songs with him. He co-founded the Heartbreakers in 1975 with former New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, later forming Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Fred Smith, briefly of Blondie, replaced Hell as Television's bassist.
Television made their vinyl debut in 1975 with "Little Johnny Jewel" (Parts One and Two), a 7-inch single on the independent label Ork Records, owned by their manager, Terry Ork. Richard Lloyd apparently disagreed with the selection of this song, preferring "O Mi Amore" for their debut, to the extent that he seriously considered leaving the band. Reportedly Pere Ubu guitarist Peter Laughner auditioned for his spot during this time.
Television's first album, "Marquee Moon", was received positively by music critics and audiences and entered the "Billboard" 200 albums chart – it also sold well in Europe and reached the Top 30 in many countries there. Upon its initial release in 1977, Roy Trakin wrote in the "SoHo Weekly" "forget everything you've heard about Television, forget punk, forget New York, forget CBGB's ... hell, forget rock and roll—this is the real item." Critics have since ranked the album number 83 on cable music channel VH1's 2000 list of the 100 Greatest Albums of Rock and Roll and number 128 on "Rolling Stone"'s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was ranked number two in "Uncut" magazine's "100 Greatest Debut Records" and number 3 on Pitchfork Media's list of the best albums of the 1970s. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic writes that the album was "revolutionary" and composed "entirely of tense garage rockers that spiral into heady intellectual territory, which is achieved through the group's long, interweaving instrumental sections."
Television's second album, "Adventure", was recorded and released in 1978. Softer and more reflective than their debut album, "Adventure" was well received by critics despite modest sales.
The members' independent and strongly held artistic visions, along with Richard Lloyd's drug abuse, led to the band's break-up in July 1978. Both Lloyd and Verlaine pursued solo careers, while Ficca became the drummer for the new wave band The Waitresses.
Television reformed in 1992, released a self-titled third album and have performed live sporadically thereafter. Since being wooed back on stage together for the 2001 All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Camber Sands, England, they've played a number of dates around the world and continue to perform on an irregular basis.
In 2007, Richard Lloyd announced he would be amicably leaving the band after a midsummer show in New York City's Central Park. Due to an extended hospital stay recovering from pneumonia, he was unable to make the Central Park concert. Jimmy Rip substituted for him that day and was subsequently asked to join the band full-time in Lloyd's place. On July 7, 2011, the new lineup performed at the Beco 203 music festival in São Paulo, Brazil. In an MTV Brazil Television interview, the band confirmed that an album with about ten new tracks was close to being finished, but as of 2020, that album has not surfaced.
As with many emerging punk bands, the Velvet Underground was a strong influence. Television also drew inspiration from minimalist composers such as Steve Reich. Tom Verlaine has often cited the influence of surf bands the Ventures and Dick Dale to Television's approach to the guitar, and he has also expressed a fondness for the bands Love and Buffalo Springfield, two groups noted for their dual-guitar interplay. Television's ties to punk were underscored by their late '60s garage rock leanings, as the band often covered the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and the 13th Floor Elevators' "Fire Engine" in concert.
Lester Bangs heard in Television's music the influence of Quicksilver Messenger Service, noting a similarity between Verlaine's guitar playing and John Cipollina's. Tom Verlaine has downplayed the comparison, citing the Ventures as a more apt reference point.
Though Verlaine and Lloyd were nominally "rhythm" and "lead" guitarists, they often rendered such labels obsolete by crafting interlocking parts, where the ostensible rhythm role could be as intriguing as the lead. Al Handa writes, "In Television's case, Lloyd was the guitarist who affected the tonality of the music more often than not, and Verlaine and the rhythm section the ones who gave the ear its anchor and familiar musical elements. Listen only to Lloyd, and you can hear some truly off the wall ideas being played." The opening of the song "Marquee Moon" from the album of the same name displays the band's characteristic interlocking melodic and rhythmic guitar lines.
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Singles | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29839 |
Television channel
A television channel is a terrestrial frequency or virtual number over which a television station or television network is distributed. For example, in North America, "channel 2" refers to the terrestrial or cable band of 54 to 60 MHz, with carrier frequencies of 55.25 MHz for NTSC analog video (VSB) and 59.75 MHz for analog audio (FM), or 55.31 MHz for digital ATSC (8VSB). Channels may be shared by many different television stations or cable-distributed channels depending on the location and service provider
Depending on the multinational bandplan for a given regional n, analog television channels are typically 6, 7, or 8 MHz in bandwidth, and therefore television channel frequencies vary as well. Channel numbering is also different. Digital terrestrial television channels are the same as their analog predecessors for legacy reasons, however through multiplexing, each physical radio frequency (RF) channel can carry several digital subchannels. On satellites, each transponder normally carries one channel, however multiple small, independent channels can be on one transponder, with some loss of bandwidth due to the need for guard bands between unrelated transmissions. ISDB, used in Japan and Brazil, has a similar segmented mode.
Preventing interference between terrestrial channels in the same area is accomplished by skipping at least one channel between two analog stations' frequency allocations. Where channel numbers are sequential, frequencies are not contiguous, such as channel 6 to 7 skip from VHF low to high band, and channel 13 to 14 jump to UHF. On cable TV, it is possible to use adjacent channels only because they are all at the same power, something which could only be done terrestrially if the two stations were transmitted at the same power and height from the same location. For DTT, selectivity is inherently better, therefore channels adjacent (either to analog or digital stations) can be used even in the same area.
Commonly, the term "television channel" is used to mean a television station or its pay television counterpart (both outlined below). Sometimes, especially outside the U.S. and in the context of pay television, it is used instead of the term television network, which otherwise (in its technical use above) describes a group of geographically-distributed television stations that share affiliation/ownership and some or all of their programming with one another.
This terminology may be muddled somewhat in other jurisdictions, for instance Europe, where terrestrial channels are commonly mapped from physical channels to common numerical positions (i.e. BBC One does not broadcast on any particular "channel 1" but is nonetheless mapped to the "1" input on most British television sets). On digital platforms, such (location) channels are usually arbitrary and changeable, due to virtual channels.
A television station is a type of terrestrial station that broadcasts both audio "and" video to television receivers in a particular area. Traditionally, TV stations made their broadcasts by sending specially-encoded radio signals over the air, called terrestrial television. Individual television stations are usually granted licenses by a government agency to use a particular section of the radio spectrum (a channel) through which they send their signals. Some stations use LPTV broadcast translators to retransmit to further areas.
Many television stations are now in the process of converting from analogue terrestrial (NTSC, PAL or SECAM) broadcast, to digital terrestrial (ATSC broadcast, DVB or ISDB).
Because some regions have had difficulty picking up terrestrial television signals (particularly in mountainous areas), alternative means of distribution such as direct-to-home satellite and cable television have been introduced. Television channels specifically built to run on cable or satellite blur the line between TV station and TV network. That fact led some early cable channels to call themselves superstations.
Satellite and cable have created changes. Local programming TV stations in an area can sign-up or even be required to be carried on cable, but content providers like TLC cannot. They are not licensed to run broadcast equipment like a station, and they do not regularly provide content to licensed broadcasters either. Furthermore, a distributor like TNT may start producing its own programming, and shows presented exclusively on pay-TV by one distributor may be syndicated to terrestrial stations. The cost of creating a nationwide channel has been reduced and there has been a huge increase in the number of such channels, with most catering to a small group. See also: significantly viewed.
From the definitions above, use of the terms "network" or "station" in reference to nationwide cable or satellite channels is technically inaccurate. However, this is an arbitrary, inconsequential distinction, and varies from company to company. Indeed, the term "cable network" has entered into common usage in the United States in reference to such channels, even with the existence of direct broadcast satellite. There is even some geographical separation among "national" pay television channels in the U.S., be it programming (e.g., the Fox Sports group of regional sports channels, which share several programs), or simply regionalized advertising inserted by the local cable company.
Should a legal distinction be necessary between a (location) channel as defined above and a television channel in this sense, the terms "programming service" (e.g.) or "programming undertaking" (for instance,) may be used instead of the latter definition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29840 |
The Goon Show
The Goon Show is a British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, with occasional repeats on the BBC Light Programme. The first series, broadcast from 28 May to 20 September 1951, was titled Crazy People; subsequent series had the title "The Goon Show".
The show's chief creator and main writer was Spike Milligan. The scripts mixed ludicrous plots with surreal humour, puns, catchphrases and an array of bizarre sound effects. Some of the later episodes feature electronic effects devised by the fledgling BBC Radiophonic Workshop, many of which were reused by other shows for decades. Many elements of the show satirised contemporary life in Britain, parodying aspects of show business, commerce, industry, art, politics, diplomacy, the police, the military, education, class structure, literature and film.
The show was released internationally through the BBC Transcription Services (TS). It was heard regularly from the 1950s in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and Canada, although these TS versions were frequently edited to avoid controversial subjects. In the United States, NBC began broadcasting the programme on its radio network from the mid-1950s.
Subversive and absurdist, "The Goon Show" exercised a considerable influence on the development of British and American comedy and popular culture. It was cited as a major influence by the Beatles, the American comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre,:4,5,61 and the British comedy troupe Monty Python.
The series was devised and written by Spike Milligan with the regular collaboration of other writers including Larry Stephens (contributing to around 140 episodes), Eric Sykes (who co-wrote most of the episodes in Series 5), Maurice Wiltshire and John Antrobus, initially under the supervision of Jimmy Grafton.
Milligan and Harry Secombe became friends while serving in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. Famously, Milligan first encountered Secombe after Gunner Milligan's artillery unit accidentally allowed a large howitzer to roll off a cliff, under which Secombe was sitting in a small wireless truck: "Suddenly there was a terrible noise as some monstrous object fell from the sky quite close to us. There was considerable confusion, and in the middle of it all the flap of the truck was pushed open and a young, helmeted idiot asked 'Anybody see a gun?' It was Milligan." Secombe's answer to that question was "What colour was it?" Milligan met Peter Sellers after the war at the Hackney Empire, where Secombe was performing, and the three became close friends.:20
The group first formed at Jimmy Grafton's London public house called "Grafton's" in the late 1940s. Sellers had already débuted with the BBC, Secombe was often heard on "Variety Bandbox", Milligan was writing for and acting in the high-profile BBC show "Hip-Hip-Hoo-Roy" with Derek Roy, and Michael Bentine, who appeared in the first series, had just begun appearing in Charlie Chester's peak-time radio show "Stand Easy".
The four clicked immediately. "It was always a relief to get away from the theatre and join in the revels at Grafton's on a Sunday night," said Secombe years later. They took to calling themselves "The Goons" and started recording their pub goings-on with a Pickersgill aluminium disk recorder. The BBC producer, Pat Dixon heard a tape and took interest in the group. He pressed the BBC for a long term contract for the gang, knowing that it would secure Sellers for more than just seasonal work, something for which the BBC had been aiming. The BBC acquiesced and ordered an initial series, though without much enthusiasm.
The series had its premiere in May 1951 and audience figures grew rapidly, from around 370,000 to nearly two million by the end of the 17th show. No recordings of any episode of this series are known to have survived. The BBC commissioned a second series and a number of other changes occurred. The musical interludes were shortened, and Max Geldray joined the lineup. Peter Eton, from the BBC's drama department, replaced Dennis Main Wilson as producer. Eton brought stricter discipline to the show's production. He was also an expert at sound effects and microphone technique, ensuring that the show became a far more dynamic listening experience. However, a few episodes into the series Milligan suffered a major nervous breakdown. He was hospitalised in early December 1952,:136-139 just before the broadcast of episode five, but it, and the following episode, had already been written, and the next 12 episodes were co-written by Stephens and Grafton. Milligan was absent as a performer for about two months, returning for episode 17, broadcast in early March 1953. As with Series 2, all episodes were co-written by Milligan and Stephens and edited by Jimmy Grafton.
Bentine left the show at the end of series 2, citing a desire to pursue solo projects, although there had been an increasing degree of creative tension between him and Milligan.
Milligan blamed his breakdown and the collapse of his first marriage on the sheer volume of writing the show required. His then ground-breaking use of sound effects also contributed to the pressure. All this exacerbated his mental instability that included bipolar disorder, especially during the third series. The BBC however made sure he was surrounded by accomplished radio comedy writers — Sykes, Stephens, Antrobus, Wiltshire, and Grafton — so many of the problems caused by his ill health were skilfully covered over by composite scripts.
Many senior BBC staff were variously bemused and befuddled by the show's surreal humour and it has been reported that senior programme executives erroneously referred to it as "The Go On Show" or even "The Coon Show". The show's title was inspired, according to Spike Milligan, by Alice the Goon, a character from the "Popeye" comic.
Several of the Goons' nonsense songs were recorded in the late 1950s such as the "Ying Tong Song", number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in 1956. The radio show had high audience ratings in Britain at its peak; tickets for the recording sessions at the BBC's Camden Theatre (now known as KOKO) in London were constantly over-subscribed and the various character voices and catchphrases from the show quickly became part of the vernacular. The series has remained consistently popular ever since, with the show being broadcast weekly by Australia's ABC network as late as 2012. The show is also broadcast upon BBC Radio 4 Extra.
The scripts exist mostly in fan-transcribed versions via dedicated websites. Although three books were published containing selected scripts, they are out of print, and typically available only in libraries or second-hand. Some more recent biographical books contain selected scripts.
There were 10 series in total, plus an additional series called "Vintage Goons", recorded at the same time as the eighth series, which featured recordings of redevelopments (by Milligan) of short sketches from early shows which had not been recorded by transcription services. The first series had 17 episodes plus one special, "Cinderella" (1951); the second series had 25 episodes, (1952); the third series had 25 episodes plus one special - "The Coronation Special" (1952–53); the fourth series had 30 episodes plus one special, "Archie In Goonland" (1953–54); the fifth series had 26 episodes plus one special - "The Starlings" (1954–55); the sixth series had 27 episodes plus three specials, (1955–56); the seventh series had 25 episodes plus two specials, (1956–57); the eighth series had 26 episodes, (1957–58); the "Vintage Goons" were re-performances of 14 episodes from series four; the ninth series had 17 episodes, (1958–59); and the tenth series had six episodes, (1959–1960).
Throughout its history, each episode of "The Goon Show, "which usually ran just under 30 minutes, was essentially structured as a comedy-variety programme, consisting of scripted comedy segments alternating with musical interludes.
The first two series were mostly produced by Dennis Main Wilson; none of the episodes was given an individual title and these early shows were loosely structured and consisted of four or five unconnected sketches, separated by musical items. According to later producer Peter Eton, the musical segments took up around half the programme.:113 In this formative phase the show co-starred Milligan (who played only minor roles in the early shows), Sellers, Secombe and Michael Bentine as the nominal 'hero' of each episode, madcap inventor Dr Osric Pureheart.:124 Musical performances were by virtuoso jazz harmonica player Max Geldray, singer Ray Ellington and his quartet (both of whom were recruited by Dixon) and vocal group the Stargazers, but they left after Episode 6 of Series 2, and for the remaining episodes Secombe filled in, singing a straight vocal number.:124 Incidental, theme and backing music was provided by Stanley Black and the BBC Dance Orchestra.:127 Series 2 also saw the first appearances of popular characters Minnie Bannister (Milligan) and Henry Crun (Sellers).
From Series 3, "The Goon Show" (as it was now officially titled) gradually settled into its 'classic' format. Milligan, Stephens and Grafton began to work within a narrative structure and by the second half of Series 4 each episode typically consisted of three acts linked by a continuing plot,:143 with Geldray performing between Acts I and II and Ellington between Acts II and III. Almost all the principal and occasional characters were now performed by Milligan and Sellers, with Secombe usually playing only Neddie Seagoon, who had replaced Pureheart as the hero of most of the stories. The closing theme, backing for Geldray and incidental music was now provided by a big band of freelance musicians under the direction of Wally Stott, who had been writing for the show since the first series.:127 After the end of Series 3, original announcer Andrew Timothy was replaced (at the suggestion of John Snagge) by Wallace Greenslade,:127 who provided spoken narrative links as well as occasionally performing small roles in the scripts.
From Series 3 onwards, the principal character roles were:
Secondary characters were the "Indians", Banerjee and Lalkaka, the servant Abdul/Singez Thingz, Willium "Mate" Cobblers, Cyril, Jim Spriggs, Little Jim, Flowerdew and Chief Ellinga/The Red Bladder - both played by Ray Ellington. There were also occasional guest stars including senior BBC announcer John Snagge, and actors Valentine Dyall, Dick Emery, Kenneth Connor, Dennis Price and Bernard Miles. The traditional plots involved Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty getting Neddie Seagoon involved in some far-fetched plan, and meeting the other cast members along the way.
Many characters had regular catchphrases which quickly moved into the vernacular; among the best known are:
"The Goon Show" has been variously described as "avant-garde", "surrealist", "abstract", and "four dimensional". The show played games with the medium of radio itself. Whole scenes were written in which characters would leave, close the door behind themselves, yet still be inside the room. Further to this, characters would announce their departure, slam a door, but it would be another character who had left the room. That character would then beat on the door for re-admittance, the door would open and close and again the wrong character would be locked out.
The show paved the way for surreal and alternative humour, as acknowledged by comedians such as Eddie Izzard.:vii The surreality was part of the attraction for Sellers, and this exacerbated his mental instability especially during the third series.
Many of the sequences have been cited as being visionary in the way that they challenged the traditional conventions of comedy. In the Pythons' autobiography, Terry Jones states "The Goons of course were my favourite. It was the surreality of the imagery and the speed of the comedy that I loved - the way they broke up the conventions of radio and played with the very nature of the medium." This is reiterated by Michael Palin and John Cleese. Cleese recalls listening to "The Goon Show" as a teenager in the mid-1950s "and being absolutely amazed by its surreal humour. It came at a key stage in my own development and I never missed a show".
Orchestral introductions, links and accompaniment were provided by a hand-picked big band made up of London-based session musicians. The arrangements and musical direction were done by Wally Stott from the third to the 10th series. Stott produced many arrangements and link passages, further improved by the first-class sound quality the BBC engineers managed to achieve. Members of the band featured prominently in the comedy proceedings, particularly jazz trombonist George Chisholm who frequently played Scots characters. The show's concluding music was usually either "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" or a truncated and ironic rendition of the "Alte Kameraden" (Old Comrades') march, followed by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet playing "Crazy Rhythm" as play-out music.
In keeping with the variety requirements of the BBC's "light entertainment" format, "The Goon Show" scripts were structured in three acts, separated by two musical interludes. These were provided by the Ray Ellington Quartet – who performed a mixture of jazz, rhythm & blues and calypso songs – and by harmonica virtuoso Max Geldray who performed mostly middle of the road numbers and jazz standards of the 30s and 40s accompanied by the big band. Both Ellington and Geldray also made occasional cameo appearances; Ellington was often drafted in to play stereotypical "black" roles such as a tribal chieftain, native bearer or Major Bloodnok's nemesis (and counterpoint to Bloodnok's affliction) "The Red Bladder".
It was in its use of pre-recorded and live sound effects that "The Goon Show" broke the most new ground. Part of the problem was that "not even Milligan knew how to capture electronically the peculiar sounds that came alive in his head – he just knew when it had not yet happened".:205 An example of this comes from an often cited story of Milligan filling his two socks with custard in the Camden Theatre canteen, in an attempt to achieve a squelching effect. Milligan asked the BBC canteen ladies to make some custard; they thought he must have some stomach trouble so lovingly made him a fresh custard – which he accepted with thanks and immediately poured into his sock, much to their horror. Secombe recalled "Back in the studio, Spike had already placed a sheet of three-ply near a microphone." One after the other, he swung them around his head against the wood, but failed to produce the sound effect he was seeking ("So, a sock full of custard and no sound effect!").:205 Secombe noted that "Spike used to drive the studio managers mad with his insistence on getting the sound effects he wanted. In the beginning, when the programme was recorded on disc, it was extremely difficult to achieve the right sound effect. There were, I think, four turntables on the go simultaneously, with different sounds being played on each – chickens clucking, Big Ben striking, donkeys braying, massive explosions, ships' sirens – all happening at once. It was only when tape came into use that Spike felt really happy with the effects." An FX instruction in one script read "Sound effect of two lions walking away, bumping against each other. If you can't get two lions, two hippos will do". Over time, the sound engineers became increasingly adept at translating the script into desired sounds, assisted from the late 1950s onwards by specialists in the BBC's newly formed Radiophonic Workshop.:205
Milligan's relationship with BBC managers preparing for the recording of episodes was often acrimonious and resulted in rows, and Milligan later agreed that he was a diva during this time, adding "I was trying to shake the BBC out of its apathy. Sound effects were a knock on the door and tramps on gravel– that was it, and I tried to transform it.".
Many of the sound effects created for later programmes featured innovative production techniques borrowed from the realm of "musique concrète", and using the then new technology of magnetic tape. Many of these sequences involved the use of complex multiple edits, echo and reverberation and the deliberate slowing down, speeding up or reversing of tapes. One of the most famous was the legendary "Bloodnok's Stomach" sound effect, created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to represent the sound of Major Bloodnok's digestive system in action, which included a variety of inexplicable gurgling and explosive noises. Lewis (1995, p. 218) states Bloodnok's stomach "was achieved by overlaying burps, whoops from oscillators, water splashes, cork-like pops, and light artillery blasts".
Several of the words and phrases invented for the show soon entered common usage, the most famous being the word lurgi. In the episode "Lurgi Strikes Britain", Spike Milligan introduced the fictional malady of Lurgi (sometimes spelled Lurgy), which has survived into modern usage to mean the common cold, or any miscellaneous or non-specific illness (often preceded by the adjective "dreaded"). The symptoms of Lurgi included the uncontrollable urge to cry "Eeeeyack-a-boo", though even during the episode the ailment proved to be an extortionate attempt to sell brass band musical instruments. Milligan was later to make up his own definition in "Treasure Island According to Spike Milligan", where Jim Hawkins' mother describes it as "like brown spots of shit on the liver".
Alcohol was strictly forbidden during rehearsals and recording, so the cast fortified themselves with milk. The milk in turn was fortified with brandy. In later episodes the catchphrase "round the back for the old brandy!" or "the old Marlon Brando" was used to announce the exit of one or more characters, or a break for music. In "The Pam's Paper Insurance Policy" (Series 9, Episode 4), Ray Ellington, before his musical item begins, muses, "I wonder where he keeps that stuff!". In "The Scarlet Capsule" (Series 9, Episode 14), Ellington's reply to Secombe's cry of "Time for Ray Ellington and the old BRANDYYY there" was "The introductions he gives me...". In "The Moon Show" (Series 7, Episode 18), Ellington sympathises with the listeners, stating "Man, the excuses he makes to get to that brandy!", causing Milligan, Sellers and Secombe to wail "MATE!" in protest. However, Milligan got his own back by making Ellington laugh halfway through the song by doing Minnie Bannister voices while Ellington was singing.
During radio programmes of the 1920s and 1930s, the background noise for crowd scenes was often achieved by a moderately large group of people mumbling "rhubarb" under their breath with random inflections. This was often parodied by Milligan, who would try to get the same effect with only three or four people, clearly intoning the word rather than mumbling. After some time, Secombe began throwing in "custard" during these scenes (for example, in "The Fear of Wages and Wings Over Dagenham", where the phrase was amended to 'flying rhubarb').
As well as being used as a comic device randomly inserted into different sketches to avoid silence, the blowing of raspberries entered the Goons as Harry Secombe's signal to the other actors that he was going to crack up; you would hear a joke from him, a raspberry, and a stream of laughter. In the Goons' musical recording "The Ying-Tong Song", Milligan performed a solo for raspberry-blower, as one might for tuba or baritone saxophone. Milligan made much use of a rather surreal Columbia 78RPM sound effects disc, catalogue number YB20, which bears the innocuous title "Donkey" on the label. Approximating possibly the most obscene and flatulent noise ever recorded, it appeared first in the show "The Sinking of Westminster Pier" as a sound to accompany an oyster opening its shell; it thereafter became known as Fred the Oyster, and appears as such in the scripts. This recording was often used as a reaction to a bad joke. Examples include "The Last Goon Show of All" during which Neddie shouts old jokes into a fuel tank in order to "start the show".
Years later, Milligan collaborated with Ronnie Barker on "The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town" in which the credits read, "Raspberries professionally blown by Spike Milligan". David Jason has also claimed to have produced the sound effect and indeed was credited with this in the second segment of Ronnie Barker's LWT series "Six Dates with Barker" (1971).
In several shows, one character, typically either Henry Crun or Minnie Bannister, would be found trapped in a piano. In "The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoon", Crun was inside a piano and his speech was accompanied by suitable piano noises. In "The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI", Moriarty is hiding in a piano disguised as one of the strings. Gritpype-Thynne plays a "do-re-mi" scale to find him - Moriarty is "me".
The "in a piano" joke was re-used one last time in "The Last Goon Show of All".
Sometimes characters were introduced as "scion of the house of Rowton", or "member of Rowton House". This was a reference to the "Rowton Houses", which were hostels for working men in London.
The following films were a product of Goon activity:
Spike Milligan teamed up with illustrator Pete Clarke to produce two books of comic strip Goons. The stories were slightly modified versions of classic Goon shows.
"The Last Goon Show of All", "The Affair of the Lone Banana", "The Scarlet Capsule", "The Pevensey Bay Disaster"
"The Case of the Vanishing Room", "The Case of the Missing C.D. Plates", "The Saga of the Internal Mountain", "Rommel's Treasure"
"Foreword by Sellers", Details of the Show, Cast, Characters, etc, and "The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler", "The Phantom Head Shaver", "The Affair of the Lone Banana", "The Canal", "Napoleon's Piano", "Foiled by President Fred", "The Mighty Wurlitzer", "The Hastings Flyer", "The House of Teeth".
"The Battle of Spion Kop", "Ned's Atomic Dustbin", "The spy; or, Who is Pink Oboe?", "Call of the West", "The Scarlet Capsule", "The Tay Bridge Disaster", "The Gold-plate Robbery", "The £50 cure".
A recreation of a "Goon Show" broadcast before a studio audience is seen early in the HBO Original Movie, "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" (2004), with Geoffrey Rush as Sellers, Edward Tudor-Pole as Spike Milligan, Steve Pemberton as Harry Secombe and Lance Ellington as Ray Ellington. A brief moment from that recreation is seen in the trailer for that film.
"Ying Tong" is a play written by Roy Smiles which is set partly in a radio studio, partly in a mental asylum and partly in Spike Milligan's mind. It recreates the Goons recording the show, but part way through Spike has a mental breakdown and is committed to an asylum. While it features all of the Goons throughout (although Bentine is mentioned, the fourth character represents Wallace Greenslade), the focus is on Milligan and his breakdown.
Birmingham Comedy Festival produced a theatre production as part of their festival in 2014 staging two Milligan Goon Show scripts, "The Canal" and "The Phantom Head Shaver (of Brighton)". The festival produced a second touring production in 2017 featuring two more Milligan scripts, "The House Of Teeth" and "The Jet Propelled Guided NAAFI". Both runs were sanctioned by Norma Farnes and Spike Milligan Productions.
Touring in late 2018 in the UK, Apollo Theatre Company in conjunction with Spike Milligan Productions recreated three episodes of The Goon Show - The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler, Tails of Men's Shirts, and The Phantom Head Shaver - with recreations of the original scripts. Co-producer Norma Farnes, Milligan’s ex-manager, agreed to the use of the material on the basis the production was respectful of the scripts. The roles of Sellers, Milligan, and Secombe were played by Julian McDowell, Colin Elmer and Clive Greenwood and the production was directed by McDowell and Tim Astley.
"The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d", which starred Peter Sellers, was the first attempt to translate "Goon Show" humour to television. Made for Associated-Rediffusion during 1956 and only broadcast in the London area, it was mainly written by Milligan, with contributions from other writers in the Associated London Scripts cooperative including Dave Freeman and Terry Nation, with Eric Sykes as script editor. "The Idiot Weekly" (1958–1962) was an Australian radio comedy series written by and starring Milligan with an Australian supporting cast including Ray Barrett and John Bluthal. It was made for the ABC during Milligan's numerous visits to Australia, where his family had emigrated. Milligan adapted some "Goon Show" scripts and included his "Goon Show" characters (notably Eccles) in many episodes. Six episodes of "The Idiot Weekly" were remade by the BBC as "The Omar Khayyam Show" in 1963.
"The Telegoons" (1963–1964) was a 15-minute BBC puppet show featuring the voices of Milligan, Secombe and Sellers and adapted from the radio scripts. 26 episodes were made. The series was briefly repeated immediately after its original run, and all episodes are known to survive, having been unofficially released online.
Recorded for Harry Secombe's six-part comedy series, of which only a portion was actually used for the original broadcast, this was similar to "Tales of Men's Shirts" as a re-enactment of a radio play for television. Whilst initially it was thought that only the portion used in the TV show survived, a full copy of the performance was found by the British Film Institute.
Essentially a re-enactment of a radio performance, the three Goons were joined by John Cleese as announcer for a special shown on Thames Television. While the original video tape was wiped, an almost-complete copy of this broadcast is held by the British Film Institute.
In 1972, the Goons reunited to perform "The Last Goon Show of All"
In 2001, the BBC recorded a "new" "Goon Show", "Goon Again", featuring Andy Secombe (son of Harry), Jon Glover and Jeffrey Holland, with Christopher Timothy (son of Andrew Timothy) announcing and Lance Ellington (son of Ray Ellington) singing, based on two lost series 3 episodes from 1953, "The Story of Civilisation" and "The Plymouth Ho Armada", both written by Milligan and Stephens.
The Goons made a number of records including "I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas" (originally sung by Milligan in the show to fill in during a musicians' strike), and "Bloodnok's Rock and Roll Call", the B-side of which, the "Ying Tong Song", soon became more popular and was reissued as an A-side in the mid-1970s, becoming a surprise novelty hit. The last time all three Goons worked together was in 1978 when they recorded two new songs, "The Raspberry Song" and "Rhymes".
A 1962 comedy LP with Milligan and Sellers as well as Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller. A spoof of the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai", it was originally recorded under that name. However, the film company threatened legal action if the name was used. Thus some clever editing of the recording by future Beatles producer George Martin removed the "K" every time the word "Kwai" was uttered, creating "Bridge on the River Wye". The LP is based on "The Goon Show"s "African Incident" (30 December 1957),:183 which featured Sellers' vocal impersonation of Alec Guinness. Lewis' (1995, pp. 205–206) gives a good account of this background.
In 1964, Milligan, Secombe and Sellers lent their voices to a comedy LP, "How to Win an Election (or Not Lose by Much)", which was written by Leslie Bricusse. It was not exactly a Goons reunion because Sellers was in Hollywood and had to record his lines separately. The album was reissued on CD in 1997.
In George Perry's book "The Life of Python" (1999) he comments: "In the Britain of 1950, humour was derived from three main sources: print, film and radio, and despite the advent of television, throughout the 1950s radio remained the dominant source of broadcast comedy. In this period, two radio comedy shows exercised a profound influence. The first was "Take It From Here", with its polished professionalism. The other was "The Goon Show", with its absurdity, manic surreality and unpredictability."
On the influence of The Goons, Eric Sykes wrote that in the post-World War II years, "other shows came along but 'The House of Comedy' needed electricity. Then, out of the blue ... "The Goons" ...Spike Milligan simply blew the roof off, and lit the whole place with sunshine. At a cursory glance, "The Goon Show" was merely quick-fire delivery of extremely funny lines mouthed by eccentric characters, but this was only the froth. In "The Goon Show", Spike was unknowingly portraying every facet of the British psyche".
Sykes and Milligan, along with Ray Galton, Alan Simpson, Frankie Howerd and Stanley ("Scruffy") Dale, co-founded the writers' cooperative Associated London Scripts (ALS), which over time included others including Larry Stephens. In his book Spike & Co, Graham McCann says "the anarchic spirit of the Goon Show...would inspire, directly or indirectly and to varying extents, "Monty Python's Flying Circus", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", " The Young Ones", "Vic Reeves Big Night Out", "The League of Gentlemen", "Brass Eye" and countless other strange and bold new comedies". Other ALS-related comedies such as "Sykes and A...", "Hancock's Half Hour", "Steptoe and Son", "Beyond Our Ken", and "Round The Horne" influenced their own genres of comedy.:344–345
Eddie Izzard notes that the Goons and Milligan in particular "influenced a new generation of comedians who came to be known as 'alternative'.":vii John Cleese notes that "In comedy, there are a very small number of defining moments when somebody comes along and genuinely creates a breakthrough, takes us into territory where nobody has been before. The only experiences to which I can compare my own discovery of the Goons are going to see N. F. Simpson's play "One Way Pendulum" ... or, later on, hearing Peter Cook for the first time. They were just light years ahead of everyone else.":151
The Goons made a considerable impact on the humour of The Beatles, and especially on John Lennon. On 30 September 1973, Lennon reviewed the book "The Goon Show Scripts" for "The New York Times". He wrote: "I was 12 when "The Goon Show" first hit me, 16 when they finished with me. Their humour was the only proof that the world was insane. One of my earlier efforts at writing was a 'newspaper' called "The Daily Howl". I would write it at night, then take it into school and read it aloud to my friends. Looking at it now, it seems strangely similar to "The Goon Show"." Lennon also noted that George Martin, the Beatles' long-time producer, had previously made records with both Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers.
In a discussion of an accidentally Goonish nature, about introducing the next song during the 1963 BBC production of "Pop Go The Beatles", Lennon is also recorded as quipping "Love these Goon shows". This was included in the double album and CD titled " Live at the BBC" (side 4, track 10 of the LP; track 62 of CD).
The NBC radio network broadcast the programme in the United States in the mid-1950s. In 1965, Peter Bergman met and befriended Milligan during the time he worked in England on the BBC television program "Not So Much a Program, More a Way of Life". He also saw the Beatles in concert, which gave him the inspiration to form a four-man comedy group. When he returned to the US the next year to host the radio show "Radio Free Oz" on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, he teamed with Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman to form the Firesign Theatre. Proctor, Austin, and Ossman were big fans of the "Monitor" broadcasts of the "Goon Show". According to Ossman:
Among the influences on Monty Python, the members of the comedy team are described as being "indebted to BBC radio comedy, and particularly to the "Goon Show"." The future members of Monty Python were fans, and on many occasions they expressed their collective debt to Milligan and The Goons. Scudamore cites an interview for example, in which John Cleese stated ""the Goon Show" influenced us enormously".:170 He reiterates this point in his contribution to Ventham's book: "We all loved "The Goon Show" in the Monty Python Team: it ignited some energy in us. It was more a spirit that was passed on, rather than any particular technique. The point is that once somebody has crossed a barrier and done something that has never been done before, it is terribly easy for everybody else to cross it".:151
Similarly, in the introduction to Graham Chapman's posthumous anthology (2006, p. xvii) Yoakum notes that while other radio comedies influenced Chapman, "the show that truly astounded Graham, and was a major influence on his comedy was "The Goon Show"." And on page 23 Chapman states: "from about the age of seven or eight I used to be an avid listener to a radio programme called "The Goon Show". In fact, at that stage I wanted to "be" a Goon".
In their episode Election Night Special, the Pythons gave an appreciative nod to their forebears. When one of the onscreen elections reporters asks his companion, "What do you make of the nylon dog cardigan and plastic mule rest?" a voice offstage yells, "There's no such thing!" to which the reporter replies, "Thank you, Spike."
Peter Sellers died on 24 July 1980, aged 54. Michael Bentine died on 26 November 1996, aged 74. Harry Secombe died on 11 April 2001, aged 79. Milligan claimed to be relieved that Secombe had died before him, because had he died before Secombe then Secombe would have been in a position to sing at his funeral. Terence "Spike" Milligan died on 27 February 2002, aged 83; Secombe ended up singing at his funeral anyway, as a recording. Two years later Milligan's wish to have the words "I told you I was ill" inscribed on his gravestone was finally granted, although the church would only agree if the words were written in Irish, as . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29843 |
Marge Simpson
Marge is the matriarch of the Simpson family. With her husband Homer, she has three children: Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. Marge is the moralistic force in her family and often provides a grounding voice in the midst of her family's antics by trying to maintain order in the Simpson household. She is often portrayed as a stereotypical television mother and is often included on lists of top "TV moms". She has appeared in other media relating to "The Simpsons"—including video games, "The Simpsons Movie", "The Simpsons" Ride, commercials, and comic books—and inspired an entire line of merchandise.
Marge's distinctive blue beehive hairstyle was inspired by a combination of the Bride's in "Bride of Frankenstein" and the style that Margaret Groening wore in the 1960s. Julie Kavner, who was a member of the original cast of "The Tracey Ullman Show", was asked to voice Marge so that more voice actors would not be needed. Kavner has won several awards for voicing Marge, including a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance in 1992. She was also nominated for an Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature for her performance in "The Simpsons Movie". In 2000, Marge, along with the rest of her family, was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
"The Simpsons" uses a floating timeline (the characters do not physically age), and as such the show is generally assumed to be set in the current year. In several episodes, events have been linked to specific time periods, although this timeline has been contradicted in subsequent episodes. Marge Simpson is the wife of Homer and mother of Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson. She was raised by her parents, Jacqueline and Clancy Bouvier. She has a pair of sisters, the joyless Patty and Selma, both of whom vocally disapprove of Homer. In "The Way We Was" (season two, 1991), it is revealed via flashback that Marge attended Springfield High School, and in her final year met Homer Simpson, after they both were sent to detention—Homer for smoking in the bathroom with Barney, and Marge for burning her bra in a feminist protest. She was at first wary of Homer, but agreed to go to the prom with him, although she ended up going with Artie Ziff after Homer received tutoring lessons as a means to get to know her better, while knowing that she needed to sleep for a school meet. However, she regretted going with Artie when he started to pressure her to have sex after prom. At the end of the evening, while Artie drove her home after receiving a slap, she spied Homer walking along the side of the road with the corsage meant for her. After hearing her parents voicing their negative opinions about Homer, she took her own car and went back to give him a ride. She then told Homer she should've gone to the prom with him and he fixes her snapped shoulder strap with the corsage. During the ride, he tells her he will hug her and kiss her and never be able to let her go. After the two had been dating for several years, Marge discovered she was pregnant with Bart, and she and Homer were married in a small wedding chapel across the state line. Bart was born soon after, and the couple bought their first house. The episode "That '90s Show" (season 19, 2008) contradicted much of the established back-story; for example, it was revealed that Marge and Homer were childless in the early 1990s although past episodes had suggested Bart and Lisa were born in the 1980s.
As with many "Simpsons" characters, Marge's age and birthday changes to serve the story. In season one (1990) episodes "Life on the Fast Lane" and "Some Enchanted Evening", Marge was said to be 34. In "Homer's Paternity Coot" (season 17, 2006), Marge states that Emerald would have been her birthstone if she had been born three months later, placing her birthday sometime in February. In "Regarding Margie" (season 17, 2006), Homer mentioned that Marge was his age, meaning she could have been anywhere between 36 and 40. During this episode (Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore), Lisa questions Homer's memory of Marge's birthday. When he cannot remember, Marge yells that it is in May. In the season eighteen episode "Marge Gamer" she states that she and actor Randy Quaid share the same birthdate (October 1).
Marge has been nonworking for most of the series, choosing to be a homemaker and take care of her family. However, she has held several one-episode jobs in the course of the series. These include working as a nuclear technician alongside Homer at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant in "Marge Gets a Job" (season four, 1992); selling houses in "Realty Bites" (season nine, 1997); owning her own pretzel business in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" (season eight, 1997), and working at an erotic bakery in "Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes" (season 20, 2008). While Marge has never expressed discontent with her role as a homemaker, she has become bored with it. In "The Springfield Connection" (season six, 1995), Marge decided that she needed more excitement in her life and became a police officer. However, by the end of the episode, she became upset with the corruption in the force and quit.
Matt Groening first conceived Marge and the rest of the Simpson family in 1986 in the lobby of producer James L. Brooks' office. Groening had been called to pitch a series of animated shorts for "The Tracey Ullman Show", and had intended to present an adaptation of his "Life in Hell" comic strip. When he realized that animating "Life in Hell" would require him to rescind publication rights, Groening decided to go in another direction and hurriedly sketched out his version of a dysfunctional family, naming the characters after members of his own family. Marge was named after Groening's mother Margaret "Marge" Groening, who has said she bears little similarity to the character, stating, "It's really weird to have people think you're a cartoon." Marge's beehive hairstyle was inspired by the titular Bride in "Bride of Frankenstein" and the style that Margaret Groening wore during the 1960s, although her hair was never blue.
Marge debuted with the rest of the Simpson family on April 19, 1987, in "The Tracey Ullman Show" short "Good Night". In 1989, the shorts were adapted into "The Simpsons", a half-hour series airing on the Fox Network. Marge and the Simpson family remained the main characters on this new show.
Matt Groening believes that episodes featuring Marge are among the most difficult episodes to write. Bill Oakley believes that the "junior" writers are usually given Marge episodes because he and writing partner Josh Weinstein were given several to write during their first season. During the third season of the show, most of the writers focused on Bart and Homer, so David M. Stern decided to write a Marge episode, which became "Homer Alone" (season three, 1992). He felt that they could achieve a "deeper vein" of comedy in an episode where Marge has a nervous breakdown, and James L. Brooks quickly approved.
The entire Simpson family was designed so that they would be recognizable in silhouette. The family was crudely drawn, because Groening had submitted basic sketches to the animators, assuming they would clean them up; instead, they just traced over his drawings. To draw Marge, the animators generally start off with a sphere, similar to the way Lisa and Maggie are drawn. The eyes are then drawn, with one roughly in the middle of the sphere, and the other to the front side of the head. Then, the nose and lip are drawn. Her hair is then drawn on top as a long tube coming out of the sphere. An original idea the animators had for when Marge walked through doorways was that her hair would be forced down as she walked through, then once clear of the door, it would spring back and forth. This was never used. Groening's original plan for Marge's hair was that it would conceal large, "Life in Hell"-esque rabbit ears. The gag was intended to be revealed in the final episode of the series, but was scrapped early on due to inconsistencies, and also to the fact that rabbit ears would be too fictitious even for "The Simpsons".
Marge's voice is performed by Julie Kavner, who also does the voices of Marge's mother Jacqueline and her sisters Patty and Selma. Kavner had been part of the regular cast of "The Tracey Ullman Show". Voices were needed for the shorts, so the producers decided to ask Kavner and fellow cast member Dan Castellaneta to voice Marge and Homer rather than hire more actors. Part of Kavner's contract says that she will never have to promote "The Simpsons" on video and she rarely performs Marge's voice in public because she believes it "destroys the illusion. People feel these are real people." Kavner takes recording sessions seriously and feels that voice acting is "a little more limiting than live acting. And I have nothing to do with my character's movement."
Marge's raspy voice is only slightly different from Kavner's, who has a "honeyed gravel voice" which she says is due to "a bump on [her] vocal cords." While Marge is her most famous character, Kavner's favorite characters to voice are Patty and Selma because "they're really funny and sad at the same time." In "The Simpsons Movie", some scenes, such as Marge's video message to Homer, were recorded over one hundred times, leaving Kavner exhausted.
Until 1998, Kavner was paid $30,000 per episode. During a pay dispute in 1998, Fox threatened to replace the six main voice actors with new actors, going as far as preparing to cast new voices. However, the dispute was soon resolved and she received $125,000 per episode until 2004 when the voice actors demanded that they be paid $360,000 an episode. The issue was resolved a month later, and Kavner earned $250,000 per episode. After salary re-negotiations in 2008, the voice actors receive approximately $400,000 per episode. Three years later, with Fox threatening to cancel the series unless production costs were cut, Kavner and the other cast members accepted a 30 percent pay cut, down to just over $300,000 per episode.
Marge is generally a stereotypical sitcom mother, and she also plays the "long-suffering wife" who puts up with the antics of her children and her oafish husband. While she usually takes her family's problems with good humor, in "Homer Alone" (season three, 1992), her workload and resultant stress caused her to have a mental breakdown. After spending time at "Rancho Relaxo", during which her family barely coped with her absence, she returned refreshed and everyone promised to help out more often. Marge often provides a grounding opinion for Homer and their marriage has often been shaky. Marge admits that she "put[s] up with a lot in [their] marriage," and has left Homer or thrown him out of the house on several occasions. One of the first such episodes to depict this is "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (season five, 1994), where Homer starts teaching an education class on how to build a successful marriage. He is at first unsuccessful, but gains the interest of the class when he starts giving away family secrets, many of which concern Marge. Upon finding this out, Marge is incensed and throws him out of the house. The next day, Homer is dirty and disheveled, and begs Marge to take him back, saying the one thing he can offer her that nobody else can is "complete and utter dependence." At first, Marge does not see that as a benefit, but eventually admits that he "really [does] make a gal feel needed." Episodes that depict marital problems have become more frequent in recent seasons of the show. Through it all, Marge has remained faithful to Homer, despite temptations to the contrary such as the one in "Life on the Fast Lane" (season one, 1990), where she resists the charming Frenchman Jacques and instead chooses to remain with Homer.
Marge is more caring, understanding, and nurturing toward Bart than Homer, but she refers to him as "a handful" and is often embarrassed by his antics. In "Marge Be Not Proud" (season seven, 1995), she felt she was mothering Bart too much and started acting more distant towards him after he was caught shoplifting. In the beginning of the episode, Bart protested her "over-mothering", but as she started acting more distant towards him, he felt guilty about it and made up with her. Marge has expressed understanding for her "special little guy" and has defended him on many occasions. She once said "I know Bart can be a handful, but I also know what he's like inside. He's got a spark. It's not a bad thing ... Of course, it makes him "do" bad things." Marge has a good relationship with Lisa and the two are shown to get along quite well. Marge over-mothers Maggie, which causes her to become too clingy and dependent on Marge.
Marge maintains a good relationship with her mother Jacqueline and her sisters Patty and Selma, though they disapprove of Homer and are vocal about it. Marge has tolerated their criticism, but has occasionally lost patience with them, once referring to them as "ghouls." Marge's late father Clancy is rarely referred to in the series and has had speaking parts in only two episodes. It was revealed in "Fear of Flying" (season six, 1994) that Clancy told Marge that he was a pilot, but in reality, he was a flight attendant. Marge discovered this one day and developed aerophobia. In "Jazzy and the Pussycats" (season 18, 2006), Homer casually mentions that they once attended his funeral. It was finally revealed that Clancy died of lung cancer in season 27 episode "Puffless".
Marge believes she has higher morals than most other characters, once leading a family values crusade against the violent "The Itchy & Scratchy Show" and being a prominent member of the "Citizens' Committee on Moral Hygiene." She often provides a voice of reason for the town itself, but many of the townspeople are frustrated or contemptuous of her failure to recognize or react correctly to breaches of social norms. Marge is the only member of the family who encourages, and often forces, church attendance. In "Homer the Heretic" (season four, 1992), Homer starts skipping church and Marge tells him "don't make me choose between my man and my God, because you just can't win.". Yet, in some episodes, Marge's stereotypical attitude seems to affect her relationship with her daughter, Lisa, who is a feminist.
In "Lisa the Skeptic" (season nine, 1997), an "angel skeleton" is discovered, much to the skepticism of Lisa. As Lisa rants about the people who believe it is an angel, Marge informs her that she also believes it is an angel. She tells Lisa, "There has to be more life than just what we see, everyone needs something to believe in." In spite of her highly debatable moral stances, Marge struggles with vices, such as a gambling addiction. While Marge has learned to cope with her addiction, it has never completely disappeared and remains an underlying problem that is referenced occasionally on the show.
Politically, Marge generally aligns with the Democratic Party, having supported the candidacy of her state's progressive governor Mary Bailey, and voted for Jimmy Carter in both of his presidential elections.
At the 44th Primetime Emmy Awards, Kavner received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for voicing Marge in the season three episode "I Married Marge". In 2004, Kavner and Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer) won a Young Artist Award for "Most Popular Mom & Dad in a TV Series". For her performance in "The Simpsons Movie", Kavner was nominated for "Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature" at the 2007 Annie Awards, but lost to Ian Holm from "Ratatouille". Kavner's emotional performance in the movie got positive reviews and one critic said she "gave what must be the most heartfelt performance ever." Various episodes in which Marge is prominently featured have been nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program, including "The Way We Weren't" in 2004 and "Life on the Fast Lane", which won the award in 1990. In 2000, Marge and the rest of the Simpson family were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard.
Marge has been ranked highly in lists of the top television mothers of all time. She was ranked first on "Entertainment Weekly"'s list in 1994; first on Fox News' list in 2005; eighth on CityNews' list in 2008; and was included in "Time"'s list of the "10 Best Moms Ever". In a 2004 poll in the United Kingdom, Marge was named the "most respected mother" by respondents. Still in 2004, Marge was ranked third in a poll conducted by the Opinion Research Company. In May 2012, Marge was one of the 12 moms chosen by users of iVillage on their list of "Mommy Dearest: The TV Moms You Love". AOL has named Marge the 24th "Most Memorable Female TV Character". Her relationship with Homer was included in "TV Guide" list of "The Best TV Couples of All Time".
Religious writer Kenneth Briggs has written that "Marge is my candidate for sainthood ... She lives in the real world, she lives with crises, with flawed people. She forgives and she makes her own mistakes. She is a forgiving, loving person ... absolutely saintly."
The edition of October 1, 1990 of "People" included an interview with then-First Lady of the United States Barbara Bush. The article included the following passage: "She loves "America's Funniest Home Videos" but remains baffled after sampling "The Simpsons". "It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen," she says, "but it's a family thing, and I guess it's clean." The writers decided to respond by privately sending a polite letter on September 28 to Bush where they posed as Marge Simpson. On October 9, Bush sent a reply: "Dear Marge, How kind of you to write. I'm glad you spoke your mind ... I foolishly didn't know you had one. I am looking at a picture of you ... depicted on a plastic cup ... with your blue hair filled with pink birds peeking out all over. Evidently, you and your charming family — Lisa, Homer, Bart and Maggie — are camping out. It's a nice family scene. Clearly you are setting a good example for the rest of the country. Please forgive a loose tongue."
In 2002, opponents of the Seattle Monorail Project planned on showing the episode "Marge vs. the Monorail" at a protest event. Following complaints, 20th Century Fox sent a letter to the event organizers ordering that the episode not be shown due to copyright laws. In 2004, Marge appeared on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom for the Alternative Christmas message, which is annually broadcast at the same time that Queen Elizabeth II gives her Christmas message.
On April 9, 2009, the United States Postal Service unveiled a series of five 44-cent stamps featuring Marge and the four other members of the Simpson family. They are the first characters from a television series to receive this recognition while the show is still in production. The stamps, designed by Matt Groening, were made available for purchase on May 7, 2009.
Marge is depicted in much "The Simpsons"-related merchandise, including T-shirts, baseball caps, bumper stickers, cardboard stand-ups, refrigerator magnets, key rings, buttons, dolls, posters and figurines. She has appeared in each of "The Simpsons" video games, including "The Simpsons Game", released in 2007. Besides the television series, Marge regularly appears in issues of "Simpsons Comics", which were first published on November 29, 1993, and are issued monthly. Marge also plays a role in The Simpsons Ride, launched in 2008 at Universal Studios Florida and Hollywood.
Marge appeared in a 2005 advertisement for Dove Styling, where her normal beehive hair was exchanged for a more stylish look for a series of ads featuring several popular cartoon women.
In April 2004, Marge appeared on the cover of "Maxim". She also appeared on the cover of the November 2009 issue of "Playboy," becoming the first cartoon character to appear on the cover. The cover and a three-page picture spread, as well as a story inside entitled "The Devil in Marge Simpson", commemomorated the 20th anniversary of "The Simpsons", but is also part of a plan to appeal to younger readers. Darine Stern's picture on the October 1971 cover served as the inspiration for Playboy's November 2009 cover. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29848 |
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu () is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian subcontinent and is bordered by the union territory of Puducherry and the South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. It is bounded by the Eastern Ghats on the north, by the Nilgiri Mountains, the Meghamalai Hills, and Kerala on the west, by the Bay of Bengal in the east, by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait on the southeast, and by the Indian Ocean on the south. The state shares a maritime border with the nation of Sri Lanka.
The region was ruled by several empires, including the three great empires – Chera, Chola and Pandyan empires, which shape the region's cuisine, culture, and architecture. After the fall of Kingdom of Mysore, the British Colonial rule during the modern period led to the emergence of Chennai, then known as Madras, as a metropolitan city. Modern-day Tamil Nadu was formed in 1956 after the reorganisation of states on linguistic lines. The state is home to a number of historic buildings, multi-religious pilgrimage sites, hill stations and three World Heritage sites.
Tamil Nadu is the tenth largest Indian state by area and the sixth largest by population. The economy of Tamil Nadu is the second-largest state economy in India with in gross domestic product with a per capita GDP of . Tamil Nadu has the 11th highest ranking among Indian states in human development index. It was ranked as one of the top seven developed states in India based on a "Multidimensional Development Index" in a 2013 report published by the Reserve Bank of India. Its official language is Tamil, which is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world.
Archaeological evidence points to this area being one of the longest continuous habitations in the Indian peninsula. In Attirampakkam, archaeologists from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education excavated ancient stone tools which suggests that a humanlike population existed in the Tamil Nadu region somewhere around 1,000 years before homo sapiens arrived from Africa. In Adichanallur, from Tirunelveli, archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) unearthed 169 clay urns containing human skulls, skeletons, bones, husks, grains of rice, charred rice and celts of the Neolithic period, 3,800 years ago. The ASI archaeologists have proposed that the script used at that site is "very rudimentary" Tamil Brahmi. Adichanallur has been announced as an archaeological site for further excavation and studies. About 60 per cent of the total epigraphical inscriptions found by the ASI in India are from Tamil Nadu, and most of these are in the Tamil language.
A Neolithic stone celt (a hand-held axe) with the Indus script on it was discovered at Sembian-Kandiyur near Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu. According to epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, this was the first datable artefact bearing the Indus script to be found in Tamil Nadu. According to Mahadevan, the find was evidence of the use of the Harappan language, and therefore that the "Neolithic people of the Tamil country spoke a Harappan language". The date of the celt was estimated at between 1500 BCE and 2000 BCE. Though this finding remains contested, like the claim of historian Michel Danino who rubbishes the theory of the latter’s southward migration in a paper he presented at the International Symposium on Indus Civilisation and Tamil Language in 2007. He wrote: ‘There is no archaeological evidence of a southward migration through the Deccan after the end of the urban phase of the Indus Valley Civilisation The only actual evidence of movements at that period is of Late Harappans migrating towards the Ganges plains and towards Gujarat... Migration apart, there is a complete absence of Harappan artefacts and features south of the Vindhyas: no Harappan designs on pottery, no Harappan seals, crafts and ornaments, no trace of Harappan urbanism… Cultural continuity from Harappan to historical times has been increasingly documented in North India, but not in the South… This means, in effect, that the south-bound Late Harappans would have reverted from an advanced urban bronze-age culture to a Neolithic one! Their migration to South would thus constitute a double “archaeological miracle”: apart from being undetectable on the ground, it implies that the migrants experienced a total break with all their traditions. Such a phenomenon is unheard of.’
The early history of the people and rulers of Tamil Nadu is a topic in Tamil literary sources known as Sangam literature. Numismatic, archaeological and literary sources corroborate that the Sangam period lasted for about eight centuries, from 500 BC to AD 300. The recent excavations in Alagankulam archaeological site suggests that Alagankulam is one of the important trade centres or port cities of the Sangam Era.
During the 4th to 8th centuries, Tamil Nadu saw the rise of the Pallava dynasty under Mahendravarman I and his son "Mamalla" Narasimhavarman I. The Pallavas ruled parts of South India with Kanchipuram as their capital. Tamil architecture reached its peak during Pallava rule. Narasimhavarman II built the Shore Temple which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Much later, the Pallavas were replaced by the Chola dynasty as the dominant kingdom in the 9th century and they in turn were replaced by the Pandyan Dynasty in the 13th century. The Pandyan capital Madurai was in the deep south away from the coast. They had extensive trade links with the southeast Asian maritime empires of Srivijaya and their successors, as well as contacts, even formal diplomatic contacts, reaching as far as the Roman Empire. During the 13th century, Marco Polo mentioned the Pandyas as the richest empire in existence. Temples such as the Meenakshi Amman Temple at Madurai and Nellaiappar Temple at Tirunelveli are the best examples of Pandyan temple architecture. The Pandyas excelled in both trade and literature. They controlled the pearl fisheries along the south coast of India, between Sri Lanka and India, which produced some of the finest pearls in the known ancient world.
During the 9th century, the Chola dynasty was once again revived by Vijayalaya Chola, who established Thanjavur as Chola's new capital by conquering central Tamil Nadu from Mutharaiyar and the Pandya king Varagunavarman II. Aditya I and his son Parantaka I expanded the kingdom to the northern parts of Tamil Nadu by defeating the last Pallava king, Aparajitavarman. Parantaka Chola II expanded the Chola empire into what is now interior Andhra Pradesh and coastal Karnataka, while under the great Rajaraja Chola and his son Rajendra Chola, the Cholas rose to a notable power in southeast Asia. Now the Chola Empire stretched as far as Bengal and Sri Lanka. At its peak, the empire spanned almost . Rajaraja Chola conquered all of peninsular South India and parts of Sri Lanka. Rajendra Chola's navy went even further, occupying coasts from Burma (now ) to Vietnam, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Sumatra, Java, Malaya, Philippines in South East Asia and Pegu islands. He defeated Mahipala, the king of Bengal, and to commemorate his victory he built a new capital and named it Gangaikonda Cholapuram.
The Cholas were prolific temple builders right from the times of the first medieval king Vijayalaya Chola. These are the earliest specimen of Dravidian temples under the Cholas. His son Aditya I built several temples around the Kanchi and Kumbakonam regions. The Cholas went on to becoming a great power and built some of the most imposing religious structures in their lifetime and they also renovated temples and buildings of the Pallavas, acknowledging their common socio-religious and cultural heritage. The celebrated Nataraja temple at Chidambaram and the Sri Ranganathaswami Temple at Srirangam held special significance for the Cholas which have been mentioned in their inscriptions as their tutelary deities. Rajaraja Chola I and his son Rajendra Chola built temples such as the Brihadeshvara Temple of Thanjavur and Brihadeshvara Temple of Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the Airavatesvara Temple of Darasuram and the Sarabeswara (Shiva) Temple, also called the Kampahareswarar Temple at Thirubhuvanam, the last two temples being located near Kumbakonam. The first three of the above four temples are titled Great Living Chola Temples among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The Muslim invasions of southern India triggered the establishment of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire with Vijayanagara in modern Karnataka as its capital. The Vijayanagara empire eventually conquered the entire Tamil country by c. 1370 and ruled for almost two centuries until its defeat in the Battle of Talikota in 1565 by a confederacy of Deccan sultanates. Subsequently, as the Vijayanagara Empire went into decline after the mid-16th century, many local rulers, called Nayaks, succeeded in gaining the trappings of independence. This eventually resulted in the further weakening of the empire; many Nayaks declared themselves independent, among whom the Nayaks of Madurai and Tanjore were the first to declare their independence, despite initially maintaining loose links with the Vijayanagara kingdom. The Nayaks of Madurai and Nayaks of Thanjavur were the most prominent Nayaks of the 17th century. They reconstructed some of the well-known temples in Tamil Nadu such as the Meenakshi Temple.
By the early 18th century, the political scene in Tamil Nadu saw a major change-over and was under the control of many minor rulers aspiring to be independent. The fall of the Vijayanagara empire and the Chandragiri Nayakas gave the sultanate of Golconda a chance to expand into the Tamil heartland. When the sultanate was incorporated into the Mughal Empire in 1688, the northern part of current-day Tamil Nadu was administrated by the Nawab of the Carnatic, who had his seat in Arcot from 1715 onward. Meanwhile, to the south, the fall of the Thanjavur Nayaks led to a short-lived Thanjavur Maratha kingdom. The fall of the Madurai Nayaks brought up many small Nayakars of southern Tamil Nadu, who ruled small parcels of land called Palayams. The chieftains of these Palayams were known as Palaiyakkarar (or 'polygar' as called by British) and were ruling under the nawabs of the Carnatic.
Europeans started to establish trade centres during the 17th century in the eastern coastal regions. Around 1609, the Dutch established a settlement in Pulicat, while the Danes had their establishment in Tharangambadi also known as Tranquebar. In 1639, the British, under the East India Company, established a settlement further south of Pulicat, in present-day Chennai. British constructed Fort St. George and established a trading post at Madras. The office of mayoralty of Madras was established in 1688. The French established trading posts at Pondichéry by 1693. The British and French were competing to expand the trade in the northern parts of Tamil Nadu which also witnessed many battles like Battle of Wandiwash as part of the Seven Years' War. British reduced the French dominions in India to Puducherry. Nawabs of the Carnatic bestowed tax revenue collection rights on the East India Company for defeating the Kingdom of Mysore. Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah surrendered much of his territory to the East India Company which firmly established the British in the northern parts. In 1762, a tripartite treaty was signed between Thanjavur Maratha, Carnatic, and the British by which Thanjavur became a vassal of the Nawab of the Carnatic which eventually ceded to the British.
In the south, Nawabs granted taxation rights to the British which led to conflicts between British and the Palaiyakkarar, which resulted in series of wars called Polygar war to establish independent states by the aspiring Palaiyakkarar. Puli Thevar was one of the earliest opponents of the British rule in South India. Thevar's prominent exploits were his confrontations with Marudhanayagam, who later rebelled against the British in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Rani Velu Nachiyar, was the first woman freedom fighter of India and Queen of Sivagangai. She was drawn to war after her husband Muthu Vaduganatha Thevar (1750–1772), King of Sivaganga was murdered at Kalayar Kovil temple by British. Before her death, Queen Velu Nachi granted powers to the Maruthu brothers to rule Sivaganga. Kattabomman (1760–1799), Palaiyakkara chief of Panchalakurichi who fought the British in the First Polygar War. He was captured by the British at the end of the war and hanged near Kayattar in 1799. Veeran Sundaralingam (1700–1800) was the General of Kattabomman Nayakan's palayam, who died in the process of blowing up a British ammunition dump in 1799 which killed more than 150 British soldiers to save Kattapomman Palace. Oomaithurai, younger brother of Kattabomman, took asylum under the Maruthu brothers, Periya Marudhu and Chinna Marudhu and raised an army. They formed a coalition with Dheeran Chinnamalai and Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja which fought the British in Second Polygar Wars. Dheeran Chinnamalai (1756–1805), Polygar chieftain of Kongu and ally of Tipu Sultan who fought the British in the Second Polygar War. After winning the Polygar wars in 1801, the East India Company consolidated most of southern India into the Madras Presidency.
The Pudukkottai Thondaimans rose to power over the Pudukkottai area by the end of the 17th Century. The Pudukkottai kingdom has the distinction of being the only princely state in Tamil Nadu, and only became part of the Indian union in 1948 after independence.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the British firmly established governance over the entirety of Tamil Nadu. The Vellore mutiny on 10 July 1806 was the first instance of a large-scale mutiny by Indian sepoys against the British East India Company, predating the Indian Rebellion of 1857 by half a century. The revolt, which took place in Vellore, was brief, lasting one full day, but brutal as mutineers broke into the Vellore fort and killed or wounded 200 British troops, before they were subdued by reinforcements from nearby Arcot. The British crown took over the control governance from the company and the remainder of the 19th century did not witness any native resistance until the beginning of 20th century Indian Independence movements. During the administration of Governor George Harris (1854–1859) measures were taken to improve education and increase the representation of Indians in the administration. Legislative powers are given to the Governor's council under the Indian Councils Act 1861 and 1909 Minto-Morley Reforms eventually led to the establishment of the Madras Legislative Council. Failure of the summer monsoons and administrative shortcomings of the Ryotwari system resulted in two severe famines in the Madras Presidency, the Great Famine of 1876–78 and the Indian famine of 1896–97. The famine led to the migration of people as bonded labourers for the British to various countries which eventually formed the present Tamil diaspora.
When India became independent in 1947, Madras presidency became Madras State, comprising present-day Tamil Nadu, coastal Andhra Pradesh up to Ganjam district in Odisha, South Canara district Karnataka, and parts of Kerala. The state was subsequently split up along linguistic lines. In 1969, Madras State was renamed Tamil Nadu, meaning "Tamil country".
Tamil Nadu covers an area of , and is the tenth-largest state in India. The bordering states are Kerala to the west, Karnataka to the north-west and Andhra Pradesh to the north. To the east is the Bay of Bengal and the state encircles the union territory of Puducherry. The southernmost tip of the Indian Peninsula is Kanyakumari which is the meeting point of the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean.
The western, southern, and the northwestern parts are hilly and rich in vegetation. The Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats meet at the Nilgiri Hills. The Western Ghats traverse the entire western border with Kerala, effectively blocking much of the rain-bearing clouds of the south-west monsoon from entering the state. The eastern parts are fertile coastal plains and the northern parts are a mix of hills and plains. The central and the south-central regions are arid plains and receive less rainfall than the other regions.
Tamil Nadu has the country's third-longest coastline at about . Tamil Nadu's coastline bore the brunt of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami when it hit India, which caused 7,793 direct deaths in the state. Tamil Nadu falls mostly in a region of low seismic hazard with the exception of the western border areas that lie in a low to moderate hazard zone; as per the 2002 Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) map, Tamil Nadu falls in Zones II and III. Historically, parts of this region have experienced seismic activity in the M5.0 range.
Tamil Nadu is mostly dependent on monsoon rains and thereby is prone to droughts when the monsoons fail. The climate of the state ranges from dry sub-humid to semi-arid. The state has two distinct periods of rainfall:
The annual rainfall of the state is about of which 48 percent is through the northeast monsoon, and 32 percent through the southwest monsoon. Since the state is entirely dependent on rains for recharging its water resources, monsoon failures lead to acute water scarcity and severe drought. Tamil Nadu is divided into seven agro-climatic zones: northeast, northwest, west, southern, high rainfall, high altitude hilly, and Kaveri Delta (the most fertile agricultural zone).
There are about 2,000 species of wildlife that are native to Tamil Nadu. Protected areas provide safe habitat for large mammals including elephants, tigers, leopards, wild dogs, sloth bears, gaurs, lion-tailed macaques, Nilgiri langurs, Nilgiri tahrs, grizzled giant squirrels and sambar deer, resident and migratory birds such as cormorants, darters, herons, egrets, open-billed storks, spoonbills and white ibises, little grebes, Indian moorhen, black-winged stilts, a few migratory ducks and occasionally grey pelicans, marine species such as the dugongs, turtles, dolphins, "Balanoglossus" and a wide variety of fish and insects.
Indian Angiosperm diversity comprises 17,672 species with Tamil Nadu leading all states in the country, with 5640 species accounting for 1/3 of the total flora of India. This includes 1,559 species of medicinal plants, 533 endemic species, 260 species of wild relatives of cultivated plants and 230 red-listed species. The gymnosperm diversity of the country is 64 species of which Tamil Nadu has four indigenous species and about 60 introduced species. The Pteridophytes diversity of India includes 1,022 species of which Tamil Nadu has about 184 species. Vast numbers of bryophytes, lichen, fungi, algae, and bacteria are among the wild plant diversity of Tamil Nadu.
Common plant species include the state tree: palmyra palm, eucalyptus, rubber, cinchona, clumping bamboos ("Bambusa arundinacea"), common teak, "Anogeissus latifolia", Indian laurel, grewia, and blooming trees like Indian labumusum, ardisia, and solanaceae. Rare and unique plant life includes "Combretum ovalifolium", ebony ("Diospyros nilagrica"), "Habenaria rariflora" (orchid), "Alsophila", "Impatiens elegans", "Ranunculus reniformis", and royal fern.
Tamil Nadu has a wide range of biomes extending east from the South Western Ghats montane rain forests in the Western Ghats through the South Deccan Plateau dry deciduous forests and Deccan thorn scrub forests to tropical dry broadleaf forests and then to the beaches, estuaries, salt marshes, mangroves, seagrasses and coral reefs of the Bay of Bengal.
The state has a range of flora and fauna with many species and habitats. To protect this diversity of wildlife there are Protected areas of Tamil Nadu as well as biospheres which protect larger areas of natural habitat often include one or more national parks. The Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve established in 1986 is a marine ecosystem with seaweed seagrass communities, coral reefs, salt marshes, and mangrove forests. The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve located in the Western Ghats and Nilgiri Hills comprises part of adjoining states of Kerala and Karnataka. The Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve is in the southwest of the state bordering Kerala in the Western Ghats. Tamil Nadu is home to five declared national parks located in Anamalai, Mudumalai, Mukurithi, Gulf of Mannar, Guindy located in the centre of Chennai city and Vandalur located in South Chennai. Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve, Mukurthi National Park and Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve are the tiger reserves in the state.
The governor is the constitutional head of the state while the Chief Minister is the head of the government and the head of the council of ministers. The Chief Justice of the Madras High Court is the head of the judiciary. The present Governor, Chief Minister and the Chief Justice are Banwarilal Purohit, Edappadi K. Palaniswami and Amreshwar Pratap Sahi respectively. Administratively the state is divided into 38 districts. Chennai, the capital of the state is the fourth largest urban agglomeration in India and is also one of the major metropolitan cities of India. The state comprises 39 Lok Sabha constituencies and 234 Legislative Assembly constituencies.
Tamil Nadu had a bicameral legislature until 1986, when it was replaced with a unicameral legislature, like most other states in India. The term length of the government is five years. The present government is headed by Edappadi K. Palaniswami, after the demise of former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The Tamil Nadu legislative assembly is housed at the Fort St. George in Chennai. The state had come under the president's rule on four occasions – first from 1976 to 1977, next for a short period in 1980, then from 1988 to 1989 and the latest in 1991.
Tamil Nadu has been a pioneering state of E-Governance initiatives in India. A large part of the government records like land ownership records are digitised and all major offices of the state government like Urban Local Bodies – all the corporations and municipal office activities – revenue collection, land registration offices, and transport offices have been computerised. Tamil Nadu is one of the states where law and order has been maintained largely successfully. The Tamil Nadu Police Force is over 140 years old. It is the fifth-largest state police force in India (as of 2015, total police force of TN is 1,11,448) and has the highest proportion of women police personnel in the country (total women police personnel of TN is 13,842 which is about 12.42%) to specifically handled violence against women in Tamil Nadu. In 2003, the state had a total police population ratio of 1:668, higher than the national average of 1:717.
Tamil Nadu is divided in to four major divisions as per the ancient Tamil kings namely Pallava Nadu division, Chera Nadu division, Chola Nadu division and Pandya Nadu division and the four divisions are further subdivided into 38 districts, which are listed below. A district is administered by a District Collector who is mostly an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) member, appointed by State Government. Districts are further divided into 226 Taluks administrated by Tahsildars comprising 1127 Revenue blocks administrated by Revenue Inspector (RI). A District has also one or more Revenue Divisions (in total 76) administrated by Revenue Divisional Officer (RDO), constituted by many Revenue Blocks. 16,564 Revenue villages (Village Panchayat) are the primary grassroots level administrative units which in turn might include many villages and administered by a Village Administrative Officer (VAO), many of which form a Revenue Block. Cities and towns are administered by Municipal corporations and Municipalities respectively. The urban bodies include 15 city corporations, 152 and 529 town panchayats. The rural bodies include 31 district panchayats, 385 panchayat unions and 12,524 village panchayats.
Due to increased population and for administrative purposes, there is an increase in demands for new districts:
The state capital of Chennai, is the most populous city in the state with more than 8,900,000 residents, followed by Coimbatore, Madurai, Trichy and Salem respectively. Chennai is also the sixth-most populous city in India according to the 2011 Indian census.
Prior to Indian independence, Tamil Nadu was under British colonial rule as part of the Madras Presidency. The main party in Tamil Nadu at that time was the Indian National Congress (INC). Regional parties have dominated state politics since 1916. One of the earliest regional parties, the South Indian Welfare Association, a forerunner to Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, was started in 1916. The party was called after its English organ, Justice Party, by its opponents. Later, South Indian Liberal Federation was adopted as its official name. The reason for the victory of the Justice Party in elections was the non-participation of the INC, demanding complete independence of India.
The Justice Party which was under E. V. Ramasamy was renamed Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944. It was a non-political party which demanded the establishment of an independent state called Dravida Nadu. However, due to the differences between its two leaders E. V. Ramasamy and C. N. Annadurai, the party was split.
C. N. Annadurai left the party Dravida Kazhagam to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The DMK decided to enter politics in 1956. After the demise of C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi became the leader of the party which was supported by majority leaders including then famous actor M. G. Ramachandran. As a breakaway faction of the DMK. In 1972, M. G. Ramachandran founded the new Dravidian party All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) named after his political mentor C. N. Annadurai popularly called "Anna".
Tamil Nadu is the seventh most populous state in India. 48.4 percent of the state's population lives in urban areas, the third-highest percentage among large states in India. The state has registered the lowest fertility rate in India in the year 2005–06 with 1.7 children born for each woman, lower than required for population sustainability.
At the 2011 India census, Tamil Nadu had a population of 72,147,030. The sex ratio of the state is 995 with 36,137,975 males and 36,009,055 females. There are a total of 23,166,721 households. The total children under the age of 6 is 7,423,832. A total of 14,438,445 people constituting 20.01 per cent of the total population belonged to Scheduled Castes (SC) and 794,697 people constituting 1.10 per cent of the population belonged to Scheduled tribes (ST).
The state has 51,837,507 literates, making the literacy rate 80.33 per cent. There are a total of 27,878,282 workers, comprising 4,738,819 cultivators, 6,062,786 agricultural labourers, 1,261,059 in house hold industries, 11,695,119 other workers, 4,120,499 marginal workers, 377,220 marginal cultivators, 2,574,844 marginal agricultural labourers, 238,702 marginal workers in household industries and 929,733 other marginal workers.
India has a human development index calculated as 0.619, while the corresponding figure for Tamil Nadu is 0.736, placing it among the top states in the country. The life expectancy at birth for males is 65.2 years and for females it is 67.6 years. However, it has a high level of poverty, especially in rural areas. In 2004–2005, the poverty line was set at 351.86/month for rural areas and 547.42/month for urban areas. Poverty in the state dropped from 51.7 percent in 1983 to 21.1 percent in 2001 For the period 2004–2005, the Trend in Incidence of Poverty in the state was 22.5 percent compared with the national figure of 27.5 percent. The World Bank is currently assisting the state in reducing poverty, high drop-out and low completion of secondary schools continue to hinder the quality of training in the population. Other problems include class, gender, inter-district, and urban-rural disparities. Based on URP – Consumption for the period 2004–2005, the percentage of the state's population below the poverty line was 27.5 percent. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative ranks Tamil Nadu to have a Multidimensional Poverty Index of 0.141, which is in the level of Ghana among the developing countries. Corruption is a major problem in the state with Transparency International ranking it the second most corrupt among the states of India.
As per the religious census of 2011, Tamil Nadu had 87.58% Hindus, 6.12% Christians, 5.86% Muslims, 0.12% Jains and 0.3% following other religions or no religion.
Tamil is the sole official language of Tamil Nadu while English is declared an additional official language for communication purposes. When India adopted national standards Tamil was the first language to be recognised as a classical language of India. As of 2001 census Tamil is spoken as the first language by nearly 90 percent of the state's population followed by Telugu (5.65%), Kannada (1.67%), Urdu (1.51%), Malayalam (0.89%).
Tamil Nadu is one of the most literate states in India. Tamil Nadu has performed reasonably well in terms of literacy growth during the decade 2001–2011. A survey conducted by the industry body Assocham ranks Tamil Nadu top among Indian states with about 100 percent gross enrolment ratio (GER) in primary and upper primary education. One of the basic limitations for improvement in education in the state is the rate of absence of teachers in public schools, which at 21.4 percent is significant. The analysis of primary school education in the state by Pratham shows a low drop-off rate but the poor quality of state education compared to other states.
Tamil Nadu has 37 universities, 552 engineering colleges 449 polytechnic colleges and 566 arts and science colleges, 34,335 elementary schools, 5,167 high schools, 5,054 higher secondary schools and 5,000 hospitals. Some of the notable educational institutes present in Tamil Nadu are Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Christian Medical College, Vellore, Madras Institute of Technology, College of Engineering, Guindy, Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University, Tamil Nadu National Law University, Madras Medical College, Madras Veterinary College, Stanley Medical College, Chennai , Anna University and Institute of Road and Transport Technology.
Tamil Nadu now has 69 percent reservation in educational institutions for socially backward sections of society, the highest among all Indian states. The Midday Meal Scheme programme in Tamil Nadu was first initiated by Kamaraj, then it was expanded by M G Ramachandran in 1983.
Tamil Nadu has a long tradition of venerable culture. Tamil Nadu is known for its rich tradition of literature, art, music and dance which continue to flourish today. Tamil Nadu is a land most known for its monumental ancient Hindu temples and classical form of dance Bharata Natyam. Unique cultural features like Bharatanatyam (dance), Tanjore painting, and Tamil architecture were developed and continue to be practised in Tamil Nadu.
Tamil written literature has existed for over 2,000 years. The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is roughly dated from ca. 300 BC – AD 300. It is one of the oldest Indian literature amongst all others. The earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and "hero stones" date from around the 3rd century BC.
Most early Tamil literary works are in verse form, with prose not becoming more common until later periods. The Sangam literature collection contains 2381 poems composed by 473 poets, some 102 of whom remain anonymous. Sangam literature is primarily secular, dealing with everyday themes in a Tamilakam context. The Sangam literature also deals with human relations and emotions. The available literature from this period was categorised and compiled in the 10th century into two categories based roughly on chronology. The categories are: Pathinenmaelkanakku ("The Major Eighteen Anthology Series") comprising Eṭṭuttokai ("The Eight Anthologies") and the Pattupattu ("Ten Idylls") and Pathinenkilkanakku ("The Minor Eighteen Anthology Series").
Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for the Tamil language, the "Tolkāppiyam."Modern Tamil is largely based on the 13th-century grammar book ' which restated and clarified the rules of the "Tolkāppiyam", with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely ', "sol", ', "yāppu", '. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry. Notable example of Tamil poetry include the "Tirukkural" written by Tiruvalluvar.
In 1578, the Portuguese published a Tamil book in old Tamil script named 'Thambiraan Vanakkam', thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published. "Tamil Lexicon", published by the University of Madras, is the first among the dictionaries published in any Indian language. During the Indian Independence Movement, many Tamil poets and writers sought to provoke national spirit, social equity and secularist thoughts among the common man, notably Subramanya Bharathy and Bharathidasan.
Pongal, also called "Tamizhar Thirunaal" (festival of Tamils) or Makara Sankranti elsewhere in India, a four-day harvest festival is one of the most widely celebrated festivals throughout Tamil Nadu. The Tamil language saying "Thai Pirandhal Vazhi Pirakkum" – literally meaning, the birth of the month of Thai will pave way for new opportunities – is often quoted with reference to this festival. The first day, Bhogi Pongal is celebrated by throwing away and destroying old clothes and materials by setting them on fire to mark the end of the old and emergence of the new. The second day, Surya Pongal is the main day which falls on the first day of the tenth Tamil month of Thai (14 January or 15 January in the western calendar). On the third day, Maattu Pongal is meant to offer thanks to the cattle, as they provide milk and are used to plough the lands. Jallikattu, a bull-taming contest, marks the main event of this day. Alanganallur is famous for its Jallikattu contest usually held on the third day of Pongal. During this final day, Kaanum Pongal – the word "kaanum", means 'to view' in Tamil. In 2011 the Madras High Court Bench ordered the cockfight at Santhapadi and Modakoor Melbegam villages permitted during the Pongal festival while disposing of a petition filed attempting to ban the cockfight.
The first month in the Tamil calendar is Chittirai and the first day of this month in mid-April is celebrated as Tamil New Year. The Thiruvalluvar calendar is 31 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar, i.e. Gregorian 2000 is Thiruvalluvar 2031. Aadi Perukku is celebrated on the 18th day of the Tamil month Aadi, which celebrates the rising of the water level in the river Kaveri. Apart from the major festivals, in every village and town of Tamil Nadu, the inhabitants celebrate festivals for the local gods once a year and the time varies from place to place. Most of these festivals are related to the goddess Maariyamman, the mother goddess of the rain. Other major Hindu festivals including Deepavali (Death of Narakasura), Ayudha Poojai, Saraswathi Poojai (Dasara), Krishna Jayanthi and Vinayaka Chathurthi are also celebrated. Eid ul-Fitr, Bakrid, Milad un Nabi, Muharram are celebrated by Muslims whereas Christmas, Good Friday, Easter are celebrated by Christians in the state. Mahamagam a bathing festival at Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu is celebrated once in 12 years. People from all the corners of the country come to Kumbakonam for the festival. This festival is also called Kumbamela of South.
In terms of modern cine-music, Ilaiyaraaja was a prominent composer of film music in Tamil cinema during the late 1970s and 1980s. His work highlighted Tamil folk lyricism and introduced broader Western musical sensibilities to the south Indian musical mainstream. Tamil Nadu is also the home of the double Oscar winner A.R. Rahman who has composed film music in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English and Chinese films. He was once referred to by "Time" magazine as "The Mozart of Madras".
Tamil Nadu is also home to the Tamil film industry nicknamed as "Kollywood", which released the most number of films in India in 2013. The term "Kollywood" is a portmanteau of Kodambakkam and Hollywood. Tamil cinema is one of the largest industries of film production in India. In Tamil Nadu, cinema ticket prices are regulated by the government. Single screen theatres may charge a maximum of 50, while theaters with more than three screens may charge a maximum of 120 per ticket. The first silent film in Tamil Keechaka Vadham, was made in 1916. The first talkie was a multi-lingual film, "Kalidas", which released on 31 October 1931, barely seven months after India's first talking picture "Alam Ara". Swamikannu Vincent, who had built the first cinema of South India in Coimbatore, introduced the concept of "Tent Cinema" in which a tent was erected on a stretch of open land close to a town or village to screen the films. The first of its kind was established in Madras, called "Edison's Grand Cinemamegaphone". This was due to the fact that electric carbons were used for motion picture projectors.
There are more than 30 television channels of various genres in Tamil. DD Podhigai, Doordarshan's Tamil language regional channel was launched on 14 April 1993. The first private Tamil channel, Sun TV was founded in 1993 by Kalanidhi Maran. In Tamil Nadu, the television industry is influenced by politics and majority of the channels are owned by politicians or people with political links. The government of Tamil Nadu distributed free televisions to families in 2006 at an estimated cost of which has led to high penetration of TV services. Cable used to be the preferred mode of reaching homes controlled by government run operator Arasu Cable. From the early 2010s, Direct to Home has become increasingly popular replacing cable television services. Tamil television serials form a major prime time source of entertainment and are directed usually by one director unlike American television series, where often several directors and writers work together.
Thoothukudi is the place of origin of the Thoothukudi macaroon, Tirunelveli is known for its wheat Halva, Salem is renowned for its unique mangoes, Madurai is the place of origin of the milk dessert Jigarthanda while Palani is known for its Panchamirtham. Idlis, dosas, and sambar are quite common throughout the state. Coffee and tea are the staple drinks.
For the year 2014–15 Tamil Nadu's GSDP was , and growth was 14.86. It ranks third in foreign direct investment (FDI) approvals (cumulative 1991–2002) of 225.826 billion ($5,000 million), next only to Maharashtra and Delhi constituting 9.12 per cent of the total FDI in the country. The per capita income in 2007–2008 for the state was 72,993 ranking third among states with a population over 10 million and has steadily been above the national average.
According to the 2011 Census, Tamil Nadu is the most urbanised state in India (49 percent), accounting for 9.6 percent of the urban population while only comprising 6 percent of India's total population. Services contributes to 45 percent of the economic activity in the state, followed by manufacturing at 34 percent and agriculture at 21 percent. The government is the major investor in the state with 51 percent of total investments, followed by private Indian investors at 29.9 percent and foreign private investors at 14.9 percent. Tamil Nadu has a network of about 113 industrial parks and estates offering developed plots with supporting infrastructure. According to the publications of the Tamil Nadu government, the Gross State Domestic Product at Constant Prices (The base year 2004–2005) for the year 2011–2012 is , an increase of 9.39 percent over the previous year. The per capita income at the current price is 72,993.
Tamil Nadu has six Nationalised Home Banks which originated in this state; Two government-sector banks Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank in Chennai, and four private-sector banks City Union Bank in Kumbakonam, Karur Vysya Bank, Lakshmi Vilas Bank in Karur, and Tamilnad Mercantile Bank Limited in Tuticorin.
Tamil Nadu has historically been an agricultural state and is a leading producer of agricultural products in India. In 2008, Tamil Nadu was India's fifth biggest producer of rice. The total cultivated area in the state was 5.60 million hectares in 2009–10. The Cauvery delta region is known as the "Rice Bowl of Tamil Nadu". In terms of production, Tamil Nadu accounts for 10 percent in fruits and 6 percent in vegetables, in India. Annual food grains production in the year 2007–08 was 10035,000 mt.
The state is the largest producer of bananas, turmeric, flowers, tapioca, the second largest producer of mango, natural rubber, coconut, groundnut and the third largest producer of coffee, sapota, Tea and sugarcane. Tamil Nadu's sugarcane yield per hectare is the highest in India. The state has 17,000 hectares of land under oil palm cultivation, the second highest in India.
Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, known as the "father of the Indian Green Revolution" was from Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu Agricultural University with its seven colleges and thirty-two research stations spread over the entire state contributes to evolving new crop varieties and technologies and disseminating through various extension agencies. Among states in India, Tamil Nadu is one of the leaders in livestock, poultry, and fisheries production. Tamil Nadu had the second largest number of poultry amongst all the states and accounted for 17.7 percent of the total poultry population in India. In 2003–2004, Tamil Nadu had produced 3783.6 million of eggs, which was the second-highest in India representing 9.37 percent of the total egg production in the country. With the second-longest coastline in India, Tamil Nadu represented 27.54 percent of the total value of fish and fishery products exported by India in 2006. Namakkal is also one of the major centres of egg production in India.
Oddanchatram is one of the major centres for vegetable supply in Tamil Nadu and is also known as the vegetable city of Tamil Nadu.Coimbatore is one of the major centres for poultry production.
Tamil Nadu is one of the leading states in the textile sector and it houses the country's largest spinning industry accounting for almost 80 per cent of the total installed capacity in India. When it comes to yarn production, the State contributes 40 per cent of the total production in the country. There are 2,614 Hand Processing Units (25 per cent of total units in the country) and 985 Power Processing Units (40 per cent of total units in the country) in Tamil Nadu. According to official data, the textile industry in Tamil Nadu accounts for 17 percent of the total invested capital in all the industries. Coimbatore is often referred to as the ""Manchester of South India"" due to its cotton production and textile industries. Tirupur is the country's largest exporter of knitwear. for its cotton production.
Tamil Nadu accounts for 60 per cent of leather tanning capacity in India and 38 per cent of all leather footwear, garments and components. The state also accounts for 50 per cent of leather exports from India, valued at around US$3.3 billion of the total US$6.5 billion from India. Hundreds of leather and tannery facilities are located around Vellore and its nearby towns.
Tamil Nadu has seen major investments in the automobile industry over many decades manufacturing cars, railway coaches, battle-tanks, tractors, motorcycles, automobile spare parts and accessories, tyres and heavy vehicles. Chennai is known as the "Detroit of India." Major global automobile companies including BMW, Ford, Robert Bosch, Renault-Nissan, Caterpillar, Hyundai, Mitsubishi Motors, and Michelin as well as Indian automobile majors like Mahindra & Mahindra, Ashok Leyland, Eicher Motors, Isuzu Motors, TI cycles, Hindustan Motors, TVS Motors, Irizar-TVS, Royal Enfield, MRF, Apollo Tyres, TAFE Tractors, Daimler AG Company invested () 4 billion for establishing a new plant in Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu is one of the highly industrialised states in India. Over 11% of the S&P CNX 500 conglomerates have corporate offices in Tamil Nadu.
The state government owns Tamil Nadu Newsprint and Papers, in Karur.
Coimbatore is also referred to as "the Pump City" as it supplies two-thirds of India's requirements of motors and pumps. The city is one of the largest exporters of wet grinders and auto components and the term "Coimbatore Wet Grinder" has been given a Geographical indication.
Electronics manufacturing is a growing industry in Tamil Nadu, with many international companies like Nokia, Flex, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Foxconn, Samsung, Cisco, Moser Baer, Lenovo, Dell, Sanmina-SCI, Bosch, Texas Instruments having chosen Chennai as their South Asian manufacturing hub. Products manufactured include circuit boards and cellular phone handsets.
Tamil Nadu is the second largest software exporter by value in India. Software exports from Tamil Nadu grew from 76 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2003–04 to 207 billion {$5 billion} by 2006–07 according to NASSCOM and to 366 billion in 2008–09 which shows 29 per cent growth in software exports according to STPI. Major national and global IT companies such as Atos Syntel, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Amazon.com, Capgemini, CGI, PayPal, IBM, NTT DATA, Accenture, Ramco Systems, Robert Bosch GmbH, DXC Technology, Cognizant, Tech Mahindra, Virtusa, LTI, Mphasis, Mindtree, Zoho, and many others have offices in Tamil Nadu. The top engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu have been a major recruiting hub for the IT firms. According to estimates, about 50 percent of the human resources required for the IT and ITES industry was being sourced from the state. Coimbatore is the second largest software producer in the state, next to Chennai.
Tamil Nadu has a transportation system that connects all parts of the state. Tamil Nadu is served by an extensive road network, providing links between urban centres, agricultural market-places and rural areas. There are 29 national highways in the state, covering a total distance of . The state is also a terminus for the Golden Quadrilateral project, that connects Indian metropolises like (New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata). The state has a total road length of , of which are maintained by the Highways Department. This is nearly 2.5 times higher than the density of all-India road network. The major road junctions are Chennai, Vellore, Madurai, Trichy, Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Salem, Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi, Karur, Kumbakonam, Krishnagiri, Dindigul and Kanniyakumari. Road transport is provided by state owned Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation and State Express Transport Corporation. Almost every part of the state is well connected by buses 24 hours a day. The state accounted for 13.6 per cent of all accidents in the country with 66,238 accidents in 2013, 11.3 per cent of all road accident deaths and 15 percent of all road-related injuries, according to data provided by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Although Tamil Nadu accounts for the highest number of road accidents in India, it also leads in having reduced the number of fatalities in accident-prone areas with deployment of personnel and a sustained awareness campaign. The number of deaths at areas decreased from 1,053 in 2011 to 881 in 2012 and 867 in 2013.
Tamil Nadu has a well-developed rail network as part of Southern Railway. Headquartered at Chennai, the Southern Railway network extends over a large area of India's southern peninsula, covering the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, a small portion of Karnataka and a small portion of Andhra Pradesh. Express trains connect the state capital Chennai with Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata. Puratchi Thalaivar Dr. M.G. Ramachandran Central Railway Station is the gateway for trains towards the north whereas Chennai Egmore serves as the gateway for the south. Tamil Nadu has a total railway track length of and there are 532 railway stations in the state. The network connects the state with most major cities in India. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway (part of the Mountain Railways of India) is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Site connecting Ooty on the hills and Mettupalayam in the foothills which is in turn connected to Coimbatore. The centenary old Pamban Bridge over sea connecting Rameswaram in Pamban island to the mainland is an engineering marvel. It is one of the oldest cantilever bridges still in operation, the double-leaf bascule bridge section can be raised to let boats and small ships pass through the Palk Strait in the Indian Ocean. The government of Tamil Nadu created a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for implementing the Chennai Metro Rail Project. This SPV named as “Chennai Metro Rail Limited” was incorporated on 3 December 2007 under the Companies Act. It has now been converted into a joint venture of the governments of India and of Tamil Nadu with equal equity holding. Chennai has a well-established suburban railway network and is constructing a Chennai Metro with phase1 operational since July 2015. Major railway junctions (four and above lines) in the state are Chennai, Coimbatore, Katpadi, Madurai, Salem, Erode, Dindigul, Karur, Nagercoil, Tiruchirapalli, and Tirunelveli. Puratchi Thalaivar Dr. M.G. Ramachandran Central Railway Station, Madurai Junction, Katpadi Junction, Chennai Egmore, Salem Junction, Tiruchirappalli Junction, Coimbatore Junction are upgraded to A1 grade level. Loco sheds are located at Erode, Arakkonam, Royapuram in Chennai and Tondaiyarpet in Chennai, Ponmalai (GOC) in Tiruchirappalli as Diesel Loco Shed. The loco shed at Erode is a huge composite electric and diesel Loco shed. MRTS which covers from Chennai Beach to Velachery, and metro rails also running from Washermenpet to Airport metro station and Central metro station to St.Thomas Mount metro station.
Tamil Nadu has four international airports, namely Chennai International Airport, Coimbatore International Airport, Tiruchirapalli International Airport and Madurai International Airport.It is has the largest number of International Airports along with Kerala. Salem Airport, Thoothukudi Airport and Vellore Airport are the domestic airports. Chennai International Airport is a major international airport and aviation hub in South Asia. Besides civilian airports, the state has four air bases of the Indian Air Force namely Thanjavur AFS, Tambram AFS, Coimbatore AFS and two naval air stations INS Rajali and INS Parundu of Indian Navy. Neyveli Airport is being renovated since 2019 to start the service from mid 2020.
Tamil Nadu has three major seaports located at Chennai, Ennore and Thoothukudi, as well as seven other minor ports including Cuddalore and Nagapattinam. Chennai Port is an artificial harbour situated on the Coromandel Coast and is the second principal port in the country for handling containers. Ennore Port handles all the coal and ore traffic in Tamil Nadu. The volume of cargo in the ports grew by 13 percent during 2005.
In Tamil Nadu, the Government of India is to set up a new Rocket launch pad near Kulasekharapatnam in Thoothukudi district for which the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has begun work. The location was selected because of its nearness to the equator like the Sriharikota spaceport in the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Tamil Nadu has four mobile service providers including BSNL, Airtel, JIO and Vodafone Idea. BSNL provides 2G & 3G mobile internet connections and all other three operators provide 2G, 3G & 4G Mobile broadband connections across Tamil Nadu. Airtel Broadband, Act Broadband BSNL, Hathway and few others are providing high speed Fiber Optic broadband connection in many cities & rural areas across Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu government is planning to lay 55,000 km of optical fibre cable across the State and provide high-speed internet up to 1Gbit/s and connect all the Corporations, Municipalities, Town Panchayats and village panchayats. This infrastructure would also benefit all the government departments, entrepreneurs and individual homes.
Tamil Nadu has the third largest installed power generation capacity in the country. The Kalpakkam Nuclear Power Plant, Ennore Thermal Plant, Neyveli Lignite Power Plant, many hydroelectric plants including Mettur Dam, hundreds of windmills and the Narimanam Natural Gas Plants are major sources of Tamil Nadu's electricity. The state generates a significant proportion of its power needs from renewable sources with wind power installed capacity at over 7154 MW, accounting for 38 percent of total installed wind power in India . It is presently adding the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant to its energy grid, which on completion would be the largest atomic power plant in the country with 2000MW installed capacity. The total installed capacity of electricity in the state by January 2014 was 20,716 MW. Tamil Nadu ranks first nationwide in diesel-based thermal electricity generation with a national market share of over 34 per cent. From a power surplus state in 2005–06, Tamil Nadu has become a state facing severe power shortage over the recent years due to lack of new power generation projects and delay in commercial power generation at Kudankulam Atomic Power Project. The Tuticorin Thermal Power Station has five 210 megawatt generators. The first generator was commissioned in July 1979. The thermal power plants under construction include the coal-based 1000 MW NLC TNEB Power Plant. From the current 17MW installed solar power, Tamil Nadu state government's new policy aims to increase the installed capacity to 3000MW by 2016. Kamuthi Solar Power Project was commissioned by Adani Power in Kamuthi, Ramanathapuram district. With a generating capacity of 648 MWp at a single location, it is the world's sixth largest (as of 2018) solar park.
Kabbadi, also known as Sadugudu, is recognised as the state game in Tamil Nadu. The traditional sports of Tamil Nadu include Silambam, a Tamil martial arts played with a long bamboo staff, cockfight, Jallikattu, a bull taming sport famous on festival occasions, ox-wagon racing known as Rekkala, kite flying also known as Pattam viduthal, Goli, the game with marbles, Aadu Puli, the "goat and tiger" game and Kabaddi also known as Sadugudu. Most of these traditional sports are associated with festivals of land like Thai Pongal and mostly played in rural areas. S. Ilavazhagi carrom world champion from 2002–2016
The M. A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai is an international cricket ground with a capacity of 50,000 and houses the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association. Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, Sadagoppan Ramesh, Laxmipathy Balaji, Murali Vijay, Ravichandran Ashwin , Vijay Shankar, Murali Karthik, Washington Sundar, Subramaniam Badrinath, Abhinav Mukund and Dinesh Karthik are some prominent cricketers from Tamil Nadu. The MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai is a popular fast bowling academy for pace bowlers all over the world. Cricket contests between local clubs, franchises and teams are popular in the state. Chennai Super Kings represent the city of Chennai in the Indian Premier League, a popular Twenty20 league. The Super Kings are the most successful team in the league with three IPL titles at par with Mumbai Indians and two CLT20 titles.Tennis is also a popular sport in Tamil Nadu with notable international players including Ramesh Krishnan, Ramanathan Krishnan, Vijay Amritraj and Mahesh Bhupathi. Nirupama Vaidyanathan, the first Indian women to play in a grand slam tournament also hails from the state. The ATP Chennai Open tournament is held in Chennai every January. The Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SDAT) owns Nungambakkam tennis stadium which hosts Chennai Open and Davis Cup play-off tournaments.
The Tamil Nadu Hockey Association is the governing body of hockey in the state. Vasudevan Baskaran was the captain of the Indian team that won the gold medal in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. The Mayor Radhakrishnan Stadium in Chennai hosts international hockey events and is regarded by the International Hockey Federation as one of the best in the world for its infrastructure.
Tamil Nadu also has golf ground in Coimbatore, The Coimbatore Golf Club is an 18-hole golf course located in Chettipalayam in Coimbatore, located within the city limits in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. The club is also a popular venue for major golf tournaments held in India.
The Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SDAT), a government body, is vested with the responsibility of developing sports and related infrastructure in the state. The SDAT owns and operates world-class stadiums and organises sporting events. It also accommodates sporting events, both at the domestic and international level, organised by other sports associations at its venues. The YMCA College of Physical Education at Nandanam in Chennai was established in 1920 and was the first college for physical education in Asia. The Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Chennai is a multi-purpose stadium hosting football and track and field events. The Indian Triathlon Federation and the Volleyball Federation of India are headquartered in Chennai. Chennai hosted India's first-ever International Beach Volleyball Championship in 2008. The SDAT – TNSRA Squash Academy in Chennai is one of the very few academics in South Asia hosting international squash events. Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Coimbatore is a multi-purpose stadium in Coimbatore constructed in 1971 which is used to host I-League football matches.
The tourism industry of Tamil Nadu is the largest in India, with an annual growth rate of 16 percent. Tourism in Tamil Nadu is promoted by Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation (TTDC), a government of Tamil Nadu undertaking. According to Ministry of Tourism statistics, 4.68 million foreign (20.1% share of the country) and 333.5 million domestic tourists (23.3% share of the country) visited the state in 2015 making it the most visited state in India both domestic and foreign tourists. The state boasts some of the grand Hindu temples built-in Dravidian architecture. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, Brihadishwara Temple in Thanjavur, Gangaikonda Cholapuram and the Airavatesvara Temple in Darasuram (Great Chola Temples) and the Shore Temple along with the collection of other monuments in Mamallapuram which have been declared as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29918 |
Tamil language
Tamil (; "" , ) is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka, and by the Tamil diaspora and Sri Lankan Moors. Tamil is an official language in three countries: India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. In India, it is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry. Furthermore, Tamil is used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. Tamil is spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India.
Tamil is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world. A. K. Ramanujan described it as "the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past." The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as "one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world".
A recorded Tamil literature has been documented for over 2000 years. The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca. 300 BC – AD 300. It has the oldest extant literature among Dravidian languages. The earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and 'hero stones' date from around the 3rd century BC. More than 55% of the epigraphical inscriptions (about 55,000) found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language. Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been discovered in Sri Lanka and on trade goods in Thailand and Egypt. The two earliest manuscripts from India, acknowledged and registered by the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, were written in Tamil.
In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named "Thambiran Vanakkam", thus making Tamil the first Indian language to be printed and published. The "Tamil Lexicon," published by the University of Madras, was one of the earliest dictionaries published in the Indian languages. According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which 353 were dailies.
Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages, a family of around 26 languages native to the Indian subcontinent. It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family that, alongside Tamil proper, includes the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups such as the Irula and Yerukula languages (see SIL Ethnologue).
The closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam; the two began diverging around the 9th century AD. Although many of the differences between Tamil and Malayalam demonstrate a pre-historic split of the western dialect, the process of separation into a distinct language, Malayalam, was not completed until sometime in the 13th or 14th century.
According to linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Tamil, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, a proto-language. Linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the culture associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India. The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been written from the 2nd century BC.
Among Indian languages, Tamil has the most ancient non-Sanskritic Indian literature. Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three periods: Old Tamil (300 BC–AD 700), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and Modern Tamil (1600–present). In November 2007, an excavation at Quseir-al-Qadim revealed Egyptian pottery dating back to first century BC with ancient Tamil Brahmi inscriptions. John Guy states that Tamil was the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India.
According to Hindu legend, Tamil or in personification form Tamil Thāi (Mother Tamil) was created by Lord Shiva. Murugan, revered as the Tamil God, along with sage Agastya, brought it to the people.
The earliest extant Tamil literary works and their commentaries celebrate the Pandiyan Kings for the organization of long-termed Tamil Sangams, which researched, developed and made amendments in Tamil language. Even though the name of the language which was developed by these Tamil Sangams is mentioned as Tamil, the period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The earliest attested use of the name is found in Tholkappiyam, which is dated as early as late 2nd century BC.Southworth suggests that the name comes from > "self-speak", or "one's own speech". Kamil Zvelebil suggests an etymology of , with meaning "self" or "one's self", and "" having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternatively, he suggests a derivation of < < * < *, meaning in origin "the proper process (of speaking)".
The Tamil Lexicon of University of Madras defines the word "Tamil" as "sweetness". S. V. Subramanian suggests the meaning "sweet sound", from "tam" — "sweet" and "il" — "sound".
Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning the 3rd century BC to the 8th century AD. The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from between the 3rd and 2nd century BC in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil-Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the "Tolkāppiyam", an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the late 2nd century BC. Many literary works in Old Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems collectively known as Sangam literature. These poems are usually dated to between the 1st century BC and 5th century AD.
The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil, which is generally taken to have been completed by the 8th century, was characterised by a number of phonological and grammatical changes. In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual disappearance of the aytam (ஃ), an old phoneme, the coalescence of the alveolar and dental nasals, and the transformation of the alveolar plosive into a rhotic. In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb ' (), meaning "to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used as an aspect marker to indicate that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting, usually in combination with a time marker such as ' (). In Middle Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – "" () – which combined the old aspect and time markers.
The Nannul remains the standard normative grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to be based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern Tamil. Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen out of use in Modern Tamil – instead, negation is expressed either morphologically or syntactically. Modern spoken Tamil also shows a number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high vowels in initial and medial positions, and the disappearance of vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.
Contact with European languages affected written and spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a more rigid word order that resembles the syntactic argument structure of English. Simultaneously, a strong strain of linguistic purism emerged in the early 20th century, culminating in the Pure Tamil Movement which called for removal of all Sanskritic elements from Tamil. It received some support from Dravidian parties. This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit loanwords by Tamil equivalents, though many others remain.
Tamil is the primary language of the majority of the people residing in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, (in India) and in Northern Province, Eastern Province (Sri Lanka). The language is spoken among small minority groups in other states of India which include Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra and in certain regions of Sri Lanka such as Colombo and the hill country. Tamil or dialects of it were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century AD. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until the 12th century AD. Tamil was used for inscriptions from the 10th through 14th centuries in southern Karnataka districts such as Kolar, Mysore, Mandya and Bangalore.
There are currently sizeable Tamil-speaking populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Mauritius, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam. A large community of Pakistani Tamils speakers exists in Karachi, Pakistan, which includes Tamil-speaking Hindus as well as Christians and Muslims – including some Tamil-speaking Muslim refugees from Sri Lanka. There are about 100 Tamil Hindu families in Madrasi Para colony in Karachi .They speak impeccable Tamil along with Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi. Many in Réunion, Guyana, Fiji, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago have Tamil origins, but only a small number speak the language. In Reunion where the Tamil language was forbidden to be learnt and used in public space by France it is now being relearnt by students and adults. Tamil is also spoken by migrants from Sri Lanka and India in Canada, the United States (especially New Jersey and New York City), Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and many other European and Middle Eastern countries.
Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the 22 languages under schedule 8 of the constitution of India. It is one of the official languages of the union territories of Puducherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Tamil is also one of the official languages of Singapore. Tamil is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, along with Sinhala. It was once given nominal official status in the Indian state of Haryana, purportedly as a rebuff to Punjab, though there was no attested Tamil-speaking population in the state, and was later replaced by Punjabi, in 2010. In Malaysia, 543 primary education government schools are available fully in Tamil medium. The establishment of Tamil medium schools has been in process in Myanmar to provide education completely in Tamil language by the Tamils who settled there 200 years ago. Tamil language is available as a course in some local school boards and major universities in Canada and the month of January has been declared "Tamil Heritage Month" by the Parliament of Canada. Tamil enjoys a special status of protection under Article 6(b), Chapter 1 of the Constitution of South Africa and is taught as a subject in schools in KwaZulu-Natal province. Recently, it has been rolled out as a subject of study in schools in the French overseas department of Réunion.
In addition, with the creation in October 2004 of a legal status for classical languages by the Government of India and following a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations, Tamil became the first legally recognised Classical language of India. The recognition was announced by the contemporaneous President of India, Abdul Kalam, in a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on 6 June 2004.
The socio-linguistic situation of Tamil is characterised by diglossia: there are two separate registers varying by socioeconomic status, a high register and a low one. Tamil dialects are primarily differentiated from each other by the fact that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound shifts in evolving from Old Tamil. For example, the word for "here"—' in "Centamil" (the classic variety)—has evolved into ' in the Kongu dialect of Coimbatore, "inga" in the dialect of Thanjavur, and ' in some dialects of Sri Lanka. Old Tamil's ' (where ' means place) is the source of ' in the dialect of Tirunelveli, Old Tamil ' is the source of ' in the dialect of Madurai, and "" in some northern dialects. Even now, in the Coimbatore area, it is common to hear "" meaning "that place". Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their vocabulary, there are a few exceptions. The dialects spoken in Sri Lanka retain many words and grammatical forms that are not in everyday use in India, and use many other words slightly differently. Tamil dialects include Central Tamil dialect, Kongu Tamil, Madras Bashai, Madurai Tamil, Nellai Tamil, Kumari tamil in India and Batticaloa Tamil dialect, Jaffna Tamil dialect, Negombo Tamil dialect in Sri Lanka. Sankethi dialect in Karnataka has been heavily influenced by Kannada.
The dialect of the district of Palakkad in Kerala has many Malayalam loanwords, has been influenced by Malayalam's syntax, and has a distinctive Malayalam accent. Similarly, Tamil spoken in Kanyakumari District has more unique words and phonetic style than Tamil spoken at other parts of Tamil Nadu. The words and phonetics are so different that a person from Kanyakumari district is easily identifiable by their spoken Tamil. Hebbar and Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka in the 11th century, retain many features of the "Vaishnava paribasai", a special form of Tamil developed in the 9th and 10th centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious and spiritual values. Several castes have their own sociolects which most members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they come from. It is often possible to identify a person's caste by their speech. Tamil in Sri Lanka incorporates loan words from Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
In addition to its dialects, Tamil exhibits different forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language ('), a modern literary and formal style ('), and a modern colloquial form ('). These styles shade into each other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible to write ' with a vocabulary drawn from ', or to use forms associated with one of the other variants while speaking '.
In modern times, ' is generally used in formal writing and speech. For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of Tamil literature and of public speaking and debate. In recent times, however, ' has been making inroads into areas that have traditionally been considered the province of '. Most contemporary cinema, theatre and popular entertainment on television and radio, for example, is in ', and many politicians use it to bring themselves closer to their audience. The increasing use of ' in modern times has led to the emergence of unofficial ‘standard' spoken dialects. In India, the ‘standard' ', rather than on any one dialect, but has been significantly influenced by the dialects of Thanjavur and Madurai. In Sri Lanka, the standard is based on the dialect of Jaffna.
After Tamil Brahmi fell out of use, Tamil was written using a script called amongst others such as Grantha and Pallava. The current Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the "āytam". The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters (12 + 18 + 1 + (12 x 18)). All consonants have an inherent vowel "a", as with other Indic scripts. This inherent vowel is removed by adding a tittle called a "", to the consonantal sign. For example, is "ṉa" (with the inherent "a") and is "ṉ" (without a vowel). Many Indic scripts have a similar sign, generically called virama, but the Tamil script is somewhat different in that it nearly always uses a visible "puḷḷi" to indicate a 'dead consonant' (a consonant without a vowel). In other Indic scripts, it is generally preferred to use a ligature or a half form to write a syllable or a cluster containing a dead consonant, although writing it with a visible virama is also possible. The Tamil script does not differentiate voiced and unvoiced plosives. Instead, plosives are articulated with voice depending on their position in a word, in accordance with the rules of Tamil phonology.
In addition to the standard characters, six characters taken from the Grantha script, which was used in the Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages. The traditional system prescribed by classical grammars for writing loan-words, which involves respelling them in accordance with Tamil phonology, remains, but is not always consistently applied. ISO 15919 is an international standard for the transliteration of Tamil and other Indic scripts into Latin characters. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script. Tamil can be transliterated into English by using ISO 15919, since English language uses the Latin script for writing.
Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil has numerals for 10, 100 and 1000. Symbols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above, rupee, and numeral are present as well. Tamil also uses several historical fractional signs.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of retroflex consonants and multiple rhotics. Tamil does not distinguish phonologically between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word. Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial. Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels, consonants, and a "secondary character", the āytam.
Tamil has five vowel qualities, namely , , , and . Each may be long or short. There are two diphthongs, and . Long vowels are about twice as long as short vowels. The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1.5 times as long as short vowels. Most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.
Tamil consonants are presented as hard, soft and medial in some grammars which roughly corresponds to plosives, nasals and approximants. Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not distinguish aspirated and unaspirated consonants. In addition, the voicing of plosives is governed by strict rules in "". Plosives are unvoiced if they occur word-initially or doubled. Elsewhere they are voiced, with a few becoming fricatives intervocalically, which means that voicing is not a phonological trait for plosives. Nasals and approximants are always voiced.
Tamil is characterised by its use of more than one type of coronal consonants: like many of the other languages of India, it contains a series of retroflex consonants. Notably, the Tamil retroflex series includes the retroflex approximant () (example Tamil; often transcribed 'zh'), which is rare in the Indo-Aryan languages. Among the other Dravidian languages, the retroflex approximant also occurs in Malayalam (for example in 'Kozhikode'), disappeared from spoken Kannada around 1000 AD (although the character is still written, and exists in Unicode, ೞ as in ಕೊೞೆ), and was never present in Telugu. In many dialects of colloquial Tamil, this consonant is seen as disappearing and shifting to the alveolar lateral approximant . Dental and alveolar consonants also historically contrasted with each other, a typically Dravidian trait not found in the neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages. While this distinction can still be seen in the written language, it has been largely lost in colloquial spoken Tamil, and even in literary usage the letters (dental) and (alveolar) may be seen as allophonic. Likewise, the historical alveolar stop has transformed into a trill consonant in many modern dialects.
A chart of the Tamil consonant phonemes in the follows:
The plosives have voiced allophones after nasals. The sounds and are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds. There are well-defined rules for elision in Tamil categorised into classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.
Classical Tamil had a phoneme called the "āytam", written as ‘'. Tamil grammarians of the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted phoneme) (""), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. The rules of pronunciation given in the "Tolkāppiyam", a text on the grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest that the "āytam" could have glottalised the sounds it was combined with. It has also been suggested that the "āytam" was used to represent the voiced implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated voiced plosives inside a word. The āytam, in modern Tamil, is also used to convert "p" to "f" when writing English words using the Tamil script.
Tamil employs agglutinative grammar, where suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. Tamil's standard metalinguistic terminology and scholarly vocabulary is itself Tamil, as opposed to the Sanskrit that is standard for most Aryan languages.
Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the "Tolkāppiyam". Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar ' which restated and clarified the rules of the "Tolkāppiyam", with some modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts, namely ', "sol", ', "yāppu", '. Of these, the last two are mostly applied in poetry.
Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination, which can lead to long words with many suffixes, which would require several words or a sentence in English. To give an example, the word "pōkamuṭiyātavarkaḷukkāka" (போகமுடியாதவர்களுக்காக) means "for the sake of those who cannot go" and consists of the following morphemes:
Tamil nouns (and pronouns) are classified into two super-classes (')—the "rational" ('), and the "irrational" ("")—which include a total of five classes ("pāl", which literally means "gender"). Humans and deities are classified as "rational", and all other nouns (animals, objects, abstract nouns) are classified as irrational. The "rational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of three classes ("pāl")—masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes: irrational singular and irrational plural. The "pāl" is often indicated through suffixes. The plural form for rational nouns may be used as an honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.
Suffixes are used to perform the functions of cases or postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to group the various suffixes into eight cases corresponding to the cases used in Sanskrit. These were the nominative, accusative, dative, sociative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and ablative. Modern grammarians argue that this classification is artificial, and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case. Tamil nouns can take one of four prefixes: "i", "a", "u", and "e" which are functionally equivalent to the demonstratives in English. For example, the word "vazhi" (வழி) meaning "way" can take these to produce "ivvazhi" (இவ்வழி) "this way", "avvazhi" (அவ்வழி) "that way", "uvvazhi" (உவ்வழி) "the medial way" and "evvazhi" (எவ்வழி) "which way".
Tamil verbs are also inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense, and voice.
Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, including both of them under the category "uriccol", although modern grammarians tend to distinguish between them on morphological and syntactical grounds. Tamil has many ideophones that act as adverbs indicating the way the object in a given state "says" or "sounds".
Tamil does not have articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an indefinite article, or by the context. In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns ' (we), ' (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns ' (we), ' (our) that do not.
Tamil is a consistently head-final language. The verb comes at the end of the clause, with a typical word order of subject–object–verb (SOV). However, word order in Tamil is also flexible, so that surface permutations of the SOV order are possible with different pragmatic effects. Tamil has postpositions rather than prepositions. Demonstratives and modifiers precede the noun within the noun phrase. Subordinate clauses precede the verb of the matrix clause.
Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects. It is possible to construct grammatically valid and meaningful sentences which lack one or more of the three. For example, a sentence may only have a verb—such as ' ("completed")—or only a subject and object, without a verb such as ' ("That [is] my house"). Tamil does not have a copula (a linking verb equivalent to the word "is"). The word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning more easily.
The vocabulary of Tamil is mainly Dravidian. A strong sense of linguistic purism is found in Modern Tamil, which opposes the use of foreign loanwords. Nonetheless, a number of words used in classical and modern Tamil are loanwords from the languages of neighbouring groups, or with whom the Tamils had trading links, including Munda (for example, "frog" from Munda ), Malay (e.g. "sago" from Malay ), Chinese (for example, "skiff" from Chinese san-pan) and Greek (for example, from Greek ὥρα). In more modern times, Tamil has imported words from Urdu and Marathi, reflecting groups that have influenced the Tamil area at times, and from neighbouring languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Sinhala. During the modern period, words have also been adapted from European languages, such as Portuguese, French, and English.
The strongest impact of purism in Tamil has been on words taken from Sanskrit. During its history, Tamil, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc., was influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles, reflecting the increased trend of Sanskritisation in the Tamil country. Tamil vocabulary never became quite as heavily Sanskritised as that of the other Dravidian languages, and unlike in those languages, it was and remains possible to express complex ideas (including in science, art, religion and law) without the use of Sanskrit loan words. In addition, Sanskritisation was actively resisted by a number of authors of the late medieval period, culminating in the 20th century in a movement called "" (meaning "pure Tamil movement"), led by Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, which sought to remove the accumulated influence of Sanskrit on Tamil. As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, literature and public speeches has seen a marked decline in the use Sanskrit loan words in the past few decades, under some estimates having fallen from 40–50% to about 20%. As a result, the Prakrit and Sanskrit loan words used in modern Tamil are, unlike in some other Dravidian languages, restricted mainly to some spiritual terminology and abstract nouns.
In the 20th century, institutions and learned bodies have, with government support, generated technical dictionaries for Tamil containing neologisms and words derived from Tamil roots to replace loan words from English and other languages. As of 2019, the language had a listed vocabulary of over 470,000 unique words, including those from old literary sources. In November 2019, the state government issued an order to add 9,000 new words to the vocabulary.
Words of Tamil origin occur in other languages. A notable example of a word in worldwide use with Dravidian (not specifically Tamil) etymology is "orange", via Sanskrit ' from a Dravidian predecessor of Tamil "nartaṅkāy" "fragrant fruit". One suggestion as to the origin of the word "anaconda" is the Tamil "anaikkonda," "having killed an elephant". Examples in English include "cheroot" (' meaning "rolled up"), "mango" (from "māngāi"), "mulligatawny" (from ', "pepper water"), "pariah" (from "paraiyan"), "curry" (from "kari"), "catamaran" (from ', "bundled logs"), and "congee" (from "kanji" – rice porridge or gruel).
The following is a sample text in literary Tamil of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Tamil in the Tamil script:
Romanized Tamil:
Tamil in the International Phonetic Alphabet:
Gloss:
Translation: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29919 |
Truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.
Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsity. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth.
Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. There are many different questions about the nature of truth which are still the subject of contemporary debates, such as: How do we define truth? Is it even possible to give an informative definition of truth? What things are truthbearers and are therefore capable of being true or false? Are truth and falsity bivalent, or are there other truth values? What are the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsity? What role does truth play in constituting knowledge? And is truth absolute, or is it merely relative to one's perspective?
The English word "truth" is derived from Old English "tríewþ, tréowþ, trýwþ", Middle English "trewþe", cognate to Old High German "triuwida", Old Norse "tryggð". Like "troth", it is a "-th" nominalisation of the adjective "true" (Old English "tréowe").
The English word "true" is from Old English (West Saxon) "(ge)tríewe, tréowe", cognate to Old Saxon "(gi)trûui", Old High German "(ga)triuwu" (Modern German "treu" "faithful"), Old Norse "tryggr", Gothic "triggws", all from a Proto-Germanic "*trewwj-" "having good faith", perhaps ultimately from PIE *dru- "tree", on the notion of "steadfast as an oak" (e.g., Sanskrit "taru" tree).
Old Norse ', "faith, word of honour; religious faith, belief" (archaic English "troth" "loyalty, honesty, good faith", compare ').
Thus, 'truth' involves both the quality of "faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity", and that of "agreement with fact or reality", in Anglo-Saxon expressed by "sōþ" (Modern English "sooth").
All Germanic languages besides English have introduced a terminological distinction between truth "fidelity" and truth "factuality". To express "factuality", North Germanic opted for nouns derived from "sanna" "to assert, affirm", while continental West Germanic (German and Dutch) opted for continuations of "wâra" "faith, trust, pact" (cognate to Slavic "věra" "(religious) faith", but influenced by Latin "verus"). Romance languages use terms following the Latin "veritas", while the Greek "aletheia", Russian "pravda", South Slavic "istina" and Sanskrit "sat" have separate etymological origins.
In some modern contexts, the word "truth" is used to refer to fidelity to an original or standard. It can also be used in the context of being "true to oneself" in the sense of acting with authenticity.
The question of what is a proper basis for deciding how words, symbols, ideas and beliefs may properly be considered true, whether by a single person or an entire society, is dealt with by the five most prevalent substantive theories of truth listed below. Each presents perspectives that are widely shared by published scholars.
Theories other than the most prevalent substantive theories are also discussed. More recently developed "deflationary" or "minimalist" theories of truth have emerged as possible alternatives to the most prevalent substantive theories. Minimalist reasoning centres around the notion that the application of a term like "true" to a statement does not assert anything significant about it, for instance, anything about its "nature". Minimalist reasoning realises "truth" as a label utilised in general discourse to express agreement, to stress claims, or to form general assumptions.
Correspondence theories emphasise that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory stresses a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or objects on the other. It is a traditional model tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined in principle entirely by how it relates to "things" by whether it accurately describes those "things". A classic example of correspondence theory is the statement by the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas: "Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus" ("Truth is the adequation of things and intellect"), which Aquinas attributed to the ninth century Neoplatonist Isaac Israeli. Aquinas also restated the theory as: "A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality".
Correspondence theory centres heavily around the assumption that truth is a matter of accurately copying what is known as "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols. Many modern theorists have stated that this ideal cannot be achieved without analysing additional factors. For example, language plays a role in that all languages have words to represent concepts that are virtually undefined in other languages. The German word "Zeitgeist" is one such example: one who speaks or understands the language may "know" what it means, but any translation of the word apparently fails to accurately capture its full meaning (this is a problem with many abstract words, especially those derived in agglutinative languages). Thus, some words add an additional parameter to the construction of an accurate truth predicate. Among the philosophers who grappled with this problem is Alfred Tarski, whose semantic theory is summarized further below in this article.
Proponents of several of the theories below have gone further to assert that there are yet other issues necessary to the analysis, such as interpersonal power struggles, community interactions, personal biases and other factors involved in deciding what is seen as truth.
For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system. A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.
Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics. However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side, for example, the various alternative geometries. On the whole, coherence theories have been rejected for lacking justification in their application to other areas of truth, especially with respect to assertions about the natural world, empirical data in general, assertions about practical matters of psychology and society, especially when used without support from the other major theories of truth.
Coherence theories distinguish the thought of rationalist philosophers, particularly of Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, along with the British philosopher F. H. Bradley. They have found a resurgence also among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.
The three most influential forms of the "pragmatic theory of truth" were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.
Peirce defines truth as follows: "Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth." This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as "fallibilism" and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of truth. Although Peirce uses words like "concordance" and "correspondence" to describe one aspect of the pragmatic sign relation, he is also quite explicit in saying that definitions of truth based on mere correspondence are no more than "nominal" definitions, which he accords a lower status than "real" definitions.
William James's version of pragmatic theory, while complex, is often summarized by his statement that "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." By this, James meant that truth is a "quality", the value of which is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to practice (thus, "pragmatic").
John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time "if" openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths.
Though not widely known, a new variation of the pragmatic theory was defined and wielded successfully from the 20th century forward. Defined and named by William Ernest Hocking, this variation is known as "negative pragmatism". Essentially, what works may or may not be true, but what fails cannot be true because the truth always works. Richard Feynman also ascribed to it: "We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong." This approach incorporates many of the ideas from Peirce, James, and Dewey. For Peirce, the idea of "... endless investigation would tend to bring about scientific belief ..." fits negative pragmatism in that a negative pragmatist would never stop testing. As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right." Similarly, James and Dewey's ideas also ascribe truth to repeated testing which is "self-corrective" over time.
Pragmatism and negative pragmatism are also closely aligned with the coherence theory of truth in that any testing should not be isolated but rather incorporate knowledge from all human endeavors and experience. The universe is a whole and integrated system, and testing should acknowledge and account for its diversity. As Feynman said, "... if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong."
Social constructivism holds that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed," because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold). Rather, perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, are socially constructed.
Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made. Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom—"verum ipsum factum"—"truth itself is constructed". Hegel and Marx were among the other early proponents of the premise that truth is, or can be, socially constructed. Marx, like many critical theorists who followed, did not reject the existence of objective truth but rather distinguished between true knowledge and knowledge that has been distorted through power or ideology. For Marx, scientific and true knowledge is "in accordance with the dialectical understanding of history" and ideological knowledge is "an epiphenomenal expression of the relation of material forces in a given economic arrangement".
Consensus theory holds that truth is whatever is agreed upon, or in some versions, might come to be agreed upon, by some specified group. Such a group might include all human beings, or a subset thereof consisting of more than one person.
Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of "truth" is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation. Among the current strong critics of consensus theory is the philosopher Nicholas Rescher.
In the Islamic tradition, this principle is exemplified by the hadith in which Muhammad states, "My community will never agree upon an error"
Modern developments in the field of philosophy, starting with the relatively modern notion that a theory being old does not necessarily imply that it is completely flawless, have resulted in the rise of a new thesis: that the term "truth" does not denote a real property of sentences or propositions. This thesis is in part a response to the common use of "truth predicates" (e.g., that some particular thing "...is true") which was particularly prevalent in philosophical discourse on truth in the first half of the 20th century. From this point of view, to assert that "'2 + 2 = 4' is true" is logically equivalent to asserting that "2 + 2 = 4", and the phrase "is true" is completely dispensable in this and every other context. In common parlance, truth predicates are not commonly heard, and it would be interpreted as an unusual occurrence were someone to utilise a truth predicate in an everyday conversation when asserting that something is true. Newer perspectives that take this discrepancy into account and work with sentence structures that are actually employed in common discourse can be broadly described:
Whichever term is used, deflationary theories can be said to hold in common that "[t]he predicate 'true' is an expressive convenience, not the name of a property requiring deep analysis." Once we have identified the truth predicate's formal features and utility, deflationists argue, we have said all there is to be said about truth. Among the theoretical concerns of these views is to explain away those special cases where it "does" appear that the concept of truth has peculiar and interesting properties. (See, e.g., Semantic paradoxes, and below.)
In addition to highlighting such formal aspects of the predicate "is true", some deflationists point out that the concept enables us to express things that might otherwise require infinitely long sentences. For example, one cannot express confidence in Michael's accuracy by asserting the endless sentence:
This assertion can also be succinctly expressed by saying: "What Michael says is true".
Attributed to P. F. Strawson is the performative theory of truth which holds that to say "'Snow is white' is true" is to perform the speech act of signaling one's agreement with the claim that snow is white (much like nodding one's head in agreement). The idea that some statements are more actions than communicative statements is not as odd as it may seem. Consider, for example, that when the wedding couple say "I do" at the appropriate time in a wedding, they are performing the act of taking the other to be their lawful wedded spouse. They are not "describing" themselves as taking the other, but actually "doing" so (perhaps the most thorough analysis of such "illocutionary acts" is J. L. Austin, "How to Do Things With Words").
Strawson holds that a similar analysis is applicable to all speech acts, not just illocutionary ones: "To say a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement, but rather to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement. When one says 'It's true that it's raining,' one asserts no more than 'It's raining.' The function of [the statement] 'It's true that...' is to agree with, accept, or endorse the statement that 'it's raining.'"
According to the redundancy theory of truth, asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, making the assertion that " 'Snow is white' is true" is equivalent to asserting "Snow is white". Redundancy theorists infer from this premise that truth is a redundant concept; that is, it is merely a word that is traditionally used in conversation or writing, generally for emphasis, but not a word that actually equates to anything in reality. This theory is commonly attributed to Frank P. Ramsey, who held that the use of words like "fact" and "truth" was nothing but a roundabout way of asserting a proposition, and that treating these words as separate problems in isolation from judgment was merely a "linguistic muddle".
A variant of redundancy theory is the disquotational theory which uses a modified form of Tarski's schema: To say that '"P" is true' is to say that P. A version of this theory was defended by C. J. F. Williams in his book "What is Truth?" Yet another version of deflationism is the prosentential theory of truth, first developed by Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap as an elaboration of Ramsey's claims. They argue that sentences like "That's true", when said in response to "It's raining", are prosentences, expressions that merely repeat the content of other expressions. In the same way that "it" means the same as "my dog" in the sentence "My dog was hungry, so I fed it", "That's true" is supposed to mean the same as "It's raining"—if you say the latter and I then say the former. These variations do not necessarily follow Ramsey in asserting that truth is "not" a property, but rather can be understood to say that, for instance, the assertion "P" may well involve a substantial truth, and the theorists in this case are minimizing only the redundancy or prosentence involved in the statement such as "that's true."
Deflationary principles do not apply to representations that are not analogous to sentences, and also do not apply to many other things that are commonly judged to be true or otherwise. Consider the analogy between the sentence "Snow is white" and the character named Snow White, both of which can be true in some sense. To a minimalist, saying "Snow is white is true" is the same as saying "Snow is white," but to say "Snow White is true" is "not" the same as saying "Snow White."
Philosophical skepticism is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of knowledge or belief which ascribe truth to their assertions and propositions. The primary target of philosophical skepticism is epistemology, but it can be applied to any domain, such as the supernatural, morality (moral skepticism), and religion (skepticism about the existence of God).
Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. Radical forms of skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge us to suspend judgment regarding ascription of truth on many or all controversial matters. More moderate forms of skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about the "big questions" in life, such as whether God exists or whether there is an afterlife. Religious skepticism is "doubt concerning basic religious principles (such as immortality, providence, and revelation)". Scientific skepticism concerns testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using the scientific method, to discover empirical evidence for them.
Several of the major theories of truth hold that there is a particular property the having of which makes a belief or proposition true. Pluralist theories of truth assert that there may be more than one property that makes propositions true: ethical propositions might be true by virtue of coherence. Propositions about the physical world might be true by corresponding to the objects and properties they are about.
Some of the pragmatic theories, such as those by Charles Peirce and William James, included aspects of correspondence, coherence and constructivist theories. Crispin Wright argued in his 1992 book "Truth and Objectivity" that any predicate which satisfied certain platitudes about truth qualified as a truth predicate. In some discourses, Wright argued, the role of the truth predicate might be played by the notion of superassertibility. Michael Lynch, in a 2009 book "Truth as One and Many", argued that we should see truth as a functional property capable of being multiply manifested in distinct properties like correspondence or coherence.
According to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views which was carried out in November 2009 (taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students) 45% of respondents accept or lean towards correspondence theories, 21% accept or lean towards deflationary theories and 14% epistemic theories.
Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell us if a proposition is true or not. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.
A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a "fact" (also called a "synthetic claim" or a "contingency") which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as "If p and q, then p" is considered to be a logical truth because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any fact of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.
Degrees of truth in logic may be represented using two or more discrete values, as with bivalent logic (or binary logic), three-valued logic, and other forms of finite-valued logic. Truth in logic can be represented using numbers comprising a continuous range, typically between 0 and 1, as with fuzzy logic and other forms of infinite-valued logic. In general, the concept of representing truth using more than two values is known as many-valued logic.
There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the "model theory of truth" and the "proof theory of truth".
Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.
In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the development of the Church–Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements that are provable in a formal axiomatic system.
The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system. Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution, or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis. Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory. In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.
Reconsidered assumptions about the essence of truth arose in the wake of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Martin Heidegger pointed out that truth may be essentially a matter of letting beings (entities of any kind, which can include logical propositions) be free to reveal themselves as they are, and stated:
Gödel agreed that the ability to perceive the truth of a mathematical or logical proposition is a matter of intuition, an ability he admitted could be ultimately beyond the scope of a formal theory of logic or mathematics and perhaps best considered in the realm of human comprehension and communication, but commented:
The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:
where 'P' refers to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.
Tarski's theory of truth (named after Alfred Tarski) was developed for formal languages, such as formal logic. Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression "is true" could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an "object language", the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences such as, "This sentence is not true". As a result, Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.
Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in "Principia Mathematica" by putting statements into a hierarchy of types, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.
Kripke's theory of truth (named after Saul Kripke) contends that a natural language can in fact contain its own truth predicate without giving rise to contradiction. He showed how to construct one as follows:
Notice that truth never gets defined for sentences like "This sentence is false", since it was not in the original subset and does not predicate truth of any sentence in the original or any subsequent set. In Kripke's terms, these are "ungrounded." Since these sentences are never assigned either truth or falsehood even if the process is carried out infinitely, Kripke's theory implies that some sentences are neither true nor false. This contradicts the principle of bivalence: every sentence must be either true or false. Since this principle is a key premise in deriving the liar paradox, the paradox is dissolved.
However, it has been shown by Gödel that self-reference cannot be avoided naively, since propositions about seemingly unrelated objects can have an informal self-referential meaning; in Gödel's work, these objects are integer numbers, and they have an informal meaning regarding propositions. In fact, this idea—manifested by the diagonal lemma—is the basis for Tarski's theorem that truth cannot be consistently defined.
It has thus been claimed that Kripke's system indeed leads to contradiction: while its truth predicate is only partial, it does give truth value (true/false) to propositions such as the one built in Tarski's proof, and is therefore inconsistent. While there is still a debate on whether Tarski's proof can be implemented to every similar partial truth system, none have been shown to be consistent by acceptable methods used in mathematical logic.
The truth predicate ""P" is true" has great practical value in human language, allowing us to "efficiently" endorse or impeach claims made by others, to emphasize the truth or falsity of a statement, or to enable various indirect (Gricean) conversational implications. Individuals or societies will sometime punish "false" statements to deter falsehoods; the oldest surviving law text, the Code of Ur-Nammu, lists penalties for false accusations of sorcery or adultery, as well as for committing perjury in court. Even four-year-old children can pass simple "false belief" tests and successfully assess that another individual's belief diverges from reality in a specific way; by adulthood we have strong implicit intuitions about "truth" that form a "folk theory" of truth. These intuitions include:
Like many folk theories, our folk theory of truth is useful in everyday life but, upon deep analysis, turns out to be technically self-contradictory; in particular, any formal system that fully obeys Capture and Release semantics for truth (also known as the "T-schema"), and that also respects classical logic, is provably inconsistent and succumbs to the liar paradox or to a similar contradiction.
Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's ideas about truth are seen by some as consistent with correspondence theory. In his "Metaphysics", Aristotle stated: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy proceeds to say of Aristotle:
[...] Aristotle sounds much more like a genuine correspondence theorist in the "Categories" (12b11, 14b14), where he talks of "underlying things" that make statements true and implies that these "things" (pragmata) are logically structured situations or facts (viz., his sitting, his not sitting). Most influential is his claim in "De Interpretatione" (16a3) that thoughts are "likenesses" (homoiosis) of things. Although he nowhere defines truth in terms of a thought's likeness to a thing or fact, it is clear that such a definition would fit well into his overall philosophy of mind. [...]
Similar statements can also be found in Plato's dialogues ("Cratylus" 385b2, "Sophist" 263b).
The Stoics conceived truth as accessible from impressions via cognitive grasping.
Other Greek philosophers maintained that truth was either not accessible to mortals, or of greatly limited accessibility, forming early philosophical skepticism. Among these were Xenophanes, Democritus, and Pyrrho.
In Hinduism, Truth is defined as "unchangeable", "that which has no distortion", "that which is beyond distinctions of time, space, and person", "that which pervades the universe in all its constancy". The human body, therefore is not completely true as it changes with time, for example. There are many references, properties and explanations of truth by Hindu sages that explain varied facets of truth, such as the national motto of India: "Satyameva Jayate" (Truth alone wins), as well as "Satyam muktaye" (Truth liberates), "Satya' is 'Parahit'artham' va'unmanaso yatha'rthatvam' satyam" (Satya is the benevolent use of words and the mind for the welfare of others or in other words responsibilities is truth too), "When one is firmly established in speaking truth, the fruits of action become subservient to him (patanjali yogasutras, sutra number 2.36), "The face of truth is covered by a golden bowl. "Unveil it, O Pusan (Sun), so that I who have truth as my duty (satyadharma) may see it!"" (Brhadaranyaka V 15 1–4 and the brief IIsa Upanisad 15–18), Truth is superior to silence (Manusmriti), etc. Combined with other words, satya acts as modifier, like "ultra" or "highest," or more literally "truest," connoting purity and excellence. For example, satyaloka is the "highest heaven' and Satya Yuga is the "golden age" or best of the four cyclical cosmic ages in Hinduism, and so on.
In Buddhism, particularly in the Mahayana tradition, the notion of truth is often divided into the Two Truths Doctrine, which consists of relative or conventional truth and ultimate truth. The former refers to truth that is based on common understanding among ordinary people and is accepted as a practical basis for communication of higher truths. Ultimate truth necessarily transcends logic in the sphere of ordinary experience, and recognizes such phenomena as illusory. Mādhyamaka philosophy asserts that any doctrine can be analyzed with both divisions of truth. Affirmation and negation belong to relative and absolute truth respectively. Political law is regarded as relative, while religious law is absolute.
Christianity has a soteriological view of truth. According to the Bible in , Jesus is quoted as having said "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me".
In early Islamic philosophy, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined truth in his work Kitab Al-Shifa "The Book of Healing", Book I, Chapter 8, as:
Avicenna elaborated on his definition of truth later in Book VIII, Chapter 6:
However, this definition is merely a rendering of the medieval Latin translation of the work by Simone van Riet. A modern translation of the original Arabic text states:
Reevaluating Avicenna, and also Augustine and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas stated in his "Disputed Questions on Truth":
Thus, for Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth in things (ontological truth). Following this, he wrote an elegant re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa I.16.1:
Richard Firth Green examined the concept of truth in the later Middle Ages in his "A Crisis of Truth", and concludes that roughly during the reign of Richard II of England the very meaning of the concept changes. The idea of the oath, which was so much part and parcel of for instance Romance literature, changes from a subjective concept to a more objective one (in Derek Pearsall's summary). Whereas truth (the "trouthe" of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight") was first "an ethical truth in which truth is understood to reside in persons", in Ricardian England it "transforms...into a political truth in which truth is understood to reside in documents".
Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the correspondence theory of truth. Kant writes in the "Critique of Pure Reason": "The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed". However, Kant denies that this correspondence definition of truth provides us with a test or criterion to establish which judgements are true. Kant states in his logic lectures:
[...] Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only "by cognizing it". Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object.
The ancients called such a circle in explanation a "diallelon". And actually the logicians were always reproached with this mistake by the sceptics, who observed that with this definition of truth it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man. The accusation was grounded, too. Only the solution of the indicated problem is impossible without qualification and for every man. [...]
This passage makes use of his distinction between nominal and real definitions. A nominal definition explains the meaning of a linguistic expression. A real definition describes the essence of certain objects and enables us to determine whether any given item falls within the definition. Kant holds that the definition of truth is merely nominal and, therefore, we cannot employ it to establish which judgements are true. According to Kant, the ancient skeptics were critical of the logicians for holding that, by means of a merely nominal definition of truth, they can establish which judgements are true. They were trying to do something that is "impossible without qualification and for every man".
Georg Hegel distanced his philosophy from psychology by presenting truth as being an external self-moving object instead of being related to inner, subjective thoughts. Hegel's truth is analogous to the mechanics of a material body in motion under the influence of its own inner force. "Truth is its own self-movement within itself." Teleological truth moves itself in the three-step form of dialectical triplicity toward the final goal of perfect, final, absolute truth. According to Hegel, the progression of philosophical truth is a resolution of past oppositions into increasingly more accurate approximations of absolute truth. Chalybäus used the terms "thesis", "antithesis", and "synthesis" to describe Hegel's dialectical triplicity. The "thesis" consists of an incomplete historical movement. To resolve the incompletion, an "antithesis" occurs which opposes the "thesis." In turn, the "synthesis" appears when the "thesis" and "antithesis" become reconciled and a higher level of truth is obtained. This "synthesis" thereby becomes a "thesis," which will again necessitate an "antithesis," requiring a new "synthesis" until a final state is reached as the result of reason's historical movement. History is the Absolute Spirit moving toward a goal. This historical progression will finally conclude itself when the Absolute Spirit understands its own infinite self at the very end of history. Absolute Spirit will then be the complete expression of an infinite God.
For Arthur Schopenhauer, a judgment is a combination or separation of two or more concepts. If a judgment is to be an expression of knowledge, it must have a sufficient reason or ground by which the judgment could be called true. "Truth is the reference of a judgment to something different from itself which is its sufficient reason (ground)". Judgments can have material, formal, transcendental, or metalogical truth. A judgment has "material" truth if its concepts are based on intuitive perceptions that are generated from sensations. If a judgment has its reason (ground) in another judgment, its truth is called logical or "formal". If a judgment, of, for example, pure mathematics or pure science, is based on the forms (space, time, causality) of intuitive, empirical knowledge, then the judgment has "transcendental" truth.
When Søren Kierkegaard, as his character "Johannes Climacus", ends his writings: "My thesis was, subjectivity, heartfelt is the truth", he does not advocate for subjectivism in its extreme form (the theory that something is true simply because one believes it to be so), but rather that the objective approach to matters of personal truth cannot shed any light upon that which is most essential to a person's life. Objective truths are concerned with the facts of a person's being, while subjective truths are concerned with a person's way of being. Kierkegaard agrees that objective truths for the study of subjects like mathematics, science, and history are relevant and necessary, but argues that objective truths do not shed any light on a person's inner relationship to existence. At best, these truths can only provide a severely narrowed perspective that has little to do with one's actual experience of life.
While objective truths are final and static, subjective truths are continuing and dynamic. The truth of one's existence is a living, inward, and subjective experience that is always in the process of becoming. The values, morals, and spiritual approaches a person adopts, while not denying the existence of objective truths of those beliefs, can only become truly known when they have been inwardly appropriated through subjective experience. Thus, Kierkegaard criticizes all systematic philosophies which attempt to know life or the truth of existence via theories and objective knowledge about reality. As Kierkegaard claims, human truth is something that is continually occurring, and a human being cannot find truth separate from the subjective experience of one's own existing, defined by the values and fundamental essence that consist of one's way of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth, or 'the will to truth', was a consequence of the "will to power" of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the "will to power", and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil", "The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..." (aphorism 4). He proposed the "will to power" as a truth only because, according to him, it was the most life-affirming and sincere perspective one could have.
Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:
[...] Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call "truth" is only "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; "truth" is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence. [...]
Separately Nietzsche suggested that an ancient, metaphysical belief in the divinity of Truth lies at the heart of and has served as the foundation for the entire subsequent Western intellectual tradition: "But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take "our" fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is Truth; that Truth is 'Divine'..."
Other philosophers take this common meaning to be secondary and derivative. According to Martin Heidegger, the original meaning and essence of truth in Ancient Greece was unconcealment, or the revealing or bringing of what was previously hidden into the open, as indicated by the original Greek term for truth, "aletheia". On this view, the conception of truth as correctness is a later derivation from the concept's original essence, a development Heidegger traces to the Latin term "veritas".
Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician who became an American philosopher, said: "There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil".
The logical progression or connection of this line of thought is to conclude that truth can lie, since half-truths are deceptive and may lead to a false conclusion.
Pragmatists like C. S. Peirce take truth to have some manner of essential relation to human practices for inquiring into and discovering truth, with Peirce himself holding that truth is what human inquiry would find out on a matter, if our practice of inquiry were taken as far as it could profitably go: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth..."
According to Kitaro Nishida, "knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing."
Erich Fromm finds that trying to discuss truth as "absolute truth" is sterile and that emphasis ought to be placed on "optimal truth". He considers truth as stemming from the survival imperative of grasping one's environment physically and intellectually, whereby young children instinctively seek truth so as to orient themselves in "a strange and powerful world". The accuracy of their perceived approximation of the truth will therefore have direct consequences on their ability to deal with their environment. Fromm can be understood to define truth as a functional approximation of reality. His vision of optimal truth is described partly in "Man from Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics" (1947), from which excerpts are included below.
Truth, says Michel Foucault, is problematic when any attempt is made to see truth as an "objective" quality. He prefers not to use the term truth itself but "Regimes of Truth". In his historical investigations he found truth to be something that was itself a part of, or embedded within, a given power structure. Thus Foucault's view shares much in common with the concepts of Nietzsche. Truth for Foucault is also something that shifts through various episteme throughout history.
Jean Baudrillard considered truth to be largely simulated, that is pretending to have something, as opposed to dissimulation, pretending to not have something. He took his cue from iconoclasts whom he claims knew that images of God demonstrated that God did not exist. Baudrillard wrote in "Precession of the Simulacra":
Some examples of simulacra that Baudrillard cited were: that prisons simulate the "truth" that society is free; scandals (e.g., Watergate) simulate that corruption is corrected; Disney simulates that the U.S. itself is an adult place. One must remember that though such examples seem extreme, such extremity is an important part of Baudrillard's theory. For a less extreme example, consider how movies usually end with the bad being punished, humiliated, or otherwise failing, thus affirming for viewers the concept that the good end happily and the bad unhappily, a narrative which implies that the status quo and established power structures are largely legitimate.
There is controversy as to the truth value of a proposition made in bad faith self-deception, such as when a hypochondriac has a complaint with no physical symptom.
Reference works | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29920 |
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He previously served as the second vice president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national level.
During the American Revolution, he represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration, drafted the law for religious freedom as a Virginia legislator, and served as the second Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, during the American Revolutionary War. He became the United States Minister to France in May 1785, and subsequently, the nation's first secretary of state under President George Washington from 1790 to 1793. Jefferson and James Madison organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party during the formation of the First Party System. With Madison, he anonymously wrote the provocative Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 and 1799, which sought to strengthen states' rights by nullifying the federal Alien and Sedition Acts.
As president, Jefferson pursued the nation's shipping and trade interests against Barbary pirates and aggressive British trade policies. Starting in 1803, Jefferson promoted a western expansionist policy, organizing the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the nation's land area. To make room for white settlement, Jefferson began a controversial process of Indian tribal removal from the newly acquired territory. As a result of peace negotiations with France, his administration reduced military forces. Jefferson was reelected in 1804. His second term was beset with difficulties at home, including the trial of former vice president Aaron Burr. In 1807, American foreign trade was diminished when Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act in response to British threats to U.S. shipping. The same year, Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.
Jefferson, while primarily a planter, lawyer and politician, mastered many disciplines, which ranged from surveying and mathematics to horticulture and mechanics. He was an architect in the classical tradition. Jefferson's keen interest in religion and philosophy led to his presidency of the American Philosophical Society; he shunned organized religion but was influenced by both Christianity and deism. A philologist, Jefferson knew several languages. He was a prolific letter writer and corresponded with many prominent people. His only full-length book is "Notes on the State of Virginia" (1785), considered perhaps the most important American book published before 1800.
Although Jefferson is regarded as a leading spokesman for democracy and republicanism in the era of the Enlightenment, some modern scholarship has been critical of him, finding a contradiction between his ownership and trading of many slaves that worked his plantations, and his famous declaration that "all men are created equal." Although the matter remains a subject of debate, most historians believe that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, a mixed-race woman who was a half-sister to his late wife and that he fathered at least one of her children. Presidential scholars and historians generally praise Jefferson's public achievements, including his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in Virginia. Jefferson continues to rank highly among U.S. presidents.
After retiring from public office, he founded the University of Virginia. Along with Millard Fillmore who founded the University at Buffalo, he is the only U.S. president to found a university.
Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743, Old Style, Julian calendar), at the family home in Shadwell in the Colony of Virginia, the third of ten children. He was of English, and possibly Welsh, descent and was born a British subject. His father Peter Jefferson was a planter and surveyor who died when Jefferson was fourteen; his mother was Jane Randolph. Peter Jefferson moved his family to Tuckahoe Plantation in 1745 upon the death of William Randolph, the plantation's owner and Jefferson's friend, who in his will had named him guardian of his children. The Jeffersons returned to Shadwell in 1752, where Peter died in 1757; his estate was divided between his sons Thomas and Randolph. Thomas inherited approximately of land, including Monticello. He assumed full authority over his property at age 21.
Jefferson began his education beside the Randolph children with tutors at Tuckahoe. Thomas' father, Peter, was self-taught, and regretting not having a formal education, he entered Thomas into an English school early, at age five. In 1752, at age nine, he began attending a local school run by a Scottish Presbyterian minister and also began studying the natural world, which he grew to love. At this time he began studying Latin, Greek, and French, while also learning to ride horses. Thomas also read books from his father's modest library. He was taught from 1758 to 1760 by the Reverend James Maury near Gordonsville, Virginia, where he studied history, science, and the classics while boarding with Maury's family. During this period Jefferson came to know and befriended various American Indians, including the famous Cherokee chief "Ontasseté" who often stopped at Shadwell to visit, on their way to Williamsburg to trade. During the two years Jefferson was with the Maury family, he traveled to Williamsburg and was a guest of Colonel Dandridge, father of Martha Washington. In Williamsburg the young Jefferson met and came to admire Patrick Henry, who was eight years his senior, sharing a common interest of violin playing.
Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, at age 16 and studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy under professor William Small. Small introduced Jefferson to George Wythe and Francis Fauquier along with British Empiricists including John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. Small, Wythe, and Fauquier recognized Jefferson as a man of exceptional ability and included him in their inner circle where he became a regular member of their Friday dinner parties where politics and philosophy were discussed. Jefferson later wrote that he "heard more common good sense, more rational & philosophical conversations than in all the rest of my life". During his first year at the college he was given more to parties and dancing and was not very frugal with his expenditures; during his second year, regretting that he had squandered away much time and money, he applied himself to fifteen hours of study a day. Jefferson improved his French and Greek and his skill at the violin. He graduated two years after starting in 1762. He read the law under Wythe's tutelage to obtain his law license while working as a law clerk in his office. He also read a wide variety of English classics and political works. Jefferson was well read in a broad variety of subjects, which along with law and philosophy, included history, natural law, natural religion, ethics, and several areas in science, including agriculture. Overall, he drew very deeply on the philosophers. During the years of study under the watchful eye of Wythe, Jefferson authored a survey of his extensive readings in his "Commonplace Book". Wythe was so impressed with Jefferson, that he would later bequeath his entire library to Jefferson.
The year 1765 was an eventful one in Jefferson's family. In July, his sister Martha married his close friend and college companion Dabney Carr, which greatly pleased Jefferson. In October, he mourned his sister Jane's unexpected death at age 25 and wrote a farewell epitaph in Latin.
Jefferson treasured his books and amassed a total of three libraries in his lifetime. The first, a library of 200 volumes started in his youth which included books inherited from his father and left to him by George Wythe, was destroyed when his Shadwell home burned in a 1770 fire. Nevertheless, he had replenished his collection with 1,250 titles by 1773, and it grew to almost 6,500 volumes by 1814. After the British burned the Library of Congress during the War of 1812, he sold this second library to the U.S. government to jumpstart the Library of Congress collection, for the price of $23,950. Jefferson used a portion of the money secured by the sale to pay off some of his large debt, remitting $10,500 to William Short and $4,870 to John Barnes of Georgetown. However, he soon resumed collecting for his personal library, writing to John Adams, "I cannot live without books." He began to construct a new library of his personal favorites and by the time of his death a decade later it had grown to almost 2,000 volumes.
Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767 and then lived with his mother at Shadwell. In addition to practicing law, Jefferson represented Albemarle County as a delegate in the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769 until 1775. He pursued reforms to slavery. He introduced legislation in 1769 allowing masters to take control over the emancipation of slaves, taking discretion away from the royal governor and General Court. He persuaded his cousin Richard Bland to spearhead the legislation's passage, but reaction was strongly negative.
Jefferson took seven cases for freedom-seeking slaves and waived his fee for one client, who claimed that he should be freed before the statutory age of thirty-one required for emancipation in cases with inter-racial grandparents. He invoked the Natural Law to argue, "everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will ... This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance." The judge cut him off and ruled against his client. As a consolation, Jefferson gave his client some money, conceivably used to aid his escape shortly thereafter. He later incorporated this sentiment into the Declaration of Independence. He also took on 68 cases for the General Court of Virginia in 1767, in addition to three notable cases: "Howell v. Netherland" (1770), "Bolling v. Bolling" (1771), and "Blair v. Blair" (1772).
The British Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts in 1774, and Jefferson wrote a resolution calling for a "Day of Fasting and Prayer" in protest, as well as a boycott of all British goods. His resolution was later expanded into "A Summary View of the Rights of British America", in which he argued that people have the right to govern themselves.
In 1768, Jefferson began constructing his primary residence Monticello (Italian for "Little Mountain") on a hilltop overlooking his plantation. He spent most of his adult life designing Monticello as architect and was quoted as saying, "Architecture is my delight, and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements." Construction was done mostly by local masons and carpenters, assisted by Jefferson's slaves.
He moved into the South Pavilion in 1770. Turning Monticello into a neoclassical masterpiece in the Palladian style was his perennial project.
On January 1, 1772, Jefferson married his third cousin Martha Wayles Skelton, the 23-year-old widow of Bathurst Skelton, and she moved into the South Pavilion. She was a frequent hostess for Jefferson and managed the large household. Biographer Dumas Malone described the marriage as the happiest period of Jefferson's life. Martha read widely, did fine needlework, and was a skilled pianist; Jefferson often accompanied her on the violin or cello. During their ten years of marriage, Martha bore six children: Martha "Patsy" (1772–1836); Jane (1774–1775); a son who lived for only a few weeks in 1777; Mary Wayles "Polly" (1778–1804); Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781); and another Lucy Elizabeth (1782–1784). Only Martha and Mary survived more than a few years. Martha's father John Wayles died in 1773, and the couple inherited 135 people of color who were legally enslaved, , and the estate's debts. The debts took Jefferson years to satisfy, contributing to his financial problems.
Martha later suffered from ill health, including diabetes, and frequent childbirth further weakened her. Her mother had died young, and Martha lived with two stepmothers as a girl. A few months after the birth of her last child, she died on September 6, 1782, at the age of 33 with Jefferson at her bedside. Shortly before her death, Martha made Jefferson promise never to marry again, telling him that she could not bear to have another mother raise her children. Jefferson was grief-stricken by her death, relentlessly pacing back and forth, nearly to the point of exhaustion. He emerged after three weeks, taking long rambling rides on secluded roads with his daughter Martha, by her description "a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief".
After working as Secretary of State (1790–93), he returned to Monticello and initiated a remodeling based on the architectural concepts which he had acquired in Europe. The work continued throughout most of his presidency, being finished in 1809.
Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. The document's social and political ideals were proposed by Jefferson before the inauguration of Washington. At age 33, he was one of the youngest delegates to the Second Continental Congress beginning in 1775 at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, where a formal declaration of independence from Britain was overwhelmingly favored. Jefferson chose his words for the Declaration in June 1775, shortly after the war had begun, where the idea of independence from Britain had long since become popular among the colonies. He was inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the sanctity of the individual, as well as by the writings of Locke and Montesquieu.
He sought out John Adams, an emerging leader of the Congress. They became close friends and Adams supported Jefferson's appointment to the Committee of Five formed to draft a declaration of independence in furtherance of the Lee Resolution passed by the Congress, which declared the United Colonies independent. The committee initially thought that Adams should write the document, but Adams persuaded the committee to choose Jefferson.
Jefferson consulted with other committee members over the next seventeen days and drew on his own proposed draft of the Virginia Constitution, George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and other sources. The other committee members made some changes, and a final draft was presented to the Congress on June 28, 1776.
The declaration was introduced on Friday, June 28, and Congress began debate over its contents on Monday, July 1, resulting in the omission of a fourth of the text, including a passage critical of King George III and the slave trade. Jefferson resented the changes, but he did not speak publicly about the revisions. On July 4, 1776, the Congress ratified the Declaration, and delegates signed it on August 2; in doing so, they were committing an act of treason against the Crown. Jefferson's preamble is regarded as an enduring statement of human rights, and the phrase "all men are created equal" has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language" containing "the most potent and consequential words in American history".
At the start of the Revolution, Jefferson was a Colonel and was named commander of the Albemarle County Militia on September 26, 1775. He was then elected to the Virginia House of Delegates for Albemarle County in September 1776, when finalizing a state constitution was a priority.
For nearly three years, he assisted with the constitution and was especially proud of his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which forbade state support of religious institutions or enforcement of religious doctrine. The bill failed to pass, as did his legislation to disestablish the Anglican church, but both were later revived by James Madison.
In 1778, Jefferson was given the task of revising the state's laws. He drafted 126 bills in three years, including laws to streamline the judicial system. Jefferson's proposed statutes provided for general education, which he considered the basis of "republican government". He had become alarmed that Virginia's powerful landed gentry were becoming a hereditary aristocracy. He took the lead in abolishing what he called "feudal and unnatural distinctions." He targeted laws such as entail and primogeniture by which the oldest son inherited all the land. The entail laws made it perpetual: the one who inherited the land could not sell it, but had to bequeath it to his oldest son. As a result, increasingly large plantations, worked by white tenant farmers and by black slaves, gained in size and wealth and political power in the eastern ("Tidewater") tobacco areas. During the Revolutionary era, all such laws were repealed by the states that had them.
Jefferson was elected governor for one-year terms in 1779 and 1780. He transferred the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, and introduced measures for public education, religious freedom, and revision of inheritance laws.
During General Benedict Arnold's 1781 invasion of Virginia, Jefferson escaped Richmond just ahead of the British forces, and the city was burned to the ground. Jefferson sent an emergency dispatch to Colonel Sampson Mathews, whose militia was traveling nearby, to thwart Arnold's efforts. General Charles Cornwallis that spring dispatched a cavalry force led by Banastre Tarleton to capture Jefferson and members of the Assembly at Monticello, but Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia thwarted the British plan. Jefferson escaped to Poplar Forest, his plantation to the west. When the General Assembly reconvened in June 1781, it conducted an inquiry into Jefferson's actions which eventually concluded that Jefferson had acted with honor—but he was not re-elected.
In April of the same year, his daughter Lucy died at age one. A second daughter of that name was born the following year, but she died at age three.
Jefferson received a letter of inquiry in 1780 about the geography, history, and government of Virginia from French diplomat François Barbé-Marbois, who was gathering data on the United States. Jefferson included his written responses in a book, "Notes on the State of Virginia" (1785). He compiled the book over five years, including reviews of scientific knowledge, Virginia's history, politics, laws, culture, and geography. The book explores what constitutes a good society, using Virginia as an exemplar. Jefferson included extensive data about the state's natural resources and economy and wrote at length about slavery, miscegenation, and his belief that blacks and whites could not live together as free people in one society because of justified resentments of the enslaved. He also wrote of his views on the American Indian and considered them as equals in body and mind to European settlers.
"Notes" was first published in 1785 in French and appeared in English in 1787. Biographer George Tucker considered the work "surprising in the extent of the information which a single individual had been thus able to acquire, as to the physical features of the state", and Merrill D. Peterson described it as an accomplishment for which all Americans should be grateful.
The United States formed a Congress of the Confederation following victory in the Revolutionary War and a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783, to which Jefferson was appointed as a Virginia delegate. He was a member of the committee setting foreign exchange rates and recommended an American currency based on the decimal system which was adopted. He advised the formation of the Committee of the States to fill the power vacuum when Congress was in recess. The Committee met when Congress adjourned, but disagreements rendered it dysfunctional.
In the Congress's 1783–84 session, Jefferson acted as chairman of committees to establish a viable system of government for the new Republic and to propose a policy for the settlement of the western territories. Jefferson was the principal author of the Land Ordinance of 1784, whereby Virginia ceded to the national government the vast area that it claimed northwest of the Ohio River. He insisted that this territory should not be used as colonial territory by any of the thirteen states, but that it should be divided into sections which could become states. He plotted borders for nine new states in their initial stages and wrote an ordinance banning slavery in all the nation's territories. Congress made extensive revisions, including rejection of the ban on slavery. The provisions banning slavery were known later as the "Jefferson Proviso;" they were modified and implemented three years later in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and became the law for the entire Northwest.
In 1784, Jefferson was sent by the Congress of the Confederation to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris as Minister Plenipotentiary for Negotiating Treaties of Amity and Commerce with Great Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, Denmark, Saxony, Hamburg, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sardinia, The Pope, Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, the Sublime Porte, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Some believed that the recently widowed Jefferson was depressed and that the assignment would distract him from his wife's death. With his young daughter Patsy and two servants, he departed in July 1784, arriving in Paris the next month. Less than a year later he was assigned the additional duty of succeeding Franklin as Minister to France. French foreign minister Count de Vergennes commented, "You replace Monsieur Franklin, I hear." Jefferson replied, "I "succeed". No man can replace him." During his five years in Paris, Jefferson played a leading role in shaping the foreign policy of the United States.
Jefferson had Patsy educated at the Pentemont Abbey. In 1786, he met and fell in love with Maria Cosway, an accomplished—and married—Italian-English musician of 27. They saw each other frequently over a period of six weeks. She returned to Great Britain, but they maintained a lifelong correspondence.
Jefferson sent for his youngest surviving child, nine-year-old Polly, in June 1787, who was accompanied on her voyage by a young slave from Monticello, Sally Hemings. Jefferson had taken her older brother James Hemings to Paris as part of his domestic staff, and had him trained in French cuisine. According to Sally's son, Madison Hemings, the 16-year-old Sally and Jefferson began a sexual relationship in Paris, where she became pregnant. According to his account, Hemings agreed to return to the United States only after Jefferson promised to free her children when they came of age.
While in France, Jefferson became a regular companion of the Marquis de Lafayette, a French hero of the American Revolutionary War, and Jefferson used his influence to procure trade agreements with France. As the French Revolution began, Jefferson allowed his Paris residence, the Hôtel de Langeac, to be used for meetings by Lafayette and other republicans. He was in Paris during the storming of the Bastille and consulted with Lafayette while the latter drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Jefferson often found his mail opened by postmasters, so he invented his own enciphering device, the "Wheel Cipher"; he wrote important communications in code for the rest of his career. Jefferson left Paris for America in September 1789, intending to return soon; however, President George Washington appointed him the country's first Secretary of State, forcing him to remain in the nation's capital. Jefferson remained a firm supporter of the French Revolution while opposing its more violent elements.
Soon after returning from France, Jefferson accepted Washington's invitation to serve as Secretary of State. Pressing issues at this time were the national debt and the permanent location of the capital. Jefferson opposed a national debt, preferring that each state retire its own, in contrast to Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who desired consolidation of various states' debts by the federal government. Hamilton also had bold plans to establish the national credit and a national bank, but Jefferson strenuously opposed this and attempted to undermine his agenda, which nearly led Washington to dismiss him from his cabinet. Jefferson later left the cabinet voluntarily.
The second major issue was the capital's permanent location. Hamilton favored a capital close to the major commercial centers of the Northeast, while Washington, Jefferson, and other agrarians wanted it located to the south. After lengthy deadlock, the Compromise of 1790 was struck, permanently locating the capital on the Potomac River, and the federal government assumed the war debts of all thirteen states.
While serving in the government in Philadelphia, Jefferson and political protegee Congressman James Madison founded the National Gazette in 1791, along with poet and writer Phillip Freneau, in an effort to counter Hamilton's Federalist policies, which Hamilton was promoting through the influential Federalist newspaper the Gazette of the United States. The National Gazette made particular criticism of the policies promoted by Hamilton, often through anonymous essays signed by the pen name "Brutus" at Jefferson's urging, which were actually written by Madison. In the Spring of 1791, Jefferson and Madison took a vacation to Vermont. Jefferson had been suffering from migraines and he was tired of Hamilton in-fighting.
In May 1792, Jefferson was alarmed at the political rivalries taking shape; he wrote to Washington, urging him to run for re-election that year as a unifying influence. He urged the president to rally the citizenry to a party that would defend democracy against the corrupting influence of banks and monied interests, as espoused by the Federalists. Historians recognize this letter as the earliest delineation of Democratic-Republican Party principles. Jefferson, Madison, and other Democratic-Republican organizers favored states' rights and local control and opposed federal concentration of power, whereas Hamilton sought more power for the federal government.
Jefferson supported France against Britain when the two nations fought in 1793, though his arguments in the Cabinet were undercut by French Revolutionary envoy Edmond-Charles Genêt's open scorn for President Washington. In his discussions with British Minister George Hammond, Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British to acknowledge their violation of the Treaty of Paris, to vacate their posts in the Northwest, and to compensate the U.S. for slaves whom the British had freed at the end of the war. Seeking a return to private life, Jefferson resigned the cabinet position in December 1793, perhaps to bolster his political influence from outside the administration.
After the Washington administration negotiated the Jay Treaty with Great Britain (1794), Jefferson saw a cause around which to rally his party and organized a national opposition from Monticello. The treaty, designed by Hamilton, aimed to reduce tensions and increase trade. Jefferson warned that it would increase British influence and subvert republicanism, calling it "the boldest act [Hamilton and Jay] ever ventured on to undermine the government". The Treaty passed, but it expired in 1805 during Jefferson's administration and was not renewed. Jefferson continued his pro-French stance; during the violence of the Reign of Terror, he declined to disavow the revolution: "To back away from France would be to undermine the cause of republicanism in America."
In the presidential campaign of 1796, Jefferson lost the electoral college vote to Federalist John Adams by 71–68 and was elected vice president because of a mistake in voting for Adams's running mate. As presiding officer of the Senate, he assumed a more passive role than his predecessor John Adams. He allowed the Senate to freely conduct debates and confined his participation to procedural issues, which he called an "honorable and easy" role. Jefferson had previously studied parliamentary law and procedure for 40 years, making him unusually well qualified to serve as presiding officer. In 1800, he published his assembled notes on Senate procedure as "A Manual of Parliamentary Practice". Jefferson would cast only three tie-breaking votes in the Senate.
Jefferson held four confidential talks with French consul Joseph Létombe in the spring of 1797 where he attacked Adams, predicting that his rival would serve only one term. He also encouraged France to invade England, and advised Létombe to stall any American envoys sent to Paris by instructing him to "listen to them and then drag out the negotiations at length and mollify them by the urbanity of the proceedings." This toughened the tone that the French government adopted toward the Adams administration. After Adams's initial peace envoys were rebuffed, Jefferson and his supporters lobbied for the release of papers related to the incident, called the XYZ Affair after the letters used to disguise the identities of the French officials involved. However, the tactic backfired when it was revealed that French officials had demanded bribes, rallying public support against France. The U.S. began an undeclared naval war with France known as the Quasi-War.
During the Adams presidency, the Federalists rebuilt the military, levied new taxes, and enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson believed that these laws were intended to suppress Democratic-Republicans, rather than prosecute enemy aliens, and considered them unconstitutional. To rally opposition, he and James Madison anonymously wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, declaring that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it by the states. The resolutions followed the "interposition" approach of Madison, in which states may shield their citizens from federal laws that they deem unconstitutional. Jefferson advocated nullification, allowing states to invalidate federal laws altogether. Jefferson warned that, "unless arrested at the threshold", the Alien and Sedition Acts would "necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood".
Historian Ron Chernow claims that "the theoretical damage of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions was deep and lasting, and was a recipe for disunion", contributing to the American Civil War as well as later events. Washington was so appalled by the resolutions that he told Patrick Henry that, if "systematically and pertinaciously pursued", the resolutions would "dissolve the union or produce coercion."
Jefferson had always admired Washington's leadership skills but felt that his Federalist party was leading the country in the wrong direction. Jefferson thought it wise not to attend his funeral in 1799 because of acute differences with Washington while serving as Secretary of State, and remained at Monticello.
In the 1800 presidential election, Jefferson contended once more against Federalist John Adams. Adams's campaign was weakened by unpopular taxes and vicious Federalist infighting over his actions in the Quasi-War. Republicans pointed to the Alien and Sedition Acts and accused the Federalists of being secret monarchists, while Federalists charged that Jefferson was a godless libertine in thrall to the French. Historian Joyce Appleby said the election was "one of the most acrimonious in the annals of American history".
Republicans ultimately won more electoral college votes, but Jefferson and his vice-presidential candidate Aaron Burr unexpectedly received an equal total. Due to the tie, the election was decided by the Federalist-dominated House of Representatives. Hamilton lobbied Federalist representatives on Jefferson's behalf, believing him a lesser political evil than Burr. On February 17, 1801, after thirty-six ballots, the House elected Jefferson president and Burr vice president.
The win was marked by Republican celebrations throughout the country. Some of Jefferson's opponents argued that he owed his victory over Adams to the South's inflated number of electors, due to counting slaves as partial population under the Three-Fifths Compromise. Others alleged that Jefferson secured James Asheton Bayard's tie-breaking electoral vote by guaranteeing the retention of various Federalist posts in the government. Jefferson disputed the allegation, and the historical record is inconclusive.
The transition proceeded smoothly, marking a watershed in American history. As historian Gordon S. Wood writes, "it was one of the first popular elections in modern history that resulted in the peaceful transfer of power from one 'party' to another."
Jefferson was sworn in by Chief Justice John Marshall at the new Capitol in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 1801. In contrast to his predecessors, Jefferson exhibited a dislike of formal etiquette; he arrived alone on horseback without escort, dressed plainly and, after dismounting, retired his own horse to the nearby stable. His inaugural address struck a note of reconciliation, declaring, "We have been called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Ideologically, Jefferson stressed "equal and exact justice to all men", minority rights, and freedom of speech, religion, and press. He said that a free and democratic government was "the strongest government on earth." He nominated moderate Republicans to his cabinet: James Madison as Secretary of State, Henry Dearborn as Secretary of War, Levi Lincoln as Attorney General, and Robert Smith as Secretary of the Navy.
Upon assuming office, he first confronted an $83 million national debt. He began dismantling Hamilton's Federalist fiscal system with help from Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin. Jefferson's administration eliminated the whiskey excise and other taxes after closing "unnecessary offices" and cutting "useless establishments and expenses". They attempted to disassemble the national bank and its effect of increasing national debt, but were dissuaded by Gallatin. Jefferson shrank the Navy, deeming it unnecessary in peacetime. Instead, he incorporated a fleet of inexpensive gunboats used only for defense with the idea that they would not provoke foreign hostilities. After two terms, he had lowered the national debt from $83 million to $57 million.
Jefferson pardoned several of those imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Congressional Republicans repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which removed nearly all of Adams's "midnight judges" from office. A subsequent appointment battle led to the Supreme Court's landmark decision in "Marbury v. Madison", asserting judicial review over executive branch actions. Jefferson appointed three Supreme Court justices: William Johnson (1804), Henry Brockholst Livingston (1807), and Thomas Todd (1807).
Jefferson strongly felt the need for a national military university, producing an officer engineering corps for a national defense based on the advancement of the sciences, rather than having to rely on foreign sources for top grade engineers with questionable loyalty. He signed the Military Peace Establishment Act on March 16, 1802, thus founding the United States Military Academy at West Point. The Act documented in 29 sections a new set of laws and limits for the military. Jefferson was also hoping to bring reform to the Executive branch, replacing Federalists and active opponents throughout the officer corps to promote Republican values.
Jefferson took great interest in the Library of Congress, which had been established in 1800. He often recommended books to acquire. In 1802, an act of Congress authorized President Jefferson to name the first Librarian of Congress and gave itself the power to establish library rules and regulations. This act also granted the president and vice president the right to use the library.
American merchant ships had been protected from Barbary Coast pirates by the Royal Navy when the states were British colonies. After independence, however, pirates often captured U.S. merchant ships, pillaged cargoes, and enslaved or held crew members for ransom. Jefferson had opposed paying tribute to the Barbary States since 1785.
In March 1786, he and John Adams went to London to negotiate with Tripoli's envoy, ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja).
In 1801, he authorized a U.S. Navy fleet under Commodore Richard Dale to make a show of force in the Mediterranean, the first American naval squadron to cross the Atlantic. Following the fleet's first engagement, he successfully asked Congress for a declaration of war. The subsequent "First Barbary War" was the first foreign war fought by the U.S.
Pasha of Tripoli Yusuf Karamanli captured the , so Jefferson authorized William Eaton, the U.S. Consul to Tunis, to lead a force to restore the pasha's older brother to the throne. The American navy forced Tunis and Algiers into breaking their alliance with Tripoli. Jefferson ordered five separate naval bombardments of Tripoli, leading the pasha to sign a treaty that restored peace in the Mediterranean. This victory proved only temporary, but according to Wood, "many Americans celebrated it as a vindication of their policy of spreading free trade around the world and as a great victory for liberty over tyranny."
Spain ceded ownership of the Louisiana territory in 1800 to the more predominant France. Jefferson was greatly concerned that Napoleon's broad interests in the vast territory would threaten the security of the continent and Mississippi River shipping. He wrote that the cession "works most sorely on the U.S. It completely reverses all the political relations of the U.S." In 1802, he instructed James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to negotiate with Napoleon to purchase New Orleans and adjacent coastal areas from France. In early 1803, Jefferson offered Napoleon nearly $10 million for of tropical territory.
Napoleon realized that French military control was impractical over such a vast remote territory, and he was in dire need of funds for his wars on the home front. In early April 1803, he unexpectedly made negotiators a counter-offer to sell of French territory for $15 million, doubling the size of the United States. U.S. negotiators seized this unique opportunity and accepted the offer and signed the treaty on April 30, 1803. Word of the unexpected purchase didn't reach Jefferson until July 3, 1803. He unknowingly acquired the most fertile tract of land of its size on Earth, making the new country self-sufficient in food and other resources. The sale also significantly curtailed British and French imperial ambitions in North America, removing obstacles to U.S. westward expansion.
Most thought that this was an exceptional opportunity, despite Republican reservations about the Constitutional authority of the federal government to acquire land. Jefferson initially thought that a Constitutional amendment was necessary to purchase and govern the new territory; but he later changed his mind, fearing that this would give cause to oppose the purchase, and he, therefore, urged a speedy debate and ratification. On October 20, 1803, the Senate ratified the purchase treaty by a vote of 24–7.
After the purchase, Jefferson preserved the region's Spanish legal code and instituted a gradual approach for integrating settlers into American democracy. He believed that a period of federal rule would be necessary while Louisianians adjusted to their new nation. Historians have differed in their assessments regarding the constitutional implications of the sale, but they typically hail the Louisiana acquisition as a major accomplishment. Frederick Jackson Turner called the purchase the most formative event in American history.
In the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson attempted to annex West Florida from Spain, a nation under the control of Emperor Napoleon and the French Empire after 1804. In his annual message to Congress, on December 3, 1805, Jefferson railed against Spain over Florida border depredations. A few days later Jefferson secretly requested a two million dollar expenditure to purchase Florida. Representative and floor leader John Randolph, however, opposed annexation and was upset over Jefferson's secrecy on the matter. The Two Million Dollar bill passed only after Jefferson successfully maneuvered to replace Randolph with Barnabas Bidwell as floor leader. This aroused suspicion of Jefferson and charges of undue executive influence over Congress. Jefferson signed the bill into law in February 1806. Six weeks later the law was made public. The two million dollars was to be given to France as payment, in turn, to put pressure on Spain to permit the annexation of Florida by the United States. France, however, was in no mood to allow Spain give up Florida, and refused the offer. Florida remained under the control of Spain. The failed venture damaged Jefferson's reputation among his supporters.
Jefferson anticipated further westward settlements due to the Louisiana Purchase and arranged for the exploration and mapping of the uncharted territory. He sought to establish a U.S. claim ahead of competing European interests and to find the rumored Northwest Passage. Jefferson and others were influenced by exploration accounts of Le Page du Pratz in Louisiana (1763) and Captain James Cook in the Pacific (1784), and they persuaded Congress in 1804 to fund an expedition to explore and the newly acquired territory to the Pacific Ocean.
Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to be leaders of the Corps of Discovery (1803–1806). In the months leading up to the expedition, Jefferson tutored Lewis in the sciences of mapping, botany, natural history, mineralogy, and astronomy and navigation, giving him unlimited access to his library at Monticello, which included the largest collection of books in the world on the subject of the geography and natural history of the North American continent, along with an impressive collection of maps.
The expedition lasted from May 1804 to September 1806 and obtained a wealth of scientific and geographic knowledge, including knowledge of many Indian tribes.
In addition to the Corps of Discovery, Jefferson organized three other western expeditions: the William Dunbar and George Hunter expedition on the Ouachita River (1804–1805), the Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis expedition (1806) on the Red River, and the Zebulon Pike Expedition (1806–1807) into the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest. All three produced valuable information about the American frontier.
Jefferson's experiences with the American Indians began during his boyhood in Virginia and extended through his political career and into his retirement. He refuted the contemporary notion that Indians were inferior people and maintained that they were equal in body and mind to people of European descent.
As governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson recommended moving the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes, who had allied with the British, to west of the Mississippi River. But when he took office as president, he quickly took measures to avert another major conflict, as American and Indian societies were in collision and the British were inciting Indian tribes from Canada. In Georgia, he stipulated that the state would release its legal claims for lands to its west in exchange for military support in expelling the Cherokee from Georgia. This facilitated his policy of western expansion, to "advance compactly as we multiply".
In keeping with his Enlightenment thinking, President Jefferson adopted an assimilation policy towards American Indians known as his "civilization program" which included securing peaceful U.S. – Indian treaty alliances and encouraging agriculture. Jefferson advocated that Indian tribes should make federal purchases by credit holding their lands as collateral for repayment. Various tribes accepted Jefferson's policies, including the Shawnees led by Black Hoof, the Creek, and the Cherokees. However, some Shawnees broke off from Black Hoof, led by Tecumseh, and opposed Jefferson's assimilation policies.
Historian Bernard Sheehan argues that Jefferson believed that assimilation was best for American Indians; second best was removal to the west. He felt that the worst outcome of the cultural and resources conflict between American citizens and American Indians would be their attacking the whites. Jefferson told Secretary of War General Henry Dearborn (Indian affairs were then under the War Department), "If we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated or driven beyond the Mississippi." Miller agrees that Jefferson believed that Indians should assimilate to American customs and agriculture. Historians such as Peter S. Onuf and Merrill D. Peterson argue that Jefferson's actual Indian policies did little to promote assimilation and were a pretext to seize lands.
Jefferson's successful first term occasioned his re-nomination for president by the Republican party, with George Clinton replacing Burr as his running mate. The Federalist party ran Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, John Adams's vice-presidential candidate in the 1800 election. The Jefferson-Clinton ticket won overwhelmingly in the electoral college vote, by 162 to 14, promoting their achievement of a strong economy, lower taxes, and the Louisiana Purchase.
In March 1806, a split developed in the Republican party, led by fellow Virginian and former Republican ally John Randolph who viciously accused President Jefferson on the floor of the House of moving too far in the Federalist direction. In so doing, Randolph permanently set himself apart politically from Jefferson. Jefferson and Madison had backed resolutions to limit or ban British imports in retaliation for British actions against American shipping. Also, in 1808, Jefferson was the first president to propose a broad Federal plan to build roads and canals across several states, asking for $20 million, further alarming Randolph and believers of limited government.
Jefferson's popularity further suffered in his second term due to his response to wars in Europe. Positive relations with Great Britain had diminished, due partly to the antipathy between Jefferson and British diplomat Anthony Merry. After Napoleon's decisive victory at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon became more aggressive in his negotiations over trading rights, which American efforts failed to counter. Jefferson then led the enactment of the Embargo Act of 1807, directed at both France and Great Britain. This triggered economic chaos in the U.S. and was strongly criticized at the time, resulting in Jefferson having to abandon the policy a year later.
During the revolutionary era, the states abolished the international slave trade, but South Carolina reopened it. In his annual message of December 1806, Jefferson denounced the "violations of human rights" attending the international slave trade, calling on the newly elected Congress to criminalize it immediately. In 1807, Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which Jefferson signed. The act established severe punishment against the international slave trade, although it did not address the issue domestically.
In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson sought to annex Florida from Spain, as brokered by Napoleon. Congress agreed to the president's request to secretly appropriate purchase money in the "$2,000,000 Bill". The Congressional funding drew criticism from Randolph, who believed that the money would wind up in the coffers of Napoleon. The bill was signed into law; however, negotiations for the project failed. Jefferson lost clout among fellow Republicans, and his use of unofficial Congressional channels was sharply criticized. In Haiti, Jefferson's neutrality had allowed arms to enable the slave independence movement during its Revolution, and blocked attempts to assist Napoleon, who was defeated there in 1803. But he refused official recognition of the country during his second term, in deference to southern complaints about the racial violence against slave-holders; it was eventually extended to Haiti in 1862. Domestically, Jefferson's grandson James Madison Randolph became the first child born in the White House in 1806.
Following the 1801 electoral deadlock, Jefferson's relationship with his vice president, former New York Senator Aaron Burr, rapidly eroded. Jefferson suspected Burr of seeking the presidency for himself, while Burr was angered by Jefferson's refusal to appoint some of his supporters to federal office. Burr was dropped from the Republican ticket in 1804.
The same year, Burr was soundly defeated in his bid to be elected New York governor. During the campaign, Alexander Hamilton publicly made callous remarks regarding Burr's moral character. Subsequently, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, mortally wounding him on July 11, 1804. Burr was indicted for Hamilton's murder in New York and New Jersey, causing him to flee to Georgia, although he remained President of the Senate during Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase's impeachment trial. Both indictments quietly died and Burr was not prosecuted. Also during the election, certain New England separatists approached Burr, desiring a New England federation and intimating that he would be their leader. However, nothing came of the plot, since Burr had lost the election and his reputation was ruined after killing Hamilton. In August 1804, Burr contacted British Minister Anthony Merry offering to capture U.S. western territory in return for money and British ships.
After leaving office in April 1805, Burr traveled west and conspired with Louisiana Territory governor James Wilkinson, beginning a large-scale recruitment for a military expedition. Other plotters included Ohio Senator John Smith and an Irishman named Harmon Blennerhassett. Burr discussed a number of plots—seizing control of Mexico or Spanish Florida, or forming a secessionist state in New Orleans or the Western U.S. Historians remain unclear as to his true goal.
In the fall of 1806, Burr launched a military flotilla carrying about 60 men down the Ohio River. Wilkinson renounced the plot, apparently from self-interested motives; he reported Burr's expedition to Jefferson, who immediately ordered Burr's arrest. On February 13, 1807, Burr was captured in Louisiana's Bayou Pierre wilderness and sent to Virginia to be tried for treason.
Burr's 1807 conspiracy trial became a national issue. Jefferson attempted to preemptively influence the verdict by telling Congress that Burr's guilt was "beyond question", but the case came before his longtime political foe John Marshall, who dismissed the treason charge. Burr's legal team at one stage subpoenaed Jefferson, but Jefferson refused to testify, making the first argument for executive privilege. Instead, Jefferson provided relevant legal documents. After a three-month trial, the jury found Burr not guilty, while Jefferson denounced his acquittal. Jefferson subsequently removed Wilkinson as territorial governor but retained him in the U.S. military. Historian James N. Banner criticized Jefferson for continuing to trust Wilkinson, a "faithless plotter".
Commanding General James Wilkinson was a hold over of the Washington and Adams administrations. Wilkinson was rumored to be a "skillful and unscrupolous plotter". In 1804, Wilkinson received 12,000 pesos from the Spanish for information on American boundary plans. Wilkinson also received advances on his salary and payments on claims submitted to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. This damaging information apparently was unknown to Jefferson. In 1805, Jefferson trusted Wilkinson, and appointed him Louisiana Territory governor, admiring Wilkinson's work ethic. In January 1806 Jefferson received information from Kentucky U.S. Attorney Joseph Davies that Wilkinson was on the Spanish payroll. Jefferson took no action against Wilkinson, there being, at the time, lack of evidence against Wilkinson. An investigation by the House in December 1807 exonerated Wilkinson. In 1808, a military court looked into Wilkinson, but lacked evidence to charge Wilkinson. Jefferson retained Wilkinson in the Army and he was passed on by Jefferson to Jefferson's successor James Madison. Twentieth Century evidence, revealed in Spanish archives, proved Wilkinson was on the Spanish payroll.
The British conducted raids on American shipping and kidnapped seamen in 1806–07; thousands of Americans were thus impressed into the British naval service. In 1806, Jefferson issued a call for a boycott of British goods; on April 18, Congress passed the Non-Importation Acts, but they were never enforced. Later that year, Jefferson asked James Monroe and William Pinkney to negotiate with Great Britain to end the harassment of American shipping, though Britain showed no signs of improving relations. The Monroe–Pinkney Treaty was finalized but lacked any provisions to end impressment, and Jefferson refused to submit it to the Senate for ratification.
The British ship fired upon the off the Virginia coast in June 1807, and Jefferson prepared for war. He issued a proclamation banning armed British ships from U.S. waters. He presumed unilateral authority to call on the states to prepare 100,000 militia and ordered the purchase of arms, ammunition, and supplies, writing, "The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation [than strict observance of written laws]". The was dispatched to demand an explanation from the British government; it also was fired upon. Jefferson called for a special session of Congress in October to enact an embargo or alternatively to consider war.
In December, news arrived that Napoleon had extended the Berlin Decree, globally banning British imports. In Britain, King George III ordered redoubling efforts at impressment, including American sailors. But the war fever of the summer faded; Congress had no appetite to prepare the U.S. for war. Jefferson asked for and received the Embargo Act, an alternative that allowed the U.S. more time to build up defensive works, militias, and naval forces. Later historians have seen irony in Jefferson's assertion of such federal power. Meacham claims that the Embargo Act was a projection of power which surpassed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and R. B. Bernstein writes that Jefferson "was pursuing policies resembling those he had cited in 1776 as grounds for independence and revolution".
Secretary of State James Madison supported the embargo with equal vigor to Jefferson, while Treasury Secretary Gallatin opposed it, due to its indefinite time frame and the risk that it posed to the policy of American neutrality. The U.S. economy suffered, criticism grew, and opponents began evading the embargo. Instead of retreating, Jefferson sent federal agents to secretly track down smugglers and violators. Three acts were passed in Congress during 1807 and 1808, called the "Supplementary", the "Additional", and the "Enforcement" acts. The government could not prevent American vessels from trading with the European belligerents once they had left American ports, although the embargo triggered a devastating decline in exports.
Most historians consider Jefferson's embargo to have been ineffective and harmful to American interests. Appleby describes the strategy as Jefferson's "least effective policy", and Joseph Ellis calls it "an unadulterated calamity". Others, however, portray it as an innovative, nonviolent measure which aided France in its war with Britain while preserving American neutrality. Jefferson believed that the failure of the embargo was due to selfish traders and merchants showing a lack of "republican virtue." He maintained that, had the embargo been widely observed, it would have avoided war in 1812.
In December 1807, Jefferson announced his intention not to seek a third term. He turned his attention increasingly to Monticello during the last year of his presidency, giving Madison and Gallatin almost total control of affairs. Shortly before leaving office in March 1809, Jefferson signed the repeal of the Embargo. In its place, the Non-Intercourse Act was passed, but it proved no more effective. The day before Madison was inaugurated as his successor, Jefferson said that he felt like "a prisoner, released from his chains".
Following his retirement from the presidency, Jefferson continued his pursuit of educational interests; he sold his vast collection of books to the Library of Congress, and founded and built the University of Virginia. Jefferson continued to correspond with many of the country's leaders, and the Monroe Doctrine bears a strong resemblance to solicited advice that Jefferson gave to Monroe in 1823. As he settled into private life at Monticello, Jefferson developed a daily routine of rising early. He would spend several hours writing letters, with which he was often deluged. In the midday, he would often inspect the plantation on horseback. In the evenings, his family enjoyed leisure time in the gardens; late at night, Jefferson would retire to bed with a book. However, his routine was often interrupted by uninvited visitors and tourists eager to see the icon in his final days, turning Monticello into "a virtual hotel".
Jefferson envisioned a university free of church influences where students could specialize in many new areas not offered at other colleges. He believed that education engendered a stable society, which should provide publicly funded schools accessible to students from all social strata, based solely on ability. He initially proposed his University in a letter to Joseph Priestley in 1800 and, in 1819, the 76-year-old Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. He organized the state legislative campaign for its charter and, with the assistance of Edmund Bacon, purchased the location. He was the principal designer of the buildings, planned the university's curriculum, and served as the first rector upon its opening in 1825.
Jefferson was a strong disciple of Greek and Roman architectural styles, which he believed to be most representative of American democracy. Each academic unit, called a pavilion, was designed with a two-story temple front, while the library "Rotunda" was modeled on the Roman Pantheon. Jefferson referred to the university's grounds as the "Academical Village," and he reflected his educational ideas in its layout. The ten pavilions included classrooms and faculty residences; they formed a quadrangle and were connected by colonnades, behind which stood the students' rows of rooms. Gardens and vegetable plots were placed behind the pavilions and were surrounded by serpentine walls, affirming the importance of the agrarian lifestyle. The university had a library rather than a church at its center, emphasizing its secular nature—a controversial aspect at the time.
When Jefferson died in 1826, James Madison replaced him as rector. Jefferson bequeathed most of his library to the university.
Jefferson and John Adams had been good friends in the first decades of their political careers, serving together in the Continental Congress in the 1770s and in Europe in the 1780s. The Federalist/Republican split of the 1790s divided them, however, and Adams felt betrayed by Jefferson's sponsorship of partisan attacks, such as those of James Callender. Jefferson, on the other hand, was angered at Adams for his appointment of "midnight judges". The two men did not communicate directly for more than a decade after Jefferson succeeded Adams as president. A brief correspondence took place between Abigail Adams and Jefferson after Jefferson's daughter "Polly" died in 1804, in an attempt at reconciliation unknown to Adams. However, an exchange of letters resumed open hostilities between Adams and Jefferson.
As early as 1809, Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, desired that Jefferson and Adams reconcile and began to prod the two through correspondence to re-establish contact. In 1812, Adams wrote a short New Year's greeting to Jefferson, prompted earlier by Rush, to which Jefferson warmly responded. Thus began what historian David McCullough calls "one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history". Over the next fourteen years, the former presidents exchanged 158 letters discussing their political differences, justifying their respective roles in events, and debating the revolution's import to the world. When Adams died, his last words included an acknowledgment of his longtime friend and rival: "Thomas Jefferson survives", unaware that Jefferson had died several hours before.
In 1821, at the age of 77, Jefferson began writing his autobiography, in order to "state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself". He focused on the struggles and achievements he experienced until July 29, 1790, where the narrative stopped short. He excluded his youth, emphasizing the revolutionary era. He related that his ancestors came from Wales to America in the early 17th century and settled in the western frontier of the Virginia colony, which influenced his zeal for individual and state rights. Jefferson described his father as uneducated, but with a "strong mind and sound judgement". His enrollment in the College of William and Mary and election to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 were included.
He also expressed opposition to the idea of a privileged aristocracy made up of large landowning families partial to the King, and instead promoted "the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, & scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic".
Jefferson gave his insight about people, politics, and events. The work is primarily concerned with the Declaration and reforming the government of Virginia. He used notes, letters, and documents to tell many of the stories within the autobiography. He suggested that this history was so rich that his personal affairs were better overlooked, but he incorporated a self-analysis using the Declaration and other patriotism.
In the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette accepted an invitation from President James Monroe to visit the country. Jefferson and Lafayette had not seen each other since 1789. After visits to New York, New England, and Washington, Lafayette arrived at Monticello on November 4.
Jefferson's grandson Randolph was present and recorded the reunion: "As they approached each other, their uncertain gait quickened itself into a shuffling run, and exclaiming, 'Ah Jefferson!' 'Ah Lafayette!', they burst into tears as they fell into each other's arms." Jefferson and Lafayette then retired to the house to reminisce. The next morning Jefferson, Lafayette, and James Madison attended a tour and banquet at the University of Virginia. Jefferson had someone else read a speech he had prepared for Lafayette, as his voice was weak and could not carry. This was his last public presentation. After an 11-day visit, Lafayette bid Jefferson goodbye and departed Monticello.
Jefferson's approximately $100,000 of debt weighed heavily on his mind in his final months, as it became increasingly clear that he would have little to leave to his heirs. In February 1826, he successfully applied to the General Assembly to hold a public lottery as a fundraiser. His health began to deteriorate in July 1825, due to a combination of rheumatism from arm and wrist injuries, as well as intestinal and urinary disorders and, by June 1826, he was confined to bed. On July 3, Jefferson was overcome by fever and declined an invitation to Washington to attend an anniversary celebration of the Declaration.
During the last hours of his life, he was accompanied by family members and friends. Jefferson died on July 4 at 12:50 p.m. at age 83, the same day as the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. His last recorded words were "No, doctor, nothing more," refusing laudanum from his physician, but his final significant words are often cited as "Is it the Fourth?" or "This is the Fourth." When John Adams died, his last words included an acknowledgment of his longtime friend and rival: "Thomas Jefferson survives," though Adams was unaware that Jefferson had died several hours before. The sitting president was Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, and he called the coincidence of their deaths on the nation's anniversary "visible and palpable remarks of Divine Favor."
Shortly after Jefferson had died, attendants found a gold locket on a chain around his neck, where it had rested for more than 40 years, containing a small faded blue ribbon which tied a lock of his wife Martha's brown hair.
Jefferson's remains were buried at Monticello, under an epitaph that he wrote:
HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
In his advanced years, Jefferson became increasingly concerned that people understand the principles in and the people responsible for writing the Declaration of Independence, and he continually defended himself as its author. He considered the document one of his greatest life achievements, in addition to authoring the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia. Plainly absent from his epitaph were his political roles, including President of the United States.
Jefferson died deeply in debt, unable to pass on his estate freely to his heirs. He gave instructions in his will for disposal of his assets, including the freeing of Sally Hemings's children; but his estate, possessions, and slaves were sold at public auctions starting in 1827. In 1831, Monticello was sold by Martha Jefferson Randolph and the other heirs.
Jefferson subscribed to the political ideals expounded by John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, whom he considered the three greatest men who ever lived. He was also influenced by the writings of Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Jefferson thought that the independent yeoman and agrarian life were ideals of republican virtues. He distrusted cities and financiers, favored decentralized government power, and believed that the tyranny that had plagued the common man in Europe was due to corrupt political establishments and monarchies. He supported efforts to disestablish the Church of England wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and he pressed for a wall of separation between church and state. The Republicans under Jefferson were strongly influenced by the 18th-century British Whig Party, which believed in limited government. His Democratic-Republican Party became dominant in early American politics, and his views became known as Jeffersonian democracy.
According to Jefferson's philosophy, citizens have "certain inalienable rights" and "rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." A staunch advocate of the jury system to protect people's liberties, he proclaimed in 1801, "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
Jeffersonian government not only prohibited individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of others, but also restrained itself from diminishing individual liberty as a protection against tyranny from the majority. Initially, Jefferson favored restricted voting to those who could actually have the free exercise of their reason by escaping any corrupting dependence on others. He advocated enfranchising a majority of Virginians, seeking to expand suffrage to include "yeoman farmers" who owned their own land while excluding tenant farmers, city day laborers, vagrants, most Amerindians, and women.
He was convinced that individual liberties were the fruit of political equality, which were threatened by arbitrary government. Excesses of democracy in his view were caused by institutional corruption rather than human nature. He was less suspicious of a working democracy than many contemporaries. As president, Jefferson feared that the Federalist system enacted by Washington and Adams had encouraged corrupting patronage and dependence. He tried to restore a balance between the state and federal governments more nearly reflecting the Articles of Confederation, seeking to reinforce state prerogatives where his party was in a majority.
Jefferson was steeped in the British Whig tradition of the oppressed majority set against a repeatedly unresponsive court party in the Parliament. He justified small outbreaks of rebellion as necessary to get monarchial regimes to amend oppressive measures compromising popular liberties. In a republican regime ruled by the majority, he acknowledged "it will often be exercised when wrong." But "the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them." As Jefferson saw his party triumph in two terms of his presidency and launch into a third term under James Madison, his view of the U.S. as a continental republic and an "empire of liberty" grew more upbeat. On departing the presidency in 1809, he described America as "trusted with the destines of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government."
Jefferson considered democracy to be the expression of society and promoted national self-determination, cultural uniformity, and education of all males of the commonwealth. He supported public education and a free press as essential components of a democratic nation.
After resigning as Secretary of State in 1795, Jefferson focused on the electoral bases of the Republicans and Federalists. The "Republican" classification for which he advocated included "the entire body of landholders" everywhere and "the body of laborers" without land. Republicans united behind Jefferson as vice president, with the election of 1796 expanding democracy nationwide at grassroots levels. Jefferson promoted Republican candidates for local offices.
Beginning with Jefferson's electioneering for the "revolution of 1800," his political efforts were based on egalitarian appeals. In his later years, he referred to the 1800 election "as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of '76 was in its form," one "not effected indeed by the sword ... but by the ... suffrage of the people." Voter participation grew during Jefferson's presidency, increasing to "unimaginable levels" compared to the Federalist Era, with turnout of about 67,000 in 1800 rising to about 143,000 in 1804.
At the onset of the Revolution, Jefferson accepted William Blackstone's argument that property ownership would sufficiently empower voters' independent judgement, but he sought to further expand suffrage by land distribution to the poor. In the heat of the Revolutionary Era and afterward, several states expanded voter eligibility from landed gentry to all propertied male, tax-paying citizens with Jefferson's support. In retirement, he gradually became critical of his home state for violating "the principle of equal political rights"—the social right of universal male suffrage. He sought a "general suffrage" of all taxpayers and militia-men, and equal representation by population in the General Assembly to correct preferential treatment of the slave-holding regions.
Baptized in his youth, Jefferson became a governing member of his local Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, which he later attended with his daughters. Influenced by Deist authors during his college years, Jefferson abandoned "orthodox" Christianity after his review of New Testament teachings. In 1803 he asserted, "I am Christian, in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be." Jefferson later defined being a Christian as one who followed the simple teachings of Jesus. Jefferson compiled Jesus' biblical teachings, omitting miraculous or supernatural references. He titled the work "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth", known today as the "Jefferson Bible". Peterson states Jefferson was a theist "whose God was the Creator of the universe ... all the evidences of nature testified to His perfection; and man could rely on the harmony and beneficence of His work."
Jefferson was firmly anticlerical, writing in "every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon." The full letter to Horatio Spatford can be read at the National Archives. Jefferson once supported banning clergy from public office but later relented. In 1777, he drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Ratified in 1786, it made compelling attendance or contributions to any state-sanctioned religious establishment illegal and declared that men "shall be free to profess ... their opinions in matters of religion." The Statute is one of only three accomplishments he chose to have inscribed in the epitaph on his gravestone. Early in 1802, Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association, "that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God." He interpreted the First Amendment as having built "a wall of separation between Church and State." The phrase 'Separation of Church and State' has been cited several times by the Supreme Court in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause.
Jefferson donated to the American Bible Society, saying the Four Evangelists delivered a "pure and sublime system of morality" to humanity. He thought Americans would rationally create "Apiarian" religion, extracting the best traditions of every denomination. And he contributed generously to several local denominations near Monticello. Acknowledging organized religion would always be factored into political life for good or ill, he encouraged reason over supernatural revelation to make inquiries into religion. He believed in a creator god, an afterlife, and the sum of religion as loving God and neighbors. But he also controversially renounced the conventional Christian Trinity, denying Jesus' divinity as the Son of God.
Jefferson's unorthodox religious beliefs became an important issue in the 1800 presidential election. Federalists attacked him as an atheist. As president, Jefferson countered the accusations by praising religion in his inaugural address and attending services at the Capitol.
Jefferson distrusted government banks and opposed public borrowing, which he thought created long-term debt, bred monopolies, and invited dangerous speculation as opposed to productive labor. In one letter to Madison, he argued each generation should curtail all debt within 19 years, and not impose a long-term debt on subsequent generations.
In 1791, President Washington asked Jefferson, then Secretary of State, and Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, if the Congress had the authority to create a national bank. While Hamilton believed Congress had the authority, Jefferson and Madison thought a national bank would ignore the needs of individuals and farmers, and would violate the Tenth Amendment by assuming powers not granted to the federal government by the states.
Jefferson used agrarian resistance to banks and speculators as the first defining principle of an opposition party, recruiting candidates for Congress on the issue as early as 1792. As president, Jefferson was persuaded by Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin to leave the bank intact, but sought to restrain its influence.
Jefferson lived in a planter economy largely dependent upon slavery, and as a wealthy landholder, used slave labor for his household, plantation, and workshops. He first recorded his slaveholding in 1774, when he counted 41. Over his lifetime he owned about 600 slaves; he inherited about 175 while most of the remainder were born on his plantations. Jefferson purchased slaves in order to unite their families, and he sold about 110 for economic reasons, primarily slaves from his outlying farms. Many historians have described Jefferson as a benevolent slaveowner who didn't overwork his slaves by the conventions of his time, and provided them log cabins with fireplaces, food, clothing and some household provisions, though slaves often had to make many of their own provisions. Additionally, Jefferson gave his slaves financial and other incentives while also allowing them to grow gardens and raise their own chickens. The whip was employed only in rare and extreme cases of fighting and stealing.
Jefferson once said, "My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated". Jefferson did not work his slaves on Sundays and Christmas and he allowed them more personal time during the winter months. Some scholars doubt Jefferson's benevolence, however, noting cases of excessive slave whippings in his absence. His nail factory was only staffed by child slaves, but many of those boys became tradesmen. Burwell Colbert, who started his working life as a child in Monticello's Nailery, was later promoted to the supervisory position of butler.
Jefferson felt slavery was harmful to both slave and master, but had reservations about releasing unprepared slaves into freedom and advocated gradual emancipation. In 1779, he proposed gradual voluntary training and resettlement to the Virginia legislature, and three years later drafted legislation allowing owners to free their own slaves. In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included a section, stricken by other Southern delegates, criticizing King George III's role in promoting slavery in the colonies. In 1784, Jefferson proposed the abolition of slavery in all western U.S. territories, limiting slave importation to 15 years. Congress, however, failed to pass his proposal by one vote. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a partial victory for Jefferson that terminated slavery in the Northwest Territory. Jefferson freed his slave Robert Hemings in 1794 and he freed his cook slave James Hemings in 1796. During his presidency Jefferson allowed the diffusion of slavery into the Louisiana Territory hoping to prevent slave uprisings in Virginia and to prevent South Carolina secession. In 1804, in a compromise on the slavery issue, Jefferson and Congress banned domestic slave trafficking for one year into the Louisiana Territory. In 1806 he officially called for anti-slavery legislation terminating the import or export of slaves. Congress passed the law in 1807. In 1819, he strongly opposed a Missouri statehood application amendment that banned domestic slave importation and freed slaves at the age of 25 on grounds it would destroy the union. Jefferson freed his runaway slave Harriet Hemings in 1822. Upon his death in 1826, Jefferson freed five male Hemings slaves in his will.
Jefferson shared the 'common belief' of his day that blacks were mentally and physically inferior, but argued they nonetheless had innate human rights. In "Notes on the State of Virginia", he created controversy by calling slavery a moral evil for which the nation would ultimately have to account to God. He therefore supported colonization plans that would transport freed slaves to another country, such as Liberia or Sierra Leone, though he recognized the impracticability of such proposals.
During his presidency, Jefferson was for the most part publicly silent on the issue of slavery and emancipation, as the Congressional debate over slavery and its extension caused a dangerous north–south rift among the states, with talk of a northern confederacy in New England. The violent attacks on white slave owners during the Haitian Revolution due to injustices under slavery supported Jefferson's fears of a race war, increasing his reservations about promoting emancipation at that time. After numerous attempts and failures to bring about emancipation, Jefferson wrote privately in an 1805 letter to William A. Burwell, "I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us." That same year he also related this idea to George Logan, writing, "I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject."
Scholars remain divided on whether Jefferson truly condemned slavery and how he changed. Francis D. Cogliano traces the development of competing emancipationist then revisionist and finally contextualist interpretations from the 1960s to the present. The emancipationist view, held by the various scholars at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Douglas L. Wilson, and others, maintains Jefferson was an opponent of slavery all his life, noting that he did what he could within the limited range of options available to him to undermine it, his many attempts at abolition legislation, the manner in which he provided for slaves, and his advocacy of their more humane treatment. The revisionist view, advanced by Paul Finkelman and others, criticizes Jefferson for racism, for holding slaves, and for acting contrary to his words. Jefferson never freed most of his slaves, and he remained silent on the issue while he was president. Contextualists such as Joseph J. Ellis emphasize a change in Jefferson's thinking from his emancipationist views before 1783, noting Jefferson's shift toward public passivity and procrastination on policy issues related to slavery. Jefferson seemed to yield to public opinion by 1794 as he laid the groundwork for his first presidential campaign against Adams in 1796.
Claims that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children have been debated since 1802. That year James T. Callender, after being denied a position as postmaster, alleged Jefferson had taken Hemings as a concubine and fathered several children with her. In 1998, a panel of researchers conducted a Y-DNA study of living descendants of Jefferson's uncle, Field, and of a descendant of Hemings's son, Eston Hemings. The results, published in the journal "Nature," showed a match with the male Jefferson line. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) assembled a team of historians whose report concluded that "the DNA study ... indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings." In July 2017 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced that archeological excavations at Monticello had revealed what they believe to have been Sally Hemings's quarters, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation stated in 2018 that it considered the issue "a settled historical matter." Since the results of the DNA tests were made public, the consensus among academic historians has been that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings and that he was the father of her son Eston Hemings, though some experts dispute this conclusion.
Some scholars maintain the evidence is insufficient to prove Jefferson's paternity conclusively. Based on DNA and other evidence, they note the possibility that additional Jefferson males, including his brother Randolph Jefferson and any one of Randolph's four sons, or his cousin, could have fathered Eston Hemings or Sally Hemings's other children.
After Thomas Jefferson's death, although not formally manumitted, Sally Hemings was allowed by Jefferson's daughter Martha to live in Charlottesville as a free woman with her two sons until her death in 1835.
Jefferson was a farmer, obsessed with new crops, soil conditions, garden designs, and scientific agricultural techniques. His main cash crop was tobacco, but its price was usually low and it was rarely profitable. He tried to achieve self-sufficiency with wheat, vegetables, flax, corn, hogs, sheep, poultry, and cattle to supply his family, slaves, and employees, but he lived perpetually beyond his means and was always in debt.
In the field of architecture, Jefferson helped popularize the Neo-Palladian style in the United States utilizing designs for the Virginia State Capitol, the University of Virginia, Monticello, and others. Jefferson mastered architecture through self-study, using various books and classical architectural designs of the day. His primary authority was Andrea Palladio's "The Four Books of Architecture", which outlines the principles of classical design.
He was interested in birds and wine, and was a noted gourmet; he was also a prolific writer and linguist, and spoke several languages. As a naturalist, he was fascinated by the Natural Bridge geological formation, and in 1774 successfully acquired the Bridge by grant from George III.
Jefferson was a member of the American Philosophical Society for 35 years, beginning in 1780. Through the society he advanced the sciences and Enlightenment ideals, emphasizing that knowledge of science reinforced and extended freedom. His "Notes on the State of Virginia" was written in part as a contribution to the society. He became the society's third president on March 3, 1797, a few months after he was elected Vice President of the United States. In accepting, Jefferson stated: "I feel no qualification for this distinguished post but a sincere zeal for all the objects of our institution and an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may at length reach even the extremes of society, beggars and kings."
Jefferson served as APS president for the next eighteen years, including through both terms of his presidency. He introduced Meriwether Lewis to the society, where various scientists tutored him in preparation for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He resigned on January 20, 1815, but remained active through correspondence.
Jefferson had a lifelong interest in linguistics, and could speak, read, and write in a number of languages, including French, Greek, Italian, and German. In his early years, he excelled in classical language while at boarding school where he received a classical education in Greek and Latin. Jefferson later came to regard the Greek language as the "perfect language" as expressed in its laws and philosophy. While attending the College of William & Mary, he taught himself Italian. Here Jefferson first became familiar with the Anglo-Saxon language, especially as it was associated with English Common law and system of government and studied the language in a linguistic and philosophical capacity. He owned 17 volumes of Anglo-Saxon texts and grammar and later wrote an essay on the Anglo-Saxon language.
Jefferson claimed to have taught himself Spanish during his nineteen-day journey to France, using only a grammar guide and a copy of "Don Quixote". Linguistics played a significant role in how Jefferson modeled and expressed political and philosophical ideas. He believed that the study of ancient languages was essential in understanding the roots of modern language. He collected and understood a number of American Indian vocabularies and instructed Lewis and Clark to record and collect various Indian languages during their Expedition. When Jefferson removed from Washington after his presidency, he packed 50 Native American vocabulary lists in a chest and transported them on a river boat back to Monticello along with the rest of his possessions. Somewhere along the journey, a thief stole the heavy chest, thinking it was full of valuables, but its contents were dumped into the James River when the thief discovered it was only filled with papers. Subsequently, 30 years of collecting were lost, with only a few fragments rescued from the muddy banks of the river.
Jefferson was not an outstanding orator and preferred to communicate through writing or remain silent if possible. Instead of delivering his State of the Union addresses himself, Jefferson wrote the annual messages and sent a representative to read them aloud in Congress. This started a tradition which continued until 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) chose to deliver his own State of the Union address.
Jefferson invented many small practical devices and improved contemporary inventions, including a revolving book-stand and a "Great Clock" powered by the gravitational pull on cannonballs. He improved the pedometer, the polygraph (a device for duplicating writing), and the moldboard plow, an idea he never patented and gave to posterity. Jefferson can also be credited as the creator of the swivel chair, the first of which he created and used to write much of the Declaration of Independence.
As Minister to France, Jefferson was impressed by the military standardization program known as the "Système Gribeauval", and initiated a program as president to develop interchangeable parts for firearms. For his inventiveness and ingenuity, he received several honorary Doctor of Law degrees.
Jefferson is an icon of individual liberty, democracy, and republicanism, hailed as the author of the Declaration of Independence, an architect of the American Revolution, and a renaissance man who promoted science and scholarship. The participatory democracy and expanded suffrage he championed defined his era and became a standard for later generations. Meacham opined, that Jefferson was the most influential figure of the democratic republic in its first half-century, succeeded by presidential adherents James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren. Jefferson is recognized for having written more than 18,000 letters of political and philosophical substance during his life, which Francis D. Cogliano describes as "a documentary legacy ... unprecedented in American history in its size and breadth."
Jefferson's reputation declined during the American Civil War, due to his support of states' rights. In the late 19th century, his legacy was widely criticized; conservatives felt that his democratic philosophy had led to that era's populist movement, while Progressives sought a more activist federal government than Jefferson's philosophy allowed. Both groups saw Alexander Hamilton as vindicated by history, rather than Jefferson, and President Woodrow Wilson even described Jefferson as "though a great man, not a great American".
In the 1930s, Jefferson was held in higher esteem; President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) and New Deal Democrats celebrated his struggles for "the common man" and reclaimed him as their party's founder. Jefferson became a symbol of American democracy in the incipient Cold War, and the 1940s and 1950s saw the zenith of his popular reputation. Following the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Jefferson's slaveholding came under new scrutiny, particularly after DNA testing in the late 1990s supported allegations that he raped Sally Hemings.
Noting the huge output of scholarly books on Jefferson in recent years, historian Gordon Wood summarizes the raging debates about Jefferson's stature: "Although many historians and others are embarrassed about his contradictions and have sought to knock him off the democratic pedestal ... his position, though shaky, still seems secure."
The Siena Research Institute poll of presidential scholars, begun in 1982, has consistently ranked Jefferson as one of the five best U.S. presidents, and a 2015 Brookings Institution poll of American Political Science Association members ranked him as the fifth greatest president.
Jefferson has been memorialized with buildings, sculptures, postage, and currency. In the 1920s, Jefferson, together with George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, was chosen by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and approved by President Calvin Coolidge to be depicted in stone at the Mount Rushmore Memorial.
The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 1943, on the 200th anniversary of Jefferson's birth. The interior of the memorial includes a statue of Jefferson and engravings of passages from his writings. Most prominent are the words inscribed around the monument near the roof: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Main page and site-search) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29922 |
Telepathy
Telepathy (from the Greek τῆλε, "tele" meaning "distant" and πάθος, "pathos" or "-patheia" meaning "feeling, perception, passion, affliction, experience") is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person to another without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression "thought-transference".
Telepathy experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no convincing evidence that telepathy exists, and the topic is generally considered by the scientific community to be pseudoscience.
According to historians such as Roger Luckhurst and Janet Oppenheim the origin of the concept of telepathy in Western civilization can be tracked to the late 19th century and the formation of the Society for Psychical Research. As the physical sciences made significant advances, scientific concepts were applied to mental phenomena (e.g., animal magnetism), with the hope that this would help to understand paranormal phenomena. The modern concept of telepathy emerged in this context.
Psychical researcher Eric Dingwall criticized SPR founding members Frederic W. H. Myers and William F. Barrett for trying to "prove" telepathy rather than objectively analyze whether or not it existed.
In the late 19th century, the magician and mentalist, Washington Irving Bishop would perform "thought reading" demonstrations. Bishop claimed no supernatural powers and ascribed his powers to muscular sensitivity (reading thoughts from unconscious bodily cues). Bishop was investigated by a group of scientists including the editor of the "British Medical Journal" and the psychologist Francis Galton. Bishop performed several feats successfully such as correctly identifying a selected spot on a table and locating a hidden object. During the experiment Bishop required physical contact with a subject who knew the correct answer. He would hold the hand or wrist of the helper. The scientists concluded that Bishop was not a genuine telepath but using a highly trained skill to detect ideomotor movements.
Another famous thought reader was the magician Stuart Cumberland. He was famous for performing blindfolded feats such as identifying a hidden object in a room that a person had picked out or asking someone to imagine a murder scene and then attempt to read the subject's thoughts and identify the victim and reenact the crime. Cumberland claimed to possess no genuine psychic ability and his thought reading performances could only be demonstrated by holding the hand of his subject to read their muscular movements. He came into dispute with psychical researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research who were searching for genuine cases of telepathy. Cumberland argued that both telepathy and communication with the dead were impossible and that the mind of man cannot be read through telepathy, but only by muscle reading.
In the late 19th century the Creery Sisters (Mary, Alice, Maud, Kathleen, and Emily) were tested by the Society for Psychical Research and believed to have genuine psychic ability. However, during a later experiment they were caught utilizing signal codes and they confessed to fraud. George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn were claimed to be genuine psychics by the Society for Psychical Research but Blackburn confessed to fraud:
For nearly thirty years the telepathic experiments conducted by Mr. G. A. Smith and myself have been accepted and cited as the basic evidence of the truth of thought transference...
...the whole of those alleged experiments were bogus, and originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of scientific mind and training could be deceived when seeking for evidence in support of a theory they were wishful to establish.
Between 1916 and 1924, Gilbert Murray conducted 236 experiments into telepathy and reported 36% as successful, however, it was suggested that the results could be explained by hyperaesthesia as he could hear what was being said by the sender. Psychologist Leonard T. Troland had carried out experiments in telepathy at Harvard University which were reported in 1917. The subjects produced below chance expectations.
Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead were duped into believing Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers. Both Doyle and Stead wrote the Zancigs performed telepathy. In 1924, Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of "Our Secrets!!" in a London newspaper.
In 1924, Robert H. Gault of Northwestern University with Gardner Murphy conducted the first American radio test for telepathy. The results were entirely negative. One of their experiments involved the attempted thought transmission of a chosen number, out of 2010 replies none were correct.
In February 1927, with the co-operation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), V. J. Woolley who was at the time the Research Officer for the SPR, arranged a telepathy experiment in which radio listeners were asked to take part. The experiment involved 'agents' thinking about five selected objects in an office at Tavistock Square, whilst listeners on the radio were asked to identify the objects from the BBC studio at Savoy Hill. 24, 659 answers were received. The results revealed no evidence for telepathy.
A famous experiment in telepathy was recorded by the American author Upton Sinclair in his book "Mental Radio" which documents Sinclair's test of psychic abilities of Mary Craig Sinclair, his second wife. She attempted to duplicate 290 pictures which were drawn by her husband. Sinclair claimed Mary successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 "partial successes" and 70 failures. However, these experiments were not conducted in a controlled scientific laboratory environment. Science writer Martin Gardner suggested that the possibility of sensory leakage during the experiment had not been ruled out:
The Turner-Ownbey long distance telepathy experiment was discovered to contain flaws. May Frances Turner positioned herself in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory whilst Sara Ownbey claimed to receive transmissions 250 miles away. For the experiment Turner would think of a symbol and write it down whilst Ownbey would write her guesses. The scores were highly successful and both records were supposed to be sent to J. B. Rhine; however, Ownbey sent them to Turner. Critics pointed out this invalidated the results as she could have simply written her own record to agree with the other. When the experiment was repeated and the records were sent to Rhine the scores dropped to average.
Another example is the experiment carried out by the author Harold Sherman with the explorer Hubert Wilkins who carried out their own experiment in telepathy for five and a half months starting in October 1937. This took place when Sherman was in New York and Wilkins was in the Arctic. The experiment consisted of Sherman and Wilkins at the end of each day to relax and visualise a mental image or "thought impression" of the events or thoughts they had experienced in the day and then to record those images and thoughts on paper in a diary. The results at the end when comparing Sherman's and Wilkins' diaries were claimed to be more than 60 percent.
The full results of the experiments were published in 1942 in a book by Sherman and Wilkins titled "Thoughts Through Space". In the book both Sherman and Wilkins had written they believed they had demonstrated that it was possible to send and receive thought impressions from the mind of one person to another. The magician John Booth wrote the experiment was not an example of telepathy as a high percentage of misses had occurred. Booth wrote it was more likely that the "hits" were the result of "coincidence, law of averages, subconscious expectancy, logical inference or a plain lucky guess". A review of their book in the "American Journal of Orthopsychiatry" cast doubt on their experiment noting "the study was published five years after it was conducted, arouses suspicion on the validity of the conclusions.
In 1948, on the BBC radio Maurice Fogel made the claim that he could demonstrate telepathy. This intrigued the journalist Arthur Helliwell who wanted to discover his methods. He found that Fogel's mind reading acts were all based on trickery, he relied on information about members of his audience before the show started. Helliwell exposed Fogel's methods in a newspaper article. Although Fogel managed to fool some people into believing he could perform genuine telepathy, the majority of his audience knew he was a showman.
In a series of experiments Samuel Soal and his assistant K. M. Goldney examined 160 subjects over 128,000 trials and obtained no evidence for the existence of telepathy. Soal tested Basil Shackleton and Gloria Stewart between 1941 and 1943 in over five hundred sittings and over twenty thousand guesses. Shackleton scored 2890 compared with a chance expectation of 2308 and Gloria scored 9410 compared with a chance level of 7420. It was later discovered the results had been tampered with. Gretl Albert who was present during many of the experiments said she had witnessed Soal altering the records during the sessions. Betty Marwick discovered Soal had not used the method of random selection of numbers as he had claimed. Marwick showed that there had been manipulation of the score sheets "all the experiments reported by Soal had thereby been discredited."
In 1979 the physicists John G. Taylor and Eduardo Balanovski wrote the only scientifically feasible explanation for telepathy could be electromagnetism (EM) involving EM fields. In a series of experiments the EM levels were many orders of magnitude lower than calculated and no paranormal effects were observed. Both Taylor and Balanovski wrote their results were a strong argument against the validity of telepathy.
Research in anomalistic psychology has discovered that in some cases telepathy can be explained by a covariation bias. In an experiment (Schienle "et al". 1996) 22 believers and 20 skeptics were asked to judge the covariation between transmitted symbols and the corresponding feedback given by a receiver. According to the results the believers overestimated the number of successful transmissions whilst the skeptics made accurate hit judgments. The results from another telepathy experiment involving 48 undergraduate college students (Rudski, 2002) were explained by hindsight and confirmation biases.
Within parapsychology, telepathy, often along with precognition and clairvoyance, is described as an aspect of extrasensory perception (ESP) or "anomalous cognition" that parapsychologists believe is transferred through a hypothetical psychic mechanism they call "psi". Parapsychologists have reported experiments they use to test for telepathic abilities. Among the most well known are the use of Zener cards and the Ganzfeld experiment.
Several forms of telepathy have been suggested:
Zener cards are marked with five distinctive symbols. When using them, one individual is designated the "sender" and another the "receiver". The sender selects a random card and visualizes the symbol on it, while the receiver attempts to determine that symbol telepathically. Statistically, the receiver has a 20% chance of randomly guessing the correct symbol, so to demonstrate telepathy, they must repeatedly score a success rate that is significantly higher than 20%. If not conducted properly, this method is vulnerable to sensory leakage and card counting.
J. B. Rhine's experiments with Zener cards were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues. Once Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects. Due to the methodological problems, parapsychologists no longer utilize card-guessing studies.
Parapsychological studies into dream telepathy were carried out at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York led by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman. They concluded the results from some of their experiments supported dream telepathy. However, the results have not been independently replicated. The psychologist James Alcock has written the dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides have failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is rampant."
The picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman were criticized by C. E. M. Hansel. According to Hansel there were weaknesses in the design of the experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target picture. Only the agent should have known the target and no other person until the judging of targets had been completed, however, an experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened. Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the main experimenter could communicate with the subject.
An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding was that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams above chance level. Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative.
When using the Ganzfeld experiment to test for telepathy, one individual is designated as the receiver and is placed inside a controlled environment where they are deprived of sensory input, and another person is designated as the sender and is placed in a separate location. The receiver is then required to receive information from the sender. The nature of the information may vary between experiments.
The Ganzfeld experiment studies that were examined by Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton had methodological problems that were well documented. Honorton reported only 36% of the studies used duplicate target sets of pictures to avoid handling cues. Hyman discovered flaws in all of the 42 Ganzfeld experiments and to access each experiment, he devised a set of 12 categories of flaws. Six of these concerned statistical defects, the other six covered procedural flaws such as inadequate documentation, randomization and security as well as possibilities of sensory leakage. Over half of the studies failed to safeguard against sensory leakage and all of the studies contained at least one of the 12 flaws. Because of the flaws, Honorton agreed with Hyman the 42 Ganzfeld studies could not support the claim for the existence of psi.
Possibilities of sensory leakage in the Ganzfeld experiments included the receivers hearing what was going on in the sender's room next door as the rooms were not soundproof and the sender's fingerprints to be visible on the target object for the receiver to see.
Hyman also reviewed the autoganzfeld experiments and discovered a pattern in the data that implied a visual cue may have taken place:
Hyman wrote the autoganzfeld experiments were flawed because they did not preclude the possibility of sensory leakage. In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%. This hit rate is statistically significant with p < .001. Participants selected for personality traits and personal characteristics thought to be psi-conducive were found to perform significantly better than unselected participants in the ganzfeld condition. Hyman (2010) published a rebuttal to Storm "et al". According to Hyman "reliance on meta-analysis as the sole basis for justifying the claim that an anomaly exists and that the evidence for it is consistent and replicable is fallacious. It distorts what scientists mean by confirmatory evidence." Hyman wrote the ganzfeld studies have not been independently replicated and have failed to produce evidence for telepathy. Storm "et al". published a response to Hyman claiming the ganzfeld experimental design has proved to be consistent and reliable but parapsychology is a struggling discipline that has not received much attention so further research on the subject is necessary. Rouder "et al". 2013 wrote that critical evaluation of Storm "et al".'s meta-analysis reveals no evidence for telepathy, no plausible mechanism and omitted replication failures. A 2016 paper examined questionable research practices in the ganzfeld experiments.
Twin telepathy is a belief that has been described as a myth in psychological literature. Psychologists Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell have noted that all experiments on the subject have failed to provide any scientific evidence for telepathy between twins. According to Hupp and Jewell there are various behavioral and genetic factors that contribute to the twin telepathy myth "identical twins typically spend a lot of time together and are usually exposed to very similar environments. Thus, it's not at all surprising that they act in similar ways and are adept at anticipating and forecasting each other's reactions to events."
A 1993 study by Susan Blackmore investigated the claims of twin telepathy. In an experiment with six sets of twins one subject would act as the sender and the other the receiver. The sender was given selected objects, photographs or numbers and would attempt to psychically send the information to the receiver. The results from the experiment were negative, no evidence of telepathy was observed.
The skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford has noted that "Despite decades of research trying to prove telepathy, there is no credible scientific evidence that psychic powers exist, either in the general population or among twins specifically. The idea that two people who shared their mother's womb — or even who share the same DNA — have a mysterious mental connection is an intriguing one not borne out in science."
A variety of tests have been performed to demonstrate telepathy, but there is no scientific evidence that the power exists. A panel commissioned by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that "despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or 'mind over matter' exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist." The scientific community considers parapsychology a pseudoscience. There is no known mechanism for telepathy. Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge has written that telepathy would contradict laws of science and the claim that "signals can be transmitted across space without fading with distance is inconsistent with physics". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29923 |
Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University (Texas A&M or A&M) is a public research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. , Texas A&M's student body is the largest in the United States. Texas A&M's designation as a land, sea, and space grant institution—the only university in Texas to hold all three designations—reflects a range of research with ongoing projects funded by organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. In 2001, Texas A&M was inducted as a member of the Association of American Universities. The school's students, alumni—over 500,000 strong—and sports teams are known as Aggies. The Texas A&M Aggies athletes compete in 18 varsity sports as a member of the Southeastern Conference.
The first public institution of higher education in Texas, the school opened on October 4, 1876, as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas under the provisions of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. Originally, the college taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on classical studies, languages, literature, and applied mathematics. After four years, students could attain degrees in scientific agriculture, civil and mechanical engineering, and language and literature. Under the leadership of President James Earl Rudder in the 1960s, A.M.C. desegregated, became coeducational, and dropped the requirement for participation in the Corps of Cadets. To reflect the institution's expanded roles and academic offerings, the Texas Legislature renamed the school to Texas A&M University in 1963. The letters "A&M," originally A.M.C. short for "Agricultural and Mechanical College," are retained as a link to the university's tradition.
The main campus is one of the largest in the United States, spanning , and is home to the George Bush Presidential Library. About one-fifth of the student body lives on campus. Texas A&M has more than 1,000 officially recognized student organizations. Many students also observe the traditions, which govern daily life, as well as special occasions, including sports events. Working with various A&M-related agencies, the school has a direct presence in each of the 254 counties in Texas. The university offers degrees in more than 150 courses of study through ten colleges and houses 18 research institutes.
As a Senior Military College, Texas A&M is one of six American public universities with a full-time, volunteer Corps of Cadets who study alongside civilian undergraduate students.
The U.S. Congress laid the groundwork for the establishment of A.M.C. in 1862 with the adoption of the Morrill Act. The act auctioned land grants of public lands to establish endowments for colleges where the "leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanical arts... to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life". In 1871, the Texas Legislature used these funds to establish the state's first public institution of higher education, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, then known as Texas A.M.C. Brazos County donated near Bryan, Texas, for the school's campus. A detailed listing and backgrounds of all of the University's presidents can be found on the Brazos County Texas Genealogical Association's site
Enrollment began on October 2, 1876. Six students enrolled on the first day, and classes officially began on October 4, 1876, with six faculty members and forty students. During the first semester, enrollment increased to 48 students, and by the end of the spring 1877 semester, 106 students had enrolled. Admission was limited to white males, and all students were required to participate in the Corps of Cadets and receive military training. Enrollment climbed to 258 students before declining to 108 students in 1883, the year the University of Texas opened in Austin, Texas. Although originally envisioned and annotated in the Texas Constitution as a branch of the University of Texas, Texas A.M.C. had a separate Board of Directors from the University of Texas from the first day of classes and was never enveloped into the University of Texas System.
In the late 1880s, many Texas residents saw no need for two colleges in Texas and clamored for an end of Texas A.M.C. In 1891, Texas A.M.C. was saved from potential closure by its new president Lawrence Sullivan Ross (also known as Sul Ross or "Sully"), former governor of Texas, and well-respected Confederate Brigadier General. Ross made many improvements to the school and enrollment doubled to 467 cadets as parents sent their sons to Texas A.M.C. "to learn to be like Ross". During his tenure, many enduring Aggie traditions were born, including the creation of the first Aggie Ring. After his death in 1898, a statue was erected in front of what is now Academic Plaza to honor Ross and his achievements in the history of the school. In 2017, the status of this statue was in doubt after other schools removed statues of former Confederate officers. In contrast, the Texas A&M Chancellor and President announced the Sul Ross statue would remain as Ross's statue's place of honor was not based upon his service in the Confederate Army.
Under pressure from the legislature, in 1911 the school began allowing women to attend classes during the summer semester. At the same time, A.M.C. began expanding its academic pursuits with the establishment of the School of Veterinary Medicine in 1915.
Many Texas A&M graduates served during World War I. By 1918, 49% of all graduates of the college were in military service, more than any other school. In early September 1918, the entire senior class enlisted, with plans to send the younger students at staggered dates throughout the next year. Many of the seniors were fighting in France when the war ended two months later.
More than 1,200 alumni served as commissioned officers. After the war, Texas A&M grew rapidly and became nationally recognized for its programs in agriculture, engineering, and military science. The first graduate school was organized in 1924 and the school awarded its first PhD in 1940. In 1925, Mary Evelyn Crawford Locke became the first female to receive a diploma from Texas A&M, although she was not allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony. The following month the Board of Directors officially prohibited all women from enrolling.
Many Aggies again served in the military during World War II, with the college producing 20,229 combat troops. Of those, 14,123 Aggies served as officers, more than any other school and more than the combined total of the United States Naval Academy and the United States Military Academy. During the war, 29 A&M graduates reached the rank of general.
At the start of World War II, Texas A&M was selected as one of six engineering colleges to participate in the Electronics Training Program, a ten-month activity of 12-hour study days to train Navy personnel who were urgently needed to maintain the then-new, highly complex electronic equipment such as radar. These colleges provided the Primary School, wherein the key topics of the first two years of a college electrical engineering curriculum were condensed into three months. The instructional effort at College Station was developed and led by Frank Bolton, EE department head and future Texas A&M president. At a given time, some 500 Navy students were on the campus, a significant fraction of the then-years enrollment. Students graduating from the Primary Schools then went to a secondary school, one of which was at Ward Island, Texas (the future location of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi).
Enrollment soared after the war as many former soldiers used the G.I. Bill to further their education. In 1948, the state legislature formally recognized Texas A&M as a separate university system from the University of Texas System, codifying the de facto arrangement between the schools.
On March 26, 1960, Major General James Earl Rudder, class of 1932, became the 16th president of the college. Rudder's tenure (1959–1970) marked a critical turning point in the school's history. Under his leadership, Texas A&M underwent a dramatic expansion in its physical plant construction, but more importantly, it diversified and expanded its student body by admitting women and minorities. The Corps of Cadets became voluntary. In the face of growing student activism during the 1960s, Rudder worked diligently to ensure that the school continue to fulfill its mission of providing a quality education for all Aggies. By his death in 1970, Rudder had overseen the growth of the school from 7,500 to 14,000 students from all 50 states and 75 nations.
In 1963, the 58th Legislature of Texas approved of Rudder's changes, and officially renamed the school "Texas A&M University," specifying that the "A" and the "M" were purely symbolic, reflecting the school's past, and no longer stood for "Agricultural and Mechanical". In the following 35 years, Texas A&M more than tripled its enrollment from 14,000 students to more than 45,000.
Much of the legislative work allowing the expansion of Texas A&M and the admission of women was pushed by State Senator William T. "Bill" Moore, who served from 1949 to 1981. Known as "the Bull of the Brazos" and "the father of the modern Texas A&M University," Moore was a Bryan attorney and businessman originally from Wheelock in Robertson County. He also taught economics at TAMU before his entry into World War II.
Texas A&M became one of the first four universities given the designation sea-grant for its achievements in oceanography and marine resources development in 1971. In 1989, the university earned the title space-grant by NASA, to recognize its commitment to space research and participation in the Texas Space Grant Consortium.
In 1997, the school became the home of the George Bush Presidential Library. Operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, it is one of thirteen American presidential libraries. Former President George Bush remained actively involved with the university, frequently visiting the campus and participating in special events.
Texas A&M received national media attention on November 18, 1999, when Aggie Bonfire, a ninety-year-old student tradition, collapsed during construction. Eleven enrolled students and one former student died and twenty-seven others were injured. The accident was later attributed to improper design and poor construction practices. The victims' family members filed six lawsuits against Texas A&M officials, the Aggie Bonfire officials and the university. Half of the defendants settled their portion of the case in 2005, and a federal appeals court dismissed the remaining lawsuits against the university in 2007.
With strong support from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin, the Association of American Universities inducted Texas A&M in May 2001, on the basis of the depth of the university's research and academic programs.
Texas A&M left the Big 12 Conference for the Southeastern Conference on July 1, 2012. This ended Texas A&M's scheduled NCAA athletic competitions with three former Southwest Conference rivals–UT Austin, Baylor, and Texas Tech–for the foreseeable future.
The university underwent several large expansions in 2013. On July 12, 2013, Texas A&M Health Science Center was formally merged into the university. On August 12, 2013, the university purchased the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law and renamed it the Texas A&M School of Law. Texas A&M on October 23, 2013, announced plans to build a new branch campus, Texas A&M University at Nazareth - Peace Campus, in Israel.
In the fall of 2019 semester, Texas A&M was the second largest public American university with an enrollment of more than 64,300 students pursuing degrees in 10 academic colleges. Another 5,165 are at the branch campuses in Galveston and Qatar and other locations across Texas. The student body includes students from all 50 US states and 124 foreign countries. As of the fall of 2018, Texas residents account for 85.00% of the student population, while 8.74% are of international origin. Members of ethnic minority groups make up 45.26% of the student population. The student body consists of 46.8% women and 53.2% men.
The university consistently ranks among the top ten public universities each year in enrollment of National Merit scholars. According to the College Board, the fall 2008 entering freshman class consisted of 54% students in the top 10% of their high school graduating class, 86% in the top quarter, and 99% in the top half. Seventy-four percent of these students took the SAT. The middle 50% of the freshmen had average scores as follows: in critical reading, 520–630, math, 560–670, and in writing 500–610. Twenty-six percent of the incoming freshmen took the ACT, with the middle 50% scoring between a 23 and 29. About 80 percent of the student body receives about $420 million in financial aid annually. The admission rate for students who applied as undergraduates in 2012 was 67%. The school is rated as "selective" by US News & World Report.
In the fall 2008 semester, the Dwight Look College of Engineering had the largest enrollment of 20.5%. The College of Liberal Arts and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences followed, enrolling 15% and 14% of the student body, respectively. The College of Education and Human Development enrolls 12%, and Mays Business School enrolled about 11%. Colleges with less than 10% enrollment included the College of Architecture, the College of Science, the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, the College of Geosciences, and the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. Approximately 8% of the student body had not declared a major.
In the fall 2011 semester, enrollment at Texas A&M surpassed 50,000 for the first time. A record 50,054 students were enrolled on the census day.
In a comparison of educational quality, faculty quality, and research output, Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked Texas A&M 51st nationally and 96th internationally in its 2014 rankings. In its 2014–2015 rankings, "The Times Higher Education Supplement" listed Texas A&M 61st among North America's universities, and 141st among world universities. The 2012/2013 QS World University Rankings ranked the university 165th overall in the world. In its 2013 edition, the Center for World University Rankings ranked Texas A&M as the 80th university globally and 50th university nationally.
In the 2020 edition of the "U.S. News and World Report" ranking of "national universities", the school is tied for 70th. According to "The Washington Monthly" criteria, which weigh research, community service, and social mobility, Texas A&M ranks third nationally in 2015. The John Templeton Foundation listed Texas A&M as one of the thirty-five American college programs that "communicate[s] the values of honesty, trust, respect, responsibility, integrity, and fairness in the classroom". The 2011 "Kiplinger's Personal Finance" ranked the school as the 23rd best-value public university on the basis of in-state tuition, and the 35th best-value public university on the basis of out-of-state tuition. After conducting a survey of leading employment recruiters, "The Wall Street Journal" ranked Texas A&M 2nd nationally, as "most likely to help students land a job in key careers and professions".
According to "Best Value Schools", Texas A&M ranked number one in the nation for the best college for veterans, as ranked by return on investment. Texas A&M is also ranked number two for veterans in "USA Today" and number nine for "business schools for veterans" by the "Military Times". With three separate offices for veterans services, A&M is well prepared to suit any unique veteran requirements.
Texas A&M University System (which includes Texas A&M, ten other universities, and a health center that are in the Texas A&M University System) has an endowment valued at more than $11 billion, which would rank second among U.S. public universities and 7th overall (if the University System was counted as one university). Apart from revenue received from tuition and research grants, the university, as part of the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), is partially funded from two endowments. The smaller endowment, totaling $1.17 billion in assets, is run by the private Texas A&M Foundation. A larger sum is distributed from the Texas Permanent University Fund (PUF). TAMUS holds a minority stake (one-third) in this fund; the remaining two-thirds belongs to the University of Texas System. , the PUF ending net asset value stood at $10.3 billion; $400.7 million was distributed to the two university systems in fiscal year 2007. Combined, the total endowment for the TAMUS stands at $11.1 billion, . Endowment assets dedicated solely to the College Station campus () are $259.9 million.
The Texas A&M University System, in 2006, was the first to explicitly state in its policy that technology commercialization was a criterion that could be used for tenure. Passage of this policy was intended to give faculty more academic freedom and strengthen the university's industry partnerships. Texas A&M works with both state and university agencies on various local and international research projects to forge innovations in science and technology that can have commercial applications. This work is concentrated in two primary locations–Research Valley and Research Park. Research Valley, an alliance of educational and business organizations, consists of with of dedicated research space. An additional , with of research space, is located in Research Park. Among the school's research entities are the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, the Texas Transportation Institute, the Cyclotron Institute, the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, and the Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology. Texas A&M University is a member of the SEC Academic Consortium.
In 2013 with $955 million Texas A&M ranked in the top three universities for research expenditures; third behind only MIT and UC Berkeley. In 2004, Texas A&M System faculty and research submitted 121 new inventions and established 78 new royalty-bearing licensing agreements; the innovations resulted in income of $8 million. The Texas A&M Technology Licensing Office filed for 88 patents for protection of intellectual property in 2004.
Spearheaded by the College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M scientists created the first cloned pet, a cat named 'cc', on December 22, 2001. Texas A&M was also the first academic institution to clone each of six different species: cattle, a Boer goat, pigs, a cat, a deer and a horse.
In 2004, Texas A&M joined a consortium of universities and countries to build the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile; the largest optical telescope ever constructed, the facility has seven mirrors, each with a diameter of . This gives the telescope the equivalent of a primary mirror and is ten times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground-breaking for the construction of the telescope began in November 2015.
As part of a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, Texas A&M completed the first conversion of a nuclear research reactor from using highly enriched uranium fuel (70%) to utilizing low-enriched uranium (20%). The eighteen-month project ended on October 13, 2006, after the first ever refueling of the reactor, thus fulfilling a portion of U.S. President George W. Bush's Global Nuclear Threat Reduction Initiative.
TAMU researchers have named the largest volcano on Earth, Tamu Massif, after the university.
In December 2016, the university became the focus of a PETA campaign hoping to close down certain veterinary laboratories, which it alleges perform abusive experiments on dogs with muscular dystrophy, including breeding dogs to worsen their illnesses and housing them in inhumane cages. The campaign urged supporters to write letters to the school in protest of experimenting on the dogs. Texas A&M responded that a video had been posted by PETA with insufficient context, and it said that the animals in question receive high-quality care with oversight from the National Institutes of Health and Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Texas A&M has participated in more than 500 research projects in more than 80 countries and leads the Southwestern United States in annual research expenditures. The university conducts research on every continent and has formal research and exchange agreements with 100 institutions in 40 countries. Texas A&M ranks 13th among U.S. research universities in exchange agreements with institutions abroad and student participation in study abroad programs, and has strong research collaborations with the National Natural Science Foundation of China and many leading universities in China.
Texas A&M owns three international facilities, a multipurpose center in Mexico City, Mexico, the Soltis Research and Education Center near the town of San Isidro, Costa Rica, and the Santa Chiara Study Abroad Center in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. In 2003, over 1,200 Aggie students, primarily undergraduates, studied abroad. Marine research occurs on the university's branch campus, Texas A&M University at Galveston. It also has collaborations with international facilities such as the Hacienda Santa Clara in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.
Texas A&M's Center for International Business Studies is one of 28 supported by the U.S. Department of Education. The university is also one of only two American universities in partnership with CONACyT, Mexico's equivalent of the National Science Foundation, to support research in areas including biotechnology, telecommunications, energy, and urban development. In addition, the university is the home of "Las Americas Digital Research Network", an online architecture network for 26 universities in 12 nations, primarily in Central and South America.
Texas A&M has a campus in Education City, Doha, Qatar. The campus is part of Qatar's "massive venture to import elite higher education from the United States". TAMUQ was set up through an agreement between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, a foundation started in 1995 by then-emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his wife and mother of the current emir, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. TAMUQ was opened in 2003, and the current contract extends through 2023. The campus offers undergraduate degrees in chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering and a graduate degree in chemical engineering. TAMUQ has received numerous awards for its research. Texas A&M receives $76.2 million per year from the Qatar Foundation for the campus. In the agreement with the Qatar Foundation, TAMU agreed that 70% of its undergraduate population at its Qatar campus would be Qatari citizens. The curriculum aims to "duplicate as closely as possible" the curriculum at College Station, but questions constantly arise over whether this is possible due to Qatar's strict stance on some of the freedoms granted to U.S. students. TAMU has also been the subject of criticism over its Qatari campus due to Qatar's support of global terrorism and appalling human rights record. Texas A&M Aggie Conservatives, a campus activism group, has spoken out against the campus and called for its immediate closure on the grounds that it violates a commitment to educating Texans, and diminishes the credibility of engineering degrees earned by students at College Station.
In late 2013, Texas A&M signed an agreement to open a $200 million campus in Nazareth, Israel as a "peace campus" for Arabs and Israelis. The agreement led to protests from students at the Qatari campus who claimed that it was "an insult to [their] people". The campus was never opened. Instead, Texas A&M opened a $6 million marine biology center in Haifa, Israel.
Texas A&M's College Station campus, one of the largest in America, spans plus for Research Park. The university is part of the Bryan-College Station metropolitan area located within Brazos County in the Brazos Valley (Southeast Central Texas) region, an area often referred to as "Aggieland". According to the U.S. Census Bureau, , the population of Brazos County is estimated at 175,122. "Money Magazine", in 2006, named College Station the most educated city in Texas, and the 11th most educated American city, due largely to the presence of the university and the size and scope of its research. Aggieland is centrally located within of 3 of the 10 largest cities in the US and 75% of the Texas and Louisiana populations (approximately 13 million people). The area's major roadway is State Highway 6, and several smaller state highways and Farm to Market Roads connect the area to larger highways such as Interstate 45.
The campus is bisected by a railroad track operated by Union Pacific. The area east of the tracks, known as Main Campus, includes buildings for the colleges of engineering, architecture, geosciences, science, education and liberal arts. Dormitories, as well as the main dining centers and many campus support facilities, are also on Main Campus. Notable buildings on Main Campus include Kyle Field, Sterling C. Evans Library, the Academic Building, Harrington Hall, the Memorial Student Center, the Administration Building, Rudder Tower, Albritton Bell Tower, and the Bonfire Memorial. To the west of the railroad tracks lies West Campus, which includes most of the sports facilities, the business school, agricultural programs, life sciences, the veterinary college, the political science and economics school, the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, the George Bush Presidential Library and two schools within the Texas A&M Health Science Center. Research Park, the area of West Campus along Kimbrough Boulevard, includes many research facilities.
Outside the main campus, the institution formally includes three additional branch campuses: Texas A&M at Qatar located in Education City in Doha, Qatar devoted to engineering disciplines, Texas A&M University at Galveston in Galveston, Texas, devoted to marine research and host to the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, and Texas A&M University Higher Education Center at McAllen in McAllen, Texas, devoted to Engineering, Biomedical Science, Public Health, and Food Systems Industry Management. All degrees at the Qatar campus are granted by the university's Dwight Look College of Engineering. Plans have been announced for a fourth (second international) branch campus, Texas A&M University at Nazareth - Peace Campus, in Israel.
The Texas A&M School of Law is located in Fort Worth, Texas.
Texas A&M also maintains the RELLIS campus formerly, Texas A&M Riverside Campus or Bryan Air Force Base. This extension of the main campus is to the northwest adjacent to Texas State Highways 47 and 21. RELLIS stands for "Respect," "Excellence," "Leadership," "Loyalty," "Integrity," and "Selfless service"; the six core values of Texas A&M University. Blinn College will also maintain a campus presence at RELLIS to partner with other institutions and organizations. The Bryan City Council is considering annexing the 2,000-acre campus and nearby land. Annexation would allow the city to regulate development at the site, provide various municipal services, and expand the tax base though RELLIS itself as a public entity would not contribute to city property tax revenues. Related private businesses attracted to the RELLIS area would produce such revenues.
Public art on the campus includes the 1997 statue, "The Day the Wall Came Down", displayed at the Bush Presidential Library.
During the 2006 fall semester, 20.5 percent of the student body lived on campus in one of two distinct housing sections located on opposite ends of campus. Both the Northside and Southside areas contain student residence halls. While some halls are single-sex, others are co-educational. Usually students of different genders live on alternate floors, although some halls are segregated by room or suite. Residence hall styles vary. Many halls offer only indoor access to individual rooms, but other halls locate room entrances on an outdoor balcony. Room sizes vary by building. Halls with larger rooms include en-suite or private bathrooms, while halls with smaller rooms have a common bathroom on each floor. Several halls include a "substance-free" floor, where residents pledge to avoid bringing alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes into the hall.
Northside consists of 17 student residence halls, including the 3 university honors halls. Two of the university honors halls are freshman only. The halls are located near local entertainment district Northgate, and offer convenient access to campus dining establishments: Sbisa Dining Hall and The Underground, a food court located in the Sbisa basement.
Several of the residence halls located on Southside are reserved for members of the Corps of Cadets. Non-corps halls in this area center around the Commons, a hub for activities and dining. Southside has two Learning Living Communities, which allow freshmen to live in a cluster with other students who share common interests.
Facilities for the Corps of Cadets are located in the Quadrangle, or "The Quad", an area consisting of dormitories, Duncan Dining Hall, and the Corps training fields. The Corps Arches, a series of 12 arches that "[symbolize] the spirit of the 12th Man of Texas A&M", mark the entrance to the Quadrangle. All cadets, except those who are married or who have had previous military service, must live in the Quad with assigned roommates from the same unit and graduating class. Reveille, the Aggie mascot, lives with her handlers in the Quadrangle.
At Texas A&M, about 10% of the undergraduate population is affiliated with a Greek fraternity or sorority. Texas A&M is home to 58 nationally or internationally recognized Greek letter organizations. There are 19 IFC fraternities, including Delta Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sigma Alpha Mu, Phi Gamma Delta, Phi Delta Theta, Alpha Tau Omega, Beta Theta Pi, Delta Tau Delta, Sigma Chi, Pi Kappa Alpha, Kappa Alpha Order, and Kappa Sigma. There are 14 Panhellenic Council Sororities, including Alpha Chi Omega, Alpha Delta Pi, Alpha Epsilon Phi, Alpha Omicron Pi, Chi Omega, Delta Gamma, Delta Zeta, Delta Delta Delta, Gamma Phi Beta, Kappa Alpha Theta, Kappa Delta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Pi Beta Phi and Zeta Tau Alpha. There are two National Pan-Hellenic Council sororities Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta. Major philanthropic events include Chi Omega's variety show and production Songfest, Sigma Alpha Epsilon's Paddy Murphy week-long fundraiser, Gamma Phi Beta's annual Crescent Classic country music festival, Zeta Tau Alpha's Big Man on Campus competition, Delta Kappa Epsilon's Ducky Derby and Sigma Chi's annual Fight Night.
Texas A&M is one of six United States Senior Military Colleges. The schools' Corps of Cadets (or "the Corps") is one of the largest uniformed student bodies outside the service academies. Many members participate in ROTC programs and earn commissions in the United States Armed Forces upon graduation. Members of the Corps have served in every armed conflict fought by the United States since 1876. There were 20,229 Aggies who served in World War II, and of these, 14,123 served as officers. Since 1876, 225 Aggies have served as generals or Flag Officers.
Until 1965, Corps membership was mandatory. The Corps welcomed female members in the fall of 1974, and as of spring 2012, the co-ed Corps boasted an enrollment of more than 2000 cadets.
The Corps is composed of three Air Force Wings, three Army Brigades, three Navy and Marine Regiments, as well as the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band, whose members may be affiliated with any military branch. Parson's Mounted Cavalry is the only mounted ROTC unit in the United States. The Ross Volunteer Company, the oldest student-run organization in the state, is the official honor guard for the Governor of Texas. The Fish Drill Team, a precision, close-order rifle drill team composed entirely of Corps freshmen, represents the school in local and national competitions. They have won the national championship almost every year since their creation in 1946, and have appeared in several Hollywood productions, with prominent roles in the movies "A Few Good Men" and "Courage Under Fire".
The Fightin' Texas Aggie Band, the world's largest precision military marching band, provides music for University functions and presents intricate halftime performances at football games. Some band drills are so complicated that they require band members to step between each other's feet to complete the maneuvers. These drills must be drawn by hand as computer marching programs have returned errors; their calculations require two people to be in the same spot at the same time. Corps of Cadets membership is a requirement to join the Aggie Band, and bandsmen live by the same standards, schedules, and regimens as the rest of the Corps.
Texas A&M has over 1,000 student organizations, including academic, service, religious, Greek and common interest organizations. Orientation programs encourage students to become involved in campus activities and organizations from the beginning. An April 2005 campus survey found that 74% of the students were involved with at least one organization and that 88% participated in a campus organization in the past.
Since 1955, the MSC Student Conference on National Affairs has held conferences, lectures, and other programs to bring the wider world to Texas A&M by discussing issues of national and international importance with top-caliber speakers like then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey, Texas A&M students, and those from across the nation.
One of the oldest student organizations is the Singing Cadets, founded in 1893. Known as the "Voice of Aggieland", the Singing Cadets are an all-male choral group with about 70 members not affiliated with the Corps of Cadets. The group travels nationally and has completed several international tours; most recently, China in 2013.
Texas A&M Hillel, the oldest Hillel organization in the United States, was founded in 1920 at the original college. The organization occurred three years before the national Hillel Foundation was organized at the University of Illinois.
GLBT Aggies is the descendant organization of Gay Student Services (GSS), the only student organization to ever successfully sue the institution for official recognition. In the decision "Gay Student Services v. Texas A&M University", the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the First Amendment required public universities to recognize student organizations aimed at gay students.
The Graduate Student Council, founded in 1995, serves as the student government for Texas A&M University's graduate and professional students. It is a council representing all TAMU graduate students with a purpose to improve graduate students' academic, living and social experiences. The GSC represents students' concerns and is their liaison with the University Administration.
The Department of Recreational Sports provides drop-in recreation, intramural sports, sport clubs, indoor climbing, strength and conditioning, fitness classes, Outdoor Adventures, aquatics classes, and more. Rec Sports facilities include the flagship Student Recreation Center, which is undergoing a renovation and expansion that will increase the size of the facility to approximately 400,000 square feet; a natatorium; the Penberthy Rec Sports Complex; and the Omar Smith Instructional Tennis Center.
Some national service organizations originated at A&M. Aggie students founded the largest one-day student-run service project in America known as The Big Event. The annual service project allows students to give back to their community by assisting local residents. The organization CARPOOL, a student-run, safe ride program has provided over 250,000 free rides () to Aggies unable to transport themselves home. Its organizers also assist other universities in establishing similar programs. In addition, the Corporation for National and Community Service listed A&M among the 500 academic institutions in the 2005–06 President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
The Student Government Association (SGA), one of A&M's largest organizations, consists of over 1,300 student members in 3 branches, 15 committees, and 4 commissions. SGA has changed little since 1972, except its relative position within the official framework of the university.
"The Princeton Review" ranked "The Battalion", founded in 1893, as the 5th best college newspaper in America in 2010. The "Aggieland", formerly known as "The Olio" and "The Longhorn", is one of America's largest college yearbooks in number of pages and copies sold. The university houses the public broadcasting stations: "KAMU-TV", a PBS member station since 1970, "KAMU-FM" an NPR affiliate since 1977, and the student-run "KANM", "the college station of College Station". W5AC broadcast the first live, play-by-play broadcast of a college football game, at Kyle Field, in November 1921. The game, played in Dallas between the Aggies and the University of Texas, ended in a scoreless tie.
The Texas A&M culture is a product of the university's founding as a rural military and agricultural school. Although the school and surrounding community have grown, and military training is no longer required, the school's history has instilled in students "the idealized elements of a small-town life: community, tradition, loyalty, optimism, and unabashed sentimentality." "Texas Monthly" posits that Texas A&M students' respect for school traditions and values is the university's greatest strength. Some of the school traditions date to the 1890s, while others have been introduced more recently. These traditions enable enrolled students and alumni to cultivate the Aggie Spirit, a sense of loyalty and respect for the school. They dictate many aspects of student life, including how to greet others (using the official school greeting "Howdy!"), how to act at an A&M sporting event, and often, what words a student may use in conversation.
A visible designation tradition among senior undergraduates and former students is the wearing of the Aggie Ring, whose design has been relatively unchanged since its introduction in 1894. Students may order a ring after completing 90 credit hours of coursework, including at least 45 hours at A&M, or after graduation. Graduate students may receive a ring after 75% of their graduate coursework is completed or after the acceptance of their dissertation or thesis. Although unsanctioned by the university, many students "dunk" their newly acquired Aggie Rings into a pitcher of beer and quickly chug the entire pitcher to "earn" the ring. Some students dunk their rings in alternative substances, including ice cream or nonalcoholic beverages.
In keeping with the idea that all enrolled students and "former students" comprise a family (the term alumni is not generally used, as "former students" include those who could not complete their education, such as those who entered military service), Aggies have created two traditions to honor members of the Aggie family who have died. Aggie Muster is held annually on the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, April 21, to honor the death during the previous year of any enrolled student or alumni. Over 300 Musters are held around the world, with the largest taking place at Reed Arena on the Texas A&M University campus. All Muster ceremonies feature the Roll Call for the Absent. As the names of the deceased Aggies are called, a family member or friend answers "Here" and lights a candle, to symbolize that although their loved one is not present in body, his or her spirit will shine forever. The event received worldwide attention during World War II, when 25 Aggies "mustered" during the battle for the island of Corregidor.
Students who die while enrolled at Texas A&M are also honored at Silver Taps, a ceremony held, when necessary, on the first Tuesday of the month. This tradition began as a memorial for former Texas A&M president Lawrence Sullivan Ross. On the day of the ceremony, flags fly half-staff and notices are posted throughout campus. At 10:15 pm the lights around campus are extinguished and hymns chime from Albritton Tower while students and faculty collect in the Academic Plaza. Following a 21-gun salute by the Ross Volunteer Firing Squad, six buglers play an A&M version of the song "Taps", Silver Taps, three times from the dome of the school's Academic Building: once to the north, the south and to the west. The song is not played to the east symbolizing that the sun will never rise on that Aggie again.
Aggie students are called the 12th Man, meaning in the context of football that they support the 11 players on the field and would be willing, if it were possible, to enter the game if necessary. To further symbolize their "readiness, desire, and enthusiasm," it is traditional for students in attendance to stand throughout the game. The tradition began on January 2, 1922, at the Dixie Classic where A&M played Centre College. A&M had so many injuries in the first half of the game that Coach Dana X. Bible feared he would not have enough men to finish the game. He called into the stands for E. King Gill, a reserve who had left football after the regular season to play basketball. Although he did not actually play, his readiness symbolized the willingness of all Aggies to support their team to the point of actually entering the game. A&M won 22–14, but E. King Gill was the only man left standing on the sidelines for the Aggies. In recent decades, the 12th Man is represented on the field by a walk-on player who wears the No. 12 jersey and participates in kick-offs.
The 12th Man uses a variety of school yells, rather than cheers, to support Aggie teams. Each year the student body elects five students to serve as the Yell Leaders. At midnight before each home football game at Kyle Field or at a predesignated location at away games, the fans gather together to practice the yells for the next day's game. Led by the Yell Leaders, and the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band, the Twelfth Man files into the stadium to participate in Midnight Yell Practice to practice yells, sing the , and joke about their opponents. At the conclusion of the yell practice, the stadium lights are extinguished and fans kiss their dates. This is also done as practice, because Aggies are expected to "mug down", or kiss their dates, every time the football team scores on the field. "Sports Illustrated" named Midnight Yell as one of the "100 Things You Gotta Do Before You Graduate."
On November 12, 2015, Texas A&M sued the Indianapolis Colts for infringing on its trademark of the 12th Man.
Almost every year since 1909, A&M students have built a large bonfire to celebrate their "burning desire to beat the hell outta t.u." (derogatory term for the University of Texas). Aggie Bonfire was traditionally lit around Thanksgiving in conjunction with the festivities surrounding the annual college football game between the schools. Although it began as a trash pile, Aggie Bonfire evolved into a massive six-tiered structure, the world record being held at . The collapse of the 1999 structure, causing the deaths of 11 students and a former student, prompted the university to suspend the official sanction of the bonfire, but the tradition continues off-campus.
The Aggies are a member of the Southeastern Conference in all sports . Previously a charter member of the Southwest Conference until its dissolution in 1996, A&M competed in the Big 12 Conference until June 30, 2012. The school's 20 sports teams are known as the Aggies, and the school's colors are maroon and white. , Aggies had earned 92 Southwest and Big 12 conference titles and 12 national championships. The women's soccer team, formed in 1993, earned 15 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances from 1995 to 2009, advancing at least as far as the round of 16 in seven of the last eight appearances. The women's volleyball team earned 12 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances from 1993 to 2004, advancing past the first round each time. In 2004 "Sports Illustrated on Campus" ranked Olsen Field "the best college baseball venue". "Sports Illustrated" ranked the university 46th, in a 2002 analysis of "America's Best Sports College[s]" and College Station the 9th best college sports town.
A&M's archrival was the University of Texas until joining the SEC. In 2004, sporting events between the Aggies and Longhorns became known as the Lone Star Showdown. The most-watched event in the rivalry was the annual football game held the day of Thanksgiving. Other rivalries have included Texas Tech, Baylor University, and the recently renewed rivalries with the University of Arkansas and Louisiana State University.
Founded in 1894, the football team has won 18 Southwest Conference championships, 3 Big 12 South Division championships, and 1 Big 12 championship. The university also claims 3 national championships. The team has appeared in 30 bowl games, winning 13, and has produced 41 first Team All-Americans, 5 Academic All-Americans, and 2 Heisman Trophy winners, John David Crow in 1957 and Johnny Manziel in 2012. Twenty-one Aggies play in the NFL, including the Super Bowl MVP for Super Bowl 50, Von Miller, a player for the Denver Broncos. Former Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak also played college football at Texas A&M.
Since 1904, home football games have been played at Kyle Field, a stadium with a current capacity of 102,500. In 2004, "CBS SportsLine.com" ranked Kyle Field the top football stadium while "Sporting News" ranked it fourth. The same year "Sports Illustrated on Campus" ranked an A&M football weekend the third best college football experience.
Founded in 1912, the men's basketball team won 11 Southwest Conference championships and 2 Southwest Conference Tournament championships. The team has appeared in the National Invitation Tournament 6 times and in the NCAA Tournament 11 times, of which 3 resulted in Sweet Sixteen appearances, most recently in the 2015–16 season, which is the highest round to which the Aggies have advanced. The women's basketball team has 1 Southwest Conference Tournament championship, 1 regular season Big 12 Conference championship and 2 Big 12 Tournament championships, most recently in 2011. The women have advanced to 8 NCAA Tournament appearances, winning the National Championship in 2011. They have also competed in the WNIT twice, winning that tournament in 1995.
The men's basketball team was coached by head coach Mark Turgeon for four years until he left for the head coaching position at the University of Maryland. The current head basketball coach is Billy Kennedy; he is entering his third season and leading the Aggies into the Southeastern Conference. The women's team has been coached by Gary Blair since 2003. Home games are played at the 12,989-seat Reed Arena. G. Rollie White Coliseum, formerly the home of the volleyball and basketball teams, hosted basketball games before Reed Arena opened in 1998.
The Texas A&M Athletic Hall of Fame was established in 1964 to "acknowledge athletes whose accomplishments on the field have brought credit to Texas A&M." As of 2018, it features 297 inductees. The Hall of Fame also hosts the Hall of Honor and Lettermen's Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Texas A&M Athletic Hall of Honor was established in 1977 to "recognizes individuals who have gone above and beyond in contributions and support of the athletic programs at Texas A&M."
The Lettermen's Lifetime Achievement Award was established in 2011 to recognize "lettermen, who after graduation, have gone on to gain prominence through his or her efforts in industry, commerce, technology, athletics, the professions, or other worthy endeavors."
With over 450,000 alumni, A&M has one of the largest and most active alumni groups in America. Many Aggies have attained local, national, and international prominence. Jorge Quiroga and Martin Torrijos have served as heads of state for Bolivia and Panama, respectively, and Rick Perry is the current United States Secretary of Energy, and former Governor of Texas and 2012 US Presidential candidate. Robert Gates, United States Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, is a past president of the university. Congressmen Joe Barton, Bill Flores, Jeb Hensarling, and Louie Gohmert, and former Austin, Texas, mayor Will Wynn are all graduates. Frank Malina was a founding member and second Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. William A. Pailes, Michael E. Fossum, and Steven Swanson became NASA astronauts. Holly Ridings, mechanical engineer, became the first woman to be chief flight director at NASA. Phyllis Frye, is a residing judge in Houston Texas, most notable for being the first Transgender Judge in the United States.
Aggies made their mark on the gridiron with former All Pro Green Bay Packer Lee Roy Caffey, 1 Pro-Bowl, 4 World Championships, including 3 Super Bowls, title-winning coach Gene Stallings, Oakland Raiders head coach Dennis Allen, Houston Oilers defensive tackle Ray Childress, Heisman Trophy winners John David Crow and Johnny Manziel, Heisman runner-up, legislator, and actor John Kimbrough, punt returner Dante Hall, offensive tackle Richmond Webb, Detroit Lions defensive back and punter Yale Lary, former Dallas Cowboys assistant coach and former player Dat Nguyen, punter Shane Lechler, Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller, and defensive end Ty Warren. Paul "Bear" Bryant coached at A&M where "survivors" of his grueling football practice camp at Junction, Texas were nicknamed named The Junction Boys. Other famous Aggie athletes include Randy Barnes, indoor/outdoor shot put world record holder, World Series champion player and manager Davey Johnson, baseball standouts Chuck Knoblauch and Wally Moon (the 1954 Rookie of the Year); along with Stacy Sykora, Libero for the USA national volleyball team.
Aggies have also made a mark on pop culture. Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett, who often strummed their guitars on the porch of their Northgate home, have become popular country singers. Rip Torn is a veteran of the silver screen and Neal Boortz is a nationally syndicated talk show host with the sixth largest listening audience in the United States. Wen Ho Lee, a doctoral graduate of A&M, became the subject of a 1999 espionage investigation; though arrested, charges were dropped in 2000.
Aggies in business, particularly in the fields of energy, construction, communications, law, and chemistry, include Lowry Mays, chairman and CEO of Clear Channel Communications; George P. Mitchell, chairman and CEO, Mitchell Energy and Development Corp.; Khalid A. Al-Falih, President and CEO of Saudi Aramco; Eduardo Castro-Wright, CEO of Wal-Mart Stores USA. Alum Charles E. Toberman was known as the "Father of Hollywood" for his role in developing many of the city's most recognizable landmarks, including the Hollywood Bowl, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, El Capitan Theatre, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Grauman's Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Masonic Temple. Architect Greg Pappas, now-deceased member and Vice President of the Pappas Restaurants family, is known for his design of the many different Pappas Family restaurants.
J. William Harbour M.D., is an ocular oncologist, cancer researcher and vice chairman at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami.
Because of A&M's military roots, many Aggies have become leaders in the armed forces, and were featured in the 1943 film "We've Never Been Licked". George H. Gay, Jr., was the sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8 in the Battle of Midway. Lieutenant General Jay T. Robbins became a fighter ace in World War II with 22 aerial victories. Major General Robert B. Williams led World War II raid on the Schweinfurt ball bearing factories. General Bernard Adolph Schriever, known as "the architect of the Air Force's ballistic missile and military space program", became the namesake of Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. General Michael Moseley is a former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
Seven Aggies received the Medal of Honor in World War II.
One Aggie received the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War prior to enrolling at the school. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29927 |
On the Origin of Species
On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had collected on the "Beagle" expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.
Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to other animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream.
The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T. H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During "the eclipse of Darwinism" from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin's concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, and it has now become the unifying concept of the life sciences.
Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows:
In later editions of the book, Darwin traced evolutionary ideas as far back as Aristotle; the text he cites is a summary by Aristotle of the ideas of the earlier Greek philosopher Empedocles. Early Christian Church Fathers and Medieval European scholars interpreted the Genesis creation narrative allegorically rather than as a literal historical account; organisms were described by their mythological and heraldic significance as well as by their physical form. Nature was widely believed to be unstable and capricious, with monstrous births from union between species, and spontaneous generation of life.
The Protestant Reformation inspired a literal interpretation of the Bible, with concepts of creation that conflicted with the findings of an emerging science seeking explanations congruent with the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and the empiricism of the Baconian method. After the turmoil of the English Civil War, the Royal Society wanted to show that science did not threaten religious and political stability. John Ray developed an influential natural theology of rational order; in his taxonomy, species were static and fixed, their adaptation and complexity designed by God, and varieties showed minor differences caused by local conditions. In God's benevolent design, carnivores caused mercifully swift death, but the suffering caused by parasitism was a puzzling problem. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 also viewed species as fixed according to the divine plan. In 1766, Georges Buffon suggested that some similar species, such as horses and asses, or lions, tigers, and leopards, might be varieties descended from a common ancestor. The Ussher chronology of the 1650s had calculated creation at 4004 BC, but by the 1780s geologists assumed a much older world. Wernerians thought strata were deposits from shrinking seas, but James Hutton proposed a self-maintaining infinite cycle, anticipating uniformitarianism.
Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin outlined a hypothesis of transmutation of species in the 1790s, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a more developed theory in 1809. Both envisaged that spontaneous generation produced simple forms of life that progressively developed greater complexity, adapting to the environment by inheriting changes in adults caused by use or disuse. This process was later called Lamarckism. Lamarck thought there was an inherent progressive tendency driving organisms continuously towards greater complexity, in parallel but separate lineages with no extinction. Geoffroy contended that embryonic development recapitulated transformations of organisms in past eras when the environment acted on embryos, and that animal structures were determined by a constant plan as demonstrated by homologies. Georges Cuvier strongly disputed such ideas, holding that unrelated, fixed species showed similarities that reflected a design for functional needs. His palæontological work in the 1790s had established the reality of extinction, which he explained by local catastrophes, followed by repopulation of the affected areas by other species.
In Britain, William Paley's "Natural Theology" saw adaptation as evidence of beneficial "design" by the Creator acting through natural laws. All naturalists in the two English universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were Church of England clergymen, and science became a search for these laws. Geologists adapted catastrophism to show repeated worldwide annihilation and creation of new fixed species adapted to a changed environment, initially identifying the most recent catastrophe as the biblical flood. Some anatomists such as Robert Grant were influenced by Lamarck and Geoffroy, but most naturalists regarded their ideas of transmutation as a threat to divinely appointed social order.
Darwin went to Edinburgh University in 1825 to study medicine. In his second year he neglected his medical studies for natural history and spent four months assisting Robert Grant's research into marine invertebrates. Grant revealed his enthusiasm for the transmutation of species, but Darwin rejected it. Starting in 1827, at Cambridge University, Darwin learnt science as natural theology from botanist John Stevens Henslow, and read Paley, John Herschel and Alexander von Humboldt. Filled with zeal for science, he studied catastrophist geology with Adam Sedgwick.
In December 1831, he joined the "Beagle" expedition as a gentleman naturalist and geologist. He read Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology" and from the first stop ashore, at St. Jago, found Lyell's uniformitarianism a key to the geological history of landscapes. Darwin discovered fossils resembling huge armadillos, and noted the geographical distribution of modern species in hope of finding their "centre of creation". The three Fuegian missionaries the expedition returned to Tierra del Fuego were friendly and civilised, yet to Darwin their relatives on the island seemed "miserable, degraded savages", and he no longer saw an unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. As the "Beagle" neared England in 1836, he noted that species might not be fixed.
Richard Owen showed that fossils of extinct species Darwin found in South America were allied to living species on the same continent. In March 1837, ornithologist John Gould announced that Darwin's rhea was a separate species from the previously described rhea (though their territories overlapped), that mockingbirds collected on the Galápagos Islands represented three separate species each unique to a particular island, and that several distinct birds from those islands were all classified as finches. Darwin began speculating, in a series of notebooks, on the possibility that "one species does change into another" to explain these findings, and around July sketched a genealogical branching of a single evolutionary tree, discarding Lamarck's independent lineages progressing to higher forms. Unconventionally, Darwin asked questions of fancy pigeon and animal breeders as well as established scientists. At the zoo he had his first sight of an ape, and was profoundly impressed by how human the orangutan seemed.
In late September 1838, he started reading Thomas Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle of Population" with its statistical argument that human populations, if unrestrained, breed beyond their means and struggle to survive. Darwin related this to the struggle for existence among wildlife and botanist de Candolle's "warring of the species" in plants; he immediately envisioned "a force like a hundred thousand wedges" pushing well-adapted variations into "gaps in the economy of nature", so that the survivors would pass on their form and abilities, and unfavourable variations would be destroyed. By December 1838, he had noted a similarity between the act of breeders selecting traits and a Malthusian Nature selecting among variants thrown up by "chance" so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected".
Darwin now had the basic framework of his theory of natural selection, but he was fully occupied with his career as a geologist and held back from compiling it until his book on "The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs" was completed. As he recalled in his autobiography, he had "at last got a theory by which to work", but it was only in June 1842 that he allowed himself "the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil".
Darwin continued to research and extensively revise his theory while focusing on his main work of publishing the scientific results of the "Beagle" voyage. He tentatively wrote of his ideas to Lyell in January 1842; then in June he roughed out a 35-page "Pencil Sketch" of his theory. Darwin began correspondence about his theorising with the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in January 1844, and by July had rounded out his "sketch" into a 230-page "Essay", to be expanded with his research results and published if he died prematurely.
In November 1844, the anonymously published popular science book "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation", written by Scottish journalist Robert Chambers, widened public interest in the concept of transmutation of species. "Vestiges" used evidence from the fossil record and embryology to support the claim that living things had progressed from the simple to the more complex over time. But it proposed a linear progression rather than the branching common descent theory behind Darwin's work in progress, and it ignored adaptation. Darwin read it soon after publication, and scorned its amateurish geology and zoology, but he carefully reviewed his own arguments after leading scientists, including Adam Sedgwick, attacked its morality and scientific errors. "Vestiges" had significant influence on public opinion, and the intense debate helped to pave the way for the acceptance of the more scientifically sophisticated "Origin" by moving evolutionary speculation into the mainstream. While few naturalists were willing to consider transmutation, Herbert Spencer became an active proponent of Lamarckism and progressive development in the 1850s.
Hooker was persuaded to take away a copy of the "Essay" in January 1847, and eventually sent a page of notes giving Darwin much-needed feedback. Reminded of his lack of expertise in taxonomy, Darwin began an eight-year study of barnacles, becoming the leading expert on their classification. Using his theory, he discovered homologies showing that slightly changed body parts served different functions to meet new conditions, and he found an intermediate stage in the evolution of distinct sexes.
Darwin's barnacle studies convinced him that variation arose constantly and not just in response to changed circumstances. In 1854, he completed the last part of his "Beagle"-related writing and began working full-time on evolution. He now realised that the branching pattern of evolutionary divergence was explained by natural selection working constantly to improve adaptation. His thinking changed from the view that species formed in isolated populations only, as on islands, to an emphasis on speciation without isolation; that is, he saw increasing specialisation within large stable populations as continuously exploiting new ecological niches. He conducted empirical research focusing on difficulties with his theory. He studied the developmental and anatomical differences between different breeds of many domestic animals, became actively involved in fancy pigeon breeding, and experimented (with the help of his son Francis) on ways that plant seeds and animals might disperse across oceans to colonise distant islands. By 1856, his theory was much more sophisticated, with a mass of supporting evidence.
In his autobiography, Darwin said he had "gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859; and I lost nothing by it". On the first page of his 1859 book he noted that, having begun work on the topic in 1837, he had drawn up "some short notes" after five years, had enlarged these into a sketch in 1844, and "from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object."
Various biographers have proposed that Darwin avoided or delayed making his ideas public for personal reasons. Reasons suggested have included fear of religious persecution or social disgrace if his views were revealed, and concern about upsetting his clergymen naturalist friends or his pious wife Emma. Charles Darwin's illness caused repeated delays. His paper on Glen Roy had proved embarrassingly wrong, and he may have wanted to be sure he was correct. David Quammen has suggested all these factors may have contributed, and notes Darwin's large output of books and busy family life during that time.
A more recent study by science historian John van Wyhe has determined that the idea that Darwin delayed publication only dates back to the 1940s, and Darwin's contemporaries thought the time he took was reasonable. Darwin always finished one book before starting another. While he was researching, he told many people about his interest in transmutation without causing outrage. He firmly intended to publish, but it was not until September 1854 that he could work on it full-time. His 1846 estimate that writing his "big book" would take five years proved optimistic.
An 1855 paper on the "introduction" of species, written by Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that patterns in the geographical distribution of living and fossil species could be explained if every new species always came into existence near an already existing, closely related species. Charles Lyell recognised the implications of Wallace's paper and its possible connection to Darwin's work, although Darwin did not, and in a letter written on 1–2 May 1856 Lyell urged Darwin to publish his theory to establish priority. Darwin was torn between the desire to set out a full and convincing account and the pressure to quickly produce a short paper. He met Lyell, and in correspondence with Joseph Dalton Hooker affirmed that he did not want to expose his ideas to review by an editor as would have been required to publish in an academic journal. He began a "sketch" account on 14 May 1856, and by July had decided to produce a full technical treatise on species as his "big book" on "Natural Selection". His theory including the principle of divergence was complete by 5 September 1857 when he sent Asa Gray a brief but detailed abstract of his ideas.
Darwin was hard at work on the manuscript for his "big book" on "Natural Selection", when on 18 June 1858 he received a parcel from Wallace, who stayed on the Maluku Islands (Ternate and Gilolo). It enclosed twenty pages describing an evolutionary mechanism, a response to Darwin's recent encouragement, with a request to send it on to Lyell if Darwin thought it worthwhile. The mechanism was similar to Darwin's own theory. Darwin wrote to Lyell that "your words have come true with a vengeance, ... forestalled" and he would "of course, at once write and offer to send [it] to any journal" that Wallace chose, adding that "all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed". Lyell and Hooker agreed that a joint publication putting together Wallace's pages with extracts from Darwin's 1844 Essay and his 1857 letter to Gray should be presented at the Linnean Society, and on 1 July 1858, the papers entitled "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection", by Wallace and Darwin respectively, were read out but drew little reaction. While Darwin considered Wallace's idea to be identical to his concept of natural selection, historians have pointed out differences. Darwin described natural selection as being analogous to the artificial selection practised by animal breeders, and emphasised competition between individuals; Wallace drew no comparison to selective breeding, and focused on ecological pressures that kept different varieties adapted to local conditions. Some historians have suggested that Wallace was actually discussing group selection rather than selection acting on individual variation.
Soon after the meeting, Darwin decided to write "an abstract of my whole work" in the form of one or more papers to be published by the Linnean Society, but was concerned about "how it can be made scientific for a Journal, without giving facts, which would be impossible." He asked Hooker how many pages would be available, but "If the Referees were to reject it as not strictly scientific I would, perhaps publish it as pamphlet." He began his "abstract of Species book" on 20 July 1858, while on holiday at Sandown, and wrote parts of it from memory, while sending the manuscripts to his friends for checking.
By early October, he began to "expect my abstract will run into a small volume, which will have to be published separately." Over the same period, he continued to collect information and write large fully detailed sections of the manuscript for his "big book" on Species, "Natural Selection".
By mid-March 1859 Darwin's abstract had reached the stage where he was thinking of early publication; Lyell suggested the publisher John Murray, and met with him to find if he would be willing to publish. On 28 March Darwin wrote to Lyell asking about progress, and offering to give Murray assurances "that my Book is not more "un"-orthodox, than the subject makes inevitable." He enclosed a draft title sheet proposing "An abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through natural selection", with the year shown as "1859".
Murray's response was favourable, and a very pleased Darwin told Lyell on 30 March that he would "send shortly a large bundle of M.S. but unfortunately I cannot for a week, as the three first chapters are in three copyists' hands". He bowed to Murray's objection to "abstract" in the title, though he felt it excused the lack of references, but wanted to keep "natural selection" which was "constantly used in all works on Breeding", and hoped "to retain it with Explanation, somewhat as thus",— "Through Natural Selection or the preservation of favoured races".
On 31 March Darwin wrote to Murray in confirmation, and listed headings of the 12 chapters in progress: he had drafted all except "XII. Recapitulation & Conclusion". Murray responded immediately with an agreement to publish the book on the same terms as he published Lyell, without even seeing the manuscript: he offered Darwin ⅔ of the profits. Darwin promptly accepted with pleasure, insisting that Murray would be free to withdraw the offer if, having read the chapter manuscripts, he felt the book would not sell well (eventually Murray paid £180 to Darwin for the first edition and by Darwin's death in 1882 the book was in its sixth edition, earning Darwin nearly £3000).
On 5 April, Darwin sent Murray the first three chapters, and a proposal for the book's title. An early draft title page suggests "On the Mutability of Species". Murray cautiously asked Whitwell Elwin to review the chapters. At Lyell's suggestion, Elwin recommended that, rather than "put forth the theory without the evidence", the book should focus on observations upon pigeons, briefly stating how these illustrated Darwin's general principles and preparing the way for the larger work expected shortly: "Every body is interested in pigeons." Darwin responded that this was impractical: he had only the last chapter still to write. In September the main title still included ""An essay on the origin of species and varieties"", but Darwin now proposed dropping "varieties".
With Murray's persuasion, the title was eventually agreed as "On the Origin of Species", with the title page adding "by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". In this extended title (and elsewhere in the book) Darwin used the biological term ""races"" interchangeably with ""varieties"", meaning varieties within a species. He used the term broadly, and as well as discussions of "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage" and "the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants", there are three instances in the book where the phrase "races of man" is used, referring to races of humans.
"On the Origin of Species" was first published on Thursday 24 November 1859, priced at fifteen shillings with a first printing of 1250 copies. The book had been offered to booksellers at Murray's autumn sale on Tuesday 22 November, and all available copies had been taken up immediately. In total, 1,250 copies were printed but after deducting presentation and review copies, and five for Stationers' Hall copyright, around 1,170 copies were available for sale. Significantly, 500 were taken by Mudie's Library, ensuring that the book promptly reached a large number of subscribers to the library. The second edition of 3,000 copies was quickly brought out on 7 January 1860, and incorporated numerous corrections as well as a response to religious objections by the addition of a new epigraph on page ii, a quotation from Charles Kingsley, and the phrase "by the Creator" added to the closing sentence. During Darwin's lifetime the book went through six editions, with cumulative changes and revisions to deal with counter-arguments raised. The third edition came out in 1861, with a number of sentences rewritten or added and an introductory appendix, "An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species", while the fourth in 1866 had further revisions. The fifth edition, published on 10 February 1869, incorporated more changes and for the first time included the phrase "survival of the fittest", which had been coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer in his "Principles of Biology" (1864).
In January 1871, George Jackson Mivart's "On the Genesis of Species" listed detailed arguments against natural selection, and claimed it included false metaphysics. Darwin made extensive revisions to the sixth edition of the "Origin" (this was the first edition in which he used the word "evolution" which had commonly been associated with embryological development, though all editions concluded with the word "evolved"), and added a new chapter VII, "Miscellaneous objections", to address Mivart's arguments.
The sixth edition was published by Murray on 19 February 1872 as "The Origin of Species", with "On" dropped from the title. Darwin had told Murray of working men in Lancashire clubbing together to buy the fifth edition at 15 shillings and wanted it made more widely available; the price was halved to 7s 6d by printing in a smaller font. It includes a glossary compiled by W.S. Dallas. Book sales increased from 60 to 250 per month.
In the United States, botanist Asa Gray, an American colleague of Darwin, negotiated with a Boston publisher for publication of an authorised American version, but learnt that two New York publishing firms were already planning to exploit the absence of international copyright to print "Origin". Darwin was delighted by the popularity of the book, and asked Gray to keep any profits. Gray managed to negotiate a 5% royalty with Appleton's of New York, who got their edition out in mid-January 1860, and the other two withdrew. In a May letter, Darwin mentioned a print run of 2,500 copies, but it is not clear if this referred to the first printing only as there were four that year.
The book was widely translated in Darwin's lifetime, but problems arose with translating concepts and metaphors, and some translations were biased by the translator's own agenda. Darwin distributed presentation copies in France and Germany, hoping that suitable applicants would come forward, as translators were expected to make their own arrangements with a local publisher. He welcomed the distinguished elderly naturalist and geologist Heinrich Georg Bronn, but the German translation published in 1860 imposed Bronn's own ideas, adding controversial themes that Darwin had deliberately omitted. Bronn translated "favoured races" as "perfected races", and added essays on issues including the origin of life, as well as a final chapter on religious implications partly inspired by Bronn's adherence to "Naturphilosophie". In 1862, Bronn produced a second edition based on the third English edition and Darwin's suggested additions, but then died of a heart attack. Darwin corresponded closely with Julius Victor Carus, who published an improved translation in 1867. Darwin's attempts to find a translator in France fell through, and the translation by Clémence Royer published in 1862 added an introduction praising Darwin's ideas as an alternative to religious revelation and promoting ideas anticipating social Darwinism and eugenics, as well as numerous explanatory notes giving her own answers to doubts that Darwin expressed. Darwin corresponded with Royer about a second edition published in 1866 and a third in 1870, but he had difficulty getting her to remove her notes and was troubled by these editions. He remained unsatisfied until a translation by Edmond Barbier was published in 1876. A Dutch translation by Tiberius Cornelis Winkler was published in 1860. By 1864, additional translations had appeared in Italian and Russian. In Darwin's lifetime, "Origin" was published in Swedish in 1871, Danish in 1872, Polish in 1873, Hungarian in 1873–1874, Spanish in 1877 and Serbian in 1878. By 1977, "Origin" had appeared in an additional 18 languages, including Chinese by Ma Chün-wu who added non-Darwinian ideas; he published the preliminaries and chapters 1–5 in 1902–1904, and his complete translation in 1920.
Page ii contains quotations by William Whewell and Francis Bacon on the theology of natural laws, harmonising science and religion in accordance with Isaac Newton's belief in a rational God who established a law-abiding cosmos. In the second edition, Darwin added an epigraph from Joseph Butler affirming that God could work through scientific laws as much as through miracles, in a nod to the religious concerns of his oldest friends. The "Introduction" establishes Darwin's credentials as a naturalist and author, then refers to John Herschel's letter suggesting that the origin of species "would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process":
WHEN on board HMS "Beagle", as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
Darwin refers specifically to the distribution of the species rheas, and to that of the Galápagos tortoises and mockingbirds. He mentions his years of work on his theory, and the arrival of Wallace at the same conclusion, which led him to "publish this Abstract" of his incomplete work. He outlines his ideas, and sets out the essence of his theory:
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
Starting with the third edition, Darwin prefaced the introduction with a sketch of the historical development of evolutionary ideas. In that sketch he acknowledged that Patrick Matthew had, unknown to Wallace or himself, anticipated the concept of natural selection in an appendix to a book published in 1831; in the fourth edition he mentioned that William Charles Wells had done so as early as 1813.
Chapter I covers animal husbandry and plant breeding, going back to ancient Egypt. Darwin discusses contemporary opinions on the origins of different breeds under cultivation to argue that many have been produced from common ancestors by selective breeding. As an illustration of artificial selection, he describes fancy pigeon breeding, noting that "[t]he diversity of the breeds is something astonishing", yet all were descended from one species of rock pigeon. Darwin saw two distinct kinds of variation: (1) rare abrupt changes he called "sports" or "monstrosities" (example: Ancon sheep with short legs), and (2) ubiquitous small differences (example: slightly shorter or longer bill of pigeons). Both types of hereditary changes can be used by breeders. However, for Darwin the small changes were most important in evolution. In this chapter Darwin expresses his erroneous belief that environmental change is necessary to generate variation.
In Chapter II, Darwin specifies that the distinction between species and varieties is arbitrary, with experts disagreeing and changing their decisions when new forms were found. He concludes that "a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world.
In Chapter III, Darwin asks how varieties "which I have called incipient species" become distinct species, and in answer introduces the key concept he calls "natural selection"; in the fifth edition he adds, "But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient."
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring ... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.
He notes that both A. P. de Candolle and Charles Lyell had stated that all organisms are exposed to severe competition. Darwin emphasizes that he used the phrase "struggle for existence" in "a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another"; he gives examples ranging from plants struggling against drought to plants competing for birds to eat their fruit and disseminate their seeds. He describes the struggle resulting from population growth: "It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." He discusses checks to such increase including complex ecological interdependencies, and notes that competition is most severe between closely related forms "which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature".
Chapter IV details natural selection under the "infinitely complex and close-fitting ... mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life". Darwin takes as an example a country where a change in conditions led to extinction of some species, immigration of others and, where suitable variations occurred, descendants of some species became adapted to new conditions. He remarks that the artificial selection practised by animal breeders frequently produced sharp divergence in character between breeds, and suggests that natural selection might do the same, saying:
But how, it may be asked, can any analogous principle apply in nature? I believe it can and does apply most efficiently, from the simple circumstance that the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.
Historians have remarked that here Darwin anticipated the modern concept of an ecological niche. He did not suggest that every favourable variation must be selected, nor that the favoured animals were better or higher, but merely more adapted to their surroundings.
Darwin proposes sexual selection, driven by competition between males for mates, to explain sexually dimorphic features such as lion manes, deer antlers, peacock tails, bird songs, and the bright plumage of some male birds. He analysed sexual selection more fully in "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871). Natural selection was expected to work very slowly in forming new species, but given the effectiveness of artificial selection, he could "see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection". Using a tree diagram and calculations, he indicates the "divergence of character" from original species into new species and genera. He describes branches falling off as extinction occurred, while new branches formed in "the great Tree of life ... with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications".
In Darwin's time there was no agreed-upon model of heredity; in Chapter I Darwin admitted, "The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown." He accepted a version of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (which after Darwin's death came to be called Lamarckism), and Chapter V discusses what he called the effects of use and disuse; he wrote that he thought "there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited", and that this also applied in nature. Darwin stated that some changes that were commonly attributed to use and disuse, such as the loss of functional wings in some island-dwelling insects, might be produced by natural selection. In later editions of "Origin", Darwin expanded the role attributed to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Darwin also admitted ignorance of the source of inheritable variations, but speculated they might be produced by environmental factors. However, one thing was clear: whatever the exact nature and causes of new variations, Darwin knew from observation and experiment that breeders were able to select such variations and produce huge differences in many generations of selection. The "observation" that selection works in domestic animals is not destroyed by lack of "understanding" of the underlying hereditary mechanism.
Breeding of animals and plants showed related varieties varying in similar ways, or tending to revert to an ancestral form, and similar patterns of variation in distinct species were explained by Darwin as demonstrating common descent. He recounted how Lord Morton's mare apparently demonstrated telegony, offspring inheriting characteristics of a previous mate of the female parent, and accepted this process as increasing the variation available for natural selection.
More detail was given in Darwin's 1868 book on "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication", which tried to explain heredity through his hypothesis of pangenesis. Although Darwin had privately questioned blending inheritance, he struggled with the theoretical difficulty that novel individual variations would tend to blend into a population. However, inherited variation could be seen, and Darwin's concept of selection working on a population with a range of small variations was workable. It was not until the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s that a model of heredity became completely integrated with a model of variation. This modern evolutionary synthesis had been dubbed Neo Darwinian Evolution because it encompasses Charles Darwin's theories of evolution with Gregor Mendel's theories of genetic inheritance.
Chapter VI begins by saying the next three chapters will address possible objections to the theory, the first being that often no intermediate forms between closely related species are found, though the theory implies such forms must have existed. As Darwin noted, "Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?" Darwin attributed this to the competition between different forms, combined with the small number of individuals of intermediate forms, often leading to extinction of such forms. This difficulty can be referred to as the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in habitat space.
Another difficulty, related to the first one, is the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in time. Darwin commented that by the theory of natural selection "innumerable transitional forms must have existed," and wondered "why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (For further discussion of these difficulties, see and Bernstein et al. and Michod.)
The chapter then deals with whether natural selection could produce complex specialised structures, and the behaviours to use them, when it would be difficult to imagine how intermediate forms could be functional. Darwin said:
Secondly, is it possible that an animal having, for instance, the structure and habits of a bat, could have been formed by the modification of some animal with wholly different habits? Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, organs of trifling importance, such as the tail of a giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and, on the other hand, organs of such wonderful structure, as the eye, of which we hardly as yet fully understand the inimitable perfection?
His answer was that in many cases animals exist with intermediate structures that are functional. He presented flying squirrels, and flying lemurs as examples of how bats might have evolved from non-flying ancestors. He discussed various simple eyes found in invertebrates, starting with nothing more than an optic nerve coated with pigment, as examples of how the vertebrate eye could have evolved. Darwin concludes: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case."
In a section on "organs of little apparent importance", Darwin discusses the difficulty of explaining various seemingly trivial traits with no evident adaptive function, and outlines some possibilities such as correlation with useful features. He accepts that we "are profoundly ignorant of the causes producing slight and unimportant variations" which distinguish domesticated breeds of animals, and human races. He suggests that sexual selection might explain these variations:
I might have adduced for this same purpose the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked; I may add that some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin of these differences, chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind, but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous.
Chapter VII (of the first edition) addresses the evolution of instincts. His examples included two he had investigated experimentally: slave-making ants and the construction of hexagonal cells by honey bees. Darwin noted that some species of slave-making ants were more dependent on slaves than others, and he observed that many ant species will collect and store the pupae of other species as food. He thought it reasonable that species with an extreme dependency on slave workers had evolved in incremental steps. He suggested that bees that make hexagonal cells evolved in steps from bees that made round cells, under pressure from natural selection to economise wax. Darwin concluded:
Finally, it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, —ants making slaves, —the larvæ of ichneumonidæ feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, —not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Chapter VIII addresses the idea that species had special characteristics that prevented hybrids from being fertile in order to preserve separately created species. Darwin said that, far from being constant, the difficulty in producing hybrids of related species, and the viability and fertility of the hybrids, varied greatly, especially among plants. Sometimes what were widely considered to be separate species produced fertile hybrid offspring freely, and in other cases what were considered to be mere varieties of the same species could only be crossed with difficulty. Darwin concluded: "Finally, then, the facts briefly given in this chapter do not seem to me opposed to, but even rather to support the view, that there is no fundamental distinction between species and varieties."
In the sixth edition Darwin inserted a new chapter VII (renumbering the subsequent chapters) to respond to criticisms of earlier editions, including the objection that many features of organisms were not adaptive and could not have been produced by natural selection. He said some such features could have been by-products of adaptive changes to other features, and that often features seemed non-adaptive because their function was unknown, as shown by his book on "Fertilisation of Orchids" that explained how their elaborate structures facilitated pollination by insects. Much of the chapter responds to George Jackson Mivart's criticisms, including his claim that features such as baleen filters in whales, flatfish with both eyes on one side and the camouflage of stick insects could not have evolved through natural selection because intermediate stages would not have been adaptive. Darwin proposed scenarios for the incremental evolution of each feature.
Chapter IX deals with the fact that the geological record appears to show forms of life suddenly arising, without the innumerable transitional fossils expected from gradual changes. Darwin borrowed Charles Lyell's argument in "Principles of Geology" that the record is extremely imperfect as fossilisation is a very rare occurrence, spread over vast periods of time; since few areas had been geologically explored, there could only be fragmentary knowledge of geological formations, and fossil collections were very poor. Evolved local varieties which migrated into a wider area would seem to be the sudden appearance of a new species. Darwin did not expect to be able to reconstruct evolutionary history, but continuing discoveries gave him well-founded hope that new finds would occasionally reveal transitional forms. To show that there had been enough time for natural selection to work slowly, he cited the example of The Weald as discussed in "Principles of Geology" together with other observations from Hugh Miller, James Smith of Jordanhill and Andrew Ramsay. Combining this with an estimate of recent rates of sedimentation and erosion, Darwin calculated that erosion of The Weald had taken around 300 million years. The initial appearance of entire groups of well-developed organisms in the oldest fossil-bearing layers, now known as the Cambrian explosion, posed a problem. Darwin had no doubt that earlier seas had swarmed with living creatures, but stated that he had no satisfactory explanation for the lack of fossils. Fossil evidence of pre-Cambrian life has since been found, extending the history of life back for billions of years.
Chapter X examines whether patterns in the fossil record are better explained by common descent and branching evolution through natural selection, than by the individual creation of fixed species. Darwin expected species to change slowly, but not at the same rate – some organisms such as "Lingula" were unchanged since the earliest fossils. The pace of natural selection would depend on variability and change in the environment. This distanced his theory from Lamarckian laws of inevitable progress. It has been argued that this anticipated the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis, but other scholars have preferred to emphasise Darwin's commitment to gradualism. He cited Richard Owen's findings that the earliest members of a class were a few simple and generalised species with characteristics intermediate between modern forms, and were followed by increasingly diverse and specialised forms, matching the branching of common descent from an ancestor. Patterns of extinction matched his theory, with related groups of species having a continued existence until extinction, then not reappearing. Recently extinct species were more similar to living species than those from earlier eras, and as he had seen in South America, and William Clift had shown in Australia, fossils from recent geological periods resembled species still living in the same area.
Chapter XI deals with evidence from biogeography, starting with the observation that differences in flora and fauna from separate regions cannot be explained by environmental differences alone; South America, Africa, and Australia all have regions with similar climates at similar latitudes, but those regions have very different plants and animals. The species found in one area of a continent are more closely allied with species found in other regions of that same continent than to species found on other continents. Darwin noted that barriers to migration played an important role in the differences between the species of different regions. The coastal sea life of the Atlantic and Pacific sides of Central America had almost no species in common even though the Isthmus of Panama was only a few miles wide. His explanation was a combination of migration and descent with modification. He went on to say: "On this principle of inheritance with modification, we can understand how it is that sections of genera, whole genera, and even families are confined to the same areas, as is so commonly and notoriously the case." Darwin explained how a volcanic island formed a few hundred miles from a continent might be colonised by a few species from that continent. These species would become modified over time, but would still be related to species found on the continent, and Darwin observed that this was a common pattern. Darwin discussed ways that species could be dispersed across oceans to colonise islands, many of which he had investigated experimentally.
Chapter XII continues the discussion of biogeography. After a brief discussion of freshwater species, it returns to oceanic islands and their peculiarities; for example on some islands roles played by mammals on continents were played by other animals such as flightless birds or reptiles. The summary of both chapters says:
... I think all the grand leading facts of geographical distribution are explicable on the theory of migration (generally of the more dominant forms of life), together with subsequent modification and the multiplication of new forms. We can thus understand the high importance of barriers, whether of land or water, which separate our several zoological and botanical provinces. We can thus understand the localisation of sub-genera, genera, and families; and how it is that under different latitudes, for instance in South America, the inhabitants of the plains and mountains, of the forests, marshes, and deserts, are in so mysterious a manner linked together by affinity, and are likewise linked to the extinct beings which formerly inhabited the same continent ... On these same principles, we can understand, as I have endeavoured to show, why oceanic islands should have few inhabitants, but of these a great number should be endemic or peculiar; ...
Chapter XIII starts by observing that classification depends on species being grouped together in a "Taxonomy", a multilevel system of groups and sub-groups based on varying degrees of resemblance. After discussing classification issues, Darwin concludes:
All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, ...
Darwin discusses morphology, including the importance of homologous structures. He says, "What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?" This made no sense under doctrines of independent creation of species, as even Richard Owen had admitted, but the "explanation is manifest on the theory of the natural selection of successive slight modifications" showing common descent. He notes that animals of the same class often have extremely similar embryos. Darwin discusses rudimentary organs, such as the wings of flightless birds and the rudiments of pelvis and leg bones found in some snakes. He remarks that some rudimentary organs, such as teeth in baleen whales, are found only in embryonic stages. These factors also supported his theory of descent with modification.
The final chapter, "Recapitulation and Conclusion", reviews points from earlier chapters, and Darwin concludes by hoping that his theory might produce revolutionary changes in many fields of natural history. He suggests that psychology will be put on a new foundation and implies the relevance of his theory to the first appearance of humanity with the sentence that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." Darwin ends with a passage that became well known and much quoted:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us ... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
As discussed under "religious attitudes", Darwin added the phrase "by the Creator" from the 1860 second edition onwards, so that the ultimate sentence began "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one".
Darwin's aims were twofold: to show that species had not been separately created, and to show that natural selection had been the chief agent of change. He knew that his readers were already familiar with the concept of transmutation of species from "Vestiges", and his introduction ridicules that work as failing to provide a viable mechanism. Therefore, the first four chapters lay out his case that selection in nature, caused by the struggle for existence, is analogous to the selection of variations under domestication, and that the accumulation of adaptive variations provides a scientifically testable mechanism for evolutionary speciation.
Later chapters provide evidence that evolution has occurred, supporting the idea of branching, adaptive evolution without directly proving that selection is the mechanism. Darwin presents supporting facts drawn from many disciplines, showing that his theory could explain a myriad of observations from many fields of natural history that were inexplicable under the alternative concept that species had been individually created. The structure of Darwin's argument showed the influence of John Herschel, whose philosophy of science maintained that a mechanism could be called a "vera causa" (true cause) if three things could be demonstrated: its existence in nature, its ability to produce the effects of interest, and its ability to explain a wide range of observations.
The "Examiner" review of 3 December 1859 commented, "Much of Mr. Darwin's volume is what ordinary readers would call 'tough reading;' that is, writing which to comprehend requires concentrated attention and some preparation for the task. All, however, is by no means of this description, and many parts of the book abound in information, easy to comprehend and both instructive and entertaining."
While the book was readable enough to sell, its dryness ensured that it was seen as aimed at specialist scientists and could not be dismissed as mere journalism or imaginative fiction. Unlike the still-popular "Vestiges", it avoided the narrative style of the historical novel and cosmological speculation, though the closing sentence clearly hinted at cosmic progression. Darwin had long been immersed in the literary forms and practices of specialist science, and made effective use of his skills in structuring arguments. David Quammen has described the book as written in everyday language for a wide audience, but noted that Darwin's literary style was uneven: in some places he used convoluted sentences that are difficult to read, while in other places his writing was beautiful. Quammen advised that later editions were weakened by Darwin making concessions and adding details to address his critics, and recommended the first edition. James T. Costa said that because the book was an abstract produced in haste in response to Wallace's essay, it was more approachable than the big book on natural selection Darwin had been working on, which would have been encumbered by scholarly footnotes and much more technical detail. He added that some parts of "Origin" are dense, but other parts are almost lyrical, and the case studies and observations are presented in a narrative style unusual in serious scientific books, which broadened its audience.
From his early transmutation notebooks in the late 1830s onwards, Darwin considered human evolution as part of the natural processes he was investigating, and rejected divine intervention. In 1856, his "big book on species" titled "Natural Selection" was to include a "note on Man", but when Wallace enquired in December 1857, Darwin replied; "You ask whether I shall discuss 'man';—I think I shall avoid whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist."
On 28 March 1859, with his manuscript for the book well under way, Darwin wrote to Lyell offering the suggested publisher John Murray assurances "That I do not discuss origin of man".
In the final chapter of "On the Origin of Species", "Recapitulation and Conclusion", Darwin briefly highlights the human implications of his theory:
"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."
Discussing this in January 1860, Darwin assured Lyell that "by the sentence [Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history] I show that I believe man is in same predicament with other animals. Many modern writers have seen this sentence as Darwin’s only reference to humans in the book; Janet Browne describes it as his only discussion there of human origins, while noting that the book makes other references to humanity.
Some other statements in the book are quietly effective at pointing out the implication that humans are simply another species, evolving through the same processes and principles affecting other organisms. For example, in Chapter III: "Struggle for Existence" Darwin includes "slow-breeding man" among other examples of Malthusian population growth. In his discussions on morphology, Darwin compares and comments on bone structures that are homologous between humans and other mammals.
Darwin's early notebooks discussed how non-adaptive characteristics could be selected when animals or humans chose mates, with races of humans differing over ideas of beauty. In his 1856 notes responding to Robert Knox's "The Races of Man: A Fragment", he called this effect sexual selection. He added notes on sexual selection to his "big book on species", and in mid-1857 he added a section heading "Theory applied to Races of Man", but did not add text on this topic.
In "On the Origin of Species", Chapter VI: "Difficulties on Theory", Darwin mentions this in the context of "slight and unimportant variations":
I might have adduced for this same purpose the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked; I may add that some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin of these differences, chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind, but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous."
When Darwin published "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" twelve years later, he said that he had not gone into detail on human evolution in the "Origin" as he thought that would "only add to the prejudices against my views". He had not completely avoided the topic:
It seemed to me sufficient to indicate, in the first edition of my 'Origin of Species,' that by this work 'light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history;' and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth.
He also said that he had "merely alluded" in that book to sexual selection differentiating human races.
The book aroused international interest and a widespread debate, with no sharp line between scientific issues and ideological, social and religious implications. Much of the initial reaction was hostile, in a large part because very few reviewers actually understood his theory, but Darwin had to be taken seriously as a prominent and respected name in science. Samuel Wilberforce wrote a review in "Quarterly Review" in 1860 where he disagreed with Darwin's 'argument'. There was much less controversy than had greeted the 1844 publication "Vestiges of Creation", which had been rejected by scientists, but had influenced a wide public readership into believing that nature and human society were governed by natural laws. The "Origin of Species" as a book of wide general interest became associated with ideas of social reform. Its proponents made full use of a surge in the publication of review journals, and it was given more popular attention than almost any other scientific work, though it failed to match the continuing sales of "Vestiges". Darwin's book legitimised scientific discussion of evolutionary mechanisms, and the newly coined term "Darwinism" was used to cover the whole range of evolutionism, not just his own ideas. By the mid-1870s, evolutionism was triumphant.
While Darwin had been somewhat coy about human origins, not identifying any explicit conclusion on the matter in his book, he had dropped enough hints about human's animal ancestry for the inference to be made, and the first review claimed it made a creed of the "men from monkeys" idea from "Vestiges". Human evolution became central to the debate and was strongly argued by Huxley who featured it in his popular "working-men's lectures". Darwin did not publish his own views on this until 1871.
The naturalism of natural selection conflicted with presumptions of purpose in nature and while this could be reconciled by theistic evolution, other mechanisms implying more progress or purpose were more acceptable. Herbert Spencer had already incorporated Lamarckism into his popular philosophy of progressive free market human society. He popularised the terms "evolution" and "survival of the fittest", and many thought Spencer was central to evolutionary thinking.
Scientific readers were already aware of arguments that species changed through processes that were subject to laws of nature, but the transmutational ideas of Lamarck and the vague "law of development" of "Vestiges" had not found scientific favour. Darwin presented natural selection as a scientifically testable mechanism while accepting that other mechanisms such as inheritance of acquired characters were possible. His strategy established that evolution through natural laws was worthy of scientific study, and by 1875, most scientists accepted that evolution occurred but few thought natural selection was significant. Darwin's scientific method was also disputed, with his proponents favouring the empiricism of John Stuart Mill's "A System of Logic", while opponents held to the idealist school of William Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences", in which investigation could begin with the intuitive idea that species were fixed objects created by design. Early support for Darwin's ideas came from the findings of field naturalists studying biogeography and ecology, including Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1860, and Asa Gray in 1862. Henry Walter Bates presented research in 1861 that explained insect mimicry using natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace discussed evidence from his Malay archipelago research, including an 1864 paper with an evolutionary explanation for the Wallace line.
Evolution had less obvious applications to anatomy and morphology, and at first had little impact on the research of the anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley. Despite this, Huxley strongly supported Darwin on evolution; though he called for experiments to show whether natural selection could form new species, and questioned if Darwin's gradualism was sufficient without sudden leaps to cause speciation. Huxley wanted science to be secular, without religious interference, and his article in the April 1860 "Westminster Review" promoted scientific naturalism over natural theology, praising Darwin for "extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated" and coining the term "Darwinism" as part of his efforts to secularise and professionalise science. Huxley gained influence, and initiated the X Club, which used the journal "Nature" to promote evolution and naturalism, shaping much of late-Victorian science. Later, the German morphologist Ernst Haeckel would convince Huxley that comparative anatomy and palaeontology could be used to reconstruct evolutionary genealogies.
The leading naturalist in Britain was the anatomist Richard Owen, an idealist who had shifted to the view in the 1850s that the history of life was the gradual unfolding of a divine plan. Owen's review of the "Origin" in the April 1860 "Edinburgh Review" bitterly attacked Huxley, Hooker and Darwin, but also signalled acceptance of a kind of evolution as a teleological plan in a continuous "ordained becoming", with new species appearing by natural birth. Others that rejected natural selection, but supported "creation by birth", included the Duke of Argyll who explained beauty in plumage by design. Since 1858, Huxley had emphasised anatomical similarities between apes and humans, contesting Owen's view that humans were a separate sub-class. Their disagreement over human origins came to the fore at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting featuring the legendary 1860 Oxford evolution debate. In two years of acrimonious public dispute that Charles Kingsley satirised as the "Great Hippocampus Question" and parodied in "The Water-Babies" as the "great hippopotamus test", Huxley showed that Owen was incorrect in asserting that ape brains lacked a structure present in human brains. Others, including Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, thought that humans shared a common ancestor with apes, but higher mental faculties could not have evolved through a purely material process. Darwin published his own explanation in the "Descent of Man" (1871).
Evolutionary ideas, although not natural selection, were accepted by German biologists accustomed to ideas of homology in morphology from Goethe's "Metamorphosis of Plants" and from their long tradition of comparative anatomy. Bronn's alterations in his German translation added to the misgivings of conservatives, but enthused political radicals. Ernst Haeckel was particularly ardent, aiming to synthesise Darwin's ideas with those of Lamarck and Goethe while still reflecting the spirit of "Naturphilosophie". Their ambitious programme to reconstruct the evolutionary history of life was joined by Huxley and supported by discoveries in palaeontology. Haeckel used embryology extensively in his recapitulation theory, which embodied a progressive, almost linear model of evolution. Darwin was cautious about such histories, and had already noted that von Baer's laws of embryology supported his idea of complex branching.
Asa Gray promoted and defended "Origin" against those American naturalists with an idealist approach, notably Louis Agassiz who viewed every species as a distinct fixed unit in the mind of the Creator, classifying as species what others considered merely varieties. Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus Hyatt reconciled this view with evolutionism in a form of neo-Lamarckism involving recapitulation theory.
French-speaking naturalists in several countries showed appreciation of the much-modified French translation by Clémence Royer, but Darwin's ideas had little impact in France, where any scientists supporting evolutionary ideas opted for a form of Lamarckism. The intelligentsia in Russia had accepted the general phenomenon of evolution for several years before Darwin had published his theory, and scientists were quick to take it into account, although the Malthusian aspects were felt to be relatively unimportant. The political economy of struggle was criticised as a British stereotype by Karl Marx and by Leo Tolstoy, who had the character Levin in his novel "Anna Karenina" voice sharp criticism of the morality of Darwin's views.
There were serious scientific objections to the process of natural selection as the key mechanism of evolution, including Karl von Nägeli's insistence that a trivial characteristic with no adaptive advantage could not be developed by selection. Darwin conceded that these could be linked to adaptive characteristics. His estimate that the age of the Earth allowed gradual evolution was disputed by William Thomson (later awarded the title Lord Kelvin), who calculated that it had cooled in less than 100 million years. Darwin accepted blending inheritance, but Fleeming Jenkin calculated that as it mixed traits, natural selection could not accumulate useful traits. Darwin tried to meet these objections in the fifth edition. Mivart supported directed evolution, and compiled scientific and religious objections to natural selection. In response, Darwin made considerable changes to the sixth edition. The problems of the age of the Earth and heredity were only resolved in the 20th century.
By the mid-1870s, most scientists accepted evolution, but relegated natural selection to a minor role as they believed evolution was purposeful and progressive. The range of evolutionary theories during "the eclipse of Darwinism" included forms of "saltationism" in which new species were thought to arise through "jumps" rather than gradual adaptation, forms of orthogenesis claiming that species had an inherent tendency to change in a particular direction, and forms of neo-Lamarckism in which inheritance of acquired characteristics led to progress. The minority view of August Weismann, that natural selection was the only mechanism, was called neo-Darwinism. It was thought that the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance invalidated Darwin's views.
While some, like Spencer, used analogy from natural selection as an argument against government intervention in the economy to benefit the poor, others, including Alfred Russel Wallace, argued that action was needed to correct social and economic inequities to level the playing field before natural selection could improve humanity further. Some political commentaries, including Walter Bagehot's "Physics and Politics" (1872), attempted to extend the idea of natural selection to competition between nations and between human races. Such ideas were incorporated into what was already an ongoing effort by some working in anthropology to provide scientific evidence for the superiority of Caucasians over non-white races and justify European imperialism. Historians write that most such political and economic commentators had only a superficial understanding of Darwin's scientific theory, and were as strongly influenced by other concepts about social progress and evolution, such as the Lamarckian ideas of Spencer and Haeckel, as they were by Darwin's work. Darwin objected to his ideas being used to justify military aggression and unethical business practices as he believed morality was part of fitness in humans, and he opposed polygenism, the idea that human races were fundamentally distinct and did not share a recent common ancestry.
The book produced a wide range of religious responses at a time of changing ideas and increasing secularisation. The issues raised were complex and there was a large middle ground. Developments in geology meant that there was little opposition based on a literal reading of Genesis, but defence of the argument from design and natural theology was central to debates over the book in the English-speaking world.
Natural theology was not a unified doctrine, and while some such as Louis Agassiz were strongly opposed to the ideas in the book, others sought a reconciliation in which evolution was seen as purposeful. In the Church of England, some liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". In the second edition of January 1860, Darwin quoted Kingsley as "a celebrated cleric", and added the phrase "by the Creator" to the closing sentence, which from then on read "life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one". While some commentators have taken this as a concession to religion that Darwin later regretted, Darwin's view at the time was of God creating life through the laws of nature, and even in the first edition there are several references to "creation".
Baden Powell praised "Mr Darwin's masterly volume [supporting] the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature". In America, Asa Gray argued that evolution is the secondary effect, or "modus operandi", of the first cause, design, and published a pamphlet defending the book in terms of theistic evolution, "Natural Selection is not inconsistent with Natural Theology". Theistic evolution became a popular compromise, and St. George Jackson Mivart was among those accepting evolution but attacking Darwin's naturalistic mechanism. Eventually it was realised that supernatural intervention could not be a scientific explanation, and naturalistic mechanisms such as neo-Lamarckism were favoured over natural selection as being more compatible with purpose.
Even though the book did not explicitly spell out Darwin's beliefs about human origins, it had dropped a number of hints about human's animal ancestry and quickly became central to the debate, as mental and moral qualities were seen as spiritual aspects of the immaterial soul, and it was believed that animals did not have spiritual qualities. This conflict could be reconciled by supposing there was some supernatural intervention on the path leading to humans, or viewing evolution as a purposeful and progressive ascent to mankind's position at the head of nature. While many conservative theologians accepted evolution, Charles Hodge argued in his 1874 critique "What is Darwinism?" that "Darwinism", defined narrowly as including rejection of design, was atheism though he accepted that Asa Gray did not reject design. Asa Gray responded that this charge misrepresented Darwin's text. By the early 20th century, four noted authors of "The Fundamentals" were explicitly open to the possibility that God created through evolution, but fundamentalism inspired the American creation–evolution controversy that began in the 1920s. Some conservative Roman Catholic writers and influential Jesuits opposed evolution in the late 19th and early 20th century, but other Catholic writers, starting with Mivart, pointed out that early Church Fathers had not interpreted Genesis literally in this area. The Vatican stated its official position in a 1950 papal encyclical, which held that evolution was not inconsistent with Catholic teaching.
Various alternative evolutionary mechanisms favoured during "the eclipse of Darwinism" became untenable as more was learned about inheritance and mutation. The full significance of natural selection was at last accepted in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the modern evolutionary synthesis. During that synthesis biologists and statisticians, including R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane, merged Darwinian selection with a statistical understanding of Mendelian genetics.
Modern evolutionary theory continues to develop. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, with its tree-like model of branching common descent, has become the unifying theory of the life sciences. The theory explains the diversity of living organisms and their adaptation to the environment. It makes sense of the geological record, biogeography, parallels in embryonic development, biological homologies, vestigiality, cladistics, phylogenetics and other fields, with unrivalled explanatory power; it has also become essential to applied sciences such as medicine and agriculture. Despite the scientific consensus, a religion-based political controversy has developed over how evolution is taught in schools, especially in the United States.
Interest in Darwin's writings continues, and scholars have generated an extensive literature, the Darwin Industry, about his life and work. The text of "Origin" itself has been subject to much analysis including a variorum, detailing the changes made in every edition, first published in 1959, and a concordance, an exhaustive external index published in 1981. Worldwide commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species" and the bicentenary of Darwin's birth were scheduled for 2009. They celebrated the ideas which "over the last 150 years have revolutionised our understanding of nature and our place within it".
In a survey conducted by a group of academic booksellers, publishers and librarians in advance of Academic Book Week in the United Kingdom, "On the Origin of Species" was voted the most influential academic book ever written. It was hailed as "the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter" and "a book which has changed the way we think about everything". "On the Origin of Species" is one of Five Books' most recommended books, with philosophers, biologists, environmentalists and science writers citing it as an influential text. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29932 |
The Graduate
The Graduate is a 1967 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The film tells the story of 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and then falls in love with her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).
The film was released on December 22, 1967, received positive reviews and grossed $104.9million in the U.S. and Canada. With the figures adjusted for inflation, the film's gross is $, making it the 23rd highest-ever grossing film in the U.S. and Canada. It won the Academy Award for Best Director and was nominated in six other categories. In 1996, "The Graduate" was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Initially, the film was placed at No.7 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1998. When AFI revised the list in 2007, the film was moved to No.17.
After earning his bachelor's degree from an East Coast college, Benjamin Braddock returns to his parents' Pasadena, California home. Benjamin is anxious about his future plans and cringes as his parents deliver accolades at his graduation party. He retreats to his bedroom until Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's law partner, insists that he drive her home. Once there she tries to seduce him. Benjamin rejects her advances but later invites her to the Taft Hotel, where he registers under the pseudonym "Mr. Gladstone".
Benjamin spends the summer relaxing in his parents' pool by day and meeting Mrs. Robinson at the hotel by night. At one of their trysts, Mrs. Robinson reveals her loveless marriage resulted when she accidentally became pregnant with Elaine. When Benjamin jokingly suggests he date Elaine, Mrs. Robinson angrily forbids it.
After Mr. Robinson and Benjamin's parents encourage him to call Elaine, Benjamin relents and asks her out.
When he sees how angry Mrs. Robinson is, Benjamin sabotages his date with Elaine by taking her to a strip club. After she flees the club in tears, he apologizes and kisses her. They eat at a drive-in, where they bond over their shared feelings of confusion about their respective futures.
Elaine deduces that Benjamin is having an affair with a married woman after they visit the Taft Hotel for a late-night drink and the staff greet Benjamin as "Mr. Gladstone". Benjamin swears the affair is over and makes another date with Elaine. Furious, Mrs. Robinson insists Benjamin stop seeing Elaine or she will reveal their affair to her. To thwart this, Benjamin tells Elaine that the married woman is her mother. Elaine is so upset that she refuses to see Benjamin and returns to school at Berkeley.
Benjamin follows her there and tries to recapture her affections. Elaine is aghast because her mother told her Benjamin raped her while she was drunk. When Benjamin tells her what really happened, Elaine forgives him. After Benjamin proposes marriage, she admits that she still loves him. Mr. Robinson arrives at Berkeley and tells Benjamin that he is divorcing his wife. He threatens to put Benjamin behind bars if he ever sees his daughter again. Mr. Robinson forces Elaine to drop out of college and marry Carl Smith, a classmate with whom she was briefly involved.
Benjamin returns to Pasadena and breaks into the Robinsons' home to find Elaine. Instead he finds Mrs. Robinson, who insists he cannot prevent Elaine's marriage to Carl. Benjamin visits Carl's fraternity brothers, who tell him the wedding will take place in Santa Barbara that day. He rushes to the church and arrives just as Elaine and Carl's wedding ends. Overlooking the sanctuary, he bangs on the glass separating him from the wedding and screams Elaine's name frantically. After hesitating, Elaine screams back "Ben!" and flees the sanctuary. He rushes toward her and fights with Mr. Robinson when he tries to stop them from leaving together. Benjamin repels the wedding guests by swinging a large wooden cross at them, which he uses to barricade the church doors, trapping them inside.
Benjamin and Elaine run into the street, flag down a passing bus, and elope aboard it, sitting together among startled passengers. As the bus drives away, their beaming smiles slowly fade, replaced by expressions of uncertainty.
Getting the film made was difficult for Nichols, who, while noted for being a successful Broadway director, was still an unknown in Hollywood. Producer Lawrence Turman, who wanted only Nichols to direct it, was continually turned down for financing. He then contacted producer Joseph E. Levine, who said he would finance the film because he had associated with Nichols on the play "The Knack", and because he heard that Elizabeth Taylor specifically wanted Nichols to direct her and Richard Burton in "Virginia Woolf".
With financing assured, Nichols suggested Buck Henry for screenwriter, although Henry's experience had also been mostly in improvised comedy, and had no writing background. Nichols said to Henry, "I think you could do it; I think you "should" do it." Nichols was paid $150,000 but was to receive 16⅔% of the profits.
Nichols' first choice for Mrs. Robinson was French actress Jeanne Moreau. The motivation for this was the cliche that in French culture, "older" women tended to "train" the younger men in sexual matters. Numerous actors were considered for or sought roles in the film. Doris Day turned down an offer because the nudity required by the role offended her. Joan Crawford inquired as to play the part, while Lauren Bacall and Audrey Hepburn both wanted the role. Patricia Neal turned down the film as she had recently recovered from a stroke and did not feel ready to accept such a major role. Geraldine Page also turned it down. Other actors considered for the part included Claire Bloom, Angie Dickinson, Sophia Loren, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, Anouk Aimée, Jennifer Jones, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint, Rosalind Russell, Simone Signoret, Jean Simmons, Lana Turner, Eleanor Parker, Anne Baxter and Shelley Winters. Angela Lansbury also asked about playing the part. Ava Gardner sought the role of Mrs. Robinson, and reportedly called Nichols saying,"I want to see you! I want to talk about this "Graduate" thing!" Nichols did not seriously consider her for the role (he wanted a younger woman as Bancroft was 35 and Gardner was 45), but did end up visiting her hotel. He later recounted that "she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, 'All right, let's talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.'" Meanwhile, Natalie Wood turned down not only the role of Mrs. Robinson, but also that of Elaine.
For the character of Elaine, casting was also an issue. Patty Duke turned down the part as she did not want to work at the time. Faye Dunaway was also considered for Elaine, but had to turn it down, in favor of "Bonnie and Clyde". Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine refused the role as well. Raquel Welch and Joan Collins both wanted the role, but did not succeed in getting it. Carroll Baker tested, but was said to have been too old to portray Anne Bancroft's daughter. Candice Bergen screen-tested as well, as did Goldie Hawn and Jane Fonda. Additionally, Ann-Margret, Elizabeth Ashley, Carol Lynley, Sue Lyon, Yvette Mimieux, Suzanne Pleshette, Lee Remick, Pamela Tiffin, Julie Christie, and Tuesday Weld were all on the director's shortlist before Katharine Ross was cast.
When Dustin Hoffman auditioned for the role of Benjamin, he was just short of his 30th birthday at the time of filming. He was asked to perform a love scene with Ross, having previously never done one during his acting classes and believed that, as he said later, "a girl like [Ross] would never go for a guy like me in a million years." Ross agreed, believing that Hoffman "look[ed] about 3 feet tall ... so unkempt. This is going to be a disaster." Producer Joseph E. Levine later admitted that he at first believed that Hoffman "was one of the messenger boys." Despite—or perhaps because of—Hoffman's awkwardness, Nichols chose him for the film. "As far as I'm concerned, Mike Nichols did a very courageous thing casting me in a part that I was not right for, meaning I was Jewish," said Hoffman. "In fact, many of the reviews were very negative. It was kind of veiled anti-Semitism... I was called 'big-nosed' in the reviews, 'a nasal voice'." Before Hoffman was cast, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty were among the top choices. Beatty turned the film down as he was occupied with "Bonnie and Clyde". Redford tested for the part of Benjamin (with Candice Bergen as Elaine), but Nichols thought Redford did not possess the underdog quality Benjamin needed.
In the role of Mr. Robinson, Gene Hackman was originally cast, but just before filming began, the director decided he was too young and decided to replace him. Marlon Brando, Howard Duff, Brian Keith, George Peppard, Jack Palance, Frank Sinatra, Walter Matthau were all other choices for the role that Murray Hamilton eventually played. Susan Hayward was the first choice for Benjamin's mother, Mrs. Braddock, but the role was given to Elizabeth Wilson. For the role of Mr. Braddock, Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon, Robert Mitchum, Karl Malden, Christopher Plummer and Ronald Reagan (who had been Governor of California for nearly a year when the film was released) were all considered before William Daniels secured the part.
The quality of the cinematography was influenced by Nichols, who chose Oscar winner Robert Surtees to do the photography. Surtees, who had photographed major films since the 1920s, including "Ben-Hur", said later, "It took everything I had learned over 30 years to be able to do the job. I knew that Mike Nichols was a young director who went in for a lot of camera. We did more things in this picture than I ever did in one film."
Many of the exterior university campus shots of Berkeley were actually filmed on the brick campus of USC in Los Angeles.
The church used for the wedding scene is actually the United Methodist Church in La Verne. In a commentary audio released with the 40th anniversary DVD, Hoffman revealed that he was uneasy about the scene in which he pounds on the church window, as the minister of the church had been watching the filming disapprovingly. The wedding scene was highly influenced by the ending of the 1924 comedy film "Girl Shy" starring Harold Lloyd, who also served as an advisor for the scene in "The Graduate".
The film boosted the profile of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Originally, Nichols and O'Steen used their existing songs like "The Sound of Silence" merely as a pacing device for the editing until Nichols decided that substituting original music would not be effective and decided to include them on the soundtrack, an unusual move at that time.
According to a "Variety" article by Peter Bart in the May 15, 2005, issue, Lawrence Turman, his producer, then made a deal for Simon to write three new songs for the movie. By the time they had nearly finished editing the film, Simon had only written one new song. Nichols begged him for more, but Simon, who was touring constantly, told him he did not have the time. He did play him a few notes of a new song he had been working on; "It's not for the movie... it's a song about times past—about Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe DiMaggio and stuff." Nichols advised Simon, "It's now about Mrs. Robinson, not Mrs. Roosevelt."
"The Graduate" was met with generally positive reviews from critics upon its release. A.D. Murphy of "Variety" and Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" praised the film, with Murphy describing it as a "delightful satirical comedy-drama" and Ebert claiming it was the "funniest American comedy of the year". However, "Life" critic Richard Schickel felt the film "starts out to satirize the alienated spirit of modern youth, does so with uncommon brilliance for its first half, but ends up selling out to the very spirit its creators intended to make fun of... It's a shame-- they were halfway to something wonderful when they skidded on a patch of greasy kid stuff." Pauline Kael wondered, "How could you convince them [younger viewers] that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they're so clearly in the market to buy innocence?"
Modern critics continue to praise the film, if not always with the same ardor. For the film's thirtieth anniversary reissue, Ebert retracted some of his previous praise for the film, noting that he felt its time had passed and that he now had more sympathy for Mrs. Robinson than Benjamin (whom he considered "an insufferable creep"), viewing one's sympathy for Mrs. Robinson and disdainful attitude toward Ben as a function of aging and wisdom. He, along with Gene Siskel, gave the film a positive if unenthusiastic review on the television program "Siskel & Ebert". Furthermore, the film's rating in the AFI list of the greatest American films fell from seventh in 1997 to seventeenth in the 2007 update. Lang Thompson, however, argued that "it really hasn't dated much".
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 86% based on 80 reviews, with an average rating of 8.85/10. The site's consensus reads, "The music, the performances, the precision in capturing the post-college malaise—"The Graduate"s coming-of-age story is indeed one for the ages." On the similar website Metacritic, the film holds a score of 83 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
In 1996, "The Graduate" was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and placed #23 on the list of highest-grossing films in the United States and Canada, adjusted for inflation.
Years later in interviews, Bancroft stated that Mrs. Robinson was the role with which she was most identified, and added, "Men still come up to me and tell me 'You were my first sexual fantasy.'"
The film is listed in "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die".
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
"The Graduate" was released in theatres on December 22, 1967. The film was released on Blu-ray by Embassy Home Entertainment on January 25, 2011. "The Graduate" was released on DVD by Embassy Home Entertainment on January 21, 2014.
Terry Johnson's adaptation of the original novel and the film ran both on London's West End and on Broadway, and has toured the United States. There is a Brazilian version adapted by Miguel Falabella. Several actresses have starred as Mrs. Robinson, including Kathleen Turner, Lorraine Bracco, Jerry Hall, Amanda Donohoe, Morgan Fairchild, Anne Archer, Vera Fischer, Patricia Richardson and Linda Gray.
The stage production adds several scenes that are not in the novel or the film, as well as using material from both film and novel. It also uses songs by Simon & Garfunkel not used in the film, such as "Bridge Over Troubled Water" as well as music from other popular musicians from the era such as The Byrds and The Beach Boys. The West End production opened at the Gielgud Theatre on April 5, 2000, after previews from March 24, with Kathleen Turner starring as Mrs. Robinson. The production closed in January 2002. Jerry Hall replaced Turner on July 31, 2000, followed by Amanda Donohoe from February 2001, Anne Archer from June 2001, and Linda Gray from October 2001. The 2003 UK touring production starred Glynis Barber as Mrs. Robinson.
The Broadway production opened at the Plymouth Theatre on April 4, 2002, and closed on March 2, 2003, after 380 performances. Directed by Terry Johnson, the play featured the cast of Jason Biggs as Benjamin Braddock, Alicia Silverstone as Elaine Robinson, and Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson. The play received no award nominations. Linda Gray briefly filled in for Turner in September 2002. Lorraine Bracco replaced Turner from November 19, 2002.
"The Graduate" ran at the Cape Playhouse (Dennis, Massachusetts) in July 2011, and starred Patricia Richardson.
Charles Webb has written a sequel to his original novel titled "Home School", but initially refused to publish it in its entirety because of a contract he signed in the 1960s. When he sold film rights to "The Graduate", he surrendered the rights to any sequels. If he were to publish "Home School", Canal+, the French media company that owns the rights to "The Graduate", would be able to adapt it for the screen without his permission. Extracts of "Home School" were printed in "The Times" on May 2, 2006. Webb also told the newspaper that there was a possibility he would find a publisher for the full text, provided he could retrieve the film rights using French copyright law. On May 30, 2006, "The Times" reported that Webb had signed a publishing deal for "Home School" with Random House which he hoped would enable him to instruct French lawyers to attempt to retrieve his rights. The novel was published in Britain in 2007.
In "The Player", Robert Altman's satire of Hollywood, Buck Henry pitches a sequel to "The Graduate" to producer Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins) during the film's opening sequence.
In the television series Roseanne season 6 episode 16, there is a fantasy scene where Jackie assumes the Bancroft role and attempts to seduce David. The famous shot of The Graduate seen between the leg of the Bancroft character is replicated for the scene. This scene is also replicated in "The Simpsons" episode Lisa's Substitute when Mrs. Krabappel tries to seduce Mr. Bergstrom who was voiced by Hoffman. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29942 |
The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American teen coming-of-age comedy-drama film written, produced, and directed by John Hughes. It stars Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy as teenagers from different high school cliques who spend a Saturday in detention with their authoritarian assistant principal (Paul Gleason).
The film premiered in Los Angeles on February 7, 1985. Universal Pictures released it in cinemas in the United States on February 15, 1985. It received critical acclaim and earned $51.5 million on a $1 million budget. Critics consider it to be one of Hughes's most memorable and recognizable works. The media referred to the film's five main actors as members of a group called the "Brat Pack".
In 2016, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was digitally remastered and was re-screened in 430 theaters in celebration of its 30th anniversary in 2015.
On Saturday, March 24, 1984, five students at the fictional Shermer High School report at 7:00 a.m. for all-day detention. Each comes from a different clique: Claire Standish the Snob, Brian Johnson the Geek, Andrew Clark the Jock, John Bender the Punk, and Allison Reynolds the Kook. They gather in the school library, where Assistant Principal Richard Vernon instructs them not to talk, move from their seats, or sleep until they are released at 4:00 p.m. He assigns them a thousand-word essay, in which each must describe "who you think you are". He leaves, returning only occasionally to check on them.
John, who has an antagonistic relationship with Vernon, ignores the rules and riles up the other students. John spends most of his time humiliating Brian, bullying Andrew, harassing Claire, and ignoring Allison, but they all eventually feel sorry for him after seeing how he interacts with abusive adults like Vernon, who gives John eight weekends' worth of additional detention and eventually locks him in a storage closet, but he escapes and returns to the library.
The students pass the hours by talking, arguing, and, at one point, smoking marijuana (except Allison who does not smoke with the others). Gradually, they open up and reveal their secrets: Claire has many experiences of peer pressure, John comes from an abusive household, Allison is a compulsive liar, Andrew can't think for himself, and Brian contemplated suicide over a bad grade. They discover they all have poor relationships with their parents: Claire's parents use her to get back at each other during arguments, John's parents physically and verbally abuse him as well as each other, Allison's parents are neglectful, Andrew's father pushes him to the limit, especially in wrestling, and Brian's parents pressure him to earn the highest grades possible. The students realize that, despite their differences, they face similar problems.
Claire gives Allison a makeover, which sparks romantic interest from Andrew. Claire decides to break her "pristine" innocent appearance by kissing John and giving him a hickey. Although they suspect their new relationships will end along with their detention, they believe their mutual experiences will change the way they look at their peers.
As the detention nears its end, the group requests that Brian complete the essay for everyone, and John returns to the storage closet to fool Vernon into thinking he never left. Brian leaves the essay in the library for Vernon to read after they leave. As the students part ways, Allison and Andrew kiss, as do Claire and John. Allison rips Andrew's state champion patch from his jacket to keep, and Claire gives John one of her diamond earrings, which he puts on. Vernon reads the essay, in which Brian states that Vernon has already judged who they are using stereotypes, and that they think Vernon is crazy if he thinks that they are going to tell him who they are; he correspondingly states that "each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?" He signs off the essay with "Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club."
Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall both starred in Hughes's 1984 film "Sixteen Candles". Towards the end of filming, Hughes asked them both to be in "The Breakfast Club". Hall became the first to be cast, agreeing to the role of Brian Johnson; his real life
mother and sister playing the same roles in the film. Ringwald was originally approached to play the character of Allison Reynolds, but she was "really upset" because she wanted to play Claire Standish (then named "Cathy" in the first draft of the script), which saw the auditions of Robin Wright, Jodie Foster, and Laura Dern. She eventually convinced Hughes and the studio to give her the part. The role of Allison ultimately went to Ally Sheedy.
Emilio Estevez originally auditioned for the role of John Bender. However, when Hughes was unable to find someone to play Andrew Clark, Estevez was recast. Nicolas Cage was considered for the role of John Bender, which was the last role to be cast, though the role was narrowed down to John Cusack and Judd Nelson. Hughes originally cast Cusack, but decided to replace him with Nelson before shooting began, because Cusack did not look threatening enough for the role. At one point, Hughes was disappointed in Nelson because he stayed in character and harassed Ringwald off-camera, with the other actors having to convince Hughes not to fire him.
Rick Moranis was originally cast as the janitor but left due to creative differences and was replaced by John Kapelos.
In 1999, Hughes said that his request to direct the film met with resistance and skepticism because he lacked filmmaking experience. Hughes ultimately convinced the film's investors that due to the modest $1 million budget and its single location shoot, he could greatly minimize their risk. Hughes originally thought that "The Breakfast Club" would be his directorial debut. Hughes opted for an insular, largely one-room set and wrote about high school students, who would be played by younger actors.
Principal photography began on March 28, 1984, and ended in May. Filming took place at Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, which had closed in 1981. The same setting was used for interior scenes of Hughes's 1986 film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", which featured exterior shots from nearby Glenbrook North High School. The library at Maine North High School, considered too small for the film, prompted the crew to build the set in the school's gymnasium. The actors rehearsed for three weeks and then shot the film in sequence. On the "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" DVD commentary (featured on the 2004 DVD version), Hughes revealed that he shot the two films concurrently to save time and money, and some outtakes of both films feature elements of the film crews working on the other film. The first print was 150 minutes in length.
During a cast reunion in honor of the film's 25th anniversary, Ally Sheedy revealed that a Director's Cut existed but Hughes's widow did not disclose any details concerning its whereabouts.
In 2015 the first draft of the film's script was discovered in a Maine South High School cabinet as district employees were moving offices to a new building.
The film's poster, featuring the five characters huddled together, was photographed by Annie Leibovitz toward the end of shooting. The shot of five actors gazing at the camera influenced the way teen films were marketed from that point on. The poster refers to the five "types" of the story using slightly different terms than those used in the film, and in a different sequence, stating "They were five total strangers with nothing in common, meeting for the first time. A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse".
The main theme of the film is the constant struggle of the American teenager to be understood, by adults and by themselves. It explores the pressure put on teenagers to fit into their own realms of high school social constructs, as well as the lofty expectations of their parents, teachers, and other authority figures. On the surface, the students have little in common with each other. However, as the day rolls on, they eventually bond over a common disdain for the aforementioned issues of peer pressure and parental expectations. Stereotyping is another theme. Once the obvious stereotypes are broken down, the characters "empathize with each other's struggles, dismiss some of the inaccuracies of their first impressions, and discover that they are more similar than different".
The main adult character, Mr. Vernon, is not portrayed in a positive light. He consistently talks down to the students and forcefully flaunts his authority throughout the film. Bender is the only one who stands up to Vernon.
The film premiered in Los Angeles on February 7, 1985. Universal Pictures released the film in cinemas on February 15, 1985 in the United States.
"The Breakfast Club" was first released on VHS and Laserdisc.
In 2003, the film was released on DVD as part of the "High School Reunion Collection". In 2008, a "Flashback Edition" DVD was released with several special features, including an audio commentary with Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson. A 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray was released in 2010, and the same disc was re-released with a DVD and digital copy in 2012 as part of Universal's 100th Anniversary series. On March 10, 2015, the 30th Anniversary Edition was released. This release was digitally remastered and restored from the original 35mm film negatives for better picture quality on DVD, Digital HD and Blu-ray.
The Criterion Collection released a special edition 2-disc DVD set and a Blu-ray disc on January 2, 2018. The transfer was the same as the previous release but included new features such as fifty-minutes of new deleted and extended scenes, an Electronic Press Kit, new and archival interviews, a 1985 excerpt of the "Today" program, a new video essay and an episode of "This American Life".
Roger Ebert awarded three stars out of four and called the performances "wonderful," adding that the film was "more or less predictable" but "doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak."
Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, ”This confessional formula has worked in films as different as 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' 'The Big Chill' and 'My Dinner with Andre,' and it works here too. It works especially well in 'The Breakfast Club' because we keep waiting for the film to break out of its claustrophobic set and give us a typical teenage movie sex-or-violence scene. That doesn't happen, much to our delight."
Kathleen Carroll from the "New York Daily News" stated, "Hughes has a wonderful knack for communicating the feelings of teenagers, as well as an obvious rapport with his exceptional cast–who deserve top grades".
Other reviews were less positive. Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" wrote, ”There are some good young actors in 'The Breakfast Club,' though a couple of them have been given unplayable roles," namely Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, adding, "The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towards which 'The Breakfast Club' forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone."
James Harwood of "Variety" panned the film as a movie that "will probably pass as deeply profound among today's teenage audience, meaning the youngsters in the film spend most of their time talking to each other instead of dancing, dropping their drawers and throwing food. This, on the other hand, should not suggest they have anything intelligent to say."
Pauline Kael wrote in "The New Yorker", "When the kids are just killing time and being funny—when they're not being challenged by the rebel's probing—the dialogue has an easy, buggy rhythm ... But the scenes involving the snotty, callous dean ring false right from the start, and though Paul Gleason seems miscast, maybe anybody playing this villain would seem miscast."
Michael Wilmington of the "Los Angeles Times" praised Estevez for "a practically perfect performance" but wrote that "'The Breakfast Club' tries to have it two ways: It borrows the O'Neill-Williams-Albee structure, but it's also a teen-age sex comedy, wherein the kids revolt and make asses of their teachers. It's not really a teen-age 'No Exit,' but an attempt to fuse something like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' with something like 'Animal House.' The movie is too crafty for its own good; its mixed ambitions often self-destruct."
Paul Attanasio of "The Washington Post" stated, "As the kids yammer at each other, 'The Breakfast Club' becomes as static and uninvolving as most filmed plays; there's none of the ingenious virtuosity that, for example, Robert Altman used in shooting David Rabe's 'Streamers.'"
Among retrospective reviews, James Berardinelli wrote in 1998: "Few will argue that The Breakfast Club is a great film, but it has a candor that is unexpected and refreshing in a sea of too-often generic teen-themed films. The material is a little talky (albeit not in a way that will cause anyone to confuse it with something by Eric Rohmer), but it's hard not to be drawn into the world of these characters."
Writing in 2015, P. J. O'Rourke called "The Breakfast Club" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" "Hughes's masterwork[s]". He described the former film as an example of Hughes's politics, in that the students do not organize a protest but, "like good conservatives do, as individuals and place the highest value, like this conservative does, on goofing off. Otherwise known as individual liberty".
As of December 2019, review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 89% approval rating based on 63 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: ""The Breakfast Club" is a warm, insightful, and very funny look into the inner lives of teenagers". Review aggregator Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 62% based on 11 reviews from mainstream critics, considered to be "generally favorable reviews".
In February 1985, the film debuted at #3 at the box office (behind blockbuster film "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Witness" starring Harrison Ford). Grossing $45,875,171 domestically and $51,525,171 worldwide, the film is a box office success, given its $1 million budget.
Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Paul Gleason and Ally Sheedy all won a Silver Bucket of Excellence Award at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards in 2005.
"The Breakfast Club" is known as the "quintessential 1980s film" and is considered as one of the best films of the decade. In 2008, "Empire" magazine ranked it at number 369 on their "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time" list. It then rose 331 places to rank at number 38 on their 2014 list. Similarly, "The New York Times" placed the film on its "Best 1000 Movies Ever" list and "Entertainment Weekly" ranked the film number 1 on its list of the 50 Best High School Movies. In the 2001 parody film "Not Another Teen Movie", Gleason reprised his role as Assistant Principal Vernon in a short scene that parodies "The Breakfast Club".
In 2005, the film received the Silver Bucket of Excellence Award in honor of its 20th anniversary at the "MTV Movie Awards". For the event, MTV attempted to reunite the original cast. Sheedy, Ringwald, and Hall appeared together on stage, with Kapelos in the audience; Gleason gave the award to his former castmates. Estevez could not attend because of other commitments, and Nelson appeared earlier in the show but left before the on-stage reunion, prompting Hall to joke that the two were "in Africa with Dave Chappelle". Yellowcard performed Simple Minds' anthem for the film, "Don't You (Forget About Me)", at the awards. At the 82nd Academy Awards (March 7, 2010), Sheedy, Hall, Ringwald, and Nelson all appeared in a tribute to John Hughes—who had died the prior year—along with other actors who had worked with him, including Jon Cryer from "Pretty in Pink", Matthew Broderick from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", and Macaulay Culkin from "Home Alone". In 2018, "The New Yorker" published an article written by Ringwald in which she critiqued Hughes's films "in the Age of #MeToo".
The film's soundtrack, The Breakfast Club (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), was produced by British pop musician Keith Forsey and released on February 19, 1985 by A&M Records. The album peaked at No. 17 on the US "Billboard" 200 album chart. The song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" performed by Scottish rock band Simple Minds was released on February 20, 1985 in the United States and on April 8, 1985 in the United Kingdom as a single and reached No. 1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100.
The album contains ten songs that are played partially throughout the movie, performed by bands and singers of the rock and new wave genre, including three instrumental songs by record producer Keith Forsey.
Simple Minds's international hit "Don't You (Forget About Me)" is played in the opening and closing credits. A music video was made for this song and for Wang Chung's "Fire in the Twilight" (reached No 110 on the US "Billboard Hot 100").
The soundtrack received generally negative reviews. In a June 25, 1985 review for "The Village Voice", music critic Robert Christgau gave the album a "D−" and said that it has "utterly negligible" songs, and he commended Simple Minds for trying to distance themselves from their song, "Don't You (Forget About Me)", best known for being played during the film's opening and closing credits. In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the soundtrack three out of five stars and wrote that, apart from Simple Minds' "undisputed masterpiece," the album is largely "disposable" and marred by "'80s artifacts" and "forgettable instrumentals". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29943 |
Tasmania
Tasmania (; abbreviated as TAS, nicknamed Tassie, Nuenonne and Palawa kani: Lutruwita) is an island state of Australia. It is located to the south of the Australian mainland, separated by Bass Strait. The state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of about 537,000 . Just more than forty percent of the population resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, which forms the metropolitan area of the state capital and largest city, Hobart.
Tasmania's area is , of which the main island covers . It is promoted as a natural state, and protected areas of Tasmania cover about 42% of its land area, which includes national parks and World Heritage Sites. Tasmania was the founding place of the first environmental political party in the world.
The island is believed to have been occupied by indigenous peoples for 30,000 years before British colonisation. It is thought Aboriginal Tasmanians were separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups about 10,000 years ago when the sea rose to form Bass Strait. The Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3,000 and 7,000 at the time of colonisation, but was almost wiped out within 30 years by a combination of violent guerrilla conflict with settlers known as the "Black War", intertribal conflict, and from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. The conflict, which peaked between 1825 and 1831, and led to more than three years of martial law, cost the lives of almost 1,100 Aboriginals and settlers.
The island was permanently settled by Europeans in 1803 as a penal settlement of the British Empire to prevent claims to the land by the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The island was initially part of the Colony of New South Wales but became a separate, self-governing colony under the name Van Diemen's Land (named after Anthony van Diemen) in 1825. Approximately 75,000 convicts were sent to Van Diemen's Land before transportation ceased in 1853. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed, and the following year the colony received permission to change its name to Tasmania. In 1901 it became a state through the process of the Federation of Australia.
The island of Tasmania is named lutruwita in the Palawa kani reconstructed language. This name is taken from the Bruny Island language word for the Tasmanian mainland, which was recorded by George Augustus Robinson as "Loe.trou.witter". Robinson also recorded the name "Trow.wer.nar" for Tasmania, likely from the Eastern or Northeastern Tasmanian languages. However, he also recorded it as a name for Cape Barren Island. In the 20th century, some writers used it as an Aboriginal name for Tasmania, spelled "Trowenna" or "Trowunna". It is now believed that the name is more properly applied to Cape Barren Island, which has had an official dual name of "Truwana" since 2014.
Tasmania is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642. Tasman named the island Anthony van Diemen's Land after his sponsor Anthony van Diemen, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies. The name was later shortened to Van Diemen's Land by the British. It was officially renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer on 1 January 1856.
Tasmania was sometimes referred to as "Dervon", as mentioned in the Jerilderie Letter written by the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in 1879. The colloquial expression for the state is "Tassie". Tasmania is also colloquially shortened to "Tas", mainly when used in business names and website addresses. TAS is also the Australia Post abbreviation for the state.
A number of Palawa kani names, based on historical records of aboriginal names, have been accepted by the Tasmanian government. A dozen of these (below) are 'dual-use' (bilingual) names, and another two are unbounded areas with only Palawa names.
There are also a number of archaeological sites with Palawa names. Some of these names have been contentious, with names being proposed without consultation with the aboriginal community, or without having a connection to the place in question.
The island was adjoined to the mainland of Australia until the end of the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago. Much of the island is composed of Jurassic dolerite intrusions (the upwelling of magma) through other rock types, sometimes forming large columnar joints. Tasmania has the world's largest areas of dolerite, with many distinctive mountains and cliffs formed from this rock type. The central plateau and the southeast portions of the island are mostly dolerites. Mount Wellington above Hobart is a good example, showing distinct columns known as the Organ Pipes.
In the southern midlands as far south as Hobart, the dolerite is underlaid by sandstone and similar sedimentary stones. In the southwest, Precambrian quartzites were formed from very ancient sea sediments and form strikingly sharp ridges and ranges, such as Federation Peak or Frenchmans Cap.
In the northeast and east, continental granites can be seen, such as at Freycinet, similar to coastal granites on mainland Australia. In the northwest and west, mineral-rich volcanic rock can be seen at Mount Read near Rosebery, or at Mount Lyell near Queenstown. Also present in the south and northwest is limestone with caves.
The quartzite and dolerite areas in the higher mountains show evidence of glaciation, and much of Australia's glaciated landscape is found on the Central Plateau and the Southwest. Cradle Mountain, another dolerite peak, for example, was a nunatak. The combination of these different rock types contributes to scenery which is distinct from any other region of the world. In the far southwest corner of the state, the geology is almost wholly quartzite, which gives the mountains the false impression of having snow-capped peaks year round.
Evidence indicates the presence of Aboriginals in Tasmania about 42,000 years ago. Rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia about 10,000 years ago and by the time of European contact, the Aboriginal people in Tasmania had nine major nations or ethnic groups. At the time of the British occupation and colonisation in 1803, the indigenous population was estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000.
Historian Lyndall Ryan's analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7,000 spread throughout the island's nine nations; Nicholas Clements, citing research by N.J.B. Plomley and Rhys Jones, settled on a figure of 3,000 to 4,000. They engaged in fire-stick farming, hunted game including kangaroo and wallabies, caught seals, mutton-birds, shellfish and fish and lived as nine separate "nations" on the island, which they knew as "Trouwunna".
The first reported sighting of Tasmania by a European was on 24 November 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who landed at today's Blackman Bay. More than a century later, in 1772, a French expedition led by Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne landed at (nearby but different) Blackmans Bay, and the following year Tobias Furneaux became the first Englishman to land in Tasmania when he arrived at Adventure Bay, which he named after his ship HMS "Adventure". Captain James Cook also landed at Adventure Bay in 1777. Matthew Flinders and George Bass sailed through Bass Strait in 1798–99, determining for the first time that Tasmania was an island.
Sealers and whalers based themselves on Tasmania's islands from 1798, and in August 1803 New South Wales Governor Philip King sent Lieutenant John Bowen to establish a small military outpost on the eastern shore of the Derwent River in order to forestall any claims to the island by French explorers who had been exploring the southern Australian coastline. Bowen, who led a party of 49, including 21 male and three female convicts, named the camp Risdon.
Several months later a second settlement was established by Captain David Collins, with 308 convicts, to the south in Sullivans Cove on the western side of the Derwent, where fresh water was more plentiful. The latter settlement became known as Hobart Town or Hobarton, later shortened to Hobart, after the British Colonial Secretary of the time, Lord Hobart. The settlement at Risdon was later abandoned. Left on their own without further supplies, the Sullivans Cove settlement suffered severe food shortages and by 1806 its inhabitants were starving, with many resorting to scraping seaweed off rocks and scavenging washed-up whale blubber from the shore to survive.
A smaller colony was established at Port Dalrymple on the Tamar River in the island's north in October 1804 and several other convict-based settlements were established, including the particularly harsh penal colonies at Port Arthur in the southeast and Macquarie Harbour on the West Coast. Tasmania was eventually sent 75,000 convicts—four out of every ten people transported to Australia. By 1819 the Aboriginal and British population reached parity with about 5000 of each, although among the colonists men outnumbered women four to one. Free settlers began arriving in large numbers from 1820, lured by the promise of land grants and free convict labour. Settlement in the island's northwest corner was monopolised by the Van Diemen's Land Company, which sent its first surveyors to the district in 1826. By 1830 one-third of Australia's non-Indigenous population lived in Van Diemen's Land and the island accounted for about half of all land under cultivation and exports.
Tensions between Tasmania's black and white inhabitants rose, partly driven by increasing competition for kangaroo and other game. Explorer and naval officer John Oxley in 1810 noted the "many atrocious cruelties" inflicted on Aboriginals by convict bushrangers in the north, which in turn led to black attacks on solitary white hunters. Hostilities increased further with the arrival of 600 colonists from Norfolk Island between 1807 and 1813. They established farms along the River Derwent and east and west of Launceston, occupying 10 percent of Van Diemen's Land. By 1824 the colonial population had swelled to 12,600, while the island's sheep population had reached 200,000. The rapid colonisation transformed traditional kangaroo hunting grounds into farms with grazing livestock as well as fences, hedges and stone walls, while police and military patrols were increased to control the convict farm labourers.
Violence began to spiral rapidly from the mid-1820s in what became known as the "Black War". While black inhabitants were driven to desperation by dwindling food supplies as well as anger at the prevalence of abductions of women and girls, whites carried out attacks as a means of exacting revenge and suppressing the native threat. Van Diemen's Land had an enormous gender imbalance, with male colonists outnumbering females six to one in 1822—and 16 to one among the convict population. Historian Nicholas Clements has suggested the "voracious appetite" for native women was the most important trigger for the explosion of violence from the late 1820s.
From 1825 to 1828 the number of native attacks more than doubled each year, raising panic among settlers. Over the summer of 1826–7 clans from the Big River, Oyster Bay and North Midlands nations speared stock-keepers on farms and made it clear that they wanted the settlers and their sheep and cattle to move from their kangaroo hunting grounds. Settlers responded vigorously, resulting in many mass-killings. In November 1826 Governor George Arthur issued a government notice declaring that colonists were free to kill Aborigines when they attacked settlers or their property and in the following eight months more than 200 Aborigines were killed in the Settled Districts in reprisal for the deaths of 15 colonists. After another eight months the death toll had risen to 43 colonists and probably 350 Aboriginals. Almost 300 British troops were sent into the Settled Districts, and in November 1828 Arthur declared martial law, giving soldiers the right to shoot on sight any Aboriginal in the Settled Districts. Martial law would remain in force for more than three years, the longest period of martial law in Australian history.
In November 1830 Arthur organised the so-called "Black Line", ordering every able-bodied male colonist to assemble at one of seven designated places in the Settled Districts to join a massive drive to sweep Aboriginals out of the region and on to the Tasman Peninsula. The campaign failed and was abandoned seven weeks later, but by then Tasmania's Aboriginal population had fallen to about 300.
After hostilities between settlers and Aboriginals ceased in 1832, almost all of the remnants of the indigenous population were persuaded or forced by government agent George Augustus Robinson to move to Flinders Island. Many quickly succumbed to infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, reducing the population further. Of those removed from Tasmania, the last to die was Truganini, in 1876. The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population has been described as an act of genocide by historians including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan and Tom Lawson. Boyce has claimed that the April 1828 "Proclamation Separating the Aborigines from the White Inhabitants" sanctioned force against Aboriginals "for no other reason than that they were Aboriginal" and described the decision to remove all Tasmanian Aborigines after 1832—by which time they had given up their fight against white colonists—as an extreme policy position. He concluded: "The colonial government from 1832 to 1838 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen's Land and then callously left the exiled people to their fate."
Van Diemen's Land—which thus far had existed as a territory within the colony of New South Wales—was proclaimed a separate colony, with its own judicial establishment and Legislative Council, on 3 December 1825. Transportation to the island ceased in 1853 and the colony was renamed Tasmania in 1856, partly to differentiate the burgeoning society of free settlers from the island's convict past.
The Legislative Council of Van Diemen's Land drafted a new constitution which it passed in 1854. The following year the Privy Council approved the colony changing its name from "Van Diemen's Land" to "Tasmania", and in 1856 the newly elected bicameral parliament sat for the first time, establishing Tasmania as a self-governing colony of the British Empire.
The colony suffered from economic fluctuations, but for the most part was prosperous, experiencing steady growth. With few external threats and strong trade links with the Empire, Tasmania enjoyed many fruitful periods in the late 19th century, becoming a world-centre of shipbuilding. It raised a local defence force that eventually played a significant role in the Second Boer War in South Africa, and Tasmanian soldiers in that conflict won the first two Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians.
In 1901 the Colony of Tasmania united with the five other Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Tasmanians voted in favour of federation with the largest majority of all the Australian colonies.
The state was badly affected by the 1967 Tasmanian fires, in which there was major loss of life and property. In the 1970s the state government announced plans to flood environmentally significant Lake Pedder. As a result of the eventual flooding of Lake Pedder, the world's first green party was established; the United Tasmania Group.
In 1975 the Tasman Bridge collapsed when the bridge was struck by the bulk ore carrier "MV Lake Illawarra". It was the only bridge in Hobart, and made crossing the Derwent River by road at the city impossible. The nearest bridge was approximately to the north, at Bridgewater.
National and international attention surrounded the campaign against the Franklin Dam in the early 1980s.
On 28 April 1996, in the Port Arthur massacre, lone gunman Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people (including tourists and residents) and injured 21 others. The use of firearms was immediately reviewed, and new gun ownership laws were adopted nationwide, with Tasmania's law one of the strictest in Australia.
In April 2006 the Beaconsfield Mine collapse was triggered by a small earthquake. One person was killed and two others were trapped underground for 14 days.
The Tasmanian community has for some time been divided over the issue of the proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill to be built in the Tamar Valley. Proponents argue that jobs will be created, while opponents argue that pollution will damage both the Bass Strait fishing industry and local tourism. The company behind the proposal collapsed in 2012 and the pulp mill project officially ended in 2017 when the building permits lapsed.
In January 2011 philanthropist David Walsh opened the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart to international acclaim. Within 12 months, MONA became Tasmania's top tourism attraction.
Tasmania's landmass of is located directly in the pathway of the notorious "Roaring Forties" wind that encircles the globe. To its north, it is separated from mainland Australia by Bass Strait. Tasmania is the only Australian state that is not located on the Australian mainland. About 2,500 kilometres (1,600 mi) south of Tasmania island lies the George V Coast of Antarctica. Depending on which borders of the oceans are used, the island can be said to be either surrounded by the Southern Ocean, or to have the Pacific on its east and the Indian to its west. Still other definitions of the ocean boundaries would have Tasmania with the Great Australian Bight to the west, and the Tasman Sea to the east. It lies at similar latitudes to the South Island of New Zealand, and parts of Patagonia in South America.
The most mountainous region is the Central Highlands area, which covers most of the central western parts of the state. The Midlands located in the central east, is fairly flat, and is predominantly used for agriculture, although farming activity is scattered throughout the state. Tasmania's tallest mountain is Mount Ossa at . Much of Tasmania is still densely forested, with the Southwest National Park and neighbouring areas holding some of the last temperate rain forests in the Southern Hemisphere. The Tarkine, containing Savage River National Park located in the island's far north west, is the largest temperate rainforest area in Australia covering about . With its rugged topography, Tasmania has a great number of rivers. Several of Tasmania's largest rivers have been dammed at some point to provide hydroelectricity. Many rivers begin in the Central Highlands and flow out to the coast. Tasmania's major population centres are mainly situated around estuaries (some of which are named rivers).
Tasmania's insularity was likely detected by Captain Abel Tasman when he charted Tasmania's coast in 1642. On 5 December, Tasman was following the east coast northward to see how far it went. When the land veered to the north-west at Eddystone Point, he tried to keep in with it but his ships were suddenly hit by the Roaring Forties howling through Banks Strait. Tasman was on a mission to find the Southern Continent, not more islands, so he abruptly turned away to the east and continued his continent-hunting.
The next European to enter the strait was Captain James Cook on HMS "Endeavour" in April 1770. A talented and diligent hydrographer, Cook quickly identified the strait, but knew he had to conceal it. The Admiralty had issued its usual instructions to hide strategically important discoveries that could become security risks, such as off-shore islands from which operations could be mounted by a hostile power, at a time of intense Anglo-French rivalry.
Consequently, in his journal Cook seemingly disguised his discovery with a riddle; and on his chart he drew a curtain across the truncated channel by sketching a false coastline down to an invented Point Hicks. Cook's ploy worked and Tasmania's insularity was suppressed for three more decades, as Europe's mapmakers increasingly depicted it as a peninsula joined to the mainland.
The age-old question about Tasmania's insularity – 'Is Van Diemen's Land a peninsula or an island?' – was officially resolved in 1798–99 when George Bass and Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the island. When news of their discovery of Bass Strait reached Europe, the French government despatched a reconnaissance expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin. This prompted Governor King to send two vessels from Sydney to the island to establish a garrison at Hobart.
Tasmania has a relatively cool temperate climate compared to the rest of Australia with four distinct seasons. Summer is from December to February when the average maximum sea temperature is and inland areas around Launceston reach . Other inland areas are much cooler, with Liawenee, located on the Central Plateau, one of the coldest places in Australia, ranging between and in February. Autumn is from March to May, with mostly settled weather, as summer patterns gradually take on the shape of winter patterns. The winter months are from June to August, and are generally the wettest and coldest months in the state, with most high lying areas receiving considerable snowfall. Winter maximums are on average along coastal areas and on the central plateau, as a result of a series of cold fronts from the Southern Ocean. Inland areas receive regular freezes throughout the winter months. Spring is from September to November, and is an unsettled season of transition, where winter weather patterns begin to take the shape of summer patterns, although snowfall is still common up until October. Spring is generally the windiest time of the year with afternoon sea breezes starting to take effect on the coast.
Despite the presence of some Quaternary glaciation, Tasmania's soils are not more fertile than those of mainland Australia, largely because most are severely leached and the areas with driest climates (least leaching) were unaffected by glaciation or alluvia derived therefrom. Most soils on the Bass Strait Islands, the east coast and western Tasmania are very infertile spodosols or psamments, with some even less fertile "lateritic podzolic soils" in the latter region. Most of these lands are thus not used for agriculture, but there is much productive forestry in Tasmania—which remains one of the state's major industries.
On the north coast, apart from some relatively fertile alluvial soils used for fruit-growing, there are also deep red, easily workable soils known as "krasnozems" ("red land"). These soils are highly acidic and fix phosphate very effectively, but their extremely favourable physical properties make them extensively used for dairying, beef cattle and fodder crops.
The Midlands and the Lower Derwent present a different story from the rest of the state. Owing to a relatively dry climate and alkaline (mostly dolerite) parent material, these soils are relatively unleached and contain lime in the deeper subsoil. They are mostly classified as "prairie soils" or "brown earths" and bear some resemblance to the chernozems of Russia and North America, although they are much lower in available phosphorus and somewhat acidic in the surface levels. Their higher nutrient levels, however, allow them to support productive pasture, and large numbers of sheep are grazed in these regions. Some grain crops are also grown in the driest areas. In the alluvial areas of southeastern Tasmania, rich alluvial soils permit apples to be grown.
Tasmania became known as the "Apple Isle" because for many years it was one of the world's major apple producers. Apples are still grown in large numbers, particularly in southern Tasmania, and have the distinction of being the first approved by the Japanese government for import, due to their verifiable pest-free status.
Geographically and genetically isolated, Tasmania is known for its unique flora and fauna.
Tasmania has extremely diverse vegetation, from the heavily grazed grassland of the dry Midlands to the tall evergreen eucalypt forest, alpine heathlands and large areas of cool temperate rainforests and moorlands in the rest of the state. Many flora species are unique to Tasmania, and some are related to species in South America and New Zealand through ancestors which grew on the super continent of Gondwana, 50 million years ago. Beech species "Nothofagus gunnii", commonly known as Fagus, is Australia's only temperate native deciduous tree that is found exclusively in Tasmania.
The island of Tasmania was home to the thylacine, a marsupial which resembled a fossa or some say a wild dog. Known colloquially as the Tasmanian tiger for the distinctive striping across its back, it became extinct in mainland Australia much earlier because of competition by the dingo, introduced in prehistoric times. Owing to persecution by farmers, government-funded bounty hunters and, in the final years, collectors for overseas museums, it appears to have been exterminated in Tasmania. The Tasmanian devil became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the thylacine in 1936, and is now found in the wild only in Tasmania. Tasmania was one of the last regions of Australia to be introduced to domesticated dogs. Dogs were brought from Britain in 1803 for hunting kangaroos and emus. This introduction completely transformed Aboriginal society, as it helped them to successfully compete with European hunters, and was more important than the introduction of guns for the Aboriginals.
Tasmania's population is more homogeneous than that of other states of Australia, with many of Irish and British descent. Approximately 65% of its residents are descendants of an estimated 10,000 "founding families" from the mid-19th century.
Until 2012, Tasmania was the only state in Australia with an above-replacement total fertility rate; Tasmanian women had an average of 2.24 children each. By 2012 the birth rate had slipped to 2.1 children per woman, bringing the state to the replacement threshold, but it continues to have the second-highest birth rate of any state or territory (behind the Northern Territory).
Major population centres include Hobart, Launceston, Devonport, Burnie, and Ulverstone. Kingston is often defined as a separate city but is generally regarded as part of the Greater Hobart Area.
At the 2016 census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were:
19.3% of the population was born overseas at the 2016 census. The five largest groups of overseas-born were from England (3.7%), New Zealand (1%), Mainland China (0.6%), Scotland (0.4%) and the Netherlands (0.4%).
4.6% of the population, or 23,572 people, identified as Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) in 2016.
At the 2016 census, 88.3% of the population spoke only English at home. The other languages most commonly spoken at home were Standard Mandarin (0.8%), Nepali (0.3%), Greek (0.2%) and Italian (0.2%).
At the 2016 census, the most commonly nominated religions were 'No Religion' (37.8%), Anglicanism (20.4%) and Catholicism (15.6%).
The form of the government of Tasmania is prescribed in its constitution, which dates from 1856, although it has been amended many times since then. Since 1901, Tasmania has been a state of the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Australian Constitution regulates its relationship with the Commonwealth and prescribes which powers each level of government is allowed.
Tasmania is a State in the Australian federation. Its relationship with the Federal Government and Parliament are regulated by the Australian Constitution. Tasmania is represented in the Senate by 12 senators, on an equal basis with all other states. In the House of Representatives, Tasmania is entitled to five seats, which is the minimum allocation for a state guaranteed by the Constitution—the number of House of Representatives seats for each state is otherwise decided on the basis of their relative populations, and Tasmania has never qualified for five seats on that basis alone. Tasmania's House of Assembly use a system of multi-seat proportional representation known as Hare-Clark.
At the 2002 state election, the Labor Party won 14 of the 25 House seats. The people decreased their vote for the Liberal Party; representation in the Parliament fell to seven seats. The Greens won four seats, with over 18% of the popular vote, the highest proportion of any Green party in any parliament in the world at that time.
On 23 February 2004 the Premier Jim Bacon announced his retirement, after being diagnosed with lung cancer. In his last months he opened a vigorous anti-smoking campaign which included many restrictions on where individuals could smoke, such as pubs. He died four months later. Bacon was succeeded by Paul Lennon, who, after leading the state for two years, went on to win the 2006 state election in his own right. Lennon resigned in 2008 and was succeeded by David Bartlett, who formed a coalition government with the Greens after the 2010 state election resulted in a hung parliament. Bartlett resigned as Premier in January 2011 and was replaced by Lara Giddings, who became Tasmania's first female Premier. In March 2014 Will Hodgman's Liberal Party won government, ending sixteen years of Labor governance, and ending an eight-year period for Hodgman himself as Leader of the Opposition. Hodgman then won a second term of government in the 2018 state election, but resigned mid-term in January 2020 and was replaced by Peter Gutwein.
Tasmania has a number of undeveloped regions. Proposals for local economic development have been faced with requirements for environmental sensitivity, or opposition. In particular, proposals for hydroelectric power generation were debated in the late 20th century. In the 1970s, opposition to the construction of the Lake Pedder reservoir impoundment led to the formation of the world's first green party, the United Tasmania Group.
In the early 1980s the state debated the proposed Franklin River Dam. The anti-dam sentiment was shared by many Australians outside Tasmania and proved a factor in the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983, which halted construction of the dam. Since the 1980s the environmental focus has shifted to old growth logging and mining in the Tarkine region, which have both proved divisive. The Tasmania Together process recommended an end to clear felling in high conservation old growth forests by January 2003, but was unsuccessful.
Tasmania has 29 local government areas. Local councils are responsible for functions delegated by the Tasmanian parliament, such as urban planning, road infrastructure and waste management. Council revenue comes mostly from property taxes and government grants.
As with the House of Assembly, Tasmania's local government elections use a system of multi-seat proportional representation known as Hare–Clark. Local government elections take place every four years and are conducted by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission by full postal ballot. The next local government elections will be held during September and October 2018.
Traditionally, Tasmania's main industries have been mining (including copper, zinc, tin, and iron), agriculture, forestry, and tourism. In the 1940s and 1950s, a hydro-industrialisation initiative was embodied in the state by Hydro Tasmania. These all have had varying fortunes over the last century and more, involved in ebbs and flows of population moving in and away dependent upon the specific requirements of the dominant industries of the time. The state also has a large number of food exporting sectors, including but not limited to seafood (such as Atlantic salmon, abalone and crayfish).
In the 1960s and 1970s there was a decline in traditional crops such as apples and pears, with other crops and industries eventually rising in their place. During the 15 years until 2010, new agricultural products such as wine, saffron, pyrethrum and cherries have been fostered by the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research.
Favourable economic conditions throughout Australia, cheaper air fares, and two new "Spirit of Tasmania" ferries have all contributed to what is now a rising tourism industry.
About 1.7% of the Tasmanian population are employed by local government. Other major employers include Nyrstar, Norske Skog, Grange Resources, Rio Tinto, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hobart, and Federal Group. Small business is a large part of the community life, including Incat, Moorilla Estate and Tassal. In the late 1990s, a number of national companies based their call centres in the state after obtaining cheap access to broad-band fibre optic connections.
34% of Tasmanians are reliant on welfare payments as their primary source of income. This number is in part due to the large number of older residents and retirees in Tasmania receiving Age Pensions. Due to its natural environment and clean air, Tasmania is a common retirement selection for Australians.
During colonial times the cuisines of the British Isles were the standard in most areas of Tasmania. Tasmania now has a wide range of restaurants, in part due to the arrival of immigrants and changing cultural patterns. Scattered across Tasmania are many vineyards, and Tasmanian beer brands such as Boags and Cascade are known and sold in Mainland Australia. King Island off the northwestern coast of Tasmania has a reputation for boutique cheeses and dairy products. Tasmanians are also consumers of seafood, such as crayfish, orange roughy, salmon and oysters, both farmed and wild.
To foster tourism, the state government encourages or supports several annual events in and around the island. The best known of these is the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, starting on Boxing Day in Sydney and usually arriving at Constitution Dock in Hobart around three to four days later, during the Taste of Tasmania, an annual food and wine festival. Other events include the road rally Targa Tasmania which attracts rally drivers from around the world and is staged all over the state, over five days. Rural or regional events include Agfest, a three-day agricultural show held at Carrick (just west of Launceston) in early May and NASA supported TastroFest - Tasmania's Astronomy Festival, held early August in Ulverstone (North West Tasmania). The Royal Hobart Show and Royal Launceston Show are both held in October annually. Music events held in Tasmania include the Falls Festival at Marion Bay (a Victorian event now held in both Victoria and Tasmania on New Year's Eve), the Festival of Voices, a national celebration of song held each year in Hobart attracting international and national teachers and choirs in the heart of Winter, MS Fest is a charity music event held in Launceston, to raise money for those with multiple sclerosis. The Cygnet Folk Festival is one Australia's most iconic folk music festivals and is held every year in January, the Tasmanian Lute Festival is an early music event held in different locations in Tasmania every two years. Recent additions to the state arts events calendar include the 10 Days on the Island arts festival, MONA FOMA, run by David Walsh and curated by Brian Ritchie and Dark MOFO also run by David Walsh and curated by Leigh Carmichael.
Notable titles by Tasmanian authors include "For the Term of his Natural Life" by Marcus Clarke, "The Museum of Modern Love" by Heather Rose, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, "The Alphabet of Light and Dark" by Danielle Wood, "The Roving Party" by Rohan Wilson and "The Year of Living Dangerously" by Christopher Koch, "The Rain Queen" by Katherine Scholes, "Bridget Crack" by Rachel Leary, and "The Blue Day Book" by Bradley Trevor Greive. Part of Helen Garner's "Monkey Grip" is set in Hobart. Children's books include "They Found a Cave" by Nan Chauncy, "The Museum of Thieves" by Lian Tanner, "Finding Serendipity", "A Week Without Tuesday" and "Blueberry Pancakes Forever" by Angelica Banks, "Tiger Tale" by Marion and Steve Isham. Tasmania is home to the eminent literary magazine that was formed in 1979, Island magazine, and the biennial Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival.
Tasmania has five broadcast television stations which produce local content including ABC Tasmania, Seven Tasmania – an affiliate of Seven Network, WIN Television Tasmania – an affiliate of Ten Network, Nine Tasmania – an affiliate of the Nine Network (joint owned by WIN and Southern Cross), and SBS.
Tasmania has a varied musical scene, ranging from the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra whose home is the Federation Concert Hall, to a substantial number of small bands, orchestras, string quintets, saxophone ensembles and individual artists who perform at a variety of venues around the state. Tasmania is also home to a vibrant community of composers including Constantine Koukias, Maria Grenfell and Don Kay, who is the patron of the Tasmanian Composers Collective, the representative body for composers in Tasmania. Tasmania is also home to one of Australia's leading new music institutions, IHOS Music Theatre and Opera and gospel choirs, the Southern Gospel Choir. Prominent Australian metal bands Psycroptic and Striborg hail from Tasmania. Noir-rock band The Paradise Motel and 1980s power-pop band The Innocents are also citizens. The first season of the television series "The Mole" was filmed and based mainly in Tasmania, with the final elimination taking place in Port Arthur jail.
Films set in Tasmania include "Young Einstein", "The Tale of Ruby Rose", "The Hunter", "The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce", "Arctic Blast", "Manganinnie", "Van Diemen's Land", "Lion", and "The Nightingale". Common within Australian cinema, the Tasmanian landscape is a focal point in most of their feature film productions. "The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce" and "Van Diemen's Land" are both set during an episode of Tasmania's convict history. Tasmanian film production goes as far back as the silent era, with the epic "For The Term of his Natural Life" in 1927 being the most expensive feature film made on Australian shores. The Kettering Incident, filmed in and around Kettering, Tasmania, won the 2016 AACTA Award for Best Telefeature or Mini Series.
The biennial "Tasmanian Living Artists' Week" is a ten-day statewide festival for Tasmania's visual artists. The fourth festival in 2007 involved more than 1000 artists. Tasmania is home to two winners of the prestigious Archibald Prize—Jack Carington Smith in 1963 for a portrait of Professor James McAuley, and Geoffrey Dyer in 2003 for his portrait of Richard Flanagan. Photographers Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis are known for works that became iconic in the Lake Pedder and Franklin Dam conservation movements. English-born painter John Glover (1767–1849) is known for his paintings of Tasmanian landscapes. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened in January 2011 at the Moorilla Estate in Berriedale, and is the largest privately owned museum complex in Australia.
Tasmania's main air carriers are Jetstar Airways and Virgin Australia; Qantas, QantasLink and Regional Express Airlines. These airlines fly direct routes to Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Sydney. Major airports include Hobart International Airport (which has not had a regular scheduled international passenger service since the 1990s) and Launceston Airport; the smaller airports, Burnie (Wynyard) and King Island, serviced by Regional Express; and Devonport, serviced by QantasLink; have services to Melbourne. Intra-Tasmanian air services are offered by Airlines of Tasmania. Until 2001 Ansett Australia operated majorly out of Tasmania to 12 destinations nationwide.
Tasmania – Hobart in particular – serves as Australia's chief sea link to Antarctica, with the Australian Antarctic Division located in Kingston. Hobart is also the home port of the French ship "l'Astrolabe", which makes regular supply runs to the French Southern Territories near and in Antarctica.
Within the state, the primary form of transport is by road. Since the 1980s, many of the state's highways have undergone regular upgrades. These include the Hobart Southern Outlet, Launceston Southern Outlet, Bass Highway reconstruction, and the Huon Highway. Public transport is provided by Metro Tasmania bus services, regular taxis and Hobart only UBER ride-share services within urban areas, with Redline Coaches, Tassielink Transit and Callows Coaches providing bus service between population centres.
Rail transport in Tasmania consists of narrow-gauge lines to all four major population centres and to mining and forestry operations on the west coast and in the northwest. Services are operated by TasRail. Regular passenger train services in the state ceased in 1977; the only scheduled trains are for freight, but there are tourist trains in specific areas, for example the West Coast Wilderness Railway. There is an ongoing proposal to reinstate commuter trains to Hobart. This idea however lacks political motivation.
The port of Hobart is the second deepest natural port in the world, second to only Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. There is a substantial amount of commercial and recreational shipping within the harbour, and the port hosts approximately 120 cruise ships during the warmer half of the year, and there are occasional visits from military vessels.
Burnie and Devonport on the northwest coast host ports and several other coastal towns host either small fishing ports or substantial marinas. The domestic sea route between Tasmanian and the mainland is serviced by Bass Strait passenger/vehicle ferries operated by the Tasmanian government-owned TT-Line (Tasmania). The state is also home to Incat, a manufacturer of very high-speed aluminium catamarans that regularly broke records when they were first launched. The state government tried using them on the Bass Strait run but eventually decided to discontinue the run because of concerns over viability and the suitability of the vessels for the extreme weather conditions sometimes experienced in the strait.
Sport is an important pastime in Tasmania, and the state has produced several famous sportsmen and women and also hosted several major sporting events. The Tasmanian Tigers cricket team represents the state successfully (for example the Sheffield Shield in 2007, 2011 and 2013) and plays its home games at the Bellerive Oval in Hobart; which is also the home ground for the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash League. In addition, Bellerive Oval regularly hosts international cricket matches. Famous Tasmanian cricketers include David Boon and former Australian captain Ricky Ponting.
Australian Rules Football is also popularly followed, with frequent discussion of a proposed Tasmanian team in the Australian Football League (AFL). Several AFL games have been played at Aurora Stadium, Launceston, including the Hawthorn Football Club and , at the Bellerive Oval with the North Melbourne Football Club playing 3 home games there. The stadium was the site of an infamous match between St Kilda and Fremantle which was controversially drawn after the umpires failed to hear the final siren. Local leagues include the North West Football League and Tasmanian State League.
Rugby League Football is also played in the area, with the highest level of football played is in the Tasmanian Rugby League competition. The most successful team is the Hobart Tigers, who have won the title three times.
Rugby Union is also played in Tasmania and is governed by the Tasmanian Rugby Union. Ten clubs take part in the statewide Tasmanian Rugby Competition.
Association Football (soccer) is played throughout the state, including a proposed Tasmanian A-League Club and an existing statewide league called the NPL Tasmania.
Tasmania hosts the professional Moorilla International tennis tournament as part of the lead up to the Australian Open and is played at the Hobart International Tennis Centre, Hobart.
The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race is an annual event starting in Sydney, NSW, on Boxing Day and finishing in Hobart, Tasmania. It is widely considered to be one of the most difficult yacht races in the world.
While some of the other sports played and barracked for have grown in popularity, others have declined. For example, in basketball Tasmania has not been represented in the National Basketball League since the demise of the Hobart Devils in 1996.
Notable people from Tasmania include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29944 |
Names of God in Judaism
Rabbinic Judaism considers seven names of God in Judaism so holy that, once written, they should not be erased: YHWH, El ("God"), Eloah ("God"), Elohim ("Gods"), Shaddai (“Almighty"), Ehyeh ("I Am"), and Tzevaot ("[of] Hosts"). Other names are considered mere epithets or titles reflecting different aspects of God, but "Khumra" sometimes dictates special care such as the writing of "G-d" instead of "God" in English or saying Ṭēt-Vav (, "9-6") instead of Yōd-Hē (, "10-5" but also "Jah") for the number fifteen in Hebrew.
The documentary hypothesis proposes that the Torah was compiled from various original sources, two of which (the Jahwist and the Elohist) are named for their usual names for God (Yahweh and Elohim respectively).
The seven names of God that, once written, cannot be erased because of their holiness are the Tetragrammaton, El, Elohim, Eloah, Elohai, El Shaddai, and Tzevaot. In addition, the name Jah—because it forms part of the Tetragrammaton—is similarly protected. Rabbi Jose considered "Tzevaot" a common name and Rabbi Ishmael that "Elohim" was. All other names, such as "Merciful", "Gracious" and "Faithful", merely represent attributes that are also common to human beings.
The name of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible is YHWH (), also known as the Tetragrammaton (Greek for "four-letter [word]"). Hebrew is an abjad, so the word's letters Yōd, Hē, Vav, Hē are usually taken for consonants and expanded to Yahweh in English.
In modern Jewish culture, it is accepted as forbidden to pronounce the name with the (consonantal) letters with which it is spelled. In prayers it is pronounced Adonai, and in discussion is usually said as HaShem, meaning "The Name". The exact pronunciation is uncertain because—although there is nothing in the Torah to prohibit the saying of the name and Ruth shows it was being pronounced as late as the 5th century —it had ceased to be spoken aloud by at least the 3rd century during Second Temple Judaism and vowel points were not written until the early medieval period. The Masoretic Text uses vowel points of Adonai or Elohim (depending on the context) indicating that these are the words to be pronounced, as shown also by the subtle pronunciation changes when combined with a preposition (see Qere and Ketiv).
The Tetragrammaton first appears in Genesis and occurs 6,828 times in total in the Stuttgart edition of the Masoretic Text. It is thought to be an archaic third-person singular imperfect tense of the verb "to be" (i.e., "[He] was being"). This agrees with the passage in Exodus where God names Himself as "I Will Be What I Will Be" using the first-person singular imperfect tense.
Rabbinical Judaism teaches that the name is forbidden to all except the High Priest, who should only speak it in the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. He then pronounces the name "just as it is written". As each blessing was made, the people in the courtyard were to prostrate themselves completely as they heard it spoken aloud. As the Temple has not been rebuilt since its destruction in 70 , most modern Jews never pronounce YHWH but instead read Adonai ("My Lord") during prayer and while reading the Torah and as HaShem ("The Name") at other times. Similarly, the Vulgate used "" ("The Lord") and most English translations of the Bible write "the " for YHWH and "the God", "the Lord " or "the Sovereign " for Adonai YHWH instead of transcribing the name. The Septuagint may have originally used the Hebrew letters themselves amid its Greek text but there is no scholarly consensus on this point. All surviving Christian-era manuscripts use "Kyrios" [, "Lord") or very occasionally "Theos" [, "God"] to translate the many thousand occurrences of the Name. (However, given the great preponderance of the anarthrous "Kyrios" solution for translating YHWH in the Septuagint and some disambiguation efforts by Christian-era copyists involving Kyrios (see especially scribal activity in Acts), "Theos" should probably not be considered historically as a serious early contender substitute for the divine Name.)
El appears in Ugaritic, Phoenician and other 2nd and 1st millennium texts both as generic "god" and as the head of the divine pantheon. In the Hebrew Bible El (Hebrew: ) appears very occasionally alone (e.g. Genesis 33:20, "el elohe yisrael", "El the God of Israel", and Genesis 46:3, "ha'el elohe abika", "El the God of thy father"), but usually with some epithet or attribute attached (e.g. "El Elyon", "Most High El", "El Shaddai", "El of "Shaddai"", "El `Olam" "Everlasting El", "El Hai", "Living El", "El Ro'i" "El my Shepherd", and "El Gibbor" "El of Strength"), in which cases it can be understood as the generic "god". In theophoric names such as Gabriel ("Strength of God"), Michael ("Who is like God?"), Raphael ("God's medicine"), Ariel ("God's lion"), Daniel ("God's Judgment"), Israel ("one who has struggled with God"), Immanuel ("God is with us"), and Ishmael ("God Hears"/"God Listens") it is usually interpreted and translated as "God", but it is not clear whether these "el"s refer to the deity in general or to the god El in particular.
A common name of God in the Hebrew Bible is Elohim (). Despite the "-im" ending common to many plural nouns in Hebrew, the word "Elohim" when referring to God is grammatically singular, and takes a singular verb in the Hebrew Bible. The word is identical to the usual plural of "el" meaning gods or magistrates, and is cognate to the "lhm" found in Ugaritic, where it is used for the pantheon of Canaanite gods, the children of El and conventionally vocalized as "Elohim" although the original Ugaritic vowels are unknown. When the Hebrew Bible uses "elohim" not in reference to God, it is plural (for example, Exodus 20:2). There are a few other such uses in Hebrew, for example "Behemoth". In Modern Hebrew, the singular word "ba'alim" ("owner") looks plural, but likewise takes a singular verb.
A number of scholars have traced the etymology to the Semitic root "*yl", "to be first, powerful", despite some difficulties with this view. "Elohim" is thus the plural construct "powers". Hebrew grammar allows for this form to mean "He is the Power (singular) over powers (plural)", just as the word "Ba'alim" means "owner" (see above). "He is lord (singular) even over any of those things that he owns that are lordly (plural)."
Theologians who dispute this claim cite the hypothesis that plurals of majesty came about in more modern times. Richard Toporoski, a classics scholar, asserts that plurals of majesty first appeared in the reign of Diocletian ( 284–305). Indeed, Gesenius states in his book "Hebrew Grammar" the following:
The Jewish grammarians call such plurals … "plur. virium" or "virtutum"; later grammarians call them "plur. excellentiae", "magnitudinis", or "plur. maiestaticus".
This last name may have been suggested by the "we" used by kings when speaking of themselves (compare 1 Maccabees 10:19 and 11:31); and the plural used by God in Genesis 1:26 and 11:7; Isaiah 6:8 has been incorrectly explained in this way). It is, however, either "communicative" (including the attendant angels: so at all events in Isaiah 6:8 and Genesis 3:22), or according to others, an indication of "the fullness of power and might" implied. It is best explained as a plural of "self-deliberation". The use of the plural as a form of respectful address is quite foreign to Hebrew.
Mark S. Smith has cited the use of plural as possible evidence to suggest an evolution in the formation of early Jewish conceptions of monotheism, wherein references to "the gods" (plural) in earlier accounts of verbal tradition became either interpreted as multiple aspects of a single monotheistic God at the time of writing, or subsumed under a form of monolatry, wherein the god(s) of a certain city would be accepted after the fact as a reference to the God of Israel and the plural deliberately dropped.
The plural form ending in "-im" can also be understood as denoting abstraction, as in the Hebrew words "chayyim" ("life") or "betulim" ("virginity"). If understood this way, "Elohim" means "divinity" or "deity". The word "chayyim" is similarly syntactically singular when used as a name but syntactically plural otherwise.
In many of the passages in which "elohim" occurs in the Bible it refers to non-Israelite deities, or in some instances to powerful men or judges, and even angels (Exodus 21:6, Psalms 8:5) as a simple plural in those instances.
Elohai or Elohei ("My God") is a form of Elohim along with the first-person singular pronoun enclitic. It appears in the names "God of Abraham" ("Elohai Avraham"); "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" ("Elohai Avraham, Elohai Yitzchak ve Elohai Yaʿaqov"); and "God of Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel" ("Elohai Sara, Elohai Rivka, Elohai Leah ve Elohai Rakhel").
El Shaddai (, ) is one of the names of God in Judaism, with its etymology coming from the influence of the Ugaritic religion on modern Judaism. El Shaddai is conventionally translated as "God Almighty". While the translation of "El" as "god" in Ugarit/Canaanite language is straightforward, the literal meaning of "Shaddai" is the subject of debate.
Tzevaot, Tsebaoth or Sabaoth (, , "Armies") appears in reference to armies or armed hosts of men in Exodus and Isaiah but is not used as a divine epithet in the Torah, Joshua, or Judges. In the First Book of Samuel, David uses the name YHWH Tzavaot and immediately glosses it as "the God of the armies of Israel". The same name appears in the prophets along with YHWH Elohe Tzevaot, Elohey Tzevaot, and Adonai YHWH Tzevaot. These are usually translated in the King James Version as the "Lord of Hosts" or "Lord God of Hosts". In its later uses, however, it often denotes God in his role as leader of the heavenly hosts.
The Hebrew word "Sabaoth" was also absorbed in Ancient Greek (σαβαωθ, sabaōth) and Latin ("Sabaoth", with no declension). Tertullian and other patristics used it with the meaning of "Army of angels of God".
The abbreviated form Jah () or Yah (; , "Yahu") appears in the Psalms and Isaiah. It is a common element in Hebrew theophoric names such as Elijah and also appears in the forms "yahu" ("Jeremiah"), "yeho" ("Joshua"), and "yo" ("John", ultimately from the biblical "Yohanan" and Jonathan, "God gives". It also appears 24 times in the Psalms as a part of Hallelujah ("Praise Jah").
It is common Jewish practice to restrict the use of the names of God to a liturgical context. In casual conversation some Jews, even when not speaking Hebrew, will call God "HaShem" (), which is Hebrew for "the Name" (cf. Leviticus 24:11 and Deuteronomy 28:58). Likewise, when quoting from the Tanakh or prayers, some pious Jews will replace "Adonai" with "HaShem". For example, when making audio recordings of prayer services, "HaShem" will generally be substituted for "Adonai".
A popular expression containing this phrase is "Baruch HaShem", meaning "Thank God" (literally, "Blessed be the Name").
Adonai (, "My Lords") is the plural form of "adon" ("Lord") along with the first-person singular pronoun enclitic. As with Elohim, Adonai's grammatical form is usually explained as a plural of majesty. In the Hebrew Bible, it is nearly always used to refer to God (approximately 450 occurrences). As pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided in the Hellenistic period, Jews may have begun to drop the Tetragrammaton when presented alongside Adonai and subsequently expand it to cover for the Tetragrammaton in the forms of spoken prayer and written scripture. Owing to the expansion of "chumra" (the idea of "building a fence around the Torah"), Adonai itself has come to be too holy to say for Orthodox Jews, leading to its replacement by HaShem ("The Name").
The singular forms adon and adoni ("my lord") are used in the Hebrew Bible as royal titles, as in the First Book of Samuel, and for distinguished persons. The Phoenicians used it as a title of Tammuz, the origin of the Greek Adonis. It is also used very occasionally in Hebrew texts to refer to God (e.g. Ps 136:3.)
Deuteronomy 10:17 has the proper name "Yahweh" alongside the superlative constructions "God of gods" "elōhê ha-elōhîm" and "Lord of lords" "adōnê ha-adōnîm " (; KJV: "For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords").
The final syllable of Adonai uses the vowel kamatz, rather than patach which would be expected from the Hebrew for "my lord(s)". Prof. Yoel Elitzur explains this as a normal transformation when a Hebrew word becomes a name, giving as other examples Nathan, Yitzchak, and Yigal.
Up until the mid-twentieth century, the use of the word "Adoshem" combining the first two syllables of "Adonai" with the last syllable of "Hashem" was quite common. It took a few centuries for the word to fall into almost complete disuse. Despite being obsolete in most circles, it is used occasionally in conversation in place of "Adonai" by Jews who do not wish to say "Adonai," but need to specify the substitution of that particular word. It is also used when quoting from the liturgy in a non-liturgical context, especially as a substitute in musical pieces where a replacement for "Adonai" must have the same number of syllables. For example, Shlomo Carlebach performed his prayer "Shema Yisrael" with the words "Shema Yisrael Adoshem Elokeinu Adoshem Eḥad" instead of "Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad."
Baal (), properly Baʿal, meant "owner" and, by extension, "lord", "master", and "husband" in Hebrew and the other Northwest Semitic languages. In some early contexts and theophoric names, it and Baali (; "My Lord") were treated as synonyms of Adon and Adonai. After the time of Solomon and particularly after Jezebel's attempt to promote the worship of the Lord of Tyre Melqart, however, the name became particularly associated with the Canaanite storm god Baʿal Haddu and was gradually avoided as a title for Yahweh. Several names that included it were rewritten as "bosheth" ("shame"). The prophet Hosea in particular reproached the Israelites for continuing to use the term:
"Ehyeh asher ehyeh" (Hebrew: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה) is the first of three responses given to Moses when he asks for God's name in the Book of Exodus. The King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew as "I Am that I Am" and uses it as a proper name for God. The Aramaic Targum Onkelos leaves the phrase untranslated and is so quoted in the Talmud (B. B. 73a.)
The word "ehyeh" is the first-person singular imperfect form of "hayah", "to be", usually translated into English as "I will be". Because Classical Hebrew had an aspectual system rather than grammatical tense, in which the imperfect denotes any actions that are not yet completed, the verb form "ehyeh" can be translated as "I am/I am being/I will be" (e.g. Exodus 3:12, "Certainly I will be [ehyeh] with thee.").
Although "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" is generally rendered in English "I am that I am", better renderings might be "I will be what I will be" or "I will be who I will be", or "I shall prove to be whatsoever I shall prove to be" or even "I will be because I will be". Other renderings include: Leeser, "I Will Be that I Will Be"; Rotherham, "I Will Become whatsoever I please", New World Translation (2013 Edition): "I Will Become What I Choose to Become." Greek, "Ego eimi ho on" (ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν), "I am The Being" in the Septuagint, and Philo, and Revelation or, "I am The Existing One"; Lat., "ego sum qui sum", "I am Who I am."
The word "asher" is a relative pronoun whose meaning depends on the immediate context, so that "that", "who", "which", or "where" are all possible translations of that word.
Elah (Aramaic: אֱלָה; pl. "elim") is the Aramaic word for God. The origin of the word is uncertain and it may be related to a root word, meaning "reverence". Elah is found in the Tanakh in the books of Ezra, Jeremiah (Jer 10:11, the only verse in the entire book written in Aramaic), and Daniel. Elah is used to describe both pagan gods and the Jews' God. The word 'Elah - ' is also an Arabic word which means god. The name is etymologically related to Allah used by Muslims.
In the Book of Genesis, Hagar is said to use this name for God who spoke to her through his angel. In Hebrew, her phrase "El Roi" is taken as an epithet of God ("God of Seeing") although the King James Version translates it as a statement: "Thou God seest me."
The name Elyon (Hebrew: עליון) occurs in combination with El, YHWH, Elohim and alone. It appears chiefly in poetic and later Biblical passages. The modern Hebrew adjective "`Elyon" means "supreme" (as in "Supreme Court") or "Most High". "El Elyon" has been traditionally translated into English as 'God Most High'. The Phoenicians used what appears to be a similar name for God, one that the Greeks wrote as Έλιον. It is cognate to the Arabic "`Aliyy".
"The Eternal One" is increasingly used, particularly in Reform and Reconstructionist communities seeking to use gender-neutral language. In the Torah, "Hashem El Olam" ("the Everlasting God") is used at Genesis 21:33 to refer to God.
Talmudic authors, ruling on the basis of Gideon's name for an altar ("YHVH-Shalom", according to Judges 6:24), write that "the name of God is 'Peace'" ("Pereq ha-Shalom", Shab. 10b); consequently, a Talmudic opinion ("Shabbat", 10b) asserts that one would greet another with the word ' in order for the word not to be forgotten in the exile. But one is not permitted to greet another with the word ' in unholy places such as a bathroom, because of the holiness of the name.
"Shekhinah" () is the presence or manifestation of God which has descended to "dwell" among humanity. The term never appears in the Hebrew Bible; later rabbis used the word when speaking of God dwelling either in the Tabernacle or amongst the people of Israel. The root of the word means "dwelling". Of the principal names of God, it is the only one that is of the feminine gender in Hebrew grammar. Some believe that this was the name of a female counterpart of God, but this is unlikely as the name is always mentioned in conjunction with an article (e.g.: "the Shekhina descended and dwelt among them" or "He removed Himself and His Shekhina from their midst"). This kind of usage does not occur in Semitic languages in conjunction with proper names.
The Arabic form of the word """ " is also mentioned in the Quran. This mention is in the middle of the narrative of the choice of Saul to be king and is mentioned as descending with the Ark of the Covenant, here the word is used to mean "security" and is derived from the root sa-ka-na which means dwell:
In Jewish tradition the sacredness of the divine name or titles must be recognized by the professional "sofer" (scribe) who writes Torah scrolls, or tefillin and mezuzah. Before transcribing any of the divine titles or name he prepares mentally to sanctify them. Once he begins a name he does not stop until it is finished, and he must not be interrupted while writing it, even to greet a king. If an error is made in writing it may not be erased, but a line must be drawn round it to show that it is canceled, and the whole page must be put in a "genizah" (burial place for scripture) and a new page begun.
One of the most important names is that of the Ein Sof ( "Endless"), which first came into use after 1300.
Another name is derived from the names . By spelling these four names out with the names of the Hebrew letters ( and ) this new forty-five letter long name is produced. Spelling the letters in (YHWH) by itself gives . Each letter in Hebrew is given a value, according to gematria, and the value of is also 45.
The seventy-two-fold name is derived from three verses in Exodus 14:19–21. Each of the verses contains 72 letters. When the verses are read boustrophedonically 72 names, three letter each, are produced (the niqqud of the source verses is disregarded in respect to pronunciation). Some regard this name as the Shemhamphorasch. The Proto-Kabbalistic book "Sefer Yetzirah" describe how the creation of the world was achieved by manipulation of these 216 sacred letters that form the names of God.
From this it is understood that one should not erase or blot out the name of God. The general halachic opinion is that this only applies to the sacred Hebrew names of God, not to other euphemistic references; there is a dispute as to whether the word "God" in English or other languages may be erased or whether Jewish law and/or Jewish custom forbids doing so, directly or as a precautionary "fence" about the law.
The words "God" and "Lord" are written by some Jews as "G-d" and "L-rd" as a way of avoiding writing any name of God in full out. The hyphenated version of the English name ("G-d") can be destroyed, so by writing that form, religious Jews prevent documents in their possession with the unhyphenated form from being destroyed later. Alternatively, a euphemistic English reference such as "Hashem" (literally, "the Name") may be substituted, or an abbreviation thereof, such as "BH" ("B'ezrat Hashem" "by the blessing of the Name").
This issue is most controversial in the context of the motto of the United States, "In God We Trust", which has been minted or printed without hyphenation since its first appearance in 1864. While many Jews write the name "God" in English, others will not or will only under special circumstances. By comparison, the nation of Israel struck down efforts to enshrine an allusive reference to God (בה "BH") on its currency in 2002, 2003, and 2009 because the frequency of currency destruction was considered too high. According to Talmudic Tractate "Rosh Hashana" (18B4), Jews in the times of the Hasmonean Kingdom were "weaned off" the practice of writing the name of Heaven by the Sages, an event that was commemorated as a holiday on the third of Tishrei, a date now dedicated to the Fast of Gedaliah. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29945 |
Trick-taking game
A trick-taking game is a card or tile-based game in which play of a "hand" centers on a series of finite rounds or units of play, called "tricks", which are each evaluated to determine a winner or "taker" of that trick. The object of such games then may be closely tied to the number of tricks taken, as in plain-trick games such as Whist, Contract bridge, Spades, Napoleon, Euchre, Rowboat, Clubs and Spoil Five, or to the value of the cards contained in taken tricks, as in point-trick games such as Pinochle, the Tarot family, Mariage, Rook, All Fours, Manille, Briscola, and most evasion games like Hearts. The domino game Texas 42 is an example of a trick-taking game that is not a card game. Trick-and-draw games are trick-taking games in which the players can fill up their hands after each trick. In most variants, players are free to play any card into a trick in the first phase of the game, but must "follow suit" as soon as the stock is depleted. Trick-avoidance games like Reversis or Polignac are those in which the aim is to avoid taking some or all tricks.
The earliest card games were trick-taking games (as evidenced by the rank-and-suit structure) originating from China and spreading westwards during the early part of the second millennium. Michael Dummett noted that these games share various features. They were played without trumps, following suit was not required but only the highest card of the suit led wins, rotation was counter-clockwise, they were plain-trick games, and that the pip cards of one or more suit are in reverse order so that the lower cards beat the higher ones. Two revolutions occurred in European trick-taking games that would lead to the development of ever more sophisticated card games. The first is the invention of trumps (and following suit to contain their power) in the 15th century. The second was bidding in the 17th century.
According to card game researcher David Parlett, the oldest known European trick-taking game, Karnöffel, was mentioned in 1426 in the Bavarian town Nördlingen – roughly half a century after the introduction of playing cards to Europe, which were first mentioned in Spain in 1371. The oldest known "trumps" appear in Karnöffel, where specific ranks of one suit were named "Karnöffel, Devil, Pope" etc. and subject to an elaborate system of trumping powers. Around 1440 in Italy, special cards called "trionfi" were introduced with a similar function. These special cards are now known as "tarots", and a deck augmented by tarots as a tarot deck. The trionfi/tarots formed essentially a fifth suit without the ordinary ranks but consisting of trumps in a fixed hierarchy. But one can get a similar effect by declaring all cards of a fixed or randomly determined suit to be trumps. This method, originating with Triomphe, is still followed by a number of modern trick-taking games that do not involve an auction. Trumps were retroactively added to some games, such as Trappola. It is much rarer for trumps to be removed. The invention of trumps became so popular that very few European trick-taking games exist without them. This did not stop the two-handed Piquet from becoming the most popular card game in Europe during the 16th century. Parlett suggests the invention of trumps let players in games involving more than two a greater chance of heading a trick.
The invention of bidding for a trump suit is credited to Ombre, the most popular card game of the 17th century. Rather than having a randomly selected trump suit, players can now hold an auction for it. The most popular games of the 18th-century was tarot which experienced a great revival. During this time, many tarot games borrowed bidding over the stock (Taroc l'Hombre). In the 20th century, Whist (now with bidding and the dummy hand) developed into Contract bridge, the last global trick-taking game.
It is possible that the origin of the practice of counting tricks (in plain-trick games) was the counting of cards won in tricks. It was therefore a logical development to accord some cards a higher counting-value, and some cards no value at all, leading to point-trick games. Point-trick games are at least as old as tarot decks and may even predate the invention of trumps. Elfern and Fünfzehnern are possible candidates although the earliest references date to the 19th century. Nearly all point-trick games are played with tarot decks or stripped decks, which in many countries became standard before 1600, and neither point-trick games nor stripped decks have a tradition in England.
While there are a number of games with unusual card-point values, such as Trappola and All Fours, most point-trick games are in the huge family of Ace–Ten card games beginning with Brusquembille. Pinochle is a representative of this family that is popular in the United States. Other examples include Belote and Skat.
In contrast to Europe, Chinese trick-taking games did not develop trumps or bidding. They diverged into multi-trick games where melds can only be beaten by other melds provided they have the same number of cards. During the Qing dynasty, these multi-trick games evolved into the earliest draw-and-discard games where the players' objective is to form melds and "go out" rather than capturing the opponents' cards. Khanhoo is an example of a multi-trick game that became a draw-and-discard game. Multi-trick games are also probably the source for climbing games like Winner and "dou dizhu" which first appeared during the Cultural Revolution.
Certain actions in trick-taking games with three or more players always proceed in the same direction. In games originating in North and West Europe, including England, Russia, and the United States and Canada, the rotation is typically clockwise (i.e., play proceeds to the left); in South and East Europe, Latin America, and Asia it is typically counterclockwise, so that play proceeds to the right. When games move from one region to another, they tend to initially preserve their original sense of rotation, but a region with a dominant sense of rotation may adapt a migrated game to its own sensibilities. For two-player games the order of play is moot as either direction would result in exactly the same turn order.
In each "hand" or "deal", one player is the "dealer". This function moves from deal to deal in the normal direction of play. The dealer usually shuffles the deck (some games use "soft shuffling", where the dealer does not explicitly shuffle the deck), and after giving the player one seat from the dealer opposite the normal direction of play an opportunity to cut, hands out the same (prescribed) number of cards to each player, usually in an order following the normal direction of play. Most games deal cards one at a time in rotation; a few games require dealing multiple cards at one time in a "packet". The cards apportioned to each player are collectively known as that player's "hand" and are only known to the player. Some games involve a set of cards that are not dealt to a player's hand; these cards form the "stock" (see below). It is generally good manners to leave one's cards on the table until the deal is complete.
The player sitting one seat after the declarer (one with the highest bid and not the dealer) in normal rotation is known as the "eldest hand", also called the "forehand" in Skat and other games of German origin. The eldest hand "leads" to the first "trick", i.e. places the first card of the trick face up in the middle of all players. The other players each follow with a single card, in the direction of play. When every player has played a card to the trick, the trick is evaluated to determine the winner, who takes the cards, places them face down on a pile, and leads to the next trick. The winner or taker of a trick is usually the player who played the highest-value card of the suit that was led, unless the game uses one or more "trump" cards (see below).
The player who leads to a trick is usually allowed to play an arbitrary card from their hand. Some games have restrictions on the first card played in the hand, or may disallow leading a card of a particular suit until that suit has been played "off-suit" in a prior trick (called "breaking" the suit, usually seen in cases of a trump or penalty suit). Other games have special restrictions on the card that must be led to the first trick; usually this is a specific card (e.g., 2) and the holder of that card is the eldest hand instead of the person one seat after the dealer.
In many games, the following players must "follow suit" if they can, i.e., they must play a card of the same suit if possible. A player who cannot follow suit may "sluff" a card, i.e., play a card of a different suit. A trick is won by the player who has played the highest-ranked card of the "suit led", i.e., of the suit of the first card in the trick (unless the game uses a trump suit).
It can be an advantage to lead to a trick, because the player who leads controls the suit that is led and which others must follow; the leading player playing a suit of which he has many, decreases the chance that anyone else would be able to follow suit; while conversely playing a suit of which he has few, allows him to rid his hand of that suit (known as "voiding" the suit), freeing him from the restriction to follow suit when that suit is led by another player. On the other hand, it can also be advantageous to be the final player who plays to the trick, because at that point one has full information about the other cards played to the trick; the last player to a trick can play a card just slightly higher or lower than the current winning card, guaranteeing they will win or lose it by the minimum amount necessary, saving more valuable high or low value cards for situations where they must guarantee that a card played early to a trick will win or lose.
When all cards have been played, the number or contents of the tricks won by each player is tallied and used to update the score. Scoring based on the play of tricks varies widely between games, but in most games either the number of tricks a player or partnership has won ("plain-trick" games), or the value of certain cards that the player has won by taking tricks ("point-trick" games) is important.
In some games not all cards are distributed to the players, and a "stock" remains. This stock can be referred to by different names, depending on the game; "supply", "talon", "nest", "skat", "kitty", and "dog" are common game-specific and/or regional names.
In some games the stock remains untouched throughout play of the hand; it is simply a pile of "extra" cards that will never be played and whose values are unknown, which will reduce the effectiveness of "counting cards" (a common strategy of keeping track of the cards that have been played or are yet to be played). In games without bidding, trumps may be decided by exposing a card in the stock as in Triomphe. In other games, the winner of an auction-bidding process (the taker or declarer) may get to exchange cards from his hand with the stock, either by integrating the stock into his hand and then discarding equal cards as in Skat, Rook and French tarot, or in a "blind" fashion by discarding and drawing as in Ombre. The stock, either in its original or discarded form, may additionally form part of one or more players' "scoring piles" of tricks taken; it may be kept by the declarer, may be won by the player of the first trick, or may go to an opposing player or partnership.
In some games, especially two-player games, after each trick every player draws a new card. This continues while the stock lasts. Since this drawing mechanism would normally make it difficult or impossible to detect a revoke (for instance, the player may not be able to follow suit, so they play off-suit and then immediately draw a card of the suit led), in the first phase of trick-play (before the stock is empty) players generally need not follow suit. A widespread game of this type is the Marriage group.
In a "contract" game the winning and scoring conditions are not fixed but are chosen by one of the players after seeing their hand. In such games, players make "bids" depending on the number of tricks or card points they believe they can win during play of the hand. One or more of these bids stands as the "contract", and the player who made that bid is rewarded for meeting it or penalized for not meeting it.
In "auction" games, bidding players are competing against each other for the right to attempt to make the contract. In a few games, the contract is fixed (normally a simple majority, less often based on certain cards captured during play) and players' bids are a wager of game points to be won or lost. In others, the bid is a number of tricks or card points the bidder is confident that they or their partnership will take. Either of these can also include the suit to be used as trumps during the hand. Common bids include slam (winning all the tricks), misère (losing all the tricks), ouvert (the contractor's hand is exposed), playing without using the stock or only part of it, and winning the last trick or other specific tricks. The highest bid becomes the contract and the highest bidder is the "contractor", known in some games as the "declarer" or "taker", who then plays either with or without a partner. The other players become "opponents" or "defenders", whose main goal is to prevent the contract being met. They may announce a "contra" against the contractor which doubles the points for the hand. The contractor can declare a "recontra" which will double the points again.
Popular examples of games with auctions include Contract bridge, Pinochle, tarot games, Skat, Belote and Twenty-Eight. In many auction games the eldest hand leads to the first trick, regardless of who won the auction, but in some, such as Contract Bridge, the first lead is made by the player next in rotation after the contractor, so that the contractor plays last to that trick.
In "precision" or "exact-prediction" games, all players choose their winning condition independently: to win precisely a predicted number of tricks (Oh Hell) or card points (Differenzler). Each player's bid stands (in partnership games the partners' bids are often combined), and each player or partnership then tries to take exactly the number of tricks or points they bid, and are rewarded or penalized for doing so independently of anyone else's success or failure in meeting their bid. This type of game began to mature in the 20th century. Other games generally falling into the exact-prediction category are Spades and Ninety-Nine.
"Trump cards" are a set of one or more cards in the deck that, when played, are of higher value than the suit led. If a trick contains any trump cards, it is won by the highest-value trump card played, not the highest-value card of the suit led.
In most games with trumps, one of the four suits is identified as the "trump suit". In the simplest case, there is a static trump suit such as the Spade suit in the game Spades, or a dedicated trump suit in the Tarot family (in addition to the other four) is featured. More often, a dynamic trump suit is determined by some means, either randomly by selection of a card as in Oh Hell and the original form of Whist, or decided by the winner or winning bid of an auction as in contract bridge and some forms of Pinochle. In certain games, such as Rowboat and Rage, the trump suit may change during the course of the hand, even from trick to trick. Some psychological variety is added to the game and makes it more difficult to cheat if the trump suit is only chosen after dealing.
In some games, in addition to or separately from a trump suit, certain fixed cards are always the highest trumps, e.g. the Jacks in Skat, the Jacks or Jokers in Euchre, and the Rook Bird card in Rook. They are called "matadors" after the high trumps in Ombre. "Matadors" either have high point values or special abilities as in Spoil Five where they can revoke legally.
Some games have more than one trump suit, such as the quasi-trick game Stortok, in which there are two trumps, with one superseding the other. Other games have no trumps; Hearts for instance has no provision for a trump suit of any kind (the Hearts suit for which the game is named has a different significance). Though trump is part of contract bridge, teams can make bids that do not specify a trump suit, and if that is the winning bid then there is no trump suit for that hand (making such a contract is regarded as harder to accomplish).
In some games such as Piquet, Tarocchini, and Belote, before the taking of tricks commences, players can expose certain cards or melds (combinations) that they possess for bonus points. While this phase may seem to award players for pure chance, those who do declare risk letting their opponents develop strategies to counter the cards that they have revealed.
In many games, "following suit" is the obligatory action of playing a card of the same suit as that of the leading suit. A player must follow suit if that player has cards of the leading suit in his hands. There is a large variation of strictness in following suit among games.
In most modern games with trump suits, the rules for following suit do not distinguish between the trump suit and the "plain suits". If a trick begins with a plain suit card and a later player cannot follow suit, the player may choose freely to either "slough" (discard a card of another plain suit), or "ruff" ("trump" the trick by playing a trump card). Subsequent players to the trick must still follow the original suit, and may only discard or trump if they do not hold a card of the suit led. Certain games are "play to beat" or "must-trump"; if a player cannot follow suit but can play trump, they must play trump, and additionally if they are able they must beat any trump card already played to the trick. Pinochle and several of the Tarot card games have this rule.
Some games, notably French tarot and a variation of Rook, use a special card (in French Tarot's case, the Excuse) that can be played at any time. If not, he has the choice of playing a trump to possibly win the trick, or rough (waste) a different suit.
If unable to follow suit or trump, any card can be played. Each trick must contain one card per player, and hence a player unable to satisfy any other instruction is at liberty to play any card. Usually a low-ranking card or one from a short suit is sacrificed. The former is used to protect a higher ranking card while the latter is to help void a suit so as to allow trumping a future trick.
It is also possible that the specific deal has "no trump". In that case, any card other than the leading suit played has no value, in most trick-taking games. In some games such as Oh, hell, where the player may need to not get more tricks to win, playing cards other than the leading suit can be useful.
For example, consider the following Whist hand:
North leads the deal with . Now, all the other players must follow suit, i.e. play a spade card. East has a spade card, and thus must follow suit by playing . South, however, does not have any spade card, and thus is allowed to play any card he wants. If he desires to win the trick, he can override North's by playing a diamond card (diamond being the trump), for example . If he does not want to win the trick, he can slough any other suit, such as . Let us assume that he plays , overriding North's card. Now, West still has to follow suit, since he has a spade card, and plays . South's trump card, gives him an opportunity to escape following suit, and he wins the trick.
If a player who can follow suit does not do so, or in games with additional restrictions on card play, not following these restrictions is known as a revoke, or 'renege'. A revoke typically cannot be discovered at the time when it is committed, but when a player plays off-suit to a trick, competent opponents will make a mental note that the player does not hold the suit led, and will notice later if the player later plays a card of the suit they were thought to be void in. The situation is similar for other types of revoke. Most game rules prescribe a severe penalty for a revoke and may also result in the hand being voided (a "misdeal"). Decks of cards have been marketed for trick-taking games with the traditional French suit symbols, but in four colors; these are often called "no-revoke" decks, as the color contrast between each suit makes a potential revoking play easier to spot and harder to do accidentally.
In some trick games—typically ones in which players are not penalized for winning tricks, and there is no requirement for trumping or following suit when possible—players may "slough", or play a card face down. A card so played is incapable of winning the trick; but sloughing has the advantage that the other players cannot see what card is played. As this form of sloughing has the potential to be used to cheat in most games (i.e. playing a winning card face-down to avoid taking an "overtrick" or a trick containing penalty points) and is thus not allowed, "sloughing" in the vernacular more often refers to simply discarding an off-suit card on a trick, particularly one that could be dangerous to that player if kept. This form of sloughing is important in evasion games and in some contract games where "overtricks" are penalized; in Oh Hell, for instance, a player who cannot follow suit may elect to discard a card that would win if played to follow suit later, thus reducing the chance that the player will "bag", or take more tricks than needed. This is common in Hearts, where high-value cards (especially Spades and Hearts) are dangerous as they increase the chance of winning a trick with penalty points.
Some games such as Pinochle use several decks shuffled together. In these games, there may be several equal winning cards in a trick; such games then use other rules to break ties. Common rules include:
A common additional rule to reduce these occurrences is that a player cannot play a card tying the current high card unless they would renege or fail to overtrump by making any other play.
When all tricks have been played, the winner of the hand and the players' scores can be determined. The determining factor in plain-trick games (the most popular form of trick-taking games in English-speaking countries) is simply how many tricks each player or partnership has taken. In point-trick games, certain card values are worth varying points, and the players sum the points from cards in their "scoring piles" that were accumulated by taking tricks. Points for cards, and the method of counting points, vary by game; in Rook, for example, the 5-card of each color is worth 5 points, the 10 and 14 (or Ace) is worth 10, and the Rook Bird (or Joker) is worth 20, while all other cards are worth nothing. Many Chinese card games like Finding Friends use a very similar system, in which each 5-card is worth 5 points, and the 10 and King are each worth 10 points. Pinochle has many popular scoring variants usually based on point values for face cards and Aces, while pip cards score no points. In French tarot, all cards have a value including a half-point, and are traditionally scored in pairs of a high-value and a low-value card which results in a whole-point value for the pair.
In the most common "positive" or "race" games, players seek to win as many tricks or card points as possible. To win a hand, a player typically needs to win a minimal number of tricks or card points; this minimal threshold is usually called the "contract", and may be defined by the game's rules (a simple majority of total available points or tricks, or tiered thresholds depending on which player or side has captured certain cards), or the result of an "auction" or "bidding" process. A player who wins more than the number of tricks or card points necessary for winning the hand may be rewarded with a higher score, or conversely (in exact-prediction games) they may be penalized.
There are also "negative" or "evasion" games, in which the object is to avoid tricks or card points. E.g. in Hearts each card point won in a trick contributes negatively to the score. A special type is "misère" games, which are usually variants of positive games which can only be won by not winning a single trick.
Other criteria also occur. Sometimes the last trick has special significance. In "marriage games" such as Pinochle the winner of the last trick receives 10 points in addition to the card points, while in "final-trick" games such as cắt tê only the winner of the last trick can win a hand. There are also blends between positive and negative games, e.g. the aim may be to win a certain prescribed number of tricks. Many card games, regardless of their normal scoring mechanism, give bonuses to players or partnerships who win all tricks or possible points in a hand, or conversely lose all tricks or points.
Games usually end after every player has had an equal chance to be the dealer. The number of rotations varies widely among games. Some games have a cumulative score where all points from each hand add up. Others assign only a set number of game points for winning a hand. For example, a player or side that wins one hand may be awarded one game point, two if they achieve a slam. The player or side with the most game points or the first to reach a certain number of card or game points, is considered the winner.
Numerous further variations to the basic rules may occur, and only a few examples can be mentioned here:
In games derived from Austria and Germany, trick-taking is governed by the rules called "Zwänge". The three main ones are "Farbzwang", "Stichzwang" and "Trumpfzwang". Although they broadly equate to rules in English-speaking countries, there are no single-word equivalents. For many games of this type, applying these rules correctly is crucial to the type of contract being played.
"Farbzwang" (or "Bedienzwang") literally means "suit compulsion" and is the rule that players must follow the suit of the first card to be led to the trick, provided that they have a card of that suit. If a player does not have a card of the led suit, they may play ('discard') a card of their choice. If a player has several cards of the led suit, they may choose which to play. In most cases it makes sense to play a higher ranking card.
"Stichzwang" means "trick compulsion" and is the rule that players must attempt to win the trick if they are able, either by playing a higher card of the led suit or by playing a trump card.
Some games apply "Farbzwang" and "Stichzwang" together, which means that a player, when it is his turn, must:
"Farbzwang", the requirement to follow suit, always takes precedence over "Stichzwang". A player is not allowed to take the trick with a trump if he can follow suit.
"Trumpfzwang" means "trump compulsion" and requires that a player "must" play a trump if he cannot follow suit. In other words, he may not simply discard, if he cannot follow suit.
"Example": Acorns are trumps. Forehand plays the 8 of Bells, middlehand trumps with a 10 of Acorns; rearhand has no Bells, but does have a trump card, the 8 of Acorns. He must play this and cannot discard another non-trump card in order to keep the trump for a subsequent trick.
"Tarockzwang" is used in tarock games such as Königrufen and Tapp-Tarock and means "Tarock compulsion" or the requirement to play a Tarock card if one is led to the trick or if a player is unable to follow suit. It is a form of "Trumpfzwang".
Trick-taking games may be divided into point-trick games and plain-trick games. Examples of each are as follows:
Point-trick game are those in which win or loss is determined by the total value of the "counters" in the tricks. The counters are cards with a point value, sometimes referred to as "card points" to avoid confusion with "game points" awarded for winning the game and/or bonuses.
Examples include:
Plain-trick games are those in which the outcome is determined by the number of tricks taken, regardless of their content.
Examples of plain-trick games include:
In games that consist of several successive, different, trick-taking contracts, such as Herzeln or Quodlibet, it is not possible to categorise them as either point- or plain-trick games.
Trick-avoidance games are those in which the aim is to avoid taking certain tricks or to avoid taking all tricks. Misere or bettel are contracts in which the declarer undertakes to win no tricks. There are also contracts like Piccolo in which the aim is to take only one trick. Examples include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29947 |
Tile-based game
A tile-based game is a game that uses tiles as one of the fundamental elements of play. Traditional tile-based games use small tiles as playing pieces for gambling or entertainment games. Some board games use tiles to create their board, giving multiple possibilities for board layout, or allowing changes in the board geometry during play.
Each tile has a back (undifferentiated) side and a face side. Domino tiles are usually rectangular, twice as long as they are wide and at least twice as wide as they are thick, though games exist with square tiles, triangular tiles and even hexagonal tiles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29950 |
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, radiation, and properties of matter. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of thermodynamics which convey a quantitative description using measurable macroscopic physical quantities, but may be explained in terms of microscopic constituents by statistical mechanics. Thermodynamics applies to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, especially physical chemistry, chemical engineering and mechanical engineering, but also in fields as complex as meteorology.
Historically, thermodynamics developed out of a desire to increase the efficiency of early steam engines, particularly through the work of French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1824) who believed that engine efficiency was the key that could help France win the Napoleonic Wars. Scots-Irish physicist Lord Kelvin was the first to formulate a concise definition of thermodynamics in 1854 which stated, "Thermo-dynamics is the subject of the relation of heat to forces acting between contiguous parts of bodies, and the relation of heat to electrical agency."
The initial application of thermodynamics to mechanical heat engines was quickly extended to the study of chemical compounds and chemical reactions. Chemical thermodynamics studies the nature of the role of entropy in the process of chemical reactions and has provided the bulk of expansion and knowledge of the field. Other formulations of thermodynamics emerged. Statistical thermodynamics, or statistical mechanics, concerns itself with statistical predictions of the collective motion of particles from their microscopic behavior. In 1909, Constantin Carathéodory presented a purely mathematical approach in an axiomatic formulation, a description often referred to as "geometrical thermodynamics".
A description of any thermodynamic system employs the four laws of thermodynamics that form an axiomatic basis. The first law specifies that energy can be exchanged between physical systems as heat and work. The second law defines the existence of a quantity called entropy, that describes the direction, thermodynamically, that a system can evolve and quantifies the state of order of a system and that can be used to quantify the useful work that can be extracted from the system.
In thermodynamics, interactions between large ensembles of objects are studied and categorized. Central to this are the concepts of the thermodynamic "system" and its "surroundings". A system is composed of particles, whose average motions define its properties, and those properties are in turn related to one another through equations of state. Properties can be combined to express internal energy and thermodynamic potentials, which are useful for determining conditions for equilibrium and spontaneous processes.
With these tools, thermodynamics can be used to describe how systems respond to changes in their environment. This can be applied to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, such as engines, phase transitions, chemical reactions, transport phenomena, and even black holes. The results of thermodynamics are essential for other fields of physics and for chemistry, chemical engineering, corrosion engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, cell biology, biomedical engineering, materials science, and economics, to name a few.
This article is focused mainly on classical thermodynamics which primarily studies systems in thermodynamic equilibrium. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is often treated as an extension of the classical treatment, but statistical mechanics has brought many advances to that field.
The history of thermodynamics as a scientific discipline generally begins with Otto von Guericke who, in 1650, built and designed the world's first vacuum pump and demonstrated a vacuum using his Magdeburg hemispheres. Guericke was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'nature abhors a vacuum'. Shortly after Guericke, the English physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guericke's designs and, in 1656, in coordination with English scientist Robert Hooke, built an air pump. Using this pump, Boyle and Hooke noticed a correlation between pressure, temperature, and volume. In time, Boyle's Law was formulated, which states that pressure and volume are inversely proportional. Then, in 1679, based on these concepts, an associate of Boyle's named Denis Papin built a steam digester, which was a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confined steam until a high pressure was generated.
Later designs implemented a steam release valve that kept the machine from exploding. By watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and a cylinder engine. He did not, however, follow through with his design. Nevertheless, in 1697, based on Papin's designs, engineer Thomas Savery built the first engine, followed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Although these early engines were crude and inefficient, they attracted the attention of the leading scientists of the time.
The fundamental concepts of heat capacity and latent heat, which were necessary for the development of thermodynamics, were developed by Professor Joseph Black at the University of Glasgow, where James Watt was employed as an instrument maker. Black and Watt performed experiments together, but it was Watt who conceived the idea of the external condenser which resulted in a large increase in steam engine efficiency. Drawing on all the previous work led Sadi Carnot, the "father of thermodynamics", to publish "Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire" (1824), a discourse on heat, power, energy and engine efficiency. The book outlined the basic energetic relations between the Carnot engine, the Carnot cycle, and motive power. It marked the start of thermodynamics as a modern science.
The first thermodynamic textbook was written in 1859 by William Rankine, originally trained as a physicist and a civil and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Glasgow. The first and second laws of thermodynamics emerged simultaneously in the 1850s, primarily out of the works of William Rankine, Rudolf Clausius, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).
The foundations of statistical thermodynamics were set out by physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck, Rudolf Clausius and J. Willard Gibbs.
During the years 1873–76 the American mathematical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs published a series of three papers, the most famous being "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances", in which he showed how thermodynamic processes, including chemical reactions, could be graphically analyzed, by studying the energy, entropy, volume, temperature and pressure of the thermodynamic system in such a manner, one can determine if a process would occur spontaneously. Also Pierre Duhem in the 19th century wrote about chemical thermodynamics. During the early 20th century, chemists such as Gilbert N. Lewis, Merle Randall, and E. A. Guggenheim applied the mathematical methods of Gibbs to the analysis of chemical processes.
The etymology of "thermodynamics" has an intricate history. It was first spelled in a hyphenated form as an adjective ("thermo-dynamic") and from 1854 to 1868 as the noun "thermo-dynamics" to represent the science of generalized heat engines.
American biophysicist Donald Haynie claims that "thermodynamics" was coined in 1840 from the Greek root θέρμη "therme," meaning “heat”, and δύναμις "dynamis," meaning “power”.
Pierre Perrot claims that the term "thermodynamics" was coined by James Joule in 1858 to designate the science of relations between heat and power, however, Joule never used that term, but used instead the term "perfect thermo-dynamic engine" in reference to Thomson's 1849 phraseology.
By 1858, "thermo-dynamics", as a functional term, was used in William Thomson's paper "An Account of Carnot's Theory of the Motive Power of Heat."
The study of thermodynamical systems has developed into several related branches, each using a different fundamental model as a theoretical or experimental basis, or applying the principles to varying types of systems.
Classical thermodynamics is the description of the states of thermodynamic systems at near-equilibrium, that uses macroscopic, measurable properties. It is used to model exchanges of energy, work and heat based on the laws of thermodynamics. The qualifier "classical" reflects the fact that it represents the first level of understanding of the subject as it developed in the 19th century and describes the changes of a system in terms of macroscopic empirical (large scale, and measurable) parameters. A microscopic interpretation of these concepts was later provided by the development of "statistical mechanics".
Statistical mechanics, also called statistical thermodynamics, emerged with the development of atomic and molecular theories in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and supplemented classical thermodynamics with an interpretation of the microscopic interactions between individual particles or quantum-mechanical states. This field relates the microscopic properties of individual atoms and molecules to the macroscopic, bulk properties of materials that can be observed on the human scale, thereby explaining classical thermodynamics as a natural result of statistics, classical mechanics, and quantum theory at the microscopic level.
Chemical thermodynamics is the study of the interrelation of energy with chemical reactions or with a physical change of state within the confines of the laws of thermodynamics.
Equilibrium thermodynamics is the study of transfers of matter and energy in systems or bodies that, by agencies in their surroundings, can be driven from one state of thermodynamic equilibrium to another. The term 'thermodynamic equilibrium' indicates a state of balance, in which all macroscopic flows are zero; in the case of the simplest systems or bodies, their intensive properties are homogeneous, and their pressures are perpendicular to their boundaries. In an equilibrium state there are no unbalanced potentials, or driving forces, between macroscopically distinct parts of the system. A central aim in equilibrium thermodynamics is: given a system in a well-defined initial equilibrium state, and given its surroundings, and given its constitutive walls, to calculate what will be the final equilibrium state of the system after a specified thermodynamic operation has changed its walls or surroundings.
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics is a branch of thermodynamics that deals with systems that are not in thermodynamic equilibrium. Most systems found in nature are not in thermodynamic equilibrium because they are not in stationary states, and are continuously and discontinuously subject to flux of matter and energy to and from other systems. The thermodynamic study of non-equilibrium systems requires more general concepts than are dealt with by equilibrium thermodynamics. Many natural systems still today remain beyond the scope of currently known macroscopic thermodynamic methods.
Thermodynamics is principally based on a set of four laws which are universally valid when applied to systems that fall within the constraints implied by each. In the various theoretical descriptions of thermodynamics these laws may be expressed in seemingly differing forms, but the most prominent formulations are the following.
The zeroth law of thermodynamics states: "If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other."
This statement implies that thermal equilibrium is an equivalence relation on the set of thermodynamic systems under consideration. Systems are said to be in equilibrium if the small, random exchanges between them (e.g. Brownian motion) do not lead to a net change in energy. This law is tacitly assumed in every measurement of temperature. Thus, if one seeks to decide whether two bodies are at the same temperature, it is not necessary to bring them into contact and measure any changes of their observable properties in time. The law provides an empirical definition of temperature, and justification for the construction of practical thermometers.
The zeroth law was not initially recognized as a separate law of thermodynamics, as its basis in thermodynamical equilibrium was implied in the other laws. The first, second, and third laws had been explicitly stated already, and found common acceptance in the physics community before the importance of the zeroth law for the definition of temperature was realized. As it was impractical to renumber the other laws, it was named the "zeroth law".
The first law of thermodynamics states: "In a process without transfer of matter, the change in internal energy," ", of a thermodynamic system is equal to the energy gained as heat," ", less the thermodynamic work," ", done by the system on its surroundings."
For processes that include transfer of matter, a further statement is needed: "With due account of the respective fiducial reference states of the systems, when two systems, which may be of different chemical compositions, initially separated only by an impermeable wall, and otherwise isolated, are combined into a new system by the thermodynamic operation of removal of the wall, then"
"where" "denotes the internal energy of the combined system, and" "and" "denote the internal energies of the respective separated systems."
Adapted for thermodynamics, this law is an expression of the principle of conservation of energy, which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.
Internal energy is a principal property of the thermodynamic state, while heat and work are modes of energy transfer by which a process may change this state. A change of internal energy of a system may be achieved by any combination of heat added or removed and work performed on or by the system. As a function of state, the internal energy does not depend on the manner, or on the path through intermediate steps, by which the system arrived at its state.
The second law of thermodynamics states: "Heat cannot spontaneously flow from a colder location to a hotter location."
This law is an expression of the universal principle of decay observable in nature. The second law is an observation of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how much this process has progressed. The entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. However, principles guiding systems that are far from equilibrium are still debatable. One of such principles is the maximum entropy production principle. It states that non-equilibrium systems behave such a way as to maximize its entropy production.
In classical thermodynamics, the second law is a basic postulate applicable to any system involving heat energy transfer; in statistical thermodynamics, the second law is a consequence of the assumed randomness of molecular chaos. There are many versions of the second law, but they all have the same effect, which is to express the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature.
The third law of thermodynamics states: "As the temperature of a system approaches absolute zero, all processes cease and the entropy of the system approaches a minimum value."
This law of thermodynamics is a statistical law of nature regarding entropy and the impossibility of reaching absolute zero of temperature. This law provides an absolute reference point for the determination of entropy. The entropy determined relative to this point is the absolute entropy. Alternate definitions include "the entropy of all systems and of all states of a system is smallest at absolute zero," or equivalently "it is impossible to reach the absolute zero of temperature by any finite number of processes".
Absolute zero, at which all activity would stop if it were possible to achieve, is −273.15 °C (degrees Celsius), or −459.67 °F (degrees Fahrenheit), or 0 K (kelvin), or 0° R (degrees Rankine).
An important concept in thermodynamics is the thermodynamic system, which is a precisely defined region of the universe under study. Everything in the universe except the system is called the "surroundings". A system is separated from the remainder of the universe by a "boundary" which may be a physical "boundary" or notional, but which by convention defines a finite volume. Segments of the "boundary" are often described as 'walls'; they have respective defined 'permeabilities'. Transfers of energy as work, or as heat, or of matter, between the system and the surroundings, take place through the walls, according to their respective permeabilities.
Matter or energy that pass across the boundary so as to effect a change in the internal energy of the system need to be accounted for in the energy balance equation. The volume contained by the walls can be the region surrounding a single atom resonating energy, such as Max Planck defined in 1900; it can be a body of steam or air in a steam engine, such as Sadi Carnot defined in 1824. The system could also be just one nuclide (i.e. a system of quarks) as hypothesized in quantum thermodynamics. When a looser viewpoint is adopted, and the requirement of thermodynamic equilibrium is dropped, the system can be the body of a tropical cyclone, such as Kerry Emanuel theorized in 1986 in the field of atmospheric thermodynamics, or the event horizon of a black hole.
Boundaries are of four types: fixed, movable, real, and imaginary. For example, in an engine, a fixed boundary means the piston is locked at its position, within which a constant volume process might occur. If the piston is allowed to move that boundary is movable while the cylinder and cylinder head boundaries are fixed. For closed systems, boundaries are real while for open systems boundaries are often imaginary. In the case of a jet engine, a fixed imaginary boundary might be assumed at the intake of the engine, fixed boundaries along the surface of the case and a second fixed imaginary boundary across the exhaust nozzle.
Generally, thermodynamics distinguishes three classes of systems, defined in terms of what is allowed to cross their boundaries:
As time passes in an isolated system, internal differences of pressures, densities, and temperatures tend to even out. A system in which all equalizing processes have gone to completion is said to be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
Once in thermodynamic equilibrium, a system's properties are, by definition, unchanging in time. Systems in equilibrium are much simpler and easier to understand than are systems which are not in equilibrium. Often, when analysing a dynamic thermodynamic process, the simplifying assumption is made that each intermediate state in the process is at equilibrium, producing thermodynamic processes which develop so slowly as to allow each intermediate step to be an equilibrium state and are said to be reversible processes.
When a system is at equilibrium under a given set of conditions, it is said to be in a definite thermodynamic state. The state of the system can be described by a number of state quantities that do not depend on the process by which the system arrived at its state. They are called intensive variables or extensive variables according to how they change when the size of the system changes. The properties of the system can be described by an equation of state which specifies the relationship between these variables. State may be thought of as the instantaneous quantitative description of a system with a set number of variables held constant.
A thermodynamic process may be defined as the energetic evolution of a thermodynamic system proceeding from an initial state to a final state. It can be described by process quantities. Typically, each thermodynamic process is distinguished from other processes in energetic character according to what parameters, such as temperature, pressure, or volume, etc., are held fixed; Furthermore, it is useful to group these processes into pairs, in which each variable held constant is one member of a conjugate pair.
Several commonly studied thermodynamic processes are:
There are two types of thermodynamic instruments, the meter and the reservoir. A thermodynamic meter is any device which measures any parameter of a thermodynamic system. In some cases, the thermodynamic parameter is actually defined in terms of an idealized measuring instrument. For example, the zeroth law states that if two bodies are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other. This principle, as noted by James Maxwell in 1872, asserts that it is possible to measure temperature. An idealized thermometer is a sample of an ideal gas at constant pressure. From the ideal gas law "pV=nRT", the volume of such a sample can be used as an indicator of temperature; in this manner it defines temperature. Although pressure is defined mechanically, a pressure-measuring device, called a barometer may also be constructed from a sample of an ideal gas held at a constant temperature. A calorimeter is a device which is used to measure and define the internal energy of a system.
A thermodynamic reservoir is a system which is so large that its state parameters are not appreciably altered when it is brought into contact with the system of interest. When the reservoir is brought into contact with the system, the system is brought into equilibrium with the reservoir. For example, a pressure reservoir is a system at a particular pressure, which imposes that pressure upon the system to which it is mechanically connected. The Earth's atmosphere is often used as a pressure reservoir. If ocean water is used to cool a power plant, the ocean is often a temperature reservoir in the analysis of the power plant cycle.
The central concept of thermodynamics is that of energy, the ability to do work. By the First Law, the total energy of a system and its surroundings is conserved. Energy may be transferred into a system by heating, compression, or addition of matter, and extracted from a system by cooling, expansion, or extraction of matter. In mechanics, for example, energy transfer equals the product of the force applied to a body and the resulting displacement.
Conjugate variables are pairs of thermodynamic concepts, with the first being akin to a "force" applied to some thermodynamic system, the second being akin to the resulting "displacement," and the product of the two equaling the amount of energy transferred. The common conjugate variables are:
Thermodynamic potentials are different quantitative measures of the stored energy in a system. Potentials are used to measure the energy changes in systems as they evolve from an initial state to a final state. The potential used depends on the constraints of the system, such as constant temperature or pressure. For example, the Helmholtz and Gibbs energies are the energies available in a system to do useful work when the temperature and volume or the pressure and temperature are fixed, respectively.
The five most well known potentials are:
where formula_3 is the temperature, formula_4 the entropy, formula_5 the pressure, formula_6 the volume, formula_7 the chemical potential, formula_8 the number of particles in the system, and formula_9 is the count of particles types in the system.
Thermodynamic potentials can be derived from the energy balance equation applied to a thermodynamic system. Other thermodynamic potentials can also be obtained through Legendre transformation.
The following titles are more technical: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29952 |
Topology
In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling and bending, but not tearing or gluing.
A topological space is a set endowed with a structure, called a "topology", which allows defining continuous deformation of subspaces, and, more generally, all kinds of continuity. Euclidean spaces, and, more generally, metric spaces are examples of a topological space, as any distance or metric defines a topology. The deformations that are considered in topology are homeomorphisms and homotopies. A property that is invariant under such deformations is a topological property. Basic examples of topological properties are: the dimension, which allows distinguishing between a line and a surface; compactness, which allows distinguishing between a line and a circle; connectedness, which allows distinguishing a circle from two non-intersecting circles.
The ideas underlying topology go back to Gottfried Leibniz, who in the 17th century envisioned the and . Leonhard Euler's Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem and polyhedron formula are arguably the field's first theorems. The term "topology" was introduced by Johann Benedict Listing in the 19th century, although it was not until the first decades of the 20th century that the idea of a topological space was developed.
The motivating insight behind topology is that some geometric problems depend not on the exact shape of the objects involved, but rather on the way they are put together. For example, the square and the circle have many properties in common: they are both one dimensional objects (from a topological point of view) and both separate the plane into two parts, the part inside and the part outside.
In one of the first papers in topology, Leonhard Euler demonstrated that it was impossible to find a route through the town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) that would cross each of its seven bridges exactly once. This result did not depend on the lengths of the bridges or on their distance from one another, but only on connectivity properties: which bridges connect to which islands or riverbanks. This Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem led to the branch of mathematics known as graph theory.
Similarly, the hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology says that "one cannot comb the hair flat on a hairy ball without creating a cowlick." This fact is immediately convincing to most people, even though they might not recognize the more formal statement of the theorem, that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on the sphere. As with the "Bridges of Königsberg", the result does not depend on the shape of the sphere; it applies to any kind of smooth blob, as long as it has no holes.
To deal with these problems that do not rely on the exact shape of the objects, one must be clear about just what properties these problems rely on. From this need arises the notion of homeomorphism. The impossibility of crossing each bridge just once applies to any arrangement of bridges homeomorphic to those in Königsberg, and the hairy ball theorem applies to any space homeomorphic to a sphere.
Intuitively, two spaces are homeomorphic if one can be deformed into the other without cutting or gluing. A traditional joke is that a topologist cannot distinguish a coffee mug from a doughnut, since a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped to a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle.
Homeomorphism can be considered the most basic topological equivalence. Another is homotopy equivalence. This is harder to describe without getting technical, but the essential notion is that two objects are homotopy equivalent if they both result from "squishing" some larger object.
An introductory exercise is to classify the uppercase letters of the English alphabet according to homeomorphism and homotopy equivalence. The result depends on the font used, and on whether the strokes making up the letters have some thickness or are ideal curves with no thickness. The figures here use the sans-serif Myriad font and are assumed to consist of ideal curves without thickness. Homotopy equivalence is a coarser relationship than homeomorphism; a homotopy equivalence class can contain several homeomorphism classes. The simple case of homotopy equivalence described above can be used here to show two letters are homotopy equivalent. For example, O fits inside P and the tail of the P can be squished to the "hole" part.
Homeomorphism classes are:
Homotopy classes are larger, because the tails can be squished down to a point. They are:
To classify the letters correctly, we must show that two letters in the same class are equivalent and two letters in different classes are not equivalent. In the case of homeomorphism, this can be done by selecting points and showing their removal disconnects the letters differently. For example, X and Y are not homeomorphic because removing the center point of the X leaves four pieces; whatever point in Y corresponds to this point, its removal can leave at most three pieces. The case of homotopy equivalence is harder and requires a more elaborate argument showing an algebraic invariant, such as the fundamental group, is different on the supposedly differing classes.
Letter topology has practical relevance in stencil typography. For instance, Braggadocio font stencils are made of one connected piece of material.
Topology, as a well-defined mathematical discipline, originates in the early part of the twentieth century, but some isolated results can be traced back several centuries. Among these are certain questions in geometry investigated by Leonhard Euler. His 1736 paper on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg is regarded as one of the first practical applications of topology. On 14 November 1750, Euler wrote to a friend that he had realised the importance of the "edges" of a polyhedron. This led to his polyhedron formula, (where , , and respectively indicate the number of vertices, edges, and faces of the polyhedron). Some authorities regard this analysis as the first theorem, signalling the birth of topology.
Further contributions were made by Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Ludwig Schläfli, Johann Benedict Listing, Bernhard Riemann and Enrico Betti. Listing introduced the term "Topologie" in "Vorstudien zur Topologie", written in his native German, in 1847, having used the word for ten years in correspondence before its first appearance in print. The English form "topology" was used in 1883 in Listing's obituary in the journal "Nature" to distinguish "qualitative geometry from the ordinary geometry in which quantitative relations chiefly are treated".
Their work was corrected, consolidated and greatly extended by Henri Poincaré. In 1895, he published his ground-breaking paper on "Analysis Situs", which introduced the concepts now known as homotopy and homology, which are now considered part of algebraic topology.
Unifying the work on function spaces of Georg Cantor, Vito Volterra, Cesare Arzelà, Jacques Hadamard, Giulio Ascoli and others, Maurice Fréchet introduced the metric space in 1906. A metric space is now considered a special case of a general topological space, with any given topological space potentially giving rise to many distinct metric spaces. In 1914, Felix Hausdorff coined the term "topological space" and gave the definition for what is now called a Hausdorff space. Currently, a topological space is a slight generalization of Hausdorff spaces, given in 1922 by Kazimierz Kuratowski.
Modern topology depends strongly on the ideas of set theory, developed by Georg Cantor in the later part of the 19th century. In addition to establishing the basic ideas of set theory, Cantor considered point sets in Euclidean space as part of his study of Fourier series. For further developments, see point-set topology and algebraic topology.
The term "topology" also refers to a specific mathematical idea central to the area of mathematics called topology. Informally, a topology tells how elements of a set relate spatially to each other. The same set can have different topologies. For instance, the real line, the complex plane, and the Cantor set can be thought of as the same set with different topologies.
Formally, let be a set and let be a family of subsets of . Then is called a topology on if:
If is a topology on , then the pair is called a topological space. The notation may be used to denote a set endowed with the particular topology .
The members of are called "open sets" in . A subset of is said to be closed if its complement is in (that is, its complement is open). A subset of may be open, closed, both (a clopen set), or neither. The empty set and itself are always both closed and open. An open subset of which contains a point is called a neighborhood of .
A function or map from one topological space to another is called "continuous" if the inverse image of any open set is open. If the function maps the real numbers to the real numbers (both spaces with the standard topology), then this definition of continuous is equivalent to the definition of continuous in calculus. If a continuous function is one-to-one and onto, and if the inverse of the function is also continuous, then the function is called a homeomorphism and the domain of the function is said to be homeomorphic to the range. Another way of saying this is that the function has a natural extension to the topology. If two spaces are homeomorphic, they have identical topological properties, and are considered topologically the same. The cube and the sphere are homeomorphic, as are the coffee cup and the doughnut. But the circle is not homeomorphic to the doughnut.
While topological spaces can be extremely varied and exotic, many areas of topology focus on the more familiar class of spaces known as manifolds. A "manifold" is a topological space that resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, each point of an -dimensional manifold has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension . Lines and circles, but not figure eights, are one-dimensional manifolds. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces, although not all surfaces are manifolds. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, which can all be realized without self-intersection in three dimensions, and the Klein bottle and real projective plane, which cannot (that is, all their realizations are surfaces that are not manifolds).
General topology is the branch of topology dealing with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differential topology, geometric topology, and algebraic topology. Another name for general topology is point-set topology.
The basic object of study is topological spaces, which are sets equipped with a topology, that is, a family of subsets, called "open sets", which is closed under finite intersections and (finite or infinite) unions. The fundamental concepts of topology, such as "continuity", "compactness", and "connectedness", can be defined in terms of open sets. Intuitively, continuous functions take nearby points to nearby points. Compact sets are those that can be covered by finitely many sets of arbitrarily small size. Connected sets are sets that cannot be divided into two pieces that are far apart. The words "nearby", "arbitrarily small", and "far apart" can all be made precise by using open sets. Several topologies can be defined on a given space. Changing a topology consists of changing the collection of open sets. This changes which functions are continuous and which subsets are compact or connected.
Metric spaces are an important class of topological spaces where the distance between any two points is defined by a function called a "metric". In a metric space, an open set is a union of open disks, where an open disk of radius centered at is the set of all points whose distance to is less than . Many common spaces are topological spaces whose topology can be defined by a metric. This is the case of the real line, the complex plane, real and complex vector spaces and Euclidean spaces. Having a metric simplifies many proofs.
Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify up to homotopy equivalence.
The most important of these invariants are homotopy groups, homology, and cohomology.
Although algebraic topology primarily uses algebra to study topological problems, using topology to solve algebraic problems is sometimes also possible. Algebraic topology, for example, allows for a convenient proof that any subgroup of a free group is again a free group.
Differential topology is the field dealing with differentiable functions on differentiable manifolds. It is closely related to differential geometry and together they make up the geometric theory of differentiable manifolds.
More specifically, differential topology considers the properties and structures that require only a smooth structure on a manifold to be defined. Smooth manifolds are "softer" than manifolds with extra geometric structures, which can act as obstructions to certain types of equivalences and deformations that exist in differential topology. For instance, volume and Riemannian curvature are invariants that can distinguish different geometric structures on the same smooth manifold—that is, one can smoothly "flatten out" certain manifolds, but it might require distorting the space and affecting the curvature or volume.
Geometric topology is a branch of topology that primarily focuses on low-dimensional manifolds (that is, spaces of dimensions 2, 3, and 4) and their interaction with geometry, but it also includes some higher-dimensional topology. Some examples of topics in geometric topology are orientability, handle decompositions, local flatness, crumpling and the planar and higher-dimensional Schönflies theorem.
In high-dimensional topology, characteristic classes are a basic invariant, and surgery theory is a key theory.
Low-dimensional topology is strongly geometric, as reflected in the uniformization theorem in 2 dimensions – every surface admits a constant curvature metric; geometrically, it has one of 3 possible geometries: positive curvature/spherical, zero curvature/flat, and negative curvature/hyperbolic – and the geometrization conjecture (now theorem) in 3 dimensions – every 3-manifold can be cut into pieces, each of which has one of eight possible geometries.
2-dimensional topology can be studied as complex geometry in one variable (Riemann surfaces are complex curves) – by the uniformization theorem every conformal class of metrics is equivalent to a unique complex one, and 4-dimensional topology can be studied from the point of view of complex geometry in two variables (complex surfaces), though not every 4-manifold admits a complex structure.
Occasionally, one needs to use the tools of topology but a "set of points" is not available. In pointless topology one considers instead the lattice of open sets as the basic notion of the theory, while Grothendieck topologies are structures defined on arbitrary categories that allow the definition of sheaves on those categories, and with that the definition of general cohomology theories.
Knot theory, a branch of topology, is used in biology to study the effects of certain enzymes on DNA. These enzymes cut, twist, and reconnect the DNA, causing knotting with observable effects such as slower electrophoresis. Topology is also used in evolutionary biology to represent the relationship between phenotype and genotype. Phenotypic forms that appear quite different can be separated by only a few mutations depending on how genetic changes map to phenotypic changes during development. In neuroscience, topological quantities like the Euler characteristic and Betti number have been used to measure the complexity of patterns of activity in neural networks.
Topological data analysis uses techniques from algebraic topology to determine the large scale structure of a set (for instance, determining if a cloud of points is spherical or toroidal). The main method used by topological data analysis is to:
Several branches of programming language semantics, such as domain theory, are formalized using topology. In this context, Steve Vickers, building on work by Samson Abramsky and Michael B. Smyth, characterizes topological spaces as Boolean or Heyting algebras over open sets, which are characterized as semidecidable (equivalently, finitely observable) properties.
Topology is relevant to physics in areas such as condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and physical cosmology.
The topological dependence of mechanical properties in solids is of interest in disciplines of mechanical engineering and materials science. Electrical and mechanical properties depend on the arrangement and network structures of molecules and elementary units in materials. The compressive strength of crumpled topologies is studied in attempts to understand the high strength to weight of such structures that are mostly empty space. Topology is of further significance in Contact mechanics where the dependence of stiffness and friction on the dimensionality of surface structures is the subject of interest with applications in multi-body physics.
A topological quantum field theory (or topological field theory or TQFT) is a quantum field theory that computes topological invariants.
Although TQFTs were invented by physicists, they are also of mathematical interest, being related to, among other things, knot theory, the theory of four-manifolds in algebraic topology, and to the theory of moduli spaces in algebraic geometry. Donaldson, Jones, Witten, and Kontsevich have all won Fields Medals for work related to topological field theory.
The topological classification of Calabi-Yau manifolds has important implications in string theory, as different manifolds can sustain different kinds of strings.
In cosmology, topology can be used to describe the overall shape of the universe. This area of research is commonly known as spacetime topology.
The possible positions of a robot can be described by a manifold called configuration space. In the area of motion planning, one finds paths between two points in configuration space. These paths represent a motion of the robot's joints and other parts into the desired pose.
Tanglement puzzles are based on topological aspects of the puzzle's shapes and components.
In order to create a continuous join of pieces in a modular construction, it is necessary to create an unbroken path in an order which surrounds each piece and traverses each edge only once. This process is an application of the Eulerian path. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29954 |
Troll
A troll is a class of being in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. In Old Norse sources, beings described as trolls dwell in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves, live together in small family units, and are rarely helpful to human beings.
Later, in Scandinavian folklore, trolls became beings in their own right, where they live far from human habitation, are not Christianized, and are considered dangerous to human beings. Depending on the source, their appearance varies greatly; trolls may be ugly and slow-witted, or look and behave exactly like human beings, with no particularly grotesque characteristic about them.
Trolls are sometimes associated with particular landmarks, which at times may be explained as formed from a troll exposed to sunlight. Trolls are depicted in a variety of media in modern popular culture.
The Old Norse nouns "troll" and "tröll" (variously meaning "fiend, demon, werewolf, jötunn") and Middle High German "troll, trolle" "fiend" (according to philologist Vladimir Orel likely borrowed from Old Norse) developed from Proto-Germanic neuter noun *"trullan". The origin of the Proto-Germanic word is unknown. Additionally, the Old Norse verb "trylla" 'to enchant, to turn into a troll' and the Middle High German verb "trüllen" "to flutter" both developed from the Proto-Germanic verb *"trulljanan", a derivative of *"trullan".
In Norse mythology, "troll", like "thurs", is a term applied to "jötnar" and is mentioned throughout the Old Norse corpus. In Old Norse sources, trolls are said to dwell in isolated mountains, rocks, and caves, sometimes live together (usually as father-and-daughter or mother-and-son), and are rarely described as helpful or friendly. The "Prose Edda" book "Skáldskaparmál" describes an encounter between an unnamed troll woman and the 9th-century skald Bragi Boddason. According to the section, Bragi was driving through "a certain forest" late one evening when a troll woman aggressively asked him who he was, in the process describing herself:
Bragi responds in turn, describing himself and his abilities as a skillful skald, before the scenario ends.
There is much confusion and overlap in the use of Old Norse terms "jötunn", "troll", "þurs", and "risi", which describe various beings. Lotte Motz theorized that these were originally four distinct classes of beings: lords of nature ("jötunn"), mythical magicians ("troll"), hostile monsters ("þurs"), and heroic and courtly beings ("risi"), the last class being the youngest addition. On the other hand, Ármann Jakobson is critical of Motz's interpretation and calls this theory "unsupported by any convincing evidence". Ármann highlights that the term is used to denote various beings, such as a jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, an abnormally strong or large or ugly person, an evil spirit, a ghost, a "blámaðr", a magical boar, a heathen demi-god, a demon, a brunnmigi, or a berserker.
Later in Scandinavian folklore, trolls become defined as a particular type of being. Numerous tales are recorded about trolls in which they are frequently described as being extremely old, very strong, but slow and dim-witted, and are at times described as man-eaters and as turning to stone upon contact with sunlight. However, trolls are also attested as looking much the same as human beings, without any particularly hideous appearance about them, but living far away from human habitation and generally having "some form of social organization"—unlike the "rå" and "näck", who are attested as "solitary beings". According to John Lindow, what sets them apart is that they are not Christian, and those who encounter them do not know them. Therefore, trolls were in the end dangerous, regardless of how well they might get along with Christian society, and trolls display a habit of "bergtagning" ('kidnapping'; literally "mountain-taking") and overrunning a farm or estate.
Lindow states that the etymology of the word "troll" remains uncertain, though he defines trolls in later Swedish folklore as "nature beings" and as "all-purpose otherworldly being[s], equivalent, for example, to fairies in Anglo-Celtic traditions". They "therefore appear in various migratory legends where collective nature-beings are called for". Lindow notes that trolls are sometimes swapped out for cats and "little people" in the folklore record.
A Scandinavian folk belief that lightning frightens away trolls and jötnar appears in numerous Scandinavian folktales, and may be a late reflection of the god Thor's role in fighting such beings. In connection, the lack of trolls and jötnar in modern Scandinavia is sometimes explained as a result of the "accuracy and efficiency of the lightning strokes". Additionally, the absence of trolls in regions of Scandinavia is described in folklore as being a "consequence of the constant din of the church-bells". This ring caused the trolls to leave for other lands, although not without some resistance; numerous traditions relate how trolls destroyed a church under construction or hurled boulders and stones at completed churches. Large local stones are sometimes described as the product of a troll's toss. Additionally, into the 20th century, the origins of particular Scandinavian landmarks, such as particular stones, are ascribed to trolls who may, for example, have turned to stone upon exposure to sunlight.
Lindow compares the trolls of the Swedish folk tradition to Grendel, the supernatural mead hall invader in the Old English poem "Beowulf", and notes that "just as the poem "Beowulf" emphasizes not the harrying of Grendel but the cleansing of the hall of Beowulf, so the modern tales stress the moment when the trolls are driven off."
Smaller trolls are attested as living in burial mounds and in mountains in Scandinavian folk tradition. In Denmark, these creatures are recorded as "troldfolk" ("troll-folk"), "bjergtrolde" ("mountain-trolls"), or "bjergfolk" ("mountain-folk") and in Norway also as "troldfolk" ("troll-folk") and "tusser". Trolls may be described as small, human-like beings or as tall as men depending on the region of origin of the story.
In Norwegian tradition, similar tales may be told about the larger trolls and the Huldrefolk ("hidden-folk"), yet a distinction is made between the two. The use of the word "trow" in Orkney and Shetland, to mean beings which are very like the Huldrefolk in Norway, may suggest a common origin for the terms. The word "troll" may have been used by pagan Norse settlers in Orkney and Shetland as a collective term for supernatural beings who should be respected and avoided rather than worshipped. "Troll" could later have become specialized as a description of the larger, more menacing Jötunn-kind whereas "Huldrefolk" may have developed as the term for smaller trolls.
John Arnott MacCulloch posited a connection between the Old Norse vættir and trolls, suggesting that both concepts may derive from spirits of the dead.
Troll, a Norwegian research station in Antarctica, is so named because of the rugged mountains which stand around that place like trolls. It includes a ground station which tracks satellites in polar orbit. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29957 |
Trade secret
Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that comprise formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily ascertainable by others, and which the owner takes reasonable measures to keep secret. In some jurisdictions, such secrets are referred to as "confidential information".
The precise language by which a trade secret is defined varies by jurisdiction, as do the particular types of information that are subject to trade secret protection. Three factors are common to all such definitions:
A trade secret is information that
In international law, these three factors define a trade secret under article 39 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, commonly referred to as the TRIPS Agreement.
Similarly, in the United States Economic Espionage Act of 1996, "A trade secret, as defined under (3)(A),(B) (1996), has three parts: (1) information; (2) reasonable measures taken to protect the information; and (3) which derives independent economic value from not being publicly known."
Trade secrets are an important, but invisible component of a company's intellectual property (IP). Their contribution to a company's value, measured as its market capitalization, can be major. Being invisible, that contribution is hard to measure. Patents are a visible contribution, but delayed, and unsuitable for internal innovations. Having an internal scoreboard provides insight into the cost of risks of employees leaving to serve or start competing ventures.
In contrast to registered intellectual property, trade secrets are, by definition, not disclosed to the world at large. Instead, owners of trade secrets seek to protect trade secret information from competitors by instituting special procedures for handling it, as well as technological and legal security measures. Legal protections include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and work-for-hire and non-compete clauses. In other words, in exchange for an opportunity to be employed by the holder of secrets, an employee may sign agreements to not reveal their prospective employer's proprietary information, to surrender or assign to their employer ownership rights to intellectual work and work-products produced during the course (or as a condition) of employment, and to not work for a competitor for a given period of time (sometimes within a given geographic region). Violation of the agreement generally carries the possibility of heavy financial penalties which operate as a disincentive to reveal trade secrets. However, proving a breach of an NDA by a former stakeholder who is legally working for a competitor or prevailing in a lawsuit for breaching a non-compete clause can be very difficult. A holder of a trade secret may also require similar agreements from other parties he or she deals with, such as vendors, licensees, and board members.
As a company can protect its confidential information through NDA, work-for-hire, and non-compete contracts with its stakeholders (within the constraints of employment law, including only restraint that is reasonable in geographic- and time-scope), these protective contractual measures effectively create a perpetual monopoly on secret information that does not expire as would a patent or copyright. The lack of formal protection associated with registered intellectual property rights, however, means that a third party not bound by a signed agreement is not prevented from independently duplicating and using the secret information once it is discovered, such as through reverse engineering.
Therefore, trade secrets such as secret formulae are often protected by restricting the key information to a few trusted individuals. Famous examples of products protected by trade secrets are Chartreuse liqueur and Coca-Cola.
Because protection of trade secrets can, in principle, extend indefinitely, it therefore may provide an advantage over patent protection and other registered intellectual property rights, which last only for a specific duration. The Coca-Cola company, for example, has no patent for the formula of Coca-Cola and has been effective in protecting it for many more years than the 20 years of protection that a patent would have provided. In fact, Coca-Cola refused to reveal its trade secret under at least two judges' orders.
Companies often try to discover one another's trade secrets through lawful methods of reverse engineering or employee poaching on one hand, and potentially unlawful methods including industrial espionage on the other. Acts of industrial espionage are generally illegal in their own right under the relevant governing laws, and penalties can be harsh. The importance of that illegality to trade secret law is: if a trade secret is acquired by improper means (a somewhat wider concept than "illegal means" but inclusive of such means), then the secret is generally deemed to have been "misappropriated". Thus, if a trade secret has been acquired via industrial espionage, its acquirer will probably be subject to legal liability for having acquired it improperly — this notwithstanding, the holder of the trade secret is nevertheless obliged to protect against such espionage to some degree in order to safeguard the secret, as under most trade secret regimes, a trade secret is not deemed to exist unless its purported holder takes reasonable steps to maintain its secrecy.
Commentators starting with A. Arthur Schiller assert that trade secrets were protected under Roman law by a claim known as , interpreted as an "action for making a slave worse" (or an action for corrupting a servant). The Roman law is described as follows:
[T]he Roman owner of a mark or firm name was legally protected against unfair usage by a competitor through the "actio servi corrupti" ... which the Roman jurists used to grant commercial relief under the guise of private law actions. "If, as the writer believes [writes Schiller], various private cases of action were available in satisfying commercial needs, the state was acting in exactly the same fashion as it does at the present day."
The suggestion that trade secret law has its roots in Roman law was introduced in 1929 in a "Columbia Law Review" article called "Trade Secrets and the Roman Law: The "Actio Servi Corrupti"", which has been reproduced in Schiller's, "An American Experience in Roman Law" 1 (1971). See "Trade Secrets and Roman Law: The Myth Exploded", at 19. However, the University of Georgia Law School professor Alan Watson argued in "Trade Secrets and Roman Law: The Myth Exploded "that the "actio servi corrupti" was not used to protect trade secrets p. 19. Rather, he explained:
Schiller is sadly mistaken as to what was going on. ... The "actio servi corrupti" presumably or possibly could be used to protect trade secrets and other similar commercial interests. That was not its purpose and was, at most, an incidental spin-off. But there is not the slightest evidence that the action was ever so used. In this regard the "actio servi corrupti" is not unique.
Exactly the same can be said of many private law actions including those for theft, damage to property, deposit, and production of property. All of these could, I suppose, be used to protect trade secrets, etc., but there is no evidence they were. It is bizarre to see any degree the Roman actio servi corrupti as the counterpart of modern law for the protection of trade secrets and other such commercial interests.
Trade secret law as known today made its first appearance in England in 1817 in "Newbery v. James", and in the United States in 1837 in "Vickery v. Welch". While those cases involved the first known common law causes of action based on a modern concept of trade secret laws, neither involved injunctive relief; rather, they involved damages only. In England, the first case involving injunctive relief came in 1820 in "Yovatt v Winyard", while in the United States, it took until the 1866 case "Taylor v. Blanchard".
Trade secrets law continued to evolve throughout the United States as a hodgepodge of state laws. In 1939, the American Law Institute issued the Restatement of Torts, containing a summary of trade secret laws across states, which served as the primary resource until the latter part of the century. As of 2013, however, only four states—Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—still rely on the Restatement as their primary source of guidance (other than their body of state case law). It has also been recently theorized that the doctrine of trade secrets should protect competitively valuable, personal information of company executives, in a concept known as "executive trade secrets".
In Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, confidentiality and trade secrets are regarded as an equitable right rather than a property right.
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales in the case of "Saltman Engineering Co Ltd v. Campbell Engineering Ltd" held that the action for breach of confidence is based on a principle of preserving "good faith".
The test for a cause of action for breach of confidence in the common law world is set out in the case of "Coco v. A.N. Clark (Engineers) Ltd":
The "quality of confidence" highlights that trade secrets are a legal concept. With sufficient effort or through illegal acts (such as breaking and entering), competitors can usually obtain trade secrets. However, so long as the owner of the trade secret can prove that reasonable efforts have been made to keep the information confidential, the information remains a trade secret and generally remains legally protected. Conversely, trade secret owners who cannot evidence reasonable efforts at protecting confidential information risk losing the trade secret, even if the information is obtained by competitors illegally. It is for this reason that trade secret owners shred documents and do not simply recycle them.
A successful plaintiff is entitled to various forms of judicial relief, including:
Hong Kong does not follow the traditional commonwealth approach, instead recognizing trade secrets where a judgment of the High Court indicates that confidential information may be a property right.
The EU adopted a Directive on the Protection of Trade Secrets on 27 May 2016. The goal of the directive is to harmonize the definition of trade secrets in accordance with existing international standards, and the means of obtaining protection of trade secrets within the EU.
Within the U.S., trade secrets generally encompass a company's proprietary information that is not generally known to its competitors, and which provides the company with a competitive advantage.
Although trade secrets law evolved under state common law, prior to 1974, the question of whether patent law preempted state trade secrets law had been unanswered. In 1974, the United States Supreme Court issued the landmark decision, "Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp.," which resolved the question in favor of allowing the states to freely develop their own trade secret laws.
In 1979 several U.S. states adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), which was further amended in 1985, with approximately 47 states having adopted some variation of it as the basis for trade secret law. Another significant development is the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996 (), which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime.
This law contains two provisions criminalizing two sorts of activity.
The statutory penalties are different for the two offenses. The EEA was extended in 2016 to allow companies to file civil suits in federal court.
On May 11, 2016, President Obama signed the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), 18 U.S.C.§§1839 et seq., which for the first time created a federal cause of action for misappropriating trade secrets. The DTSA provides for both a private right of action for damages and injunction and a civil action for injunction brought by the Attorney General.
The statute followed state laws on liability in significant part, defining trade secrets in the same way as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act as,
However, the law contains several important differences from prior law.
The DTSA also clarifies that a United States resident (including a company) can be liable for misappropriation that takes place outside the United States, and any person can be liable as long as an act in furtherance of the misappropriation takes place in the United States, 18 U.S.C. §1837. The DTSA provides the courts with broad injunctive powers. 18 U.S.C. §1836(b)(3).
The DTSA does not preempt or supplant state laws, but provides an additional cause of action. Because states vary significantly in their approach to the "inevitable disclosure" doctrine, its use has limited, if any, application under the DTSA, 18 U.S.C.§1836(b)(3)(A).
In the United States, trade secrets are not protected by law in the same manner as patents or trademarks. Historically, trademarks and patents are protected under federal statutes, the Lanham Act and Patent Act, respectively, while trade secrets are usually protected under state laws, and most states have enacted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), except for Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. However, since 2016 this situation changed with the enactment of the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), making trade secrets also protectable under a federal law. One of the differences between patents and trademarks, on the one hand, and trade secrets, on the other, is that a trade secret is protected only when the owner has taken reasonable measures to protect the information as a secret (see (3)(A)).
Nations have different trademark policies. Assuming the mark in question meets certain other standards of protectibility, trademarks are generally protected from infringement on the grounds that other uses might confuse consumers as to the origin or nature of the goods once the mark has been associated with a particular supplier. Similar considerations apply to service marks and trade dress.
By definition, a trademark enjoys no protection ("qua" trademark) until and unless it is "disclosed" to consumers, for only then are consumers able to associate it with a supplier or source in the requisite manner. (That a company plans to "use" a certain trademark might itself be protectable as a trade secret, however, until the mark is actually made public.)
To acquire a trademark rights under U.S. law, one must simply use the mark "in commerce". It is possible to register a trademark in the United States, both at the federal and state levels. Registration of trademarks confers some advantages, including stronger protection in certain respects, but registration is not required in order to get protection. Registration may be required in order to file a lawsuit for trademark infringement.
To acquire a patent, full information about the method or product has to be supplied to the patent office and upon publication or issuance, will then be available to all. After expiration of the patent, competitors can copy the method or product legally. The temporary monopoly on the subject matter of the patent is regarded as a tradeoff for thus disclosing the information to the public.
It may be possible to obtain patent protection for a trade secret. In order to obtain a patent, the inventor must disclose the invention, so that others will be able to both make and use the invention. To obtain a patent in the United States, any preference for the mode of practicing the invention must be disclosed. Often, an invention will be improved after filing of the patent application, and additional information will be learned. None of that additional information must be disclosed through the patent application process, and it may thus be kept as a trade secret. That nondisclosed information will often increase the commercial viability of the patent. Most patent licenses include clauses that require the inventor to disclose any trade secrets they have, and patent licensors must be careful to maintain their trade secrets while licensing a patent through such means as the use of a non-disclosure agreement.
Compared to patents, the advantages of trade secrets are that a trade secret is not limited in time (it "continues indefinitely as long as the secret is not revealed to the public", whereas a patent is only in force for a specified time, after which others may freely copy the invention), a trade secret does not imply any registration costs, has an immediate effect, does not require compliance with any formalities, and does not imply any disclosure of the invention to the public. The disadvantages of trade secrets include that "others may be able to legally discover the secret and be thereafter entitled to use it", "others may obtain patent protection for legally discovered secrets", and a trade secret is more difficult to enforce than a patent.
Trade secret regulations that mask the composition of chemical agents in consumer products have been criticized for allowing the trade secret holders to hide the presence of potentially harmful and toxic substances. It has been argued that the public is being denied a clear picture of such products' safety, whereas competitors are well positioned to analyze its chemical composition. In 2004, the National Environmental Trust tested 40 common consumer products; in more than half of them they found toxic substances not listed on the product label. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29960 |
Tensor
In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a (multilinear) relationship between sets of algebraic objects related to a vector space. Objects that tensors may map between include vectors and scalars, and, recursively, even other tensors. Tensors can take several different forms – for example: scalars and vectors (which are the simplest tensors), dual vectors, multilinear maps between vector spaces, and even some operations such as the dot product. Tensors are defined independent of any basis, although they are often referred to by their components in a basis related to a particular coordinate system.
Tensors are important in physics because they provide a concise mathematical framework for formulating and solving physics problems in areas such as mechanics (stress, elasticity, fluid mechanics, moment of inertia, ...), electrodynamics (electromagnetic tensor, Maxwell tensor, permittivity, magnetic susceptibility, ...), or general relativity (stress–energy tensor, curvature tensor, ... ) and others. In applications, it is common to study situations in which a different tensor can occur at each point of an object; for example the stress within an object may vary from one location to another. This leads to the concept of a tensor field. In some areas, tensor fields are so ubiquitous that they are often simply called "tensors".
Tensors were conceived in 1900 by Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, who continued the earlier work of Bernhard Riemann and Elwin Bruno Christoffel and others, as part of the "absolute differential calculus". The concept enabled an alternative formulation of the intrinsic differential geometry of a manifold in the form of the Riemann curvature tensor.
Although seemingly different, the various approaches to defining tensors describe the same geometric concept using different language and at different levels of abstraction.
A tensor may be represented as a (potentially multidimensional) array (although a multidimensional array is not necessarily a representation of a tensor, as discussed below with regard to holors). Just as a vector in an -dimensional space is represented by a one-dimensional array with components with respect to a given basis, any tensor with respect to a basis is represented by a multidimensional array. For example, a linear operator is represented in a basis as a two-dimensional square array. The numbers in the multidimensional array are known as the "scalar components" of the tensor or simply its "components". They are denoted by indices giving their position in the array, as subscripts and superscripts, following the symbolic name of the tensor. For example, the components of an order tensor could be denoted , where and are indices running from to , or also by . Whether an index is displayed as a superscript or subscript depends on the transformation properties of the tensor, described below. Thus while and can both be expressed as "n" by "n" matrices, and are numerically related via index juggling, the difference in their transformation laws indicates it would be improper to add them together. The total number of indices required to identify each component uniquely is equal to the dimension of the array, and is called the "order", "degree" or "rank" of the tensor. However, the term "rank" generally has another meaning in the context of matrices and tensors.
Just as the components of a vector change when we change the basis of the vector space, the components of a tensor also change under such a transformation. Each type of tensor comes equipped with a "transformation law" that details how the components of the tensor respond to a change of basis. The components of a vector can respond in two distinct ways to a change of basis (see covariance and contravariance of vectors), where the new basis vectors formula_1 are expressed in terms of the old basis vectors formula_2 as,
Here "R"" j""i" are the entries of the change of basis matrix, and in the rightmost expression the summation sign was suppressed: this is the Einstein summation convention, which will be used throughout this article. The components "v""i" of a column vector v transform with the inverse of the matrix "R",
where the hat denotes the components in the new basis. This is called a "contravariant" transformation law, because the vector components transforms by the "inverse" of the change of basis. In contrast, the components, "w""i", of a covector (or row vector), w transform with the matrix "R" itself,
This is called a "covariant" transformation law, because the covector components transforms by the "same matrix" as the change of basis matrix. The components of a more general tensor transform by some combination of covariant and contravariant transformations, with one transformation law for each index. If the transformation matrix of an index is the inverse matrix of the basis transformation, then the index is called "contravariant" and is conventionally denoted with an upper index (superscript). If the transformation matrix of an index is the basis transformation itself, then the index is called "covariant" and is denoted with a lower index (subscript).
As a simple example, the matrix of a linear operator with respect to a basis is a rectangular array formula_7 that transforms under a change of basis matrix formula_8 by formula_9. For the individual matrix entries, this transformation law has the form formula_10 so the tensor corresponding to the matrix of a linear operator has one covariant and one contravariant index: it is of type (1,1).
Combinations of covariant and contravariant components with the same index allow us to express geometric invariants. For example, the fact that a vector is the same object in different coordinate systems can be captured by the following equations, using the formulas defined above:
where formula_12 is the Kronecker delta, which functions similarly to the identity matrix, and has the effect of renaming indices ("j" into "k" in this example). This shows several features of the component notation: the ability to re-arrange terms at will (commutativity), the need to use different indices when working with multiple objects in the same expression, the ability to rename indices, and the manner in which contravariant and covariant tensors combine so that all instances of the transformation matrix and its inverse cancel, so that expressions like formula_13 can immediately be seen to be geometrically identical in all coordinate systems.
Similarly, a linear operator, viewed as a geometric object, does not actually depend on a basis: it is just a linear map that accepts a vector as an argument and produces another vector. The transformation law for how the matrix of components of a linear operator changes with the basis is consistent with the transformation law for a contravariant vector, so that the action of a linear operator on a contravariant vector is represented in coordinates as the matrix product of their respective coordinate representations. That is, the components formula_14 are given by formula_15. These components transform contravariantly, since
The transformation law for an order tensor with "p" contravariant indices and "q" covariant indices is thus given as,
Here the primed indices denote components in the new coordinates, and the unprimed indices denote the components in the old coordinates. Such a tensor is said to be of order or "type" . The terms "order", "type", "rank", "valence", and "degree" are all sometimes used for the same concept. Here, the term "order" or "total order" will be used for the total dimension of the array (or its generalisation in other definitions), in the preceding example, and the term "type" for the pair giving the number of contravariant and covariant indices. A tensor of type is also called a -tensor for short.
This discussion motivates the following formal definition:
[\mathbf{f}]
to each basis of an "n"-dimensional vector space such that, if we apply the change of basis
then the multidimensional array obeys the transformation law
The definition of a tensor as a multidimensional array satisfying a transformation law traces back to the work of Ricci.
An equivalent definition of a tensor uses the representations of the general linear group. There is an action of the general linear group on the set of all ordered bases of an "n"-dimensional vector space. If formula_24 is an ordered basis, and formula_25 is an invertible formula_26 matrix, then the action is given by
Let "F" be the set of all ordered bases. Then "F" is a principal homogeneous space for GL("n"). Let "W" be a vector space and let formula_28 be a representation of GL("n") on "W" (that is, a group homomorphism formula_29). Then a tensor of type formula_28 is an equivariant map formula_31. Equivariance here means that
When formula_28 is a tensor representation of the general linear group, this gives the usual definition of tensors as multidimensional arrays. This definition is often used to describe tensors on manifolds, and readily generalizes to other groups.
A downside to the definition of a tensor using the multidimensional array approach is that it is not apparent from the definition that the defined object is indeed basis independent, as is expected from an intrinsically geometric object. Although it is possible to show that transformation laws indeed ensure independence from the basis, sometimes a more intrinsic definition is preferred. One approach that is common in differential geometry is to define tensors relative to a fixed (finite-dimensional) vector space "V", which is usually taken to be a particular vector space of some geometrical significance like the tangent space to a manifold. In this approach, a type tensor "T" is defined as a multilinear map,
where "V"∗ is the corresponding dual space of covectors, which is linear in each of its arguments. The above assumes "V" is a vector space over the real numbers, ℝ. More generally, "V" can be taken over an arbitrary field of numbers, "F" (e.g. the complex numbers) with a one-dimensional vector space over "F" replacing ℝ as the codomain of the multilinear maps.
By applying a multilinear map "T" of type to a basis {e"j"} for "V" and a canonical cobasis {ε"i"} for "V"∗,
a -dimensional array of components can be obtained. A different choice of basis will yield different components. But, because "T" is linear in all of its arguments, the components satisfy the tensor transformation law used in the multilinear array definition. The multidimensional array of components of "T" thus form a tensor according to that definition. Moreover, such an array can be realized as the components of some multilinear map "T". This motivates viewing multilinear maps as the intrinsic objects underlying tensors.
In viewing a tensor as a multilinear map, it is conventional to identify the double dual "V"∗∗ of the vector space "V", i.e., the space of linear functionals on the dual vector space "V"∗, with the vector space "V". There is always a natural linear map from "V" to its double dual, given by evaluating a linear form in "V"∗ against a vector in "V". This linear mapping is an isomorphism in finite dimensions, and it is often then expedient to identify "V" with its double dual.
For some mathematical applications, a more abstract approach is sometimes useful. This can be achieved by defining tensors in terms of elements of tensor products of vector spaces, which in turn are defined through a universal property. A type tensor is defined in this context as an element of the tensor product of vector spaces,
A basis of and basis of naturally induce a basis of the tensor product . The components of a tensor are the coefficients of the tensor with respect to the basis obtained from a basis for and its dual basis , i.e.
Using the properties of the tensor product, it can be shown that these components satisfy the transformation law for a type tensor. Moreover, the universal property of the tensor product gives a -to- correspondence between tensors defined in this way and tensors defined as multilinear maps.
Tensor products can be defined in great generality – for example, involving arbitrary modules over a ring. In principle, one could define a "tensor" simply to be an element of any tensor product. However, the mathematics literature usually reserves the term "tensor" for an element of a tensor product of any number of copies of a single vector space and its dual, as above.
This discussion of tensors so far assumes finite dimensionality of the spaces involved, where the spaces of tensors obtained by each of these constructions are naturally isomorphic. Constructions of spaces of tensors based on the tensor product and multilinear mappings can be generalized, essentially without modification, to vector bundles or coherent sheaves. For infinite-dimensional vector spaces, inequivalent topologies lead to inequivalent notions of tensor, and these various isomorphisms may or may not hold depending on what exactly is meant by a tensor (see topological tensor product). In some applications, it is the tensor product of Hilbert spaces that is intended, whose properties are the most similar to the finite-dimensional case. A more modern view is that it is the tensors' structure as a symmetric monoidal category that encodes their most important properties, rather than the specific models of those categories.
In many applications, especially in differential geometry and physics, it is natural to consider a tensor with components that are functions of the point in a space. This was the setting of Ricci's original work. In modern mathematical terminology such an object is called a tensor field, often referred to simply as a tensor.
In this context, a coordinate basis is often chosen for the tangent vector space. The transformation law may then be expressed in terms of partial derivatives of the coordinate functions,
defining a coordinate transformation,
An elementary example of a mapping describable as a tensor is the dot product, which maps two vectors to a scalar. A more complex example is the Cauchy stress tensor T, which takes a directional unit vector v as input and maps it to the stress vector T(v), which is the force (per unit area) exerted by material on the negative side of the plane orthogonal to v against the material on the positive side of the plane, thus expressing a relationship between these two vectors, shown in the figure (right). The cross product, where two vectors are mapped to a third one, is strictly speaking not a tensor because it changes its sign under those transformations that change the orientation of the coordinate system. The totally anti-symmetric symbol formula_40 nevertheless allows a convenient handling of the cross product in equally oriented three dimensional coordinate systems.
This table shows important examples of tensors on vector spaces and tensor fields on manifolds. The tensors are classified according to their type , where "n" is the number of contravariant indices, "m" is the number of covariant indices, and gives the total order of the tensor. For example, a bilinear form is the same thing as a -tensor; an inner product is an example of a -tensor, but not all -tensors are inner products. In the -entry of the table, "M" denotes the dimensionality of the underlying vector space or manifold because for each dimension of the space, a separate index is needed to select that dimension to get a maximally covariant antisymmetric tensor.
Raising an index on an -tensor produces an -tensor; this corresponds to moving diagonally down and to the left on the table. Symmetrically, lowering an index corresponds to moving diagonally up and to the right on the table. Contraction of an upper with a lower index of an -tensor produces an -tensor; this corresponds to moving diagonally up and to the left on the table.
Assuming a basis of a real vector space, e.g., a coordinate frame in the ambient space, a tensor can be represented as an organized multidimensional array of numerical values with respect to this specific basis. Changing the basis transforms the values in the array in a characteristic way that allows to "define" tensors as objects adhering to this transformational behavior. For example, there are invariants of tensors that must be preserved under any change of the basis, thereby making only certain multidimensional arrays of numbers a tensor. Compare this to the array representing formula_41 not being a tensor, for the sign change under transformations changing the orientation.
Because the components of vectors and their duals transform differently under the change of their dual bases, there is a covariant and/or contravariant transformation law that relates the arrays, which represent the tensor with respect to one basis and that with respect to the other one. The numbers of, respectively, (contravariant indices) and dual (covariant indices) in the input and output of a tensor determine the "type" (or "valence") of the tensor, a pair of natural numbers , which determine the precise form of the transformation law. The "" of a tensor is the sum of these two numbers.
The order (also "degree" or "") of a tensor is thus the sum of the orders of its arguments plus the order of the resulting tensor. This is also the dimensionality of the array of numbers needed to represent the tensor with respect to a specific basis, or equivalently, the number of indices needed to label each component in that array. For example, in a fixed basis, a standard linear map that maps a vector to a vector, is represented by a matrix (a 2-dimensional array), and therefore is a 2nd-order tensor. A simple vector can be represented as a 1-dimensional array, and is therefore a 1st-order tensor. Scalars are simple numbers and are thus 0th-order tensors. This way the tensor representing the scalar product, taking two vectors and resulting in a scalar has order , the same as the stress tensor, taking one vector and returning another . The mapping two vectors to one vector, would have order
The collection of tensors on a vector space and its dual forms a tensor algebra, which allows products of arbitrary tensors. Simple applications of tensors of order , which can be represented as a square matrix, can be solved by clever arrangement of transposed vectors and by applying the rules of matrix multiplication, but the tensor product should not be confused with this.
There are several notational systems that are used to describe tensors and perform calculations involving them.
Ricci calculus is the modern formalism and notation for tensor indices: indicating inner and outer products, covariance and contravariance, summations of tensor components, symmetry and antisymmetry, and partial and covariant derivatives.
The Einstein summation convention dispenses with writing summation signs, leaving the summation implicit. Any repeated index symbol is summed over: if the index is used twice in a given term of a tensor expression, it means that the term is to be summed for all . Several distinct pairs of indices may be summed this way.
Penrose graphical notation is a diagrammatic notation which replaces the symbols for tensors with shapes, and their indices by lines and curves. It is independent of basis elements, and requires no symbols for the indices.
The abstract index notation is a way to write tensors such that the indices are no longer thought of as numerical, but rather are indeterminates. This notation captures the expressiveness of indices and the basis-independence of index-free notation.
A component-free treatment of tensors uses notation that emphasises that tensors do not rely on any basis, and is defined in terms of the tensor product of vector spaces.
There are several operations on tensors that again produce a tensor. The linear nature of tensor implies that two tensors of the same type may be added together, and that tensors may be multiplied by a scalar with results analogous to the scaling of a vector. On components, these operations are simply performed component-wise. These operations do not change the type of the tensor; but there are also operations that produce a tensor of different type.
The tensor product takes two tensors, "S" and "T", and produces a new tensor, , whose order is the sum of the orders of the original tensors. When described as multilinear maps, the tensor product simply multiplies the two tensors, i.e.
which again produces a map that is linear in all its arguments. On components, the effect is to multiply the components of the two input tensors pairwise, i.e.
If is of type and is of type , then the tensor product has type .
Tensor contraction is an operation that reduces a type tensor to a type tensor, of which the trace is a special case. It thereby reduces the total order of a tensor by two. The operation is achieved by summing components for which one specified contravariant index is the same as one specified covariant index to produce a new component. Components for which those two indices are different are discarded. For example, a -tensor formula_44 can be contracted to a scalar through
Where the summation is again implied. When the -tensor is interpreted as a linear map, this operation is known as the trace.
The contraction is often used in conjunction with the tensor product to contract an index from each tensor.
The contraction can also be understood using the definition of a tensor as an element of a tensor product of copies of the space "V" with the space "V"∗ by first decomposing the tensor into a linear combination of simple tensors, and then applying a factor from "V"∗ to a factor from "V". For example, a tensor
can be written as a linear combination
The contraction of "T" on the first and last slots is then the vector
In a vector space with an inner product (also known as a metric) "g", the term contraction is used for removing two contravariant or two covariant indices by forming a trace with the metric tensor or its inverse. For example, a -tensor formula_49 can be contracted to a scalar through
(yet again assuming the summation convention).
When a vector space is equipped with a nondegenerate bilinear form (or "metric tensor" as it is often called in this context), operations can be defined that convert a contravariant (upper) index into a covariant (lower) index and vice versa. A metric tensor is a (symmetric) (-tensor; it is thus possible to contract an upper index of a tensor with one of the lower indices of the metric tensor in the product. This produces a new tensor with the same index structure as the previous tensor, but with lower index generally shown in the same position of the contracted upper index. This operation is quite graphically known as "lowering an index".
Conversely, the inverse operation can be defined, and is called "raising an index". This is equivalent to a similar contraction on the product with a -tensor. This "inverse metric tensor" has components that are the matrix inverse of those of the metric tensor.
Important examples are provided by continuum mechanics. The stresses inside a solid body or fluid are described by a tensor field. The stress tensor and strain tensor are both second-order tensor fields, and are related in a general linear elastic material by a fourth-order elasticity tensor field. In detail, the tensor quantifying stress in a 3-dimensional solid object has components that can be conveniently represented as a 3 × 3 array. The three faces of a cube-shaped infinitesimal volume segment of the solid are each subject to some given force. The force's vector components are also three in number. Thus, 3 × 3, or 9 components are required to describe the stress at this cube-shaped infinitesimal segment. Within the bounds of this solid is a whole mass of varying stress quantities, each requiring 9 quantities to describe. Thus, a second-order tensor is needed.
If a particular surface element inside the material is singled out, the material on one side of the surface will apply a force on the other side. In general, this force will not be orthogonal to the surface, but it will depend on the orientation of the surface in a linear manner. This is described by a tensor of type, in linear elasticity, or more precisely by a tensor field of type , since the stresses may vary from point to point.
Common applications include:
The concept of a tensor of order two is often conflated with that of a matrix. Tensors of higher order do however capture ideas important in science and engineering, as has been shown successively in numerous areas as they develop. This happens, for instance, in the field of computer vision, with the trifocal tensor generalizing the fundamental matrix.
The field of nonlinear optics studies the changes to material polarization density under extreme electric fields. The polarization waves generated are related to the generating electric fields through the nonlinear susceptibility tensor. If the polarization P is not linearly proportional to the electric field E, the medium is termed "nonlinear". To a good approximation (for sufficiently weak fields, assuming no permanent dipole moments are present), P is given by a Taylor series in E whose coefficients are the nonlinear susceptibilities:
Here formula_52 is the linear susceptibility, formula_53 gives the Pockels effect and second harmonic generation, and formula_54 gives the Kerr effect. This expansion shows the way higher-order tensors arise naturally in the subject matter.
The vector spaces of a tensor product need not be the same, and sometimes the elements of such a more general tensor product are called "tensors". For example, an element of the tensor product space is a second-order "tensor" in this more general sense, and an order- tensor may likewise be defined as an element of a tensor product of different vector spaces. A type tensor, in the sense defined previously, is also a tensor of order in this more general sense. The concept of tensor product can be extended to arbitrary modules over a ring.
The notion of a tensor can be generalized in a variety of ways to infinite dimensions. One, for instance, is via the tensor product of Hilbert spaces. Another way of generalizing the idea of tensor, common in nonlinear analysis, is via the multilinear maps definition where instead of using finite-dimensional vector spaces and their algebraic duals, one uses infinite-dimensional Banach spaces and their continuous dual. Tensors thus live naturally on Banach manifolds and Fréchet manifolds.
Suppose that a homogeneous medium fills , so that the density of the medium is described by a single scalar value in . The mass, in kg, of a region is obtained by multiplying by the volume of the region , or equivalently integrating the constant over the region:
where the Cartesian coordinates are measured in m. If the units of length are changed into cm, then the numerical values of the coordinate functions must be rescaled by a factor of 100:
The numerical value of the density must then also transform by formula_57 to compensate, so that the numerical value of the mass in kg is still given by integral of formula_58. Thus formula_59 (in units of ).
More generally, if the Cartesian coordinates undergo a linear transformation, then the numerical value of the density must change by a factor of the reciprocal of the absolute value of the determinant of the coordinate transformation, so that the integral remains invariant, by the change of variables formula for integration. Such a quantity that scales by the reciprocal of the absolute value of the determinant of the coordinate transition map is called a scalar density. To model a non-constant density, is a function of the variables (a scalar field), and under a curvilinear change of coordinates, it transforms by the reciprocal of the Jacobian of the coordinate change. For more on the intrinsic meaning, see Density on a manifold.
A tensor density transforms like a tensor under a coordinate change, except that it in addition picks up a factor of the absolute value of the determinant of the coordinate transition:
Here "w" is called the weight. In general, any tensor multiplied by a power of this function or its absolute value is called a tensor density, or a weighted tensor. An example of a tensor density is the current density of electromagnetism.
Under an affine transformation of the coordinates, a tensor transforms by the linear part of the transformation itself (or its inverse) on each index. These come from the rational representations of the general linear group. But this is not quite the most general linear transformation law that such an object may have: tensor densities are non-rational, but are still semisimple representations. A further class of transformations come from the logarithmic representation of the general linear group, a reducible but not semisimple representation, consisting of an with the transformation law
The transformation law for a tensor behaves as a functor on the category of admissible coordinate systems, under general linear transformations (or, other transformations within some class, such as local diffeomorphisms.) This makes a tensor a special case of a geometrical object, in the technical sense that it is a function of the coordinate system transforming functorially under coordinate changes. Examples of objects obeying more general kinds of transformation laws are jets and, more generally still, natural bundles.
When changing from one orthonormal basis (called a "frame") to another by a rotation, the components of a tensor transform by that same rotation. This transformation does not depend on the path taken through the space of frames. However, the space of frames is not simply connected (see orientation entanglement and plate trick): there are continuous paths in the space of frames with the same beginning and ending configurations that are not deformable one into the other. It is possible to attach an additional discrete invariant to each frame that incorporates this path dependence, and which turns out (locally) to have values of ±1. A spinor is an object that transforms like a tensor under rotations in the frame, apart from a possible sign that is determined by the value of this discrete invariant.
Succinctly, spinors are elements of the spin representation of the rotation group, while tensors are elements of its tensor representations. Other classical groups have tensor representations, and so also tensors that are compatible with the group, but all non-compact classical groups have infinite-dimensional unitary representations as well.
The concepts of later tensor analysis arose from the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss in differential geometry, and the formulation was much influenced by the theory of algebraic forms and invariants developed during the middle of the nineteenth century. The word "tensor" itself was introduced in 1846 by William Rowan Hamilton to describe something different from what is now meant by a tensor. The contemporary usage was introduced by Woldemar Voigt in 1898.
Tensor calculus was developed around 1890 by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro under the title "absolute differential calculus", and originally presented by Ricci-Curbastro in 1892. It was made accessible to many mathematicians by the publication of Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita's 1900 classic text "Méthodes de calcul différentiel absolu et leurs applications" (Methods of absolute differential calculus and their applications).
In the 20th century, the subject came to be known as "tensor analysis", and achieved broader acceptance with the introduction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, around 1915. General relativity is formulated completely in the language of tensors. Einstein had learned about them, with great difficulty, from the geometer Marcel Grossmann. Levi-Civita then initiated a correspondence with Einstein to correct mistakes Einstein had made in his use of tensor analysis. The correspondence lasted 1915–17, and was characterized by mutual respect:
Tensors were also found to be useful in other fields such as continuum mechanics. Some well-known examples of tensors in differential geometry are quadratic forms such as metric tensors, and the Riemann curvature tensor. The exterior algebra of Hermann Grassmann, from the middle of the nineteenth century, is itself a tensor theory, and highly geometric, but it was some time before it was seen, with the theory of differential forms, as naturally unified with tensor calculus. The work of Élie Cartan made differential forms one of the basic kinds of tensors used in mathematics.
From about the 1920s onwards, it was realised that tensors play a basic role in algebraic topology (for example in the Künneth theorem). Correspondingly there are types of tensors at work in many branches of abstract algebra, particularly in homological algebra and representation theory. Multilinear algebra can be developed in greater generality than for scalars coming from a field. For example, scalars can come from a ring. But the theory is then less geometric and computations more technical and less algorithmic. Tensors are generalized within category theory by means of the concept of monoidal category, from the 1960s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29965 |
Springbok
The springbok ("Antidorcas marsupialis") is a medium-sized antelope found mainly in southern and southwestern Africa. The sole member of the genus "Antidorcas", this bovid was first described by the German zoologist Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann in 1780. Three subspecies are identified. A slender, long-legged antelope, the springbok reaches at the shoulder and weighs between . Both sexes have a pair of black, long horns that curve backwards. The springbok is characterised by a white face, a dark stripe running from the eyes to the mouth, a light-brown coat marked by a reddish-brown stripe that runs from the upper fore leg to the buttocks across the flanks like the Thomson's gazelle, and a white rump flap.
Active mainly at dawn and dusk, springbok form harems (mixed-sex herds). In earlier times, springbok of the Kalahari desert and Karoo migrated in large numbers across the countryside, a practice known as "trekbokking". A feature, peculiar but not unique, to the springbok is pronking, in which the springbok performs multiple leaps into the air, up to above the ground, in a stiff-legged posture, with the back bowed and the white flap lifted. Primarily a browser, the springbok feeds on shrubs and succulents; this antelope can live without drinking water for years, meeting its requirements through eating succulent vegetation. Breeding takes place year-round, and peaks in the rainy season, when forage is most abundant. A single calf is born after a five- to six-month-long pregnancy; weaning occurs at nearly six months of age, and the calf leaves its mother a few months later.
Springbok inhabit the dry areas of south and southwestern Africa. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources classifies the springbok as a least concern species. No major threats to the long-term survival of the species are known; the springbok, in fact, is one of the few antelope species considered to have an expanding population. They are popular game animals, and are valued for their meat and skin. The springbok is the national animal of South Africa.
The common name "springbok" comes from the Afrikaans words "spring" ("jump") and "bok" ("antelope" or "goat"); the first recorded use of the name dates to 1775. The scientific name of the springbok is "Antidorcas marsupialis"; "anti" is Greek for "opposite", and "dorcas" for "gazelle" – identifying that the animal is not a gazelle. The specific epithet "marsupialis" comes from the Latin "marsupium" ("pocket"); it refers to a pocket-like skin flap which extends along the midline of the back from the tail. In fact, this physical feature distinguishes the springbok from true gazelles.
The springbok is the sole member of the genus "Antidorcas" and is placed in the family Bovidae. It was first described by the German zoologist Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann in 1780. Zimmermann assigned the genus "Antilope" (blackbuck) to the springbok. In 1845, Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall placed the springbok in "Antidorcas", a genus of its own.
In 2013, Eva Verena Bärmann (of the University of Cambridge) and colleagues undertook a revision of the phylogeny of the tribe Antilopini on the basis of nuclear and mitochondrial data. They showed that the springbok and the gerenuk ("Litocranius walleri") form a clade with saiga ("Saiga tatarica") as sister taxon. The study pointed out that the saiga and the springbok could be considerably different from the rest of the antilopines; a 2007 phylogenetic study even suggested that the two form a clade sister to the gerenuk. The cladogram below is based on the 2013 study.
Fossil springbok are known from the Pliocene; the antelope appears to have evolved about three million years ago from a gazelle-like ancestor. Three fossil species of "Antidorcas" have been identified, in addition to the extant form, and appear to have been widespread across Africa. Two of these, "A. bondi" and "A. australis", became extinct around 7,000 years ago (early Holocene). The third species, "A. recki", probably gave rise to the extant form "A. marsupialis" during the Pleistocene, about 100,000 years ago. Fossils have been reported from Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene sites in northern, southern, and eastern Africa. Fossils dating back to 80 and 100 thousand years ago have been excavated at Herolds Bay Cave (Western Cape Province, South Africa) and Florisbad (Free State), respectively.
Three subspecies are recognised:
The springbok is a slender antelope with long legs and neck. Both sexes reach at the shoulder with a head-and-body length typically between . The weights for both sexes range between . The tail, long, ends in a short, black tuft. Major differences in the size and weight of the subspecies are seen. A study tabulated average body measurements for the three subspecies. "A. m. angolensis" males stand tall at the shoulder, while females are tall. The males weigh around , while the females weigh . "A. m. hofmeyri" is the largest subspecies; males are nearly tall, and the notably shorter females are tall. The males, weighing , are heavier than females, that weigh . However, "A. m. marsupialis" is the smallest subspecies; males are tall and females tall. Average weight of males is , while for females it is . Another study showed a strong correlation between the availability of winter dietary protein and the body mass.
Dark stripes extend across the white face, from the corner of the eyes to the mouth. A dark patch marks the forehead. In juveniles, the stripes and the patch are light brown. The ears, narrow and pointed, measure . Typically light brown, the springbok has a dark reddish-brown band running horizontally from the upper foreleg to the edge of the buttocks, separating the dark back from the white underbelly. The tail (except the terminal black tuft), buttocks, the insides of the legs and the rump are all white. Two other varieties – pure black and pure white forms – are artificially selected in some South African ranches. Though born with a deep black sheen, adult black springbok are two shades of chocolate-brown and develop a white marking on the face as they mature. White springbok, as the name suggests, are predominantly white with a light tan stripe on the flanks.
The three subspecies also differ in their colour. "A. m. angolensis" has a brown to tawny coat, with thick, dark brown stripes on the face extending two-thirds down to the snout. While the lateral stripe is nearly black, the stripe on the rump is dark brown. The medium brown forehead patch extends to eye level and is separated from the bright white face by a dark brown border. A brown spot is seen on the nose. "A. m. hofmeyri" is a light fawn, with thin, dark brown face stripes. The stripes on the flanks are dark brown to black, and the posterior stripes are moderately brown. The forehead patch, dark brown or fawn, extends beyond the level of the eyes and mixes with the white of the face without any clear barriers. The nose may have a pale smudge. "A. m. marsupialis" is a rich chestnut brown, with thin, light face stripes. The stripe near the rump is well-marked, and that on the flanks is deep brown. The forehead is brown, fawn, or white, the patch not extending beyond the eyes and having no sharp boundaries. The nose is white or marked with brown.
The skin along the middle of the dorsal side is folded in, and covered with white hair erected by arrector pili muscles (located between hair follicles). This white hair is almost fully concealed by the surrounding brown hairs until the fold opens up, and this is a major feature distinguishing this antelope from gazelles. Springbok differ from gazelles in several other ways; for instance, springbok have two premolars on both sides of either jaw, rather than the three observed in gazelles. This gives a total of 28 teeth in the springbok, rather than 32 of gazelles. Other points of difference include a longer, broader, and rigid bridge to the nose and more muscular cheeks in springbok, and differences in the structure of the horns.
Both sexes have black horns, about long, that are straight at the base and then curve backward. In "A. m. marsupialis", females have thinner horns than males; the horns of females are only 60 to 70% as long as those of males. Horns have a girth of at the base; this thins to towards the tip. In the other two subspecies, horns of both sexes are nearly similar. The spoor, narrow and sharp, is long.
Springbok are mainly active around dawn and dusk. Activity is influenced by weather; springbok can feed at night in hot weather, and at midday in colder months. They rest in the shade of trees or bushes, and often bed down in the open when weather is cooler. The social structure of the springbok is similar to that of Thomson's gazelle. Mixed-sex herds or harems have a roughly 3:1 sex ratio; bachelor individuals are also observed. In the mating season, males generally form herds and wander in search of mates. Females live with their offspring in herds, that very rarely include dominant males. Territorial males round up female herds that enter their territories and keep out the bachelors; mothers and juveniles may gather in nursery herds separate from harem and bachelor herds. After weaning, female juveniles stay with their mothers until the birth of their next calves, while males join bachelor groups.
A study of vigilance behaviour of herds revealed that individuals on the borders of herds tend to be more cautious; vigilance decreases with group size. Group size and distance from roads and bushes were found to have major influence on vigilance, more among the grazing springbok than among their browsing counterparts. Adults were found to be more vigilant than juveniles, and males more vigilant than females. Springbok passing through bushes tend to be more vulnerable to predator attacks as they can not be easily alerted, and predators usually conceal themselves in bushes. Another study calculated that the time spent in vigilance by springbok on the edges of herds is roughly double that spent by those in the centre and the open. Springbok were found to be more cautious in the late morning than at dawn or in the afternoon, and more at night than in the daytime. Rates and methods of vigilance were found to vary with the aim of lowering risk from predators.
During the rut, males establish territories, ranging from , which they mark by urinating and depositing large piles of dung. Males in neighbouring territories frequently fight for access to females, which they do by twisting and levering at each other with their horns, interspersed with stabbing attacks. Females roam the territories of different males. Outside of the rut, mixed-sex herds can range from as few as three to as many as 180 individuals, while all-male bachelor herds are of typically no more than 50 individuals. Harem and nursery herds are much smaller, typically including no more than 10 individuals.
In earlier times, when large populations of springbok roamed the Kalahari desert and Karoo, millions of migrating springbok formed herds hundreds of kilometres long that could take several days to pass a town. These mass treks, known as "trekbokking" in Afrikaans, took place during long periods of drought. Herds could efficiently retrace their paths to their territories after long migrations. "Trekbokking" is still observed occasionally in Botswana, though on a much smaller scale than earlier.
Springbok often go into bouts of repeated high leaps of up to into the air – a practice known as pronking (derived from the Afrikaans "pronk", "to show off") or stotting. In pronking, the springbok performs multiple leaps into the air in a stiff-legged posture, with the back bowed and the white flap lifted. When the male shows off his strength to attract a mate, or to ward off predators, he starts off in a stiff-legged trot, leaping into the air with an arched back every few paces and lifting the flap along his back. Lifting the flap causes the long white hairs under the tail to stand up in a conspicuous fan shape, which in turn emits a strong scent of sweat. Although the exact cause of this behaviour is unknown, springbok exhibit this activity when they are nervous or otherwise excited. The most accepted theory for pronking is that it is a method to raise alarm against a potential predator or confuse it, or to get a better view of a concealed predator; it may also be used for display. Springbok are very fast antelopes, clocked at . They generally tend to be ignored by carnivores unless they are breeding. Caracals, cheetahs, leopards, spotted hyenas, lions and wild dogs are major predators of the springbok. Southern African wildcats, black-backed jackals, black eagles, martial eagles, and tawny eagles target juveniles. Springbok are generally quiet animals, though they may make occasional low-pitched bellows as a greeting and high-pitched snorts when alarmed.
A 2012 study on the effects of rainfall patterns and parasite infections on the body of the springbok in Etosha National Park observed that males and juveniles were in better health toward the end of the rainy season. Health of females was more affected by parasites than by rainfall; parasite count in females peaked prior to and immediately after parturition. Studies show that springbok host helminths ("Haemonchus", "Longistrongylus" and "Trichostrongylus"), ixodid ticks ("Rhipicephalus" species), lice ("Damalinia" and "Linognathus" species). "Eimeria" species mainly affect juveniles.
Springbok are primarily browsers and may switch to grazing occasionally; they feed on shrubs and young succulents (such as "Lampranthus" species) before they lignify. They prefer grasses such as "Themeda triandra". Springbok can meet their water needs from the food they eat, and are able to survive without drinking water through dry season. In extreme cases, they do not drink any water over the course of their lives. Springbok may accomplish this by selecting flowers, seeds, and leaves of shrubs before dawn, when the food items are most succulent. In places such as Etosha National Park, springbok seek out water bodies where they are available. Springbok gather in the wet season and disperse during the dry season, unlike other African mammals.
Springbok mate year-round, though females are more likely to enter oestrus during the rainy season, when food is more plentiful. Females are able to conceive at as early as six to seven months, whereas males do not attain sexual maturity until two years; rut lasts 5 to 21 days. When a female approaches a rutting male, the male holds his head and tail at level with the ground, lowers his horns, and makes a loud grunting noise to attract her. The male then urinates and sniffs the female's perineum. If the female is receptive, she urinates, as well, and the male makes a flehmen gesture, and taps his leg till the female leaves or permits him to mate. Copulation consists of a single pelvic thrust.
Gestation lasts five to six months, after which a single calf (or rarely twins) is born. Most births take place in the spring (October to November), prior to the onset of the rainy season. The infant weighs ; the female keeps her calf hidden in cover while she is away. Mother and calf rejoin the herd about three to four weeks after parturition; the young are weaned at five or six months. When the mother gives birth again, the previous offspring, now 6 to 12 months old, deserts her to join herds of adult springbok. Thus, a female can calve twice a year, and even thrice if one calf dies. Springbok live for up to 10 years in the wild.
Springbok inhabit the dry areas of south and southwestern Africa. Their range extends from northwestern South Africa through the Kalahari desert into Namibia and Botswana. The Transvaal marks the eastern limit of the range, from where it extends westward to the Atlantic and northward to southern Angola and Botswana. In Botswana, they mostly occur in the Kalahari desert in the southwestern and central parts of the country. They are widespread across Namibia and the vast grasslands of the Free State and the shrublands of Karoo in South Africa; however, they are confined to the Namib Desert in Angola.
The historic range of the springbok stretched across the dry grasslands, bushlands, and shrublands of south-western and southern Africa; springbok migrated sporadically in southern parts of the range. These migrations are rarely seen nowadays, but seasonal congregations can still be observed in preferred areas of short vegetation, such as the Kalahari desert.
The springbok has been classified as least concern by the IUCN. No major threats to the long-term survival of the species are known. In fact, the springbok is one of the few antelope species with a positive population trend.
Springbok occur in several protected areas across their range: Makgadikgadi and Nxai National Park (Botswana); Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park between Botswana and South Africa; Etosha National Park and Namib-Naukluft Park (Namibia); Mokala and Karoo National Parks and a number of provincial reserves in South Africa. In 1999, Rod East of the IUCN SSC Antelope Specialist Group estimated the springbok population in South Africa at more than 670,000, noting that it might be an underestimate. However, estimates for Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Transvaal, Karoo, and the Free State (which gave a total population estimate of nearly 2,000,000 – 2,500,000 animals in southern Africa), were in complete disagreement with East's estimate. Springbok are under active management in several private lands. Small populations have been introduced into private lands and provincial areas of KwaZulu-Natal.
Springbok are hunted as game throughout Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa because of their attractive coats; they are common hunting targets due to their large numbers and the ease with which they can be supported on farmlands. The export of springbok skins, mainly from Namibia and South Africa, is a booming industry; these skins serve as taxidermy models. The meat is a prized fare, and is readily available in South African supermarkets. As of 2011, the springbok, the gemsbok, and the greater kudu collectively account for around two-thirds of the game meat production from Namibian farmlands; nearly of the springbok meat is exported as mechanically deboned meat to overseas markets.
The latissimus dorsi muscle of the springbok comprises 1.1–1.3% ash, 1.3–3.5% fat, 72–75% moisture and 18–22% protein. Stearic acid is the main fatty acid, accounting for 24–27% of the fatty acids. The cholesterol content varies from per of meat. The pH of the meat increases if the springbok is under stress or cropping is done improperly; consequently, the quality deteriorates and the colour darkens. The meat might be adversely affected if the animal is killed by shooting. The meat may be consumed raw or used in prepared dishes. Biltong can be prepared by preserving the raw meat with vinegar, spices, and table salt, without fermentation, followed by drying. Springbok meat may also be used in preparing salami; a study found that the flavour of this salami is better than mutton salami, and feels oilier than salami of beef, horse meat, or mutton.
The springbok has been a national symbol of South Africa since the white minority rule in the 20th century. It was adopted as a nickname or mascot by several South African sports teams, most famously by the national rugby union team. The springbok is the national animal of South Africa. Even after the decline of apartheid, Nelson Mandela intervened to keep the name of the animal for the reconciliation of rugby fans, the majority of whom were whites. The springbok is featured on the reverse of the South African Krugerrand coin.
The cap badge of The Royal Canadian Dragoons has featured a springbok since 1913, a reference to the unit's involvement in the Second Boer War. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28580 |
Song of Songs
The Song of Songs, also Song of Solomon or Canticles (Hebrew: "Šîr Hašîrîm", Greek and ; ), is one of the "megillot" (scrolls) found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim (or "Writings"), and a book of the Old Testament.
The Song of Songs is unique within the Hebrew Bible: it shows no interest in Law or Covenant or the God of Israel, nor does it teach or explore wisdom like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes (although it does have some affinities to wisdom literature, as the ascription to Solomon indicates); instead, it celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy". The two are in harmony, each desiring the other and rejoicing in sexual intimacy; the women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader.
In modern Judaism the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, Christianity as an allegory of Christ and his "bride", the Church.
There is widespread consensus that, although the book has no plot, it does have what can be called a framework, as indicated by the links between its beginning and end. Beyond this, however, there appears to be little agreement: attempts to find a chiastic structure have not been compelling, and attempts to analyse it into units have used differing methods and arrived at differing results. The following schema, from Kugler & al. must therefore be taken as indicative, rather than determinative:
The introduction calls the poem "the song of songs", a construction commonly used in Scriptural Hebrew to show something as the greatest and most beautiful of its class (as in Holy of Holies). The poem proper begins with the woman's expression of desire for her lover and her self-description to the "daughters of Jerusalem": she insists on her sun-born blackness, likening it to the "tents of Kedar" (nomads) and the "curtains of Solomon". A dialogue between the lovers follows: the woman asks the man to meet; he replies with a lightly teasing tone. The two compete in offering flattering compliments ("my beloved is to me as a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En Gedi", "an apple tree among the trees of the wood", "a lily among brambles", while the bed they share is like a forest canopy). The section closes with the woman telling the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love such as hers until it is ready.
The woman recalls a visit from her lover in the springtime. She uses imagery from a shepherd's life, and she says of her lover that "he pastures his flock among the lilies".
The woman again addresses the daughters of Jerusalem, describing her fervent and ultimately successful search for her lover through the night-time streets of the city. When she finds him she takes him almost by force into the chamber in which her mother conceived her. She reveals that this is a dream, seen on her "bed at night" and ends by again warning the daughters of Jerusalem "not to stir up love until it is ready".
The next section reports a royal wedding procession. Solomon is mentioned by name, and the daughters of Jerusalem are invited to come out and see the spectacle.
The man describes his beloved: Her hair is like a flock of goats, her teeth like shorn ewes, and so on from face to breasts. Place-names feature heavily: her neck is like the Tower of David, her smell like the scent of Lebanon. He hastens to summon his beloved, saying that he is ravished by even a single glance. The section becomes a "garden poem", in which he describes her as a "locked garden" (usually taken to mean that she is chaste). The woman invites the man to enter the garden and taste the fruits. The man accepts the invitation, and a third party tells them to eat, drink, "and be drunk with love".
The woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem of another dream. She was in her chamber when her lover knocked. She was slow to open, and when she did, he was gone. She searched through the streets again, but this time she failed to find him and the watchmen, who had helped her before, now beat her. She asks the daughters of Jerusalem to help her find him, and describes his physical good looks. Eventually, she admits her lover is in his garden, safe from harm, and committed to her as she is to him.
The man describes his beloved; the woman describes a rendezvous they have shared. (The last part is unclear and possibly corrupted.)
The people praise the beauty of the woman. The images are the same as those used elsewhere in the poem, but with an unusually dense use of place-names, e.g., pools of Hebron, gate of Bath-rabbim, tower of Damascus, etc. The man states his intention to enjoy the fruits of the woman's garden. The woman invites him to a tryst in the fields. She once more warns the daughters of Jerusalem against waking love until it is ready.
The woman compares love to death and sheol: love is as relentless and jealous as these two, and cannot be quenched by any force. She summons her lover, using the language used before: he should come "like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountain of spices".
The Song offers no clue to its author or to the date, place, or circumstances of its composition. The superscription states that it is "Solomon's", but even if this is meant to identify the author, it cannot be read as strictly as a similar modern statement. The most reliable evidence for its date is its language: Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew after the end of the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BCE, and the evidence of vocabulary, morphology, idiom and syntax clearly points to a late date, centuries after King Solomon to whom it is traditionally attributed. It has parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry from the first half of the 1st millennium, and with the pastoral idylls of Theocritus, a Greek poet who wrote in the first half of the 3rd century BCE; as a result of these conflicting signs, speculation ranges from the 10th to the 2nd centuries BCE, with the language supporting a date around the 3rd century.
Debate continues on the unity or disunity of the Song. Those who see it as an anthology or collection point to the abrupt shifts of scene, speaker, subject matter and mood, and the lack of obvious structure or narrative. Those who hold it to be a single poem point out that it has no internal signs of composite origins, and view the repetitions and similarities among its parts as evidence of unity. Some claim to find a conscious artistic design underlying it, but there is no agreement among them on what this might be. The question therefore remains unresolved.
The setting in which the poem arose is also debated. The poem seems to be rooted in some kind of festive performance. A minority of academics posit a ritual origin in the celebration of the sacred marriage of the god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar. A popular theory of the 19th century suggests that the Song was originally recited as a drama by different singers representing the different characters, however recent scholarship has abandoned this theory.
The Song was accepted into the Jewish canon of scripture in the 2nd century CE, after a period of controversy in the 1st century. It was accepted as canonical because of its supposed authorship by Solomon and based on an allegorical reading where the subject-matter was taken to be not sexual desire but God's love for Israel. For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade the use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, "He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come". However, Rabbi Akiva famously defended the canonicity of the Song of Songs, reportedly saying when the question came up of whether it should be considered a defiling work, "God forbid! [...] For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies."
It is one of the overtly mystical Biblical texts for the Kabbalah, which gave esoteric interpretation on all the Hebrew Bible. Following the dissemination of the Zohar in the 13th century, Jewish mysticism took on a metaphorically anthropomorphic erotic element, and Song of Songs is an example of this. In Zoharic Kabbalah, God is represented by a system of ten sephirot emanations, each symbolizing a different attribute of God, comprising both male and female. The Shechina (indwelling Divine presence) was identified with the feminine sephira Malchut, the vessel of Kingship. This symbolizes the Jewish people, and in the body, the female form, identified with the woman in Song of Songs. Her beloved was identified with the male sephira Tiferet, the "Holy One Blessed be He", central principle in the beneficent Heavenly flow of Divine emotion. In the body, this represents the male torso, uniting through the sephira Yesod of the male sign of the covenant organ of procreation.
Through beneficent deeds and Jewish observance, the Jewish people restore cosmic harmony in the Divine realm, healing the exile of the Shechina with God's transcendence, revealing the essential Unity of God. This elevation of the World is aroused from Above on the Sabbath, a foretaste of the redeemed purpose of Creation. The text thus became a description, depending on the aspect, of the creation of the world, the passage of "Shabbat", the covenant with Israel, and the coming of the Messianic age. "Lecha Dodi", a 16th-century liturgical song with strong Kabbalistic symbolism, contains many passages, including its opening two words, taken directly from Song of Songs.
In modern Judaism, certain verses from the Song are read on "Shabbat" eve or at Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, to symbolize the love between the Jewish People and their God. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel.
The literal subject of the Song of Songs is love and sexual longing between a man and a woman, and it has little (or nothing) to say about the relationship of God and man; in order to find such a meaning it was necessary to resort to allegory, treating the love that the Song celebrates as an analogy for the love between God and Church. The Christian church's interpretation of the Song as evidence of God's love for his people, both collectively and individually, began with Origen. Over the centuries the emphases of interpretation shifted, first reading the Song as a depiction of the love between Christ and Church, the 11th century adding a moral element, and the 12th century understanding of the Bride as the Virgin Mary, with each new reading absorbing rather than simply replacing earlier ones, so that the commentary became ever more complex. These theological themes are not in the poem, but derive from a theological reading; nevertheless, what is notable about this approach is the way it leads to conclusions not found in the overtly theological books of the Bible. Those books reveal an abiding imbalance in the relationship between God and man, ranging from slight to enormous; but reading Songs as a theological metaphor produces quite a different outcome, one in which the two partners are equals, bound in a committed relationship.
In modern times the poem has attracted the attention of feminist biblical critics, with Phyllis Trible's foundational "Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation" treating it as an exemplary text and the Feminist Companion to the Bible series edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine devoting to it two volumes (1993, 2000).
Excerpts from the book have inspired composers to vocal and instrumental compositions, including: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28582 |
Sheridan Le Fanu
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (; 28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are "Uncle Silas", "Carmilla", and "The House by the Churchyard".
Sheridan Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot, Irish and English descent. He had an elder sister, Catherine Frances, and a younger brother, William Richard. His parents were Thomas Philip Le Fanu and Emma Lucretia Dobbin.
Both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights (his niece Rhoda Broughton would become a successful novelist), and his mother was also a writer, producing a biography of Charles Orpen. Within a year of his birth his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, where his father, a Church of Ireland clergyman, was appointed to the chaplaincy of the establishment. The Phoenix Park and the adjacent village and parish church of Chapelizod would appear in Le Fanu's later stories.
In 1826 the family moved to Abington, County Limerick, where Le Fanu's father Thomas took up his second rectorship in Ireland. Although he had a tutor, who, according to his brother William, taught them nothing and was finally dismissed in disgrace, Le Fanu used his father's library to educate himself. By the age of fifteen, Joseph was writing poetry which he shared with his mother and siblings but never with his father. His father was a stern Protestant churchman and raised his family in an almost Calvinist tradition.
In 1832 the disorders of the Tithe War (1831–36) affected the region. There were about six thousand Catholics in the parish of Abington and only a few dozen members of the Church of Ireland. (In bad weather the Dean cancelled Sunday services because so few parishioners would attend.) However, the government compelled all farmers, including Catholics, to pay tithes for the upkeep of the Protestant church. The following year the family moved back temporarily to Dublin, to Williamstown Avenue in a southern suburb, where Thomas was to work on a Government commission.
Although Thomas Le Fanu tried to live as though he were well-off, the family was in constant financial difficulty. Thomas took the rectorships in the south of Ireland for the money, as they provided a decent living through tithes. However, from 1830, as the result of agitation against the tithes, this income began to fall, and it ceased entirely two years later. In 1838 the government instituted a scheme of paying rectors a fixed sum, but in the interim the Dean had little besides rent on some small properties he had inherited. In 1833 Thomas had to borrow £100 from his cousin Captain Dobbins (who himself ended up in the debtors' prison a few years later) to visit his dying sister in Bath, who was also deeply in debt over her medical bills. At his death Thomas had almost nothing to leave to his sons, and the family had to sell his library to pay off some of his debts. His widow went to stay with the younger son, William.
Sheridan Le Fanu studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, where he was elected Auditor of the College Historical Society. Under a system peculiar to Ireland he did not have to live in Dublin to attend lectures, but could study at home and take examinations at the university when necessary. He was called to the bar in 1839, but he never practised and soon abandoned law for journalism. In 1838 he began contributing stories to the "Dublin University Magazine", including his first ghost story, entitled "The Ghost and the Bone-Setter" (1838). He became owner of several newspapers from 1840, including the "Dublin Evening Mail" and the "Warder".
On 18 December 1844 Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett, the daughter of a leading Dublin barrister. Future Home Rule League MP Isaac Butt was a witness. The couple then travelled to his parents' home in Abington for Christmas. They took a house in Warrington Place near the Grand Canal in Dublin. Their first child, Eleanor, was born in 1845, followed by Emma in 1846, Thomas in 1847 and George in 1854.
In 1847 Le Fanu supported John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in their campaign against the indifference of the government to the Irish Famine. Others involved in the campaign included Samuel Ferguson and Isaac Butt. Butt wrote a forty-page analysis of the national disaster for the "Dublin University Magazine" in 1847. His support cost him the nomination as Tory MP for County Carlow in 1852.
In 1856 the family moved from Warrington Place to the house of Susanna's parents at 18 Merrion Square (later number 70, the office of the Irish Arts Council). Her parents retired to live in England. Le Fanu never owned the house, but rented it from his brother-in-law for £22 per annum (which he still failed to pay in full).
His personal life also became difficult at this time, as his wife suffered from increasing neurotic symptoms. She had a crisis of faith and attended religious services at the nearby St. Stephen's Church. She also discussed religion with William, Le Fanu's younger brother, as Le Fanu had apparently stopped attending services. She suffered from anxiety after the deaths of several close relatives, including her father two years before, which may have led to marital problems.
In April 1858 she suffered an "hysterical attack" and died the following day in unclear circumstances. She was buried in the Bennett family vault in Mount Jerome Cemetery beside her father and brothers. The anguish of Le Fanu's diaries suggests that he felt guilt as well as loss. From then on he did not write any fiction until the death of his mother in 1861. He turned to his cousin Lady Gifford for advice and encouragement, and she remained a close correspondent until her death at the end of the decade.
In 1861 he became the editor and proprietor of the "Dublin University Magazine", and he began to take advantage of double publication, first serialising in the "Dublin University Magazine", then revising for the English market. He published both "The House by the Churchyard" and "Wylder's Hand" in this way. After lukewarm reviews of the former novel, set in the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, Le Fanu signed a contract with Richard Bentley, his London publisher, which specified that future novels be stories "of an English subject and of modern times", a step Bentley thought necessary for Le Fanu to satisfy the English audience. Le Fanu succeeded in this aim in 1864, with the publication of "Uncle Silas", which he set in Derbyshire. In his very last short stories, however, Le Fanu returned to Irish folklore as an inspiration and encouraged his friend Patrick Kennedy to contribute folklore to the "D.U.M."
Le Fanu died of a heart attack in his native Dublin on 7 February 1873, at the age of 58. According to Russell Kirk, in his essay "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale" in "The Surly Sullen Bell", Le Fanu "is believed to have literally died of fright"; but Kirk does not give the circumstances. Today there is a road and a park in Ballyfermot, near his childhood home in south-west Dublin, named after him.
Le Fanu worked in many genres but remains best known for his horror fiction. He was a meticulous craftsman and frequently reworked plots and ideas from his earlier writing in subsequent pieces. Many of his novels, for example, are expansions and refinements of earlier short stories. He specialised in tone and effect rather than "shock horror" and liked to leave important details unexplained and mysterious. He avoided overt supernatural effects: in most of his major works, the supernatural is strongly implied but a "natural" explanation is also possible. The demonic monkey in "Green Tea" could be a delusion of the story's protagonist, who is the only person to see it; in "The Familiar", Captain Barton's death seems to be supernatural, but is not actually witnessed, and the ghostly owl may be a real bird. This technique influenced later horror artists, both in print and on film (see, for example, the film producer Val Lewton's principle of "indirect horror"). Though other writers have since chosen less subtle techniques, Le Fanu's finest tales, such as the vampire novella "Carmilla" and the short story "Schalken the Painter", remain some of the most powerful in the genre. He had enormous influence on one of the 20th century's most important ghost story writers, M. R. James, and although his work fell out of favour in the early part of the 20th century, towards the end of the century interest in his work increased and remains comparatively strong.
His earliest twelve short stories, written between 1838 and 1840, purport to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. They were published in the "Dublin University Magazine" and were later collected as "The Purcell Papers" (1880). They are mostly set in Ireland and include some classic stories of gothic horror, with gloomy castles, supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, madness, and suicide. Also apparent are nostalgia and sadness for the dispossessed Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, whose ruined castles stand as mute witness to this history. Some of the stories still often appear in anthologies:
Revised versions of "Irish Countess" and "Schalken" were reprinted in Le Fanu's first collection of short stories, the very rare "Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery" (1851).
An anonymous novella "Spalatro: From the Notes of Fra Giacomo", published in the "Dublin University Magazine" in 1843, was added to the Le Fanu canon as late as 1980, being recognised as Le Fanu's work by W. J. McCormack in his biography of that year. "Spalatro" has a typically Gothic Italian setting, featuring a bandit as hero, as in Ann Radcliffe (whose 1797 novel "The Italian" includes a repentant minor villain of the same name). More disturbing, however, is the hero Spalatro's necrophiliac passion for an undead blood-drinking beauty, who seems to be a predecessor of Le Fanu's later female vampire Carmilla. Like Carmilla, this undead femme fatale is not portrayed in an entirely negative way and attempts, but fails, to save the hero Spalatro from the eternal damnation that seems to be his destiny.
Le Fanu wrote this story after the death of his elder sister Catherine in March 1841. She had been ailing for about ten years, but her death came as a great shock to him.
Le Fanu's first novels were historical, "à la" Sir Walter Scott, though with an Irish setting. Like Scott, Le Fanu was sympathetic to the old Jacobite cause:
Le Fanu published many novels in the contemporary sensation fiction style of Wilkie Collins and others:
His best-known works, still widely read today, are:
In addition to M. R. James, several other writers have expressed strong admiration for Le Fanu's fiction. E. F. Benson stated that Le Fanu's stories "Green Tea", "The Familiar", and "Mr. Justice Harbottle" "are instinct with an awfulness which custom cannot stale, and this quality is due, as in "The Turn of the Screw", to Le Fanu's admirably artistic methods in setting and narration". Benson added, "[Le Fanu's] best work is of the first rank, while as a 'flesh-creeper' he is unrivalled. No one else has so sure a touch in mixing the mysterious atmosphere in which horror darkly breeds". Jack Sullivan has asserted that Le Fanu is "one of the most important and innovative figures in the development of the ghost story" and that Le Fanu's work has had "an incredible influence on the genre; [he is] regarded by M. R. James, E. F. Bleiler, and others as the most skillful writer of supernatural fiction in English."
Le Fanu's work influenced several later writers. Most famously, "Carmilla" was to greatly influence Bram Stoker in the writing of "Dracula". M. R. James' ghost fiction was influenced by Le Fanu's work in the genre. Oliver Onions's supernatural novel "The Hand of Kornelius Voyt" (1939) was inspired by Le Fanu's "Uncle Silas".
There is an extensive critical analysis of Le Fanu's supernatural stories (particularly "Green Tea", "Schalken the Painter", and "Carmilla") in Jack Sullivan's book "Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood" (1978). Other books on Le Fanu include "Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others" (1931) by S. M. Ellis, "Sheridan Le Fanu" (1951) by Nelson Browne, "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu" (1971) by Michael H. Begnal, "Sheridan Le Fanu" (third edition, 1997) by W. J. McCormack, "Le Fanu's Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness" (2004) by Victor Sage and "Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu" (2007) by James Walton.
Le Fanu, his works, and his family background are explored in Gavin Selerie's mixed prose/verse text "Le Fanu's Ghost" (2006). Gary William Crawford's "J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography" (1995) is the first full bibliography. Crawford and Brian J. Showers's "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: A Concise Bibliography" (2011) is a supplement to Crawford's out-of-print 1995 bibliography. With Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers, Crawford has edited "Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu". Jim Rockhill's introductions to the three volumes of the Ash-Tree Press edition of Le Fanu's short supernatural fiction ("Schalken the Painter and Others" [2002], "The Haunted Baronet and Others" [2003], "Mr Justice Harbottle and Others" [2005]) provide a perceptive account of Le Fanu's life and work. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28584 |
Star Chamber
The Star Chamber (Latin: "Camera stellata") was an English court which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late to the mid-17th century (c. 1641), and was composed of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, to supplement the judicial activities of the common-law and equity courts in civil and criminal matters. The Star Chamber was originally established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and politically prominent people so powerful that ordinary courts would probably hesitate to convict them of their crimes. However, it became synonymous with social and political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of the power it wielded.
In modern usage, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings, no “due process” rights to those accused, and secretive proceedings are sometimes called, metaphorically or poetically, "star chambers". This is a pejorative term and casts doubt on the legitimacy of the proceedings. "Star Chamber" can also, rarely, be used in its original meaning, for instance when a politician uses parliamentary privilege to examine and then exculpate or condemn a powerful organisation or person. In America, due to the constitutional separation of powers, the main powers of select committees are often used to enhance public debate, but often leave the accused without legal representation, and hence the term “star chamber” is used to characterize the proceedings. Politicians are deemed to no longer wield powers in the criminal law, which belongs to the courts.
The first reference to the "star chamber" is in 1398, as the "Sterred chambre"; the more common form of the name appears in 1422 as "le Sterne-chamere". Both forms recur throughout the fifteenth century, with "Sterred Chambre" last attested as appearing in the Supremacy of the Crown Act 1534 (establishing the English monarch as head of the Church in England). The origin of the name has usually been explained as first recorded by John Stow, writing in his "Survey of London" (1598), who noted "this place is called the Star Chamber, at the first all the roofe thereof was decked with images of starres gilted". Gold stars on a blue background were a common medieval decoration for ceilings in richly decorated rooms: the Star Chamber ceiling itself is still to be seen at Leasowe Castle, Wirral, and similar examples are in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and elsewhere.
Alternatively, William Blackstone, a notable English jurist writing in 1769, speculated that the name may have derived from the legal word "starr" meaning the contract or obligation to a Jew (from the Hebrew שטר ("shtar") meaning 'document'). This term was in use until 1290, when Edward I had all Jews expelled from England. Blackstone thought the "Starr Chamber" might originally have been used for the deposition and storage of such contracts. However, the "Oxford English Dictionary" gives this etymology "no claim to consideration".
Other etymological speculations mentioned by Blackstone on the use of star include the derivation from Old English "steoran" (steer) meaning "to govern"; as a court used to punish (in Latin: "crimen stellionatus"); or that the chamber was full of windows.
The Court evolved from meetings of the King's Council, with its roots going back to the medieval period. Contrary to popular belief, the so-called "Star Chamber Act" of King Henry VII's second Parliament (1487) did not actually empower the Star Chamber, but rather created a separate tribunal distinct from the King's general Council.
Initially well regarded because of its speed and flexibility, Star Chamber was regarded as one of the most just and efficient courts of the Tudor era. Sir Edward Coke once described Star Chamber as "The most honourable court (Our Parliament excepted) that is in the Christian world. Both in respect of the judges in the court and its honourable proceeding."
The Star Chamber was made up of Privy Counsellors, as well as common-law judges, and it supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters. In a sense, the court was a court of appeal, a supervisory body, overseeing the operation of the lower courts, although it could hear cases by direct appeal as well. The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against the English upper class, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes.
Another function of the Court of Star Chamber was to act like a court of equity, which could impose punishment for actions which were deemed to be morally reprehensible but were not in violation of the letter of the law. This gave the Star Chamber great flexibility, as it could punish defendants for any action which the court felt should be unlawful, even when in fact it was technically lawful.
However, this meant that the justice meted out by the Star Chamber could be very arbitrary and subjective, and it enabled the court to be used later on in its history as an instrument of oppression rather than for the purpose of justice for which it was intended. Many crimes which are now commonly prosecuted, such as attempt, conspiracy, criminal libel, and perjury, were originally developed by the Court of Star Chamber, along with its more common role of dealing with riots and sedition.
The cases decided in those sessions enabled both the very powerful and those without power to seek redress. Thus King Henry VII used the power of Star Chamber to break the power of the landed gentry which had been such a cause of problems in the Wars of the Roses. Yet, when local courts were often clogged or mismanaged, the Court of Star Chamber also became a site of remittance for the common people against the excesses of the nobility.
In the reign of King Henry VIII, the court was under the leadership of Cardinal Wolsey (the Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor) and Thomas Cranmer (the Archbishop of Canterbury) (1515–1529). From this time forward, the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon for bringing actions against opponents to the policies of King Henry VIII, his Ministers and his Parliament.
Although it was initially a court of appeal, King Henry, Wolsey and Cranmer encouraged plaintiffs to bring their cases directly to the Star Chamber, bypassing the lower courts entirely.
The Court was used extensively to control Wales, after the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 (sometimes referred to as the "Acts of Union"). The Tudor-era gentry in Wales turned to the Chamber to evict Welsh landowners and protect themselves, and in general protect the English advantages of the Laws in Wales Acts.
One of the weapons of the Star Chamber was the "ex officio" oath where, because of their positions, individuals were forced to swear to answer truthfully all questions that might be asked. Faced by hostile questioning, this then gave them the "cruel trilemma" of having to incriminate themselves, face charges of perjury if they gave unsatisfactory answers to their accusers, or be held in contempt of court if they gave no answer.
The power of the Court of Star Chamber grew considerably under the House of Stuart, and by the time of King Charles I, it had become synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the King and his circle. King James I and his son Charles used the court to examine cases of sedition, which meant that the court could be used to suppress opposition to royal policies. It came to be used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to trial in the lower court.
King Charles I used the Court of Star Chamber as Parliamentary substitute during the eleven years of Personal Rule, when he ruled without a Parliament. King Charles made extensive use of the Court of Star Chamber to prosecute dissenters, including the Puritans who fled to New England. This was also one of the causes of the English Civil War.
On 17 October 1632, the Court of Star Chamber banned all "news books" because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years' War in England was unfair. As a result, newsbooks pertaining to this matter were often printed in Amsterdam and then smuggled into the country, until control of the press collapsed with the developing ideological conflict of 1640–41.
The Star Chamber became notorious for judgments favourable to the king. Archbishop Laud had William Prynne
branded on both cheeks through its agency in 1637 for seditious libel.
In 1571 Elizabeth I had set up an equivalent Court in Ireland, the Court of Castle Chamber, to deal with cases of riot and offences against public order. Although it was initially popular with private litigants, under the Stuarts it developed the same reputation for harsh and arbitrary proceedings as its parent Court, and during the political confusion of the 1640s it simply disappeared.
In the early 1900s, Edgar Lee Masters commented:
In 1641, the Long Parliament, led by John Pym and inflamed by the severe treatment of John Lilburne, as well as that of other religious dissenters such as William Prynne, Alexander Leighton, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, abolished the Star Chamber with an Act of Parliament: the Habeas Corpus Act 1640.
The Chamber itself stood until demolished in 1806, when its materials were salvaged. The door was reused in the nearby Westminster School until destroyed in the blitz, and the historic Star Chamber ceiling, with its bright gold stars, was brought to Leasowe Castle on the Wirral Peninsula in Merseyside from the Court of Westminster, along with four tapestries depicting the four seasons.
In the late 20th century, the expression was revived in reference to ways of resolving internal high-level questions within the government, usually relating to budget appropriations. The press and some civil servants under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) revived the term for private ministerial meetings at which disputes between the Treasury and high-spending departments were resolved.
In 2010, the press employed the term for a committee established by the Cameron ministry to plan spending cuts to reduce public debt.
The historical abuses of the Star Chamber are considered a primary motivating force behind the protections against compelled self-incrimination embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The meaning of "compelled testimony" under the Fifth Amendment – i.e., the conditions under which a defendant is allowed to "plead the Fifth" to avoid self-incrimination – is thus often interpreted via reference to the inquisitorial methods of the Star Chamber.
As the U.S. Supreme Court described it, "the Star Chamber has, for centuries, symbolized disregard of basic individual rights. The Star Chamber not merely allowed, but required, defendants to have counsel. The defendant's answer to an indictment was not accepted unless it was signed by counsel. When counsel refused to sign the answer, for whatever reason, the defendant was considered to have confessed." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28587 |
Coat of arms of South Africa
The present coat of arms of South Africa was introduced on Freedom Day 27 April 2000 and designed by Mr Iaan Bekker. It replaced the earlier national arms, which had been in use since 1910. The motto is written in the Khoisan language of the ǀXam people and translates literally to "diverse people unite". The previous motto, in Latin, was "", translated as "From unity, strength".
The design process was initiated when, in 1999, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology requested ideas for the new coat-of-arms from the public. A brief was then prepared based on the ideas received, along with input from the Cabinet. The Government Communication and Information System then approached Design South Africa to brief ten of the top designers. Three designers were chosen to present their concepts to the Cabinet. Iaan Bekker's design was chosen.
The new arms were introduced on Freedom Day, 27 April 2000. The change reflected the government's aim to highlight the democratic change in South Africa and a new sense of patriotism.
The coat of arms is a series of elements organised in distinct symmetric egg-like or oval shapes placed on top of one another. The completed structure of the coat of arms combines the lower and higher oval shape in a symbol of infinity. The path that connects the lower edge of the scroll, through the lines of the tusks, with the horizon above and the sun rising at the top, forms the shape of the cosmic egg from which the secretary bird rises. In the symbolic sense, this is the implied rebirth of the spirit of the great and heroic nation of South Africa.
The coat of arms is also a central part of the Seal of the Republic, traditionally considered to be the highest emblem of the State. Absolute authority is given to every document with an impression of the Seal of the Republic on it, as this means that it has been approved by the President of South Africa. Since 1997, however, the use of the Seal of the Republic has not actually been required by the Constitution, but it continues to be used.
The official blazon of the arms is:
The first element is the motto, in a green semicircle. Completing the semicircle are two symmetrically placed pairs of elephant tusks pointing upwards. Within the oval shape formed by the tusks are two symmetrical ears of wheat, that in turn frame a centrally placed gold shield.
The shape of the shield makes reference to the drum, and contains two human figures derived from Khoisan rock art "Linton Stone", which is housed and displayed in the South African Museum in Cape Town. The figures are depicted facing one another in greeting and in unity.
Above the shield are a spear and a knobkierie, crossed in a single unit. These elements are arranged harmoniously to give focus to the shield and complete the lower oval shape of foundation.
Immediately above the oval shape of foundation, is the visual centre of the coat of arms, a protea. The petals of the protea are rendered in a triangular pattern reminiscent of the crafts of Africa.
The secretary bird is placed above the protea and the flower forms the chest of the bird. The secretary bird stands with its wings uplifted in a regal and uprising gesture. The distinctive head feathers of the secretary bird crown a strong and vigilant head.
The rising sun above the horizon is placed between the wings of the secretary bird and completes the oval shape of ascendance.
The combination of the upper and lower oval shapes intersect to form an unbroken infinite course, and the great harmony between the basic elements result in a dynamic, elegant and thoroughly distinctive design. Yet it clearly retains the stability, gravity and immediacy that a coat of arms demands.
The first coat of arms was granted by King George V by Royal Warrant on 17 September 1910. This was a few months after the formation of the Union of South Africa.
It was a combination of symbols representing the four provinces (formerly colonies) that made up the Union.
The motto, "Ex Unitate Vires" was officially translated as "Union is Strength" until 1961, and thereafter as "Unity is Strength".
Three official renditions of the arms were used. The original rendition (1910) was the only version used until 1930, and it continued to be used as the rank badge of warrant officers in the South African Defence Force and South African National Defence Force until 2002. The second version, painted in 1930 and known as the "ordinary coat of arms", and the third version, painted in 1932 and known as the "embellished coat of arms", were both used until 2000. The former was also used on the insignia of the South African Police until the 1990s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28588 |
Specialization (logic)
Specialisation, (or specialization) is an important way to generate propositional knowledge, by applying general knowledge, such as the theory of gravity, to specific instances, such as "when I release this apple, it will fall to the floor". Specialisation is the opposite of generalisation.
Concept B is a specialisation of concept A if and only if: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28592 |
Shaka
King Shaka kaSenzangakhona ( – 22 September 1828), also known as Shaka Zulu (), was the King of the Zulu Kingdom from 1816 to 1828. He was one of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu Kingdom.
Shaka was born in the lunar month of "uNtulikazi" (July) in the year of 1787 near present-day Melmoth, KwaZulu-Natal Province. Due to persecution as a result of his illegitimacy, Shaka spent his childhood in his mother's settlements where he was initiated into an "ibutho lempi" (fighting unit). In his early days, Shaka served as a warrior under the sway of Dingiswayo.
Shaka further refined the "ibutho" system used by Dingiswayo and others and, with the Mthethwa empire's support over the next several years, forged alliances with his smaller neighbours, to counter the growing threat from Ndwandwe raids from the north. The initial Zulu maneuvers were primarily defensive in nature, as Shaka preferred to apply pressure diplomatically, aided by an occasional strategic assassination. His changes to local society built on existing structures. Although he preferred social and propagandistic political methods, he also engaged in a number of battles, as the Zulu sources make clear. In turn, he was ultimately assassinated by his own half brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana. Shaka's reign coincided with the start of the (the "Upheaval" or "Crushing"), a period of widespread destruction and warfare in southern Africa between 1815 and about 1840 that depopulated the region. His role in the "Mfecane" is highly controversial.
When Senzangakhona (Shaka's father) died in 1816, Shaka's younger half-brother Sigujana assumed power as the legitimate heir to the Zulu chiefdom. Sigujana's reign was short, however, as Dingiswayo, anxious to confirm his authority, lent Shaka a regiment so that he was able to put Sigujana to death, launching a relatively bloodless coup that was substantially accepted by the Zulu. Thus Shaka became Chief of the Zulu clan, although he remained a vassal of the Mthethwa empire until Dingiswayo's death in battle a year later at the hands of Zwide, powerful chief of the Ndwandwe (Nxumalo) nation. When the Mthethwa forces were defeated and scattered temporarily, the power vacuum was filled by Shaka. He reformed the remnants of the Mthethwa and other regional tribes and later defeated Zwide in the Zulu Civil War of 1819–20.
When Dingiswayo was murdered by Zwide, Shaka sought to avenge his death. At some point, Zwide barely escaped Shaka, though the exact details are not known. In that encounter, Zwide's mother Ntombazi, a Sangoma (Zulu seer or shaman), was killed by Shaka. Shaka chose a particularly gruesome revenge on her, locking her in a house and placing jackals or hyenas inside: they devoured her and, in the morning, Shaka burned the house to the ground. Despite carrying out this revenge, Shaka continued his pursuit of Zwide. It was not until around 1825 that the two military leaders met, near Phongola, in their final meeting. Phongola is near the present day border of KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa. Shaka was victorious in battle, although his forces sustained heavy casualties, which included his head military commander, Umgobhozi Ovela Entabeni.
In the initial years, Shaka had neither the influence nor reputation to compel any but the smallest of groups to join him, and upon Dingiswayo's death, Shaka moved southwards across the Thukela River, establishing his capital Bulawayo in Qwabe territory; he never did move back into the traditional Zulu heartland. In Qwabe, Shaka may have intervened in an existing succession dispute to help his own choice, Nqetho, into power.
As Shaka became more respected by his people, he was able to spread his ideas with greater ease. Because of his background as a soldier, Shaka taught the Zulus that the most effective way of becoming powerful quickly was by conquering and controlling other tribes. His teachings greatly influenced the social outlook of the Zulu people. The Zulu tribe soon developed a warrior outlook, which Shaka turned to his advantage.
Shaka's hegemony was primarily based on military might, smashing rivals and incorporating scattered remnants into his own army. He supplemented this with a mixture of diplomacy and patronage, incorporating friendly chieftains, including Zihlandlo of the Mkhize, Jobe of the Sithole, and Mathubane of the Thuli. These peoples were never defeated in battle by the Zulu; they did not have to be. Shaka won them over by subtler tactics, such as patronage and reward. As for the ruling Qwabe, they began re-inventing their genealogies to give the impression that Qwabe and Zulu were closely related in the past. In this way a greater sense of cohesion was created, though it never became complete, as subsequent civil wars attest.
Shaka still recognised Dingiswayo and his larger Mthethwa clan as overlord after he returned to the Zulu but, some years later, Dingiswayo was ambushed by Zwide's amaNdwandwe and killed. There is no evidence to suggest that Shaka betrayed Dingiswayo. Indeed, the core Zulu had to retreat before several Ndwandwe incursions; the Ndwandwe was clearly the most aggressive grouping in the sub-region.
Shaka was able to form an alliance with the leaderless Mthethwa clan and was able to establish himself amongst the Qwabe, after Phakathwayo was overthrown with relative ease. With Qwabe, Hlubi and Mkhize support, Shaka was finally able to summon a force capable of resisting the Ndwandwe (of the Nxumalo clan). Historian Donald Morris states that Shaka's first major battle against Zwide, of the Ndwandwe, was the Battle of Gqokli Hill, on the Mfolozi river. Shaka's troops maintained a strong position on the crest of the hill. A frontal assault by their opponents failed to dislodge them, and Shaka sealed the victory by sending his reserve forces in a sweep around the hill to attack the enemy's rear. Losses were high overall but the efficiency of the new Shakan innovations was proved. It is probable that, over time, the Zulu were able to hone and improve their encirclement tactics.
Another decisive fight eventually took place on the Mhlatuze river, at the confluence with the Mvuzane stream. In a two-day running battle, the Zulu inflicted a resounding defeat on their opponents. Shaka then led a fresh reserve some to the royal kraal of Zwide, ruler of the Ndwandwe, and destroyed it. Zwide himself escaped with a handful of followers before falling foul of a chieftainess named Mjanji, ruler of a baBelu clan. (He died in mysterious circumstances soon afterwards.) Zwide's general Soshangane (of the Shangaan) moved north towards what is now Mozambique to inflict further damage on less resistant foes and take advantage of slaving opportunities, obliging Portuguese traders to give tribute. Shaka later had to contend again with Zwide's son Sikhunyane in 1826.
Shaka granted permission to Europeans to enter Zulu territory on rare occasions. In the mid-1820s Henry Francis Fynn provided medical treatment to the king after an assassination attempt by a rival tribe member hidden in a crowd (see account of Nathaniel Isaacs). To show his gratitude, Shaka permitted European settlers to enter and operate in the Zulu kingdom. This would open the door for future British incursions into the Zulu kingdom that were not so peaceful. Shaka observed several demonstrations of European technology and knowledge, but he held that the Zulu way was superior to that of the foreigners.
Dingane and Mhlangana, Shaka's half-brothers, appear to have made at least two attempts to assassinate Shaka before they succeeded, with perhaps support from Mpondo elements and some disaffected iziYendane people. While the British colonialists considered his regime to be a future threat, allegations that European traders wished him dead were problematic given that Shaka had granted concessions to Europeans prior to his death, including the right to settle at Port Natal (now Durban). Shaka had made enough enemies among his own people to hasten his demise. It came relatively quickly after the death of his mother Nandi in October 1827, and the devastation caused by Shaka's subsequent erratic behavior. According to Donald Morris, Shaka ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year of mourning, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, although the killing was not restricted to humans: cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like.
The Zulu monarch was killed by three assassins sometime in 1828; September is the most frequently cited date, when almost all available Zulu manpower had been sent on yet another mass sweep to the north. This left the royal kraal critically lacking in security. It was all the conspirators needed—they being Shaka's half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, and an iNduna called Mbopa. A diversion was created by Mbopa, and Dingane and Mhlangana struck the fatal blows. Shaka's corpse was dumped by his assassins in an empty grain pit, which was then filled with stones and mud. The exact location is unknown. A monument was built at one alleged site. Historian Donald Morris holds that the true site is somewhere on Couper Street in the village of Stanger, South Africa.
Shaka's half-brother Dingane assumed power and embarked on an extensive purge of pro-Shaka elements and chieftains, running over several years, in order to secure his position. The initial problem Dingane faced was maintaining the loyalty of the Zulu fighting regiments, or amabutho. He addressed this by allowing them to marry and set up homesteads (which was forbidden during Shaka's rule) and they also received cattle from Dingane. Loyalty was also maintained through fear, as anyone who was suspected of rivaling Dingane was killed. He set up his main residence at Mmungungundlovo and established his authority over the Zulu kingdom. Dingane ruled for some twelve years, during which time he fought, disastrously, against the Voortrekkers, and against another half-brother, Mpande, who, with Boer and British support, took over the Zulu leadership in 1840, ruling for some 30 years.
Some older histories have doubted the military and social innovations customarily attributed to Shaka, denying them outright, or attributing them variously to European influences. More modern researchers argue that such explanations fall short, and that the general Zulu culture, which included other tribes and clans, contained a number of practices that Shaka could have drawn on to fulfill his objectives, whether in raiding, conquest or hegemony. Some of these practices are shown below.
Shaka is often said to have been dissatisfied with the long throwing assegai, and is credited with having introduced a new variant of the weapon: the "iklwa", a short stabbing spear with a long, broad, and indeed sword-like, spearhead.
Though Shaka probably did not invent the "iklwa", according to Zulu scholar John Laband, the leader did insist that his warriors train with the weapon, which gave them a "terrifying advantage over opponents who clung to the traditional practice of throwing their spears and avoiding hand-to-hand conflict." The throwing spear was not discarded but used as an initial missile weapon before close contact with the enemy, when the shorter stabbing spear was used in hand-to-hand combat.
It is also supposed that Shaka introduced a larger, heavier version of the Nguni shield. Furthermore, it is believed that he taught his warriors how to use the shield's left side to hook the enemy's shield to the right, exposing the enemy's ribs for a fatal spear stab. In Shaka's time, these cowhide shields were supplied by the king, and they remained the king's property. Different coloured shields distinguished different "amabutho" within Shaka's army. Some had black shields, others used white shields with black spots, and some had white shields with brown spots, while others used pure brown or white shields.
The story that sandals were discarded to toughen the feet of Zulu warriors has been noted in various military accounts such as "The Washing of the Spears," "Like Lions They Fought," and "Anatomy of the Zulu Army." Implementation was typically blunt. Those who objected to going without sandals were simply killed. Shaka drilled his troops frequently, in forced marches that sometimes covered more than a day in a fast trot over hot, rocky terrain. He also drilled the troops to carry out encirclement tactics.
Historian John Laband dismisses these stories as myth, writing: "What are we to make, then, of [European trader Henry Francis] Fynn's statement that once the Zulu army reached hard and stony ground in 1826, Shaka ordered sandals of ox-hide to be made for himself?"
Laband also dismissed the idea of a march in a single day as ridiculous. He further claims that even though these stories have been repeated by "astonished and admiring white commentators," the Zulu army covered "no more than a day, and usually went only about ." Furthermore, Zulus under Shaka sometimes advanced more slowly. They spent two whole days recuperating in one instance, and on another they rested for a day and two nights before pursuing their enemy. Several other historians of the Zulu, and the Zulu military system, however, affirm the mobility rate of up to 50 miles per day.
Boys and girls aged six and over joined Shaka's force as apprentice warriors ("udibi") and served as carriers of rations, supplies like cooking pots and sleeping mats, and extra weapons until they joined the main ranks. It is sometimes held that such support was used more for very light forces designed to extract tribute in cattle and slaves from neighbouring groups. Nevertheless, the concept of "light" forces is questionable. The fast-moving Zulu raiding party, or "ibutho lempi," on a mission invariably travelled light, driving cattle as provisions on the hoof, and were not weighed down with heavy weapons and supply packs.
Age-grade groupings of various sorts were common in the Bantu culture of the day, and indeed are still important in much of Africa. Age grades were responsible for a variety of activities, from guarding the camp, to cattle herding, to certain rituals and ceremonies. Shaka organised various grades into regiments, and quartered them in special military kraals, with regiments having their own distinctive names and insignia. The regimental system clearly built on existing tribal cultural elements that could be adapted and shaped to fit an expansionist agenda.
Most historians credit Shaka with initial development of the famous "bull horn" formation." It was composed of three elements:
The expanding Zulu power inevitably clashed with European hegemony in the decades after Shaka's death. In fact, European travellers to Shaka's kingdom demonstrated advanced technology such as firearms and writing, but the Zulu monarch was less than convinced. There was no need to record messages, he held, since his messengers stood under penalty of death should they bear inaccurate tidings. As for firearms, Shaka acknowledged their utility as missile weapons after seeing muzzle-loaders demonstrated, but he argued that in the time a gunman took to reload, he would be swamped by charging spear-wielding warriors.
The first major clash after Shaka's death took place under his successor Dingane, against expanding European Voortrekkers from the Cape. Initial Zulu success rested on fast-moving surprise attacks and ambushes, but the Voortrekkers recovered and dealt the Zulu a severe defeat from their fortified wagon laager at the Battle of Blood River. The second major clash was against the British during 1879. Once again, most Zulu successes rested on their mobility, ability to screen their forces and to close when their opponents were unfavourably deployed. Their major victory at the Battle of Isandlwana is well known, but they also forced back a British column at the Battle of Hlobane mountain, by deploying fast-moving regiments over a wide area of rugged ravines and gullies, and attacking the British who were forced into a rapid disorderly fighting retreat, back to the town of Kambula.
A number of historians argue that Shaka "changed the nature of warfare in Southern Africa" from "a ritualised exchange of taunts with minimal loss of life into a true method of subjugation by wholesale slaughter." Others dispute this characterization (see Scholarship section below). A number of writers focus on Shaka's military innovations such as the "iklwa" – the Zulu thrusting spear, and the "buffalo horns" formation. This combination has been compared to the standardisation implemented by the reorganised Roman legions under Marius.
Much controversy still surrounds the character, methods and activities of the Zulu king. From a military standpoint, historian John Keegan notes exaggerations and myths that surround Shaka, but nevertheless maintains:
Some scholars hold that popular depictions of Shaka as a suddenly appearing genius creating innovation are overstated, and that to the contrary, Shaka was a borrower and imitator of indigenous methods, customs and even ruler-lineages already in place. They also argue that Shaka's line was relatively short-lived and receives undue attention, compared to other, longer established lines and rulers in the region.
Shaka's triumphs did not succeed in obliterating or diminishing the memories of his better-born rivals. The hypothesis that several states of a new kind arose about the same time does not take account of the contrast between the short line of Shaka and the long pedigrees of his most important opponents – especially the coalition grouped around his deadly enemy Zwide (d. 1822). The founders of the states which Omer-Cooper called "Zulu-type states," including the Ndebele, the Gasa, the Ngoni, and the Swazi had all been closely associated with Zwide. Instead of hypothesizing that they all chose to imitate Shaka, it is easier to imagine that he modeled his state on theirs. And as they stemmed from ancient families it is entirely possible that states of that type existed in a more remote past. Soga and Bryant related each of them to a larger grouping they called Mho."
Scholarship in recent years has revised views of the sources on Shaka's reign. The earliest are two eyewitness accounts written by European adventurer-traders who met Shaka during the last four years of his reign. Nathaniel Isaacs published his "Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa" in 1836, creating a picture of Shaka as a degenerate and pathological monster, which survives in modified forms to this day. Isaacs was aided in this by Henry Francis Fynn, whose diary (actually a rewritten collage of various papers) was edited by James Stuart only in 1950.
Their accounts may be balanced by the rich resource of oral histories collected around 1900 by the same James Stuart, now published in six volumes as "The James Stuart Archive". Stuart's early 20th century work was continued by D. McK. Malcolm in 1950. These and other sources such as A.T. Bryant gives us a more Zulu-centred picture. Most popular accounts are based on E.A. Ritter's novel "Shaka Zulu" (1955), a potboiling romance that was re-edited into something more closely resembling a history. John Wright (history professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg), Julian Cobbing and Dan Wylie (Rhodes University, Grahamstown) are among a number of writers who have modified these stories.
Various modern historians writing on Shaka and the Zulu point to the uncertain nature of Fynn and Isaac's accounts of Shaka's reign. A standard general reference work in the field is Donald Morris's "The Washing of The Spears", which notes that the sources, as a whole, for this historical era are not the best. Morris nevertheless references a large number of sources, including Stuart, and A. T. Bryant's extensive but uneven "Olden Times in Zululand and Natal", which is based on four decades of exhaustive interviews of tribal sources. After sifting through these sources and noting their strengths and weaknesses, Morris generally credits Shaka with a large number of military and social innovations, and this is the general consensus in the field.
A 1998 study by historian Carolyn Hamilton summarizes much of the scholarship on Shaka towards the dawn of the 21st century in areas ranging from ideology, politics and culture, to the use of his name and image in a popular South African theme park, "Shakaland." It argues that in many ways, the image of Shaka has been "invented" in the modern era according to whatever agenda persons hold. This "imagining of Shaka" it is held, should be balanced by a sober view of the historical record, and allow greater scope for the contributions of indigenous African discourse.
Military historians of the Zulu War must also be considered for their description of Zulu fighting methods and tactics, including authors like Ian Knight and Robert Edgerton. General histories of Southern Africa are also valuable including Noel Mostert's "Frontiers" and a detailed account of the results from the Zulu expansion, J.D. Omer-Cooper's "The Zulu Aftermath", which advances the traditional Mfecane theory.
The increased military efficiency led to more and more clans being incorporated into Shaka's Zulu empire, while other tribes moved away to be out of range of Shaka's "impis". The ripple effect caused by these mass migrations would become known (though only in the twentieth century) as the "Mfecane" (annihilation).
Shaka's army set out on a massive programme of expansion, killing or enslaving those who resisted in the territories he conquered. His "impis" (warrior regiments) were rigorously disciplined: failure in battle meant death.
At the time of his death, Shaka ruled over 250,000 people and could muster more than 50,000 warriors. His 10-year-long kingship resulted in a massive number of deaths, mostly due to the disruptions the Zulu caused in neighbouring tribes, although the exact death toll is a matter of scholarly dispute. Further unquantifiable deaths occurred during mass tribal migrations to escape his armies.
The Mfecane produced Mzilikazi of the Khumalo, a general of Shaka's. He fled Shaka's employ, and in turn conquered an empire in Zimbabwe, after clashing with European groups like the Boers. The settling of Mzilikazi's people, the AmaNdebele or Matabele, in the south of Zimbabwe with the concomitant driving of the AmaShona into the north caused a tribal conflict that still resonates today. Other notable figures to arise from the Mfecane include Soshangane, who expanded from the Zulu area into what is now Mozambique.
The theory of the Mfecane holds that the aggressive expansion of Shaka's armies caused a brutal chain reaction across the southern areas of the continent, as dispossessed tribe after tribe turned on their neighbours in a deadly cycle of fight and conquest. Some scholars contend that this theory must be treated with caution as it generally neglects several other factors such as the impact of European encroachment, slave trading and expansion in that area of Southern Africa around the same time. Normal estimates for the death toll range from 1 million to 2 million. These numbers are, however, controversial.
According to Julian Cobbing, the development of the view that Shaka was the monster responsible for the devastation is based on the need of apartheid era historians to justify the apartheid regime's racist policies. Other scholars acknowledge distortion of the historical record by apartheid supporters and shady European traders seeking to cover their tracks, but dispute the revisionist approach, noting that stories of cannibalism, raiding, burning of villages, or mass slaughter were not developed out of thin air but based on the clearly documented accounts of hundreds of black victims and refugees. Confirmation of such accounts can also be seen in modern archaeology of the village of Lepalong, an entire settlement built underground to shelter remnants of the Kwena people from 1827–36 against the tide of disruption that engulfed the region during Shakan times.
William Rubinstein wrote that "Western guilt over colonialism, have also accounted for much of this distortion of what pre-literate societies actually were like, as does the wish to avoid anything which smacks of racism, even when this means distorting the actual and often appalling facts of life in many pre-literate societies". Rubinstein also notes:
Fynn complies, and Wylie notes that he had an additional motive to distort Shaka's image—he applied for a huge grant of land—an area allegedly depopulated by Shaka's savagery.
Michal Lesniewski has criticised Wylie for some of his attempts to revise Western thinking about Shaka.
Though much remains unknown about Shaka's personal appearance, sources tend to agree he had a strong, muscular body and was not fat. He was tall and his skin tone was dark brown.
Shaka's enemies described him as ugly in some respects. He had a big nose, according to Baleka of the Qwabe, as told by her father. He also had two prominent front teeth. Her father also told Baleka that Shaka spoke as though "his tongue were too big for his mouth." Many said that he spoke with a speech impediment.
There is an anecdote that Shaka joked with one of his friends, Magaye, that he could not kill Magaye because he would be laughed at. Supposedly if he killed Magaye, it would appear to be out of jealousy because Magaye was so handsome and "Shaka himself was ugly, with a protruding forehead".
The figure of Shaka still sparks interest among not only the contemporary Zulu but many worldwide who have encountered the tribe and its history. The current tendency appears to be to lionise him; popular film and other media have certainly contributed to his appeal. Certain aspects of traditional Zulu culture still revere the dead monarch, as the typical praise song below attests. The praise song is one of the most widely used poetic forms in Africa, applying not only to spirits but to men, animals, plants and even towns.
Other Zulu sources are sometimes critical of Shaka, and numerous negative images abound in Zulu oral history. When Shaka's mother Nandi died for example, the monarch ordered a massive outpouring of grief including mass executions, forbidding the planting of crops or the use of milk, and the killing of all pregnant women and their husbands. Oral sources record that in this period of devastation, a singular Zulu, a man named "Gala", eventually stood up to Shaka and objected to these measures, pointing out that Nandi was not the first person to die in Zululand. Taken aback by such candid talk, the Zulu king is supposed to have called off the destructive edicts, rewarding the blunt teller-of-truths with a gift of cattle.
The figure of Shaka thus remains an ambiguous one in African oral tradition, defying simplistic depictions of the Zulu king as a heroic, protean nation builder on one hand, or a depraved monster on the other. This ambiguity continues to lend the image of Shaka its continued power and influence, almost two centuries after his death. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28596 |
Sinusitis
Sinusitis, also known as rhinosinusitis, is inflammation of the mucous membranes that line the sinuses resulting in symptoms. Common symptoms include thick nasal mucus, a plugged nose, and facial pain. Other signs and symptoms may include fever, headaches, a poor sense of smell, sore throat, and a cough. The cough is often worse at night. Serious complications are rare. It is defined as acute sinusitis if it lasts fewer than 4 weeks, and as chronic sinusitis if it lasts for more than 12 weeks.
Sinusitis can be caused by infection, allergies, air pollution, or structural problems in the nose. Most cases are caused by a viral infection. A bacterial infection may be present if symptoms last more than 10 days or if a person worsens after starting to improve. Recurrent episodes are more likely in persons with asthma, cystic fibrosis, and poor immune function. X-rays are not usually needed unless complications are suspected. In chronic cases, confirmatory testing is recommended by either direct visualization or computed tomography.
Some cases may be prevented by hand washing, avoiding smoking, and immunization. Pain killers such as naproxen, nasal steroids, and nasal irrigation may be used to help with symptoms. Recommended initial treatment for acute sinusitis is watchful waiting. If symptoms do not improve in 7–10 days or get worse, then an antibiotic may be used or changed. In those in whom antibiotics are used, either amoxicillin or amoxicillin/clavulanate is recommended first line. Surgery may occasionally be used in people with chronic disease.
Sinusitis is a common condition. It affects between about 10 and 30 percent of people each year in the United States and Europe. Women are more often affected than men. Chronic sinusitis affects about 12.5% of people. Treatment of sinusitis in the United States results in more than 11 billion in costs. The unnecessary and ineffective treatment of viral sinusitis with antibiotics is common.
Headache or facial pain or pressure of a dull, constant, or aching sort over the affected sinuses is common with both acute and chronic stages of sinusitis. This pain is usually localized to the involved sinus and may worsen when the affected person bends over or when lying down. Pain often starts on one side of the head and progresses to both sides.
Acute sinusitis may be accompanied by thick nasal discharge that is usually green in color and may contain pus or blood. Often, a localized headache or toothache is present, and these symptoms distinguish a sinus-related headache from other types of headaches, such as tension and migraine headaches. Another way to distinguish between toothache and sinusitis is that the pain in sinusitis is usually worsened by tilting the head forward and with the Valsalva maneuver.
Infection of the eye socket is possible, which may result in the loss of sight and is accompanied by fever and severe illness. Another possible complication is the infection of the bones (osteomyelitis) of the forehead and other facial bones – Pott's puffy tumor.
Sinus infections can also cause middle-ear problems due to the congestion of the nasal passages. This can be demonstrated by dizziness, "a pressurized or heavy head", or vibrating sensations in the head. Postnasal drip is also a symptom of chronic rhinosinusitis.
Halitosis (bad breath) is often stated to be a symptom of chronic rhinosinusitis; however, gold-standard breath analysis techniques have not been applied. Theoretically, several possible mechanisms of both objective and subjective halitosis may be involved.
A 2004 study suggested that up to 90% of "sinus headaches" are actually migraines. The confusion occurs in part because migraine involves activation of the trigeminal nerves, which innervate both the sinus region and the meninges surrounding the brain. As a result, accurately determining the site from which the pain originates is difficult. People with migraines do not typically have the thick nasal discharge that is a common symptom of a sinus infection.
Symptoms may include any combination of: nasal congestion, facial pain, headache, night-time coughing, an increase in previously minor or controlled asthma symptoms, general malaise, thick green or yellow discharge, feeling of facial fullness or tightness that may worsen when bending over, dizziness, aching teeth, and/or bad breath. Often, chronic sinusitis can lead to anosmia, the inability to smell objects. In a small number of cases, acute or chronic maxillary sinusitis is associated with a dental infection. Vertigo, lightheadedness, and blurred vision are not typical in chronic sinusitis and other causes should be investigated.
The four paired paranasal sinuses are the frontal, ethmoidal, maxillary, and sphenoidal sinuses. The ethmoidal sinuses are further subdivided into anterior and posterior ethmoid sinuses, the division of which is defined as the basal lamella of the middle nasal concha. In addition to the severity of disease, discussed below, sinusitis can be classified by the sinus cavity it affects:
The proximity of the brain to the sinuses makes the most dangerous complication of sinusitis, particularly involving the frontal and sphenoid sinuses, infection of the brain by the invasion of anaerobic bacteria through the bones or blood vessels. Abscesses, meningitis, and other life-threatening conditions may result. In extreme cases, the patient may experience mild personality changes, headache, altered consciousness, visual problems, seizures, coma, and possibly death.
Sinus infection can spread through anastomosing veins or by direct extension to close structures. Orbital complications were categorized by Chandler et al. into five stages according to their severity (see table). Contiguous spread to the orbit may result in periorbital cellulitis, subperiosteal abscess, orbital cellulitis, and abscess. Orbital cellulitis can complicate acute ethmoiditis if anterior and posterior ethmoidal veins thrombophlebitis enables the spread of the infection to the lateral or orbital side of the ethmoid labyrinth. Sinusitis may extend to the central nervous system, where it may cause cavernous sinus thrombosis, retrograde meningitis, and epidural, subdural, and brain abscesses. Orbital symptoms frequently precede intracranial spread of the infection . Other complications include sinobronchitis, maxillary osteomyelitis, and frontal bone osteomyelitis. Osteomyelitis of the frontal bone often originates from a spreading thrombophlebitis. A periostitis of the frontal sinus causes an osteitis and a periostitis of the outer membrane, which produces a tender, puffy swelling of the forehead.
The diagnosis of these complications can be assisted by noting local tenderness and dull pain, and can be confirmed by CT and nuclear isotope scanning. The most common microbial causes are anaerobic bacteria and "S. aureus". Treatment includes performing surgical drainage and administration of antimicrobial therapy. Surgical debridement is rarely required after an extended course of parenteral antimicrobial therapy. Chronic sinus infections may lead to mouth breathing, which can result in mouth dryness and an increased risk of gingivitis. Decongestants may also cause mouth dryness.
Maxillary sinusitis may also develop from problems with the teeth, and these cases make up between 10 and 40% of cases. The cause of this situation is usually a periapical or periodontal infection of a maxillary posterior tooth, where the inflammatory exudate has eroded through the bone superiorly to drain into the maxillary sinus. Once an odontogenic infection involves the maxillary sinus, it may then spread to the orbit or to the ethmoid sinus, the nasal cavity, and frontal sinuses, and in unusual instances can spread from the maxillary sinus causing orbital cellulitis, blindness, meningitis, subdural empyema, brain abscess and life-threatening cavernous sinus thrombosis. Limited field CBCT imaging, as compared to periapical radiographs, improves the ability to detect the teeth as the sources for sinusitis. Treatment focuses on removing the infection and preventing reinfection, by removal of the microorganisms, their byproducts, and pulpal debris from the infected root canal. Systemic antibiotics are ineffective as a definitive solution, but may afford temporary relief of symptoms by improving sinus clearing, and may be appropriate for rapidly spreading infections, but debridement and disinfection of the root canal system at the same time is necessary.
Chronic sinusitis can also be caused indirectly through a common but slight abnormality in the auditory or eustachian tube, which is connected to the sinus cavities and the throat. Other diseases such as cystic fibrosis and granulomatosis with polyangiitis can also cause chronic sinusitis. This tube is usually almost level with the eye sockets, but when this sometimes hereditary abnormality is present, it is below this level and sometimes level with the vestibule or nasal entrance.
Acute sinusitis is usually precipitated by an earlier upper respiratory tract infection, generally of viral origin, mostly caused by rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and influenza viruses, others caused by adenoviruses, human parainfluenza viruses, human respiratory syncytial virus, enteroviruses other than rhinoviruses, and metapneumovirus. If the infection is of bacterial origin, the most common three causative agents are "Streptococcus pneumoniae", "Haemophilus influenzae", and "Moraxella catarrhalis". Until recently, "H. influenzae" was the most common bacterial agent to cause sinus infections. However, introduction of the "H. influenzae" type B (Hib) vaccine has dramatically decreased these infections and now non-typable "H. influenzae" (NTHI) is predominantly seen in clinics. Other sinusitis-causing bacterial pathogens include "S. aureus" and other streptococci species, anaerobic bacteria and, less commonly, Gram-negative bacteria. Viral sinusitis typically lasts for 7 to 10 days, whereas bacterial sinusitis is more persistent. Around 0.5 to 2.0% of viral sinusitis results in subsequent bacterial sinusitis.
Acute episodes of sinusitis can also result from fungal invasion. These infections are typically seen in people with diabetes or other immune deficiencies (such as AIDS or transplant on immunosuppressive antirejection medications) and can be life-threatening. In type I diabetics, ketoacidosis can be associated with sinusitis due to mucormycosis.
Chemical irritation can also trigger sinusitis, commonly from cigarette smoke and chlorine fumes. It may also be caused by a tooth infection.
By definition, chronic sinusitis lasts longer than 12 weeks and can be caused by many different diseases that share chronic inflammation of the sinuses as a common symptom. It is subdivided into cases with and without polyps. When polyps are present, the condition is called chronic hyperplastic sinusitis; however, the causes are poorly understood and may include allergy, environmental factors such as dust or pollution, bacterial infection, or fungi (either allergic, infective, or reactive). It may develop with anatomic derangements, including deviation of the nasal septum and the presence of concha bullosa (pneumatization of the middle concha) that inhibit the outflow of mucus, or with allergic rhinitis, asthma, cystic fibrosis, and dental infections.
Chronic rhinosinusitis represents a multifactorial inflammatory disorder, rather than simply a persistent bacterial infection. The medical management of chronic rhinosinusitis is now focused upon controlling the inflammation that predisposes people to obstruction, reducing the incidence of infections. However, all forms of chronic rhinosinusitis are associated with impaired sinus drainage and secondary bacterial infections. Most individuals require initial antibiotics to clear any infection and intermittently afterwards to treat acute exacerbations of chronic rhinosinusitis. Surgery may be needed if medications are not working.
A combination of anaerobic and aerobic bacteria is detected in conjunction with chronic sinusitis. Also isolated are "S. aureus", including methicillin-resistant "S. aureus", and coagulase-negative staphylococci and Gram-negative enteric bacteria can be isolated.
Attempts have been made to provide a more consistent nomenclature for subtypes of chronic sinusitis. The presence of eosinophils in the mucous lining of the nose and paranasal sinuses has been demonstrated for many people, and this has been termed eosinophilic mucin rhinosinusitis (EMRS). Cases of EMRS may be related to an allergic response, but allergy is not often documented, resulting in further subcategorization into allergic and nonallergic EMRS.
A more recent, and still debated, development in chronic sinusitis is the role that fungi play in this disease. Whether fungi are a definite factor in the development of chronic sinusitis remains unclear, and if they are, what is the difference between those who develop the disease and those who remain free of symptoms. Trials of antifungal treatments have had mixed results.
Recent theories of sinusitis indicate that it often occurs as part of a spectrum of diseases that affect the respiratory tract ("i.e.", the "one airway" theory) and is often linked to asthma. All forms of sinusitis may either result in, or be a part of, a generalized inflammation of the airway, so other airway symptoms, such as cough, may be associated with it.
Both smoking and secondhand smoke are associated with chronic rhinosinusitis.
Biofilm bacterial infections may account for many cases of antibiotic-refractory chronic sinusitis. Biofilms are complex aggregates of extracellular matrix and interdependent microorganisms from multiple species, many of which may be difficult or impossible to isolate using standard clinical laboratory techniques. Bacteria found in biofilms have their antibiotic resistance increased up to 1000 times when compared to free-living bacteria of the same species. A recent study found that biofilms were present on the mucosa of 75% of people undergoing surgery for chronic sinusitis.
Sinusitis (or rhinosinusitis) is defined as an inflammation of the mucous membrane that lines the paranasal sinuses and is classified chronologically into several categories:
Roughly 90% of adults have had sinusitis at some point in their lives.
Health care providers distinguish bacterial and viral sinusitis by watchful waiting. If a person has had sinusitis for fewer than 10 days without the symptoms becoming worse, then the infection is presumed to be viral. When symptoms last more than 10 days or get worse in that time, then the infection is considered bacterial sinusitis. Pain in the teeth and bad breath are also more indicative of bacterial disease.
Imaging by either X-ray, CT or MRI is generally not recommended unless complications develop. Pain caused by sinusitis is sometimes confused for pain caused by pulpitis (toothache) of the maxillary teeth, and vice versa. Classically, the increased pain when tilting the head forwards separates sinusitis from pulpitis.
For sinusitis lasting more than 12 weeks, a CT scan is recommended. On a CT scan, acute sinus secretions have a radiodensity of 10 to 25 Hounsfield units (HU), but in a more chronic state they become more viscous, with a radiodensity of 30 to 60 HU.
Nasal endoscopy and clinical symptoms are also used to make a positive diagnosis. A tissue sample for histology and cultures can also be collected and tested. Nasal endoscopy involves inserting a flexible fiber-optic tube with a light and camera at its tip into the nose to examine the nasal passages and sinuses.
Sinus infections, if they result in tooth pain, usually present with pain involving more than one of the upper teeth, whereas a toothache usually involves a single tooth. Dental examination and appropriate radiography aid in ruling out pain arise from a tooth.
Recommended treatments for most cases of sinusitis include rest and drinking enough water to thin the mucus. Antibiotics are not recommended for most cases.
Breathing low-temperature steam such as from a hot shower or gargling can relieve symptoms. There is tentative evidence for nasal irrigation in acute sinusitis, for example during upper respiratory infections. Decongestant nasal sprays containing oxymetazoline may provide relief, but these medications should not be used for more than the recommended period. Longer use may cause rebound sinusitis. It is unclear if nasal irrigation, antihistamines, or decongestants work in children with acute sinusitis. There is no clear evidence that plant extracts such as cyclamen europaeum are effective as an intranasal wash to treat acute sinusitis. Evidence is inconclusive on whether anti-fungal treatments improve symptoms or quality of life.
Most sinusitis cases are caused by viruses and resolve without antibiotics. However, if symptoms do not resolve within 10 days, amoxicillin is a reasonable antibiotic for first treatment, with amoxicillin/clavulanate being indicated if symptoms do not improve after 7 days on amoxicillin alone. A 2012 Cochrane review, however, found only a small benefit between 7 and 14 days, and could not recommend the practice when compared to potential complications and risk of developing resistance. Antibiotics are specifically not recommended in those with mild / moderate disease during the first week of infection due to risk of adverse effects, antibiotic resistance, and cost.
Fluoroquinolones, and a newer macrolide antibiotic such as clarithromycin or a tetracycline like doxycycline, are used in those who have severe allergies to penicillins. Because of increasing resistance to amoxicillin the 2012 guideline of the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends amoxicillin-clavulanate as the initial treatment of choice for bacterial sinusitis. The guidelines also recommend against other commonly used antibiotics, including azithromycin, clarithromycin, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, because of growing antibiotic resistance. The FDA recommends against the use of fluoroquinolones when other options are available due to higher risks of serious side effects.
A short-course (3–7 days) of antibiotics seems to be just as effective as the typical longer-course (10–14 days) of antibiotics for those with clinically diagnosed acute bacterial sinusitis without any other severe disease or complicating factors. The IDSA guideline suggest five to seven days of antibiotics is long enough to treat a bacterial infection without encouraging resistance. The guidelines still recommend children receive antibiotic treatment for ten days to two weeks.
For unconfirmed acute sinusitis, nasal sprays using corticosteroids have not been found to be better than a placebo either alone or in combination with antibiotics. For cases confirmed by radiology or nasal endoscopy, treatment with intranasal corticosteroids alone or in combination with antibiotics is supported. The benefit, however, is small.
For confirmed chronic rhinosinusitis, there is limited evidence that intranasal steroids improve symptoms and insufficient evidence that one type of steroid is more effective.
There is only limited evidence to support short treatment with corticosteroids by mouth for chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps. There is limited evidence to support corticosteroids by mouth in combination with antibiotics for acute sinusitis; it has only short-term effect improving the symptoms.
For chronic or recurring sinusitis, referral to an otolaryngologist may be indicated, and treatment options may include nasal surgery. Surgery should only be considered for those people who do not benefit with medication. It is unclear how benefits of surgery compare to medical treatments in those with nasal polyps as this has been poorly studied.
Maxillary antral washout involves puncturing the sinus and flushing with saline to clear the mucus. A 1996 study of people with chronic sinusitis found that washout confers no additional benefits over antibiotics alone.
A number of surgical approaches can be used to access the sinuses and these have generally shifted from external/extranasal approaches to intranasal endoscopic ones. The benefit of functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is its ability to allow for a more targeted approach to the affected sinuses, reducing tissue disruption, and minimizing post-operative complications. The use of drug eluting stents such as propel mometasone furoate implant may help in recovery after surgery.
Another recently developed treatment is balloon sinuplasty. This method, similar to balloon angioplasty used to "unclog" arteries of the heart, utilizes balloons in an attempt to expand the openings of the sinuses in a less invasive manner. The effectiveness of the functional endoscopic balloon dilation approach compared to conventional FESS is not known.
For persistent symptoms and disease in people who have failed medical and the functional endoscopic approaches, older techniques can be used to address the inflammation of the maxillary sinus, such as the Caldwell-luc antrostomy. This surgery involves an incision in the upper gum, opening in the anterior wall of the antrum, removal of the entire diseased maxillary sinus mucosa and drainage is allowed into inferior or middle meatus by creating a large window in the lateral nasal wall.
Sinusitis is a common condition, with between 24 and 31 million cases occurring in the United States annually. Chronic sinusitis affects approximately 12.5% of people.
Based on recent theories on the role that fungus may play in the development of chronic sinusitis, antifungal treatments have been used, on a trial basis. These trials have had mixed results. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28598 |
Aos Sí
The (; older form ) is the Irish term for a supernatural race in Irish mythology and Scottish mythology (where it is usually spelled Sìth, but pronounced the same), comparable to the fairies or elves.
They are said to live underground in fairy mounds, across the western sea, or in an invisible world that coexists with the world of humans. This world is described in the "Lebor Gabála Érenn" as a parallel universe in which the "aos sí" walk amongst the living. In the Irish language, "aos sí" means "people of the mounds" (the mounds are known in Irish as "the "sídhe""). In modern Irish the people of the mounds are also called daoine sídhe ; in Scottish mythology they are daoine sìth. They are variously said to be the ancestors, the spirits of nature, or goddesses and gods.
Some secondary and tertiary sources in English, including well-known and influential authors such as W. B. Yeats, refer to "aos sí" simply as "the "sídhe" (lit. "mounds").
In many Gaelic tales, the "aos sí" are later, literary versions of the Tuatha Dé Danann ("People of the Goddess Danu")—the deities and deified ancestors of Irish mythology. Some sources describe them as the survivors of the Tuatha Dé Danann who retreated into the Otherworld when fleeing the mortal Sons of Míl Espáine who, like many other early invaders of Ireland, came from Iberia. As part of the terms of their surrender to the Milesians, the Tuatha Dé Danann agreed to retreat and dwell underground. (In later interpretations, each tribe of the Tuatha Dé Danann was given its own mound.) Geoffrey Keating, an Irish historian of the early 17th century, equates Iberia with the Land of the Dead, providing a possible connection to the "aos sí."
In folk belief and practice, the "aos sí" are often appeased with offerings, and care is taken to avoid angering or insulting them. Often they are not named directly, but rather spoken of as "The Good Neighbors", "The Fair Folk", or simply "The Folk". The most common names for them, "aos sí", "aes sídhe", "daoine sídhe" (singular "duine sídhe") and "daoine sìth" mean, literally, "people of the mounds" (referring to the "sídhe"). The "aos sí" are generally described as stunningly beautiful, though they can also be terrible and hideous.
"Aos sí" are seen as fierce guardians of their abodes—whether a fairy hill, a fairy ring, a special tree (often a hawthorn) or a particular loch or wood. It is believed that infringing on these spaces will cause the "aos sí" to retaliate in an effort to remove the people or objects that invaded their homes. Many of these tales contribute to the changeling myth in west European folklore, with the "aos sí" kidnapping trespassers or replacing their children with changelings as a punishment for transgressing. The "aos sí" are often connected to certain times of year and hours; as the Gaelic Otherworld is believed to come closer to the mortal world at the times of dusk and dawn, the "aos sí" correspondingly become easier to encounter. Some festivals such as Samhain, Beltane and Midsummer are also associated with the "aos sí."
"Sídhe" are the hills or tumuli that dot the Irish landscape. In modern Irish the word is "sí"; in Scottish Gaelic, "sìth"; in Old Irish "síde" and the singular is "síd". In a number of later, English-language texts, the word "sídhe" is incorrectly used both for the mounds and the people of the mounds. However "sidh" in older texts refers specifically to "the palaces, courts, halls or residences" of the otherworldly beings that supposedly inhabit them. The fact that many of these "sídhe" have been found to be ancient burial mounds has contributed to the theory that the "aos sí" were the pre-Celtic occupants of Ireland.
Others present these stories as mythology deriving from Greek cultural influence, deriving arguments mainly from Hesiod's "Works and Days", which portrays the basic moral foundation and plantation techniques of the citizens of Greece and describes the races of men, created by the Greek deities. However, many of these views have been deemed unlikely, and the influence can be explained by the similar moral foundations stemming from the two cultures' Indo-European background.
The banshee or "bean sídhe" (from ), which means "woman of the "sídhe"", has come to indicate any supernatural woman of Ireland who announces a coming death by wailing and keening. Her counterpart in Scottish mythology is the "bean sìth" (sometimes spelled "bean-sìdh"). Other varieties of "aos sí" and "daoine sìth" include the Scottish "bean nighe": the washerwoman who is seen washing the bloody clothing or armour of the person who is doomed to die; the "leanan sídhe": the "fairy lover"; the "cat sìth": a fairy cat; and the "Cù Sìth": fairy dog.
The "sluagh sídhe"—"the fairy host"—is sometimes depicted in Irish and Scottish lore as a crowd of airborne spirits, perhaps the cursed, evil or restless dead. The "siabhra" (anglicised as "sheevra"), may be a type of these lesser spirits, prone to evil and mischief. However, an Ulster folk song also uses "sheevra" simply to mean "spirit" or "fairy".
' is Irish for the "Fairy Faith", a collection of beliefs and practices observed by those who wish to keep good relationships with the ' and avoid angering them. The custom of offering milk and traditional foods—such as baked goods, apples or berries—to the ' have survived through the Christian era into the present day in parts of Ireland, Scotland and the diaspora. Those who maintain some degree of belief in the ' also are aware to leave their sacred places alone and protect them from damage through road or housing construction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28601 |
Star cluster
Star clusters are very large groups of stars. Two types of star clusters can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds to millions of old stars which are gravitationally bound, while open clusters, more loosely clustered groups of stars, generally contain fewer than a few hundred members, and are often very young. Open clusters become disrupted over time by the gravitational influence of giant molecular clouds as they move through the Galaxy, but cluster members will continue to move in broadly the same direction through space even though they are no longer gravitationally bound; they are then known as a stellar association, sometimes also referred to as a "moving group".
Star clusters visible to the naked eye include the Pleiades (M45), Hyades, and the Beehive Cluster (M44).
Globular clusters are roughly spherical groupings of from 10,000 to several million stars packed into regions of from 10 to 30 light-years across. They commonly consist of very old Population II stars—just a few hundred million years younger than the universe itself—which are mostly yellow and red, with masses less than two solar masses. Such stars predominate within clusters because hotter and more massive stars have exploded as supernovae, or evolved through planetary nebula phases to end as white dwarfs. Yet a few rare blue stars exist in globulars, thought to be formed by stellar mergers in their dense inner regions; these stars are known as blue stragglers.
In our Galaxy, globular clusters are distributed roughly spherically in the galactic halo, around the Galactic Centre, orbiting the centre in highly elliptical orbits. In 1917, the astronomer Harlow Shapley made the first reliable estimate of the Sun's distance from the galactic centre based on the distribution of globular clusters.
Until the mid-1990s, globular clusters were the cause of a great mystery in astronomy, as theories of stellar evolution gave ages for the oldest members of globular clusters that were greater than the estimated age of the universe. However, greatly improved distance measurements to globular clusters using the Hipparcos satellite and increasingly accurate measurements of the Hubble constant resolved the paradox, giving an age for the universe of about 13 billion years and an age for the oldest stars of a few hundred million years less.
Our Galaxy has about 150 globular clusters, some of which may have been captured from small galaxies disrupted by the Milky Way, as seems to be the case for the globular cluster M79. Some galaxies are much richer in globulars: the giant elliptical galaxy M87 contains over a thousand.
A few of the brightest globular clusters are visible to the naked eye, with the brightest, Omega Centauri, having been known since antiquity and catalogued as a star before the telescopic age. The brightest globular cluster in the northern hemisphere is Messier 13 in the constellation of Hercules.
Super star clusters are very large regions of recent star formation, and are thought to be the precursors of globular clusters. Examples include Westerlund 1 in the Milky Way.
Open clusters are very different from globular clusters. Unlike the spherically distributed globulars, they are confined to the galactic plane, and are almost always found within spiral arms. They are generally young objects, up to a few tens of millions of years old, with a few rare exceptions as old as a few billion years, such as Messier 67 (the closest and most observed old open cluster) for example. They form H II regions such as the Orion Nebula.
Open clusters usually contain up to a few hundred members, within a region up to about 30 light-years across. Being much less densely populated than globular clusters, they are much less tightly gravitationally bound, and over time, are disrupted by the gravity of giant molecular clouds and other clusters. Close encounters between cluster members can also result in the ejection of stars, a process known as 'evaporation'.
The most prominent open clusters are the Pleiades and Hyades in Taurus. The Double Cluster of h+Chi Persei can also be prominent under dark skies. Open clusters are often dominated by hot young blue stars, because although such stars are short-lived in stellar terms, only lasting a few tens of millions of years, open clusters tend to have dispersed before these stars die.
Establishing precise distances to open clusters enables the calibration of the period-luminosity relationship shown by Cepheids variable stars, which are then used as standard candles. Cepheids are luminous and can be used to establish both the distances to remote galaxies and the expansion rate of the Universe (Hubble constant). Indeed, the open cluster NGC 7790 hosts three classical Cepheids which are critical for such efforts.
Embedded clusters are groups of very young stars that are partially or fully encased in an Interstellar dust or gas which is often impervious to optical observations. Embedded clusters form in molecular clouds, when the clouds begin to collapse and form stars. There is often ongoing star formation in these clusters, so embedded clusters may be home to various types of young stellar objects including protostars and pre-main-sequence stars. An example of an embedded cluster is the Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula. In ρ Ophiuchi cloud (L1688) core region there is an embedded cluster.
The embedded cluster phase may last for several million years, after which gas in the cloud is depleted by star formation or dispersed through radiation pressure, stellar winds and outflows, or supernova explosions. In general less than 30% of cloud mass is converted to stars before the cloud is dispersed, but this fraction may be higher in particularly dense parts of the cloud. With the loss of mass in the cloud, the energy of the system is altered, often leading to the disruption of a star cluster. Most young embedded clusters disperse shortly after the end of star formation.
The open clusters found in the Galaxy are former embedded clusters that were able to survive early cluster evolution. However, nearly all freely floating stars, including the Sun, were originally born into embedded clusters that disintegrated.
In 2005, astronomers discovered a new type of star cluster in the Andromeda Galaxy, which is, in several ways, very similar to globular clusters although less dense. No such clusters (which also known as "extended globular clusters") are known in the Milky Way. The three discovered in Andromeda Galaxy are M31WFS C1 M31WFS C2, and M31WFS C3.
These new-found star clusters contain hundreds of thousands of stars, a similar number to globular clusters. The clusters also share other characteristics with globular clusters, "e.g." the stellar populations and metallicity. What distinguishes them from the globular clusters is that they are much larger – several hundred light-years across – and hundreds of times less dense. The distances between the stars are thus much greater. The clusters have properties intermediate between globular clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies.
How these clusters are formed is not yet known, but their formation might well be related to that of globular clusters. Why M31 has such clusters, while the Milky Way has not, is not yet known. It is also unknown if any other galaxy contains this kind of clusters, but it would be very unlikely that M31 is the sole galaxy with extended clusters.
Another type of cluster are "faint fuzzies" which so far have only been found in lenticular galaxies like NGC 1023 and NGC 3384. They are characterized by their large size compared to globular clusters and a ringlike distribution around the centres of their host galaxies. As the latter they seem to be old objects.
Stellar clusters are important in many areas of astronomy. Because the stars were all born at roughly the same time, the different properties of all the stars in a cluster are a function only of mass, and so stellar evolution theories rely on observations of open and globular clusters.
Clusters are also a crucial step in determining the distance scale of the universe. A few of the nearest clusters are close enough for their distances to be measured using parallax. A Hertzsprung–Russell diagram can be plotted for these clusters which has absolute values known on the luminosity axis. Then, when similar diagram is plotted for a cluster whose distance is not known, the position of the main sequence can be compared to that of the first cluster and the distance estimated. This process is known as main-sequence fitting. Reddening and stellar populations must be accounted for when using this method.
Nearly all stars in the Galactic field, including the Sun, were initially born in regions with embedded clusters that disintegrated. This means that properties of stars and planetary systems may have been affected by early clustered environments. This appears to be the case for our own Solar System, in which chemical abundances point to the effects of a supernova from a nearby star early in our Solar System's history.
A large group of many stars spread over very many light-years of space; the stars are not part of any structure but are in an area of greater than average stellar density. Examples of star clouds include the Sagittarius Star Cloud, Scutum Star Cloud, and NGC 206.
In 1979, the International Astronomical Union's 17th general assembly recommended that newly discovered star clusters, open or globular, within the Galaxy have designations following the convention "Chhmm±ddd", always beginning with the prefix "C", where "h", "m", and "d" represent the approximate coordinates of the cluster centre in hours and minutes of right ascension, and degrees of declination, respectively, with leading zeros. The designation, once assigned, is not to change, even if subsequent measurements improve on the location of the cluster centre. The first of such designations were assigned by Gosta Lynga in 1982. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28603 |
Seinfeld
Seinfeld is an American sitcom television series created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld for NBC. As a comedian rising in popularity in the late 1980s, Seinfeld was presented with an opportunity to create a show with NBC. Seinfeld asked fellow comedian and friend Larry David to help create a premise for a sitcom. The show stars Seinfeld as a fictionalized version of himself, and mostly focuses on his personal life with a handful of friends and acquaintances, including best friend George Costanza (Jason Alexander), friend and former girlfriend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and neighbor across the hall Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards). "Seinfeld" is set predominantly in an apartment building in Manhattan's Upper West Side in New York City. It is often described as being "a show about nothing", as many of its episodes are about the minutiae of daily life.
"Seinfeld" was produced by West-Shapiro Productions and Castle Rock Entertainment and ran from 1989 to 1998. The series was distributed by Columbia Pictures Television.1 It was largely written by David and Seinfeld with script writers who included Larry Charles, Peter Mehlman, Gregg Kavet, Carol Leifer, David Mandel, Jeff Schaffer, Steve Koren, Jennifer Crittenden, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Dan O'Keefe, Charlie Rubin, Marjorie Gross, Alec Berg, Elaine Pope, and Spike Feresten. A favorite among critics, the series led the Nielsen ratings in seasons six and nine, and finished among the top two (with NBC's "ER") every year from 1994 to 1998. Only two other shows have finished their runs at the top of the ratings, "I Love Lucy" and "The Andy Griffith Show".
"Seinfeld" is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential sitcoms of all time. It has been ranked among the best television shows of all time in publications such as "Entertainment Weekly", "Rolling Stone", and "TV Guide". The show's most renowned episodes include "The Chinese Restaurant", "The Parking Garage", and "The Contest". In 2013, the Writers Guild of America voted it the No. 2 Best Written TV Series of All Time (second to "The Sopranos"). E! named the series the "Number 1 reason the '90s ruled", and quotes from numerous episodes have become catchphrases in American popular culture.
Many characters have made multiple appearances, like Jerry's nemesis Newman and his Uncle Leo. In addition to recurring characters, "Seinfeld" features numerous celebrities who appear as themselves or girlfriends, boyfriends, bosses and other acquaintances. Many actors who made guest appearances became household names later in their careers, or were already well known.
Many "Seinfeld" episodes are based on the writers' real-life experiences, with the experiences reinterpreted for the characters' storylines. For example, George's storyline, "The Revenge", is based on Larry David's experience at "Saturday Night Live". "The Contest" is also based on David's experiences. "The Smelly Car" storyline is based on Peter Mehlman's lawyer friend, who could not get a bad smell out of his car. "The Strike" is based on Dan O'Keefe's dad, who made up his own holiday—Festivus. Other stories take on a variety of turns. "The Chinese Restaurant" consists of George, Jerry and Elaine waiting for a table throughout the entire episode. "The Boyfriend", revolving around Keith Hernandez, extends through 2 episodes. "The Betrayal" is famous for using reverse chronology, and was inspired by a similar plot device in a Harold Pinter play, "Betrayal". Some stories were inspired by headlines and rumors, as explained in the DVD features "Notes About Nothing", "Inside Look", and "Audio Commentary". In "The Maestro", Kramer's lawsuit is roughly similar to the McDonald's coffee case. "The Outing" is based primarily on rumors that Larry Charles heard about Jerry Seinfeld's sexuality.
The series was often described as "a show about nothing". However, Seinfeld in 2014 stated "the pitch for the show, the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that." Much of the show's humor is based upon repeated use of irony, incongruity, and (oftentimes unfortunate) coincidence(s) as plot devices for many of the individual episodes' plots and humorous moments.
"Seinfeld" broke several conventions of mainstream television. Larry David is credited with refusing to follow the predictable sitcom formula that would have a blossoming romantic relationship develop between Jerry and Elaine. The show offers no growth or reconciliation to its characters. It eschews sentimentality. An episode is typically driven by humor interspersed with the superficial conflicts of characters with peculiar dispositions. Many episodes revolve around the characters' involvement in the lives of others with typically disastrous results. On the set, the notion that the characters should not develop or improve throughout the series was expressed as the "no hugging, no learning" rule. Also unlike most sitcoms, there are no moments of pathos; the audience is never made to feel sorry for any of the characters. Even Susan's death elicits no genuine emotions from anybody in the show. "Seinfeld" does not shy away from making light of tough topics, from death to illness to handicaps.
The characters are "thirty-something singles with vague identities, no roots, and conscious indifference to morals". Usual conventions, like isolating the characters from the actors playing them and separating the characters' world from that of the actors and audience, were broken. One such example is the story arc where the characters promote a TV sitcom series named "Jerry". The show within a show, "Jerry", was much like "Seinfeld" in that it was "about nothing" and Seinfeld played himself. The fictional "Jerry" was launched in the season four finale, but unlike "Seinfeld", it wasn't picked up as a series. "Jerry" is one of many examples of metafiction in the show. There are no fewer than twenty-two fictional movies featured, like "Rochelle, Rochelle". Because of these several elements, "Seinfeld" became the first TV series since "Monty Python's Flying Circus" to be widely described as postmodern.
Jerry Seinfeld is an avid Abbott and Costello fan, and has cited the Abbott and Costello Show as an influence on "Seinfeld." "Everybody on the show knows I'm a fan. We're always joking about how we do stuff from their show. George and I will often get into a riff that has the rhythm from the old Abbott and Costello shows. And sometimes I'll hit George in the chest the way Abbott would hit Costello." The series includes numerous references to the team. George Costanza's middle name is "Louis," after Costello. "The Old Man" episode features a cantankerous character named "Sid Fields" as a tribute to the landlord on the team's TV show. Kramer's friend is named Mickey Abbott. A copywriter for the J. Peterman catalog is named Eddie Sherman, after the team's longtime agent. In Episode 30, Kramer hears the famous Abbott and Costello line, "His father was a mudder. His mother was a mudder."
Many terms were coined, popularized, or re-popularized in the series' run and have become part of popular culture, such as "Yada, yada, yada", "No soup for you!" and "not that there's anything wrong with that".
The lexicon of Seinfeldian code words and recurring phrases that evolved around particular episodes is referred to as Seinlanguage, the title of Jerry Seinfeld's best-selling book on humor.
A signature of "Seinfeld" is its theme music. Composed by Jonathan Wolff, it consists of distinct solo sampled bass synthesizer riffs (played on a Korg M1 synthesizer) which open the show and connect the scenes, often accompanied by beatboxing. The bass synthesizer music eventually replaced the original piano/synth music by Jep Epstein when it was played again after the first broadcast of the pilot episode. The show lacked a traditional title track and the riffs were played over the first moments of dialogue or action. They vary throughout each episode and are played in an improvised funk style. An additional musical theme with an ensemble, led by a synthesized mid-range brass instrument, ends each episode.
In "The Note", the first episode of season three, the bumper music featured a scatting female jazz singer who sang a phrase that sounded like "easy to beat". Jerry Seinfeld and executive producer Larry David both liked Wolff's additions, and three episodes were produced with this new style music. However, they had neglected to inform NBC and Castle Rock executives of the change, and when the season premiere aired, the executives were surprised and unimpressed, and requested that they return to the original style. The subsequent two episodes were redone, leaving this episode as the only one with additional music elements. In the commentary of "The Note", Louis-Dreyfus facetiously suggests it was removed because the perceived lyric related closely to the low ratings at the time.
In the final three seasons, the bits were tweaked slightly with more frantic rhythms; a bass guitar was added in addition to the sampled bass from earlier seasons. Throughout the show, the main theme could be restyled in different ways depending on the episode. For instance, in "The Betrayal", part of which takes place in India, the theme is heard played on a sitar.
"Seinfeld" stood out from family and group sitcoms of its time. The principal characters are not related by family or work connections but remain distinctively close friends throughout the series.
Many characters were based primarily on Seinfeld's and David's real-life acquaintances. Two prominent recurring characters were based on well-known people: Jacopo Peterman of the J. Peterman catalog (based on John Peterman), and George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees. Many characters were introduced as new writers got involved with "Seinfeld". Other characters based on real people include the Soup Nazi and Jackie Chiles, who was based on Johnnie Cochran.
"Seinfeld" follows its own structure: story thread is presented at the beginning of every episode, which involves the characters starting in their own situations. Rapid scene-shifts between plot lines bring the stories together. Even though it does not follow a pattern as other sitcoms, the characters' stories variously intertwine in each episode. Despite the separate plot strands, the narratives reveal the creators' "consistent efforts to maintain the intimacy" among the small cast of characters.
The show maintains a strong sense of continuity—characters and plots from past episodes are often referenced or expanded on. Occasionally, story arcs span multiple episodes and even entire seasons, the most memorable being season four, which revolved around the pilot pitch to NBC by Jerry and George. Another example is Jerry's girlfriend Vanessa, who appears in "The Stake Out" and he ends the relationship when things do not work out in "The Stock Tip". Other examples are Kramer getting his jacket back and Elaine heading the "Peterman catalog". Larry David, the head writer and executive producer for the first seven seasons, was praised for keeping a close eye on minor details and making sure the main characters' lives remained consistent and believable. "Curb Your Enthusiasm"—David's later comedy series—expanded on this idea by following a specific theme for all but one season in the series.
A major difference between "Seinfeld" and sitcoms which preceded it is that the principal characters never learn from their mistakes. In effect, they are indifferent and even callous towards the outside world and sometimes one another. A mantra of the show's producers was: "No hugging, no learning". "Entertainment Weekly"'s TV critic Ken Tucker has described them as "a group dynamic rooted in jealousy, rage, insecurity, despair, hopelessness, and a touching lack of faith in one's fellow human beings". This leads to very few happy endings, except at somebody else's expense. More often in every episode, situations resolve with characters getting a justly deserved comeuppance.
The show premiered as "The Seinfeld Chronicles" on July 5, 1989. After it aired, a pickup by NBC seemed unlikely and the show was offered to Fox, which declined to pick it up. Rick Ludwin, head of late night and special events for NBC, however, diverted money from his budget by canceling a Bob Hope television special, and the next 4 episodes were filmed. These episodes were highly rated as they followed summer re-runs of "Cheers" on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m., and the series was finally picked up. At one point NBC considered airing these episodes on Saturdays at 10:30 p.m., but gave that slot to a short-lived sitcom called "FM". The series was renamed simply "Seinfeld" after the failure of short-lived 1990 ABC series "The Marshall Chronicles". After airing the remaining four episodes of its first season the summer of 1990, NBC ordered thirteen more episodes. Larry David believed that he and Jerry Seinfeld had no more stories to tell, and advised Seinfeld to turn down the order, but Seinfeld agreed to the additional episodes. Season two was bumped off its scheduled premiere of January 16, 1991, due to the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. It settled into a regular time slot on Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. and eventually flipped with veteran series "Night Court" to 9:00.
TV critics championed "Seinfeld" in its early seasons, even as it was slow to cultivate a substantial audience. For the first three seasons, Jerry's stand-up comedy act would bookend an episode, even functioning as cut scenes during the show. A few episodes set a benchmark for later seasons. "The Deal" establishes Jerry and Elaine's relationship by setting rules about sleeping together and remaining friends. "The Parking Garage" was the first episode shot with no audience for the episode and, after "The Chinese Restaurant", with not showing Jerry's apartment. "The Keys" contains a crossover to CBS show "Murphy Brown", marking the first such cooperation between rival networks. "The Busboy" introduces George, Kramer and Elaine as having their own storylines for the first time. Although Castle Rock Entertainment's Glenn Padnick thought Jerry Seinfeld was too generous, showcasing his co-stars' comedic talent became a trademark throughout the series.
Larry Charles wrote an episode for season two, "The Bet", in which Elaine buys a gun from Kramer's friend. This episode wasn't filmed because the content was deemed unacceptable, and was replaced by the episode "The Phone Message". "The Stranded", aired in season three, was intended for season two. In the beginning of this episode, Jerry clears up the continuity error over George's real estate job.
Season four marked the sitcom's entry into the Nielsen ratings Top 30, coinciding with several popular episodes, such as "The Bubble Boy" in which George and the bubble boy argue over "Trivial Pursuit", and "The Junior Mint" in which Jerry and Kramer accidentally fumble a mint in the operating room. This was the first season to use a story arc of Jerry and George creating their own sitcom, "Jerry". Also at this time, the use of Jerry's stand-up act slowly declined, and the stand-up segment in the middle of "Seinfeld" episodes was cut.
Much publicity followed the controversial episode, "The Contest", an Emmy Award-winning episode written by co-creator Larry David, whose subject matter was considered inappropriate for prime time network TV. To circumvent this taboo, the word "masturbation" was never used in the script, instead substituted for by a variety of oblique references. Midway through that season, "Seinfeld" was moved from its original 9:00 p.m. time slot on Wednesdays to 9:30 p.m. on Thursdays, following "Cheers" again, which gave the show even more popularity. Ratings also sparked the move, as Tim Allen's sitcom "Home Improvement" on ABC had aired at the same time and "Improvement" kept beating "Seinfeld" in the ratings. NBC moved the series after Ted Danson announced the end of "Cheers" and "Seinfeld" quickly surpassed the ratings of the 9:00 p.m. "Cheers" reruns that spring. The show won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Comedy Series" in 1993, beating out its family-oriented, time-slot competitor "Home Improvement", which was only in its second season on rival network ABC.
Season five was an even bigger ratings-hit, consisting of popular episodes, such as "The Puffy Shirt" in which Jerry feels embarrassed wearing a "pirate" shirt on "The Today Show", "The Non-Fat Yogurt" featuring Rudy Giuliani, the Republican then-mayor-elect of New York, and "The Opposite" in which George, doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him he should do, lands a job with the New York Yankees and Elaine leaves "Pendant Publishing" because of a comedy of errors that lead to its demise. Another story arc has George returning to live with his parents. In the midst of the story arc, Kramer creates and promotes his coffee table book. The show was again nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series, but lost to the "Cheers" spin-off "Frasier", then in its first season. "Seinfeld" was nominated for the same award every year for its entire run but, after its win at the 45th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1994, always lost to "Frasier", which went on to win a record thirty-nine Emmy Awards in its eleven-season run.
In season six, Andy Ackerman replaced Tom Cherones as director of the show. The series remained well-regarded and produced some of its most famous episodes, such as "The Beard" in which Jerry is put through a lie detector test to make him admit that he watched "Melrose Place", "The Switch" in which Kramer's mom, Babs, reveals that his first name is Cosmo, and "The Understudy" in which Elaine meets J. Peterman for the first time. Story arcs used in this season were Elaine working as a personal assistant to her eccentric boss Justin Pitt and George's parents' temporary separation. This was the first season in which "Seinfeld" reached No. 1 in the Nielsen Ratings. The use of Jerry's stand-up act declined with the end stand-up segment no longer appearing, as the storylines for all four characters grew denser.
In season seven, a story arc involved George getting engaged to his ex-girlfriend, Susan Ross, after the pilot "Jerry" proved unsuccessful. In it, George spends most of the season regretting and trying to get out of the engagement. Along with the regular half-hour episodes, two notable one-hour episodes were "The Cadillac" in which George plans to date award-winning actor Marisa Tomei and "The Bottle Deposit" with Elaine and Sue Ellen participating in a bidding war to buy JFK's golf clubs in an auction.
The show's ratings were still going strong in its final two seasons. Larry David left at the end of season seven, although he continued to voice Steinbrenner, so Seinfeld assumed David's duties as showrunner, and, under the direction of a new writing staff, "Seinfeld" became a faster-paced show. The show no longer contained extracts of Jerry performing stand-up comedy—Jerry had no time or energy for this with his new responsibilities—and storylines occasionally delved into fantasy and broad humor. For example, in "The Bizarro Jerry", Elaine is torn between exact opposites of her friends and Jerry dates a woman who has the now-famed "man hands". Some notable episodes from season eight include "The Little Kicks" showing Elaine's horrible dancing, and "The Chicken Roaster" which portrays the "Kenny Rogers Roasters" chicken restaurant which opened during that time. A story arc in this season involves Peterman going to Burma in "The Foundation" until he recovered from a nervous breakdown in "The Money", followed by Elaine writing Peterman's biography in "The Van Buren Boys", which leads to Kramer's parody of Kenny Kramer's Reality Tour seen in "The Muffin Tops".
The final season included episodes like "The Merv Griffin Show" in which Kramer converts his apartment into a talk-show studio and plays the character of talk-show host, "The Betrayal" that presents in reverse chronological order what happened to Sue Ellen's wedding in India, and "The Frogger" in which George pushes a "Frogger" machine across the street, mimicking the action of the game itself. The last season included a story arc in which Elaine has an on/off relationship with Puddy. Despite the enormous popularity and willingness of the cast to return for a tenth season, Seinfeld decided to end the show after season nine, believing he would thereby be able to ensure the show would maintain its quality and go out on top. NBC offered him over $100 million for a tenth season, but Seinfeld declined.
A major controversy caused in this final season was the accidental burning of a Puerto Rican flag by Kramer in "The Puerto Rican Day". This scene caused a furor among Puerto Ricans, and as a result, NBC showed this episode only once. Jerry Seinfeld defused the protestors by not letting this episode continue in syndication, as revealed in "Inside Look" on DVD. However, the episode would be added to the syndicated rerun package several years later uncut.
After nine years on the air, NBC and Jerry Seinfeld announced on December 25, 1997, that the series would end production the following spring in 1998. The announcement made the front page of the major New York newspapers, including the "New York Times". Jerry Seinfeld was featured on the cover of "Time" magazine's first issue of 1998. The series ended with a seventy-five-minute episode (cut to 60 minutes in syndication, in two parts) written by co-creator and ex-executive producer Larry David, which aired on May 14, 1998. Before the finale, a forty-five-minute retrospective clip show, "The Chronicle", was aired. The retrospective was expanded to an hour after the original airing and aired again on NBC as an hour-long episode, and has since aired in syndication.
It was the first episode since the finale of season seven, "The Invitations", to feature opening and closing stand-up comedy acts by Jerry Seinfeld. The finale was filmed before an audience of NBC executives and friends of the show. The press and public were shut out of the taping in order to keep its plot secret; those who attended the shoot of the final episode were required to sign written "vows of silence". The secrecy only seemed to increase speculation about how the series would end. The producers of the show tweaked the media about the hype, spreading a false rumor about Newman ending up in the hospital and Jerry and Elaine sitting in a chapel, presumably to marry.
The final episode enjoyed a historic audience, estimated at 76.3 million viewers (58% of all viewers that night) making it the fourth most watched regular series finale in U.S. TV history, behind "M*A*S*H", "Cheers" and "The Fugitive". However, the finale received mixed reviews from critics and fans of the show. The finale poked fun at the many rumors that were circulating, seeming to move into multiple supposed plots before settling on its true storyline—a lengthy trial where the gang is prosecuted for violating a "Duty to Rescue" law and sentenced to prison terms.
According to "Forbes" magazine, Jerry Seinfeld's earnings from the show in 1998 came to US$267 million, including syndication earnings. He refused NBC's offer of $5 million per episode, or over $100 million total, to continue the show into a tenth season. The offer NBC made to Seinfeld was over three times higher per episode than anyone on TV had ever been offered before. Seinfeld told the network that he was not married nor had children, and wished to focus on his personal life. As reported in July 2007, he was the second-highest earner in the TV industry, earning at the time $60 million a year. The show became the first TV series to command over $1 million a minute for advertising–a mark previously attained only by the Super Bowl.
According to Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Bros. Entertainment, "Seinfeld" made $2.7 billion through June 2010. the show has made an estimated $4.06 billion in syndication. Steve Bannon, who invested in the show, later said, "We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication. We were wrong by a factor of five". In September 2019, it was announced Viacom had acquired cable syndication rights to the series, with it airing on Paramount Network, Comedy Central and TV Land beginning in October 2021.
"Seinfeld" began as a twenty-three-minute pilot titled "The Seinfeld Chronicles". Created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, developed by NBC executive Rick Ludwin, and produced by Castle Rock Entertainment, it was a mix of Seinfeld's stand-up comedy routines and idiosyncratic, conversational scenes focusing on mundane aspects of everyday life like laundry, the buttoning of the top button on one's shirt, and the effort by men to properly interpret the intent of women spending the night in Seinfeld's apartment.
The pilot was filmed at Stage 8 of Desilu Cahuenga studios, the same studio where "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was filmed (this was seen by the crew as a good omen), and was recorded at Ren-Mar Studios in Hollywood. The pilot was first screened to a group of two dozen NBC executives in Burbank, California in early 1989. It didn't yield the explosion of laughter garnered by the pilots for the decade's previous NBC successes like "The Cosby Show" and "The Golden Girls." Brandon Tartikoff was not convinced that the show would work. A Jewish man from New York himself, Tartikoff characterized it as "Too New York, too Jewish" (a sentiment which would also lead to the Cosmo character's later surname change from the more Jewish-sounding Kessler to Kramer). Test audiences were even harsher. NBC's practice at the time was to recruit 400 households by phone to ask them to evaluate pilots it aired on an unused channel on its cable system. An NBC research department memo summarized the pilot's performance among the respondents as "weak", which Warren Littlefield, then second-in-command in NBC's entertainment division, called "a dagger to the heart". Comments included, "You can't get too excited about two guys going to the laundromat"; "Jerry's loser friend George isn't a forceful character"; "Jerry needs a stronger supporting cast"; and "Why are they interrupting the stand-up for these stupid stories?" Seinfeld and David didn't see the memo for several years, but after they became aware of it, they hung it in a bathroom on the set. Seinfeld comments, "We thought, if someone goes in to use this bathroom, this is something they should see. It fits that moment."
Around the time the show's pilot was filmed, Castle Rock Entertainment, which produced the show, had also produced another pilot for NBC that featured Ann Jillian in her almost-similarly eponymous TV series. After "The Seinfeld Chronicles" tested poorly among audiences, Castle Rock then devoted their focus to Jillian's series, which tested better with audiences and received a full-season order. "Ann Jillian" would last only a single season of 13 episodes and would be off the air by the end of 1990.
When NBC announced its 1989–90 prime time schedule in May 1989, "The Seinfeld Chronicles" was not included, but supporters of the show didn't give up on it. The pilot first aired on July 5, 1989, and finished second in its time slot against the CBS police drama "Jake and the Fatman", receiving a Nielsen rating of 10.9/19. The ratings didn't exhibit regional skew that Tartikoff predicted, much to the encouragement of the show's supporters. Despite the poor test results, Ludwin cancelled one of the Bob Hope specials budgeted for that season so that the entertainment division had the money to order four more episodes of "The Seinfeld Chronicles", which formed the rest of the show's first season (the series was by then retitled to just "Seinfeld"). "Chicago Tribune" columnist Phil Rosenthal later stated that without this move, there would be no "Seinfeld". Although this was a very low order number for a new series (the smallest sitcom order in TV history), Castle Rock failed to find any other buyers when it shopped the show to other networks, and accepted the order. The show wouldn't return to the airwaves until May 30, 1990, and it would be another three years before it became a Top 5-rated show. Preston Beckman, who was in charge of NBC's research department at the time, reminisced, "The show was different. Nobody had seen anything like it. It wasn't unusual for poor-testing shows to get on the air, but it was very rare that they became hits."
When it was first repeated on July 5, 1990, it received a rating of 13.9/26. These ratings were high enough to secure a second season. NBC research showed that the show was popular with young male adults, a demographic sought after by advertisers. This gave NBC an incentive to keep broadcasting the show. One DVD reviewer, Britt Gillette, wrote that "this initial episode exhibits the flashes of brilliance that made "Seinfeld" a cultural phenomenon."
Other than the pilot, the series was filmed at CBS Studio Center in Studio City, California. The first three seasons were filmed on soundstage 19, and the show then moved to the larger stage 9 for the remainder of the series' production. Despite using numerous establishing shots taken in New York City, all scenes of the actors walking in New York were also filmed at CBS Studio Center, on their New York Street backlot. Other locations on the CBS lot were also used for filming, as well as scenes filmed at Paramount Studios and Warner Brothers Studios Hollywood.
A source of problems for the cast was the small sets, specifically that of Jerry's apartment, which Alexander has noted "If you knew you were doing a series for nine years, you would never build that set". Adding to the issue was that the scripts contained only minimal action lines leading to the actors struggling to come up with actions to perform on the sets. Eventually they got into a routine of directing each other on how to make their movements look natural. Alexander has stated that this helped the cast build chemistry with each other.
Tapings of the show would usually go long as the cast and David were perfectionists. If a joke didn't elicit the type of reaction they were hoping for they would rewrite the joke and perform it again. In at least one case, The Marine Biologist, this led to David writing an entirely new scene requiring Alexander to memorize a monologue in only a matter of minutes. Laugh tracks were used but only for matching shots and not for artificially adding laughter to a scene.
There are two high-definition versions of "Seinfeld". The first is that of the network TV (non-syndicated) versions in the original aspect ratio of 4:3 that were downscaled for the DVD releases. Syndicated broadcast stations and the cable network TBS began airing the syndicated version of "Seinfeld" in HD. Unlike the version used for the DVD, Sony Pictures cropped the top and bottom parts of the frame, while restoring previously cropped images on the sides, from the 35mm film source, to use the entire 16:9 frame.
Elizabeth Magnotta and Alexandra Strohl analyze the success of "Seinfeld" with recourse to the incongruity theory of humor: "The Incongruity Theory claims that humor is created out of a violation of an expectation. For humor to result from this unexpected result, the event must have an appropriate emotional climate, the setting, characters, prior discourse, relationships of the characters, and the topic." Specifically, Magnotta and Strohl focus on "The Marine Biologist", where George is embroiled in yet another lie, and on "The Red Dot", where George tries to save a few dollars at Elaine's expense by giving her a marked-down cashmere sweater.
Seinfeld has not reached the same level of popularity around the globe as it has reached in America. In “Translating "Seinfeld"”, Jennifer Armstrong notes that "Seinfeld’s" unique style of humor is apparently “too cultural and word-based to make for easy translation”. Carol Iannone sums up the legacy of this American hit in her "Modern Age" article “"Seinfeld": The Politically Incorrect Comedy" when she says, “It may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art”.
Nod Miller, of the University of East London, has discussed the self-referential qualities of the show:
William Irwin has edited an anthology of scholarly essays on philosophy in "Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing". Some entries include "The Jerry Problem and the Socratic Problem", "George's Failed Zest for Happiness: An Aristotelian Analysis", "Elaine's Moral Character", "Kramer the 'Seducer, "Making Something Out of Nothing: Seinfeld, Sophistry and the Tao", "Seinfeld, Subjectivity, and Sartre", "Mr. Peterman, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Me", and "Minimally Decent Samaritans and Uncommon Law".
"Seinfeld" has received awards and nominations in various categories throughout the mid-1990s. It was awarded the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993, Golden Globe Award for Best TV-Series (Comedy) in 1994 and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 1995, 1997 and 1998. Apart from these, the show was also nominated for an Emmy award from 1992 to 1998 for Outstanding Comedy series, Golden Globe award from 1994 to 1998 for Best TV-Series (Comedy), and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series from 1995 to 1998.
"TV Guide" named it the greatest TV show of all time in 2002. and in 2013, the magazine ranked it as the second greatest TV show. A 2015 "The Hollywood Reporter" survey of 2,800 actors, producers, directors, and other industry people named "Seinfeld" as their #5 favorite show.
A recurring feature of "Seinfeld" was its inclusion of specific products, especially candy, as plot points. These might be a central feature of a plot (e.g., Junior Mints, Twix, Chuckles, Jujyfruits, bite size Three Musketeers, Snickers, Nestlé Chunky, Oh Henry!, Drake's Coffee Cake and PEZ), or an association of candy with a guest character (e.g. Oh Henry! bars) or simply a conversational aside (e.g., Chuckles, Clark Bar, Twinkies). A large number of non-candy products were also featured throughout the series.
The show's creators claim that they weren't engaging in a product placement strategy for commercial gain. One motivation for the use of real-world products, quite unrelated to commercial considerations, is the comedy value of funny-sounding phrases and words. "I knew I wanted Kramer to think of watching the operation like going to see a movie", explained "Seinfeld" writer/producer Andy Robin in an interview published in "The Hollywood Reporter". "At first, I thought maybe a piece of popcorn falls into the patient. I ran that by my brother, and he said, 'No, Junior Mints are just funnier.'"
Many advertisers capitalized on the popularity of "Seinfeld". American Express created a webisode where Jerry Seinfeld and an animated Superman (voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played the role of Puddy) starred in its commercial. The makers of the Today Sponge created the "Spongeworthy" game, on their website, inspired by "The Sponge". An advertisement featured Jason Alexander in a Chrysler commercial. In this, Alexander acts much like his character George, and his relationship with Lee Iacocca plays on his George's relationship with Steinbrenner. Similarly, Michael Richards was the focus of a series of advertisements for Vodafone which ran in Australia where he dressed and acted exactly like Kramer, including the trademark bumbling pratfalls.
In addition, the show occasionally incorporated fictional products like a Scotch brand called "Hennigan's" (a portmanteau of "Hennessy" and "Brannigans") and a canned meat product called "Beef-a-reeno" (a parody of "Beef-a-roni").
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released all nine seasons of "Seinfeld" on DVD in Regions 1, 2 and 4 between 2004 and 2007. On November 6, 2007, "Seinfeld: The Complete Series" was released on DVD. The complete series box set includes a 2007 "roundtable" reunion of the four main cast members and Larry David; only highlights of this were also included in the Season 9 set.
On April 29, 2015, it was officially announced, during Hulu's upfronts presentation in New York, that all nine seasons of "Seinfeld" would be available for online streaming, via the video service, starting in June 2015. The news was first reported by "Deadline" and "Variety", citing the deal at around $130 million to $180 million. On May 20, 2015, Hulu announced that every episode would be available starting June 24, 2015. The series will no longer be available at the end of 2020.
In January 2017, Amazon acquired the UK rights to all seasons of Seinfeld for its Prime Video streaming service.
On November 8, 2016, the Australian streaming service Stan announced via Twitter that later in the week all episodes would be available to stream for the first time in Australia. All episodes were available from November 11, 2016 with the remastered versions of all episodes on the service featuring HD and Widescreen enhancements. The widescreen offered was cropped from the original 4:3 format negatives, thus resulting in better visual quality than the previously available DVD version, however, the top and bottom portions of the frame were cut out to achieve the widescreen aspect ratio. In April 2020, all seasons of Seinfeld were also made available on demand via pay television service Foxtel, as well as its internet-based alternative Foxtel Now.
In September 2019, Netflix and Sony Pictures announced that Netflix had acquired the exclusive global streaming rights for "Seinfeld", starting in 2021, superseding the above Hulu and Amazon rights. When it airs, Netflix's version of "Seinfeld" will be available in 4K resolution via a new scan from the original 35mm film source.
On the November 1, 2007, episode of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", Jerry Seinfeld mentioned the possibility of shooting one last scene, after the characters leave jail. He mentioned that he was too busy to do it at the time, but didn't announce what the scene would entail, as its production isn't a certainty.
In commentary from the final season DVD, Seinfeld outlines that he and Jason Alexander spoke about this scene being in Monk's Cafe, with George saying "That was brutal" in reference to the foursome's stint in prison.
On an episode of "Saturday Night Live" that Jerry Seinfeld hosted on October 2, 1999, a sketch was produced that showed what life was like for Jerry behind bars after being transferred to the fictional prison portrayed on the HBO series "Oz". The roughly four-minute sketch shows the opening credits for the HBO series with clips of Jerry mixed in doing various activities around the prison. The sketch continues and mixes in different story lines from both "Oz" and "Seinfeld" and has Jerry interacting with various characters from the show in his typical quick-witted, sarcastic way.
Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander, and Richards have all tried to launch new sitcoms as title-role characters. Almost every show was canceled quickly, usually within the first season. This gave rise to the term "Seinfeld curse": the failure of a sitcom starring one of the three, despite the conventional wisdom that each person's "Seinfeld" popularity should almost guarantee a strong, built-in audience for the actor's new show. Shows specifically cited regarding the "Seinfeld curse" are Julia Louis-Dreyfus's "Watching Ellie", Jason Alexander's "Bob Patterson" and "Listen Up!", and Michael Richards' "The Michael Richards Show".
This phenomenon was mentioned throughout the second season of Larry David's HBO program "Curb Your Enthusiasm", which aired in 2001. In real life, David has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a curse, saying, "It's so completely idiotic. It's very hard to have a successful sitcom."
The success of Louis-Dreyfus in the 2006-2010 CBS sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine", which included winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2006, led many to believe that she had broken the curse. In her acceptance speech, Louis-Dreyfus held up her award and exclaimed, "I'm not somebody who really believes in curses, but curse this, baby!" The show produced enough episodes to air in reruns in syndication for several years, something the other shows did not achieve. The "Saturday Night Live" episode guest-hosted by Louis-Dreyfus made references to the curse. She went on to win six further Lead Actress in a Comedy Emmys for her acclaimed performance as Vice President Selina Meyer in the HBO comedy series "Veep".
Early in March 2009, it was announced that the "Seinfeld" cast would reunite for season seven of "Curb Your Enthusiasm". The cast first appeared in the third episode of the season, all playing their real life selves. The season-long story is that Larry David tries to initiate a "Seinfeld" reunion show as a ploy to get his ex-wife, Cheryl, back. Along with the four main characters, some "Seinfeld" supporting actors like Wayne Knight, Estelle Harris and Steve Hytner appeared in the ninth episode at a table read for the reunion show. Though much dialogue in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is improvised, the plot was scripted, and the "Seinfeld" special that aired within the show was scripted and directed by "Seinfeld" regular Andy Ackerman, making this the first time since "Seinfeld" went off the air that the central cast appeared together in a scripted show.
Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Wayne Knight, playing their respective "Seinfeld" characters, appeared in a spot presented during halftime of Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014. FOX came up with the idea of doing such a spot, due in part to the Super Bowl's location being New York that year. An uncut version appeared on Crackle.com immediately afterward, as an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" titled "The Over-Cheer". Although the spot was used to advertise Seinfeld's web series, it was not considered a commercial, as Sony, which produces the series, did not pay for it. Seinfeld has indicated that he thinks the webisode will probably be the last cast reunion, saying, "I have a feeling you've seen the final coda on that very unique experience." Since then, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have also appeared in episodes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28606 |
Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (; ; 19 August 1929), usually referred to outside Russia as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise.
Sergei Diaghilev was born to a wealthy and cultured family in Selishchi (Novgorod Governorate), Russia; his father, Pavel Pavlovich, was a cavalry colonel, but the family's money came mainly from vodka distilleries. After the death of Sergei's mother, his father married Elena Valerianovna Panaeva, an artistic young woman who was on very affectionate terms with her stepson and was a strong influence on him. The family lived in Perm but had an apartment in Saint Petersburg and a country estate in Bikbarda (near Perm). In 1890, Sergei's parents went bankrupt, having for a long time lived beyond their means, and from that time Sergei (who had a small income inherited from his mother) had to support the family. After graduating from Perm gymnasium in 1890, he went to the capital to study law at St. Petersburg University, but ended up also taking classes at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, where he studied singing and music (a love of which he had picked up from his stepmother). After graduating in 1892 he abandoned his dreams of composition (his professor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, told him he had no talent for music).
During his years at University, Diaghilev's cousin Dmitry Filosofov introduced him to a circle of art-loving friends who called themselves The Nevsky Pickwickians. They included Alexandre Benois, Walter Nouvel, Konstantin Somov, and Léon Bakst. Although not instantly received into the group, Diaghilev was aided by Benois in developing his knowledge of Russian and Western art. In two years, he had voraciously absorbed this new obsession (even travelling abroad to further his studies) and came to be respected as one of the most learned of the group.
With financial backing from Savva Mamontov (the director of the Russian Private Opera Company) and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the group founded the journal "Mir iskusstva (World of Art)". In 1899, Diaghilev became special assistant to Prince Sergei Mikhaylovich Volkonsky, who had recently taken over directorship of all Imperial theaters. Diaghilev was soon responsible for the production of the "Annual of the Imperial Theaters" in 1900, and promptly offered assignments to his close friends: Léon Bakst would design costumes for the French play "Le Coeur de la Marquise", while Benois was given the opportunity to produce Alexander Taneyev's opera "Cupid's Revenge".
In 1900–1901 Volkonsky entrusted Diaghilev with the staging of Léo Delibes' ballet "Sylvia", a favorite of Benois. The two collaborators concocted an elaborate production plan that startled the established personnel of the Imperial Theatres. After several increasingly antagonistic differences of opinion, Diaghilev in his demonstrative manner refused to go on editing the "Annual of the Imperial Theatres" and was discharged by Volkonsky in 1901 and left disgraced in the eyes of the nobility. At the same time, some of Diaghilev's researchers hinted at his homosexuality as the main cause for this conflict. However, his homosexuality had been well known long before he was invited into the Imperial Theatres.
In 1905 he organized a huge exhibition of Russian portrait painting at the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg, having travelled widely through Russia for a year discovering many previously unknown masterpieces of Russian portrait art. In the following year he took a major exhibition of Russian art to the Petit Palais in Paris. It was the beginning of a long involvement with France. In 1907 he presented five concerts of Russian music in Paris, and in 1908 mounted a production of Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov", starring Feodor Chaliapin, at the Paris Opéra.
This led to an invitation to return the following year with ballet as well as opera, and thus to the launching of his famous Ballets Russes. The company included the best young Russian dancers, among them Anna Pavlova, Adolph Bolm, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina and Vera Karalli, and their first night on 19 May 1909 was a sensation.
During these years Diaghilev's stagings included several compositions by the late Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, such as the operas "The Maid of Pskov", "May Night", and "The Golden Cockerel". His balletic adaptation of the orchestral suite "Sheherazade", staged in 1910, drew the ire of the composer's widow, Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, who protested in open letters to Diaghilev published in the periodical "Rech."
Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from composers such as Nikolai Tcherepnin ("Narcisse et Echo", 1911), Claude Debussy ("Jeux", 1913), Maurice Ravel ("Daphnis et Chloé", 1912), Erik Satie ("Parade", 1917), Manuel de Falla ("El Sombrero de Tres Picos", 1917), Richard Strauss ("Josephslegende", 1914), Sergei Prokofiev ("Ala and Lolli", 1915, rejected by Diaghilev and turned into the "Scythian Suite"; "Chout", 1915 revised 1920; "Le pas d'acier", 1926; and "The Prodigal Son", 1929); Ottorino Respighi ("La Boutique fantasque", 1919); Francis Poulenc ("Les biches", 1923) and others. His choreographer Michel Fokine often adapted the music for ballet. Diaghilev also worked with dancer and ballet master Léonide Massine.
The artistic director for the Ballets Russes was Léon Bakst. Together they developed a more complicated form of ballet with show-elements intended to appeal to the general public, rather than solely the aristocracy. The exotic appeal of the Ballets Russes had an effect on Fauvist painters and the nascent Art Deco style. Coco Chanel is said to have stated that "Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners." [Rhonda K. Garelick].
Perhaps Diaghilev's most notable composer-collaborator, however, was Igor Stravinsky. Diaghilev heard Stravinsky's early orchestral works "Fireworks" and "Scherzo fantastique", and was impressed enough to ask Stravinsky to arrange some pieces by Chopin for the Ballets Russes. In 1910, he commissioned his first score from Stravinsky, "The Firebird". "Petrushka" (1911) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913) followed shortly afterwards, and the two also worked together on "Les noces" (1923) and "Pulcinella" (1920) together with Picasso, who designed the costumes and the set.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Diaghilev stayed abroad. The new Soviet regime, once it became obvious that he could not be lured back, condemned him in perpetuity as an especially insidious example of bourgeois decadence. Soviet art historians wrote him out of the picture for more than 60 years.
Diaghilev made Boris Kochno his secretary in 1920 and staged Tchaikovsky's "The Sleeping Beauty" in London in 1921; it was a production of remarkable magnificence in both settings and costumes but, despite being well received by the public, it was a financial disaster for Diaghilev and Oswald Stoll, the theatre-owner who had backed it. The first cast included the legendary ballerina Olga Spessivtseva and Lubov Egorova in the role of Aurora. Diaghilev insisted on calling the ballet "The Sleeping Princess". When asked why, he quipped, "Because I have no beauties!" The later years of the Ballets Russes were often considered too "intellectual", too "stylish" and seldom had the unconditional success of the first few seasons, although younger choreographers like George Balanchine hit their stride with the Ballet Russes.
The start of the 20th century brought a development in the handling of tonality, harmony, rhythm and meter towards more freedom. Until that time, rigid harmonic schemes had forced rhythmic patterns to stay fairly uncomplicated. Around the turn of the century, however, harmonic and metric devices became either more rigid, or much more unpredictable, and each approach had a liberating effect on rhythm, which also affected ballet. Diaghilev was a pioneer in adapting these new musical styles to modern ballet. When Ravel used a time in the final part of his ballet "Daphnis and Chloe" (1912), dancers of the Ballets Russes sang "Ser-gei-dia-ghi-lev" during rehearsals to keep the correct rhythm.
Members of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes later went on to found ballet traditions in the United States (George Balanchine) and England (Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert). Ballet master Serge Lifar went on a technical revival at the Paris Opera Ballet, enhanced by Claude Bessy and Rudolf Nureyev in the 1980s. Lifar is credited for saving many Jewish and other minority dancers from the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. After dancing with the Ballets Russes in 1925, Ruth Page emerged as a founder of her own ballet troupes based in Chicago, including the Chicago Opera Ballet.
Diaghilev's life and the Ballets Russes were inextricably entwined. His most famous lover was Nijinsky. However, according to Serge Lifar, of all Diaghilev's lovers, only Léonide Massine, who replaced Nijinsky, provided him with "so many moments of happiness or anguish." Diaghilev's other lovers included Anton Dolin, Serge Lifar and his secretary and librettist Boris Kochno. His last lover, composer and conductor Igor Markevitch, later married the daughter of Nijinsky.
Nijinsky's later bitter comments about Diaghilev inspired a mention in W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939":
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
Diaghilev dismissed Nijinsky summarily from the Ballets Russes after the dancer's marriage in 1913. Nijinsky appeared again with the company, but the old relationship between the men was never re-established; moreover, Nijinsky's magic as a dancer was much diminished by incipient mental illness. Their last meeting was after Nijinsky's mind had given way, and he appeared not to recognise his former lover.
Diaghilev was known as a hard, demanding, even frightening taskmaster. Ninette de Valois, no shrinking violet, said she was too afraid to ever look him in the face. George Balanchine said he carried around a cane during rehearsals, and banged it angrily when he was displeased. Other dancers said he would shoot them down with one look, or a cold comment. On the other hand, he was capable of great kindness, and when stranded with his bankrupt company in Spain during the 1914–18 war, gave his last bit of cash to Lydia Sokolova to buy medical care for her daughter. Alicia Markova was very young when she joined the Ballet Russes and would later say that she had called Diaghilev "Sergypops" and he had said he would take care of her like a daughter.
Dancers such as Alicia Markova, Tamara Karsavina, Serge Lifar, and Lydia Sokolova remembered Diaghilev fondly, as a stern but kind father-figure who put the needs of his dancers and company above his own. He lived from paycheck to paycheck to finance his company, and though he spent considerable amounts of money on a splendid collection of rare books at the end of his life, many people noticed that his impeccably cut suits had frayed cuffs and trouser-ends. The film "The Red Shoes" is a thinly disguised dramatization of the Ballet Russes.
Throughout his life, Diaghilev was severely afraid of dying in water, and avoided traveling by boat. He died of diabetes in Venice on 19 August 1929, and his tomb is on the nearby island of San Michele, near to the grave of Stravinsky, in the Orthodox section.
The Ekstrom Collection of the Diaghilev and Stravinsky Foundation is held by the Department of Theatre and Performance of the Victoria and Albert Museum. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28607 |
Soong Mei-ling
Soong Mei-ling or, legally, Soong May-ling (; March 5, 1898 – October 23, 2003), also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek or Madame Chiang, was a Chinese political figure who was First Lady of the Republic of China, the wife of Generalissimo and President Chiang Kai-shek. Soong played a prominent role in the politics of the Republic of China and was the sister-in-law of Sun Yat-sen, the founder and the leader of the Republic of China. She was active in the civic life of her country and held many honorary and active positions, including chairwoman of Fu Jen Catholic University. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, she rallied her people against the Japanese invasion; and in 1943 conducted an eight-month speaking tour of the United States of America to gain support. Her life traversed three centuries.
She was born in her family home, a traditional house called Neishidi (內史第), in Pudong, Shanghai. She was born on March 5, 1898, though some biographies give the year as 1897, since Chinese tradition considers one to be a year old at birth.
She was the fourth of six children of Charlie Soong, a wealthy businessman and former Methodist missionary from Hainan, and his wife Ni Kwei-tseng (). Mei-ling's siblings were sister Ai-ling, sister Ching-ling, who later became Madame Sun Yat-sen, older brother Tse-ven and younger brothers Tse-liang (T.L.) and Tse-an (T.A.)
In Shanghai, May-ling attended the McTyeire School for Girls with her sister, Ching-ling. Their father, who had studied in the United States, arranged to have them continue their education in the US in 1907. May-ling and Ching-ling attended a private school in Summit, New Jersey. In 1908, Ching-ling was accepted by her sister Ai-ling's alma mater, Wesleyan College, at age 15 and both sisters moved to Macon, Georgia, to join Ai-ling. However, she could not get permission to stay on campus as a family member nor could she be a student because she was too young.
May-ling spent the year in Demorest, Georgia, with Ai-ling's Wesleyan friend, Blanche Moss, who enrolled May-ling as an 8th grader at Piedmont College. In 1909, Wesleyan's newly appointed president, William Newman Ainsworth, gave her permission to stay at Wesleyan and assigned her tutors. She briefly attended Fairmount College in Monteagle, Tennessee in 1910.
May-ling was officially registered as a freshman at Wesleyan in 1912 at the age of 15. She then transferred to Wellesley College two years later to be closer to her older brother, T. V., who, at the time, was studying at Harvard. By then, both her sisters had graduated and returned to Shanghai. She graduated from Wellesley as one of the 33 "Durant Scholars" on June 19, 1917, with a major in English literature and minor in philosophy. She was also a member of Tau Zeta Epsilon, Wellesley's Arts and Music Society. As a result of being educated in English all her life, she spoke excellent English, with a pronounced Georgia accent which helped her connect with American audiences.
Soong Mei-ling met Chiang Kai-shek in 1920. Since he was eleven years her elder, already married, and a Buddhist, Mei-ling's mother vehemently opposed the marriage between the two, but finally agreed after Chiang showed proof of his divorce and promised to convert to Christianity. Chiang told his future mother-in-law that he could not convert immediately, because religion needed to be gradually absorbed, not swallowed like a pill. They married in Shanghai on December 1, 1927. While biographers regard the marriage with varying appraisals of partnership, love, politics and competition, it lasted 48 years. The couple had no children. In 1928, she was made a member of the Committee of Yuans by Chiang.
They renewed their wedding vows on May 24, 1944 at St. Bartholomew's Church in New York City. Polly Smith sang the Lord's Prayer at the ceremony.
Madame Chiang initiated the New Life Movement and became actively engaged in Chinese politics. She was a member of the Legislative Yuan from 1930 to 1932 and Secretary-General of the Chinese Aeronautical Affairs Commission from 1936 to 1938. In 1945 she became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. As her husband rose to become Generalissimo and leader of the Kuomintang, Madame Chiang acted as his English translator, secretary and advisor. She was his muse, his eyes, his ears, and his most loyal champion. During World War II, Madame Chiang tried to promote the Chinese cause and build a legacy for her husband on a par with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Well-versed in both Chinese and Western culture, she became popular both in China and abroad. Her prominence led Joseph Stilwell to quip that she ought to be appointed minister of defense.
In 1931, Soong Mei-ling had a villa built for her on the east side of Nanjing. Located a few hundred meters east of the Sifangcheng Pavilion of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, the villa still exists, and is commonly known as Meilinggong (美齡宮), "Mei-ling Palace".
Although Soong Mei-ling initially avoided the public eye after marrying Chiang, she soon began an ambitious social welfare project to establish schools for the orphans of Chinese soldiers. The orphanages were well-appointed: with playgrounds, hotels, swimming pools, a gymnasium, model classrooms, and dormitories. Soong Mei-ling was deeply involved in the project and even picked all of the teachers herself. There were two schools - one for boys and one for girls—built on a thousand-acre site at the foot of Purple Mountain, in Nanjing. She referred to these children as her "warphans" and made them a personal cause. The fate of the children of fallen soldiers became a much more important issue in China after the beginning of the war with Japan in 1937. In order to better provide for these children she established the Chinese Women's National War Relief Society.
Soong Mei-ling made several tours to the United States to lobby support for the Nationalists' war effort. She drew crowds as large as 30,000 people and in 1943 made the cover of "TIME" magazine for a third time. She had earlier appeared on the October 26, 1931 cover alongside her husband and on the January 3, 1937 cover with her husband as "Man and Wife of the Year."
Arguably showing the impact of her visits, in 1943, the United States Women's Army Corps recruited a unit of Chinese-American women to serve with the Army Air Forces as "Air WACs", referred to as the "Madame Chiang Kai-Shek Air WAC unit".
Both Soong Mei-ling and her husband were on good terms with "Time" magazine senior editor and co-founder Henry Luce, who frequently tried to rally money and support from the American public for the Republic of China. On February 18, 1943, she became the first Chinese national and the second woman to address both houses of the US Congress. After the defeat of her husband's government in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Madame Chiang followed her husband to Taiwan, while her sister Soong Ching-ling stayed in mainland China, siding with the communists. Madame Chiang continued to play a prominent international role. She was a Patron of the International Red Cross Committee, honorary chair of the British United Aid to China Fund, and First Honorary Member of the Bill of Rights Commemorative Society.
After the death of her husband in 1975, Madame Chiang assumed a low profile. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975 and would undergo two mastectomies in Taiwan. She also had an ovarian tumor removed in 1991.
Chiang Kai-shek was succeeded to power by his eldest son Chiang Ching-kuo, from a previous marriage, with whom Madame Chiang had rocky relations. In 1975, she emigrated from Taiwan to her family's 36 acre (14.6 hectare) estate in Lattingtown, New York, where she kept a portrait of her late husband in full military regalia in her living room. She kept a residence in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where she vacationed in the summer. Madame Chiang returned to Taiwan upon Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988, to shore up support among her old allies. However, Chiang Ching-kuo's successor, Lee Teng-hui, proved more adept at politics than she was, and consolidated his position. She again returned to the U.S. and made a rare public appearance in 1995 when she attended a reception held on Capitol Hill in her honor in connection with celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Madame Chiang made her last visit to Taiwan in 1995. In the 2000 Presidential Election on Taiwan, the Kuomintang produced a letter from her in which she purportedly supported the KMT candidate Lien Chan over independent candidate James Soong (no relation). James Soong never disputed the authenticity of the letter. Soong sold her Long Island estate in 2000 and spent the rest of her life in a Gracie Square apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan owned by her niece. An open house viewing of the estate drew many Taiwanese expatriates. When Madame Chiang was 103 years old, she had an exhibition of her Chinese paintings in New York.
Madame Chiang died in her sleep in New York City, in her Manhattan apartment on October 23, 2003, at the age of 105. Her remains were interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, pending an eventual burial with her late husband who was entombed in Cihu, Taiwan. The stated intention is to have them both buried in mainland China once political differences are resolved.
Upon her death, The White House released a statement:
The New York Times obituary wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28608 |
Second Epistle of Peter
The Second Epistle of Peter, often referred to as Second Peter and written 2 Peter or in Roman numerals II Peter (especially in older references), is a book of the New Testament of the Bible, traditionally held to have been written by Saint Peter. Most critical biblical scholars have concluded Peter is not the author, considering the epistle pseudepigraphical.
According to the Epistle itself, it was composed by the Apostle Peter, an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry. If 2 Peter 3:1 alludes to 1 Peter, the audience of the epistle is the various Churches in Asia Minor in general (cf. 1 Peter 1:1).
It criticizes who distort the authentic, apostolic tradition, and predicts judgment for them. 2 Peter explains that God is patient, and has not yet brought the Second Coming of Christ in order that more people will have the chance to reject evil and find salvation (3:3–9). It calls on Christians to wait patiently for the parousia and to study scripture.
The date of composition has proven to be very difficult to determine. Commentaries and reference books have placed 2 Peter in almost every decade from AD 60 to 160. Taken literally, it would have been written between 65–68 AD because Peter was martyred around 68 AD by Nero and also because Peter references his approaching death in 2 Peter 1:14 ("since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me").
The questions of authorship and date are closely related. For Petrine authorship to be authentic, it must have been written prior to Peter's death in c. AD 65–67. The letter refers to the Pauline epistles and so must post-date at least some of them, regardless of authorship, thus a date before 60 is improbable. Further, it goes as far to name the Pauline epistles as "scripture"—the only time a New Testament work refers to another New Testament work in this way—implying that it postdates them by some time. Scholars consider the epistle to be written between c. AD 100–150 and so contend that it is pseudepigraphical.
Acceptance of the letter into the canon did not occur without some difficulty; however, "nowhere did doubts about the letter's authorship take the form of definitive rejection." The earliest record of doubts concerning the authorship of the letter were recorded by Origen (c. 185–254), though Origen mentioned no explanation for the doubts, nor did he give any indication concerning the extent or location. Donald Guthrie suggests that "It is fair to assume, therefore, that he saw no reason to treat these doubts as serious, and this would mean to imply that in his time the epistle was widely regarded as canonical."
Origen, in another passage, has been interpreted as considering the letter to be Petrine in authorship. Before Origen's time, the evidence is inconclusive; there is a lack of definite early quotations from the letter in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, though possible use or influence has been located in the works of Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 211), Theophilius (d. c. 183), Aristides (d. c. 134), Polycarp (d. 155), and Justin (d. 165).
Eusebius (c. 275–339) professed his own doubts (see also Antilegomena), and is the earliest direct testimony of such, though he stated that the majority supported the text, and by the time of Jerome (c. 346–420) it had been mostly accepted as canonical.
The Peshitta, the standard version of the Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition, does not contain the Second Epistle of Peter and thus rejects its canonical status.
In both content and style this letter is very different from 1 Peter. The epistle presciently declares that it is written shortly before the apostle's death (1:14). Arguments have been made both for and against this being part of the original text, but this debate largely is centered on the acceptance or rejection of supernatural intervention in the life of the writer.
The epistle contains eleven references to the Old Testament. In 3:15, 16 a reference is made to one of Paul's epistles, which some have identified as 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11.
The book also shares a number of passages with the Epistle of Jude, "1:5" with Jude 3; "1:12" with Jude 5; "2:1" with Jude 4; "2:4" with Jude 6; "2:5" with Jude 5; "2:6" with Jude 7; "2:10–11" with Jude 8–9; "2:12" with Jude 10; "2:13–17" with Jude 11–13; "2:18" with Jude 16; "3:2f" with Jude 17f; "3:3" with Jude 18; "3:14" with Jude 24; and "3:18" with Jude 25. Because the Epistle of Jude is much shorter than 2 Peter, and due to various stylistic details, the scholarly consensus is that Jude was the source for the similar passages of 2 Peter.
Tartarus is mentioned in 2 Peter 2:4 as devoted to the holding of certain fallen angels. It is elaborated on in Jude 6. Jude 6 however, is a clear reference to the Book of Enoch. Bauckham suggests that 2 Peter 2:4 is partially dependent on Jude 6 but is independently drawing on paraenetic tradition that also lies behind Jude 5–7. The paraenetic traditions are in Sirach 16:7–10, Damascus Document 2:17–3:12, 3 Maccabees 2:4–7, Testament of Naphtali 3:4–5 and Mishna Sanhedrin 10:3.
The letter is usually outlined as follows: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28611 |
Sequencing
In genetics and biochemistry, sequencing means to determine the primary structure (sometimes incorrectly called the primary sequence) of an unbranched biopolymer. Sequencing results in a symbolic linear depiction known as a sequence which succinctly summarizes much of the atomic-level structure of the sequenced molecule.
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleotide order of a given DNA fragment. So far, most DNA sequencing has been performed using the chain termination method developed by Frederick Sanger. This technique uses sequence-specific termination of a DNA synthesis reaction using modified nucleotide substrates. However, new sequencing technologies such as pyrosequencing are gaining an increasing share of the sequencing market. More genome data are now being produced by pyrosequencing than Sanger DNA sequencing. Pyrosequencing has enabled rapid genome sequencing. Bacterial genomes can be sequenced in a single run with several times coverage with this technique. This technique was also used to sequence the genome of James Watson recently.
The sequence of DNA encodes the necessary information for living things to survive and reproduce. Determining the sequence is therefore useful in fundamental research into why and how organisms live, as well as in applied subjects. Because of the key importance DNA has to living things, knowledge of DNA sequences is useful in practically any area of biological research. For example, in medicine it can be used to identify, diagnose, and potentially develop treatments for genetic diseases. Similarly, research into pathogens may lead to treatments for contagious diseases. Biotechnology is a burgeoning discipline, with the potential for many useful products and services.
The Carlson curve is a term coined by "The Economist" to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson. Carlson accurately predicted the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law. Carlson curves illustrate the rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis, and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures.
In chain terminator sequencing (Sanger sequencing), extension is initiated at a specific site on the template DNA by using a short oligonucleotide 'primer' complementary to the template at that region. The oligonucleotide primer is extended using a DNA polymerase, an enzyme that replicates DNA. Included with the primer and DNA polymerase are the four deoxynucleotide bases (DNA building blocks), along with a low concentration of a chain terminating nucleotide (most commonly a di-deoxynucleotide). The deoxynucleotides lack in the OH group both at the 2' and at the 3' position of the ribose molecule, therefore once they are inserted within a DNA molecule they prevent it from being further elongated. In this sequencer four different vessels are employed, each containing only of the four dideoxyribonucleotides; the incorporation of the chain terminating nucleotides by the DNA polymerase in a random position results in a series of related DNA fragments, of different sizes, that terminate with a given dideoxiribonucleotide. The fragments are then size-separated by electrophoresis in a slab polyacrylamide gel, or more commonly now, in a narrow glass tube (capillary) filled with a viscous polymer.
An alternative to the labelling of the primer is to label the terminators instead, commonly called 'dye terminator sequencing'. The major advantage of this approach is the complete sequencing set can be performed in a single reaction, rather than the four needed with the labeled-primer approach. This is accomplished by labelling each of the dideoxynucleotide chain-terminators with a separate fluorescent dye, which fluoresces at a different wavelength. This method is easier and quicker than the dye primer approach, but may produce more uneven data peaks (different heights), due to a template dependent difference in the incorporation of the large dye chain-terminators. This problem has been significantly reduced with the introduction of new enzymes and dyes that minimize incorporation variability.
This method is now used for the vast majority of sequencing reactions as it is both simpler and cheaper. The major reason for this is that the primers do not have to be separately labelled (which can be a significant expense for a single-use custom primer), although this is less of a concern with frequently used 'universal' primers. This is changing rapidly due to the increasing cost-effectiveness of second- and third-generation systems from Illumina, 454, ABI, Helicos, and Dover.
The pyrosequencing method is based on the detection of the pyrophosphate release on nucleotide incorporation. Before performing pyrosequencing, the DNA strand to sequence has to be amplified by PCR. Then the order in which the nucleotides have to be added in the sequencer is chosen (i.e. G-A-T-C). When a specific nucleotide is added, if the DNA polymerase incorporates it in the growing chain, the pyrophosphate is released and converted into ATP by ATP sulfurylase. ATP powers the oxidation of luciferase through the luciferase; this reaction generates a light signal recorded as a pyrogram peak. In this way, the nucleotide incorporation is correlated to a signal. The light signal is proportional to the amount of nucleotides incorporated during the synthesis of the DNA strand (i.e. two nucleotides incorporated correspond to two pyrogram peaks). When the added nucleotides aren't incorporated in the DNA molecule, no signal is recorded; the enzyme apyrase removes any unincorporated nucleotide remaining in the reaction.
This method requires neither fluorescently-labelled nucleotides nor gel electrophoresis.
Pyrosequencing, which was developed by Pål Nyrén and Mostafa Ronaghi DNA, has been commercialized by Biotage (for low-throughput sequencing) and 454 Life Sciences (for high-throughput sequencing). The latter platform sequences roughly 100 megabases [now up to 400 megabases] in a seven-hour run with a single machine. In the array-based method (commercialized by 454 Life Sciences), single-stranded DNA is annealed to beads and amplified via EmPCR. These DNA-bound beads are then placed into lls on a fiber-optic chip along with enzymes which produce light in the presence of ATP. When free nucleotides are washed over this chip, light is produced as ATP is generated when nucleotides join with their complementary base pairs. Addition of one (or more) nucleotide(s) results in a reaction that generates a light signal that is recorded by the CCD camera in the instrument. The signal strength is proportional to the number of nucleotides, for example, homopolymer stretches, incorporated in a single nucleotide flow.
Whereas the methods above describe various sequencing methods, separate related terms are used when a large portion of a genome is sequenced. Several platforms were developed to perform exome sequencing (a subset of all DNA across all chromosomes that encode genes) or whole genome sequencing (sequencing of the all nuclear DNA of a human).
RNA is less stable in the cell, and also more prone to nuclease attack experimentally. As RNA is generated by transcription from DNA, the information is already present in the cell's DNA. However, it is sometimes desirable to sequence RNA molecules. While sequencing DNA gives a genetic profile of an organism, sequencing RNA reflects only the sequences that are actively expressed in the cells. To sequence RNA, the usual method is first to reverse transcribe the RNA extracted from the sample to generate cDNA fragments. This can then be sequenced as described above.
The bulk of RNA expressed in cells are ribosomal RNAs or small RNAs, detrimental for cellular translation, but often not the focus of a study. This fraction can be removed "in vitro", however, to enrich for the messenger RNA, also included, that usually is of interest. Derived from the exons these mRNAs are to be later translated to proteins that support particular cellular functions. The expression profile therefore indicates cellular activity, particularly desired in the studies of diseases, cellular behaviour, responses to reagents or stimuli. Eukaryotic RNA molecules are not necessarily co-linear with their DNA template, as introns are excised. This gives a certain complexity to map the read sequences back to the genome and thereby identify their origin.
For more information on the capabilities of next-generation sequencing applied to whole transcriptomes see: RNA-Seq and MicroRNA Sequencing.
Methods for performing protein sequencing
include:
If the gene encoding the protein is known, it is currently much easier to sequence the DNA and infer the protein sequence. Determining part of a protein's amino-acid sequence (often one end) by one of the above methods may be sufficient to identify a clone carrying this gene.
Though polysaccharides are also biopolymers, it is not so common to talk of 'sequencing' a polysaccharide, for several reasons. Although many polysaccharides are linear, many have branches. Many different units (individual monosaccharides) can be used, and bonded in different ways. However, the main theoretical reason is that whereas the other polymers listed here are primarily generated in a 'template-dependent' manner by one processive enzyme, each individual join in a polysaccharide may be formed by a different enzyme. In many cases the assembly is not uniquely specified; depending on which enzyme acts, one of several different units may be incorporated. This can lead to a family of similar molecules being formed. This is particularly true for plant polysaccharides. Methods for the structure determination of oligosaccharides and polysaccharides include NMR spectroscopy and methylation analysis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28615 |
Shotgun sequencing
In genetics, shotgun sequencing is a method used for sequencing random DNA strands. It is named by analogy with the rapidly expanding, quasi-random firing pattern of a shotgun.
The chain termination method of DNA sequencing ("Sanger sequencing") can only be used for short DNA strands of 100 to 1000 base pairs. Due to this size limit, longer sequences are subdivided into smaller fragments that can be sequenced separately, and these sequences are assembled to give the overall sequence.
There are two principal methods for this fragmentation and sequencing process. Primer walking (or "chromosome walking") progresses through the entire strand piece by piece, whereas shotgun sequencing is a faster but more complex process that uses random fragments.
In shotgun sequencing, DNA is broken up randomly into numerous small segments, which are sequenced using the chain termination method to obtain "reads". Multiple overlapping reads for the target DNA are obtained by performing several rounds of this fragmentation and sequencing. Computer programs then use the overlapping ends of different reads to assemble them into a continuous sequence.
Shotgun sequencing was one of the precursor technologies that was responsible for enabling full genome sequencing.
For example, consider the following two rounds of shotgun reads:
In this extremely simplified example, none of the reads cover the full length of the original sequence, but the four reads can be assembled into the original sequence using the overlap of their ends to align and order them. In reality, this process uses enormous amounts of information that are rife with ambiguities and sequencing errors. Assembly of complex genomes is additionally complicated by the great abundance of repetitive sequences, meaning similar short reads could come from completely different parts of the sequence.
Many overlapping reads for each segment of the original DNA are necessary to overcome these difficulties and accurately assemble the sequence. For example, to complete the Human Genome Project, most of the human genome was sequenced at 12X or greater "coverage"; that is, each base in the final sequence was present on average in 12 different reads. Even so, current methods have failed to isolate or assemble reliable sequence for approximately 1% of the (euchromatic) human genome, as of 2004.
Whole genome shotgun sequencing for small (4000- to 7000-base-pair) genomes was first suggested in 1979. The first genome sequenced by shotgun sequencing was that of cauliflower mosaic virus, published in 1981.
Broader application benefited from pairwise end sequencing, known colloquially as "double-barrel shotgun sequencing". As sequencing projects began to take on longer and more complicated DNA sequences, multiple groups began to realize that useful information could be obtained by sequencing both ends of a fragment of DNA. Although sequencing both ends of the same fragment and keeping track of the paired data was more cumbersome than sequencing a single end of two distinct fragments, the knowledge that the two sequences were oriented in opposite directions and were about the length of a fragment apart from each other was valuable in reconstructing the sequence of the original target fragment.
History. The first published description of the use of paired ends was in 1990 as part of the sequencing of the human HGPRT locus, although the use of paired ends was limited to closing gaps after the application of a traditional shotgun sequencing approach. The first theoretical description of a pure pairwise end sequencing strategy, assuming fragments of constant length, was in 1991. At the time, there was community consensus that the optimal fragment length for pairwise end sequencing would be three times the sequence read length. In 1995 Roach et al. introduced the innovation of using fragments of varying sizes, and demonstrated that a pure pairwise end-sequencing strategy would be possible on large targets. The strategy was subsequently adopted by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) to sequence the genome of the bacterium "Haemophilus influenzae" in 1995, and then by Celera Genomics to sequence the "Drosophila melanogaster" (fruit fly) genome in 2000, and subsequently the human genome.
To apply the strategy, a high-molecular-weight DNA strand is sheared into random fragments, size-selected (usually 2, 10, 50, and 150 kb), and cloned into an appropriate vector. The clones are then sequenced from both ends using the chain termination method yielding two short sequences. Each sequence is called an "end-read" or "read 1 and read 2" and two reads from the same clone are referred to as "mate pairs". Since the chain termination method usually can only produce reads between 500 and 1000 bases long, in all but the smallest clones, mate pairs will rarely overlap.
The original sequence is reconstructed from the reads using sequence assembly software. First, overlapping reads are collected into longer composite sequences known as "contigs". Contigs can be linked together into "scaffolds" by following connections between mate pairs. The distance between contigs can be inferred from the mate pair positions if the average fragment length of the library is known and has a narrow window of deviation. Depending on the size of the gap between contigs, different techniques can be used to find the sequence in the gaps. If the gap is small (5-20kb) then the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify the region is required, followed by sequencing. If the gap is large (>20kb) then the large fragment is cloned in special vectors such as bacterial artificial chromosomes (BAC) followed by sequencing of the vector.
Proponents of this approach argue that it is possible to sequence the whole genome at once using large arrays of sequencers, which makes the whole process much more efficient than more traditional approaches. Detractors argue that although the technique quickly sequences large regions of DNA, its ability to correctly link these regions is suspect, particularly for genomes with repeating regions. As sequence assembly programs become more sophisticated and computing power becomes cheaper, it may be possible to overcome this limitation.
Coverage (read depth or depth) is the average number of reads representing a given nucleotide in the reconstructed sequence. It can be calculated from the length of the original genome ("G"), the number of reads("N"), and the average read length("L") as formula_1. For example, a hypothetical genome with 2,000 base pairs reconstructed from 8 reads with an average length of 500 nucleotides will have 2x redundancy. This parameter also enables one to estimate other quantities, such as the percentage of the genome covered by reads (sometimes also called coverage). A high coverage in shotgun sequencing is desired because it can overcome errors in base calling and assembly. The subject of DNA sequencing theory addresses the relationships of such quantities.
Sometimes a distinction is made between "sequence coverage" and "physical coverage". Sequence coverage is the average number of times a base is read (as described above). Physical coverage is the average number of times a base is read or spanned by mate paired reads.
Although shotgun sequencing can in theory be applied to a genome of any size, its direct application to the sequencing of large genomes (for instance, the human genome) was limited until the late 1990s, when technological advances made practical the handling of the vast quantities of complex data involved in the process. Historically, full-genome shotgun sequencing was believed to be limited by both the sheer size of large genomes and by the complexity added by the high percentage of repetitive DNA (greater than 50% for the human genome) present in large genomes. It was not widely accepted that a full-genome shotgun sequence of a large genome would provide reliable data. For these reasons, other strategies that lowered the computational load of sequence assembly had to be utilized before shotgun sequencing was performed.
In hierarchical sequencing, also known as top-down sequencing, a low-resolution physical map of the genome is made prior to actual sequencing. From this map, a minimal number of fragments that cover the entire chromosome are selected for sequencing. In this way, the minimum amount of high-throughput sequencing and assembly is required.
The amplified genome is first sheared into larger pieces (50-200kb) and cloned into a bacterial host using BACs or P1-derived artificial chromosomes (PAC). Because multiple genome copies have been sheared at random, the fragments contained in these clones have different ends, and with enough coverage (see section above) finding a scaffold of BAC contigs that covers the entire genome is theoretically possible. This scaffold is called a tiling path. Once a tiling path has been found, the BACs that form this path are sheared at random into smaller fragments and can be sequenced using the shotgun method on a smaller scale.
Although the full sequences of the BAC contigs is not known, their orientations relative to one another are known. There are several methods for deducing this order and selecting the BACs that make up a tiling path. The general strategy involves identifying the positions of the clones relative to one another and then selecting the least number of clones required to form a contiguous scaffold that covers the entire area of interest. The order of the clones is deduced by determining the way in which they overlap. Overlapping clones can be identified in several ways. A small radioactively or chemically labeled probe containing a sequence-tagged site (STS) can be hybridized onto a microarray upon which the clones are printed. In this way, all the clones that contain a particular sequence in the genome are identified. The end of one of these clones can then be sequenced to yield a new probe and the process repeated in a method called chromosome walking.
Alternatively, the BAC library can be restriction-digested. Two clones that have several fragment sizes in common are inferred to overlap because they contain multiple similarly spaced restriction sites in common. This method of genomic mapping is called restriction fingerprinting because it identifies a set of restriction sites contained in each clone. Once the overlap between the clones has been found and their order relative to the genome known, a scaffold of a minimal subset of these contigs that covers the entire genome is shotgun-sequenced.
Because it involves first creating a low-resolution map of the genome, hierarchical shotgun sequencing is slower than whole-genome shotgun sequencing, but relies less heavily on computer algorithms than whole-genome shotgun sequencing. The process of extensive BAC library creation and tiling path selection, however, make hierarchical shotgun sequencing slow and labor-intensive. Now that the technology is available and the reliability of the data demonstrated, the speed and cost efficiency of whole-genome shotgun sequencing has made it the primary method for genome sequencing.
The classical shotgun sequencing was based on the Sanger sequencing method: this was the most advanced technique for sequencing genomes from about 1995–2005. The shotgun strategy is still applied today, however using other sequencing technologies, such as short-read sequencing and long-read sequencing.
Short-read or “next-gen” sequencing produces shorter reads (anywhere from 25–500bp) but many hundreds of thousands or millions of reads in a relatively short time (on the order of a day).
This results in high coverage, but the assembly process is much more computationally intensive. These technologies are vastly superior to Sanger sequencing due to the high volume of data and the relatively short time it takes to sequence a whole genome.
Having reads of 400-500 base pairs length is sufficient to determine the species/strain of the organism where the DNA comes from, provided its genome is already known, by using for example a k-mer based taxonomic classifier software. With millions of reads from next generation sequencing of an environmental sample, it is possible to get a complete overview of any complex microbiome with thousands of species, like the gut flora. Advantages over 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing are: not being limited to bacteria; strain-level classification where amplicon sequencing only gets the genus; and the possibility to extract whole genes and specify their function as part of the metagenome.
The sensitivity of metagenomic sequencing makes it an attractive choice for clinical use.
It however emphasizes the problem of contamination of the sample or the sequencing pipeline. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28616 |
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; ) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York, in the United States. The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.
The statue is a figure of Libertas, a robed Roman liberty goddess. She holds a torch above her head with her right hand, and in her left hand carries a "tabula ansata" inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776 in Roman numerals), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. A broken shackle and chain lie at her feet as she walks forward, commemorating the recent national abolition of slavery. After its dedication, the statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, seen as a symbol of welcome to immigrants arriving by sea.
Bartholdi was inspired by a French law professor and politician, Édouard René de Laboulaye, who is said to have commented in 1865 that any monument raised to U.S. independence would properly be a joint project of the French and U.S. peoples. The Franco-Prussian War delayed progress until 1875, when Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the U.S. provide the site and build the pedestal. Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions.
The torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and in Madison Square Park in Manhattan from 1876 to 1882. Fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened by lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the "New York World", started a drive for donations to finish the project and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar. The statue was built in France, shipped overseas in crates, and assembled on the completed pedestal on what was then called Bedloe's Island. The statue's completion was marked by New York's first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.
The statue was administered by the United States Lighthouse Board until 1901 and then by the Department of War; since 1933 it has been maintained by the National Park Service as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, and is a major tourist attraction. The monument has been temporarily closed since March 16, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public access to the balcony around the torch has been barred since 1916.
According to the National Park Service, the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time. The project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist, and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in the American Civil War, is supposed to have said: "If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations." The National Park Service, in a 2000 report, however, deemed this a legend traced to an 1885 fundraising pamphlet, and that the statue was most likely conceived in 1870. In another essay on their website, the Park Service suggested that Laboulaye was minded to honor the Union victory and its consequences, "With the abolition of slavery and the Union's victory in the Civil War in 1865, Laboulaye's wishes of freedom and democracy were turning into a reality in the United States. In order to honor these achievements, Laboulaye proposed that a gift be built for the United States on behalf of France. Laboulaye hoped that by calling attention to the recent achievements of the United States, the French people would be inspired to call for their own democracy in the face of a repressive monarchy."
According to sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who later recounted the story, Laboulaye's alleged comment was not intended as a proposal, but it inspired Bartholdi. Given the repressive nature of the regime of Napoleon III, Bartholdi took no immediate action on the idea except to discuss it with Laboulaye. Bartholdi was in any event busy with other possible projects; in the late 1860s, he approached Isma'il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, with a plan to build "Progress" or "Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia", a huge lighthouse in the form of an ancient Egyptian female "fellah" or peasant, robed and holding a torch aloft, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal in Port Said. Sketches and models were made of the proposed work, though it was never erected. There was a classical precedent for the Suez proposal, the Colossus of Rhodes: an ancient bronze statue of the Greek god of the sun, Helios. This statue is believed to have been over high, and it similarly stood at a harbor entrance and carried a light to guide ships. Both the khedive and Lesseps declined the proposed statue from Bartholdi, citing the expensive cost. The Port Said Lighthouse was built instead, by François Coignet in 1869.
Any large project was further delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, in which Bartholdi served as a major of militia. In the war, Napoleon III was captured and deposed. Bartholdi's home province of Alsace was lost to the Prussians, and a more liberal republic was installed in France. As Bartholdi had been planning a trip to the United States, he and Laboulaye decided the time was right to discuss the idea with influential Americans. In June 1871, Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic, with letters of introduction signed by Laboulaye.
Arriving at New York Harbor, Bartholdi focused on Bedloe's Island (now named Liberty Island) as a site for the statue, struck by the fact that vessels arriving in New York had to sail past it. He was delighted to learn that the island was owned by the United States government—it had been ceded by the New York State Legislature in 1800 for harbor defense. It was thus, as he put it in a letter to Laboulaye: "land common to all the states." As well as meeting many influential New Yorkers, Bartholdi visited President Ulysses S. Grant, who assured him that it would not be difficult to obtain the site for the statue. Bartholdi crossed the United States twice by rail, and met many Americans who he thought would be sympathetic to the project. But he remained concerned that popular opinion on both sides of the Atlantic was insufficiently supportive of the proposal, and he and Laboulaye decided to wait before mounting a public campaign.
Bartholdi had made a first model of his concept in 1870. The son of a friend of Bartholdi's, U.S. artist John LaFarge, later maintained that Bartholdi made the first sketches for the statue during his U.S. visit at La Farge's Rhode Island studio. Bartholdi continued to develop the concept following his return to France. He also worked on a number of sculptures designed to bolster French patriotism after the defeat by the Prussians. One of these was the "Lion of Belfort", a monumental sculpture carved in sandstone below the fortress of Belfort, which during the war had resisted a Prussian siege for over three months. The defiant lion, long and half that in height, displays an emotional quality characteristic of Romanticism, which Bartholdi would later bring to the Statue of Liberty.
Bartholdi and Laboulaye considered how best to express the idea of American liberty. In early American history, two female figures were frequently used as cultural symbols of the nation. One of these symbols, the personified Columbia, was seen as an embodiment of the United States in the manner that Britannia was identified with the United Kingdom and Marianne came to represent France. Columbia had supplanted the traditional European personification of the Americas as an "Indian princess", which had come to be regarded as uncivilized and derogatory toward Americans. The other significant female icon in American culture was a representation of Liberty, derived from Libertas, the goddess of freedom widely worshipped in ancient Rome, especially among emancipated slaves. A Liberty figure adorned most American coins of the time, and representations of Liberty appeared in popular and civic art, including Thomas Crawford's "Statue of Freedom" (1863) atop the dome of the United States Capitol Building.
The statue's design envokes iconography evident in ancient history including the Egyptian goddess Isis, the ancient Greek deity of the same name, the Roman Columbia and the Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary.
Artists of the 18th and 19th centuries striving to evoke republican ideals commonly used representations of Libertas as an allegorical symbol. A figure of Liberty was also depicted on the Great Seal of France. However, Bartholdi and Laboulaye avoided an image of revolutionary liberty such as that depicted in Eugène Delacroix's famed "Liberty Leading the People" (1830). In this painting, which commemorates France's July Revolution, a half-clothed Liberty leads an armed mob over the bodies of the fallen. Laboulaye had no sympathy for revolution, and so Bartholdi's figure would be fully dressed in flowing robes. Instead of the impression of violence in the Delacroix work, Bartholdi wished to give the statue a peaceful appearance and chose a torch, representing progress, for the figure to hold.
Crawford's statue was designed in the early 1850s. It was originally to be crowned with a "pileus", the cap given to emancipated slaves in ancient Rome. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who would later serve as President of the Confederate States of America, was concerned that the "pileus" would be taken as an abolitionist symbol. He ordered that it be changed to a helmet. Delacroix's figure wears a "pileus", and Bartholdi at first considered placing one on his figure as well. Instead, he used a diadem, or crown, to top its head. In so doing, he avoided a reference to Marianne, who invariably wears a "pileus". The seven rays form a halo or aureole. They evoke the sun, the seven seas, and the seven continents, and represent another means, besides the torch, whereby Liberty enlightens the world.
Bartholdi's early models were all similar in concept: a female figure in neoclassical style representing liberty, wearing a "stola" and "pella" (gown and cloak, common in depictions of Roman goddesses) and holding a torch aloft. According to popular accounts, the face was modeled after that of Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi, the sculptor's mother, but Regis Huber, the curator of the Bartholdi Museum is on record as saying that this, as well as other similar speculations, have no basis in fact. He designed the figure with a strong, uncomplicated silhouette, which would be set off well by its dramatic harbor placement and allow passengers on vessels entering New York Bay to experience a changing perspective on the statue as they proceeded toward Manhattan. He gave it bold classical contours and applied simplified modeling, reflecting the huge scale of the project and its solemn purpose. Bartholdi wrote of his technique:
Bartholdi made alterations in the design as the project evolved. Bartholdi considered having Liberty hold a broken chain, but decided this would be too divisive in the days after the Civil War. The erected statue does stride over a broken chain, half-hidden by her robes and difficult to see from the ground. Bartholdi was initially uncertain of what to place in Liberty's left hand; he settled on a "tabula ansata", used to evoke the concept of law. Though Bartholdi greatly admired the United States Constitution, he chose to inscribe JULY IV MDCCLXXVI on the tablet, thus associating the date of the country's Declaration of Independence with the concept of liberty.
Bartholdi interested his friend and mentor, architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, in the project. As chief engineer, Viollet-le-Duc designed a brick pier within the statue, to which the skin would be anchored.
After consultations with the metalwork foundry Gaget, Gauthier & Co., Viollet-le-Duc chose the metal which would be used for the skin, copper sheets, and the method used to shape it, repoussé, in which the sheets were heated and then struck with wooden hammers. An advantage of this choice was that the entire statue would be light for its volume, as the copper need be only thick. Bartholdi had decided on a height of just over for the statue, double that of Italy's Sancarlone and the German statue of Arminius, both made with the same method.
By 1875, France was enjoying improved political stability and a recovering postwar economy. Growing interest in the upcoming Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia led Laboulaye to decide it was time to seek public support. In September 1875, he announced the project and the formation of the Franco-American Union as its fundraising arm. With the announcement, the statue was given a name, "Liberty Enlightening the World". The French would finance the statue; Americans would be expected to pay for the pedestal. The announcement provoked a generally favorable reaction in France, though many Frenchmen resented the United States for not coming to their aid during the war with Prussia. French monarchists opposed the statue, if for no other reason than it was proposed by the liberal Laboulaye, who had recently been elected a senator for life. Laboulaye arranged events designed to appeal to the rich and powerful, including a special performance at the Paris Opera on April 25, 1876, that featured a new cantata by composer Charles Gounod. The piece was titled "La Liberté éclairant le monde", the French version of the statue's announced name.
Initially focused on the elites, the Union was successful in raising funds from across French society. Schoolchildren and ordinary citizens gave, as did 181 French municipalities. Laboulaye's political allies supported the call, as did descendants of the French contingent in the American Revolutionary War. Less idealistically, contributions came from those who hoped for American support in the French attempt to build the Panama Canal. The copper may have come from multiple sources and some of it is said to have come from a mine in Visnes, Norway, though this has not been conclusively determined after testing samples. According to Cara Sutherland in her book on the statue for the Museum of the City of New York, was needed to build the statue, and the French copper industrialist Eugène Secrétan donated of copper.
Although plans for the statue had not been finalized, Bartholdi moved forward with fabrication of the right arm, bearing the torch, and the head. Work began at the Gaget, Gauthier & Co. workshop. In May 1876, Bartholdi traveled to the United States as a member of a French delegation to the Centennial Exhibition, and arranged for a huge painting of the statue to be shown in New York as part of the Centennial festivities. The arm did not arrive in Philadelphia until August; because of its late arrival, it was not listed in the exhibition catalogue, and while some reports correctly identified the work, others called it the "Colossal Arm" or "Bartholdi Electric Light". The exhibition grounds contained a number of monumental artworks to compete for fairgoers' interest, including an outsized fountain designed by Bartholdi. Nevertheless, the arm proved popular in the exhibition's waning days, and visitors would climb up to the balcony of the torch to view the fairgrounds. After the exhibition closed, the arm was transported to New York, where it remained on display in Madison Square Park for several years before it was returned to France to join the rest of the statue.
During his second trip to the United States, Bartholdi addressed a number of groups about the project, and urged the formation of American committees of the Franco-American Union. Committees to raise money to pay for the foundation and pedestal were formed in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The New York group eventually took on most of the responsibility for American fundraising and is often referred to as the "American Committee". One of its members was 19-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, the future governor of New York and president of the United States. On March 3, 1877, on his final full day in office, President Grant signed a joint resolution that authorized the President to accept the statue when it was presented by France and to select a site for it. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who took office the following day, selected the Bedloe's Island site that Bartholdi had proposed.
On his return to Paris in 1877, Bartholdi concentrated on completing the head, which was exhibited at the 1878 Paris World's Fair. Fundraising continued, with models of the statue put on sale. Tickets to view the construction activity at the Gaget, Gauthier & Co. workshop were also offered. The French government authorized a lottery; among the prizes were valuable silver plate and a terracotta model of the statue. By the end of 1879, about 250,000 francs had been raised.
The head and arm had been built with assistance from Viollet-le-Duc, who fell ill in 1879. He soon died, leaving no indication of how he intended to transition from the copper skin to his proposed masonry pier. The following year, Bartholdi was able to obtain the services of the innovative designer and builder Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel and his structural engineer, Maurice Koechlin, decided to abandon the pier and instead build an iron truss tower. Eiffel opted not to use a completely rigid structure, which would force stresses to accumulate in the skin and lead eventually to cracking. A secondary skeleton was attached to the center pylon, then, to enable the statue to move slightly in the winds of New York Harbor and as the metal expanded on hot summer days, he loosely connected the support structure to the skin using flat iron bars which culminated in a mesh of metal straps, known as "saddles", that were riveted to the skin, providing firm support. In a labor-intensive process, each saddle had to be crafted individually. To prevent galvanic corrosion between the copper skin and the iron support structure, Eiffel insulated the skin with asbestos impregnated with shellac.
Eiffel's design made the statue one of the earliest examples of curtain wall construction, in which the exterior of the structure is not load bearing, but is instead supported by an interior framework. He included two interior spiral staircases, to make it easier for visitors to reach the observation point in the crown. Access to an observation platform surrounding the torch was also provided, but the narrowness of the arm allowed for only a single ladder, long. As the pylon tower arose, Eiffel and Bartholdi coordinated their work carefully so that completed segments of skin would fit exactly on the support structure. The components of the pylon tower were built in the Eiffel factory in the nearby Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret.
The change in structural material from masonry to iron allowed Bartholdi to change his plans for the statue's assembly. He had originally expected to assemble the skin on-site as the masonry pier was built; instead, he decided to build the statue in France and have it disassembled and transported to the United States for reassembly in place on Bedloe's Island.
In a symbolic act, the first rivet placed into the skin, fixing a copper plate onto the statue's big toe, was driven by United States Ambassador to France Levi P. Morton. The skin was not, however, crafted in exact sequence from low to high; work proceeded on a number of segments simultaneously in a manner often confusing to visitors. Some work was performed by contractors—one of the fingers was made to Bartholdi's exacting specifications by a coppersmith in the southern French town of Montauban. By 1882, the statue was complete up to the waist, an event Barthodi celebrated by inviting reporters to lunch on a platform built within the statue. Laboulaye died in 1883. He was succeeded as chairman of the French committee by Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. The completed statue was formally presented to Ambassador Morton at a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884, and de Lesseps announced that the French government had agreed to pay for its transport to New York. The statue remained intact in Paris pending sufficient progress on the pedestal; by January 1885, this had occurred and the statue was disassembled and crated for its ocean voyage.
The committees in the United States faced great difficulties in obtaining funds for the construction of the pedestal. The Panic of 1873 had led to an economic depression that persisted through much of the decade. The Liberty statue project was not the only such undertaking that had difficulty raising money: construction of the obelisk later known as the Washington Monument sometimes stalled for years; it would ultimately take over three-and-a-half decades to complete. There was criticism both of Bartholdi's statue and of the fact that the gift required Americans to foot the bill for the pedestal. In the years following the Civil War, most Americans preferred realistic artworks depicting heroes and events from the nation's history, rather than allegorical works like the Liberty statue. There was also a feeling that Americans should design American public works—the selection of Italian-born Constantino Brumidi to decorate the Capitol had provoked intense criticism, even though he was a naturalized U.S. citizen. "Harper's Weekly" declared its wish that "M. Bartholdi and our French cousins had 'gone the whole figure' while they were about it, and given us statue and pedestal at once." "The New York Times" stated that "no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances." Faced with these criticisms, the American committees took little action for several years.
The foundation of Bartholdi's statue was to be laid inside Fort Wood, a disused army base on Bedloe's Island constructed between 1807 and 1811. Since 1823, it had rarely been used, though during the Civil War, it had served as a recruiting station. The fortifications of the structure were in the shape of an eleven-point star. The statue's foundation and pedestal were aligned so that it would face southeast, greeting ships entering the harbor from the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1881, the New York committee commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design the pedestal. Within months, Hunt submitted a detailed plan, indicating that he expected construction to take about nine months. He proposed a pedestal in height; faced with money problems, the committee reduced that to .
Hunt's pedestal design contains elements of classical architecture, including Doric portals, as well as some elements influenced by Aztec architecture. The large mass is fragmented with architectural detail, in order to focus attention on the statue. In form, it is a truncated pyramid, square at the base and at the top. The four sides are identical in appearance. Above the door on each side, there are ten disks upon which Bartholdi proposed to place the coats of arms of the states (between 1876 and 1889, there were 38 U.S. states), although this was not done. Above that, a balcony was placed on each side, framed by pillars. Bartholdi placed an observation platform near the top of the pedestal, above which the statue itself rises. According to author Louis Auchincloss, the pedestal "craggily evokes the power of an ancient Europe over which rises the dominating figure of the Statue of Liberty". The committee hired former army General Charles Pomeroy Stone to oversee the construction work. Construction on the foundation began in 1883, and the pedestal's cornerstone was laid in 1884. In Hunt's original conception, the pedestal was to have been made of solid granite. Financial concerns again forced him to revise his plans; the final design called for poured concrete walls, up to thick, faced with granite blocks. This Stony Creek granite came from the Beattie Quarry in Branford, Connecticut. The concrete mass was the largest poured to that time.
Norwegian immigrant civil engineer Joachim Goschen Giæver designed the structural framework for the Statue of Liberty. His work involved design computations, detailed fabrication and construction drawings, and oversight of construction. In completing his engineering for the statue's frame, Giæver worked from drawings and sketches produced by Gustave Eiffel.
Fundraising for the statue had begun in 1882. The committee organized a large number of money-raising events. As part of one such effort, an auction of art and manuscripts, poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original work. She initially declined, stating she could not write a poem about a statue. At the time, she was also involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in eastern Europe. These refugees were forced to live in conditions that the wealthy Lazarus had never experienced. She saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue. The resulting sonnet, "The New Colossus", including the iconic lines: "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", is uniquely identified with the Statue of Liberty and is inscribed on a plaque in its museum.
Even with these efforts, fundraising lagged. Grover Cleveland, the governor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project in 1884. An attempt the next year to have Congress provide $100,000, sufficient to complete the project, also failed. The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal. With the project in jeopardy, groups from other American cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it.
Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the "New York World", a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise $100,000—the equivalent of $2.3 million today. Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given. The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when Pulitzer began publishing the notes he received from contributors. "A young girl alone in the world" donated "60 cents, the result of self denial." One donor gave "five cents as a poor office boy's mite toward the Pedestal Fund." A group of children sent a dollar as "the money we saved to go to the circus with." Another dollar was given by a "lonely and very aged woman." Residents of a home for alcoholics in New York's rival city of Brooklyn—the cities would not merge until 1898—donated $15; other drinkers helped out through donation boxes in bars and saloons. A kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa, mailed the "World" a gift of $1.35. As the donations flooded in, the committee resumed work on the pedestal.
On June 16, 1885, Captain Joseph Henderson a harbor pilot, regarded as one of the most experienced and trustworthy of New York's Sandy Hook Pilots, on the Pilot Boat Pet, No. 9, ran across the French steamer Isère about ten o'clock on Tuesday night, about ten miles outside the Sandy Hook lightship. She was unable to cross the bar and remained outside until the next morning, when she was able to anchor at Sandy Hook. Pilot Henderson was taken on board as he was expressly selected to escort the Isère into the New York Harbor to Bedloe's Island. On June 17, 1885, the French steamer "" arrived in New York with the crates holding the disassembled statue on board. New Yorkers displayed their new-found enthusiasm for the statue. Two hundred thousand people lined the docks and hundreds of boats put to sea to welcome the ship. After five months of daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the "World" announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.
Even with the success of the fund drive, the pedestal was not completed until April 1886. Immediately thereafter, reassembly of the statue began. Eiffel's iron framework was anchored to steel I-beams within the concrete pedestal and assembled. Once this was done, the sections of skin were carefully attached. Due to the width of the pedestal, it was not possible to erect scaffolding, and workers dangled from ropes while installing the skin sections. Bartholdi had planned to put floodlights on the torch's balcony to illuminate it; a week before the dedication, the Army Corps of Engineers vetoed the proposal, fearing that ships' pilots passing the statue would be blinded. Instead, Bartholdi cut portholes in the torch—which was covered with gold leaf—and placed the lights inside them. A power plant was installed on the island to light the torch and for other electrical needs. After the skin was completed, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, supervised a cleanup of Bedloe's Island in anticipation of the dedication. General Charles Stone claimed on the day of dedication that no man had died during the construction of the statue. This was not true however, as Francis Longo, a thirty-nine year old Italian laborer had been killed when an old wall fell on him.
A ceremony of dedication was held on the afternoon of October 28, 1886. President Grover Cleveland, the former New York governor, presided over the event. On the morning of the dedication, a parade was held in New York City; estimates of the number of people who watched it ranged from several hundred thousand to a million. President Cleveland headed the procession, then stood in the reviewing stand to see bands and marchers from across America. General Stone was the grand marshal of the parade. The route began at Madison Square, once the venue for the arm, and proceeded to the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan by way of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, with a slight detour so the parade could pass in front of the "World" building on Park Row. As the parade passed the New York Stock Exchange, traders threw ticker tape from the windows, beginning the New York tradition of the ticker-tape parade.
A nautical parade began at 12:45 p.m., and President Cleveland embarked on a yacht that took him across the harbor to Bedloe's Island for the dedication. De Lesseps made the first speech, on behalf of the French committee, followed by the chairman of the New York committee, Senator William M. Evarts. A French flag draped across the statue's face was to be lowered to unveil the statue at the close of Evarts's speech, but Bartholdi mistook a pause as the conclusion and let the flag fall prematurely. The ensuing cheers put an end to Evarts's address. President Cleveland spoke next, stating that the statue's "stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression until Liberty enlightens the world". Bartholdi, observed near the dais, was called upon to speak, but he declined. Orator Chauncey M. Depew concluded the speechmaking with a lengthy address.
No members of the general public were permitted on the island during the ceremonies, which were reserved entirely for dignitaries. The only females granted access were Bartholdi's wife and de Lesseps's granddaughter; officials stated that they feared women might be injured in the crush of people. The restriction offended area suffragists, who chartered a boat and got as close as they could to the island. The group's leaders made speeches applauding the embodiment of Liberty as a woman and advocating women's right to vote. A scheduled fireworks display was postponed until November 1 because of poor weather.
Shortly after the dedication, "The Cleveland Gazette", an African American newspaper, suggested that the statue's torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation "in reality":
When the torch was illuminated on the evening of the statue's dedication, it produced only a faint gleam, barely visible from Manhattan. The "World" characterized it as "more like a glowworm than a beacon." Bartholdi suggested gilding the statue to increase its ability to reflect light, but this proved too expensive. The United States Lighthouse Board took over the Statue of Liberty in 1887 and pledged to install equipment to enhance the torch's effect; in spite of its efforts, the statue remained virtually invisible at night. When Bartholdi returned to the United States in 1893, he made additional suggestions, all of which proved ineffective. He did successfully lobby for improved lighting within the statue, allowing visitors to better appreciate Eiffel's design. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, once a member of the New York committee, ordered the statue's transfer to the War Department, as it had proved useless as a lighthouse. A unit of the Army Signal Corps was stationed on Bedloe's Island until 1923, after which military police remained there while the island was under military jurisdiction.
Wars and other upheavals in Europe prompted large-scale emigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century; many entered through New York and saw the statue not as a symbol of enlightenment, as Bartholdi had intended, but as a sign of welcome to their new home. The association with immigration only became stronger when an immigrant processing station was opened on nearby Ellis Island. This view was consistent with Lazarus's vision in her sonnet—she described the statue as "Mother of Exiles"—but her work had become obscure. In 1903, the sonnet was engraved on a plaque that was affixed to the base of the statue.
Oral histories of immigrants record their feelings of exhilaration on first viewing the Statue of Liberty. One immigrant who arrived from Greece recalled:
The statue rapidly became a landmark. Originally, it was a dull copper color, but shortly after 1900 a green patina, also called verdigris, caused by the oxidation of the copper skin, began to spread. As early as 1902 it was mentioned in the press; by 1906 it had entirely covered the statue. Believing that the patina was evidence of corrosion, Congress authorized for various repairs, and to paint the statue both inside and out. There was considerable public protest against the proposed exterior painting. The Army Corps of Engineers studied the patina for any ill effects to the statue and concluded that it protected the skin, "softened the outlines of the Statue and made it beautiful." The statue was painted only on the inside. The Corps of Engineers also installed an elevator to take visitors from the base to the top of the pedestal.
On July 30, 1916, during World War I, German saboteurs set off a disastrous explosion on the Black Tom peninsula in Jersey City, New Jersey, in what is now part of Liberty State Park, close to Bedloe's Island. Carloads of dynamite and other explosives that were being sent to Britain and France for their war efforts were detonated, and five people were killed. The statue sustained minor damage, mostly to the torch-bearing right arm, and was closed for ten days. The cost to repair the statue and buildings on the island was about . The narrow ascent to the torch was closed for public-safety reasons, and it has remained closed ever since.
That same year, Ralph Pulitzer, who had succeeded his father Joseph as publisher of the "World", began a drive to raise for an exterior lighting system to illuminate the statue at night. He claimed over 80,000 contributors, but failed to reach the goal. The difference was quietly made up by a gift from a wealthy donor—a fact that was not revealed until 1936. An underwater power cable brought electricity from the mainland and floodlights were placed along the walls of Fort Wood. Gutzon Borglum, who later sculpted Mount Rushmore, redesigned the torch, replacing much of the original copper with stained glass. On December 2, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson pressed the telegraph key that turned on the lights, successfully illuminating the statue.
After the United States entered World War I in 1917, images of the statue were heavily used in both recruitment posters and the Liberty bond drives that urged American citizens to support the war financially. This impressed upon the public the war's stated purpose—to secure liberty—and served as a reminder that embattled France had given the United States the statue.
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge used his authority under the Antiquities Act to declare the statue a national monument. The only successful suicide in the statue's history occurred five years later, when a man climbed out of one of the windows in the crown and jumped to his death, glancing off the statue's breast and landing on the base.
In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the statue to be transferred to the National Park Service (NPS). In 1937, the NPS gained jurisdiction over the rest of Bedloe's Island. With the Army's departure, the NPS began to transform the island into a park. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) demolished most of the old buildings, regraded and reseeded the eastern end of the island, and built granite steps for a new public entrance to the statue from its rear. The WPA also carried out restoration work within the statue, temporarily removing the rays from the statue's halo so their rusted supports could be replaced. Rusted cast-iron steps in the pedestal were replaced with new ones made of reinforced concrete; the upper parts of the stairways within the statue were replaced, as well. Copper sheathing was installed to prevent further damage from rainwater that had been seeping into the pedestal. The statue was closed to the public from May until December 1938.
During World War II, the statue remained open to visitors, although it was not illuminated at night due to wartime blackouts. It was lit briefly on December 31, 1943, and on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when its lights flashed "dot-dot-dot-dash", the Morse code for V, for victory. New, powerful lighting was installed in 1944–1945, and beginning on V-E Day, the statue was once again illuminated after sunset. The lighting was for only a few hours each evening, and it was not until 1957 that the statue was illuminated every night, all night. In 1946, the interior of the statue within reach of visitors was coated with a special plastic so that graffiti could be washed away.
In 1956, an Act of Congress officially renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island, a change advocated by Bartholdi generations earlier. The act also mentioned the efforts to found an American Museum of Immigration on the island, which backers took as federal approval of the project, though the government was slow to grant funds for it. Nearby Ellis Island was made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument by proclamation of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. In 1972, the immigration museum, in the statue's base, was finally opened in a ceremony led by President Richard Nixon. The museum's backers never provided it with an endowment to secure its future and it closed in 1991 after the opening of an immigration museum on Ellis Island.
In 1970, Ivy Bottini led a demonstration at the statue where she and others from the National Organization for Women's New York chapter draped an enormous banner over a railing which read "WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!"
Beginning December 26, 1971, 15 anti-Vietnam War veterans occupied the statue, flying a US flag upside down from her crown. They left December 28 following a Federal Court order. The statue was also several times taken over briefly by demonstrators publicizing causes such as Puerto Rican independence, opposition to abortion, and opposition to US intervention in Grenada. Demonstrations with the permission of the Park Service included a Gay Pride Parade rally and the annual Captive Baltic Nations rally.
A powerful new lighting system was installed in advance of the American Bicentennial in 1976. The statue was the focal point for Operation Sail, a regatta of tall ships from all over the world that entered New York Harbor on July 4, 1976, and sailed around Liberty Island. The day concluded with a spectacular display of fireworks near the statue.
The statue was examined in great detail by French and American engineers as part of the planning for its centennial in 1986. In 1982, it was announced that the statue was in need of considerable restoration. Careful study had revealed that the right arm had been improperly attached to the main structure. It was swaying more and more when strong winds blew and there was a significant risk of structural failure. In addition, the head had been installed off center, and one of the rays was wearing a hole in the right arm when the statue moved in the wind. The armature structure was badly corroded, and about two percent of the exterior plates needed to be replaced. Although problems with the armature had been recognized as early as 1936, when cast iron replacements for some of the bars had been installed, much of the corrosion had been hidden by layers of paint applied over the years.
In May 1982, President Ronald Reagan announced the formation of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Centennial Commission, led by Chrysler Corporation chair Lee Iacocca, to raise the funds needed to complete the work. Through its fundraising arm, the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., the group raised more than $350 million in donations for the renovations of both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty was one of the earliest beneficiaries of a cause marketing campaign. A 1983 promotion advertised that for each purchase made with an American Express card, the company would contribute one cent to the renovation of the statue. The campaign generated contributions of $1.7 million to the restoration project.
In 1984, the statue was closed to the public for the duration of the renovation. Workers erected the world's largest free-standing scaffold, which obscured the statue from view. Liquid nitrogen was used to remove layers of paint that had been applied to the interior of the copper skin over decades, leaving two layers of coal tar, originally applied to plug leaks and prevent corrosion. Blasting with baking soda powder removed the tar without further damaging the copper. The restorers' work was hampered by the asbestos-based substance that Bartholdi had used—ineffectively, as inspections showed—to prevent galvanic corrosion. Workers within the statue had to wear protective gear, dubbed "moon suits", with self-contained breathing circuits. Larger holes in the copper skin were repaired, and new copper was added where necessary. The replacement skin was taken from a copper rooftop at Bell Labs, which had a patina that closely resembled the statue's; in exchange, the laboratory was provided some of the old copper skin for testing. The torch, found to have been leaking water since the 1916 alterations, was replaced with an exact replica of Bartholdi's unaltered torch. Consideration was given to replacing the arm and shoulder; the National Park Service insisted that they be repaired instead. The original torch was removed and replaced in 1986 with the current one, whose flame is covered in 24-karat gold. The torch reflects the Sun's rays in daytime and is lighted by floodlights at night.
The entire puddled iron armature designed by Gustave Eiffel was replaced. Low-carbon corrosion-resistant stainless steel bars that now hold the staples next to the skin are made of Ferralium, an alloy that bends slightly and returns to its original shape as the statue moves. To prevent the ray and arm making contact, the ray was realigned by several degrees. The lighting was again replaced—night-time illumination subsequently came from metal-halide lamps that send beams of light to particular parts of the pedestal or statue, showing off various details. Access to the pedestal, which had been through a nondescript entrance built in the 1960s, was renovated to create a wide opening framed by a set of monumental bronze doors with designs symbolic of the renovation. A modern elevator was installed, allowing handicapped access to the observation area of the pedestal. An emergency elevator was installed within the statue, reaching up to the level of the shoulder.
July 3–6, 1986, was designated "Liberty Weekend", marking the centennial of the statue and its reopening. President Reagan presided over the rededication, with French President François Mitterrand in attendance. July 4 saw a reprise of Operation Sail, and the statue was reopened to the public on July 5. In Reagan's dedication speech, he stated, "We are the keepers of the flame of liberty; we hold it high for the world to see."
Immediately following the September 11 attacks, the statue and Liberty Island were closed to the public. The island reopened at the end of 2001, while the pedestal and statue remained off-limits. The pedestal reopened in August 2004, but the National Park Service announced that visitors could not safely be given access to the statue due to the difficulty of evacuation in an emergency. The Park Service adhered to that position through the remainder of the Bush administration. New York Congressman Anthony Weiner made the statue's reopening a personal crusade. On May 17, 2009, President Barack Obama's Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced that as a "special gift" to America, the statue would be reopened to the public as of July 4, but that only a limited number of people would be permitted to ascend to the crown each day.
The statue, including the pedestal and base, closed on October 29, 2011, for installation of new elevators and staircases and to bring other facilities, such as restrooms, up to code. The statue was reopened on October 28, 2012, but then closed again a day later in advance of Hurricane Sandy. Although the storm did not harm the statue, it destroyed some of the infrastructure on both Liberty and Ellis Islands, including the dock used by the ferries that ran to Liberty and Ellis Islands. On November 8, 2012, a Park Service spokesperson announced that both islands would remain closed for an indefinite period for repairs to be done. Since Liberty Island had no electricity, a generator was installed to power temporary floodlights to illuminate the statue at night. The superintendent of Statue of Liberty National Monument, David Luchsinger—whose home on the island was severely damaged—stated that it would be "optimistically ... months" before the island was reopened to the public. The statue and Liberty Island reopened to the public on July 4, 2013. Ellis Island remained closed for repairs for several more months but reopened in late October 2013.
The Statue of Liberty has also been closed due to government shutdowns and protests, as well as for disease pandemics. During the October 2013 United States federal government shutdown, Liberty Island and other federally funded sites were closed. In addition, Liberty Island was briefly closed on July 4, 2018, after a woman protesting against American immigration policy climbed onto the statue. However, the island remained open during the 2018–19 United States federal government shutdown because the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation had donated funds. It closed beginning on March 16, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On October 7, 2016, construction started on the new Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island. The new $70 million, museum may be visited by all who come to the island, as opposed to the museum in the pedestal, which only 20% of the island's visitors had access to. The new museum, designed by FXFOWLE Architects, is integrated with the surrounding parkland. Diane von Fürstenberg headed the fundraising for the museum, and the project received over $40 million in fundraising by groundbreaking. The museum opened on May 16, 2019.
The statue is situated in Upper New York Bay on Liberty Island south of Ellis Island, which together comprise the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Both islands were ceded by New York to the federal government in 1800. As agreed in an 1834 compact between New York and New Jersey that set the state border at the bay's midpoint, the original islands remain New York territory though located on the New Jersey side of the state line. Liberty Island is one of the islands that are part of the borough of Manhattan in New York. Land created by reclamation added to the original island at Ellis Island is New Jersey territory.
No charge is made for entrance to the national monument, but there is a cost for the ferry service that all visitors must use, as private boats may not dock at the island. A concession was granted in 2007 to Statue Cruises to operate the transportation and ticketing facilities, replacing Circle Line, which had operated the service since 1953. The ferries, which depart from Liberty State Park in Jersey City and the Battery in Lower Manhattan, also stop at Ellis Island when it is open to the public, making a combined trip possible. All ferry riders are subject to security screening, similar to airport procedures, prior to boarding.
Visitors intending to enter the statue's base and pedestal must obtain a complimentary museum/pedestal ticket along with their ferry ticket. Those wishing to climb the staircase within the statue to the crown purchase a special ticket, which may be reserved up to a year in advance. A total of 240 people per day are permitted to ascend: ten per group, three groups per hour. Climbers may bring only medication and cameras—lockers are provided for other items—and must undergo a second security screening.
There are several plaques and dedicatory tablets on or near the Statue of Liberty.
A group of statues stands at the western end of the island, honoring those closely associated with the Statue of Liberty. Two Americans—Pulitzer and Lazarus—and three Frenchmen—Bartholdi, Eiffel, and Laboulaye—are depicted. They are the work of Maryland sculptor Phillip Ratner.
President Calvin Coolidge officially designated the Statue of Liberty as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1924. The monument was expanded to also include Ellis Island in 1965. The following year, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were jointly added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the statue individually in 2017. On the sub-national level, the Statue of Liberty National Monument was added to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places in 1971, and was made a New York City designated landmark in 1976.
In 1984, the Statue of Liberty was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The UNESCO "Statement of Significance" describes the statue as a "masterpiece of the human spirit" that "endures as a highly potent symbol—inspiring contemplation, debate and protest—of ideals such as liberty, peace, human rights, abolition of slavery, democracy and opportunity."
Hundreds of replicas of the Statue of Liberty are displayed worldwide. A smaller version of the statue, one-fourth the height of the original, was given by the American community in Paris to that city. It now stands on the Île aux Cygnes, facing west toward her larger sister. A replica tall stood atop the Liberty Warehouse on West 64th Street in Manhattan for many years; it now resides at the Brooklyn Museum. In a patriotic tribute, the Boy Scouts of America, as part of their Strengthen the Arm of Liberty campaign in 1949–1952, donated about two hundred replicas of the statue, made of stamped copper and in height, to states and municipalities across the United States. Though not a true replica, the statue known as the Goddess of Democracy temporarily erected during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 was similarly inspired by French democratic traditions—the sculptors took care to avoid a direct imitation of the Statue of Liberty. Among other recreations of New York City structures, a replica of the statue is part of the exterior of the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
As an American icon, the Statue of Liberty has been depicted on the country's coinage and stamps. It appeared on commemorative coins issued to mark its 1986 centennial, and on New York's 2001 entry in the state quarters series. An image of the statue was chosen for the American Eagle platinum bullion coins in 1997, and it was placed on the reverse, or tails, side of the Presidential Dollar series of circulating coins. Two images of the statue's torch appear on the current ten-dollar bill. The statue's intended photographic depiction on a 2010 forever stamp proved instead to be of the replica at the Las Vegas casino.
Depictions of the statue have been used by many regional institutions. Between 1986 and 2000, New York State issued license plates with an outline of the statue. The Women's National Basketball Association's New York Liberty use both the statue's name and its image in their logo, in which the torch's flame doubles as a basketball. The New York Rangers of the National Hockey League depicted the statue's head on their third jersey, beginning in 1997. The National Collegiate Athletic Association's 1996 Men's Basketball Final Four, played at New Jersey's Meadowlands Sports Complex, featured the statue in its logo. The Libertarian Party of the United States uses the statue in its emblem.
The statue is a frequent subject in popular culture. In music, it has been evoked to indicate support for American policies, as in Toby Keith's song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", and in opposition, appearing on the cover of the Dead Kennedys' album "Bedtime for Democracy", which protested the Reagan administration. In film, the torch is the setting for the climax of director Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 movie "Saboteur". The statue makes one of its most famous cinematic appearances in the 1968 picture "Planet of the Apes", in which it is seen half-buried in sand. It is knocked over in the science-fiction film "Independence Day" and in "Cloverfield" the head is ripped off. In Jack Finney's time-travel novel "Time and Again", the right arm of the statue, on display in the early 1880s in Madison Square Park, plays a crucial role. Robert Holdstock, consulting editor of "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", wondered in 1979: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28617 |
Speech coding
Speech coding is an application of data compression of digital audio signals containing speech. Speech coding uses speech-specific parameter estimation using audio signal processing techniques to model the speech signal, combined with generic data compression algorithms to represent the resulting modeled parameters in a compact bitstream.
Some applications of speech coding are mobile telephony and voice over IP (VoIP). The most widely used speech coding technique in mobile telephony is linear predictive coding (LPC), while the most widely used in VoIP applications are the LPC and modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) techniques.
The techniques employed in speech coding are similar to those used in audio data compression and audio coding where knowledge in psychoacoustics is used to transmit only data that is relevant to the human auditory system. For example, in voiceband speech coding, only information in the frequency band 400 Hz to 3500 Hz is transmitted but the reconstructed signal is still adequate for intelligibility.
Speech coding differs from other forms of audio coding in that speech is a simpler signal than most other audio signals, and a lot more statistical information is available about the properties of speech. As a result, some auditory information which is relevant in audio coding can be unnecessary in the speech coding context. In speech coding, the most important criterion is preservation of intelligibility and "pleasantness" of speech, with a constrained amount of transmitted data.
In addition, most speech applications require low coding delay, as long coding delays interfere with speech interaction.
Speech coders are of two types:
From this point of view, the A-law and μ-law algorithms (G.711) used in traditional PCM digital telephony can be seen as an earlier precursor of speech encoding, requiring only 8 bits per sample but giving effectively 12 bits of resolution. The logarithmic companding laws are consistent with human hearing perception in that a low-amplitude noise is heard along a low-amplitude speech signal but is masked by a high-amplitude one. Although this would generate unacceptable distortion in a music signal, the peaky nature of speech waveforms, combined with the simple frequency structure of speech as a periodic waveform having a single fundamental frequency with occasional added noise bursts, make these very simple instantaneous compression algorithms acceptable for speech.
A wide variety of other algorithms were tried at the time, mostly on delta modulation variants, but after a careful consideration, the A-law/μ-law algorithms were chosen by the designers of the early digital telephony systems. At the time of their design, their 33% bandwidth reduction for a very low complexity made an excellent engineering compromise. Their audio performance remains acceptable, and there was no need to replace them in the stationary phone network.
In 2008, G.711.1 codec, which has a scalable structure, was standardized by ITU-T. The input sampling rate is 16 kHz.
Much of the later works in speech compression was motivated by military research into digital communications for secure military radios, where very low data rates were required to allow effective operation in a hostile radio environment. At the same time, far more processing power was available, in the form of VLSI circuits, than was available for earlier compression techniques. As a result, modern speech compression algorithms could use far more complex techniques than were available in the 1960s to achieve far higher compression ratios.
These techniques were available through the open research literature to be used for civilian applications, allowing the creation of digital mobile phone networks with substantially higher channel capacities than the analog systems that preceded them.
The most widely used speech coding algorithms are based on linear predictive coding (LPC). In particular, the most common speech coding scheme is the LPC-based Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) coding, which is used for example in the GSM standard. In CELP, the modelling is divided in two stages, a linear predictive stage that models the spectral envelope and code-book based model of the residual of the linear predictive model. In CELP, linear prediction coefficients (LPC) are computed and quantized, usually as line spectral pairs (LSPs). In addition to the actual speech coding of the signal, it is often necessary to use channel coding for transmission, to avoid losses due to transmission errors. Usually, speech coding and channel coding methods have to be chosen in pairs, with the more important bits in the speech data stream protected by more robust channel coding, in order to get the best overall coding results.
The modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), a type of discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm, was adapted into a speech coding algorithm called LD-MDCT, used for the AAC-LD format introduced in 1999. MDCT has since been widely adopted in voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, such as the G.729.1 wideband audio codec introduced in 2006, Apple's Facetime (using AAC-LD) introduced in 2010, and the CELT codec introduced in 2011.
Opus is a free software speech coder. It combines both the MDCT and LPC audio compression algorithms. It is widely used for VoIP calls in WhatsApp. The PlayStation 4 video game console also uses the CELT/Opus codec for its PlayStation Network system party chat.
Codec2 is another free software speech coder, which manages to achieve very good compression, as low as 700 bit/s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28618 |
Stalinism
Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), including rapid industrialization; the theory of socialism in one country; totalitarianism; collectivization of agriculture; a cult of personality; and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.
Stalinism promoted the escalation of class conflict, utilizing state violence to forcibly purge society of the bourgeoisie, whom Stalinist doctrine regarded as threats to the pursuit of the communist revolution. This policy resulted in substantial political violence and persecution of such people. However, 'enemies' not only included the bourgeoisie, but also those of the working class who demonstrated counter-revolutionary sympathies.
Officially designed to accelerate development towards communism, the need for Stalinist industrialization was emphasized because the Soviet Union had previously fallen behind economically compared to Western countries, and that socialist society needed industry to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism. As such, rapid industrialization was accompanied by mass collectivization of agriculture and by rapid urbanization, the latter of which converted many small villages into industrial cities. To accelerate the development of industrialization, Stalin imported materials, ideas, expertise, and workers from Western Europe and the United States, pragmatically setting up joint-venture contracts with major American private enterprises, such as the Ford Motor Company, which, under state supervision, assisted in developing the basis of the industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to the 1930s. After the American private enterprises had completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.
Stalinism is used to describe the period during which Stalin was leader of the Soviet Union while serving as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1922 to his death on 5 March 1953.
The term "Stalinism" came into prominence during the mid-1930s when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared: "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!" Stalin dismissed this as excessively praiseful and contributing to a cult of personality.
While some historians view Stalinism as a reflection of the ideologies of Leninism and Marxism, some argue that it stands separate from the socialist ideals it stemmed from. After a political struggle that culminated in the defeat of the Bukharinists (the "Party's Right Tendency"), Stalinism was free to shape policy without opposition, ushering forth an era of harsh authoritarianism that worked toward rapid industrialization regardless of the cost.
From 1917 to 1924, though often appearing united, Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (e.g., he considered the American working class "bourgeoisified" labor aristocracy). Stalin also polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants as in China, whereas Trotsky's position was in favor of urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.
While all other October Revolution 1917 Bolshevik leaders regarded their revolution more or less just as the beginning, they viewed Russia as the springboard on the road towards the World Wide Revolution. Stalin would eventually introduce the idea of socialism in one country by the autumn of 1924, a theory not only standing in sharp contrast to Trotsky's permanent revolution but to all earlier socialistic theses just as well. The revolution, however, did not spread outside of Russia as Lenin had assumed it soon would. Not even within other former territories of the Russian Empire―such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia―had the revolution been a success. On the contrary, all of these countries had returned to capitalist bourgeois rule.
Despite this, by the autumn of 1924, Stalin's notion of socialism in Soviet Russia was initially considered next to blasphemy in the ears of other Politburo members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev to the intellectual left; Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky to the pragmatic right; and the powerful Trotsky, who belonged to no side but his own. None would even think of Stalin's concept as a potential addition to Communist ideology. As result, Stalin's "socialism in one country" doctrine could not be imposed until he, himself, had become close to being the autocratic ruler of the U.S.S.R. around 1929. Bukharin and the Right Opposition expressed their support for imposing Stalin's ideas, as Trotsky had been exiled, whereas Zinoviev and Kamenev had been thrown out of the party.
While traditional communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away," as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction, Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian.
Sheng Shicai, a Chinese warlord with Marxist leanings, invited Soviet intervention and allowed Stalinist rule to be extended to the Xinjiang province in the 1930s. In 1937, Sheng conducted a purge similar to the Great Purge, imprisoning, torturing, and killing about 100,000 people, many of whom were Uyghurs.
Stalin blamed the kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation. In response, the state under Stalin's leadership initiated a violent campaign against the kulaks. This kind of campaign would later be known as "classicide".
As head of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators." Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, though more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.
In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes (the fewest of any candidate) while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes. After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. From thereon, the investigations and trials expanded. Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly."
Thereafter, several trials, known as the Moscow Trials, were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as a counter-revolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner. Many alleged anti-Soviet pretexts were used to brand individuals as "enemies of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution, often proceeding to interrogation, torture, and deportation, if not death. The Russian word "troika" thereby gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD troika—with sentencing carried out within 24 hours. Stalin's hand-picked executioner Vasili Blokhin was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.
Many military leaders were convicted of treason, and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed. The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937—this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership.
With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.
Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, and Koreans. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed. Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed, while others were sent to prison camps or gulags. Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed into a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.
In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror, with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, and beggars. Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some of the major killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty, and Butovo.
Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable. Conversely, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, who spent a good portion of his academic career researching the archives, contends that, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge."
Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned to execute some 40,000 people, about 90% of whom are confirmed to have been shot. At the time, while reviewing one such list, he reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one." In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD "troika", and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese spies," as Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and other opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia (e.g. Andréu Nin Pérez).
Shortly before, during, and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a broad-scale series of deportations that profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule, and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars—more than a million people in total—were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.
As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, ethnic groups such as the Soviet Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and many Poles, were forcibly moved out of strategic areas and relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the gulags from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including entire nationalities in several cases). The emergent scholarly consensus is that from 1930 to 1953, around 1.5 to 1.7 million perished in the gulag system.
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians, and Volga Germans were allowed to return "en masse" to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations has played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic states, Tatarstan and Chechnya even today.
At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This came to be known as the Great Turn as Russia turned away from the near-capitalist New Economic Policy (NEP) and instead adopted a command economy. The NEP had been implemented by Lenin in order to ensure the survival of the socialist state following seven years of war (World War I, 1914–1917, and the subsequent Civil War, 1917–1921) and had rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. However, Russia still lagged far behind the West, and the NEP was felt by Stalin and the majority of the Communist Party, not only to be compromising communist ideals but also not delivering sufficient economic performance as well as not creating the envisaged socialist society. It was, therefore, felt necessary to increase the pace of industrialization in order to catch up with the West.
Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was…a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernized the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure." Robert Conquest disputed such a conclusion, noting that "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I" and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivization, famine, or terror. According to Conquest, the industrial successes were far less than claimed, and the Soviet-style industrialization was "an anti-innovative dead-end." Stephen Kotkin said those who argue collectivization was necessary are "dead wrong," arguing that such "only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver." Kotkin further claimed that it decreased harvests instead of increasing them.
According to several Western historians, Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in causing the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which the Ukrainian government now calls the Holodomor, recognizing it as an act of genocide. Some scholars, however, dispute the intentionality of the famine.
Pierre du Bois argues that the cult was elaborately constructed to legitimize his rule. Many deliberate distortions and falsehoods were used. The Kremlin refused access to archival records that might reveal the truth, and key documents were destroyed. Photographs were altered, and documents were invented. People who knew Stalin were forced to provide "official" accounts to meet the ideological demands of the cult, especially as Stalin himself presented it in 1938 in "Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", which became the official history. Historian David L. Hoffmann sums up the consensus of scholars:
However, after Stalin's death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies and condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, as well as instituting de-Stalinisation and relative liberalization (within the same political framework). Consequently, some of the world's communist parties who previously adhered to Stalinism abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the positions of Khrushchev. Others, such as the Communist Party of China, instead chose to split from the Soviet Union. The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomized by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres," lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Mao Zedong famously declared that Stalin was 70% good, 30% bad. Maoists criticized Stalin chiefly regarding his view that bourgeois influence within the Soviet Union was primarily a result of external forces (to the almost complete exclusion of internal forces) and his view that class contradictions ended after the basic construction of socialism. However, they praised Stalin for leading the Soviet Union and the international proletariat, defeating fascism in Germany and his anti-revisionism.
Taking the side of the Chinese Party in the Sino-Soviet split, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania remained committed, at least theoretically, to its own brand of Stalinism ("Hoxhaism") for decades thereafter under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism," Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified communist organization in the world. This had the effect of isolating Albania from the rest of the world as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-American and pro-Soviet spheres of influence, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also denounced.
Some historians and writers (such as German Dietrich Schwanitz) draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great, although Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Both largely succeeded, turning Russia into Europe's leading power. Others compare Stalin with Ivan the Terrible because of his policies of oprichnina and restriction of the liberties of common people.
Stalinism has been considered by some reviewers as a "red fascism." Though fascist regimes were ideologically opposed to the Soviet Union, some of them positively regarded Stalinism as evolving Bolshevism into a form of fascism. Benito Mussolini, himself, positively reviewed Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.
In writing "The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argues that the use of the term "Stalinism" is an excuse to hide the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberties. He writes that the concept of "Stalinism" was developed after 1956 by Western intellectuals so as to be able to keep alive the communist ideal. However, the term "Stalinism" was in use as early as 1937 when Leon Trotsky wrote his pamphlet "Stalinism and Bolshevism".
Kristen R. Ghodsee, ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, posits that the triumphalist attitudes of Western powers at the end of the Cold War and, in particular, the fixation with linking all socialist political ideals with the excesses of Stalinism had marginalized the left's response to the fusing of democracy with neoliberal ideology, which helped undermine the former. This allowed the anger and resentment that came with the ravages of neoliberalism (i.e. economic misery, unemployment, hopelessness, and rising inequality throughout the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West) to be channeled into nationalist movements in the decades that followed.
Writing in 2002, British journalist Seumas Milne said that the impact of the post-Cold War narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, and therefore Communism is as monstrous as Nazism, "has been to relativize the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."
In modern Russia, public opinion of Stalin and the former Soviet Union has increased in recent years. According to a 2015 Levada Center poll, 34% of respondents (up from 28% in 2007) say that leading the Soviet people to victory in the World War II was such a great achievement that it outweighed his mistakes. A 2019 Lavada Center poll showed that support for Stalin reached a record high in the post-Soviet era, with 51% regarding Stalin as a positive figure, and 70% saying his reign was good for the country.
Trotskyists argue that the Stalinist USSR was neither socialist nor communist, but rather a bureaucratized degenerated workers' state—that is, a non-capitalist state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, although not owning the means of production and not constituting a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class. Trotsky believed that the Bolshevik revolution needed to be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians for world revolution. However, after the failure of the revolution in Germany, Stalin reasoned that industrializing and consolidating Bolshevism in Russia would best serve the proletariat in the long run. The dispute did not end until Trotsky's assassination in his Mexican villa by Stalinist assassin Ramón Mercader in 1940.
Max Shachtman, one of the principal Trotskyist theorists in the United States at the time, argued that the Soviet Union had evolved from a degenerated worker's state to a new mode of production which he called "bureaucratic collectivism", whereby orthodox Trotskyists considered the Soviet Union an ally gone astray. Shachtman and his followers thus argued for the formation of a Third Camp opposed equally to both the Soviet and capitalist blocs. By the mid-20th century, Shachtman and many of his associates identified as social democrats rather than Trotskyists, while some ultimately abandoned socialism altogether. In the United Kingdom, Tony Cliff independently developed a critique of state capitalism that resembled Shachtman's in some respects, but retained a commitment to revolutionary communism.
Stalin considered the political and economic system under his rule to be Marxism–Leninism, which he considered the only legitimate successor of Marxism and Leninism. The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes of Stalin and Lenin proposed. Some historians, such as Richard Pipes, consider Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programs." Robert Service notes that "institutionally and ideologically Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin… but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable." Likewise, historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a real follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself. Another Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotkin, wrote that "his violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist–Leninist ideology."
Dmitri Volkogonov, who wrote biographies of both Lenin and Stalin, explained that during the 1960s through 1980s an official patriotic Soviet de-Stalinized view of the Lenin–Stalin relationship (i.e., during the Khrushchev Thaw and later) was that the overly-autocratic Stalin had distorted the Leninism of the wise "dedushka" Lenin. However, Volkogonov also lamented that this view eventually dissolved for those like him who had the scales fall from their eyes in the years immediately before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After researching the biographies in the Soviet archives, he came to the same conclusion as Radzinsky and Kotkin: that Lenin had built a culture of violent autocratic totalitarianism, of which Stalinism was a logical extension. He lamented that, while Stalin had long since fallen in the estimation of many Soviet minds (the many who agreed with de-Stalinization), "Lenin was the last bastion" in Volkogonov's mind to fall and the fall was the most painful, given the secular apotheosis of Lenin that all Soviet children grew up with.
Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors, in that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage-taking and internment camps; that it was Lenin who developed the infamous Article 58 and who established the autocratic system within the Communist Party. They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921—a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed: "We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated."
Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and a number of post-Cold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin…in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them." In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism in order to undermine the totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin were inherent in communism from the start. Critics of this kind include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the Communist Party to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary. Lenin's Testament, the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. In his biography of Trotsky, British historian Isaac Deutscher says that, on being faced with the evidence, "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism." A similar analysis is present in more recent works, such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that "[Stalinism was] not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors." However, Gill notes that "difficulties with the use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism." Revisionist historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have criticized the focus upon the upper levels of society and the use of Cold War concepts, such as totalitarianism, which have obscured the reality of the system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28621 |
Sukkot
Sukkot ( or , '; traditional Ashkenazi spelling: "Sukkos"/"Succos"), commonly called the Feast of Tabernacles or in some translations the Festival of Shelters, and known also as the Feast of Ingathering (חג האסיף, "Chag HaAsif"), is a biblical Jewish holiday celebrated on the 15th day of the seventh month, Tishrei (varies from late September to late October). During the existence of the Jerusalem Temple, it was one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (, ') on which the Israelites were commanded to perform a pilgrimage to the Temple.
The names used in the Torah are "Chag HaAsif", translated to "Festival of Ingathering" or "Harvest Festival", and "Chag HaSukkot", translated to "Festival of Booths". This corresponds to the double significance of Sukkot. The one mentioned in the Book of Exodus is agricultural in nature—"Festival of Ingathering at the year's end" ()—and marks the end of the harvest time and thus of the agricultural year in the Land of Israel. The more elaborate religious significance from the Book of Leviticus is that of commemorating the Exodus and the dependence of the People of Israel on the will of God ().
The holiday lasts seven days in the Land of Israel and eight in the diaspora. The first day (and second day in the diaspora) is a Shabbat-like holiday when work is forbidden. This is followed by intermediate days called Chol Hamoed, when certain work is permitted. The festival is closed with another Shabbat-like holiday called Shemini Atzeret (one day in the Land of Israel, two days in the diaspora, where the second day is called Simchat Torah). Shemini Atzeret coincides with the eighth day of Sukkot outside the Land of Israel.
The Hebrew word "" is the plural of "sukkah", "booth" or "tabernacle", which is a walled structure covered with "s'chach" (plant material, such as overgrowth or palm leaves). A sukkah is the name of the temporary dwelling in which farmers would live during harvesting, a fact connecting to the agricultural significance of the holiday stressed by the Book of Exodus. As stated in Leviticus, it is also intended as a reminiscence of the type of fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the sukkah and many people sleep there as well.
On each day of the holiday it is mandatory to perform a waving ceremony with the Four Species.
In the Book of Leviticus, God told Moses to command the people: "On the first day you shall take the product of "hadar" trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook" (), and "You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt" ().
The origins of Sukkot are both historical and agricultural. Historically, Sukkot commemorates the 40-year period during which the children of Israel wandered in the desert, living in temporary shelters. Agriculturally, Sukkot is a harvest festival and is sometimes referred to as " (, the "Festival of Ingathering").
Sukkot is a seven-day festival, with the first day celebrated as a full festival with special prayer services and holiday meals. The seventh day of Sukkot is called " ("Great Hoshana", referring to the tradition that worshippers in the synagogue walk around the perimeter of the sanctuary during morning services) and has a special observance of its own. Outside the Land of Israel, the first and last two days are celebrated as full festivals. The intermediate days are known as "Chol HaMoed" ("festival weekdays"). According to Halakha, some types of work are forbidden during "Chol HaMoed". In Israel many businesses are closed during this time.
Throughout the week of Sukkot, meals are eaten in the sukkah. If a brit milah (circumcision ceremony) or Bar Mitzvah rises during Sukkot, the seudat mitzvah (obligatory festive meal) is served in the sukkah. Similarly, the father of a newborn boy greets guests to his Friday-night Shalom Zachar in the sukkah. Males awaken there, although the requirement is waived in case of drought. Every day, a blessing is recited over the Lulav and the Etrog.
Keeping of Sukkot is detailed in the Hebrew Bible (, and ); the Mishnah (Sukkah 1:1–5:8); the Tosefta (Sukkah 1:1–4:28); and the Jerusalem Talmud (Sukkah 1a–) and Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 2a–56b).
The sukkah walls can be constructed of any material (wood, canvas, aluminum siding, sheets). The walls can be free-standing or include the sides of a building or porch. The roof must be of organic material, known as s'chach, such as leafy tree overgrowth, schach mats or palm fronds – plant material that is no longer connected with the earth. It is customary to decorate the interior of the sukkah with hanging decorations of the four species as well as with attractive artwork.
Prayers during Sukkot include the reading of the Torah every day, reciting the Mussaf (additional) service after morning prayers, reciting Hallel, and adding special additions to the Amidah and Grace after Meals. In addition, the service includes rituals involving the Four Species. The lulav and etrog are not brought to the synagogue on Shabbat.
On each day of the festival, worshippers walk around the synagogue carrying the Four Species while reciting special prayers known as "Hoshanot". This takes place either after the morning's Torah reading or at the end of Mussaf. This ceremony commemorates the willow ceremony at the Temple in Jerusalem, in which willow branches were piled beside the altar with worshippers parading around the altar reciting prayers.
A custom originating with Lurianic Kabbalah is to recite the "ushpizin" prayer to "invite" one of seven "exalted guests" into the sukkah. These "ushpizin" (Aramaic 'guests'), represent the "seven shepherds of Israel": Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David, each of whom correlate with one of the seven lower Sephirot (this is why Joseph, associated with Yesod, follows Moses and Aaron, associated with Netzach and Hod respectively, even though he precedes them in the narrative). According to tradition, each night a different guest enters the sukkah followed by the other six. Each of the "ushpizin" has a unique lesson to teach that parallels the spiritual focus of the day on which they visit, based on the Sephirah associated with that character.
Some streams of Judaism also recognize a set of seven female shepherds of Israel, called variously (using modern Hebrew feminine pluralization), or (in reconstructed Aramaic). Several lists of seven have been proposed. The Ushpizata are sometimes coidentified with the seven prophetesses of Judaism: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther. Some lists seek to relate each female leader to one of the Sephirot, to parallel their male counterparts of the evening. One such list (in the order they would be invoked, each evening) is: Ruth, Sarah, Rebecca, Miriam, Deborah, Tamar, and Rachel.
The second through seventh days of Sukkot (third through seventh days outside the Land of Israel) are called Chol HaMoed ( – "festival weekdays"). These days are considered by halakha to be more than regular weekdays but less than festival days. In practice, this means that all activities that are needed for the holiday—such as buying and preparing food, cleaning the house in honor of the holiday, or traveling to visit other people's sukkot or on family outings—are permitted by Jewish law. Activities that will interfere with relaxation and enjoyment of the holiday—such as laundering, mending clothes, engaging in labor-intensive activities—are not permitted.
Religious Jews often treat Chol HaMoed as a vacation period, eating nicer than usual meals in their sukkah, entertaining guests, visiting other families in their sukkot, and taking family outings. Many synagogues and Jewish centers also offer events and meals in their sukkot during this time to foster community and goodwill.
On the Shabbat which falls during the week of Sukkot (or in the event when the first day of Sukkot is on Shabbat), the Book of Ecclesiastes is read during morning synagogue services in the Land of Israel. (Diaspora communities read it the second Shabbat {eighth day} when the first day of sukkot is on Shabbat.) This Book's emphasis on the ephemeralness of life ("Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...") echoes the theme of the sukkah, while its emphasis on death reflects the time of year in which Sukkot occurs (the "autumn" of life). The penultimate verse reinforces the message that adherence to God and His Torah is the only worthwhile pursuit. (Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:13,14.)
In the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, all Israelite, and later Jewish men, women, and children on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the festival would gather in the Temple courtyard on the first day of Chol HaMoed Sukkot to hear the Jewish king read selections from the Torah. This ceremony, which was mandated in Deuteronomy 31:10–13, was held every seven years, in the year following the Shmita (Sabbatical) year. This ceremony was discontinued after the destruction of the Temple, but it has been revived in Israel since 1952 on a smaller scale.
During the intermediate days of Sukkot, gatherings of music and dance, known as "Simchat Beit HaShoeivah" (Celebration of the Place of Water-Drawing), take place. This commemorates the drawing of the water for the water-libation on the Altar, an offering unique to Sukkot, when water was carried up the Jerusalem pilgrim road from the Pool of Siloam to the Temple in Jerusalem.
The seventh day of Sukkot is known as "Hoshana Rabbah" (Great Supplication). This day is marked by a special synagogue service in which seven circuits are made by worshippers holding their Four Species, reciting additional prayers. In addition, a bundle of five willow branches is beaten on the ground.
The holiday immediately following Sukkot is known as "Shemini Atzeret" ( "Eighth [Day] of Assembly"). Shemini Atzeret is usually viewed as a separate holiday. In the Diaspora a second additional holiday, "Simchat Torah" ("Joy of the Torah"), is celebrated. In the Land of Israel, Simchat Torah is celebrated on Shemini Atzeret. On Shemini Atzeret people leave their sukkah and eat their meals inside the house. Outside the Land of Israel, many eat in the sukkah without making the blessing. The sukkah is not used on Simchat Torah.
According to , King Jeroboam, first king of the rebellious northern kingdom, instituted a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month in imitation of the feast of Sukkot in Judah, and pilgrims went to Bethel instead of Jerusalem to make thanksgiving offerings. Jeroboam feared that continued pilgrimages from the northern kingdom to Jerusalem could lead to pressure for reunion with Judah:
Sukkot is celebrated by a number of Christian denominations that observe holidays from the Old Testament. These groups base this on the fact that Jesus celebrated Sukkot (see the Gospel of John 7). The holiday is celebrated according to its Hebrew calendar dates. The first mention of observing the holiday by Christian groups dates to the 17th century, among the sect of the Subbotniks in Russia. In the Orthodox Church, the holiday is said to correspond to the new covenant Feast of the Transfiguration.
De Moor has suggested that there are links between Sukkot and the Ugaritic New Year festival, in particular the Ugaritic custom of erecting two rows of huts built of branches on the temple roof as temporary dwelling houses for their gods.
Some have pointed out that the original Thanksgiving holiday had many similarities with Sukkot in the Bible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28622 |
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (), titled Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom on English-language prints and commonly referred to as simply Salò (), is a 1975 period art film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film is a loose adaptation of the 1904 book (written in 1785) "The 120 Days of Sodom" by the Marquis de Sade, set during World War II, and was Pasolini's final film, being released three weeks after his murder. The film focuses on four wealthy, corrupt Italian libertines, in the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943–1945). The libertines kidnap 18 teenagers and subject them to four months of extreme violence, murder, sadism and sexual and mental torture. The film explores the themes of political corruption, consumerism, socialism, nihilism, morality, abuse of power, social Darwinism, sadism, sexuality and fascism. The story is in four segments, inspired by Dante's "Divine Comedy": the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and the Circle of Blood. The film also contains frequent references to and several discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1887 book "On the Genealogy of Morality", Ezra Pound's poem "The Cantos", and Marcel Proust's novel sequence "In Search of Lost Time".
Premiering at the Paris Film Festival on 23 November 1975, the film had a brief theatrical run in Italy before being banned in January 1976, and was released in the United States the following year on 3 October 1977. Because it depicts youths subjected to graphic violence, sadism, sexual deviance and brutal murder, the film was controversial upon its release and has remained banned in several countries into the 21st century.
The confluence of thematic content in the film—ranging from the political and socio-historical, to psychological and sexual—has led to much critical discussion. It has been both praised and decried by various film historians and critics and was named the 65th-scariest film ever made by the Chicago Film Critics Association in 2006. It is also the subject of an entry in "The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural" (1986).
The film is separated into four segments with intertitles, based on Dante's "Divine Comedy":"
In 1944 in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy, four wealthy men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. They rule that when they get to the mansion their daughters must be completely naked at all times. They recruit four teenage boys to act as guards (dressed with uniforms of Decima Flottiglia MAS) and four young soldiers (called "studs", "cockmongers", or "fuckers"), who are chosen because of their large penises. They then kidnap nine young men and nine young women and take them to a palace near Marzabotto.
Accompanying the libertines at the palace are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose job it is to orchestrate debauched interludes for the men, who sadistically exploit their victims. During the many days at the palace, the four men devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. During breakfast, the daughters enter the dining hall naked to serve food. One of the studs trips and rapes a daughter in front of the crowd, who laugh at her cries of pain. Intrigued, the President moons several slaves before prompting the stud to perform anal sex on him and the Duke sings 'Sul Ponte di perati'. Signora Vaccari uses a mannequin to demonstrate to the young men and women how to properly masturbate a penis and one of the girls tries to escape, only to have her throat cut. Signora Vaccari continues with her story. Two victims, Sergio and Renata, are forced to marry. The ceremony is interrupted when the Duke fondles several victims and prostitutes. At the end, Sergio and Renata are forced to fondle each other and the men rape them to stop them from having sex with each other. During this, the Magistrate engages with the Duke in three-way intercourse.
Another day, the victims are forced to get naked and act like dogs. When one of the victims, Lamberto, refuses, the Magistrate whips him and tortures the President's daughter by tricking her into eating food containing nails.
Signora Maggi relates her troubled childhood and her coprophilia. As she tells her story, the President notices that one of the studs has an erection and fondles him; another stud uses a female victim's hand to masturbate himself. She also explains how she killed her mother over a dispute about her prostitution and Renata cries, remembering the murder of her own mother. The Duke, sexually excited at the sound of her cries, begins verbally abusing her. The Duke orders the guards and studs to undress her. During this, she begs God for death and the Duke punishes her by defecating on the floor and forcing her to eat his feces with a spoon. The President leaves to masturbate. Later, the other victims are presented with a meal of human feces. During a search for the victim with the most beautiful buttocks, Franco is picked and promised death in the future.
Later, there is a Black Mass-like wedding between the studs and the men of power. The men angrily order the children to laugh, but they are too grief-stricken to do so. The Pianist and Signora Vaccari tell jokes to make the victims laugh. The wedding ceremony ensues with each man of power exchanging rings with a stud. After the wedding, the Bishop consummates the marriage and receives anal sex from his stud. The Bishop then leaves to examine the captives in their rooms, where they start systematically betraying each other: Claudio reveals that Graziella is hiding a photograph, Graziella reveals that Eva and Antiniska are having a secret sexual affair and Ezio, a collaborator and the black servant girl are shot dead after being found having sex, but not before Ezio makes a defiant Socialist salute. Victim Umberto Chessari is appointed to replace Ezio.
Toward the end, the remaining victims are called out to determine which of them will be punished. Graziella is spared due to her betrayal of Eva and Rino is spared due to his submissive relationship with the Duke. Those who are called are given a blue ribbon and sentenced to a painful death, while those who haven't been called, as long as they kept collaborating with the libertines, can hope to return home. The victims huddle together and cry and pray in the bathroom. They are then taken outside and raped, tortured and murdered through methods such as branding, hanging, scalping, burning and having their tongues and eyes cut out, as each libertine takes his turn to watch as a voyeur. The soldiers shake hands and bid each other farewell. The Pianist, looking out an open window, suddenly realises with horror what atrocities are being committed, and climbing out, throws herself to her death.
The sombre music during the final sequences is "Veris Leta Facies", by German composer Carl Orff, using text from the "Carmina Burana".
The film's final shot is of two young soldiers, who had witnessed and collaborated in all the atrocities, dancing a simple waltz together; one asks the name of the other's girlfriend back at home.
Masters
Daughters
Storytellers, Middle-age prostitutes
Soldiers/Studs
Collaborators
Servants
Male victims
Female victims
Pasolini's writing collaborator Sergio Citti had originally been attached to direct the intended adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom". During the creation of the first drafts of the script, Pasolini appealed to several of his usual collaborators, among them Citti, Claudio Masenza, Antonio Troisi and specially Pupi Avati.
While collaborating with Citti on the script, Pasolini was compelled to transpose the setting of "Salò" from 18th-century France (as depicted in de Sade's original book) to the last days of Benito Mussolini's regime in the Republic of Salò in the spring of 1944. Salò is a toponymical metonymy for the Italian Social Republic (RSI) (because Mussolini ruled from this northern town rather than from Rome), which was a puppet state of Nazi Germany. While writing the script, it was decided between Citti and Pasolini that the latter would direct the project, as Citti had planned to write a separate project after completing "Salò". Pasolini noted his main contribution to Citti's original screenplay as being its "Dante-esque structure," which Pasolini felt had been de Sade's original intention with the source material.
In the film, almost no background is given on the tortured subjects and, for the most part, they almost never speak. Pasolini's depiction of the victims in such a manner was intended to demonstrate the physical body "as a commodity...the annulment of the personality of the Other." Specifically, Pasolini intended to depict what he described as an "anarchy of power," in which sex acts and physical abuse functioned as metaphor for the relationship between power and its subjects. Aside from this theme, Pasolini also described the film as being about the "nonexistence of history" as it is seen from Western culture and Marxism.
In contrast to his "Trilogy of Life" ("Il Decameron", "I racconti di Canterbury" and "Il fiore delle Mille e una notte"), Pasolini initially planned "The 120 days of Sodom" and "Salò" as separate stories, but noting similarity between both concepts and based on their experiences in the Republic of Salò conceived the idea of "Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom". Pasolini established that the violence scenes in "Salò" were symbolic and reducing the romanticism of his previous films, although knowing that once the film was premiered would be considered as damned. As a continuation, Pasolini planned to make a biographical film about the life of child murderer Gilles de Rais, but after his death, the idea was aborted.
Initially, Ninetto Davoli was chosen to play Claudio, a young collaborationist, but due to legal problems he had to decline, the role being replaced by Claudio Troccoli, a young man who had a similarity to Davoli in his first films. Pupi Avati, being the writer, is not officially accredited due also to legal problems. Most of the actors of the cast, although they were natural actors, many of them were models that did not have modesty to show their naked bodies and most of them retaining their original name. Franco Merli was considered like a prototype of the Pasolinian boy. Ezio Manni remembers during filming: "The same with Franco Merli, the boy chosen for the seat more beautiful. When to reward the link the gun to his head, he had a rebellious snap, could not withstand that gesture. Then, there, too, he came the assistant director and if it is embraced."
Franco Citti was to play one of the soldiers' studs, but he did not appear. Laura Betti was also going to play Signora Vaccari, but also because of legal problems and prior commitments to "Novecento". declined the role, even though she doubled the voice of Hélène Surgère.
Umberto Paolo Quintavalle (the Magistrate) was a writer, he knew Pasolini working on the newspaper "Corriere della Sera". He was chosen for the role because he had all "the characteristics of a decadent intellectual."
Aldo Valletti (the President) was a friend of Pasolini from the time of "Accattone". Giorgio Cataldi (the bishop) another friend of Pasolini, was a clothes seller in Rome.
Paolo Bonacelli (El Duque) had participated in several small Italian productions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Several outdoor scenes were filmed in Villa Aldini, a neoclassical building on the hills of Bologna. The interiors were shot in Villa Sorra near Castelfranco Emilia. The noble hall of the building and the courtyard were filmed in the Cinecittà studios. The town on the Reno replaces the fictional location in Marzabotto.
The shooting, carried out mainly in the 16th-century Villa Gonzaga-Zani in Villimpenta in the spring of 1975, was difficult and involved scenes of homophilia, coprophagia and sadomasochism. The acts of torture in the courtyard caused some of the actors to suffer abrasions and burns. Actress Hélène Surgère described the film shoot as "unusual", with nearly 40 actors being on set at any given time, and Pasolini shooting "enormous" amounts of footage. She also noted the mood on the set as "paradoxically jovial and immature" in spite of the content. In-between working, the cast shared large meals of risotto and also had football games played against the crew of Bernardo Bertolucci's "Novecento", which was being filmed nearby. It also marked the reconciliation between the then 34-year-old Bertolucci and his old mentor after several disagreements following Pasolini's criticism of "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and his failure to defend it from drastic censorship measures.
During production, some reels were stolen and the thieves demanded a ransom for their return. Using doubles, the same scenes were reshot but from a different angle. At the trial for Pasolini's murder, it was hypothesized that Pasolini was told the film reels were discovered in Ostia Lido. He was led there by Pelosi, the accused, and fell victim to an ambush, where he died.
The original music corresponds to Ennio Morricone interpreted at the piano by Arnaldo Graziosi. Other non-original music was Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" in "Veris leta facies" at the nearly end of the film during "Circle of Blood". Other music was several Frédéric Chopin's pieces Preludes Op.28 nº 17 and nº4 and Valses Op. 34 nº 2 in La minor.
It seems that Pasolini was undecided on what type of conclusion the film should have, to the point of having conceived and shot four different endings: the first was a shot of a red flag in the wind with the words "Love You", but it was abandoned by the director because he thought it "too pompous" and "prone to the ethics of psychedelic youth", which he detested. The second showed all the actors, other than the four gentlemen, the director and his troupe perform a wild dance in a room of the villa furnished with red flags and the scene was filmed with the purpose of using it as a background scene during the credits, but was discarded because it appeared, in the eyes of Pasolini, chaotic and unsatisfactory. Another final scene, discovered years later and which was only in the initial draft of the script, showed, after the torture's end, the four gentlemen walk out of the house and drawing conclusions about the morality of the whole affair. Finally, keeping the idea of dance as the summation of carnage, Pasolini chose to mount the so-called final "Margherita", with the two young soldiers dancing.
"Salò" premiered at the Paris Film Festival on 23 November 1975, three weeks following Pasolini's death. In Italy, the film was initially rejected for screening by the Italian censorship, but received approval on 23 December 1975. The approval, however, was withdrawn three weeks after the film's Italian release in January 1976 and it was formally banned. Worldwide distribution for the film was supplied by United Artists. In the United States, however, the film was given a limited release via Zebra Releasing Corporation on 3 October 1977.
"Salò" has been banned in several countries, because of its graphic portrayals of rape, torture and murder—mainly of people thought to be younger than eighteen years of age. The film remains banned in several countries and sparked numerous debates among critics and censors about whether or not it constituted pornography due to its nudity and graphic depiction of sex acts.
The film was rejected by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in January 1976. It was first screened at the Old Compton Street cinema club in Soho, London in 1977, in an uncut form and without certification from BBFC secretary James Ferman; the premises were raided by the Metropolitan Police after a few days. A cut version prepared under Ferman's supervision, again without formal certification, was subsequently screened under cinema club conditions for some years. In 2000, in an uncut form, the film was finally passed for theatrical and video distribution in the United Kingdom.
The film was not banned in the United States and received a limited release in October 1977; it was, however, banned in Ontario, Canada. In 1994, an undercover policeman in Cincinnati, Ohio, rented the film from a local gay bookstore and then arrested the owners for "pandering". A large group of artists, including Martin Scorsese and Alec Baldwin, and scholars signed a legal brief arguing the film's artistic merit; the Ohio state court dismissed the case because the police violated the owners' Fourth Amendment rights, without reaching the question of whether the film was obscene.
It was banned in Australia in 1976 for reasons of indecency. After a 17-year-long ban, the Australian Classification Board passed the film with a R-18+ (for 18 and older only) uncut for theatrical release in July 1993. However, the Australian Classification Review Board overturned this decision in February 1998 and banned the film outright, for "offensive cruelty with high impact, sexual violence and depictions of offensive and revolting fetishes". The film was then pulled from all Australian cinemas. "Salò" was resubmitted for classification in Australia in 2008, only to be rejected once again. The DVD print was apparently a modified version, causing outrage in the media over censorship and freedom of speech. In 2010, the film was submitted again and passed with an R18+ rating. According to the Australian Classification Board media release, the DVD was passed due to "the inclusion of 176 minutes of additional material which provided a context to the feature film." The media release also stated that "The Classification Board wishes to emphasise that this film is classified R18+ based on the fact that it contains additional material. Screening this film in a cinema without the additional material would constitute a breach of classification laws." The majority opinion of the board stated that the inclusion of additional material on the DVD "facilitates wider consideration of the context of the film which results in the impact being no more than high." This decision came under attack by FamilyVoice Australia (formerly the Festival of Light Australia), the Australian Christian Lobby and Liberal Party of Australia Senator Julian McGauran, who tried to have the ban reinstated, but the Board refused, stating "The film has aged plus there is bonus material that clearly shows it is fiction." The film was released on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on 8 September 2010.
In New Zealand, the film was originally banned in 1976. The ban was upheld in 1993. In 1997, special permission was granted for the film to be screened uncut at a film festival. In 2001, the DVD was finally passed uncut with an 'R18' rating.
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 73% approval rating based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 6.55/10. The site's consensus states that the film "will strike some viewers as irredeemably depraved, but its unflinching view of human cruelty makes it impossible to ignore".
Director Michael Haneke named the film his fourth-favorite film when he voted for the 2002 "Sight and Sound" poll; director Catherine Breillat and critic Joel David also voted for the film. David Cross and Gaspar Noé named it one of their favorite films. Rainer Werner Fassbinder also cited it as one of his 10 favorite films. A 2000 poll of critics conducted by "The Village Voice" named it the 89th-greatest film of the 20th century. Director John Waters said, ""Salo" is a beautiful film...it uses obscenity in an intelligent way...and it's about the pornography of power." Alec Baldwin also says it his one of his favorites
The film's reputation for pushing boundaries has led some critics to criticize or avoid it; the "Time Out" film guide, for example, deemed the film a "thoroughly objectionable piece of work," adding that it "offers no insights whatsoever into power, politics, history or sexuality." "TV Guide" gave the film a mixed review awarding it a score of 2.5/4, stating, "despite moments of undeniably brilliant insight, is nearly unwatchable, extremely disturbing, and often literally nauseous".
Upon the film's United States release, Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote, ""Salo" is, I think, a perfect example of the kind of material that, theoretically, anyway, can be acceptable on paper but becomes so repugnant when visualized on the screen that it further dehumanizes the human spirit, which is supposed to be the artist's concern." In 2011 Roger Ebert wrote that he owned the film since its release on LaserDisc but had not watched it, citing the film's transgressive reputation. In 2011, David Haglund of "Slate" surveyed five film critics and three of them said that it was required viewing for any serious critic or cinephile. Haglund concluded that he still would not watch the film.
Jonathan Rosenbaum of the "Chicago Reader" wrote of the film: "Roland Barthes noted that in spite of all its objectionable elements (he pointed out that any film that renders Sade real and fascism unreal is doubly wrong), this film should be defended because it 'refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves.' It's certainly the film in which Pasolini's protest against the modern world finds its most extreme and anguished expression. Very hard to take, but in its own way an essential work."
The Criterion Collection first released the film in 1993 on LaserDisc, following with a DVD release in 1998. In 2011, The Criterion Collection released a newly restored version on Blu-ray and DVD in conjunction with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a two-disc release with multiple interviews collected on the accompanying second disc.
"Salò" has received critical analysis from film scholars, critics and others for its converging depictions of sexual violence and cross-referencing of historical and sociopolitical themes. Commenting on the film's prevalent sexual themes, horror film scholar Stephen Barber writes: "The core of "Salò" is the anus, and its narrative drive pivots around the act of sodomy. No scene of a sex act has been confirmed in the film until one of the libertines has approached its participants and sodomized the figure committing the act. The filmic material of "Salò" is one that compacts celluloid and feces, in Pasolini's desire to burst the limits of cinema, via the anally resonant eye of the film lens." Barber also notes that Pasolini's film reduces the extent of the storytelling sequences present in de Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom" so that they "possess equal status" with the sadistic acts committed by the libertines.
Pasolini scholar Gian Annovi notes in the book "Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship" (2007) that "Salò" is stylistically and thematically marked by a "link between Duchamp's Dada aesthetics and the perverse dynamics of desire," which, according to Annovi, became artistic points of interest for Pasolini in the early developments of "Salò".
"Salò" has earned a reputation amongst some film scholars for being the "sickest film of all time," with some citing it as an early progenitor of the Extreme subgenre, alongside the American film "The Last House on the Left" (1972). Film scholar Mattias Frey notes that the cross-section between the film's thematic content and graphic visuals has resulted in it being considered both a horror film as well as an art film: "[Films like "Salò"], which are usually considered by critics as "works" by the "artists"...might be received in practice also by individuals who watch "Saw" or "Hostel" or any "popular" or cult horror film." In 2006, the Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 65th-scariest film ever made and in 2010, the Toronto International Film Festival placed it at no. 47 on its list of "The Essential 100 films".
In 2008, British opera director David McVicar and Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan have produced a performance of Richard Strauss' 1905 opera "Salome" based on the film, setting it in a debauched palace in Nazi Germany, for the Royal Opera House in London, with Nadja Michael as Salome, Michaela Schuster as Herodias, Thomas Moser as Herod, Joseph Kaiser as Narraboth, and Michael Volle as Jokanaan. This performance was recorded by Jonathan Haswell and later that year was released on DVD by Opus Arte.
Nikos Nikolaidis' 2005 "The Zero Years" has been compared to the film. The film is also the subject of the 2001 documentary "Salò: Fade to Black" written by Mark Kermode and directed by Nigel Algar. An exhibition of photographs by Fabian Cevallos depicting scenes which were edited out of the film was displayed in 2005 in Rome. Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Bertolucci released a documentary in 2006, "Pasolini prossimo nostro", based on an interview with Pasolini done on the set of "Salò" in 1975. The documentary also included photographs taken on the set of the film. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28623 |
Selenocysteine
Selenocysteine (symbol Sec or U, in older publications also as Se-Cys) is the 21st proteinogenic amino acid.
Selenocysteine exists naturally in all three domains of life, but not in every lineage, as a building block of selenoproteins. Selenocysteine is a cysteine analogue with a selenium-containing selenol group in place of the sulfur-containing thiol group.
Selenocysteine is present in several enzymes (for example glutathione peroxidases, tetraiodothyronine 5′ deiodinases, thioredoxin reductases, formate dehydrogenases, glycine reductases, selenophosphate synthetase 2, methionine-"R"-sulfoxide reductase B1 (SEPX1), and some hydrogenases).
Selenocysteine was discovered by biochemist Thressa Stadtman at the National Institutes of Health.
The biochemical utility of selenocysteine was described by biochemist Robert Hondal (University of Vermont) and chemist Hans Reich (University of Wisconsin–Madison).
Selenocysteine has a structure similar to that of cysteine, but with an atom of selenium taking the place of the usual sulfur, forming a selenol group which is deprotonated at physiological pH. (Like other natural proteinogenic amino acids, cysteine and selenocysteine have chirality in the older / notation based on homology to - and -glyceraldehyde. In the newer "R"/"S" system of designating chirality, based on the atomic numbers of atoms near the asymmetric carbon, they have "R" chirality, because of the presence of sulfur or selenium as a second neighbor to the asymmetric carbon. (The remaining chiral amino acids, having only lighter atoms in that position, have "S" chirality.)
Proteins which contain one or more selenocysteine residues are called selenoproteins. Most selenoproteins contain a single selenocysteine residue. Selenoproteins which depend on selenocysteine's catalytic activity are called selenoenzymes.
Selenoenzymes have been found to employ catalytic triad structures that influence the nucleophilicity of the active site selenocysteine.
Selenocysteine has both a lower p"K"a (5.47) and a lower reduction potential than cysteine. These properties make it very suitable in proteins that are involved in antioxidant activity.
Although it is found in the three domains of life, it is not universal in all organisms. Unlike other amino acids present in biological proteins, selenocysteine is not coded for directly in the genetic code. Instead, it is encoded in a special way by a UGA codon, which is normally a stop codon. Such a mechanism is called translational recoding and its efficiency depends on the selenoprotein being synthesized and on translation initiation factors. When cells are grown in the absence of selenium, translation of selenoproteins terminates at the UGA codon, resulting in a truncated, nonfunctional enzyme. The UGA codon is made to encode selenocysteine by the presence of a selenocysteine insertion sequence (SECIS) in the mRNA. The SECIS element is defined by characteristic nucleotide sequences and secondary structure base-pairing patterns. In bacteria, the SECIS element is typically located immediately following the UGA codon within the reading frame for the selenoprotein. In Archaea and in eukaryotes, the SECIS element is in the 3′ untranslated region (3′ UTR) of the mRNA and can direct multiple UGA codons to encode selenocysteine residues.
Again unlike the other amino acids, no free pool of selenocysteine exists in the cell. Its high reactivity would cause damage to cells. Instead, cells store selenium in the less reactive oxidized form, selenocystine, or in methylated form, selenomethionine. Selenocysteine synthesis occurs on a specialized tRNA, which also functions to incorporate it into nascent polypeptides.
The primary and secondary structure of selenocysteine-specific tRNA, tRNASec, differ from those of standard tRNAs in several respects, most notably in having an 8-base-pair (bacteria) or 10-base-pair (eukaryotes) acceptor stem, a long variable region arm, and substitutions at several well-conserved base positions. The selenocysteine tRNAs are initially charged with serine by seryl-tRNA ligase, but the resulting Ser-tRNASec is not used for translation because it is not recognised by the normal translation elongation factor (EF-Tu in bacteria, eEF1A in eukaryotes).
Rather, the tRNA-bound seryl residue is converted to a selenocysteine residue by the pyridoxal phosphate-containing enzyme selenocysteine synthase. In eukaryotes and archaea, two enzymes are required to convert tRNA-bound seryl residue into tRNA selenocysteinyl residue: PSTK ("O"-phosphoseryl-tRNA[Ser]Sec kinase) and selenocysteine synthase. Finally, the resulting Sec-tRNASec is specifically bound to an alternative translational elongation factor (SelB or mSelB (or eEFSec)), which delivers it in a targeted manner to the ribosomes translating mRNAs for selenoproteins. The specificity of this delivery mechanism is brought about by the presence of an extra protein domain (in bacteria, SelB) or an extra subunit (SBP2 for eukaryotic mSelB/eEFSec) which bind to the corresponding RNA secondary structures formed by the SECIS elements in selenoprotein mRNAs.
Selenocysteine is decomposed by the enzyme selenocysteine lyase into L-alanine and selenide.
As of 2016, fifty-four human proteins are known to contain selenocysteine (selenoproteins).
Selenocysteine derivatives γ-glutamyl-"Se"-methylselenocysteine and "Se"-methylselenocysteine occur naturally in plants of the genera "Allium" and "Brassica".
Biotechnological applications of selenocysteine include use of 73Se-labeled Sec (half-life of 73Se = 7.2 hours) in positron emission tomography (PET) studies and 75Se-labeled Sec (half-life of 75Se = 118.5 days) in specific radiolabeling, facilitation of phase determination by multiwavelength anomalous diffraction in X-ray crystallography of proteins by introducing Sec alone, or Sec together with selenomethionine (SeMet), and incorporation of the stable 77Se isotope, which has a nuclear spin of and can be used for high-resolution NMR, among others. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28624 |
Supervolcano
A supervolcano is a large volcano that has had an eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 8, the largest recorded value on the index. This means the volume of deposits for that eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles).
Supervolcanoes occur when magma in the mantle rises into the crust but is unable to break through it and pressure builds in a large and growing magma pool until the crust is unable to contain the pressure. This can occur at hotspots (for example, Yellowstone Caldera) or at subduction zones (for example, Toba). Large-volume supervolcanic eruptions are also often associated with large igneous provinces, which can cover huge areas with lava and volcanic ash. These can cause long-lasting climate change (such as the triggering of a small ice age) and threaten species with extinction. The Oruanui eruption of New Zealand's Taupo Volcano (about 26,500 years ago) was the world's most recent VEI-8 eruption.
The term "supervolcano" was first used in a volcanic context in 1949.
Its origins lie in an early 20th-century scientific debate about the geological history and features of the Three Sisters volcanic region of Oregon in the United States. In 1925, Edwin T. Hodge suggested that a very large volcano, which he named Mount Multnomah, had existed in that region. He believed that several peaks in the Three Sisters area were the remnants of Mount Multnomah after it had been largely destroyed by violent volcanic explosions, similar to Mount Mazama. In 1948, the possible existence of Mount Multnomah was ignored by volcanologist Howel Williams in his book "The Ancient Volcanoes of Oregon". This book was reviewed in 1949 by another volcanologist, F. M. Byers Jr. In the review, Byers refers to Mount Multnomah as a supervolcano.
More than fifty years after Byers' review was published, the term "supervolcano" was popularised by the BBC popular science television program "Horizon" in 2000, referring to eruptions that produce extremely large amounts of ejecta.
The term "megacaldera" is sometimes used for caldera supervolcanoes, such as the Blake River Megacaldera Complex in the Abitibi greenstone belt of Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
Eruptions that rate VEI 8 are termed "super eruptions". Though there is no well-defined minimum explosive size for a "supervolcano", there are at least two types of volcanic eruptions that have been identified as supervolcanoes: large igneous provinces and massive eruptions.
Large igneous provinces, such as Iceland, the Siberian Traps, Deccan Traps, and the Ontong Java Plateau, are extensive regions of basalts on a continental scale resulting from flood basalt eruptions. When created, these regions often occupy several thousand square kilometres and have volumes on the order of millions of cubic kilometers. In most cases, the lavas are normally laid down over several million years. They release large amounts of gases.
The Réunion hotspot produced the Deccan Traps about 66 million years ago, coincident with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The scientific consensus is that a meteor impact was the cause of the extinction event, but the volcanic activity may have caused environmental stresses on extant species up to the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. Additionally, the largest flood basalt event (the Siberian Traps) occurred around 250 million years ago and was coincident with the largest mass extinction in history, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, although it is unknown whether it was solely responsible for the extinction event.
Such outpourings are not explosive, though lava fountains may occur. Many volcanologists consider Iceland to be a large igneous province that is currently being formed. The last major outpouring occurred in 1783–84 from the Laki fissure, which is approximately long. An estimated of basaltic lava was poured out during the eruption (VEI 4).
The Ontong Java Plateau has an area of about , and the province was at least 50% larger before the Manihiki and Hikurangi Plateaus broke away.
Volcanic eruptions are classified using the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. It is a logarithmic scale, which means that an increase of one in VEI number is equivalent to a tenfold increase in volume of erupted material. VEI 7 or VEI 8 eruptions are so powerful that they often form circular calderas rather than cones because the downward withdrawal of magma causes the overlying rock mass to collapse into the empty magma chamber beneath it.
Based on incomplete statistics, at least 60 VEI 8 eruptions have been identified.
* means DRE (dense rock equivalent). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28625 |
Single European Sky
The Single European Sky is a European Commission initiative that seeks to reform the European air traffic management system through a series of actions carried out in four different levels (institutional, operational, technological and control and supervision) with the aim of satisfying the needs of the European airspace in terms of capacity, safety, efficiency and environmental impact.
This is hoped to benefit airspace users by ensuring the safe and efficient utilisation of airspace and the air traffic management system within and beyond the EU. Airspace management is planned to move away from the current domination by national borders to the use of 'functional airspace blocks' the boundaries of which will be designed to maximise the efficiency of the airspace. Within the airspace, air traffic management, while continuing to have safety as its primary objective, will also be driven by the requirements of the airspace user and the need to provide for increasing air traffic. The aim is to use air traffic management that is more closely based on desired flight patterns leading to greater safety, efficiency and capacity.
Air traffic management in the European Union is undertaken by member countries, co-operating through EUROCONTROL, an intergovernmental organisation that includes most of the European countries.
European air spaces are some of the busiest in the world, and the current system of air traffic management allegedly suffers from several parameters, such as using national borders in the sky, and having large areas of airspace reserved for national military use when in fact they may not be needed.
In October 2001, the European Commission adopted proposals for a Single European Sky, to create a Union regulator for air traffic management within the countries forming the European Union, Norway and Switzerland. The European Union regulator was supposed to merge upper European airspaces, currently divided into national zones. It was proposed to organise this airspace uniformly, with air traffic control areas based on operational efficiency, instead of national borders. Also, there were plans to integrate civil and military air traffic management.
There are discussions about enlarging the initiative to cover the Balkan and Mediterranean countries.
In June 2008, a revision of the SES regulations was adopted, called SES-II.
Focus is here on four areas:
The SES-II aims at implementing FABs as a mean for providing better performance.
On 10 June 2013, the European Commission presented its plan "B" to speed up the implementation process of SES. The so-called SES 2+ is a package of measure which aim at challenging the current situation with state owned monopolies responsible for providing air navigation services. At the same time, transport workers' union ETF announced mobilising its members to protest against the suggested package.
As of 2019, nothing about the plan has been officially realized.
One report from the British Parliament, dated 2000, reported that Spain blocked the inclusion of Gibraltar Airport in the Single European Sky, meaning the whole package was suspended.
The air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption may have caused a purported acceleration to push the national air traffic control systems to collaborate into the Single European Sky, and the immediate creation of a crisis co-ordination group to handle future transport disruptions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28626 |
Sputtering
In physics, sputtering is a phenomenon in which microscopic particles of a solid material are ejected from its surface, after the material is itself bombarded by energetic particles of a plasma or gas. It occurs naturally in outer space, and can be an unwelcome source of wear in precision components. However, the fact that it can be made to act on extremely fine layers of material is utilised in science and industry—there, it is used to perform precise etching, carry out analytical techniques, and deposit thin film layers in the manufacture of optical coatings, semiconductor devices and nanotechnology products. It is a physical vapor deposition technique.
When energetic ions collide with atoms of a target material, an exchange of momentum takes place between them.
These ions, known as "incident ions", set off collision cascades in the target. Such cascades can take many paths; some recoil back toward the surface of the target. If a collision cascade reaches the surface of the target, and its remaining energy is greater than the target's surface binding energy, an atom will be ejected. This process is known as "sputtering". If the target is thin (on an atomic scale), the collision cascade can reach through to its back side; the atoms ejected in this fashion are said to escape the surface binding energy "in transmission".
The average number of atoms ejected from the target per incident ion is called the "sputter yield". The sputter yield depends on several things: the angle at which ions collide with the surface of the material, how much energy they strike it with, their masses, the masses of the target atoms, and the target's surface binding energy. If the target possesses a crystal structure, the orientation of its axes with respect to the surface is an important factor.
The ions that cause sputtering come from a variety of sources -- they can come from plasma, specially constructed ion sources, particle accelerators, outer space (e.g. solar wind), or radioactive materials (e.g. alpha radiation).
A model for describing sputtering in the cascade regime for amorphous flat targets is Thompson's analytical model. An algorithm that simulates sputtering based on a quantum mechanical treatment including electrons stripping at high energy is implemented in the program TRIM.
Another mechanism of physical sputtering is called "heat spike sputtering". This can occur when the solid is dense enough, and the incoming ion heavy enough, that collisions occur very close to each other. In this case, the binary collision approximation is no longer valid, and the collisional process should be understood as a many-body process. The dense collisions induce a heat spike (also called thermal spike), which essentially melts a small portion of the crystal. If that portion is close enough to its surface, large numbers of atoms may be ejected, due to liquid flowing to the surface and/or microexplosions. Heat spike sputtering is most important for heavy ions (e.g. Xe or Au or cluster ions) with energies in the keV–MeV range bombarding dense but soft metals with a low melting point (Ag, Au, Pb, etc.). The heat spike sputtering often increases nonlinearly with energy, and can for small cluster ions lead to dramatic sputtering yields per cluster of the order of 10,000. For animations of such a process see "Re: Displacement Cascade 1" in the external links section.
Physical sputtering has a well-defined minimum energy threshold, equal to or larger than the ion energy at which the maximum energy transfer from the ion to a target atom equals the binding energy of a surface atom. That is to say, it can only happen when an ion is capable of transferring more energy into the target than is required for an atom to break free from its surface.
This threshold is typically somewhere in the range of ten to a hundred eV.
"Preferential sputtering" can occur at the start when a multicomponent solid target is bombarded and there is no solid state diffusion. If the energy transfer is more efficient to one of the target components, or it is less strongly bound to the solid, it will sputter more efficiently than the other. If in an AB alloy the component A is sputtered preferentially, the surface of the solid will, during prolonged bombardment, become enriched in the B component, thereby increasing the probability that B is sputtered such that the composition of the sputtered material will ultimately return to AB.
The term "electronic sputtering" can mean either sputtering induced by energetic electrons (for example in a transmission electron microscope), or sputtering due to very high-energy or highly charged heavy ions that lose energy to the solid, mostly by electronic stopping power, where the electronic excitations cause sputtering. Electronic sputtering produces high sputtering yields from insulators, as the electronic excitations that cause sputtering are not immediately quenched, as they would be in a conductor. One example of this is Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, where a MeV sulfur ion from Jupiter's magnetosphere can eject up to 10,000 H2O molecules.
In the case of multiple charged projectile ions a particular form of electronic sputtering can take place that has been termed "potential sputtering". In these cases the potential energy stored in multiply charged ions (i.e., the energy necessary to produce an ion of this charge state from its neutral atom) is liberated when the ions recombine during impact on a solid surface (formation of hollow atoms). This sputtering process is characterized by a strong dependence of the observed sputtering yields on the charge state of the impinging ion and can already take place at ion impact energies well below the physical sputtering threshold. Potential sputtering has only been observed for certain target species and requires a minimum potential energy.
Removing atoms by sputtering with an inert gas is called "ion milling" or "ion etching".
Sputtering can also play a role in reactive-ion etching (RIE), a plasma process carried out with chemically active ions and radicals, for which the sputtering yield may be enhanced significantly compared to pure physical sputtering. Reactive ions are frequently used in secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) equipment to enhance the sputter rates. The mechanisms causing the sputtering enhancement are not always well understood, although the case of fluorine etching of Si has been modeled well theoretically.
Sputtering observed to occur below the threshold energy of physical sputtering is also often called chemical sputtering. The mechanisms behind such sputtering are not always well understood, and may be hard to distinguish from chemical etching. At elevated temperatures, chemical sputtering of carbon can be understood to be due to the incoming ions weakening bonds in the sample, which then desorb by thermal activation. The hydrogen-induced sputtering of carbon-based materials observed at low temperatures has been explained by H ions entering between C-C bonds and thus breaking them, a mechanism dubbed "swift chemical sputtering".
Sputtering only happens when the kinetic energy of the incoming particles is much higher than conventional thermal energies (≫ 1 eV). When done with direct current (DC sputtering), voltages of 3-5 kV are used. When done with alternating current (RF sputtering), frequencies are around the 14MHz range.
Surfaces of solids can be cleaned from contaminants by using physical sputtering in a vacuum. Sputter cleaning is often used in surface science, vacuum deposition and ion plating. In 1955 Farnsworth, Schlier, George, and Burger reported using sputter cleaning in an ultra-high-vacuum system to prepare ultra-clean surfaces for low-energy electron-diffraction (LEED) studies. Sputter cleaning became an integral part of the ion plating process. When the surfaces to be cleaned are large, a similar technique, plasma cleaning, can be used. Sputter cleaning has some potential problems such as overheating, gas incorporation in the surface region, bombardment (radiation) damage in the surface region, and the roughening of the surface, particularly if "over done." It is important to have a "clean" plasma in order to not continually recontaminate the surface during sputter cleaning. Redeposition of sputtered material on the substrate can also give problems, especially at high sputtering pressures. Sputtering of the surface of a compound or alloy material can result in the surface composition being changed. Often the species with the least mass or the highest vapor pressure is the one preferentially sputtered from the surface.
Sputter deposition is a method of depositing thin films by sputtering that involves eroding material from a "target" source onto a "substrate" e.g. a silicon wafer, solar cell, optical component, or many other possibilities. Resputtering, in contrast, involves re-emission of the deposited material, e.g. SiO2 during the deposition also by ion bombardment.
Sputtered atoms are ejected into the gas phase but are not in their thermodynamic equilibrium state, and tend to deposit on all surfaces in the vacuum chamber. A substrate (such as a wafer) placed in the chamber will be coated with a thin film. Sputtering deposition usually uses an argon plasma because argon, a noble gas, will not react with the target material.
In the semiconductor industry sputtering is used to etch the target. Sputter etching is chosen in cases where a high degree of etching anisotropy is needed and selectivity is not a concern. One major drawback of this technique is wafer damage and high voltage use.
Another application of sputtering is to etch away the target material. One such example occurs in secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), where the target sample is sputtered at a constant rate. As the target is sputtered, the concentration and identity of sputtered atoms are measured using mass spectrometry. In this way the composition of the target material can be determined and even extremely low concentrations (20 µg/kg) of impurities detected. Furthermore, because the sputtering continually etches deeper into the sample, concentration profiles as a function of depth can be measured.
Sputtering is one of the forms of space weathering, a process that changes the physical and chemical properties of airless bodies, such as asteroids and the Moon. On icy moons, especially Europa, sputtering of photolyzed water from the surface leads to net loss of hydrogen and accumulation of oxygen-rich materials that may be important for life. Sputtering is also one of the possible ways that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere and that Mercury continually replenishes its tenuous surface-bounded exosphere. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28627 |
Satchel Paige
Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige (July 7, 1906 – June 8, 1982) was an American Negro league baseball and Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher who is notable for his longevity in the game, and for attracting record crowds wherever he pitched.
Paige was a right-handed pitcher, and at age 42 in 1948, was the oldest major league rookie while playing for the Cleveland Indians. He played with the St. Louis Browns until age 47, and represented them in the All-Star Game in 1952 and 1953.
He was the first player who had played in the Negro leagues to pitch in the World Series, in 1948, and was the first electee of the Negro League Committee to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.
Paige first played for the semi-professional Mobile Tigers from 1924 to 1926. He began his professional baseball career in 1926 with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League and became one of the most famous and successful players from the Negro leagues. While his outstanding control as a pitcher first got him noticed, it was his infectious, cocky, enthusiastic personality and his love for the game that made him a star. On town tours across the United States, Paige would sometimes have his infielders sit down behind him and then routinely strike out the side. He played his last professional game on June 21, 1966, for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League.
While Satchel Paige was playing baseball, many ages and birthdates were reported, ranging from 1900 to 1908. Paige himself was the source of many of these dates. His actual birthdate, July 7, 1906, was determined in 1948 when Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck traveled to Mobile, Alabama and accompanied Paige's family to the County Health Department to obtain his birth certificate. Paige's birth certificate is displayed in his autobiography.
In 1959, Paige's mother told a reporter that he was 55 rather than 53, saying she knew this because she wrote it down in her Bible. Paige wrote in his autobiography, "Seems like Mom's Bible would know, but she ain't ever shown me the Bible. Anyway, she was in her nineties when she told the reporter that, and sometimes she tended to forget things."
Satchel was born Leroy Robert Page to John Page, a gardener, and Lula Page (née Coleman), a domestic worker, in a section of Mobile, Alabama known as Down the Bay. Lula and her children changed the spelling of their name from Page to Paige in the mid-1920s, just before the start of Satchel's baseball career. Lula said, "Page looked too much like a page in a book", whereas Satchel explained, "My folks started out by spelling their name 'Page' and later stuck in the 'i' to make themselves sound more high-tone." The introduction of the new spelling coincided with the death of Satchel's father, and may have suggested a desire for a new start.
According to Paige, his nickname originated from childhood work toting bags at the train station. He said he was not making enough money at a dime a bag, so he used a pole and rope to build a contraption that allowed him to cart up to four bags at once. Another kid supposedly yelled, "You look like a walking satchel tree." A different story was told by boyhood friend and neighbor, Wilber Hines, who said he gave Paige the nickname after he was caught trying to steal a bag. At the age of 10, Satchel was playing "top ball" which was what got him into baseball. "Top ball" was a kids' game that used sticks and bottle caps instead of baseballs and bats to play a variation of the diamond sport. Satchel's mother, Lula, would even comment on how Satchel would rather "play baseball than eat. It was always baseball, baseball."
On July 24, 1918, just 17 days after his 12th birthday, Leroy was sentenced to six years—or until his 18th birthday, whichever came first—at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers in Mount Meigs, Alabama. It is commonly believed that he was sent off to reform school because of shoplifting. New research shows that it was the rock throwing battles that Leroy and friends engaged in against the white boys of the nearby Oakdale School that was the major reason he was sentenced to reform school. The person who taught Leroy to pitch while in reform school was the Reverend Moses Davis. It was Davis, who was also a trustee of the school, who devoted the long hours coaching the boys in baseball, and it was he who struck the deal with the sporting-goods store in Montgomery to secure the team's first uniforms. Davis was African American as was the entire teaching staff at Mount Meigs including the school's founder, Cornelia Bowen, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute. Leroy was released from the institution in December 1923, seven months short of his 18th birthday. He summed up his years of incarceration: "I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch. At least I started my real learning on the Mount. They were not wasted years at all. It made a real man out of me."
After his release, Paige played for several Mobile semi-pro teams. He joined the semi-pro Mobile Tigers where his brother Wilson was already pitching. He also pitched for a semi-pro team named the "Down the Bay Boys", and he recalled an incident in the ninth inning of a 1–0 ballgame when his teammates made three consecutive errors, loading the bases for the other team with two outs. Angry, Paige said he stomped around the mound, kicking up dirt. The fans started booing him, so he decided that "somebody was going to have to be showed up for that." He called in his outfielders and had them sit down in the infield. With the fans and his own teammates howling, Paige struck out the final batter, winning the game.
A former friend from Mobile, Alex Herman, was the player/manager for the Chattanooga White Sox of the minor Negro Southern League. In 1926 he discovered Paige and offered to pay him $250 per month, of which Paige would collect $50 with the rest going to his mother. He also agreed to pay Lula Paige a $200 advance, and she agreed to the contract.
The local newspapers—the "Chattanooga News" and "Chattanooga Times"—recognized from the beginning that Paige was special. In April 1926, shortly after his arrival, he recorded nine strikeouts over six innings against the Atlanta Black Crackers. Part way through the 1927 season, Paige's contract was sold to the Birmingham Black Barons of the major Negro National League (NNL). According to Paige's first memoir, his contract was for $450 per month, but in his second he said it was for $275.
Pitching for the Black Barons, Paige threw hard but was wild and awkward. In his first big game in late June 1927, against the St. Louis Stars, Paige incited a brawl when his fastball hit the hand of St. Louis catcher Mitchell Murray. Murray then charged the mound and Paige raced for the dugout, but Murray flung his bat and struck Paige above the hip. The police were summoned, and the headline of the "Birmingham Reporter" proclaimed a "Near Riot." Paige improved and matured as a pitcher with help from his teammates, Sam Streeter and Harry Salmon, and his manager, Bill Gatewood. He finished the 1927 season 7–1 with 69 strikeouts and 26 walks in 89 innings.
Over the next two seasons, Paige went 12–5 and 10–9 while recording 176 strikeouts in 1929. (Several sources credit his 1929 strikeout total as the all-time single-season record for the Negro leagues, though there is variation among the sources about the exact number of strikeouts.) On April 29 of that season he recorded 17 strikeouts in a game against the Cuban Stars, which exceeded what was then the major league record of 16 held by Noodles Hahn and Rube Waddell. Six days later he struck out 18 Nashville Elite Giants, a number that was tied in the white majors by Bob Feller in 1938. Due to his increased earning potential, Barons owner R. T. Jackson would "rent" Paige out to other ball clubs for a game or two to draw a decent crowd, with both Jackson and Paige taking a cut.
Abel Linares offered Paige $100 per game to play winter ball for the Santa Clara team in the Cuban League. Gambling on baseball games in Cuba was such a huge pastime that players were not allowed to drink alcohol, so they could stay ready to play. Paige—homesick for carousing, hating the food, despising the constant inspections and being thoroughly baffled by the language—went 6–5 in Cuba. He left Cuba abruptly before the end of the season, with several stories told about the circumstances. Paige told one version in which the mayor of a small hamlet asked him, in Spanish, if he had intentionally lost a particular game. Paige, not understanding a word the man said, nodded and smiled, thinking the man was fawning over him, and then had to flee from the furious mayor. Another version, also told by Paige, says that when he called on an attractive local girl at her home, she and her family interpreted his attentions as an official engagement and sent the police to enforce it, leading Paige to flee the island with police in pursuit. A third version, told by the general manager of the Santa Clara Leopards, says that he left Cuba in haste after legal charges were brought against him regarding an amorous incident with "a young lady from the provincial mulatto bourgeoisie."
When Paige returned to the United States, he and Jackson revived their practice of renting him out to various teams. In the spring of 1930, Jackson leased him to the Baltimore Black Sox, who had won the 1929 American Negro League championship led by their bowlegged third baseman Jud "Boojum" Wilson. Paige, as a Southerner, found that he was an outsider on the Black Sox, and his teammates considered him a hick. Moreover, he was the team's number two pitcher behind Lamon Yokely, and Paige did not like being overshadowed.
In mid-summer Paige returned to Birmingham, where he pitched well the rest of the summer, going 7–4. In September he was leased to the Chicago American Giants of the NNL for a home-and-home series with the Houston Black Buffaloes of the Texas–Oklahoma League. Paige won one and lost one in the series and then returned to Birmingham.
By the spring of 1931, the Depression was taking its toll on the Negro leagues, and the Black Barons had temporarily disbanded. Few teams could afford Paige, but Tom Wilson, who was moving the Nashville Elite Giants to Cleveland as the Cleveland Cubs, thought he could. Playing in the same city as a white major league team, Paige recalled, "I'd look over at the Cleveland Indians' stadium, called League Park ... All season long it burned me, playing there in the shadow of that stadium. "It didn't hurt my pitching, but it sure didn't do me any good."
In June 1931, the Crawford Colored Giants, an independent club owned by Pittsburgh underworld figure Gus Greenlee, made Paige an offer of $250 a month. On August 6, Paige made his Crawford debut against their hometown rivals, the Homestead Grays. Entering the game in the fourth inning, Paige held the Grays scoreless and had six strikeouts and no walks in five innings of relief work to get the win.
In September, Paige joined a Negro all-star team organized by Tom Wilson, called the Philadelphia Giants, to play in the California Winter League. This was the first of nine winters that he played in a league that provided ongoing competition between elite black and white baseball players, including major and minor league players. On October 24 Paige won his first California game 8–1, allowing five hits and striking out 11, including Babe Herman four times. He finished the winter with a 6–0 record and 70 strikeouts in 58 innings.
In 1932, Greenlee signed Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe away from Cumberland Posey's Homestead Grays to assemble one of the finest baseball clubs in history. Paige took the mound when the Crawfords opened the season on April 30 in their newly built stadium, Greenlee Field, the first completely black-owned stadium in the country. Paige lost the opener to the New York Black Yankees in a pitching duel with Jesse "Mountain" Hubbard, but got even with them by beating them twice that season, including Paige's first Negro league no-hitter in July. Paige went 10–4, allowing 3.19 runs per game and striking out 92 in 132 innings.
In the midst of the Depression, Cum Posey's new East–West League had collapsed by mid-season, and Greenlee was able to obtain many of the best players in black baseball. By the end of the season, Greenlee had signed to contracts Cool Papa Bell, John Henry Russell, Leroy Matlock, Jake Stephens, "Boojum" Wilson, Jimmie Crutchfield, Ted Page, Judy Johnson, and Rap Dixon. With the Crawfords playing five future Hall of Famers, many Negro league historians regard the 1930s Crawfords as the greatest team in Negro league history.
The next season Greenlee organized a new Negro National League, which survived for 16 years. Despite Greenlee's efforts to control his biggest star, Paige followed his own schedule and was often late to games that he was scheduled to pitch. In August, he jumped the Crawfords, accepting an offer from Neil Churchill's North Dakota semi-pro team, the Bismarcks (sometimes known as the "Bismarck Churchills" today), of $400 and a late model car for just one month's work. It was Paige's first experience playing with an integrated team in the United States. He helped Bismarck beat their local rivals in Jamestown, who were also featuring a Negro league ace pitcher, Barney Brown. Paige was unapologetic when he returned to Pittsburgh in September to help the Crawfords win the second-half championship. Paige was snubbed by other Negro league players and fans when he was not selected for the first ever East–West All-Star Game.
1934 was perhaps the best season of Paige's career, as he went 14–2 in league games while allowing 2.16 runs per game, recording 144 strikeouts, and giving up only 26 walks. On July 4, Paige threw his second no-hitter, this time against the Homestead Grays. He struck out 17, and only a first inning walk to future Hall of Famer Buck Leonard and an error in the fourth inning prevented it from being a perfect game. Leonard, unnerved by the rising swoop of the ball, repeatedly asked the umpire to check the ball for scuffing. When the umpire removed one ball from play, Paige hollered, "You may as well thrown 'em all out 'cause they're all gonna jump like that."
"The Denver Post" conducted an annual baseball tournament (sometimes known as the "Little World Series") that attracted semi-pro and independent professional teams from across the country. In 1934 it was open, for the first time, to black players. Greenlee leased Paige to the Colored House of David, a prominent barnstorming team of white men who represented a religious commune and wore beards. Their manager was Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. Paige pitched shutouts in his first two starts, striking out 14 and 18. The final, championship game was his third start in five days and he faced the Kansas City Monarchs—at the time an independent, barnstorming team—who were participating in the tournament with a lineup augmented by Negro league stars Turkey Stearnes and Sam Bankhead. Paige faced Chet Brewer before a crowd of 11,120. Paige won the pitchers' duel 2–1, striking out 12 Monarchs for a tournament total of 44 strikeouts in 28 innings. The 1934 tournament was Paige's first major exposure in front of the white press.
Paige received his first East–West All Star Game selection in 1934. Playing for the East, Paige came in during the sixth inning with a man on second and the score tied 0–0, and proceeded to strike out Alec Radcliffe and retire Turkey Stearnes and Mule Suttles on soft fly balls. The East scored one run in the top of the eighth and Paige held the West scoreless the rest of the way, giving him his first All-Star Game victory. 27 years after winning the second-ever East-West All-Star Game, Paige was also the winning pitcher of the 1961 East-West Game, the next to last in the series.
Despite an outstanding season, Paige had a strong competitor for best Negro league pitcher of 1934, the 21-year-old Slim Jones of the Philadelphia Stars, who went 22–3 in league games. In September, a four-team charity benefit doubleheader was played at Yankee Stadium, with the second game featuring a faceoff between Paige and Jones. Paige recalled driving all night from Pittsburgh and parking near the stadium, then falling asleep in the car. A batboy found and woke him, and he got into uniform just in time for his scheduled start. In a game that was sometimes described as the greatest game in Negro league history, Paige and Jones battled to a 1–1 tie that was called because of darkness. A rematch was scheduled, and this time Paige and the Crawfords beat Jones and the Stars 3–1.
That fall, Paige faced off against major league star Dizzy Dean, who that season had won 30 regular season games plus two more in the World Series, in several exhibition games. In Cleveland, Paige struck out 13 while beating Dean 4–1, although for that game Dean was playing with a minor league team. Later, while playing in the California Winter League, Paige faced Dean in front of 18,000 fans in Los Angeles, with Dean's team including major league stars like Wally Berger. The two teams battled for thirteen innings, with Paige's team finally winning 1–0. Bill Veeck, future owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox, was watching the game and many years later described it as "the greatest pitchers' battle I have ever seen." Paige and Dean would continue to barnstorm against each other until 1945. Later, when Dean was a sports columnist for the "Chicago Tribune", he called Paige "the pitcher with the greatest stuff I ever saw."
In the spring of 1935, Greenlee refused Paige's request to raise his $250 per month salary, so Paige decided to return to Bismarck for the same $400 per month and late model used car that he got before. Churchill added other Negro league players to the team—pitchers Barney Morris, and Hilton Smith, catcher Quincy Trouppe, and pitcher/catcher Double Duty Radcliffe. Paige dominated the competition, with a 29–2 record, 321 strikeouts, and only 16 walks. In Wichita, Ray "Hap" Dumont was establishing a new national baseball tournament, the National Baseball Congress. Dumont invited 32 semi-pro teams, paying $1,000 for Paige and his Bismarck teammates to attend. The tournament was held at Lawrence–Dumont Stadium in Wichita, Kansas and offered a $7,000 purse. Churchill added yet another Negro league star to his team—Chet Brewer, the Kansas City Monarchs' ace pitcher. Bismarck swept the tournament in seven straight games. Paige won the four games he started, pitched in relief in a fifth game, and struck out 60 batters—a record that still held 74 years later.
In September, Paige could not return to the NNL because he was banned from the league for the 1935 season for jumping to the Bismarck team. J. L. Wilkinson, owner of the independent Kansas City Monarchs, signed Paige on a game-by-game basis through the end of the season.
That winter, a northern California promoter, Johnny Burton, hired Paige to front a team called the "Satchel Paige All-Stars", in a game to be held on February 7, 1936 in Oakland against a white all-star squad. The opposing team included a number of major league players out of the Bay Area, including Ernie Lombardi, Augie Galan, Cookie Lavagetto, and Gus Suhr, as well as Pacific Coast League star Joe DiMaggio, who was making his last stop as a minor leaguer before joining the New York Yankees. Other than Negro league catcher, Ebel Brooks, Paige's team was composed of local semi-pro players. Despite the imbalance in talent, Paige kept the game to a 1–1 tie through nine innings, striking out 12 and giving up one run on three hits. In the bottom of the tenth inning, he struck out two more, then gave up a single to Dick Bartell, bringing up DiMaggio. Bartell stole second on the first pitch, then went to third on a wild pitch. DiMaggio then hit a hard hopper to the mound that Paige deflected; DiMaggio beat the second baseman's throw to drive in the winning run. A Yankee scout watching the game wired the club that day a report that read, "DiMaggio everything we'd hoped he'd be: Hit Satch one for four." DiMaggio later said that Paige was "the best I've ever faced, and the fastest."
In 1936, Paige returned to Pittsburgh where Greenlee acquiesced to Paige's salary demands and gave him a $600-per-month contract, by far the highest in the Negro leagues. In games for which complete box scores are available, Paige went 5–0, allowed 3.21 runs per game, and struck out 47 in 47 innings. At the end of the season, Tom Wilson arranged with the other NNL owners to assemble an all-star team that would enter the lucrative "Denver Post" tournament. The team included Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Leroy Matlock, Buck Leonard, Felton Snow, Bill Wright and Sammy Hughes. They swept the tournament in seven games to win the $5,000 prize, with Paige winning three of them. In the title game against an overmatched semi-pro team from Borger, Texas, Paige pitched a 7–0 shutout, striking out 18. The Negro league all-stars then barnstormed, playing a series against a team of major leaguers led by Rogers Hornsby. One match-up featured Paige facing the 17-year-old Bob Feller, who had just finished a half-season with the Cleveland Indians. Each pitched three innings and gave up one hit, with Feller striking out eight and Paige seven. Later in the game, the Negro league team pulled out a win.
In the spring of 1937 the Crawfords were training in New Orleans, and Paige was approached by Dr. José Enrique Aybar, dean of the University of Santo Domingo, deputy of the Dominican Republic's national congress and director of Los Dragones, a baseball team operated by Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. Aybar hired Paige to act as an agent for Trujillo in recruiting other Negro league players to play for "Los Dragones." Aybar gave Paige $30,000 to hire as many players as he could. Paige recruited five of his Crawfords teammates—Cool Papa Bell, Leroy Matlock, Sam Bankhead, Harry Williams and Herman Andrews—as well as Josh Gibson, who had recently been traded to the Homestead Grays. Other Dominican teams were also recruiting Negro league players. Greenlee and his fellow owners banned Paige and the other jumpers from the organized Negro leagues, but failed to dissuade the players.
In the Dominican Republic, the American players were shadowed by armed guards. Although the purpose of the guards was to protect the players, the players were fearful that Trujillo would unleash them in anger if his team lost the championship. The season ended with an eight-game series between the two top teams, Paige's Dragones of "Ciudad Trujillo" (as Trujillo had renamed the capital city of Santo Domingo) and the "Águilas Cibaeñas" of Santiago. The Dragones won the first four, with Paige contributing two of them. The Águilas came back to win the next two and still had a chance to win the championship if they won the final two games. In Paige's memoirs, he recalled finishing the game with two shutout innings to hold onto a 6–5 win while soldiers looked on "like a firing squad." In reality, however, Paige did not enter the game until there was one out in the ninth inning, with his team leading 8–3. He proceeded to give up three runs on three hits before he got the third out on a great throw by Bankhead. Paige had an excellent season overall, however, leading the league with an 8–2 record.
Paige and the other players returning from the Dominican Republic faced a Negro league ban for jumping their teams. In response, they formed a barnstorming team called "Trujillo's All-Stars", which was later known as the "Satchel Paige All-Stars." Wilkinson evaded the ban by having promoter Ray Dean schedule games between the All-Stars and the House of David. In August, the All-Stars won the "Denver Post" tournament. In late September, Paige faced a team of Negro league all-stars at the Polo Grounds. Despite striking out eight and allowing only two runs, he lost when the opposing pitcher, Johnny "Schoolboy" Taylor, tossed a no-hitter. A week later a rematch was held at Yankee Stadium, and this time Paige beat Taylor handily.
In 1938, Greenlee, who still held Paige's NNL contract, again made an unsuccessful attempt to sign Paige. Greenlee then sold his contract to the Newark Eagles for $5,000, but they could not sign him either. Paige instead went to play in the Mexican League.
Jorge Pasquel, a Mexican baseball executive and businessman, and his four brothers wanted the Mexican League to compete with the major leagues. Their plan to do that was to hire the best Negro league players who were ignored by the big leagues, then raid big league teams and field integrated clubs in the name of international baseball. With this goal, they hired Paige for $2,000 per month to play for the moribund Club Agrario of Mexico City, to create a rivalry for Club Azules of Veracruz, a powerhouse bunch led by Martín Dihigo. Back in the states, Greenlee, out $5,000, declared Paige "banned forever from baseball."
Pitching in Venezuela, Paige felt pain in his right shoulder. After he arrived in Mexico, the pain developed into the first major injury of his career. He tried to pitch through the pain, and managed to beat Dihigo in their first match-up in early September, allowing one run in eight innings. Two weeks later they faced off again, and this time Paige could barely lift his arm. He managed to go six-plus innings in a game that Paige's team ultimately lost 10–3. One sportswriter wrote that Paige looked like a "squeezed lemon."
Paige returned to his hotel room. He recalled that the next morning, "My stomach got sick with the pain that shot up my right arm. Sweat popped out all over me. The pain wouldn't quit. I tried lifting my arm. I couldn't. I just sat there, sweating, hurting enough to want to cry, getting sicker in the stomach and getting scared—real scared. My arm. I couldn't lift it." He was examined by physicians in Mexico and in the United States; one expert told him that he would never pitch again.
With his arm injured, Paige suddenly found himself unemployable. He looked for work as a manager or coach, but was unsuccessful. One ballclub owner was willing to give him a chance to play ball again—J.L. Wilkinson of the Monarchs. Wilkinson offered him the modest opportunity to play, not for the Negro American League Monarchs, but for a second-string barnstorming team called the Travelers, which was now renamed the Satchel Paige All-Stars. Paige would pitch when he could and play first base when he could not.
Managed by Newt Joseph, the team also included Byron "Mex" Johnson, but otherwise it mostly functioned as a minor-league team staffed by marginal, aging, or young players. Playing throughout Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas, Illinois, and even Utah, large crowds turned out to see Paige throw an inning or two, relying on junkballs. Paige recalled, "Everybody'd heard I was a fastballer and here I was throwing Alley Oops and bloopers and underhand and sidearm and any way I could to get the ball up to the plate and get it over, maybe even for a strike. But even that made my arm ache like a tooth was busting every time I threw. And the balls I was throwing never would fool anybody in the Negro leagues, not without a fast ball to go with them." Paige insisted he never threw a spitball or "an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in awhile I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation."
Sometime that summer Paige's fast ball returned. Paige's catcher, Frazier "Slow" Robinson, recalled that one afternoon Paige told him, "You better be ready because I'm ready today." Paige then surprised him when, with Robinson expecting a lob, Paige "threw that baseball so hard that he knocked the mitt off my hand." Modern sports medicine specialists suggest that Paige suffered from a partially torn rotator cuff in his shoulder caused by repetitive stress. Paige's recovery was assisted by the Monarch's long-time trainer, Frank "Jewbaby" Floyd, who was sent by Wilkinson to work with Paige. Floyd worked with massage, hot and cold water, ointments, and chiropractic. He had Paige rest his arm by pitching fewer innings and playing other positions.
By late fall his team was playing well against major Negro league teams. On September 22, 1939, in the second game of a double-header against the powerful American Giants, Paige won a 1–0 game, striking out 10 men in the seven innings before the game was called on account of darkness. Buck O'Neil, who had batted against Paige in 1935 and 1936 and faced him again in a game against the parent Monarchs, recalled a dropoff in speed but an improvement in deception. "He could still throw hard. Not as hard as he had thrown, but you're talkin' about somebody thrown' ninety-eight, a hundred miles an hour. But now he's throwin' maybe ninety—which is still more than the average guy ... He was the best and, actually, he was so deceptive! You'd look at that big ol' slow arm movin' and—"chooo"—that ball's just right by you. And then he'd come up and throw you a change of pace and, oh, man."
In just one season, Paige left his mark on Puerto Rican baseball. He arrived in Puerto Rico in late October, four weeks after the start of the 1939/40 winter season, and joined the "Brujos de Guayama" (the Guayama Witch Doctors). The town of Guayama is widely known for its Santería, Palo, and other spiritualist religious practices. In a legendary game in Guayama, Paige walked off the mound because he saw a ghost standing next to him.
A team that featured shortstop Perucho Cepeda and outfielder Tetelo Vargas, the Guayama Witch Doctors were the 1938–39 champions. In September 1939, they had won the semi-pro baseball "World Series" in Puerto Rico against the Duncan Cementeers. On November 5, Paige pitched a shutout against rival Santurce, which featured player-manager Josh Gibson, by a lopsided score of 23–0.
In a December game against Mayagüez, Paige set a league record by striking out 17. He ended the season with a 19–3 record, a 1.93 ERA, and 208 strikeouts in 205 innings. The 19 wins and 208 strikeouts set league single-season records that have never been broken. Paige helped his team win the league championship playoff series, winning two games against the San Juan Senadores.
Puerto Rican pitcher Ramón Bayron recalled, "It took special eyes to see his pitches." Luis Olmo, who later played with the Brooklyn Dodgers, described Paige that winter as "the best I've ever seen."
When asked who was the toughest batter he ever faced Paige answered. "That little indian fellow from Puerto Rico named Coimbre"
Paige returned to the Travelers for the 1940 season. Abe and Effa Manley, owners of the Newark Eagles, still claimed that they still held the rights to Paige's Negro league contract, and retaliated against Wilkinson by signing players from Wilkinson's Negro American League. In late June, the NNL and NAL leaders met to discuss the situation and reached an agreement that allowed Paige to advance to the Kansas City Monarchs and let the Manleys keep the players they had recruited in violation of the inter-league rules. Late in the 1940 season, Paige was promoted to the Monarchs. On September 12, Paige made his debut with the Monarchs against the American Giants and pitched a five-inning darkness-shortened complete game. The Monarchs won 9–3 and Paige struck out ten.
Because of Paige's strong gate appeal, there was considerable demand by outside teams to lease Paige's services to pitch for a single game. With infrequent league games, Wilkinson booked Paige to pitch for small-town teams or other Negro league teams at rates ranging from a third of the total receipts to a fixed fee $250 to $2,000 per game, plus expenses. Wilkinson purchased a Douglas DC-3 airplane just to ferry Paige around to these outside appearances. Because of the larger gate when Paige pitched, the Monarchs' owners could also insist on a larger share of the receipts from their road games. Wilkinson and Paige each kept a share of the fees. By the early 1940s, Paige's estimated annual earnings were $40,000, which was four times the pay of the average player on the major league New York Yankees and nearly matched the pay of their top star, Joe DiMaggio.
Hoping for some publicity for Paige, who had received relatively little coverage while pitching in the hinterlands with the Travelers, Wilkinson arranged for Paige to pitch on opening day of 1941 for the New York Black Yankees. Appearing in front of a crowd of 20,000 fans at Yankee Stadium, Paige pitched a complete game, 5–3 victory, striking out eight. As intended, the contest brought considerable coverage from both the black and white media, including a pictorial by "Life" magazine.
Paige took over the role of ace pitcher for the Monarchs, while Hilton Smith, their former ace, dropped to number two pitcher and sometimes was relegated to relieving Paige. Because of Paige's ability to draw a crowd, he would often be scheduled to start a game and pitch for three innings, with Smith or another teammate assigned to pitch the last six. In addition to Smith, Paige's teammates included first baseman Buck O'Neil, shortstop and manager Newt Allen, and center fielder Willard Brown. In 1941, the Monarchs won their third consecutive Negro American League championship. Though no standings were published, according to historian John Holway, they had a 24–6 team record for a winning percentage of .800, placing them five games ahead of the second-place New Orleans/St. Louis Stars.
On August 1, 1941, Paige made his first appearance in the East–West All Star Game in five years, collecting 305,311 votes, 40,000 more than the next highest player, Buck Leonard. Paige entered the game at the start of the eighth inning with the East leading 8–1 and pitched the last two innings. The only hit he gave up was a slow roller to the NNL's new starting catcher, the Baltimore Elite Giants' Roy Campanella.
With America's entrance into World War II, Dizzy Dean came out of retirement, forming an all-star team consisting of recently drafted white major league and minor league players. On May 24, Dean faced Paige and the Monarchs in an exhibition game at Wrigley Field, the first time a black team ever played at Wrigley. The Monarchs defeated Dean's All-Stars 3–1 in front of a crowd of 29,775. On May 31, Paige teamed up with the Homestead Grays to face Dean's All-Stars again before 22,000 fans at Griffith Stadium. The Grays won 8–1, with Paige striking out seven (including Washington Senators star Cecil Travis) in five innings of work.
In the 1942 East-West All-Star Game, Paige entered in the top of the seventh with the score tied 2–2. Pitching the last three innings, he allowed three runs on five hits and was charged with the loss in the 5–2 game.
The Monarchs won the Negro American League pennant again in 1942. For the first time since 1927, the champions of the two leagues, Kansas City and Washington/Homestead, met in the Negro World Series. Paige started game one in Washington and pitched five shutout innings. The Monarchs scored their first run in the top of the sixth. In the bottom of the frame, Jack Matchett relieved Paige and finished the game, with Kansas City adding seven more runs to win 8–0.
Game two was played two days later in Pittsburgh, and a highlight was Paige's dramatic showdown with Josh Gibson. In the bottom of the sixth, Paige relieved starter Hilton Smith with the Monarchs ahead 2–0. In the seventh inning, he gave up three singles and faced Gibson with the bases loaded and two outs. Gibson fouled off the first two pitches, then whiffed on the third. When Paige told the story in his autobiography, he mythologized the story. According to Paige, the strikeout came in the ninth inning with a one-run lead, and he walked the three batters ahead of Gibson in order to face him. The mythical version was retold by Buck Leonard and Buck O'Neil in their memoirs. In the actual game, the Monarchs added three runs in the top of the eighth to take a 5–0 lead, then Paige gave up four in the bottom of the frame to make it 5–4. The Monarchs added another three in the top of the ninth and won 8–4.
After two days rest, Paige started game three, which was played in Yankee Stadium. Paige gave up two runs in the first and was pulled after two innings. Matchett pitched the remainder of the game, which the Monarchs won, 9–3, giving them a 3–0 lead in the series. The next series game was played a week later in Kansas City. When the injury-plagued Grays brought in star players from other teams, including pitcher Leon Day, second baseman Lenny Pearson, and outfielder Ed Stone of the Newark Eagles and shortstop Bus Clarkson of the Philadelphia Stars, the Monarchs played under protest. Day and Paige both pitched complete games, with Paige giving up four runs on eight hits and Day giving up one run on five hits for a Grays victory. The Monarchs' protest was upheld and the game was disallowed. Game four took place in Shibe Park in Philadelphia, and Paige was scheduled to start, but he did not show up until the fourth inning. According to his autobiography, Paige was delayed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania by an arrest for speeding. The Grays had taken a 5–4 lead, and Paige immediately entered the game. In the remainder of the game, he did not allow a hit or a run and struck out six, while the Monarchs' hitters scored two runs in the seventh to take the lead and three more in the eighth to win, 9–5, and sweep the series. Paige had pitched in all four official games in the Series (as well as one unofficial one), going 16 innings, striking out 18, and giving up eight hits and six runs.
Paige was the West's starting pitcher in the 1943 East-West All-Star Game, played before a record 51,723 fans in Comiskey Park. He pitched three scoreless innings without giving up a hit, struck out four, walked one, and was credited as the winning pitcher in the West's 2–1 victory. As a batter, he hit a double to lead off the bottom of the third, then was lifted for a pitch runner to "thunderous applause."
World War II caused a large number of baseball players to be inducted into military service. Among Paige's Kansas City teammates, Connie Johnson, Buck O'Neil, and Ted Strong entered military service that year, and Willard Brown followed them the following season. Paige's Selective Service records show that during the war his draft status evolved from 1-A (available to be drafted) to 2-A ("deferred in support of national health, safety, or interest") to the final 4-A (too old for service, even though when he registered he gave a birth date of 1908, two years younger than his actual birth date). Paige continued to play, and the available statistics show a slip in performance in 1943, with a 6–8 record and a 4.59 run average (his highest average since 1929) reported for the Monarchs. The Monarchs' string of four straight pennants ended, as the Negro American League title was captured by the Birmingham Black Barons in 1943 and 1944 and by the Cleveland Buckeyes in 1945.
Before the 1944 East-West All-Star Game—black baseball's most lucrative event—Paige grabbed headlines when he demanded that the owners contribute the receipts to the war relief fund, threatening a player strike if they did not accede. The owners were able to turn the other players and fans against Paige, however, when they revealed that Paige had received $800 for participating in the 1943 game (in contrast to the $50 paid to the other players) and had demanded an extra cut for the 1944 game as well. Paige was removed from the roster and the strike was averted when the owners agreed to raise the player payments (the East's team accepted $200 each, while the West's players agreed to $100).
In 1946, many of the Monarchs' players, including Willard Brown, Connie Johnson, Buck O'Neil, Ford Smith, and Ted Strong, returned from military service, and the team led the NAL in both the first and second halves, capturing the league pennant. O'Neil led the league in batting average, Brown in home runs, Johnson in wins, and Paige in total run average.
The Monarchs faced the Newark Eagles in the 1946 Negro World Series. The first game was played at the Polo Grounds and Hilton Smith started for the Monarchs. The Monarchs held a 1–0 lead in the bottom of the sixth, when Smith walked Larry Doby to lead off the inning, and Paige was called in to relieve. Paige struck out Monte Irvin and Lenny Pearson, but Doby stole second and Paige gave up a single to Johnny Davis, which tied the game. In the top of the seventh, the Monarchs got the lead back when Paige hit a single, advanced to second on an error, and scored on a hit by Herb Souell. Paige shut down the Eagles for the rest of the game, striking out eight and allowing four hits over four innings, and was credited with the win.
Two days later, Paige came into the second game in a similar situation as the first, but the result was quite different. Ford Smith started the game for the Monarchs, and he had a 4–1 lead entering the bottom of the seventh. After allowing two runs and with Irvin on first, Paige was brought in to protect the 4–3 lead. This time, however, Paige gave up four hits before the end of the inning, and four runs crossed the plate. Paige finished the game, but was charged with the loss in the 7–4 game.
The next two games were played in Kansas City, and the Monarchs won game three, getting a complete game from Jim LaMarque. Ted Alexander started game four, but gave way to Paige in the top of the sixth with the Monarchs trailing 4–1. Paige gave up three runs on three hits in the sixth, including a home run to Irvin. He went on to finish the game, giving up one more run in the seventh, and the Monarchs lost 8–1.
Kansas City won the fifth game and Newark won the sixth. For the deciding game seven, Paige was missing. Buck O'Neil believed Paige was meeting with Bob Feller about their upcoming barnstorming tour. With Ford Smith pitching, the Monarchs lost 3–2, and the Eagles claimed the championship.
In late 1946, Bob Feller organized the first barnstorming tour to use airplanes to travel from site to site. His tour has been described as "the most ambitious baseball undertaking since John McGraw and Charles Comiskey dreamed up their round-the-world junket in 1913." For his team, Feller recruited all-stars from both major leagues. As his main opponent, he asked Paige to head a team of Negro league all-stars.
Feller's team included 1946 American League batting champion, Mickey Vernon, at first base, Johnny Beradino at second, Phil Rizzuto at shortstop, and Ken Keltner at third. The outfielders were Jeff Heath, Charlie Keller, and Sam Chapman; after the World Series was over, National League batting champion Stan Musial would also join the tour. Catching was shared by Jim Hegan and Frankie Hayes. In addition to Feller, the pitching staff included Bob Lemon, Dutch Leonard, Johnny Sain, Spud Chandler, and Fred Hutchinson.
With help from J.L. Wilkinson and Tom Baird, Paige assembled a team that included first baseman Buck O'Neil, second baseman Hank Thompson, shortstops Chico Renfroe and Artie Wilson, third basemen Howard Easterling and Herb Souell, outfielders Gene Benson and Johnny Davis, catcher Quincy Trouppe, and pitchers Barney Brown, Gentry Jessup, Rufus Lewis, Hilton Smith, and Neck Stanley.
Feller scheduled 35 games in 31 cities in 17 different states, all to be played in 27 days. The tour would require 13,000 miles of travel. Several same-day multi-city doubleheaders were to be played. Feller leased two DC-3 airplanes, with "Bob Feller All-Stars" painted on one fuselage and "Satchel Paige All-Stars" on the other. While Feller's team would face several other opponents, the majority of the games were against Paige's team. Feller and Paige would start each game whenever possible and usually pitch one to five innings.
The first game was played at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh on September 30, two days after the end of the major league season and one day after the final game of the Negro World Series. Paige and Feller each pitched three innings and left the game with the score tied 1–1. Feller struck out three and gave up two hits, while Paige struck out four and gave up only one hit. Paige's team broke the tie in the seventh inning when Hank Thompson walked and stole second and Souell drove him home with a single up the middle.
Over the next six days, Feller's team won games in Youngstown, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and Newark, before Paige's team won a second game in New York. Paige pitched five shutout innings in Yankee Stadium before a crowd of 27,462. After the game they flew to Baltimore, where that same evening Paige's team beat Feller's. The next day, Paige's team won again in Columbus. From there, Feller's team won games in Dayton, Ohio, Richmond, Indiana, Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Wichita, Kansas. They then played two games in Kansas City, with Paige's team winning the first game on a three-run walk-off home run by Johnny Davis, and Feller's team winning the second. After that series, Feller's team continued on to Denver and California, while most of Paige's team left the tour. Paige, however, continued on to California where he joined a lesser team, Chet Brewer's Kansas City Royals, which was scheduled to play Feller's All-Stars.
Paige faced Feller in Los Angeles and in San Diego and lost both games. Another scheduled match-up was cancelled when Paige filed a lawsuit against Feller, claiming that Feller had not paid some of the money he was owed. Overall, Feller had pitched 54 innings against Paige's team and given up 15 runs, an average of 2.50 per nine innings. Paige had pitched 42 innings and allowed 18 runs, or 3.86 per nine innings.
After the 1947 season, Feller organized another all-star team for a barnstorming tour. This time, Paige was not invited to tour with him, with Feller opting to play more games in the South against white opponents. Paige did face Feller twice, however, while playing with Chet Brewer's Kansas City Royals in Los Angeles. In the first game, on October 15, both pitchers went four innings. Feller gave up four hits and one walk and struck out two, while Paige gave up just two hits and one walk and struck out seven. Nevertheless, Paige took the loss when he gave up a run in the fourth when Keltner singled and later scored on a sacrifice fly by Heath. On October 19, they again faced each other in front of a crowd of 12,000-plus. Both pitchers went five innings. Paige allowed three hits and no walks, and struck out eight, including Ralph Kiner twice. He left the game with a 1–0 lead, but Feller's team came back in the late innings to win 2–1.
When Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, a former teammate of Paige, Paige realized that it was for the best that Paige himself was not the first black player in major league baseball. Robinson started in the minors, and had a major league team started him in its minor league affiliate, Paige would have probably seen this as an insult. Paige eventually realized that by integrating baseball in the minor leagues first with Robinson, the white major league players got the chance to "get used to" the idea of playing alongside black players. Understanding that, Paige said in his autobiography that, "Signing Jackie like they did still hurt me deep down. I'd been the guy who'd started all that big talk about letting us in the big time. I'd been the one who'd opened up the major league parks to colored teams. I'd been the one who the white boys wanted to go barnstorming against." Paige, and all other black players, knew that quibbling about the choice of the first black player in the major leagues would do nothing productive, so, despite his inner feelings, Paige said of Robinson, "He's the greatest colored player I've ever seen."
Finally, on July 7, 1948, with his Cleveland Indians in a pennant race and in desperate need of pitching, Indians owner Bill Veeck brought Paige in to try out with Indians player-manager Lou Boudreau. On that same day, his 42nd birthday, Paige signed his first major league contract, for $40,000 for the three months remaining in the season, becoming the first black pitcher in the American League and the seventh black big leaguer overall. Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the American League at the age of 23 the same year Robinson did in the National League, would be a teammate of Paige.
On July 9, 1948, Paige became the oldest man ever to debut in the major leagues, at the age of 42 years and two days. When asked about his age, he would reply "If someone asked you how old you were and you didn't know your age, how old would you think you were?" With the St. Louis Browns beating the Indians 4–1 in the bottom of the fourth inning, Boudreau pulled his starting pitcher, Bob Lemon, and sent Paige in. Paige, not knowing the signs and not wanting to confuse his catcher, pitched cautiously. Chuck Stevens lined a ball to left field for a single. Jerry Priddy bunted Stevens over to second. Up next was Whitey Platt, and Paige decided to take command. He threw an overhand pitch for a strike and one sidearm for another strike. Paige then threw his "Hesitation Pitch" (see "pitching style" section below), which surprised Platt so much that he threw his bat 40 feet up the third base line. Browns manager Zack Taylor bolted from the dugout to talk to umpire Bill McGowan about the pitch, claiming it was a balk, but McGowan let it stand as a strike. Paige then got Al Zarilla to fly out to end the inning. The next inning, he gave up a leadoff single, but with his catcher having simplified his signals, Paige got the next batter to hit into a double play, followed by a pop fly. Larry Doby pinch-hit for Paige the following inning.
Paige got his first big league victory on July 15, 1948, the night after he pitched in an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in front of 65,000 people in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. It came at Philadelphia's Shibe Park. The Indians were up 5–3 and the bases were loaded in the sixth inning of the second game of a double header. He got Eddie Joost to fly out to end the inning, but gave up two runs the next inning when Ferris Fain doubled and Hank Majeski hit a home run. Paige buckled down and gave up only one more hit the rest of the game, getting five of the next six outs on fly balls. Larry Doby and Ken Keltner hit home runs in the ninth to give the Indians an 8–5 victory.
Longtime Chicago Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse once said with amusement that Paige "threw a lot of pitches that were not quite 'legal' and not quite 'illegal. American League President Will Harridge eventually ruled the Hesitation Pitch definitely illegal and, if thrown again, it would result in a balk. Paige said, "I guess Mr. Harridge did not want me to show up those boys who were young enough to be my sons."
On August 3, 1948, with the Indians one game behind the Athletics, Boudreau started Paige against the Washington Senators in Cleveland. The 72,562 people that saw the game set a new attendance record for a major league night game. Although a nervous Paige walked two of the first three batters and gave up a triple to Bud Stewart to fall behind 2–0, by the time he left in the seventh, the Indians were up 4–2 and held on to give him his second victory. His next start was at Comiskey Park in Chicago. 51,013 people paid to see the game, but many thousands more stormed the turnstiles and crashed into the park, overwhelming the few dozen ticket-takers. Paige went the distance, shutting out the White Sox, 5–0, debunking the assumption that nine innings of pitching was now beyond his capabilities.
The Indians were in a heated pennant race on August 20, 1948. Coming into the game against the White Sox, Bob Lemon, Gene Bearden and Sam Zoldak had thrown shutouts to run up a thirty-inning scoreless streak, eleven shy of the big league record. 201,829 people had come to see his last three starts. For this game in Cleveland, 78,382 people came to see Paige, a full 6,000 more people than the previous night game attendance record. Paige went the distance, giving up two singles and one double for his second consecutive three hit shutout. At that point in the season, Paige was 5–1 with an astoundingly low 1.33 ERA. He made one appearance in the 1948 World Series. He pitched for two-thirds of an inning in Game Five while the Indians were trailing the Boston Braves, giving up a sacrifice fly to Warren Spahn, got called for a balk and struck out Tommy Holmes. The Indians ended up winning the series in six games.
Paige ended the 1948 season with a 6–1 record with a 2.48 ERA, 2 shutouts, 43 strikeouts, 22 walks and 61 base hits allowed in 72 innings. There was some discussion of Paige possibly winning the Rookie of the Year Award. While technically a "rookie" to the majors, the 20-plus-year veteran Paige regarded such an idea with disdain and considered rejecting the award if it were to be given. The issue proved moot, as both versions of the award (by Major League Baseball and by "Sporting News") were given to other players. The year 1949 was not nearly as good for Paige as 1948. He ended the season with a 4–7 record and was 1–3 in his starts with a 3.04 ERA. After the season, with Veeck selling the team to pay for his divorce, the Indians gave Paige his unconditional release.
Penniless, Paige returned to his barnstorming days after being released from the Indians. In 1950, he signed with the Philadelphia Stars in the Eastern Division of the NAL for $800 per game. When Veeck bought an 80% interest in the St. Louis Browns he soon signed Paige. In his first game back in the major leagues, on July 18, 1951, against the Washington Senators, Paige pitched six innings of shutout baseball until the seventh when he gave up three runs. He ended the season with a 3–4 record and a 4.79 ERA.
In 1952, Rogers Hornsby took over as manager of the Browns, and despite past accusations of racism, Hornsby was less hesitant to use Paige than Boudreau was four years before. Paige was so effective that when Hornsby was fired by Veeck, his successor Marty Marion seemed not to want to risk going more than three games without using Paige in some form. By July 4, with Paige having worked in 25 games, Casey Stengel named him to the American League All-Star team, making him the first black pitcher on an AL All-Star team. The All-Star game was cut short after five innings due to rain and Paige never got in. Stengel resolved to name him to the team the following year. Paige finished the year 12–10 with a 3.07 ERA for a team that lost ninety games.
Stengel kept his word and named Paige to the 1953 All-Star team despite Paige not having a very good year. He got in the game in the eighth inning. First, Paige got Gil Hodges to line out, then after Roy Campanella singled up the middle, Eddie Mathews popped out. He then walked Duke Snider, and Enos Slaughter lined a hit to center to score Campanella. National League pitcher Murry Dickson drove in Snider, but was thrown out at second base trying to stretch the hit into a double. Paige ended the year with a disappointing 3–9 record, but a respectable 3.53 ERA. Paige was released after the season when Veeck once again had to sell the team.
Paige once again returned to his barnstorming days with Abe Saperstein. They formed a baseball version of Saperstein's Harlem Globetrotters. Paige then joined the real Globetrotters when he joined one of their most popular "reams"—the "baseball routine". Paige would "pitch" the basketball to Goose Tatum, who would "bat" the ball with his arms, run around the "bases" and slide "home" safely. Paige never actually played on the team, though. Although he was making a decent living, Paige grew tired of the constant travel. His family had grown with the birth of his fourth child and first son, Robert Leroy.
Paige then signed for $300 a month and a percentage of the gate to play for the Monarchs again. Then, on August 14, 1955, Paige signed a contract with the Greensboro Patriots of the Carolina League. He was scheduled to pitch at home three days later against the Philadelphia Phillies farm team, the Reidsville Luckies, but before he could suit up, Phillies farm director Eddie Collins wired George Trautman, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, to protest Paige's appearance. Trautman, dealing with the integration of southern baseball against a Jim Crow backdrop, ruled that the signing was invalid, but the Greensboro team reminded him that the Carolina League had already approved the contract. Trautman then ruled that Greensboro could only use Paige in exhibition games. Unfortunately, Greensboro had already scheduled Paige to pitch in a regular season game which was sold out in advance and could not change it to an exhibition. In the end, the game was canceled when Hurricane Diane hit the Carolinas.
Veeck once again came to Paige's rescue when, after taking control of the Phillies' triple-A farm team, the Miami Marlins of the International League, he signed Paige to a contract for $15,000 and a percentage of the gate. Marlins manager Don Osborn did not want Paige and said that he would only use him in exhibition games. Veeck made a deal with Osborn that he could line up his best nine hitters, rotating them in from their positions in the field, and Veeck agreed to pay $10 to any of them who get a clean hit off of Paige. Paige retired all nine and Osborn agreed to make Paige a roster player. In Paige's first game as a Marlin, he pitched a complete-game, four-hit shutout. Osborn, a former minor league pitcher, taught Paige the proper way to throw a curveball, which allowed Paige to tear through the International League. Paige finished the season 11–4 with an ERA of 1.86 with 79 strikeouts and only 28 walks. This time, when Veeck left the team, Paige was allowed to stay on, for two more years.
In 1957, the Marlins finished in sixth place, but Paige had a 10–8 record with 76 strikeouts versus 11 walks and 2.42 ERA. The following year, Osborn was replaced as manager by Kerby Farrell, who was not as forgiving when it came to Paige missing curfews or workouts. He was fined several times throughout the year and finished 10–10, saying that he would not return to Miami the following season. In 1959, Paige returned to his barnstorm roots and signed a pitching contract with the Havana Cuban Stars who were owned by Dempsey Hovland. Paige was in and out of baseball, pitching sporadically, over the next decade. At the age of 55, in 1961, Paige signed on with the Triple-A Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League, pitching 25 innings, striking out 19 and giving up eight earned runs. He failed to record a single decision in his stint with the Beavers.
In 1965, Kansas City Athletics owner Charles O. Finley signed Paige, 59 at the time, for one game. On September 25, against the Boston Red Sox, Finley invited several Negro league veterans including Cool Papa Bell to be introduced before the game. Paige was in the bullpen, sitting on a rocking chair, being served coffee by a "nurse" between innings. He started the game by getting Jim Gosger out on a pop foul. The next man, Dalton Jones, reached first and went to second on an infield error, but was thrown out trying to reach third on a pitch in the dirt. Carl Yastrzemski doubled and Tony Conigliaro hit a fly ball to end the inning. The next six batters went down in order, including a strikeout of Bill Monbouquette. In the fourth inning, Paige took the mound, to be removed according to plan by Haywood Sullivan. He walked off to a standing ovation from the small crowd of 9,289. The lights dimmed and, led by the PA announcer, the fans lit matches and cigarette lighters while singing "The Old Gray Mare".
In 1966, Paige pitched in his last game in organized baseball, getting some measure of revenge when he pitched for the Carolina League's Peninsula Grays of Hampton, Virginia, against the very same Greensboro Patriots who had been forced to release him before his first pitch back in 1955. Paige gave up two runs in the first, threw a scoreless second and then left, never to return as a player in organized baseball again. Peninsula used their backup catcher that day, rather than play their regular starter, a young Johnny Bench. Also in 1966, Paige pitched for the semipro Anchorage Earthquakers, a team that barnstormed through Canada. In 1967, Paige appeared with the Globetrotters in Chicago and played with the Indianapolis Clowns for $1,000 a month.
The spectacle of watching Paige pitch was made all the more entertaining by the expansive pitching repertoire he developed over the years. In his early years, Paige was known as a pure fastball pitcher. He experimented with releasing pitches from a variety of arm angles in that time, something he would build upon later as he added more pitches to the mix. In 1933, while playing integrated baseball in Bismarck, North Dakota, "The Bismarck Tribune" reported that Paige used "a tricky delayed delivery with great effectiveness," something that would later become known as Paige's famous "hesitation pitch."
The idea came to me in a game, when the guy at bat was all tighted up waiting for my fast ball. I knew he'd swing as soon as I just barely moved. So when I stretched, I paused just a little longer with my arms above my head. Then I threw my left foot forward but I didn't come around with my arm right away. I put that foot of mine down, stopping for a second, before the ball left my hand. When my foot hit the ground that boy started swinging, so by the time I came around with the whip he was way off stride and couldn't get anywhere near the ball. I had me a strikeout.
In 1934, before a barnstorming match-up, Dizzy Dean was heard on the radio saying that "Satchel Paige has no clue how to throw a curve." In actuality, Paige had been practicing and perfecting his curveball in secret for many years. When Dean came up to bat, Satchel Paige struck him out with nothing but curveballs—officially adding the pitch to his repertoire. Paige could throw a variety of curveballs at different speeds and arm angles.
In late 1939, after Paige had recovered from the severe arm injury that jeopardized his career, he re-designed his pitching repertoire to take better care of his arm. He still had an exceptional fastball but he did away with his fast curve, deciding to only throw slow curves from that point forward. He learned to throw a knuckleball from Cool Papa Bell, a pitch which he reportedly perfected in regards to its movement but did not always exhibit full control of. He also added a "slow sinker" and used his hesitation pitch more frequently. Along with these additions to his repertoire, Paige made greater use of his sidearm and submarine releases, which both made him a more deceptive pitcher and lessened the strain on his pitching arm.
As Paige got older, he had to rely more and more on his offspeed pitches. By the time he finally got to play in the major leagues, he threw a seemingly endless variety of pitches, all of which moved. He was especially known for his tailing fastball, slow curve, hesitation pitch, a fantastic change-up, and a highly effective eephus pitch. He reportedly could deceive batters by throwing fastballs with a curveball wrist action, and vice-versa. Pitching this way allowed Paige to be a highly effective pitcher, even into his fifties.
After the 1957 season, Paige went to the Mexican state of Durango to appear in a United Artists movie, "The Wonderful Country", starring Robert Mitchum and Julie London. Paige played Sgt. Tobe Sutton, a hard-bitten cavalry sergeant of the Buffalo Soldiers. He was paid $10,000 to be in it, and the movie became the pride of his life. Late in 1960, Paige began collaborating with writer David Lipman on his autobiography, which was published by Doubleday in April 1962, and ran to three printings.
In 1968, Paige assumed the position of deputy sheriff in Jackson County, Missouri, with the understanding that he need not bother to actually come to work in the sheriff's office. The purpose of the charade was to set up Paige with political credentials. Soon after, he was running for a Missouri state assembly seat with the support of the local Democratic club against incumbent Representative Leon Jordan. Candidate Paige never gave a speech, and was never taken seriously. Jordan defeated Paige by the margin of 1,870 votes to 382 (83%–17%).
In August 1968, the owner of the Atlanta Braves, William Bartholomay, signed Paige to a contract running through the 1969 season as a pitching coach/pitcher, although it was mainly done so that Paige could gain service time to receive a major league pension. Paige did most of his coaching from his living room in Kansas City, but he did pitch in at least one pre-season exhibition game in April 1969, striking out Don Drysdale.
Bowie Kuhn replaced William Eckert as the Commissioner of Baseball in 1969. In the wake of Ted Williams' 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech urging the induction of Negro leaguers, and on the recommendation of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, Kuhn empowered a ten-man committee to sift through hundreds of names and nominate the first group of four Negro league players to go to the Hall of Fame. Because Paige pitched in Greensboro in 1966, he would not have been eligible for enshrinement until 1971, as players have to be out of professional baseball for at least five years before they can be elected. All of the men on the committee agreed that Paige had to be the first Negro league player to get elected, so this gave Kuhn plenty of time to create some sort of Negro league branch in the Hall of Fame. On February 9, 1971, Kuhn announced that Paige would be the first member of the Negro wing of the Hall of Fame. Because many in the press saw the suggestion of a "Negro wing" as separate-but-equal and denounced major league baseball for the idea, by the time that Paige's induction came around on August 9, Kuhn convinced the owners and the private trust of the Hall of Fame that there should be no separate wing after all. It was decided that all who had been chosen and all who would be chosen would get their plaques in the "regular" section of the Hall of Fame. Paige could not get a job in the major leagues after part of his HOF induction speech was misinterpreted as bitter anger, instead of grateful, by the still largely white baseball elite. Satchel enjoyed a brief run of renewed popularity after his HOF induction appearing on a few TV shows and making the rounds of the Major Leagues Old Timers Games Circuit. After the buzz died down he took a job with the Tulsa Oilers minor league team in 1973 as their pitching coach. During the mid-to-late 1970s he finally slowed down his traveling, making only occasional personal appearances at mostly minor league stadiums and banquets. In 1980 Satchel was named vice-president of the Triple-A Springfield Cardinals, although it was mostly an honorary position.
Paige was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals in 2001.
On October 26, 1934, Paige married his longtime sweetheart Janet Howard. After a few years they separated and she had him served with divorce papers while he was walking onto the field during a game at Wrigley Field. At his court date, on August 4, 1943, Paige's divorce was finalized with him paying a one time payment of $1,500 plus $300 for attorney's fees to Janet. Paige married Lucy Maria Figueroa during this time while playing in Puerto Rico in 1940 but because he was not divorced from his first wife, the marriage to Figueroa was not legal.
In 1946 or 1947, Paige married his longtime girlfriend LaHoma Jean Brown. Paige and LaHoma had seven children together; LaHoma also had a daughter from an earlier marriage.
Paige died of a heart attack after a power failure at his home in Kansas City on June 8, 1982. He is buried on Paige Island in the Forest Hill Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City.
In 2010, sportswriter Joe Posnanski, writing for "Sports Illustrated", named Paige as the hardest thrower in the history of baseball. He based this, in part, on the fact that: "Joe DiMaggio would say that Paige was the best he ever faced. Bob Feller would say that Paige was the best he ever saw. Hack Wilson would say that the ball looked like a marble when it crossed the plate. Dizzy Dean would say that Paige's fastball made his own look like a changeup." Posnanski further noted that: for most of his career Satchel Paige threw nothing but fastballs. Nothing. Oh, he named them different names—Bat Dodger, Midnight Rider, Midnight Creeper, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball—but essentially they were all fastballs. And he was still unhittable for the better part of 15 years. One pitch. It's a lot like Mariano Rivera, except he wasn't doing it for one inning at a time. He was pitching complete games day after day. That had to be some kind of incredible fastball. ... [he was] perhaps the most precise pitcher in baseball history—he threw ludicrously hard. And he also threw hundreds and hundreds of innings.
In an article in "Esquire" magazine in 1976, sportswriter Harry Stein published an article called the "All Time All-Star Argument Starter", a list of five ethnic baseball teams. Paige, a choice Stein meant more out of sentiment than anything else, was the relief pitcher on his black team.
On May 31, 1981, the made-for-television movie aired, starring Louis Gossett Jr. as Paige, Beverly Todd as Lahoma, and former baseball pro Bubba Phillips as Coach Hardy. Paige was paid $10,000 for his story and technical advice. The film was based on the 1962 book, "Maybe I'll Pitch Forever". In August, with great difficulty because of health problems, he attended a reunion of Negro league players held in Ashland, Kentucky that paid special tribute to him and Cool Papa Bell. Attending the reunion were Willie Mays, Buck Leonard, Monte Irvin, Judy Johnson, Chet Brewer, Gene Benson, Bob Feller and Happy Chandler.
In the film "Are We There Yet?", there is a Satchel Paige bobblehead doll which is voiced by Tracy Morgan and is anthropomorphic to its keeper.
In 1996, Paige was played by Delroy Lindo in the made-for-cable film "Soul of the Game".
In 1999, he ranked Number 19 on "Sporting News" list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was nominated as a finalist for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
On July 28, 2006, a statue of Satchel Paige was unveiled in Cooper Park, Cooperstown, New York commemorating the contributions of the Negro leagues to baseball.
Satchel Paige Elementary School in Kansas City is named in his honor.
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Note: Compiled by Tye from newspaper clippings; some clipping did not include complete stats.
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Note: Paige suffered a serious arm injury while playing in Mexico.
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The above venues aggregate a total of 232 victories and 89 losses, for a winning percentage of .723. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28630 |
Sam Raimi
Samuel M. Raimi (born October 23, 1959) is an American filmmaker, actor, and producer, primarily known for creating the cult horror "Evil Dead" series, and directing the "Spider-Man" trilogy (2002–2007). He also directed the 1990 superhero film "Darkman", the 1998 neo-noir crime-thriller "A Simple Plan", the 2000 supernatural thriller film "The Gift", the 2009 supernatural horror film "Drag Me to Hell", and the 2013 Disney fantasy film "Oz the Great and Powerful". Raimi has also produced several successful television series, including "" and its spin-off "". He founded the production company Renaissance Pictures in 1979. His current project includes "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" which is scheduled for a release on March 25, 2022.
Raimi was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, to a Conservative Jewish family. His ancestors were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. He is the elder brother of actor Ted Raimi and the younger brother of screenwriter Ivan Raimi. His sister is Andrea Raimi Rubin. Another older brother, Sander Raimi, died at 15 in an accidental drowning; Sam Raimi has said that the trauma knitted the remaining family closer together and "colour[ed] everything [he's done] for the rest of [his] life."
The fourth of five children born to Celia Barbara (née Abrams) and Leonard Ronald Raimi, Raimi grew up in Franklin, Michigan. He graduated from Groves High School and later went on to attend Michigan State University, where he majored in English but left after three semesters to film "The Evil Dead".
Raimi became fascinated with making films when his father brought a movie camera home one day. He began to make Super 8 movies with his friend Bruce Campbell, whom he met in 1975. In college, he teamed up with his brother's roommate Robert Tapert and Campbell to shoot "Within the Woods" (1978), a 32-minute horror film which raised $375,000, as well as his debut feature film "It's Murder!". During that time, he also shot the 7-minute short film "Clockwork" (1978), starring Scott Spiegel, who had appeared in "Within the Woods", and Cheryl Guttridge. Through family, friends, and a network of investors, Raimi was able to finance production of the highly successful horror film "The Evil Dead" (1981) which became a cult hit and effectively launched Raimi's career.
He began work on his third film "Crimewave" (1985), which he co-wrote with the then-unknown Coen brothers, shortly after. Intended as a live-action comic book, the film was not successful, due in part to unwanted studio intervention. Raimi then returned to the horror genre with the seminal "Evil Dead II" (which added slapstick humor to the over the top horror, showcasing his love of the Three Stooges). With his brother Ivan Raimi (and crediting himself as Celia Abrams), Sam Raimi also wrote "Easy Wheels" (1989), a parody of the Outlaw biker film genre. A long-time comic book buff, he then attempted to adapt "The Shadow" into a movie, but was unable to secure the rights, so he created his own super-hero, "Darkman" (1990). The film was his first major studio picture, and was a commercial success, spawning two sequels. Through it he was still able to secure funding for "Evil Dead III", which was retitled "Army of Darkness" and turned away almost totally from horror in favor of fantasy and comedy elements. "Army of Darkness", the final movie in the "Evil Dead" trilogy, was a box office disappointment, yet on video became a cult classic.
In the 1990s, Raimi moved into other genres, directing such films as the western "The Quick and the Dead" (starring Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman), the critically acclaimed crime thriller "A Simple Plan" (1998) (starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton), and the romantic drama "For Love of the Game" (1999) (starring Kevin Costner).
Raimi achieved great critical and commercial success with the blockbuster "Spider-Man" (2002), which was adapted from the comic book series of the same name. The movie has grossed over US$800 million worldwide, spawning two sequels: "Spider-Man 2" and "Spider-Man 3", both directed by Raimi and each grossing approximately $800 million.
After the completion of the third "Spider-Man" film, he planned on producing two more sequels (although Sony Pictures planned three sequels) but could not find a satisfactory script.
Raimi frequently collaborates with Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning when Joel was one of the editors of "Evil Dead". The Coens co-wrote "Crimewave" and "The Hudsucker Proxy" with Raimi in the mid-1980s (though "Hudsucker" was not produced for almost a decade). Raimi made cameo appearances in "Miller's Crossing", "The Hudsucker Proxy", and with Joel Coen in "Spies Like Us". The Coen brothers gave Raimi advice on shooting in snow for "A Simple Plan", based on their experiences with "Fargo".
He worked in front of the camera in "The Stand" as a dimwitted hitman, John Carpenter's "Body Bags" as a murdered gas station attendant, and "Indian Summer" in what is perhaps his biggest role as a bumbling assistant to Alan Arkin. The film was written by his childhood friend writer-director Mike Binder and shot at the camp that they both attended when they were younger. Raimi also produced the entire American-made "The Grudge" franchise, based on the original Japanese films.
According to "Entertainment Weekly", Raimi had expressed an interest in directing a film version of "The Hobbit", the prequel to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. In 2008, Guillermo del Toro was selected as the director, with Peter Jackson as the executive producer. Raimi may direct "By Any Means Necessary", the next film based on the "Jack Ryan" CIA character created by Tom Clancy for Paramount Pictures. Disney also approached him to direct "W.I.T.C.H.: The Movie", based on the popular comic.
Blizzard Entertainment announced on July 22, 2009 that Sam Raimi will be directing a "Warcraft" film. However at Comic-Con International 2012, it was revealed that he would not be the one directing the "World of Warcraft" adaptation.
On September 23, 2009, he became the producer for the British supernatural thriller "Refuge", which is directed by Corin Hardy and published by Mandate Pictures. He will produce the remake of the Danish thriller "The Substitute", which will be directed by Scott Dickerson under his new label Spooky Pictures. Raimi produced with his company Ghost House Pictures the British thriller flick "Burst 3D", which is directed by Neil Marshall.
Raimi directed "Oz the Great and Powerful", which was released on March 8, 2013 by Walt Disney Pictures. He said he would not be directing the planned sequel.
On December 11, 2006, the website SuperHero Hype reported that director Sam Raimi and Michael Uslan would co-produce a new film version of "The Shadow" for Columbia Pictures. On October 16, 2007, Raimi stated that: "I don't have any news on 'The Shadow' at this time, except that the company that I have with Josh Donen, my producing partner, we've got the rights to 'The Shadow.' I love the character very much and we're trying to work on a story that'll do justice to the character."
Raimi, along with Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert, produced the remake of Raimi's "The Evil Dead". First-time feature filmmaker Fede Álvarez wrote and directed, and Diablo Cody was also brought in to revise/rewrite the script. Raimi confirmed plans to write "Evil Dead 4" with his brother; it was later specified that this film would be "Army of Darkness 2". Alvarez revealed that Raimi would direct the sequel to "Army of Darkness". However, in a 2014 interview, Bruce Campbell announced that "Army of Darkness 2" is not happening, saying "It's all internet b.s. There's no reality whatsoever. These random comments slip out of either my mouth, or Sam Raimi's mouth, next thing you know, we're making a sequel."
On February 26, 2016, it was confirmed that Raimi is attached to direct the upcoming film "World War 3" for Warner Bros. The film will be based on a possible future inspired by the book "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman.
On February 16, 2017, it was reported that Raimi will be directing a thriller about the Bermuda Triangle for Skydance Media, with the script being written by Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard.
On January 29, 2018, it was announced that Raimi was set to direct the first movie in the big-screen adaptation of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle series, "The Name of the Wind", with Rothfuss and "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda serving as executive producers.
On February 5, 2020, it was announced that Raimi was in talks with Marvel Studios to direct "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness", which Raimi confirmed his involvement in April 2020. This is marking Raimi's return to the superhero film genre for more than 13 years following "Spider-Man 3" in 2007.
In addition to film, Raimi has worked in television, producing such series as "" and its spin-off "", both featuring his younger brother Ted Raimi and long-time friend Bruce Campbell, "American Gothic", "Cleopatra 2525", "M.A.N.T.I.S.", "", "Young Hercules", and "Jack of All Trades". In 2008, Raimi executive produced a syndicated TV series called "Legend of the Seeker", based on Terry Goodkind's best-selling "The Sword of Truth" fantasy series. He is also the executive producer of Starz original television series "" and "", "" and "". He directed the pilot episode of "Ash vs Evil Dead" for Starz.
Raimi has been married since 1993 to Gillian Dania Greene, daughter of actor Lorne Greene. They have five children, three of whom (daughter Emma Rose and sons Lorne and Henry) appeared as extras in "Drag Me to Hell", and in "Spider-Man 3" during the movie's final battle.
Raimi has donated to both Democratic and Republican politicians. In 2004, he donated to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, and has also donated to Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California.
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Seventh-day Adventist Church
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a Protestant Christian denomination which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week in Christian and Jewish calendars, as the Sabbath, and its emphasis on the imminent Second Coming (advent) of Jesus Christ. The denomination grew out of the Millerite movement in the United States during the mid-19th century and it was formally established in 1863. Among its founders was Ellen G. White, whose extensive writings are still held in high regard by the church.
Much of the theology of the Seventh-day Adventist Church corresponds to common evangelical Christian teachings, such as the Trinity and the infallibility of Scripture. Distinctive teachings include the unconscious state of the dead and the doctrine of an investigative judgment. The church is known for its emphasis on diet and health, including adhering to Kosher food laws, advocating vegetarianism, and its holistic understanding of the person. It is likewise known for its promotion of religious liberty, and its conservative principles and lifestyle.
The world church is governed by a General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, with smaller regions administered by divisions, union conferences, and local conferences. It currently has a worldwide baptized membership of over 20 million people, and 25 million adherents. As of May 2007, it was the twelfth-largest religious body in the world, and the sixth-largest highly international religious body. It is ethnically and culturally diverse, and maintains a missionary presence in over 215 countries and territories. The church operates over 7,500 schools including over 100 post-secondary institutions, numerous hospitals, and publishing houses worldwide, as well as a humanitarian aid organization known as the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is the largest of several Adventist groups which arose from the Millerite movement of the 1840s in upstate New York, a phase of the Second Great Awakening. William Miller predicted on the basis of Daniel 8:14–16 and the "day-year principle" that Jesus Christ would return to Earth between the spring of 1843 and the spring of 1844. In the summer of 1844, Millerites came to believe that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844, understood to be the biblical Day of Atonement for that year. Miller's failed prediction became known as the "Great Disappointment".
Hiram Edson and other Millerites came to believe that Miller's calculations were correct, but that his interpretation of Daniel 8:14 was flawed as he assumed Christ would come to cleanse the world. These Adventists came to the conviction that Daniel 8:14 foretold Christ's entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary rather than his Second Coming. Over the next few decades this understanding of a sanctuary in heaven developed into the doctrine of the investigative judgment, an eschatological process that commenced in 1844, in which every person would be judged to verify their eligibility for salvation and God's justice will be confirmed before the universe. This group of Adventists continued to believe that Christ's Second Coming would continue to be imminent, however they resisted setting further dates for the event, citing Revelation 10:6, "that there should be time no longer."
As the early Adventist movement consolidated its beliefs, the question of the biblical day of rest and worship was raised. The foremost proponent of Sabbath-keeping among early Adventists was Joseph Bates. Bates was introduced to the Sabbath doctrine through a tract written by Millerite preacher Thomas M. Preble, who in turn had been influenced by Rachel Oakes Preston, a young Seventh Day Baptist. This message was gradually accepted and formed the topic of the first edition of the church publication "The Present Truth" (now the "Adventist Review"), which appeared in July 1849.
For about 20 years, the Adventist movement consisted of a small, loosely knit group of people who came from many churches and whose primary means of connection and interaction was through James White's periodical "The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald". They embraced the doctrines of the Sabbath, the heavenly sanctuary interpretation of Daniel 8:14, conditional immortality, and the expectation of Christ's premillennial return. Among its most prominent figures were Joseph Bates, James White, and Ellen G. White. Ellen White came to occupy a particularly central role; her many visions and spiritual leadership convinced her fellow Adventists that she possessed the gift of prophecy.
The church was formally established in Battle Creek, Michigan, on May 21, 1863, with a membership of 3,500. The denominational headquarters were later moved from Battle Creek to Takoma Park, Maryland, where they remained until 1989. The General Conference headquarters then moved to its current location in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The denomination in the 1870s turned to missionary work and revivals, tripling its membership to 16,000 by 1880 and establishing a presence beyond North America during the late 19th century. Rapid growth continued, with 75,000 members in 1901. By this time the denomination operated two colleges, a medical school, a dozen academies, 27 hospitals, and 13 publishing houses. By 1945, the church reported 210,000 members in the US and Canada, and 360,000 elsewhere; the budget was $29 million and enrollment in church schools was 140,000.
The church's beliefs and doctrines were first published in 1872 in Battle Creek Michigan as a brief statement called "A Synopsis of our Faith". The church experienced challenges as it formed its core beliefs and doctrines especially as a number of the early Adventist leaders came from churches that held to some form of Arianism (Ellen G. White was not one of them). This, along with some of the movement's other theological views, led to a consensus among conservative evangelical Protestants to regard it as a cult. According to Adventist scholars, the teachings and writings of White, ultimately proved influential in shifting the church from largely semi-Arian roots towards Trinitarianism. Adventists, for the most part, credit her with bringing the Seventh-day Adventist church into a more comprehensive awareness of the GodHead during the 1890s. The Adventist Church adopted Trinitarian theology early in the 20th century and began to dialogue with other Protestant groups toward the middle of the century, eventually gaining wide recognition as a Protestant church. Christianity Today recognized the Seventh-day Adventist church as " the fifth-largest Christian communion worldwide" in its January 22, 2015 issue.
Ellen White avoided using the word "Trinity", "and her husband stated categorically that her visions did not support the Trinitarian creed." Her theology did not include a doctrine of the Trinity. Through continued Bible study, and decades-long debate, the denomination eventually concluded that Scripture does explicitly teach the existence of a triune God and affirm that biblical view in the non-credal 28 Fundamental Beliefs.
The official teachings of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination are expressed in its 28 Fundamental Beliefs. This statement of beliefs was originally adopted by the General Conference in 1980, with an additional belief (number 11) being added in 2005. Acceptance of either of the church's two baptismal vows is a prerequisite for membership.
Adventist doctrine resembles trinitarian Protestant theology, with premillennial and Arminian emphases. Adventists uphold teachings such as the infallibility of Scripture, the substitutionary atonement, the resurrection of the dead and justification by faith alone, and are therefore considered evangelical. They believe in baptism by immersion and creation in six literal days. The modern Creationist movement started with Adventist George McCready Price, who was inspired by a vision of Ellen White.
There is a generally recognized set of "distinctive" doctrines which distinguish Adventism from the rest of the Christian world, although not all of these teachings are wholly unique to Adventism:
As with any religious movement, a theological spectrum exists within Adventism comparable to the fundamentalist-moderate-liberal spectrum in the wider Christian church as well as in other religions. A variety of groups, movements and subcultures within the church present differing views on beliefs and lifestyle.
The conservative end of the theological spectrum is represented by historic Adventists, who are characterized by their opposition to theological trends within the denomination, beginning in the 1950s. They object to theological compromises with Evangelicalism, and seek to defend traditional Adventist teachings such as the human post-fall nature of Jesus Christ, investigative judgment, and character perfectionism. Historic Adventism is represented by some scholars, is also seen at the grassroots level of the church and is often promoted through independent ministries.
The most liberal elements in the church are typically known as progressive Adventists (progressive Adventists generally do not identify with liberal Christianity). They tend to disagree with the traditional views concerning the inspiration of Ellen White, the Sabbath, a seven-day Creation, the doctrine of the remnant and the investigative judgment. The progressive movement is supported by some scholars and finds expression in bodies such as the Association of Adventist Forums and in journals such as "Spectrum" and "Adventist Today".
The Biblical Research Institute is the official theological research center of the church. The church has two professional organizations for Adventist theologians who are affiliated with the denomination. The Adventist Society for Religious Studies (ASRS) was formed to foster a community among Adventist theologians who attend the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion. In 2006, ASRS voted to continue their meetings in the future in conjunction with SBL. During the 1980s, the Adventist Theological Society was formed to provide a forum for more conservative theologians to meet and is held in conjunction with the Evangelical Theological Society.
Part of Friday might be spent in preparation for the Sabbath; for example, preparing meals and tidying homes. Adventists may gather for Friday evening worship to welcome in the Sabbath, a practice often known as Vespers.
Adventists abstain from secular work on Saturday. They will also usually refrain from purely secular forms of recreation, such as competitive sport and watching non-religious programs on television. However, nature walks, family-oriented activities, charitable work and other activities that are compassionate in nature are encouraged. Saturday afternoon activities vary widely depending on the cultural, ethnic and social background. In some churches, members and visitors will participate in a fellowship (or "potluck") lunch and AYS (Adventist Youth Service).
The major weekly worship service occurs on Saturday, typically commencing with Sabbath School which is a structured time of small-group bible study at church. Adventists make use of an officially produced "Sabbath School Lesson", which deals with a particular biblical text or doctrine every quarter. Special meetings are provided for children and youth in different age groups during this time (analogous to Sunday school in other churches).
After a brief break, the community joins together again for a church service that follows a typical evangelical format, with a sermon as a central feature. Corporate singing, Scripture readings, prayers and an offering, including tithing (or money collection), are other standard features. The instruments and forms of worship music vary greatly throughout the worldwide church. Some churches in North America have a contemporary Christian music style, whereas other churches enjoy more traditional hymns including those found in the "Adventist Hymnal". Worship is known to be generally restrained.
Adventist churches usually practice open communion four times a year. It commences with a foot washing ceremony, known as the "Ordinance of Humility", based on the Gospel account of John 13. The Ordinance of Humility is meant to emulate Christ's washing of his disciples' feet at the Last Supper and to remind participants of the need to humbly serve one another. Participants segregate by gender to separate rooms to conduct this ritual, although some congregations allow married couples to perform the ordinance on each other and families are often encouraged to participate together. After its completion, participants return to the main sanctuary for consumption of the Lord's Supper, which consists of unleavened bread and unfermented grape juice.
Since the 1860s when the church began, wholeness and health have been an emphasis of the Adventist church. Adventists are known for presenting a "health message" that advocates vegetarianism and expects adherence to the kosher laws, particularly the consumption of kosher foods described in Leviticus 11, meaning abstinence from pork, shellfish, and other animals proscribed as "unclean".
The church discourages its members from consuming alcoholic beverages, tobacco or illegal drugs (compare Christianity and alcohol). In addition, some Adventists avoid coffee, tea, cola, and other beverages that contain caffeine.
The pioneers of the Adventist Church had much to do with the common acceptance of breakfast cereals into the Western diet, and the "modern commercial concept of cereal food" originated among Adventists. John Harvey Kellogg was one of the early founders of Adventist health work. His development of breakfast cereals as a health food led to the founding of Kellogg's by his brother William. He advertised bland corn flakes as a way to curb sexual desire and avoid the evils of masturbation. In both Australia and New Zealand, the church-owned Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing Company is a leading manufacturer of health and vegetarian-related products, most prominently Weet-Bix.
Research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health has shown that the average Adventist in California lives 4 to 10 years longer than the average Californian. The research, as cited by the cover story of the November 2005 issue of "National Geographic", asserts that Adventists live longer because they do not smoke or drink alcohol, have a day of rest every week, and maintain a healthy, low-fat vegetarian diet that is rich in nuts and beans. The cohesiveness of Adventists' social networks has also been put forward as an explanation for their extended lifespan.
Since Dan Buettner's 2005 "National Geographic" story about Adventist longevity, his book, "The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest", named Loma Linda, California a "Blue Zone" because of the large concentration of Seventh-day Adventists. He cites the Adventist emphasis on health, diet, and Sabbath-keeping as primary factors for Adventist longevity.
An estimated 35% of Adventists practice vegetarianism or veganism, according to a 2002 worldwide survey of local church leaders.
Adventists' clean lifestyles were recognized by the U.S. military in 1954 when 2,200 Adventists volunteered to serve as human test subjects in Operation Whitecoat, a biodefense medical research program whose stated purpose was to defend troops and civilians against biological weapons:
The first task of the scientists was to find people who were willing to be infected by pathogens that could make them very sick. They found them in the followers of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. Although willing to serve their country when drafted, the Adventists refused to bear arms. As a result many of them became medics. Now the U.S. was offering recruits an opportunity to help in a different manner: to volunteer for biological tests as a way of satisfying their military obligations. When contacted in late 1954, the Adventist hierarchy readily agreed to this plan. For Camp Detrick scientists, church members were a model test population, since most of them were in excellent health and they neither drank, smoked, nor used caffeine. From the perspective of the volunteers, the tests gave them a way to fulfill their patriotic duty while remaining true to their beliefs.
The Adventist understanding of marriage is a lawfully binding lifelong commitment of a man and a woman. The Church Manual refers to the origination of the marriage institution in Eden and points to the union between Adam and Eve as the pattern for all future marriages.
Adventists hold that marriage is a divine institution established by God Himself before the fall. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." (Gen. 2:24). They hold that God celebrated the first marriage and the institution has as its origin the Creator of the universe and was one of the first gifts of God to man, and it is "one of the two institutions that, after the fall, Adam brought with him beyond the gates of Paradise."
The Old and New Testament texts are interpreted by some Adventists to teach that wives should submit to their husbands in marriage.
Adventists hold that heterosexual marriages are the only biblically ordained grounds for sexual intimacy. Adventists do not perform same-sex marriages, and individuals who are openly homosexual cannot be ordained, but may hold church office and membership if they are not actively pursuing same-sex relationships. Current church policy states that openly homosexual (and "practicing") persons are to be welcomed into the church services and treated with the love and kindness afforded any human being.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church considers abortion out of harmony with God's plan for human life. It affects the unborn, the mother, the father, immediate and extended family members, the church family, and society with long-term consequences for all. In an official statement on the "Biblical View of Unborn Life", the Church states that 1. God upholds the value and sacredness of human life, 2. God considers the unborn child as human life, 3. The will of God regarding human life is expressed in the Ten Commandments and explained by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, 4. God is the Owner of life, and human beings are His stewards, 5. The Bible teaches care for the weak and the vulnerable, and 6. God's grace promotes life in a world marred by sin and death.
Adventists believe in and encourage abstinence for both men and women before marriage. The church disagrees with extra-marital cohabitation. Adventists believe that scripture makes no accommodation for homosexual activity or relationships and the official position is opposed to it.
The Adventist church has released official statements in relation to other ethical issues such as euthanasia (against active euthanasia but permissive of passive withdrawal of medical support to allow death to occur), birth control (in favor of it for married couples if used correctly, but against abortion as birth control and premarital sex in any case) and human cloning (against it while the technology is unsafe and would result in defective births or abortions).
Adventists have traditionally held socially conservative attitudes regarding dress and entertainment. These attitudes are reflected in one of the church's fundamental beliefs:
Accordingly, many Adventists are opposed to practices such as body piercing and tattoos and refrain from the wearing of jewelry, including such items as earrings and bracelets. Some also oppose the displaying of wedding bands, although banning wedding bands is not the position of the General Conference. Conservative Adventists avoid certain recreational activities which are considered to be a negative spiritual influence, including dancing, rock music and secular theatre. However, major studies conducted from 1989 onwards found that a majority of North American church youth reject some of these standards.
Adventists often cite the writings of Ellen White, especially her books, "Counsels on Diet and Foods", "Counsels to Parents, Teachers and Students", and "Education" as inspired sources for Christian deportment. The Adventist church officially opposes the practice of gambling.
The Youth Department of the Adventist church runs age specific clubs for children and youth worldwide.
"Adventurer" (grades 1-4), "Eager Beaver" (Kindergarten), and "Little Lambs" (pre-K) clubs are programs for younger children that feed into the Pathfinder program.
Pathfinders is a club for 5th to 10th grade (up to 12th in Florida Conference) boys and girls. It is similar to and based partly on the Scouting movement. Pathfinders exposes young people to such activities as camping, community service, personal mentorship, and skills-based education, and trains them for leadership in the church. Yearly "Camporees" are held in individual Conferences, where Pathfinders from the region gather and participate in events similar to Boy Scouts' Jamborees.
After a person enters 9th grade, he or she is eligible to join Teen Leadership Training within Pathfinders. In the 11th grade, typically after being a member of a club, they can become a Pathfinder or Adventurer staff member and begin the "Master Guide" program (similar to Scout Master) which develops leaders for both Adventurers and Pathfinders.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church operates youth camps all over North America and many other parts of the world. Each camp varies in the activities they offer but most have archery, swimming, horses, arts and crafts, nature, high ropes challenge course, and many other common camp activities. In addition to regular camps some have specialty camps, or RAD camps, which vary in their activities such as a week of nature nuggets, surfing, waterskiing/wakeboarding, rock climbing, golf, skateboarding, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, cycling, or basketball.
The Seventh-day Adventist church is governed by a form of representation which resembles the presbyterian system of church organization. Four levels of organization exist within the world church.
Each organization is governed by a general "session" which occurs at certain intervals. This is usually when administrative decisions are made. The president of the General Conference, for instance, is elected at the General Conference Session every five years. Delegates to a session are appointed by organizations at a lower level. For example, each local church appoints delegates to a conference session.
Tithes collected from church members are not used directly by the local churches, but are passed upwards to the local conferences which then distribute the finances toward various ministry needs. Employees are compensated "on the basis of the church remuneration policy and practice in effect in the location or country in which they reside."
The Church Manual gives provisions for each level of government to create educational, healthcare, publishing, and other institutions that are seen within the call of the Great Commission.
The ordained clergy of the Adventist church are known as ministers or pastors. Ministers are neither elected nor employed by the local churches, but instead are appointed by the local Conferences, which assign them responsibility over a single church or group of churches. Ordination is a formal recognition bestowed upon pastors and elders after usually a number of years of service. In most parts of the world, women may not be given the title "ordained", although some are employed in ministry, and may be "commissioned" or "ordained-commissioned". However, beginning in 2012, some unions adopted policies of allowing member conferences to ordain without regard to gender.
A number of lay offices exist within the local church, including the ordained positions of elder and deacon. Elders and deacons are appointed by the vote of a local church business meeting or elected committees. Elders serve a mainly administrative and pastoral role, but must also be capable of providing religious leadership (particularly in the absence of an ordained minister). The role of deacons is to assist in the smooth functioning of a local church and to maintain church property.
Although the church has no written policy forbidding the ordination of women, it has traditionally ordained only men. In recent years the ordination of women has been the subject of heated debate, especially in North America and Europe. In the Adventist church, candidates for ordination are chosen by local conferences (which usually administer about 50–150 local congregations) and approved by unions (which serve about 6–12 conferences). The General Conference, the church's world headquarters, claims the right to declare the worldwide qualifications for ordination, including gender requirements. The General Conference has never stated that ordination of women contravenes the Bible, but the General Conference has requested that no local conference ordain women until all parts of the world church accept the practice.
The primary prerequisite for membership in the Adventist church is baptism by immersion. This, according to the church manual, should occur only after the candidate has undergone proper instruction on what the church believes.
As of December 31, 2016, the church has 20,008,779 baptized members. Between 2005 and 2015, around half a million people per year have joined the Adventist church, through baptisms and professions of faith. The church is one of the world's fastest-growing organizations, primarily from membership increases in developing nations. Today, less than 7% of the world membership reside in the United States, with large numbers in Africa as well as Central and South America. Depending on how the data was measured, it is reported that church membership reached 1 million between 1955 and 1961, and grew to five million in 1986. At the turn of the 21st century the church had over 10 million members, which grew to over 14 million in 2005, 16 million in 2009, and 19 million in 2015. It is reported that today over 25 million people worship weekly in Seventh-day Adventist churches worldwide. The church operates in 202 out of 230 countries and areas recognized by the United Nations, making it "probably the most widespread Protestant denomination".
G. Jeffrey MacDonald, an award-winning religion reporter, and author of "Thieves in the Temple," reports that the SDA church is the fastest-growing church in the United States. "Newly released data show Seventh-day Adventism growing by 2.5% in North America, a rapid clip for this part of the world, where Southern Baptists and mainline denominations, as well as other church groups, are declining."
The church has been described as "something of an extended family", enjoying close, "two-degrees-of-separation social networks".
The Biblical Research Institute is the theological research center of the church.
The Ellen G. White Estate was established in 1915 at the death of Ellen White, as specified in her legal will. Its purpose is to act as custodian of her writings, and as of 2006 it has 15 board members. The Ellen G. White Estate also hosts the official Ellen White website whiteestate.org.
The Geoscience Research Institute, based at Loma Linda University, was founded in 1958 to investigate the scientific evidence concerning origins.
Started in the late 19th century, Adventist mission work today reaches people in over 200 countries and territories. Adventist mission workers seek to preach the gospel, promote health through hospitals and clinics, run development projects to improve living standards, and provide relief in times of calamity.
Missionary outreach of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is aimed not only at non-Christians but also at Christians from other denominations. Adventists believe that Christ has called his followers in the Great Commission to reach the whole world. Adventists are cautious, however, to ensure that evangelism does not impede or intrude on the basic rights of the individual. Religious liberty is a stance that the Adventist Church supports and promotes.
Globally, the Adventist Church operates 7,598 schools, colleges and universities, with a total enrollment of more than 1,545,000 and a total teaching staff of approximately 80,000. It claims to operate "one of the largest church-supported educational systems in the world". In the United States it operates the largest Protestant educational system, second overall only to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Adventist educational program strives to be comprehensive, encompassing "mental, physical, social and above all, spiritual health" with "intellectual growth and service to humanity" as its goal.
The largest (in terms of population) Seventh-day Adventist university in the world is Northern Caribbean University, located in Mandeville, Jamaica.
Adventists run a large number of hospitals and health-related institutions. Their largest medical school and hospital in North America is Loma Linda University and its attached Medical Center. Throughout the world, the church runs a wide network of hospitals, clinics, lifestyle centers, and sanitariums. These play a role in the church's health message and worldwide missions outreach.
Adventist Health System is the largest not-for-profit multi-institutional Protestant healthcare system in the United States. It is sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and cares for over 4 million patients yearly.
For over 50 years, the church has been active in humanitarian aid through the work of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA). ADRA works as a non-sectarian relief agency in 125 countries and areas of the world. ADRA has been granted General Consultative Status by the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Worldwide, ADRA employs over 4,000 people to help provide relief in crises as well as development in situations of poverty.
The church embraces an official commitment to the protection and care of the environment as well as taking action to avoid the dangers of climate change:
"Seventh-day Adventism advocates a simple, wholesome lifestyle, where people do not step on the treadmill of unbridled over-consumption, accumulation of goods, and production of waste. A reformation of lifestyle is called for, based on respect for nature, restraint in the use of the world's resources, reevaluation of one's needs, and reaffirmation of the dignity of created life."
For over 120 years, The Adventist church has actively promoted freedom of religion for all people regardless of faith. In 1893, its leaders founded the International Religious Liberty Association, which is universal and non-sectarian. The Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council serves, primarily through advocacy, to seek protection for religious groups from legislation that may affect their religious practices. In May 2011, for example, the organization fought to pass legislation that would protect Adventist employees who wish to keep the Sabbath. According to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has, throughout its history, aggressively advocated for the separation of church and state.
Adventists have long been proponents of media-based ministries. Traditional Adventist evangelistic efforts consisted of street missions and the distribution of tracts such as "The Present Truth", which was published by James White as early as 1849. Until J. N. Andrews was sent to Switzerland in 1874, Adventist global efforts consisted entirely of the posting of tracts such as White's to various locations.
In the last century, these efforts have also made use of emerging media such as radio and television. The first of these was H. M. S. Richards' radio show "Voice of Prophecy", which was initially broadcast in Los Angeles in 1929. Since then, Adventists have been on the forefront of media evangelism; "It Is Written", founded by George Vandeman, was the first religious program to air on color television and the first major Christian ministry to utilize satellite uplink technology. Today the "Hope Channel", the official television network of the church, operates 8+ international channels broadcasting 24 hours a day on cable, satellite, and the Web.
Adventist World Radio was founded in 1971 and is the "radio mission arm" of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It utilizes AM, FM, shortwave, satellite, podcasting, and the Internet, broadcasting in 77 major language groups of the world with a potential coverage of 80% of the world's population. AWR's headquarters is in Silver Spring, Maryland, with studios throughout the world. A large portion of the ministry's income is derived from membership gifts.
SDA evangelists such as Doug Batchelor, Mark Finley and Dwight Nelson have undertaken a number of international satellite-broadcast live evangelistic events, addressing audiences in up to 40 languages simultaneously.
Additionally, there exists a range of privately owned media entities representing Adventist beliefs. These include the Three Angels Broadcasting Network (3ABN) and SafeTV networks and organizations such as "The Quiet Hour" and "Amazing Discoveries".
In 2016, the Church released the film "Tell the World".
The Adventist Church owns and operates many publishing companies around the world. Two of the largest are the Pacific Press and Review and Herald publishing associations, both located in the United States. The "Review and Herald" is headquartered in Hagerstown, Maryland.
The official church magazine is the "Adventist Review", which has a North American focus. It has a sister magazine ("Adventist World"), which has an international perspective. Another major magazine published by the church is the bimonthly "Liberty" magazine, which addresses issues pertaining to religious freedom.
The Adventist Church generally opposes the ecumenical movement, although it supports some of the other goals of ecumenism. The General Conference has released an official statement concerning the Adventist position with respect to the ecumenical movement, which contains the following paragraph:
While not being a member of the World Council of Churches, the Adventist Church has participated in its assemblies in an observer capacity.
The Adventist Church has received criticism along several lines, including what some claim are heterodox doctrines, and in relation to Ellen G. White and her status within the church, and in relation to alleged exclusivist issues.
Critics such as evangelical Anthony Hoekema (who felt that Adventists were more in agreement with Arminianism) argue that some Adventist doctrines are heterodox. Several teachings which have come under scrutiny are the annihilationist view of hell, the investigative judgment (and a related view of the atonement), and the Sabbath; in addition, Hoekema also claims that Adventist doctrine suffers from legalism.
While critics such as Hoekema have classified Adventism as a sectarian group on the basis of its atypical doctrines, it has been accepted as more mainstream by Protestant evangelicals since its meetings and discussions with evangelicals in the 1950s. Notably, Billy Graham invited Adventists to be part of his crusades after "Eternity", a conservative Christian magazine edited by Donald Barnhouse, asserted in 1956 that Adventists are Christians, and also later stated, "They are sound on the great New Testament doctrines including grace and redemption through the vicarious offering of Jesus Christ 'once for all. Walter Martin, who is considered by many to be the father of the counter-cult apologetics movement within evangelicalism, authored "The Truth About Seventh-day Adventists" (1960) which marked a turning point in the way Adventism was viewed.
Later on, Martin planned to write a new book on Seventh-day Adventism, with the assistance of Kenneth R. Samples. Samples subsequently authored "From Controversy to Crisis: An Updated Assessment of Seventh-day Adventism", which upholds Martin's view "for that segment of Adventism which holds to the position stated in QOD, and further expressed in the Evangelical Adventist movement of the last few decades." However, Samples also claimed that "Traditional Adventism" appeared "to be moving further away from a number of positions taken in QOD", and at least at Glacier View seemed to have "gained the support of many administrators and leaders".
Ellen G. White's status as a modern-day prophet has also been criticized. In the "Questions on Doctrine" era, evangelicals expressed concern about Adventism's understanding of the relationship of White's writings to the inspired canon of Scripture. The Adventist fundamental beliefs maintain that "the Bible is the standard by which all teaching and experience must be tested."
A common criticism of Ellen White, widely popularized by Walter T. Rea, Ronald Numbers and others, is the claim of plagiarism from other authors. An independent lawyer specializing in plagiarism, Vincent L. Ramik, was engaged to undertake a study of Ellen G. White's writings during the early 1980s, and concluded that they were "conclusively unplagiaristic". When the plagiarism charge ignited a significant debate during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Adventist General Conference commissioned a major study by Dr. Fred Veltman. The ensuing project became known as the Life of Christ' Research Project". The results are available at the General Conference Archives. Dr. Roger W. Coon, David J. Conklin, Dr. Denis Fortin, King and Morgan, and Morgan, among others, undertook the refutation of the accusations of plagiarism. At the conclusion of his report, Ramik states:
It is impossible to imagine that the intention of Ellen G. White, as reflected in her writings and the unquestionably prodigious efforts involved therein, was anything other than a sincerely motivated and unselfish effort to place the understandings of Biblical truths in a coherent form for all to see and comprehend. Most certainly, the nature and content of her writings had but one hope and intent, namely, the furthering of mankind's understanding of the word of God. Considering all factors necessary in reaching a just conclusion on this issue, it is submitted that the writings of Ellen G. White were conclusively unplagiaristic.
Critics have alleged that certain Adventist beliefs and practices are exclusivist in nature and they point to the Adventist claim to be the "remnant church", and the traditional Protestant association of Roman Catholicism with "Babylon". These attitudes are said to legitimize the proselytising of Christians from other denominations. In response to such criticisms, Adventist theologians have stated that the doctrine of the remnant does not preclude the existence of genuine Christians in other denominations, but is concerned with institutions.
Ellen White also presented it in a similar light:
In addition to the ministries and institutions which are formally administered by the denomination, numerous para-church organizations and independent ministries exist. These include various health centers and hospitals, publishing and media ministries, and aid organizations. Present Truth Magazine is an independent online magazine for those claiming to be "evangelical" Adventists.
A number of independent ministries have been established by groups within the Adventist church who hold a theologically distinct position or wish to promote a specific message, such as Hope International which have strained relationship with the official church, which has expressed concerns that such ministries may threaten Adventist unity. Some independent ministries, like many of the Protestant reformers have continued to emphasize the mainstream Adventist belief which identified the Roman Papacy as the Antichrist. The church has put out a statement clarifying the official position that it does not condone any behavior by members which may "have manifested prejudice and even bigotry" against Catholics.
Throughout the history of the denomination, there have been a number of groups which have left the church and formed their own movements.
Following World War I, a group known as the Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement was formed as a result of the actions of L. R. Conradi and certain European church leaders during the war, who decided that it was acceptable for Adventists to take part in war. Those who were opposed to this stand and refused to participate in the war were declared "disfellowshipped" by their local Church leaders at the time. When the Church leaders from the General Conference came and admonished the local European leaders after the war to try to heal the damage, and bring the members together, it met with resistance from those who had suffered under those leaders. Their attempts at reconciliation failed after the war and the group became organized as a separate church at a conference that was held on July 14–20, 1925. The movement officially incorporated in 1949.
In 2005, in another attempt to examine and resolve what its German leaders had done, the mainstream church apologized for its failures during World War II, stating, we deeply regret' any participation in or support of Nazi activities during the war by the German and Austrian leadership of the church."
In the Soviet Union the same issues produced the group known as the True and Free Seventh-day Adventists. This formed as the result of a schism within the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Europe during World War I over the position its European church leaders took on having its members join the military or keep the Sabbath. The group remains active today (2010) in the former republics of the Soviet Union.
Well known but distant offshoots are the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist organization and the Branch Davidians, themselves a schism within the larger Davidian movement. The Davidians formed in 1929, following Victor Houteff after he came out with his book "The Shepherd's Rod" which was rejected as heretical. A succession dispute after Houteff's death in 1955 led to the formation of two groups, the original Davidians and the Branches. Later, another ex-Adventist, David Koresh, led the Branch Davidians until he died in the 1993 siege at the group's headquarters near Waco, Texas.
A number of Adventists who apostatized, such as former ministers Walter Rea and Dale Ratzlaff, have become critics of the church's teachings and they particularly criticize Ellen G. White.
"Hacksaw Ridge" depicts the life of Adventist conscientious objector and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss. "A Cry in the Dark", a film about the death of Azaria Chamberlain, features the prejudice her parents faced due to misconceptions about their religion, and the father's loss of faith. On television, a main character on the show Gilmore Girls is depicted as a strict conservative Adventist, causing conflict with her daughter. Many other forms of media include mentions of Seventh-day Adventism.
Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump attacked his opponent Ben Carson's Adventist faith during the 2016 GOP primaries. Trump told his supporters, "I'm Presbyterian; boy, that's down the middle of the road...I mean, Seventh-day Adventist? I don't know about that. I just don't know about it." Trump would later make Carson his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28632 |
Scroll Lock
Scroll lock (⤓ or ⇳) is a lock key (typically with an associated status light) on most IBM-compatible computer keyboards.
Depending on the operating system, it may be used for different purposes and applications may assign functions to the key or change their behaviour depending on its toggling state.
The key is not frequently used, and therefore some reduced or specialized keyboards lack altogether.
Pressing performs the same function as pressing . This behavior is a remnant of the original IBM PC keyboards, which did not have a dedicated key. Instead, they assigned the Pause function to and the Break function to .
The key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a vestige of the original IBM PC keyboard. In the original design, was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released.
Today, this particular use of is rare. Modern programs honoring this behavior include IBM Lotus Notes, Forté Agent, Image-Line FL Studio, Renoise, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, LibreOffice Calc, and on occasions Microsoft Word.
Some text editors (such as Notepad++, Microsoft Visual Studio) exhibit similar behavior when the arrow keys are used with pressed.
Most GUI environments neglect , which means scrolling must be accomplished with a mouse, using means such as scrollbars or scroll wheels. Often, the middle or the wheel mouse button works as a toggle determining if mouse movements will move the mouse cursor or scroll the contents in scroll window.
Some web browsers including Firefox and Internet Explorer support a Caret browsing mode which can be toggled by . While the window scrolling behaviour with Caret navigation disabled (the default) is similar to that suggested for Scroll Lock, enabling Caret navigation will enable a cursor scrolling behaviour as if Scroll Lock were disabled.
Pressing the key in the Linux console while text is scrolling through the screen freezes the console output (but not input) during which no further text is sent to the screen, while the program continues running as usual. When is pressed again, the screen is unfrozen and all text generated during the freeze is displayed at once. This allows the user to pause the display and read long messages that scroll through the screen too quickly to read, such as for example when the system is booting up (provided the keyboard driver has already been loaded). If not configured otherwise, and can be used instead of Scroll Lock in any terminal in Linux to freeze and unfreeze the terminal output respectively.
This behaviour emulates the Hold Screen key or similar flow control mechanisms on computer terminals.
The behaviour must be distinguished from pressing the Pause key during POST or under DOS, which, by default, has the effect of temporarily halting the running process.
On the FreeBSD system console, the key additionally enables scrolling: after pressing Scroll Lock, one can use and to scroll up or down. Pressing Scroll Lock again disables this mode and moves back to the bottom of the output. The Linux console implements this behaviour by using and , not requiring to be active.
In Multiuser DOS, System Manager, and REAL/32, activating during boot will always enter a special diagnostic mode, where the operating system and loaded device drivers will display detailed status and debugging information about themselves and their interaction with the operating system, sometimes up to several screenfuls per loaded driver. Automatic scrolling is suspended for as long as remains activated.
DR-DOS 7.02 and higher provides a CONFIG.SYS directive named codice_1 to change the Scroll Lock status on the fly.
Activating during boot will enter a DIAG mode as well, wherein some special drivers may display more verbose messages, but in contrast to the situation under the Multiuser DOS family normal DOS drivers do not typically display additional information. The operating system, however, will temporarily suspend any automatic timeouts (codice_2) in CONFIG.SYS trace (codice_3) and / single-stepping modes for as long as is active.
In the Microsoft Windows NT family starting with Windows 2000, a debugging feature can be enabled, that allows the user to manually crash the system, generating a memory dump for analysis of the current state of the operating system. This can be accomplished by setting the REG_DWORD registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\CrashOnCtrlScroll to 1. Once set, the user can hold the key and tap the key twice to trigger a Blue Screen of Death.
In Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0, pauses the running program in the integrated development environment, as does its alias .
In conjunction with the alternative DOS keyboard and console drivers FreeKEYB and K3PLUS, also served as part of a copy & paste facility between applications. Compared to the standard keyboard driver KEYB these drivers offered a number of extensions including an extended keystroke buffer with key stacking facility, macro recorder and a second cursor called CopyCursor, which could be invoked on demand (by default on pressing or the middle mouse button) and freely moved on the screen using the cursor keys or the mouse, even outside the area reachable by the standard cursor in the running application. Once invoked, pressing (or the left mouse button) the characters under the CopyCursor could be stuffed, one after another, into the keyboard buffer, from where they would be read by the running application as emulated key (or Alt Numpad) input, thereby typically showing up at the location of the standard cursor. The CopyCursor would move to the next screen position after each (or backwards with each ). Normal keyboard input was still possible while the CopyCursor was enabled, and the user could switch between the two cursors by toggling the hotkey again. Pressing or would exit the CopyCursor, so that, on its next invocation, it would show up at the position of the standard cursor again rather than at its previous location. If the screen contents was scrolled, the position of the CopyCursor would move accordingly until reaching the display limits. With activated, keypresses would still reach the normal keystroke buffer, while CopyCursor input would be stacked up internally for later use in a second queue, dynamically maintained within the extended keystroke buffer. Thereby, it was possible to "collect" selected screen output from different programs and spool out the data much later while within yet another application by toggling off again. It was also possible to use this as input into the macro recorder for later use as scrap macro. Since this was an integral part of these keyboard drivers, it was fully transparent to running software and therefore worked with virtually any DOS programs, including at the command prompt, temporary shelled programs and task switchers.
IBM PC documentation called an "inactive key". When "PC Magazine" asked an executive of keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic about the key's purpose in a 1983 interview, he replied "I don't know, but we put it on ours, too".
The indicator light is sometimes used for other purposes such as a keyboard layout indicator in some Linux distributions or other applications, because doing so is less likely to cause problems than manipulating other keys/lights.
Keyboard, video, mouse switches (KVM) often use the Scroll Lock key on the keyboard connected to the KVM switch for selecting between computers. On KVM switches with On-screen display (OSD), a "double click" of the Scroll Lock key often brings up the OSD, allowing the user to select the desired computer from a list or access the configuration menu of the KVM. Some models, especially those which lack an OSD, switch to the input corresponding to the number key pressed after Scroll Lock, or in the case of some 2-port switches, the up and down arrow keys. Simple models with only two or four inputs may immediately switch to the next input following a double press of the Scroll Lock key.
Some laptops and keyboards do not have a physical key. Some of these have a second function on another key that acts as if a key was pressed. Some common methods are:
Another way to press the key is to use an onscreen keyboard. In Windows 8 this can be found through the Control Panel > Ease Of Access Center (), selecting "Start On-Screen Keyboard". This will provide access to an emulation of a standard 101/102-key keyboard. In Windows 10, the same function is performed by the "on-screen keyboard" module codice_4 (which can be started from either the command line or, alternatively, from the "Run" menu ()). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28637 |
List of synthetic polymers
Synthetic polymers are human-made polymers derived from petroleum oil. From the utility point of view they can be classified into three main categories: thermoplastics, elastomers and synthetic fibers. They are found commonly in a variety of consumer products such as honey, glue, etc.
A wide variety of synthetic polymers are available with variations in main chain as well as side chains. The back bones of common synthetic polymers such as polythene, polystyrene and poly acrylates are made up of carbon-carbon bonds, whereas hetero chain polymers such as polyamides, polyesters, polyurethanes, polysulfides and polycarbonates have other elements (e.g. oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen) inserted along to the backbone. Also silicon forms similar materials without the need of carbon atoms, such as silicones through siloxane linkages; these compounds are thus said to be inorganic polymers. Coordination polymers may contain a range of metals in the backbone, with non-covalent bonding present.
Some familiar household synthetic polymers include: Nylons in textiles and fabrics, Teflon in non-stick pans, Bakelite for electrical switches, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in pipes, etc. The common PET bottles are made of a synthetic polymer, polyethylene terephthalate. The plastic kits and covers are mostly made of synthetic polymers like polythene and tires are manufactured from Buna rubbers. However, due to the environmental issues created by these synthetic polymers which are mostly non-biodegradable and often synthesized from petroleum, alternatives like bioplastics are also being considered. They are however expensive when compared to the synthetic polymers.
The eight most common types of synthetic organic polymers, which are commonly found in households are:
These polymers are often better known through their brand names, for instance: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28638 |
Stop codon
In the genetic code, a stop codon (or termination codon) is a nucleotide triplet within messenger RNA that signals a termination of translation into proteins. Most codons in messenger RNA correspond to the addition of an amino acid to a growing polypeptide chain, which may ultimately become a protein. Stop codons signal the termination of this process by binding release factors, which cause the ribosomal subunits to disassociate, releasing the amino acid chain. While start codons need nearby sequences or initiation factors to start translation, a stop codon alone is sufficient to initiate termination.
In the standard genetic code, there are three different termination codons:
There are variations on the standard genetic code, and alternative stop codons have been found in the mitochondrial genomes of vertebrates, "Scenedesmus obliquus", and "Thraustochytrium".
The nuclear genetic code is flexible as illustrated by variant genetic codes that reassign standard stop codons to amino acids.
In 2007, the UGA codon was identified as the codon coding for selenocysteine (Sec) and found in 25 selenoproteins located in the active site of the protein. Translation of this codon is enabled by the proximity of the SECIS element (SElenoCysteine Incorporation Sequence).
The UAG codon can translate into pyrrolysine (Pyl) in a similar manner.
Distribution of stop codons within the genome of an organism is non-random and can correlate with GC-content. For example, the "E. coli" K-12 genome contains 2705 TAA (63%), 1257 TGA (29%), and 326 TAG (8%) stop codons (GC content 50.8%). Also the substrates for the stop codons release factor 1 or release factor 2 are strongly correlated to the abundance of stop codons. Large scale study of bacteria with a broad range of GC-contents shows that while the frequency of occurrence of TAA is negatively correlated to the GC-content and the frequency of occurrence of TGA is positively correlated to the GC-content, the frequency of occurrence of the TAG stop codon, which is often the minimally used stop codon in a genome, is not influenced by the GC-content.
Recognition of stop codons in bacteria have been associated with the so-called 'tripeptide anticodon', a highly conserved amino acid motif in RF1 (PxT) and RF2 (SPF). Even though this is supported by structural studies, it was shown that the tripeptide anticodon hypothesis is an oversimplification.
Stop codons were historically given many different names, as they each corresponded to a distinct class of mutants that all behaved in a similar manner. These mutants were first isolated within bacteriophages (T4 and lambda), viruses that infect the bacteria "Escherichia coli". Mutations in viral genes weakened their infectious ability, sometimes creating viruses that were able to infect and grow within only certain varieties of "E. coli".
They were the first set of nonsense mutations to be discovered, isolated by Richard H. Epstein and Charles Steinberg and named after their friend and graduate Caltech student Harris Bernstein, whose last name means "amber" in German ("cf." Bernstein).
Viruses with amber mutations are characterized by their ability to infect only certain strains of bacteria, known as amber suppressors. These bacteria carry their own mutation that allows a recovery of function in the mutant viruses. For example, a mutation in the tRNA that recognizes the amber stop codon allows translation to "read through" the codon and produce a full-length protein, thereby recovering the normal form of the protein and "suppressing" the amber mutation.
Thus, amber mutants are an entire class of virus mutants that can grow in bacteria that contain amber suppressor mutations. Similar suppressors are known for ochre and opal stop codons as well.
It was the second stop codon mutation to be discovered. Reminiscent of the usual yellow-orange-brown color associated with amber, this second stop codon was given the name of "ochre", a orange-reddish-brown mineral pigment.
Ochre mutant viruses had a property similar to amber mutants in that they recovered infectious ability within certain suppressor strains of bacteria. The set of ochre suppressors was distinct from amber suppressors, so ochre mutants were inferred to correspond to a different nucleotide triplet. Through a series of mutation experiments comparing these mutants with each other and other known amino acid codons, Sydney Brenner concluded that the amber and ochre mutations corresponded to the nucleotide triplets "UAG" and "UAA".
The third and last stop codon in the standard genetic code was discovered soon after, and corresponds to the nucleotide triplet "UGA".
To continue matching with the theme of colored minerals, the third nonsense codon came to be known as "opal", which is a type of silica showing a variety of colors. Nonsense mutations that created this premature stop codon were later called opal mutations or umber mutations.
Nonsense mutations are changes in DNA sequence that introduce a premature stop codon, causing any resulting protein to be abnormally shortened. This often causes a loss of function in the protein, as critical parts of the amino acid chain are no longer created. Because of this terminology, stop codons have also been referred to as nonsense codons.
A nonstop mutation is a point mutation that occurs within a stop codon. Nonstop mutations cause the continued translation of an mRNA strand into what should be an untranslated region. Most polypeptides resulting from a gene with a nonstop mutation are nonfunctional due to their extreme length.
Nonstop mutations differ from nonsense mutations in that they do not create a stop codon but, instead, delete one. Nonstop mutations also differ from missense mutations, which are point mutations where a single nucleotide is changed to cause replacement by a different amino acid.
Nonstop mutations have been linked with several congenital diseases including congenital adrenal hyperplasia, variable anterior segment dysgenesis, cystic fibrosis and mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalomyopathy.
Hidden stops are non-stop codons that would be read as stop codons if they were frameshifted +1 or −1. These prematurely terminate translation if the corresponding frame-shift (such as due to a ribosomal RNA slip) occurs before the hidden stop. It is hypothesised that this decreases resource waste on nonfunctional proteins and the production of potential cytotoxins. Researchers at Louisiana State University propose the "ambush hypothesis", that hidden stops are selected for. Codons that can form hidden stops are used in genomes more frequently compared to synonymous codons that would otherwise code for the same amino acid. Unstable rRNA in an organism correlates with a higher frequency of hidden stops.
This hypothesis however could not be validated with a larger data set.
Stop-codons and hidden stops together are collectively referred as stop-signals. Researchers at University of Memphis found that the ratios of the stop-signals on the three reading frames of a genome (referred to as translation stop-signals ratio or TSSR) of genetically related bacteria, despite their great differences in gene contents, are much alike. This nearly identical Genomic-TSSR value of genetically related bacteria may suggest that bacterial genome expansion is limited by their unique stop-signals bias of that bacterial species.
Stop codon suppression or translational readthrough occurs when in translation a stop codon is interpreted as a sense codon, that is, when a (standard) amino acid is 'encoded' by the stop codon. Mutated tRNAs can be the cause of readthrough, but also certain nucleotide motifs close to the stop codon. Translational readthrough is very common in viruses and bacteria, and has also been found as a gene regulatory principle in humans, yeasts, bacteria and drosophila. This kind of endogenous translational readthrough constitutes a variation of the genetic code, because a stop codon codes for an amino acid. In the case of human malate dehydrogenase, the stop codon is read through with a frequency of about 4%. The amino acid inserted at the stop codon depends on the identity of the stop codon itself: Gln, Tyr, and Lys have been found for the UAA and UAG codons, while Cys, Trp, and Arg for the UGA codon have been identified by mass spectrometry.
In 2010 when Craig Venter unveiled the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA he described how his team used frequent stop codons to create watermarks in RNA and DNA to help confirm the results were indeed synthetic (and not contaminated or otherwise), using it to encode authors' names and website addresses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28639 |
Symbionese Liberation Army
The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was an American left-wing terrorist organization active between 1973 and 1975 that considered itself a vanguard army. The group committed bank robberies, two murders, and other acts of violence.
The SLA became internationally notorious for the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst, abducting the 19-year-old from Berkeley, California. Interest increased when Hearst, in audiotaped messages delivered to (and broadcast by) regional news media, announced that she had joined the SLA. Hearst later said that members of the terrorist group threatened to kill her, held her in close confinement, and sexually assaulted and brainwashed her.
As of 2017, all but one of the surviving SLA members have been released from prison.
In his manifesto "Symbionese Liberation Army Declaration of Revolutionary War & the Symbionese Program", Donald DeFreeze wrote, "The name 'symbionese' is taken from the word "symbiosis" and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body." The political symbiosis DeFreeze describes means the unity of all left-wing struggles: feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and others. DeFreeze wanted all races, genders, and ages to fight together in a left-wing united front, and to live together peacefully.
DeFreeze was the SLA's only black member. His seven-headed SLA hydra-like cobra symbol was based on the seven principles of Kwanzaa, each head representing a principle. The Swahili words for these seven principles are: "Umoja" (unity), "Kujichagulia" (self-determination), "Ujima" (collective work and responsibility), "Ujamaa" (cooperative economics), "Nia" (purpose), "Kuumba" (creativity) and "Imani" (faith). The appearance of the symbol of the seven-headed cobra on SLA publications indicates that it was copied from the ancient Indian and Sri Lankan seven-headed nāga; carved stones depicting a seven-headed cobra are commonly found near the sluices of the ancient irrigation tanks in Sri Lanka and are believed to have been placed there as guardians of the water. The particular graphic of the seven-headed cobra used by the SLA may have been copied from an illustration in "The Lost Continent of Mu" by James Churchward.
The SLA formed as a result of the prison visitation programs of the radical left-wing group Venceremos Organization and a group known as the Black Cultural Association in Soledad prison. The idea of a South-American–style urban guerrilla movement, similar to the Tupamaros movement in Uruguay, combined with Régis Debray's theory of urban warfare and ideas drawn from Maoism, appealed to a number of people, including Patricia Michelle Soltysik ("alias" "Mizmoon").
The SLA formed after the escape from prison by Donald DeFreeze, "alias" "General Field Marshal Cinque". He had been serving five years to life for robbing a prostitute. DeFreeze took the name Cinque from the leader of the slave rebellion which took over the slave ship "Amistad" in 1839. DeFreeze escaped from Soledad State Prison on March 5, 1973, by walking away while on work duty in a boiler room located outside the perimeter fence.
DeFreeze has been accused by some sources of being an informant from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.
DeFreeze had been active in the Black Cultural Association while at the California Medical Facility, a state prison facility in Vacaville, California, where he had made contacts with members of Venceremos. He sought refuge among these contacts, and ended up at a commune known as Peking House in the San Francisco Bay Area. Venceremos associates and future SLA members Willie Wolfe and Russell Little, concerned with the potential for exposure through surveillance at the high-profile Peking House, arranged for DeFreeze to move in with their associate Patricia Michelle Soltysik in the relative anonymity of Concord, California. DeFreeze and Soltysik became lovers and began to outline the plans for founding the "Symbionese Nation".
On November 6, 1973, in Oakland, California, two members of the SLA killed school superintendent Marcus Foster and badly wounded his deputy, Robert Blackburn, as the two men left an Oakland school board meeting. The hollow-point bullets used to kill Foster had been packed with cyanide.
Although Foster had been the first black school superintendent in the history of Oakland, the SLA had condemned him for his supposed plan to introduce identification cards into Oakland schools, calling him "fascist". In fact, Foster had opposed the use of identification cards in his schools, and his plan was a watered-down version of other similar proposals.
On January 10, 1974, Joseph Remiro and Russell Little were arrested and charged with Foster's murder, and initially both men were convicted of murder. Both men received sentences of life imprisonment. Seven years later, on June 5, 1981, Little's conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeal, and he was later acquitted in a retrial in Monterey County. Remiro remains incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison serving his life sentence.
Little has stated: "Who actually pulled the trigger that killed Foster was Mizmoon (Soltysik). Nancy Ling Perry was supposed to shoot Blackburn, she kind of botched that and DeFreeze ended up shooting him with a shotgun."
In response to the arrests of Remiro and Little, the SLA began planning their next action: the kidnapping of an important figure to negotiate the release of their imprisoned members. Documents found by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at one abandoned safe house revealed that an action was planned for the "full moon of January 17". The FBI did not take any precautions, and the SLA did not act until a month later. On February 4, 1974, publishing heiress Patricia Hearst, a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley, was kidnapped from her Berkeley residence at Apartment 4, 2603 Benvenue Avenue. The kidnapping occurred less than three months after a November 1973 "San Francisco Chronicle" story in the "Society" section announcing the Hearst–Steven Weed betrothal (with the apartment's address given). The SLA had chosen to kidnap Hearst to increase the news coverage of the incident.
The SLA issued an ultimatum to the Hearst family: that they would release Patty in exchange for the freedom of Remiro and Little. When such an arrangement proved impossible, the SLA demanded a ransom, in the form of a food distribution program. The value of food to be distributed fluctuated: on February 23 the demand was for $4 million; it peaked at $400 million. Although free food was distributed, the operation was halted when violence erupted at one of the four distribution points. This happened because the crowds were much greater than expected, and people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks into the crowd. After the SLA demanded that a community coalition called the Western Addition Project Area Committee be put in charge of the food distribution, 100,000 bags of groceries were handed out at 16 locations across four counties between February 26 and the end of March.
The FBI was conducting an unsuccessful search, and the SLA took refuge in a number of safe houses. Hearst later claimed she was subjected to a series of ordeals while in SLA captivity that her mother would later describe as "brainwashing". The change in Hearst's politics has been attributed to Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response in which a hostage exhibits apparent loyalty to the abductor. Hearst was later examined by specialist psychologist Margaret Singer, who came to the same conclusion.
Terence Hallinan, the first attorney who represented her, was planning to argue involuntary intoxication, a side effect of which is amnesia.
Hearst's attorney F. Lee Bailey used the Stockholm syndrome argument as part of the defense at trial. During Hearst's subsequent trial, her lawyer claimed that she had been confined in a closet barely large enough for her to lie down in; that her contact with the outside world was regulated by her captors; and that she was regularly threatened with execution. Hearst's lawyer contended that she had been raped by DeFreeze and Wolfe. Both died before Hearst's capture and trial. The SLA claimed to be holding Hearst according to the conditions of the Geneva Conventions.
The SLA subjected Hearst to indoctrination in SLA ideology. In Hearst's taped recordings, used to announce demands and conditions, Hearst can first be heard extemporaneously expressing SLA ideology on day 13 of her capture.
With each successive taped communiqué, Hearst voiced increasing support for the aims of the SLA. She eventually denounced her former life, her parents, and fiancé. She later claimed that at that point, when the SLA had ostensibly given her the option of being released or joining the SLA, she had believed she would be killed if she turned them down. She began using the nom de guerre "Tania", after Che Guevara's associate "Tania the Guerilla".
The SLA's next action was the robbery of the Hibernia Bank branch at 1450 Noriega Street, San Francisco, during which two civilians were shot.
At 10:00 a.m. on April 15, 1974, SLA members burst into the bank, including Hearst holding a rifle, and the security camera footage of Hearst became an iconic image. She has denied willing involvement in the robbery in her book "Every Secret Thing". The group was able to get away with over $10,000. (Hearst was later sentenced to 7 years in prison for her involvement in the robbery. Her sentence was later commuted by Jimmy Carter and her crime eventually pardoned by Bill Clinton.)
The SLA believed that its future depended on its ability to acquire new members and realized that, because of the killing of Marcus Foster, few if any people in the Bay Area underground wished to join them. Cinque suggested moving the organization to his former neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he had friends who they might recruit. However, they had difficulty becoming established in the new area. The SLA relied on commandeering housing and supplies in Los Angeles, and thus alienated the people who were ensuring their secrecy and protection. At this stage, the imprisoned SLA member Russell Little said that he believed the SLA had entirely lost sight of its goals and had entered into a confrontation with the police rather than a political dialogue with the public.
On May 16, 1974, "Teko" and "Yolanda" (William and Emily Harris) entered Mel's Sporting Goods Store in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, California, to shop for supplies. While Yolanda made the purchases, Teko on a whim decided to shoplift a bandolier. When a security guard confronted him, Teko brandished a revolver. The guard knocked the gun out of his hand and placed a handcuff on William's left wrist. Hearst, on armed lookout from the group's van across the street, began shooting up the store's overhead sign. Everyone in the store but the Harrises took cover, and the Harrises fled the store and drove off with Hearst.
As a result of the SLA's botched shoplifting incident, the police acquired the address of the safe house from a parking ticket in the glove box of the van, which had been abandoned. The rest of the SLA fled the safe house when they saw the events on the news. The SLA took over a house occupied by Christine Johnson and Minnie Lewisin. One of the people in the house at the time was a then-17-year-old neighbor named Brenda Daniels, who was sleeping on the couch. Daniels recalls the events that day:
The next day, an anonymous phone call to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stated that several heavily armed people were staying at the caller's daughter's house. That afternoon, more than 400 LAPD officers, under the command of Captain Mervin King, along with the FBI, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD), California Highway Patrol (CHP), and Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), surrounded the neighborhood. The leader of a SWAT team used a bullhorn to announce, "Occupants of 1466 East 54th Street, this is the Los Angeles Police Department speaking. Come out with your hands up!" A young child walked out, along with an older man. The man stated that no one else was in the house, but the child intervened stating that several people were in the house with guns and ammo belts. After several more attempts to get anyone else to leave the house, a member of the SWAT team fired tear gas projectiles into the house. This was answered by heavy bursts of automatic gunfire, and a violent gun battle began. The police were firing semi-automatic AR-15 and AR-180 rifles. The SLA members were armed with M1 Carbines, which had been converted to fully automatic fire. Police also reported that the SLA had created homemade grenades from 35mm film canisters, and had thrown them at responding officers.
During the shootout, police continued to fire dozens of tear-gas grenades into the home, trying to flush out the SLA members. About two hours into the shootout, the house caught fire, probably due to an exploding tear gas canister. As the house began to burn, two women left from the rear of the house and one came out the front (she had come in drunk the previous night, passed out, and woken up in the middle of the siege); all were taken into custody, but were found not to be SLA members. Automatic weapons fire continued from the house. At this point, Nancy Ling Perry and Camilla Hall came out of the house. Investigators working for their parents would claim that they walked out intending to surrender and that they were unarmed but police later stated that Hall was shot in the head by police as she aimed a weapon towards them while Perry was providing covering fire. After Hall's body fell to the ground, it was pulled back inside the burning house by Angela Atwood. Perry followed Hall out of the house, firing a pistol at officers as she emerged, and was shot twice. Her body remained outside the house.
The rest died inside, from smoke inhalation, burns and gunshot wounds. The coroner's report concluded that Donald DeFreeze committed suicide by shooting himself in the side of the head. After the shooting stopped and the fire was extinguished, 19 firearms—including rifles, pistols, and shotguns—were recovered. Thousands of rounds had been fired out of the house by the SLA and police in response had fired several thousands of rounds into the house. This remains one of the largest police shootouts in U.S. history with a reported total of over 9,000 rounds being fired (4,000 by the SLA and 5,000 by police). Every round fired by SLA members at the police missed the officers. There were no casualties among law enforcement, firefighters, and civilians.
The SLA dead were: Nancy Ling Perry ("Fahizah"), Angela Atwood ("General Gelina"), Camilla Hall ("Gabi"), Willie Wolfe ("Kahjoh", misspelled by the media at the time as "Cujo"), Donald DeFreeze ("Cinque"), and Patricia Soltysik ("Mizmoon," "Zoya"). All but one of the bodies were found huddled in a crawl space under the house, which had burned down around them.
New broadcasting technology (smaller portable cameras and more nimble and versatile mobile units that made it easier to cover unfolding news events) had recently been acquired by area TV stations, so Hearst and the Harrises were able to watch the televised siege live from their hotel room in Anaheim.
Police allegedly consulted psychics in searching for Hearst.
As a result of the siege, the remaining SLA members returned to the relative safety of the San Francisco Bay Area and protection of student radical households. At this time, a number of new members gravitated towards the SLA. The active participants at this time were: Bill and Emily Harris, Patty Hearst, Wendy Yoshimura, siblings Steve and Kathleen Soliah, James Kilgore (Kathleen Soliah's boyfriend) and Michael Bortin.
On April 21, 1975, the remaining members of the SLA robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California. During the robbery, bank customer Myrna Lee Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four children, was killed when Emily Harris discharged the shotgun she was holding, apparently by accident. Five SLA members were ultimately held accountable for the murder and robbery, but not until almost 27 years later, in early 2002.
Patricia Hearst, after a long and highly publicized search, was captured on September 18, 1975, along with the Harrises, Steven Soliah, and Yoshimura, all rounded up in San Francisco safe houses. In Hearst's arrest affidavit she claimed that SLA members had used LSD to drug her and had forced her to take part in the bank raid. She was convicted of the Hibernia Bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison. US President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence to time served after she had been in prison for 21 months. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton. The Harrises were convicted for their part in the Hearst kidnapping and spent eight years in prison.
On February 26, 1976, a Los Angeles county grand jury indicted Kathleen Ann Soliah on explosives and conspiracy charges, accusing her of planting pipe bombs under two LAPD squad cars in August 1975, with the intent to kill police officers in retribution for the SLA member deaths in the May 17th shootout. The devices did not detonate.
Soliah went on the run, moving to Minnesota, and living a quiet upper middle class life under the alias Sara Jane Olson; she married a doctor and had three daughters, while managing to remain a fugitive for over 23 years.
The FBI caught up with and arrested Soliah/Olson in 1999 after a tip was received by the television show "America's Most Wanted", which had twice aired her profile. In 2001, she pleaded guilty to possession of explosives with the intent to murder and was sentenced to two consecutive terms of ten years to life, although she had been told as part of a plea bargain that she would serve no more than eight years. She attempted to change her plea, claiming to the judge that she pleaded guilty only because she believed she could not receive a fair trial for bombing charges considering public sentiment after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She maintained her innocence, insisting that she personally had had nothing to do with making, possessing or placement of the pipe bombs. The judge refused her request.
The Opsahl murder/Crocker bank robbery cold case was finally pursued due to new evidence brought forth through the efforts of the Los Angeles deputy district attorneys, who had prosecuted Olson. On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Sara Jane Olson, Emily Harris, William Harris, Michael Bortin, and James Kilgore. All were living "above ground" and were immediately arrested except for Kilgore, who remained at large for nearly another year, in South Africa.
On November 7, 2002, Olson, the Harrises, and Bortin pleaded guilty to reduced second-degree murder charges. Emily Harris, now known as Emily Montague, admitted to being the one holding the murder weapon but said that the shotgun had gone off accidentally. Hearst had claimed that Montague had dismissed the murder at the time saying, "She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor." In court, Montague denied having said this and added, "I do not want [the Opsahl family] to believe that we ever considered her life insignificant."
Sentences were handed down on February 14, 2003, in Sacramento, California, for all four defendants in the Opsahl murder case. Montague was sentenced to eight years for the murder (2nd degree). Her former husband, William Harris, was sentenced to seven years, and Bortin to six years. Olson was sentenced to six years, adding two consecutively to the 14-year sentence she had already received. All sentences were the maximum allowed under their plea bargains.
On November 8, 2002, James Kilgore, who had been a fugitive since 1975, was arrested in South Africa and extradited to the United States to face federal explosives and passport fraud charges. Prosecutors alleged that a pipe bomb had been found in Kilgore's apartment in 1975 and that he had obtained a passport under a false name. He pleaded guilty to the charges in 2003.
Sara Jane Olson was expecting to receive a sentence of 5 years and 4 months, but "in stiffening Olson's sentence ..., the prison board turned to a seldom-used section of state law, allowing it to recalculate sentences for old crimes in light of new, tougher sentencing guidelines." Olson was sentenced to 14 years— later reduced to 13 years—plus six years for her role in the Opsahl killing. Hearst had immunity because she was a state's witness, but as there was no trial, she never testified.
On April 26, 2004, Kilgore was sentenced to 54 months in prison for the explosives and passport fraud charges. He was the last remaining SLA member to face federal prosecution.
After serving six years of the prison sentence, Sarah Jane Olson was released on parole and reunited with her family in California on March 17, 2008. But after a discovery that her release was premature because of a clerical error, an arrest warrant was issued. She was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport and notified that her right to travel out of state had been rescinded. She was returned to prison.
On March 17, 2009, Sarah Olsen was released, this time correctly, after serving seven years of her 14-year sentence. She was to check in with her parole officer in Los Angeles where it would be determined if she would be allowed to serve her parole in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband and three daughters. Several officials, including the Governor of Minnesota, urged that she serve her parole in California, but she was finally allowed to serve her parole in Minnesota.
On May 10, 2009, James Kilgore was released from prison in California.
Founding member Joseph Remiro remains incarcerated as of 2016 serving a life sentence for the murder of Marcus Foster. He is the only SLA member still in prison. He is up for parole in 2019.
The SLA distributed photographs, news releases and radio-quality taped interviews in which they explained their past activities to the press. The Bay Area Research Collective was formed as an above-ground support group for the SLA, and distributed a mimeographed newsletter, "The Dragon". Since that time the SLA's activities have been covered in other ways in the media. These include films and television shows, such as:
Patti Smith's 1974 single of Jimi Hendrix's 1960s song "Hey Joe" begins with a salacious and provocative monologue about Patty Hearst and the SLA, which puts a feminist spin on the lyrics that had been written about a man who murders his adulterous wife and then flees to Mexico.
Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so... makes me feel so..."masochistic". The way you go down low deep into the neck... and I would do anything... and I would do anything. And Patty Hearst, you standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread. I was wondering: were you gettin' it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women? Or were you really dead? And now that you're on the run, what goes on in your mind? Your sisters they sit by the window. You know, your mama does sit and cry. And your daddy—well, you know what your daddy said Patty. You know what your daddy said, Patty? He said... he said... he said... "Well, sixty days ago she was such a lovely child. Now here she is, with a gun in her hand.
Thus, Smith's version effectively casts Patty Hearst in the role of Joe "with a gun in her hand"—a violent criminal rebelling against the law and all civil authority. Before the fadeout, Smith sings in the voice of Hearst angrily repudiating both her privileged upbringing as well as the mainstream society which has condemned her as a spoiled, vacuous "pretty little rich girl" who became a terrorist. This particular recording was made when Patty Hearst was still a fugitive and members of the SLA were still at large.
The 1976 film "Network" features a Maoist insurgent group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army. Although the film distinguishes it from the SLA, it is plainly a parody of the group and its relationship with the television business. Over the course of the film, the ELA kidnaps an heiress and reeducates her into the group, robs a bank, and negotiates with the titular network for its own prime-time program, "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour".
The Norwegian rock band Turbonegro included the seven-headed cobra symbol on the front cover of their 1998 album "Apocalypse Dudes".
The episode "Inheritance" from the CBS action-drama series "S.W.A.T." focuses on the group of criminals with nearly similar motives and tactics as the SLA, later identified as "The Emancipators".
The Horror punk band Misfits have a song named "She" on their debut album "Static Age" which is about the Patty Hearst case and the ensuing controversy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28642 |
Secondary sex characteristic
Secondary sex characteristics are features that appear during puberty in humans, and at sexual maturity in other animals. These characteristics are particularly evident in the sexually dimorphic phenotypic traits that distinguish the sexes of a species, but--unlike the sex organs (primary sex characteristics)--are not directly part of the reproductive system. Secondary sex characteristics are believed to be the product of sexual selection for traits which display fitness, giving an organism an advantage over its rivals in courtship and in aggressive interactions.
Secondary sex characteristics include, for example, the manes of male lions, the bright facial and rump coloration of male mandrills, and horns in many goats and antelopes. These characteristics are believed to be produced by a positive feedback loop known as the Fisherian runaway produced by the secondary characteristic in one sex and the desire for that characteristic in the other sex. Male birds and fish of many species have brighter coloration or other external ornaments. Differences in size between sexes are also considered secondary sexual characteristics.
In humans, visible secondary sex characteristics include pubic hair, enlarged breasts and widened hips of females, and facial hair and Adam's apples on males.
Charles Darwin hypothesized that sexual selection, or competition within a species for mates, can explain observed differences between sexes in many species.
Ronald Fisher, the English biologist developed a number of ideas concerning secondary characteristics in his 1930 book "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection", including the concept of Fisherian runaway which postulates that the desire for a characteristic in females combined with that characteristic in males can create a positive feedback loop or runaway where the feature becomes hugely amplified. The 1975 handicap principle extends this idea, stating that a peacock's tail, for instance, displays fitness by being a useless impediment that is very hard to fake. Another of Fisher's ideas is the sexy son hypothesis, whereby females will desire to have sons that possess the characteristic that they find sexy in order to maximize the number of grandchildren they produce. An alternative hypothesis is that some of the genes that enable males to develop impressive ornaments or fighting ability may be correlated with fitness markers such as disease resistance or a more efficient metabolism. This idea is known as the good genes hypothesis.
Secondary sex characteristics in non-human animals include manes of male lions and long feathers of male peafowl, the tusks of male narwhals, enlarged proboscises in male elephant seals and proboscis monkeys, the bright facial and rump coloration of male mandrills, and horns in many goats and antelopes.
Biologists today distinguish between "male-to-male combat" and "mate choice", usually female choice of male mates. Sexual characteristics due to combat are such things as antlers, horns, and greater size. Characteristics due to mate choice, often referred to as "ornaments", include brighter plumage, coloration, and other features that have no immediate purpose for survival or combat.
Male jumping spiders have visual patches of UV reflectance, which are ornamentations used to attract females.
Sexual differentiation begins during gestation, when the gonads are formed. The general structure and shape of the body and face, as well as sex hormone levels, are similar in preadolescent boys and girls. As puberty begins and sex hormone levels rise, differences appear, though some changes are similar in males and females. Male levels of testosterone directly induce the growth of the genitals, and indirectly (via dihydrotestosterone (DHT)) the prostate. Estradiol and other hormones cause breasts to develop in females. However, fetal or neonatal androgens may modulate later breast development by reducing the capacity of breast tissue to respond to later estrogen.
Underarm hair and pubic hair are usually considered secondary sex characteristics, but they may also be considered non-secondary sex characteristics because they are features of both sexes following puberty.
In females, breasts are a manifestation of higher levels of estrogen; estrogen also widens the pelvis and increases the amount of body fat in hips, thighs, buttocks, and breasts. Estrogen also induces growth of the uterus, proliferation of the endometrium, and menstruation. Female secondary sex characteristics include:
The increased secretion of testosterone from the testes during puberty causes the male secondary sexual characteristics to be manifested. In males, testosterone directly increases size and mass of muscles, vocal cords, and bones, deepening the voice, and changing the shape of the face and skeleton. Converted into DHT in the skin, it accelerates growth of androgen-responsive facial and body hair but may slow and eventually stop the growth of head hair. Taller stature is largely a result of later puberty and slower epiphyseal fusion. Male secondary sex characteristics include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28643 |
Smuggling
Smuggling is the illegal transportation of objects, substances, information or people, such as out of a house or buildings, into a prison, or across an international border, in violation of applicable laws or other regulations.
There are various motivations to smuggle. These include the participation in illegal trade, such as in the drug trade, illegal weapons trade, exotic wildlife trade, illegal immigration or illegal emigration, tax evasion, providing contraband to a prison inmate, or the theft of the items being smuggled.
Smuggling is a common theme in literature, from Bizet's opera "Carmen" to the James Bond spy books (and later films) "Diamonds Are Forever" and "Goldfinger".
The verb "smuggle", from Low German "smuggeln" or Dutch "smokkelen" (="to transport (goods) illegally"), apparently a frequentative formation of a word meaning "to sneak", most likely entered the English language during the 1600s–1700s.
Smuggling has a long and controversial history, probably dating back to the first time at which duties were imposed in any form, or any attempt was made to prohibit a form of traffic. Smuggling is often associated with efforts by authorities to prevent the importation of certain contraband items or non-taxed goods; however, there has also been smuggling based on illegally exporting goods. In England smuggling first became a recognised problem in the 13th century, following the creation of a national customs collection system by Edward I in 1275. Medieval smuggling tended to focus on the export of highly taxed export goods — notably wool and hides. Merchants also, however, sometimes smuggled other goods to circumvent prohibitions or embargoes on particular trades. Grain, for instance, was usually prohibited from export, unless prices were low, because of fears that grain exports would raise the price of food in England and thus cause food shortages and / or civil unrest. Following the loss of Gascony to the French in 1453, imports of wine were also sometimes embargoed during wars to try and deprive the French of the revenues that could be earned from their main export.
Most studies of historical smuggling have been based on official sources — such as court records, or the letters of Revenue Officers. A senior academic of the University of Bristol states that they only detail the activities of those dumb enough to get caught. This has led him and others, such as Prof. H. V. Bowen of the University of Swansea to use commercial records to reconstruct smuggling businesses. Jones' study focuses on smuggling in Bristol in the mid-16th century, arguing that the illicit export of goods like grain and leather represented a significant part of the city's business, with many members of the civic elite engaging in it, whether by disguised/hidden transport or mis-description of goods. Grain smuggling by members of the civic elite, often working closely with corrupt customs officers, has also been shown to have been prevalent in East Anglia during the later 16th century.
In England wool was smuggled to the continent in the 17th century, under the pressure of high excise taxes. In 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote of Lymington, Hampshire, on the south coast of England
"I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End in Cornwall."
The high rates of duty levied on tea and also wine and spirits, and other luxury goods coming in from mainland Europe at this time made the clandestine import of such goods and the evasion of the duty a highly profitable venture for impoverished fishermen and seafarers. In certain parts of the country such as the Romney Marsh, East Kent, Cornwall and East Cleveland, the smuggling industry was for many communities more economically significant than legal activities such as farming and fishing. The principal reason for the high duty was the need for the government to finance a number of extremely expensive wars with France and the United States.
Before the era of drug smuggling and human trafficking, smuggling had acquired a kind of nostalgic romanticism, in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped":
"Few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or mooncussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. "The Smugglers Inn" was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast".
In Henley Road, smuggling in colonial times was a reaction to the heavy taxes and regulations imposed by mercantilist trade policies. After American independence in 1783, smuggling developed at the edges of the United States at places like Passamaquoddy Bay, St. Mary's in Georgia, Lake Champlain, and Louisiana. During Thomas Jefferson's embargo of 1807-1809, these same places became the primary places where goods were smuggled out of the nation in defiance of the law. Like Britain, a gradual liberalization of trade laws as part of the free trade movement meant less smuggling. in 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt tried to cut down on smuggling by establishing the Roosevelt Reservation along the United States-Mexico Border. Smuggling revived in the 1920s during Prohibition, and drug smuggling became a major problem after 1970. In the 1990s, when economic sanctions were imposed on Serbia, a large percent of the population lived off smuggling petrol and consumer goods from neighboring countries. The state unofficially allowed this to continue or otherwise the entire economy would have collapsed.
In modern times, as many first-world countries have struggled to contain a rising influx of immigrants, the smuggling of people across national borders has become a lucrative extra-legal activity, as well as the extremely dark side, people-trafficking, especially of women who may be enslaved typically as prostitutes.
Much smuggling occurs when enterprising merchants attempt to supply demand for a good or service that is illegal or heavily taxed. As a result, illegal drug trafficking, and the smuggling of weapons (illegal arms trade), as well as the historical staples of smuggling, alcohol and tobacco, are widespread. As the smuggler faces significant risk of civil and criminal penalties if caught with contraband, smugglers are able to impose a significant price premium on smuggled goods. The profits involved in smuggling goods appear to be extensive. The Iron Law of Prohibition dictates that greater enforcement results in more potent alcohol and drugs being smuggled.
Profits also derive from avoiding taxes or levies on imported goods. For example, a smuggler might purchase a large quantity of cigarettes in a place with low taxes and smuggle them into a place with higher taxes, where they can be sold at a far higher margin than would otherwise be possible. It has been reported that smuggling one truckload of cigarettes within the United States can lead to a profit of US$2 million.
With regard to people smuggling, a distinction can be made between people smuggling as a service to those wanting to illegally migrate and the involuntary trafficking of people. An estimated 90% of people who illegally crossed the border between Mexico and the United States are believed to have paid a smuggler to lead them across.
People smuggling can be used to rescue a person from oppressive circumstances. For example, when the Southern United States allowed slavery, many slaves moved north via the Underground Railroad. Similarly, during the Holocaust, Jewish people were smuggled out of Germany by people such as Algoth Niska.
Trafficking of human beings — sometimes called human trafficking or, in the case of sexual services, sex trafficking — is not the same as people smuggling. A smuggler will facilitate illegal entry into a country for a fee, and on arrival at their destination, the smuggled person is free; the trafficking victim is coerced in some way. Victims do not agree to be trafficked; they are tricked, lured by false promises, or forced into it. Traffickers use coercive tactics including deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, physical threats and use of force, debt bondage or even force-feeding drugs to control their victims.
While the majority of victims are women, and sometimes children, other victims include men, women and children forced or conned into manual or cheap labor. Due to the illegal nature of trafficking, the exact extent is unknown. A U.S. government report published in 2003 estimates that 800,000-900,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally.
According to a study by Alternatives to Combat Child Labour Through Education and Sustainable Services in the Middle East and North Africa Region (ACCESS-MENA) 30% of school children living in border villages of Yemen had been smuggled into Saudi Arabia. Child trafficking is commonly referenced as "transporting". Smuggled children were in danger of being sexually abused or even killed. Poverty is one of the reasons behind child trafficking and some children are smuggled with their parents' consent via a transporter. As many as 50% of those smuggled are children. In the Philippines, between 60,000 and 100,000 children are trafficked to work in the sex industry.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved illegally by highly organized international smuggling and trafficking groups, often in dangerous or inhumane conditions. This phenomenon has been growing in recent years as people of low income countries are aspiring to enter developed countries in search of jobs. Migrant smuggling and human trafficking are two separate offences and differ in a few central respects. While "smuggling" refers to facilitating the illegal entry of a person into a State, "trafficking" includes an element of exploitation.
The trafficker retains control over the migrant—through force, fraud or coercion—typically in the sex industry, through forced labour or through other practices similar to slavery. Trafficking violates the idea of basic human rights. The overwhelming majority of those trafficked are women and children. These victims are commodities in a multibillion-dollar global industry. Criminal organizations are choosing to traffic human beings because, unlike other commodities, people can be used repeatedly and because trafficking requires little in terms of capital investment.
Smuggling is also reaping huge financial dividends to criminal groups who charge migrants massive fees for their services. Intelligence reports have noted that drug-traffickers and other criminal organizations are switching to human cargo to obtain greater profit with less risk.
It is acknowledged that the smuggling of people is a growing global phenomenon. It is a transnational crime. Currently, economic instability appears to be the main reason for illegal migration movement throughout the world. Nevertheless, many of the willing migrants undertake the hazardous travel to their destination country with criminal syndicates specialized in people smuggling. These syndicates arrange everything for the migrants, but at a high price.
Very often the traveling conditions are inhumane: the migrants are overcrowded in trucks or boats and fatal accidents occur frequently. After their arrival in the destination country, their illegal status puts them at the mercy of their smugglers, which often force the migrants to work for years in the illegal labor market to pay off the debts incurred as a result of their transportation.
Wildlife smuggling results from the demand for exotic species and the lucrative nature of the trade. The CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) regulates the movement of endangered wildlife across political borders.
Research on smuggling as economic phenomenon is scant. Jagdish Bhagwati and Bent Hansen first forwarded a theory of smuggling in which they saw smuggling essentially as an import-substituting economic activity. Their main consideration, however, was the welfare implications of smuggling. Against common belief that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, they showed that smuggling might not enhance social welfare though it may divert resources from government to private sector.
In contrast, Faizul Latif Chowdhury, in 1999, suggested a production-substituting model of smuggling in which price disparity due to cost of supply is critically important as an incentive for smuggling. This price disparity is caused by domestic consumption taxes and import duties. Drawing attention to the case of cigarettes, Chowdhury suggested that, in Bangladesh, smuggling of cigarettes reduced the level of domestic production. Domestic production of cigarettes is subject to value added tax (VAT) and other consumption tax. Reduction of domestic taxes enables the local producer to supply at a lower cost and bring down the price disparity that encourages smuggling.
However, Chowdhury suggested that there is a limit beyond which reducing domestic taxes on production cannot confer a competitive advantage versus smuggled cigarettes. Therefore, government needs to upscale its anti-smuggling drive so that seizures (the taking possession of person or property by legal process) can add to the cost of smuggling and thus render smuggling uncompetitive. Notably, Chowdhury modeled the relationship of the smuggler to the local producer as one of antagonistic duopoly.
Contrarily, in a research by Tat Chee Tsui in 2016, even if increasing of cigarette duty may encourage smuggling, total cigarette consumption still declines because price of illicit goods, as substitutes of taxed cigarettes, also increases because of higher tax rate.
In smuggling, concealment can involve concealing the smuggled goods on a person's clothing, luggage or inside a body cavity. Some smugglers hide the whole transportation vehicle or ship used to bring the items into an area. Avoiding border checks, such as by small ships, private airplanes, through overland smuggling routes, smuggling tunnels and even small submersibles. This also applies for illegally passing a border oneself, for illegal immigration or illegal emigration. In many parts of the world, particularly the Gulf of Mexico, the smuggling vessel of choice is the go-fast boat.
Submitting to border checks with the goods or people hidden in a vehicle or between (other) merchandise, or the goods hidden in luggage, in or under clothes, inside the body (see body cavity search, balloon swallower and mule), etc. Many smugglers fly on regularly scheduled airlines. A large number of suspected smugglers are caught each year by customs worldwide. Goods and people are also smuggled across seas hidden in containers, and overland hidden in cars, trucks, and trains. A related topic is illegally passing a border oneself as a stowaway. The high level of duty levied on alcohol and tobacco in Britain has led to large-scale smuggling from France to the UK through the Channel Tunnel.
The combination of acknowledged corruption at the border and high import tariffs led smugglers in the 1970s and ‘80s to fly electronic equipment such as stereos and televisions in cargo planes from one country to clandestine landing strips in another, thereby circumventing encounters at the frontier between countries.
For illegally passing a border oneself, another method is with a false passport (completely fake, or illegally changed, or the passport of a lookalike).
At Border checkpoints, especially for shipping cargo, Border agents must inspect cargo for smuggled and illegal goods. However, because of what is called Gridlock a maximum of 5% inspections per cargo holds worldwide. Since it can take a proper and complete inspection four to six hours, major global trade routes such as Singapore offer great opportunity for smugglers and traders alike. As the leading Cape Town Customs Official argues, if a shipping port stops and inspects every ship it would cause a total shipping grid lock, which is trade gridlock, which is also economic gridlock. By under-declaring and misrepresenting, even the most surprising goods is common practice when smuggling. What popular culture doesn’t communicate, is that illegal drugs and arms are not the bane of customs officers and the ultimate threat to their economy. In reality, the most commonly smuggled items are everyday items one believes to be common and thus causes higher losses in tax revenue. An anonymous shipping agent said that smuggling becomes second nature to businessmen, taking finished products and misrepresenting them to offer the cheapest possible rate. What the majority of people do not realize, is that the media and popular culture focus on criminal organizations as primary smugglers, but in reality legitimate businesses are the biggest offenders. By incorporating their label on merchandise or products, it leaves bias towards their goods as the popular media portrays them as reliable. Smuggling, however, is produced through the very culture of the shipping industry and is affected by institutionalized tariffs and taxes around the world.
The existence of the Multi-Consignment Contraband (MCC) smuggling method (smuggling two or more different types of contraband such as drugs and illegal immigrants or drugs and guns at the same time) was verified following the completion of a study that found 16 documented cases of smugglers transporting more than one type of contraband in the same shipment. MCC shipments were frequently associated with Phase II and Phase III smuggling organizations.
In popular perception smuggling is synonymous with illegal trade. Even social scientists have misconstrued smuggling as illegal trade. While the two have indeed identical objectives, namely the evasion of taxes and the importation of contraband items, their demand and cost functions are altogether different requiring different analytical framework. As a result, illegal trade through customs stations is differently considered, and smuggling is defined as international trade through ‘unauthorized route’. A seaport, airport or land port which has not been authorized by the government for importation and exportation is an ‘unauthorized route’. The legal definition of these occurs in the Customs Act of the country. Notably, some definitions define any 'undeclared' trafficking of currency and precious metal as smuggling. Smuggling is a cognizable offense in which both the smuggled goods and the goods are punishable. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28645 |
String-searching algorithm
In computer science, string-searching algorithms, sometimes called string-matching algorithms, are an important class of string algorithms that try to find a place where one or several strings (also called patterns) are found within a larger string or text.
A basic example of string searching is when the pattern and the searched text are arrays of elements of an alphabet (finite set) Σ. Σ may be a human language alphabet, for example, the letters "A" through "Z" and other applications may use a "binary alphabet" (Σ = {0,1}) or a "DNA alphabet" (Σ = {A,C,G,T}) in bioinformatics.
In practice, the method of feasible string-search algorithm may be affected by the string encoding. In particular, if a variable-width encoding is in use, then it may be slower to find the "N"th character, perhaps requiring time proportional to "N". This may significantly slow some search algorithms. One of many possible solutions is to search for the sequence of code units instead, but doing so may produce false matches unless the encoding is specifically designed to avoid it.
The most basic case of string searching involves one (often very long) string, sometimes called the "haystack", and one (often very short) string, sometimes called the "needle". The goal is to find one or more occurrences of the needle within the haystack. For example, one might search for "to" within:
One might request the first occurrence of "to", which is the fourth word; or all occurrences, of which there are 3; or the last, which is the fifth word from the end.
Very commonly, however, various constraints are added. For example, one might want to match the "needle" only where it consists of one (or more) complete words—perhaps defined as "not" having other letters immediately adjacent on either side. In that case a search for "hew" or "low" should fail for the example sentence above, even though those literal strings do occur.
Another common example involves "normalization". For many purposes, a search for a phrase such as "to be" should succeed even in places where there is something else intervening between the "to" and the "be":
Many symbol systems include characters that are synonymous (at least for some purposes):
Finally, for strings that represent natural language, aspects of the language itself become involved. For example, one might wish to find all occurrences of a "word" despite it having alternate spellings, prefixes or suffixes, etc.
Another more complex type of search is regular expression searching, where the user constructs a pattern of characters or other symbols, and any match to the pattern should fulfill the search. For example, to catch both the American English word "color" and the British equivalent "colour", instead of searching for two different literal strings, one might use a regular expression such as:
where the "?" conventionally makes the preceding character ("u") optional.
This article mainly discusses algorithms for the simpler kinds of string searching.
A similar problem introduced in the field of bioinformatics and genomics is the maximal exact matching (MEM). Given two strings, MEMs are common substrings that cannot be extended left or right without causing a mismatch.
The various algorithms can be classified by the number of patterns each uses.
Let "m" be the length of the pattern, "n" be the length of the searchable text and "k" = |Σ| be the size of the alphabet.
The Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm has been the standard benchmark for the practical string-search literature.
Naturally, the patterns can not be enumerated finitely in this case. They are represented usually by a regular grammar or regular expression.
Other classification approaches are possible. One of the most common uses preprocessing as main criteria.
Another one classifies the algorithms by their matching strategy:
A simple and inefficient way to see where one string occurs inside another is to check each place it could be, one by one, to see if it's there. So first we see if there's a copy of the needle in the first character of the haystack; if not, we look to see if there's a copy of the needle starting at the second character of the haystack; if not, we look starting at the third character, and so forth. In the normal case, we only have to look at one or two characters for each wrong position to see that it is a wrong position, so in the average case, this takes O("n" + "m") steps, where "n" is the length of the haystack and "m" is the length of the needle; but in the worst case, searching for a string like "aaaab" in a string like "aaaaaaaaab", it takes O("nm")
In this approach, we avoid backtracking by constructing a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) that recognizes stored search string. These are expensive to construct—they are usually created using the powerset construction—but are very quick to use. For example, the DFA shown to the right recognizes the word "MOMMY". This approach is frequently generalized in practice to search for arbitrary regular expressions.
Knuth–Morris–Pratt computes a DFA that recognizes inputs with the string to search for as a suffix, Boyer–Moore starts searching from the end of the needle, so it can usually jump ahead a whole needle-length at each step. Baeza–Yates keeps track of whether the previous "j" characters were a prefix of the search string, and is therefore adaptable to fuzzy string searching. The bitap algorithm is an application of Baeza–Yates' approach.
Faster search algorithms preprocess the text. After building a substring index, for example a suffix tree or suffix array, the occurrences of a pattern can be found quickly. As an example, a suffix tree can be built in formula_1 time, and all formula_2 occurrences of a pattern can be found in formula_3 time under the assumption that the alphabet has a constant size and all inner nodes in the suffix tree know what leaves are underneath them. The latter can be accomplished by running a DFS algorithm from the root of the suffix tree.
Some search methods, for instance trigram search, are intended to find a "closeness" score between the search string and the text rather than a "match/non-match". These are sometimes called "fuzzy" searches. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28648 |
Stevens–Johnson syndrome
Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS) is a type of severe skin reaction. Together with toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) and Stevens–Johnson/toxic epidermal necrolysis (SJS/TEN), it forms a spectrum of disease, with SJS being less severe. Erythema multiforme (EM) is generally considered a separate condition. Early symptoms of SJS include fever and flu-like symptoms. A few days later, the skin begins to blister and peel, forming painful raw areas. Mucous membranes, such as the mouth, are also typically involved. Complications include dehydration, sepsis, pneumonia and multiple organ failure.
The most common cause is certain medications such as lamotrigine, carbamazepine, allopurinol, sulfonamide antibiotics and nevirapine. Other causes can include infections such as "Mycoplasma pneumoniae" and cytomegalovirus, or the cause may remain unknown. Risk factors include HIV/AIDS and systemic lupus erythematosus.
The diagnosis of Stevens–Johnson syndrome is based on involvement of less than 10% of the skin. It is known as TEN when more than 30% of the skin is involved and considered an intermediate form when 10–30% is involved. SJS/TEN reactions are believed to follow a type IV hypersensitivity mechanism. It is also included with drug reaction with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS syndrome), acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis (AGEP) and toxic epidermal necrolysis in a group of conditions known severe cutaneous adverse reactions (SCARs).
Treatment typically takes place in hospital such as in a burn unit or intensive care unit. Efforts may include stopping the cause, pain medication, antihistamines, antibiotics, intravenous immunoglobulins or corticosteroids. Together with TEN, SJS affects 1 to 2 people per million per year. Typical onset is under the age of 30. Skin usually regrows over two to three weeks; however, complete recovery can take months. Overall, the risk of death with SJS is 5 to 10%.
SJS usually begins with fever, sore throat, and fatigue, which is commonly misdiagnosed and therefore treated with antibiotics. SJS, SJS/TEN, and TEN are often heralded by fever, sore throat, cough, and burning eyes for 1 to 3 days. Patients with these disorders frequently experience burning pain of their skin at the start of disease. Ulcers and other lesions begin to appear in the mucous membranes, almost always in the mouth and lips, but also in the genital and anal regions. Those in the mouth are usually extremely painful and reduce the patient's ability to eat or drink. Conjunctivitis occurs in about 30% of children who develop SJS. A rash of round lesions about an inch across arises on the face, trunk, arms and legs, and soles of the feet, but usually not the scalp.
SJS is thought to arise from a disorder of the immune system. The immune reaction can be triggered by drugs or infections. Genetic factors are associated with a predisposition to SJS. The cause of SJS is unknown in one-quarter to one-half of cases. SJS, SJS/TEN, and TEN are considered a single disease with common causes and mechanisms.
Individuals expressing certain human leukocyte antigen (i.e. HLA) serotypes (i.e. genetic alleles), genetical-based T cell receptors, or variations in their efficiency to absorb, distribute to tissues, metabolize, or excrete (this combination is termed ADME) a drug are predisposed to develop SJS.
Although SJS can be caused by viral infections and malignancies, the main cause is medications. A leading cause appears to be the use of antibiotics, particularly sulfa drugs. Between 100 and 200 different drugs may be associated with SJS. No reliable test exists to establish a link between a particular drug and SJS for an individual case. Determining what drug is the cause is based on the time interval between first use of the drug and the beginning of the skin reaction. Drugs discontinued more than 1 month prior to onset of mucocutaneous physical findings are highly unlikely to cause SJS and TEN. SJS and TEN most often begin between 4 and 28 days after culprit drug administration. A published algorithm (ALDEN) to assess drug causality gives structured assistance in identifying the responsible medication.
SJS may be caused by the medications rivaroxaban, vancomycin, allopurinol, valproate, levofloxacin, diclofenac, etravirine, isotretinoin, fluconazole, valdecoxib, sitagliptin, oseltamivir, penicillins, barbiturates, sulfonamides, phenytoin, azithromycin, oxcarbazepine, zonisamide, modafinil, lamotrigine, nevirapine, pyrimethamine, ibuprofen, ethosuximide, carbamazepine, bupropion, telaprevir, and nystatin.
Medications that have traditionally been known to lead to SJS, erythema multiforme, and toxic epidermal necrolysis include sulfonamide antibiotics, penicillin antibiotics, cefixime (antibiotic), barbiturates (sedatives), lamotrigine, phenytoin (e.g., Dilantin) (anticonvulsants) and trimethoprim. Combining lamotrigine with sodium valproate increases the risk of SJS.
Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a rare cause of SJS in adults; the risk is higher for older patients, women, and those initiating treatment. Typically, the symptoms of drug-induced SJS arise within a week of starting the medication. Similar to NSAIDs, paracetamol (acetaminophen) has also caused rare cases of SJS. People with systemic lupus erythematosus or HIV infections are more susceptible to drug-induced SJS.
The second most common cause of SJS and TEN is infection, particularly in children. This includes upper respiratory infections, otitis media, pharyngitis, and Epstein–Barr virus, Mycoplasma pneumoniae and cytomegalovirus infections. The routine use of medicines such as antibiotics, antipyretics and analgesics to manage infections can make it difficult to identify if cases were caused by the infection or medicines taken.
Viral diseases reported to cause SJS include: herpes simplex virus (possibly; is debated), AIDS, coxsackievirus, influenza, hepatitis, and mumps.
In pediatric cases, Epstein-Barr virus and enteroviruses have been associated with SJS.
Recent upper respiratory tract infections have been reported by more than half of patients with SJS.
Bacterial infections linked to SJS include group A beta-hemolytic streptococci, diphtheria, brucellosis, lymphogranuloma venereum, mycobacteria, "Mycoplasma pneumoniae", rickettsial infections, tularemia, and typhoid.
Fungal infections with coccidioidomycosis, dermatophytosis and histoplasmosis are also considered possible causes. Malaria and trichomoniasis, protozoal infections, have also been reported as causes.
SJS is a type IV hypersensitivity reaction in which a drug or its metabolite stimulates cytotoxic T cells (i.e. CD8+ T cells) and T helper cells (i.e. CD4+ T cells) to initiate autoimmune reactions that attack self tissues. In particular, it is a type IV, subtype IVc, delayed hypersensitivity reaction dependent in part on the tissue-injuring actions of natural killer cells. This contrasts with the other types of SCARs disorders, i.e., the DRESS syndrome which is a Type IV, Subtype IVb, hypersensitivity drug reaction dependent in part on the tissue-injuring actions of eosinophils and acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis which is a Type IV, subtype IVd, hypersensitivity reaction dependent in part on the tissue-injuring actions of neutrophils.
Like other SCARs-inducing drugs, SJS-inducing drugs or their metabolites stimulate CD8+ T cells or CD4+ T cells to initiate autoimmune responses. Studies indicate that the mechanism by which a drug or its metabolites accomplishes this involves subverting the antigen presentation pathways of the innate immune system. The drug or metabolite covalently binds with a host protein to form a non-self, drug-related epitope. An antigen presenting cell (APC) takes up these alter proteins; digests them into small peptides; places the peptides in a groove on the human leukocyte antigen (i.e. HLA) component of their major histocompatibility complex (i.e. MHC); and presents the MHC-associated peptides to T-cell receptors on CD8+ T cells or CD4+ T cells. Those peptides expressing a drug-related, non-self epitope on one of their various HLA protein forms (HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, HLA-DM, HLA-DO, HLA-DP, HLA-DQ, or HLA-DR) can bind to a T-cell receptor and thereby stimulate the receptor-bearing parent T cell to initiate attacks on self tissues. Alternatively, a drug or its metabolite may stimulate these T cells by inserting into the groove on a HLA protein to serve as a non-self epitope or bind outside of this groove to alter a HLA protein so that it forms a non-self epitope. In all these cases, however, a non-self epitope must bind to a specific HLA serotype (i.e. variation) in order to stimulate T cells. Since the human population expresses some 13,000 different HLA serotypes while an individual expresses only a fraction of them and since a SJS-inducing drug or metabolite interacts with only one or a few HLA serotypes, a drug's ability to induce SCARs is limited to those individuals who express HLA serotypes targeted by the drug or its metabolite. Accordingly, only rare individuals are predisposed to develop a SCARs in response to a particular drug on the bases of their expression of HLA serotypes: Studies have identified several HLA serotypes associated with development of SJS, SJS/TEN, or TEN in response to certain drugs. In general, these associations are restricted to the cited populations.
In some East Asian populations studied (Han Chinese and Thai), carbamazepine- and phenytoin-induced SJS is strongly associated with HLA-B*1502 (HLA-B75), an HLA-B serotype of the broader serotype HLA-B15. A study in Europe suggested the gene marker is only relevant for East Asians. This has clinical relevance as it is agreed upon that prior to starting a medication such as allopurinol in a patient of Chinese descent, HLA-B*58:01 testing should be considered.
Based on the Asian findings, similar studies in Europe showed 61% of allopurinol-induced SJS/TEN patients carried the HLA-B58 (phenotype frequency of the B*5801 allele in Europeans is typically 3%). One study concluded: "Even when HLA-B alleles behave as strong risk factors, as for allopurinol, they are neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the disease."
Other HLA associations with the development of SJS, SJS/TEN, or TEN and the intake of specific drugs as determined in certain populations are given in HLA associations with SCARs.
In addition to acting through HLA proteins to bind with a T-cell receptor, a drug or its metabolite may bypass HLA proteins to bind directly to a T-cell receptor and thereby stimulate CD8+ T or CD4+ T cells to initiate autoimmune responses. In either case, this binding appears to develop only on certain T cell receptors. Since the genes for these receptors are highly edited, i.e. altered to encode proteins with different amino acid sequences, and since the human population may express more than 100 trillion different (i.e. different amino acid sequences) T-cell receptors while an individual express only a fraction of these, a drug's or its metabolite's ability to induce the DRESS syndrome by interacting with a T cell receptor is limited to those individuals whose T cells express a T cell receptor(s) that can interact with the drug or its metabolite. Thus, only rare individuals are predisposed to develop SJS in response to a particular drug on the bases of their expression of specific T-cell receptor types. While the evidence supporting this T-cell receptor selectivity is limited, one study identified the preferential presence of the TCR-V-b and complementarity-determining region 3 in T-cell receptors found on the T cells in the blisters of patients with allopurinol-induced DRESS syndrome. This finding is compatible with the notion that specific types of T cell receptors are involved in the development of specific drug-induced SCARs.
Variations in ADME, i.e. an individual's efficiency in absorbing, tissue-distributing, metabolizing, or excreting a drug, have been found to occur in various severe cutaneous adverse reactions (SCARS) as well as other types of adverse drug reactions. These variations influence the levels and duration of a drug or its metabolite in tissues and thereby impact the drug's or metabolite's ability to evoke these reactions. For example, CYP2C9 is an important drug-metabolizing cytochrome P450; it metabolizes and thereby inactivates phenytoin. Taiwanese, Japanese, and Malaysian individuals expressing the CYP2C9*3 variant of CYP2C9, which has reduced metabolic activity compared to the wild type (i.e. CYP2c9*1) cytochrome, have increased blood levels of phenytoin and a high incidence of SJS (as well as SJS/TEN and TEN) when taking the drug. In addition to abnormalities in drug-metabolizing enzymes, dysfunctions of the kidney, liver, or GI tract which increase a SCARs-inducing drug or metabolite levels are suggested to promote SCARs responses. These ADME abnormalities, it is also suggested, may interact with particular HLA proteins and T cell receptors to promote a SCARs disorder.
The diagnosis is based on involvement of less than 10% of the skin. It is known as TEN when more than 30% of the skin is involved and an intermediate form with 10 to 30% involvement. A positive Nikolsky's sign is helpful in the diagnosis of SJS and TEN. A skin biopsy is helpful, but not required, to establish a diagnosis of SJS and TEN.
SJS, like TEN and erythema multiforme, is characterized by confluent epidermal necrosis with minimal associated inflammation. The acuity is apparent from the (normal) basket weave-like pattern of the stratum corneum.
Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS) is a milder form of toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN). These conditions were first recognised in 1922. A classification first published in 1993, that has been adopted as a consensus definition, identifies Stevens–Johnson syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis, and SJS/TEN overlap. All three are part of a spectrum of severe cutaneous reactions (SCAR) which affect skin and mucous membranes. The distinction between SJS, SJS/TEN overlap, and TEN is based on the type of lesions and the amount of the body surface area with blisters and erosions. It is agreed that the most reliable method to classify EM, SJS, and TEN is based on lesion morphology and extent of epidermal detachment. Blisters and erosions cover between 3% and 10% of the body in SJS, 11–30% in SJS/TEN overlap, and over 30% in TEN. The skin pattern most commonly associated with SJS is widespread, often joined or touching (confluent), papuric spots (macules) or flat small blisters or large blisters which may also join together. These occur primarily on the torso.
SJS, TEN, and SJS/TEN overlap can be mistaken for erythema multiforme. Erythema multiforme, which is also within the SCAR spectrum, differs in clinical pattern and etiology. Although both SJS and TEN can also be caused by infections, they are most often adverse effects of medications.
Screening individuals for certain predisposing gene variants before initiating treatment with particular SJS-, TEN/SJS-, or TEN-inducing drugs is recommended or under study. These recommendations are typically limited to specific populations that show a significant chance of having the indicated gene variant since screening of populations with extremely low incidences of expressing the variant is considered cost-ineffective. Individuals expressing the HLA allele associated with sensitivity to an indicated drug should not be treated with the drug. These recommendations include the following. Before treatment with carbamazepine, the Taiwan and USA Food and Drug Administrations recommend screening for HLA-B*15:02 in certain Asian groups. This has been implemented in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and many medical centers in Thailand and Mainland China. Before treatment with allopurinol, the American College of Rheumatology guidelines for managing gout recommend HLA-B*58:01 screening. This is provided in many medical centers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Mainland China. Before treatment with abacavir, the USA Food and Drug Administration recommends screening for HLA-B*57:01 in Caucasian populations. This screening is widely implemented. It has also been suggested that all individuals found to express this HLA serotype avoid treatment with abacovir. Current trials are underway in Taiwan to define the cost-effectiveness of avoiding phenytoin in SJS, SJS/TEN, and TEN for individuals expressing the CYP2C9*3 allele of CYP2C9.
SJS constitutes a dermatological emergency. Patients with documented "Mycoplasma" infections can be treated with oral macrolide or oral doxycycline.
Initially, treatment is similar to that for patients with thermal burns, and continued care can only be supportive (e.g. intravenous fluids and nasogastric or parenteral feeding) and symptomatic (e.g., analgesic mouth rinse for mouth ulcer). Dermatologists and surgeons tend to disagree about whether the skin should be debrided.
Beyond this kind of supportive care, no treatment for SJS is accepted. Treatment with corticosteroids is controversial. Early retrospective studies suggested corticosteroids increased hospital stays and complication rates. No randomized trials of corticosteroids were conducted for SJS, and it can be managed successfully without them.
Other agents have been used, including cyclophosphamide and ciclosporin, but none has exhibited much therapeutic success. Intravenous immunoglobulin treatment has shown some promise in reducing the length of the reaction and improving symptoms. Other common supportive measures include the use of topical pain anesthetics and antiseptics, maintaining a warm environment, and intravenous analgesics.
An ophthalmologist should be consulted immediately, as SJS frequently causes the formation of scar tissue inside the eyelids, leading to corneal vascularization, impaired vision, and a host of other ocular problems. Those with chronic ocular surface disease caused by SJS may find some improvement with PROSE treatment (prosthetic replacement of the ocular surface ecosystem treatment).
SJS (with less than 10% of body surface area involved) has a mortality rate of around 5%. The mortality for toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is 30–40%. The risk for death can be estimated using the SCORTEN scale, which takes a number of prognostic indicators into account. It is helpful to calculate a SCORTEN within the first 3 days of hospitalization. Other outcomes include organ damage/failure, cornea scratching, and blindness.. Restrictive lung disease may develop in patients with SJS and TEN after initial acute pulmonary involvement. Patients with SJS or TEN caused by a drug have a better prognosis the earlier the causative drug is withdrawn.
SJS is a rare condition, with a reported incidence of around 2.6 to 6.1 cases per million people per year. In the United States, about 300 new diagnoses are made each year. The condition is more common in adults than in children.
SJS is named for Albert Mason Stevens and Frank Chambliss Johnson, American pediatricians who jointly published a description of the disorder in the "American Journal of Diseases of Children" in 1922.
In 2015, the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) organized a workshop entitled “Research Directions in Genetically-Mediated Stevens-Johnson Syndrome/Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis”. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28649 |
Stoichiometry
Stoichiometry is the calculation of reactants and products in chemical reactions.
Stoichiometry is founded on the law of conservation of mass where the total mass of the reactants equals the total mass of the products, leading to the insight that the relations among quantities of reactants and products typically form a ratio of positive integers. This means that if the amounts of the separate reactants are known, then the amount of the product can be calculated. Conversely, if one reactant has a known quantity and the quantity of the products can be empirically determined, then the amount of the other reactants can also be calculated.
This is illustrated in the image here, where the balanced equation is:
Here, one molecule of methane reacts with two molecules of oxygen gas to yield one molecule of carbon dioxide and two molecules of water. This particular chemical equation is an example of complete combustion. Stoichiometry measures these quantitative relationships, and is used to determine the amount of products and reactants that are produced or needed in a given reaction. Describing the quantitative relationships among substances as they participate in chemical reactions is known as "reaction stoichiometry". In the example above, reaction stoichiometry measures the relationship between the quantities of methane and oxygen that react to form carbon dioxide and water.
Because of the well known relationship of moles to atomic weights, the ratios that are arrived at by stoichiometry can be used to determine quantities by weight in a reaction described by a balanced equation. This is called "composition stoichiometry".
"Gas stoichiometry" deals with reactions involving gases, where the gases are at a known temperature, pressure, and volume and can be assumed to be ideal gases. For gases, the volume ratio is ideally the same by the ideal gas law, but the mass ratio of a single reaction has to be calculated from the molecular masses of the reactants and products. In practice, due to the existence of isotopes, molar masses are used instead when calculating the mass ratio.
The term "stoichiometry" was first used by Jeremias Benjamin Richter in 1792 when the first volume of Richter's "Stoichiometry or the Art of Measuring the Chemical Elements" was published. The term is derived from the Ancient Greek words "stoicheion" "element" and "metron" "measure". In patristic Greek, the word "Stoichiometria" was used by Nicephorus to refer to the number of line counts of the canonical New Testament and some of the Apocrypha.
A stoichiometric amount or stoichiometric ratio of a reagent is the optimum amount or ratio where, assuming that the reaction proceeds to completion:
Stoichiometry rests upon the very basic laws that help to understand it better, i.e., law of conservation of mass, the law of definite proportions (i.e., the law of constant composition), the law of multiple proportions and the law of reciprocal proportions. In general, chemical reactions combine in definite ratios of chemicals. Since chemical reactions can neither create nor destroy matter, nor transmute one element into another, the amount of each element must be the same throughout the overall reaction. For example, the number of atoms of a given element X on the reactant side must equal the number of atoms of that element on the product side, whether or not all of those atoms are actually involved in a reaction.
Chemical reactions, as macroscopic unit operations, consist of simply a very large number of elementary reactions, where a single molecule reacts with another molecule. As the reacting molecules (or moieties) consist of a definite set of atoms in an integer ratio, the ratio between reactants in a complete reaction is also in integer ratio. A reaction may consume more than one molecule, and the stoichiometric number counts this number, defined as positive for products (added) and negative for reactants (removed).
Different elements have a different atomic mass, and as collections of single atoms, molecules have a definite molar mass, measured with the unit mole (6.02 × 1023 individual molecules, Avogadro's constant). By definition, carbon-12 has a molar mass of 12 g/mol. Thus, to calculate the stoichiometry by mass, the number of molecules required for each reactant is expressed in moles and multiplied by the molar mass of each to give the mass of each reactant per mole of reaction. The mass ratios can be calculated by dividing each by the total in the whole reaction.
Elements in their natural state are mixtures of isotopes of differing mass, thus atomic masses and thus molar masses are not exactly integers. For instance, instead of an exact 14:3 proportion, 17.04 kg of ammonia consists of 14.01 kg of nitrogen and 3 × 1.01 kg of hydrogen, because natural nitrogen includes a small amount of nitrogen-15, and natural hydrogen includes hydrogen-2 (deuterium).
A stoichiometric reactant is a reactant that is consumed in a reaction, as opposed to a catalytic reactant, which is not consumed in the overall reaction because it reacts in one step and is regenerated in another step.
Stoichiometry is not only used to balance chemical equations but also used in conversions, i.e., converting from grams to moles using molar mass as the conversion factor, or from grams to milliliters using density. For example, to find the amount of NaCl (sodium chloride) in 2.00 g, one would do the following:
In the above example, when written out in fraction form, the units of grams form a multiplicative identity, which is equivalent to one (g/g = 1), with the resulting amount in moles (the unit that was needed), as shown in the following equation,
Stoichiometry is often used to balance chemical equations (reaction stoichiometry). For example, the two diatomic gases, hydrogen and oxygen, can combine to form a liquid, water, in an exothermic reaction, as described by the following equation:
Reaction stoichiometry describes the 2:1:2 ratio of hydrogen, oxygen, and water molecules in the above equation.
The molar ratio allows for conversion between moles of one substance and moles of another. For example, in the reaction
the amount of water that will be produced by the combustion of 0.27 moles of is obtained using the molar ratio between and of 2 to 4.
The term stoichiometry is also often used for the molar proportions of elements in stoichiometric compounds (composition stoichiometry). For example, the stoichiometry of hydrogen and oxygen in H2O is 2:1. In stoichiometric compounds, the molar proportions are whole numbers.
Stoichiometry can also be used to find the quantity of a product yielded by a reaction. If a piece of solid copper (Cu) were added to an aqueous solution of silver nitrate (AgNO3), the silver (Ag) would be replaced in a single displacement reaction forming aqueous copper(II) nitrate (Cu(NO3)2) and solid silver. How much silver is produced if 16.00 grams of Cu is added to the solution of excess silver nitrate?
The following steps would be used:
The complete balanced equation would be:
For the mass to mole step, the mass of copper (16.00 g) would be converted to moles of copper by dividing the mass of copper by its molecular mass: 63.55 g/mol.
Now that the amount of Cu in moles (0.2518) is found, we can set up the mole ratio. This is found by looking at the coefficients in the balanced equation: Cu and Ag are in a 1:2 ratio.
Now that the moles of Ag produced is known to be 0.5036 mol, we convert this amount to grams of Ag produced to come to the final answer:
This set of calculations can be further condensed into a single step:
For propane (C3H8) reacting with oxygen gas (O2), the balanced chemical equation is:
The mass of water formed if 120 g of propane (C3H8) is burned in excess oxygen is then
Stoichiometry is also used to find the right amount of one reactant to "completely" react with the other reactant in a chemical reaction – that is, the stoichiometric amounts that would result in no leftover reactants when the reaction takes place. An example is shown below using the thermite reaction,
This equation shows that 1 mole of and 2 moles of aluminum will produce 1 mole of aluminium oxide and 2 moles of iron. So, to completely react with 85.0 g of (0.532 mol), 28.7 g (1.06 mol) of aluminium are needed.
The limiting reagent is the reagent that limits the amount of product that can be formed and is completely consumed when the reaction is complete. An excess reactant is a reactant that is left over once the reaction has stopped due to the limiting reactant being exhausted.
Consider the equation of roasting lead(II) sulfide (PbS) in oxygen (O2) to produce lead(II) oxide (PbO) and sulfur dioxide (SO2):
To determine the theoretical yield of lead(II) oxide if 200.0 g of lead(II) sulfide and 200.0 g of oxygen are heated in an open container:
Because a lesser amount of PbO is produced for the 200.0 g of PbS, it is clear that PbS is the limiting reagent.
In reality, the actual yield is not the same as the stoichiometrically-calculated theoretical yield. Percent yield, then, is expressed in the following equation:
If 170.0 g of lead(II) oxide is obtained, then the percent yield would be calculated as follows:
Consider the following reaction, in which iron(III) chloride reacts with hydrogen sulfide to produce iron(III) sulfide and hydrogen chloride:
Suppose 90.0 g of FeCl3 reacts with 52.0 g of H2S. To find the limiting reagent and the mass of HCl produced by the reaction, we could set up the following equations:
Thus, the limiting reagent is FeCl3 and the amount of HCl produced is 60.8 g.
To find what mass of excess reagent (H2S) remains after the reaction, we would set up the calculation to find out how much H2S reacts completely with the 90.0 g FeCl3:
By subtracting this amount from the original amount of H2S, we can come to the answer:
Often, more than one reaction is possible given the same starting materials. The reactions may differ in their stoichiometry. For example, the methylation of benzene (C6H6), through a Friedel–Crafts reaction using AlCl3 as a catalyst, may produce singly methylated (C6H5CH3), doubly methylated (C6H4(CH3)2), or still more highly methylated (C6H6−"n"(CH3)"n") products, as shown in the following example,
In this example, which reaction takes place is controlled in part by the relative concentrations of the reactants.
In lay terms, the "stoichiometric coefficient" (or "stoichiometric number" in the IUPAC nomenclature) of any given component is the number of molecules that participate in the reaction as written.
For example, in the reaction , the stoichiometric coefficient of CH4 is −1, the stoichiometric coefficient of O2 is −2, for it would be +1 and for H2O it is +2.
In more technically precise terms, the stoichiometric coefficient in a chemical reaction system of the "i"th component is defined as
or
where "Ni" is the number of molecules of "i", and "ξ" is the progress variable or extent of reaction.
The extent of reaction "ξ" can be regarded as [the amount of] a real (or hypothetical) product, one molecule of which produced each time the reaction event occurs. It is the extensive quantity describing the progress of a chemical reaction equal to the number of chemical transformations, as indicated by the reaction equation on a molecular scale, divided by the Avogadro constant (in essence, it is the amount of chemical transformations). The change in the extent of reaction is given by d"ξ" = d"n"B/"ν"B, where "ν"B is the stoichiometric number of any reaction entity B (reactant or product) and "n"B is the corresponding amount.
The stoichiometric coefficient "ν""i" represents the degree to which a chemical species participates in a reaction. The convention is to assign negative coefficients to "reactants" (which are consumed) and positive ones to "products". However, any reaction may be viewed as going in the reverse direction, and all the coefficients then change sign (as does the free energy). Whether a reaction actually "will" go in the arbitrarily selected forward direction or not depends on the amounts of the substances present at any given time, which determines the kinetics and thermodynamics, i.e., whether equilibrium lies to the "right" or the "left".
In reaction mechanisms, stoichiometric coefficients for each step are always integers, since elementary reactions always involve whole molecules. If one uses a composite representation of an overall reaction, some may be rational fractions. There are often chemical species present that do not participate in a reaction; their stoichiometric coefficients are therefore zero. Any chemical species that is regenerated, such as a catalyst, also has a stoichiometric coefficient of zero.
The simplest possible case is an isomerization
in which since one molecule of B is produced each time the reaction occurs, while since one molecule of A is necessarily consumed. In any chemical reaction, not only is the total mass conserved but also the numbers of atoms of each kind are conserved, and this imposes corresponding constraints on possible values for the stoichiometric coefficients.
There are usually multiple reactions proceeding simultaneously in any natural reaction system, including those in biology. Since any chemical component can participate in several reactions simultaneously, the stoichiometric coefficient of the "i"th component in the "k"th reaction is defined as
so that the total (differential) change in the amount of the "i"th component is
Extents of reaction provide the clearest and most explicit way of representing compositional change, although they are not yet widely used.
With complex reaction systems, it is often useful to consider both the representation of a reaction system in terms of the amounts of the chemicals present (state variables), and the representation in terms of the actual compositional degrees of freedom, as expressed by the extents of reaction . The transformation from a vector expressing the extents to a vector expressing the amounts uses a rectangular matrix whose elements are the stoichiometric coefficients .
The maximum and minimum for any "ξk" occur whenever the first of the reactants is depleted for the forward reaction; or the first of the "products" is depleted if the reaction as viewed as being pushed in the reverse direction. This is a purely kinematic restriction on the reaction simplex, a hyperplane in composition space, or "N"‑space, whose dimensionality equals the number of "linearly-independent" chemical reactions. This is necessarily less than the number of chemical components, since each reaction manifests a relation between at least two chemicals. The accessible region of the hyperplane depends on the amounts of each chemical species actually present, a contingent fact. Different such amounts can even generate different hyperplanes, all sharing the same algebraic stoichiometry.
In accord with the principles of chemical kinetics and thermodynamic equilibrium, every chemical reaction is "reversible", at least to some degree, so that each equilibrium point must be an interior point of the simplex. As a consequence, extrema for the "ξ"s will not occur unless an experimental system is prepared with zero initial amounts of some products.
The number of "physically"-independent reactions can be even greater than the number of chemical components, and depends on the various reaction mechanisms. For example, there may be two (or more) reaction "paths" for the isomerism above. The reaction may occur by itself, but faster and with different intermediates, in the presence of a catalyst.
The (dimensionless) "units" may be taken to be molecules or moles. Moles are most commonly used, but it is more suggestive to picture incremental chemical reactions in terms of molecules. The "N"s and "ξ"s are reduced to molar units by dividing by Avogadro's number. While dimensional mass units may be used, the comments about integers are then no longer applicable.
In complex reactions, stoichiometries are often represented in a more compact form called the stoichiometry matrix. The stoichiometry matrix is denoted by the symbol N.
If a reaction network has "n" reactions and "m" participating molecular species then the stoichiometry matrix will have correspondingly "m" rows and "n" columns.
For example, consider the system of reactions shown below:
This systems comprises four reactions and five different molecular species. The stoichiometry matrix for this system can be written as:
where the rows correspond to S1, S2, S3, S4 and S5, respectively. Note that the process of converting a reaction scheme into a stoichiometry matrix can be a lossy transformation, for example, the stoichiometries in the second reaction simplify when included in the matrix. This means that it is not always possible to recover the original reaction scheme from a stoichiometry matrix.
Often the stoichiometry matrix is combined with the rate vector, v, and the species vector, S to form a compact equation describing the rates of change of the molecular species:
"Gas stoichiometry" is the quantitative relationship (ratio) between reactants and products in a chemical reaction with reactions that produce gases. Gas stoichiometry applies when the gases produced are assumed to be ideal, and the temperature, pressure, and volume of the gases are all known. The ideal gas law is used for these calculations. Often, but not always, the standard temperature and pressure (STP) are taken as 0 °C and 1 bar and used as the conditions for gas stoichiometric calculations.
Gas stoichiometry calculations solve for the unknown volume or mass of a gaseous product or reactant. For example, if we wanted to calculate the volume of gaseous NO2 produced from the combustion of 100 g of NH3, by the reaction:
we would carry out the following calculations:
There is a 1:1 molar ratio of NH3 to NO2 in the above balanced combustion reaction, so 5.871 mol of NO2 will be formed. We will employ the ideal gas law to solve for the volume at 0 °C (273.15 K) and 1 atmosphere using the gas law constant of "R" = 0.08206 L·atm·K−1·mol−1 :
Gas stoichiometry often involves having to know the molar mass of a gas, given the density of that gas. The ideal gas law can be re-arranged to obtain a relation between the density and the molar mass of an ideal gas:
and thus:
where:
In the combustion reaction, oxygen reacts with the fuel, and the point where exactly all oxygen is consumed and all fuel burned is defined as the stoichiometric point. With more oxygen (overstoichiometric combustion), some of it stays unreacted. Likewise, if the combustion is incomplete due to lack of sufficient oxygen, fuel remains unreacted. (Unreacted fuel may also remain because of slow combustion or insufficient mixing of fuel and oxygen – this is not due to stoichiometry). Different hydrocarbon fuels have different contents of carbon, hydrogen and other elements, thus their stoichiometry varies.
Gasoline engines can run at stoichiometric air-to-fuel ratio, because gasoline is quite volatile and is mixed (sprayed or carburetted) with the air prior to ignition. Diesel engines, in contrast, run lean, with more air available than simple stoichiometry would require. Diesel fuel is less volatile and is effectively burned as it is injected. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28650 |
Outline of statistics
Statistics is a field of inquiry that studies the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the physical and social sciences to the humanities; it is also used and misused for making informed decisions in all areas of business and government.
Statistics can be described as all of the following:
Computational statistics – | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28651 |
Principality of Sealand
The Principality of Sealand () is a micronation that claims Roughs Tower, an offshore platform in the North Sea approximately off the coast of Suffolk, as its territory. Roughs Tower is a disused Maunsell Sea Fort, originally called HM Fort Roughs, built as an anti-aircraft gun platform by the British during World War II.
Since 1967, the decommissioned HM Fort Roughs has been occupied by the family and associates of Paddy Roy Bates, who claim that it is an independent sovereign state. Bates seized it from a group of pirate radio broadcasters in 1967 with the intention of setting up his own station at the site. He attempted to establish Sealand as a nation state in 1975 with the writing of a national constitution and establishment of other national symbols.
While it has been described as the world's smallest country, Sealand is not officially recognised by any established sovereign state in spite of Sealand's government's claim that it has been "de facto" recognised by the United Kingdom and Germany. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, in force since 1994, states: "Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf." Since 1987, Sealand has lain within the United Kingdom's territorial waters.
Bates moved to the mainland when he became elderly, naming his son, Michael, as regent. Bates died in October 2012 at the age of 91. Michael lives in Suffolk, where he and his sons run a family fishing business called Fruits of the Sea.
In 1943, during World War II, HM Fort Roughs (sometimes called Roughs Tower) was constructed by the United Kingdom as one of the Maunsell Forts, primarily to defend the vital shipping lanes in nearby estuaries against Nazi Kriegsmarine mine-laying aircraft. It consisted of a floating pontoon base with a superstructure of two hollow towers joined by a deck upon which other structures could be added. The fort was towed to a position above the Rough Sands sandbar, where its base was deliberately flooded to sink it on its final resting place. This is approximately from the coast of Suffolk, outside the then claim of the United Kingdom and, therefore, in international waters. The facility was occupied by 150–300 Royal Navy personnel throughout World War II; the last full-time personnel left in 1956.
Roughs Tower was occupied in February and August 1965 by Jack Moore and his daughter Jane, squatting on behalf of the pirate station Wonderful Radio London.
On 2 September 1967, the fort was occupied by Major Paddy Roy Bates, a British subject and pirate radio broadcaster, who ejected a competing group of pirate broadcasters. Bates intended to broadcast his pirate radio station – called Radio Essex – from the platform. Despite having the necessary equipment, he never began broadcasting. Bates declared the independence of Roughs Tower and deemed it the Principality of Sealand.
In 1968, British workmen entered what Bates claimed to be his territorial waters to service a navigational buoy near the platform. Michael Bates (son of Paddy Roy Bates) tried to scare the workmen off by firing warning shots from the former fort. As Bates was a British subject at the time, he was summoned to court in England on firearms charges following the incident. But as the court ruled that the platform (which Bates was now calling "Sealand") was outside British territorial limits, being beyond the then limit of the country's waters, the case could not proceed.
In 1975, Bates introduced a constitution for Sealand, followed by a national flag, a national anthem, a currency and passports.
In August 1978, Alexander Achenbach, who describes himself as the Prime Minister of Sealand, hired several German and Dutch mercenaries to lead an attack on Sealand while Bates and his wife were in England. Achenbach had disagreed with Bates over plans to turn Sealand into a luxury hotel and casino with fellow German and Dutch businessmen. They stormed the platform with speedboats, Jet Skis and helicopters, and took Bates's son Michael hostage. Michael was able to retake Sealand and capture Achenbach and the mercenaries using weapons stashed on the platform. Achenbach, a German lawyer who held a Sealand passport, was charged with treason against Sealand and was held unless he paid DM 75,000 (more than US$35,000 or £23,000). Germany then sent a diplomat from its London embassy to Sealand to negotiate for Achenbach's release. Roy Bates relented after several weeks of negotiations and subsequently claimed that the diplomat's visit constituted "de facto" recognition of Sealand by Germany.
Following the former's repatriation, Achenbach and Gernot Pütz established a government in exile, sometimes known as the Sealand Rebel Government or Sealandic Rebel Government, in Germany.
In 1997, the Bates family revoked all Sealand passports, including those that they themselves had issued over the previous 22 years. There were thought to have been about 150,000 in circulation. This was due to the realisation that an international money laundering ring had appeared, using the sale of fake Sealand passports to finance drug trafficking and money laundering from Russia and Iraq. The ringleaders of the operation, based in Madrid but with ties to various groups in Germany, including the rebel Sealand Government in exile established by Achenbach after the attempted 1978 coup, had used fake Sealandic diplomatic immunity and license plates. They were even reported to have sold 4,000 fake Sealandic passports to Hong Kong citizens for an estimated $1,000 each.
On the afternoon of 23 June 2006, the top platform of the Roughs Tower caught fire due to an electrical fault. A Royal Air Force rescue helicopter transferred one person to Ipswich hospital, directly from the tower. The Harwich lifeboat stood by the Roughs Tower until a local fire tug extinguished the fire. All damage was repaired by November 2006.
In January 2007, The Pirate Bay, an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software founded by the Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, attempted to purchase Sealand after harsher copyright measures in Sweden forced them to look for a base of operations elsewhere. Between 2007 and 2010, Sealand was offered for sale through the Spanish estate company InmoNaranja, at an asking price of €750 million (£600 million, US$906 million).
Roy Bates died at the age of 91 on 9 October 2012; he had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years. He was succeeded by his son Michael. Joan Bates, Roy Bates's wife, died in an Essex nursing home at the age of 86 on 10 March 2016.
Michael Bates stated in late 2016 that Sealand was receiving hundreds of applications for passports every day.
Sealand's claim to be an independent sovereign state is based on an interpretation of a 1968 decision of an English court, in which it was held that Roughs Tower was in international waters and thus outside the jurisdiction of the domestic courts.
In international law, the most common schools of thought for the creation of statehood are the constitutive and declaratory theories of state creation.
The constitutive theory is the standard nineteenth-century model of statehood. The constitutive theory posits that a state exists exclusively via recognition by other states. The theory splits on whether this recognition requires diplomatic recognition or merely recognition of existence. No other state grants Sealand official recognition, but Bates argued that negotiations carried out by Germany following a brief hostage incident constituted recognition of existence and, since the German government reportedly sent an ambassador to the tower, diplomatic recognition.
The declaratory theory was developed in the twentieth century to address shortcomings of the constitutive theory.
In the declaratory theory of statehood, an entity becomes a state as soon as it meets the minimal criteria for statehood. Therefore, recognition by other states is purely declaratory.
In 1987, the UK extended its territorial waters from . Sealand now sits inside British waters. The United Kingdom is one of 165 parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (in force since 1994), which states in Part V, Article 60, that "Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf." In the opinion of law academic John Gibson, there is little chance that Sealand would be recognised as a nation because it is a man-made structure.
In a 1990 court case (and a 1991 appeal) in the United States regarding registering ships in Sealand as a flag of convenience, the court ruled against allowing Sealand flagged vessels; the case was never contested by Bates.
Irrespective of its legal status, Sealand is managed by the Bates family as if it were a recognised sovereign entity and they are its hereditary royal rulers. Roy Bates styled himself as "Prince Roy" and his wife "Princess Joan". Their son is known as "His Royal Highness Prince Michael" and has been referred to as the "Prince regent" by the Bates family since 1999. In this role, he apparently serves as Sealand's acting "Head of State" and also its "Head of Government".
At a micronations conference hosted by the University of Sunderland in 2004, Sealand was represented by Michael Bates's son James. The facility is now occupied by one or more caretakers representing Michael Bates, who himself resides in Essex, England.
Sealand's constitution was instituted in 1974. It consists of a preamble and seven articles. The preamble asserts Sealand's independence, while the articles variously deal with Sealand's status as a constitutional monarchy, the empowerment of government bureaux, the role of an appointed, advisory senate, the functions of an appointed, advisory legal tribunal, a proscription against the bearing of arms except by members of a designated "Sealand Guard", the exclusive right of the sovereign to formulate foreign policy and alter the constitution, and the hereditary patrilinear succession of the monarchy.
Sealand's legal system is claimed to follow British common law, and statutes take the form of decrees enacted by the sovereign. Sealand has issued "fantasy passports" (as termed by the Council of the European Union), which are not valid for international travel, and holds the Guinness World Record for "the smallest area to lay claim to nation status". Sealand's motto is "E Mare Libertas" ("From the Sea, Freedom"). It appears on Sealandic items – such as stamps, passports and coins – and is the title of the Sealandic anthem. The anthem was composed by Londoner Basil Simonenko; being an instrumental anthem, it does not have lyrics. In 2005, the anthem was recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and released on their CD "National Anthems of the World, Vol. 7: Qatar – Syria".
Sealand has been involved in several commercial operations, including the issuing of coins and postage stamps and the establishment of an offshore Internet hosting facility, or "data haven". Sealand also publishes an online newspaper, "Sealand News". In addition, a number of amateur athletes 'represent' Sealand in sporting events, including unconventional events like the World Egg Throwing Championship, which the Sealand team won in 2008.
Several dozen different Sealand coins have been minted since 1972. In the early 1990s, Achenbach's German group also produced a coin, featuring a likeness of 'Prime Minister Seiger'. Sealand's coins and postage stamps are denominated in 'Sealand dollars', which it deems to be at parity with the US dollar. Sealand first issued postage stamps in 1969, and issues through 1977. No further stamps were produced until 2010. Sealand is not a member of the Universal Postal Union, therefore its inward address is a PO Box in the British borough of Ipswich. Once an item is mailed to Sealand's tourist and government office, it will then be taken to Sealand. Sealand only has one street address, "The Row".
A Sealand mailing address looks like this:
This Felixstowe post code was terminated by the Royal Mail in December 2018.
Sealand also gifts and sells pretend titles of nobility including Lord, Baron, Count, Duke and those titles' distaff equivalents. Following Roy Bates's 2012 death, Sealand also began offering knighthoods and coats of arms.
In 1978, following the invasion, the Knights of the Sovereign Military Order of Sealand were formed by Prince Roy and Prince Michael "to provide for the Principality's defence should it come under threat or attack". In 2012, following the death of Prince Roy, membership to the Order was opened for sale to the general public.
In 2000, worldwide publicity was created about Sealand following the establishment of a new entity called HavenCo, a data haven, which effectively took control of Roughs Tower itself. Ryan Lackey, Haven's co-founder and a key participant in the country, left HavenCo under acrimonious circumstances in 2002, citing disagreements with the Bates family over management of the company. The HavenCo website went offline in 2008.
Sealand is not recognised by any major international sporting body, and its population is insufficient to maintain a team composed entirely of Sealanders in any team sport. However, Sealand claims to have official national athletes, including non-Sealanders. These athletes take part in various sports, such as curling, mini-golf, football, fencing, ultimate, table football and athletics, although all its teams compete out of the country. The Sealand National Football Association is an associate member of the Nouvelle Fédération-Board, a football sanctioning body for non-recognised states and states not members of FIFA. It administers the Sealand national football team. In 2004 the national team played its first international game against Åland Islands national football team, drawing 2–2.
Sealand claims that its first official athlete was Darren Blackburn of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, who was appointed in 2003. Blackburn has represented Sealand at a number of local sporting events, including marathons and off-trail races. In 2004, mountaineer Slader Oviatt carried the Sealandic flag to the top of Muztagh Ata. Also in 2007, Michael Martelle represented the Principality of Sealand in the World Cup of Kung Fu, held in Quebec City, Canada; bearing the designation of "Athleta Principalitas Bellatorius" (Principal Martial Arts Athlete and Champion), Martelle won two silver medals, becoming the first-ever Sealand athlete to appear on a world championship podium.
In 2008, Sealand hosted a skateboarding event with Church and East sponsored by Red Bull.
In 2009, Sealand announced the revival of the Sealand Football Association and their intention to compete in a future Viva World Cup. Scottish author Neil Forsyth was appointed as President of the Association. Sealand played the second game in their history against Chagos Islands on 5 May 2012, losing 3–1. The team included actor Ralf Little and former Bolton Wanderers defender Simon Charlton.
In 2009 and 2010, Sealand sent teams to play in various ultimate club tournaments in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands. They came 11th at UK nationals in 2010.
In 2012 Sealand was represented in the flat track variant of roller derby, by a team principally composed of skaters from the South Wales area.
Sealand played a friendly match in aid of charity against an "All Stars" team from Fulham F.C. on 18 May 2013, losing 5–7.
On 22 May 2013, the mountaineer Kenton Cool placed a Sealand flag at the summit of Mount Everest.
In 2015, the runner Simon Messenger ran a half-marathon on Sealand as part of his "round the world in 80 runs" challenge.
In August 2018 competitive swimmer Richard Royal became the first person to swim the 12 km from Sealand to the mainland, finishing in 3 hrs 29 mins. Royal visited the platform before the swim, getting his passport stamped. He entered the water from the 'bosuns chair', signalling the start of the swim, and finished on Felixstowe beach. It was accredited as an inaugural and therefore current world and British record by the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) and the British Long Distance Swimming Association (BLDSA). Royal was subsequently awarded with a Sealand Knighthood by Prince Michael. The swim was the subject of a short documentary film entitled "Escape from Sealand". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28667 |
Steve Lacy (saxophonist)
Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.
The music of Thelonious Monk became a permanent part of Lacy's repertoire after a stint in the pianist's band, with Monk's songs appearing on virtually every Lacy album and concert program; Lacy often partnered with trombonist Roswell Rudd in exploring Monk's work. Beyond Monk, Lacy performed the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols; unlike many jazz musicians he rarely played standard popular or show tunes.
Lacy began his career at sixteen playing Dixieland music with much older musicians such as Henry "Red" Allen, Pee Wee Russell, George "Pops" Foster and Zutty Singleton and then with Kansas City jazz players like Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, and Jimmy Rushing. He then became involved with the avant-garde, performing on "Jazz Advance" (1956), the debut album of Cecil Taylor, and appearing with Taylor's groundbreaking quartet at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival; he also made a notable appearance on an early Gil Evans album. His most enduring relationship, however, was with the music of Thelonious Monk: he recorded the first album to feature only Monk compositions ("Reflections", Prestige, 1958) and briefly played in Monk's band in 1960 and later on Monk's "Big Band and Quartet in Concert" album (Columbia, 1963).
Lacy's first visit to Europe came in 1965, with a visit to Copenhagen in the company of Kenny Drew; he went to Italy and formed a quartet with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava and the South African musicians Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo (their visit to Buenos Aires is documented on "The Forest and the Zoo", ESP, 1967). After a brief return to New York, he returned to Italy, then in 1970 moved to Paris, where he lived until the last two years of his life. He became a widely respected figure on the European jazz scene, though he remained less well known in the U.S.
The core of Lacy's activities from the 1970s to the 1990s was his sextet: his wife, singer/violinist Irene Aebi, soprano/alto saxophonist Steve Potts, pianist Bobby Few, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson (later John Betsch). Sometimes this group was scaled up to a large ensemble (e.g. "Vespers", Soul Note, 1993, which added Ricky Ford on tenor sax and Tom Varner on French horn), sometimes pared down to a quartet, trio, or even a two-saxophone duo. He played duos with pianist Eric Watson. Lacy also, beginning in the 1970s, became a specialist in solo saxophone; he ranks with Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, and Lol Coxhill in the development of this demanding form of improvisation.
Lacy was interested in all the arts: the visual arts and poetry in particular became important sources for him. Collaborating with painters and dancers in multimedia projects, he made musical settings of his favourite writers: Robert Creeley, Samuel Beckett, Tom Raworth, Taslima Nasrin, Herman Melville, Brion Gysin and other Beat writers, including settings for the Tao Te Ching and haiku poetry. As Creeley noted in the Poetry Project Newsletter, "There’s no way simply to make clear how particular Steve Lacy was to poets or how much he can now teach them by fact of his own practice and example. No one was ever more generous or perceptive."
In 1992, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the "genius grant").
He also collaborated with a wide range of musicians, from traditional jazz to the avant-garde to contemporary classical music. Outside of his regular sextet, his most regular collaborator was pianist Mal Waldron, with whom he recorded a number of duet albums (notably "Sempre Amore", a collection of Ellington/Strayhorn material, Soul Note, 1987).
Lacy played his 'farewell concerts to Europe' in Belgium, in duo and solo, for a small but motivated public. This happened in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges and Mons. In duo he played with Fred Van Hove, Joëlle Léandre, Mikhail Bezverkhni, Irene Aibe, Frederic Rzewski and the dancer Shiro Daimon. This recollection is published by Naked Music, Afkikker, Ghent. In Ghent he played with the classical violinist Mikhail Bezverkhni, winner of Queen Elisabeth Concours. 2 of these concerts were organized by Rita De Vuyst, his last muse in Europe, to whom he dedicated his solo CD Mother Goose solo @ afkikker. This CD is published within the book 'Bone' a Tribute to Steve Lacy.
He returned to the United States in 2002, where he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. One of his last public performances was in front of 25,000 people at the close of a peace rally on Boston Common in March 2003, shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
After Lacy was diagnosed with cancer in August 2003, he continued playing and teaching until weeks before his death on June 4, 2004 at the age of 69. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28677 |
Sabah
Sabah () is a state of Malaysia located on the northern portion of Borneo. Sabah has land borders with the Malaysian state of Sarawak to the southwest and Indonesia's Kalimantan region to the south. The Federal Territory of Labuan is an island just off the Sabah coast. Sabah shares maritime borders with Vietnam to the west and the Philippines to the north and east. Kota Kinabalu is the state capital city, the economic centre of the state and the seat of the Sabah state government. Other major towns in Sabah include Sandakan and Tawau. As of the 2015 census in Malaysia, the state's population is 3,543,500. Sabah has an equatorial climate with tropical rainforests and abundant animal and plant species. The state has long mountain ranges on the west side which form part of the Crocker Range National Park. Kinabatangan River, second longest river in Malaysia runs through Sabah and Mount Kinabalu is the highest point of Sabah as well as of Malaysia.
The earliest human settlement in Sabah can be traced back to 20,000–30,000 years ago along the Darvel Bay area at the Madai-Baturong caves. The state has had a trading relationship with China starting from the 14th century AD. Sabah came under the influence of the Bruneian Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries, while the eastern part of the territory was given to the Sultanate of Sulu because the Sultanate had helped the Bruneian empire in a battle and as such it was given to them as a gift between the 17th and 18th centuries. The state was subsequently acquired by the British-based North Borneo Chartered Company in the 19th century. During World War II, Sabah was occupied by the Japanese for three years. It became a British Crown Colony in 1946. On 31 August 1963, Sabah was granted self-government by the British. Following this, Sabah became one of the founding members of the Federation of Malaysia (established on 16 September 1963) alongside Sarawak, Singapore (expelled in 1965), and the Federation of Malaya (Peninsular Malaysia or West Malaysia). The federation was opposed by neighbouring Indonesia, which led to the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation over three years along with the threats of annexation by the Philippines along with the Sultanate of Sulu, threats which continue to the present day.
Sabah exhibits notable diversity in ethnicity, culture and language. The head of state is the Governor, also known as the Yang di-Pertua Negeri, while the head of government is the Chief Minister. The government system is closely modelled on the Westminster parliamentary system and has one of the earliest state legislature systems in Malaysia. Sabah is divided into five administrative divisions and 27 districts. Malay is the official language of the state; and Islam is the state religion, but other religions may be practised in peace and harmony in any part of the state. Sabah is known for its traditional musical instrument, the sompoton.
Sabah has abundant natural resources, and its economy is strongly export oriented. Its primary exports include oil, gas, timber and palm oil. The other major industries are agriculture and ecotourism.
The origin of the name "Sabah" is uncertain, and there are many theories that have arisen. One theory is that during the time it was part of the Bruneian Sultanate, it was referred to as "Saba" because of the presence a variety of banana called "pisang saba" (also known as "pisang menurun"), which is grown widely on the coast of the region and popular in Brunei. The Bajau community referred to it as "pisang jaba". While the name "Saba" also refers to a variety of banana in both Tagalog and Visayan languages, the word in Visayan has the meaning of "noisy". Perhaps due to local dialect, the word "Saba" has been pronounced as "Sabah" by the local community. While Brunei was a vassal state of Majapahit, the Old Javanese eulogy of Nagarakretagama described the area in what is now Sabah as "Seludang".
Meanwhile, although the Chinese since during the Han dynasty had long been associated with the island of Borneo, they did not have any specific names for the area. Instead during the Song dynasty, they referred to the whole island as "Po Ni" (also pronounced "Bo Ni"), which is the same name they used to refer to the Sultanate of Brunei at the time. Due to the location of Sabah in relation to Brunei, it has been suggested that "Sabah" was a Brunei Malay word meaning upstream or "in a northerly direction". Another theory suggests that it came from the Malay word "sabak" which means a place where palm sugar is extracted. "Sabah" (صباح) is also an Arabic word which means "morning". The presence of multiple theories makes it difficult to pinpoint the true origin of the name. It is nicknamed "Land Below the Wind" ("Negeri Di Bawah Bayu") as the state lies below the typhoon belt of East Asia and never battered by any typhoons, except for several tropical storms.
The earliest known human settlement into the region existed 20,000–30,000 years ago, as evidenced by stone tools and food remains found by excavations along the Darvel Bay area at Madai-Baturong caves near the Tingkayu River. The earliest inhabitants in the area were thought to be similar to Australian aborigines, but the reason for their disappearance is unknown. In 2003, archaeologists discovered the Mansuli valley in the Lahad Datu District, which dates back the history of Sabah to 235,000 years. The first southern Mongoloid migration then occurred 5,000 years ago, as evidenced from the discovery of archaeological site at Skull Hill ("Bukit Tengkorak") in Semporna District which is famed for being the largest pottery making site during the Neolithic Southeast Asian period. Some anthropologists such as S.G. Tan and Thomas R. Williams believe that these Mongoloids (comprising today of Kadazan-Dusun, Murut, Orang Sungai, etc.) are said to originate from South China and Northern Vietnam, and are more closely related to a number of indigenous groups in the Philippines and Formosa (Taiwan) than to the indigenous peoples of neighbouring Sarawak and Kalimantan, These claims were also supported by the findings of Charles Hose and William McDougall in their account of the "Pagan Tribes of Borneo", which stated: "The people in northern Borneo are probably part of Mongolian blood and descended from a race inhabiting southern China."
During the 7th century AD, a settled community known as Vijayapura, a tributary to the Srivijaya empire, was thought to have existed in northwest Borneo. Based on the Philippine historical record of "Maragtas", local Datus led by Datu Puti fled the oppressive policies of Rajah Makatunao (also spelled as Makatunaw) in Borneo. These datus and their loyal followers then moved to the northwest of Panay Island in present-day Aklan to established the "Madja-as" ("Madia-as"). The earliest independent kingdom in Borneo, supposed to have existed from the 9th century, was Po Ni, as recorded in the Chinese geographical treatise "Taiping Huanyu Ji". It was believed that Po Ni existed at the mouth of Brunei River and was the predecessor to the Bruneian Empire. As China had been under the conquest of Mongol Empire, all Chinese vassal state subsequently controlled by the Mongol emperors of China. Early in 1292, Kublai Khan is said to have sent an expedition to northern Borneo, before departing for the invasion of Java in 1293. As a result of this campaign, it is believed that many of his followers in addition to other Chinese traders eventually settled and established their own enclave at Kinabatangan River. In the 14th century, Brunei and Sulu was part of the Majapahit Empire but in 1369, Sulu successfully rebelled and then attacked Brunei which was still a Majapahit tributary, the Sulus were then repelled but Brunei became weakened. In 1370, Brunei transferred its allegiance to Ming dynasty of China. The Maharaja Karna of Borneo then paid a visit to Nanjing with his family until his death. He was succeeded by his son Hsia-wang who agreed to send tribute to China once every three years. After that, Chinese junks came to northern Borneo with cargoes of spices, bird nests, shark fins, camphor, rattan and pearls. More Chinese traders eventually settled in Kinabatangan, as stated in both Brunei and Sulu records. A younger sister of Ong Sum Ping (Huang Senping), the Governor of the Chinese settlement then married Sultan Ahmad of Brunei. Perhaps due to this relationship, a burial place with 2,000 wooden coffins, some estimated to be 1,000 years old, were discovered in Agop Batu Tulug Caves and around the Kinabatangan Valley area. It is believed that this type of funeral culture was brought by traders from Mainland China and Indochina to northern Borneo as similar wooden coffins were also discovered in these countries. In addition with the discovery of Chinese ceramics from a shipwreck in Tanjung Simpang Mengayau which estimated to be from 960–1127 AD of Song dynasty and Vietnamese Đông Sơn drum in Bukit Timbang Dayang on Banggi Island that had existed between 2,000–2,500 years ago.
During the reign of the fifth sultan of Bolkiah between 1485 and 1524, the Sultanate's thalassocracy extended over northern Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago, as far as "Kota Seludong" (present-day Manila) with its influence extending as far of Banjarmasin, taking advantage of maritime trade after the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese. Many Brunei Malays migrated to Sabah during this period, beginning after the Brunei conquest of the territory in the 15th century. But plagued by internal strife, civil war, piracy and the arrival of western powers, the Bruneian Empire began to shrink. The first Europeans to visit Brunei were the Portuguese, who described the capital of Brunei at the time as surrounded by a stone wall. The Spanish followed, arriving soon after Ferdinand Magellan's death in 1521, when the remaining members of his expedition sailed to the islands of Balambangan and Banggi in the northern tip Borneo; later, in the Castilian War of 1578, the Spanish who had sailed from New Spain and had taken Manila from Brunei, unsuccessfully declared war on Brunei by briefly occupying the capital before abandoning it. The Sulu region gained its own independence in 1578, forming their own sultanate known as the Sultanate of Sulu.
When the civil war broke out in Brunei between Sultans Abdul Hakkul Mubin and Muhyiddin, the Sulu asserted their claim to Brunei's territories in northern Borneo. The Sulu claimed that Sultan Muhyiddin had promised to cede the northern and eastern portion of Borneo to them in compensation for their help in settling the civil war. The territory seems never to have been ceded formally, but the Sulu continued to claim the territory, with Brunei weakened and unable to resist. After the war with the Spanish, the area in northern Borneo began to fall under the influence of the Sulu Sultanate. The seafaring Bajau-Suluk and Illanun people then arrived from the Sulu Archipelago and started settling on the coasts of north and eastern Borneo, many of them were fleeing from the oppression of Spanish colonialism. While the thalassocratic Brunei and Sulu sultanates controlled the western and eastern coasts of Sabah respectively, the interior region remained largely independent from either kingdoms. The Sultanate of Bulungan's influence was limited to the Tawau area, who came under the influence of the Sulu Sultanate before gaining its own rule after the 1878 treaty between the British and Spanish governments.
In 1761, Alexander Dalrymple, an officer of the British East India Company, concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Sulu to allow him to set up a trading post for the first time in northern Borneo, although this was to prove a failure. Following the British occupation of Manila in 1763, the British freed the Sultan Alimuddin from Spanish colonisers and allowed him to return to his throne; this was welcomed by the Sulu people and by 1765, Dalrymple managed to obtain the island, having concluded a Treaty of Alliance and Commerce with the Sultan of Sulu by the willing of Sultan Alimuddin as a sign of gratitude for the British aid. A small British factory was then established in 1773 on Balambangan Island, a tiny island situated off the north coast of Borneo. The British saw the island as a suitable location to control the trade route in the East, capable of diverting trade from the Spanish port of Manila and the Dutch port of Batavia especially with its strategic location between the South China Sea and Sulu Sea. But the British abandoned the island two years later when the Sulu pirates began attacking. This forced the British to seek refuge in Brunei in 1774, and to abandon temporarily their attempts to find alternative sites for the factory. Although an attempt was made in 1803 to turn Balambangan into a military station, the British did not re-establish any further trading posts in the region until Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819.
In 1846, the island of Labuan on the west coast of Sabah was ceded to Britain by the Sultan of Brunei through the Treaty of Labuan, and in 1848 it became a British Crown Colony. Seeing the presence of British in Labuan, the American consul in Brunei, Claude Lee Moses, obtained a ten-year lease in 1865 for a piece of land in northern Borneo. Moses then passed the land to the American Trading Company of Borneo, a company owned by Joseph William Torrey and Thomas Bradley Harris as well Chinese investors. The company choose Kimanis (which they renamed "Ellena") and start to build a base there. Requests for financial backing from the US government proved futile and the settlement was later abandoned. Before he left, Torrey managed to sell all his rights to the Austrian Consul in Hong Kong, von Overbeck. Overbeck then went to Brunei, where he met the Temenggong to renew the concession. Brunei agreed to cede all territory in northern Borneo under its control, with the Sultan receiving an annual payment of $12,000, while the Temenggong received a sum of $3,000.
In 1872, the Sultanate of Sulu granted use of an area of land in the Sandakan Bay to William Frederick Schuck, a former agent of the German consular service who had lived on the Sulu island of Jolo since 1864. The arrival of German warship "Nymph" at the Sulu Sea in 1872 to investigate the Sulu-Spanish conflict made the Sultanate believe Schuck was connected with the German government. The Sultanate authorised Schuck to establish a trading port to monopolise the rattan trade in the northeast coast, where Schuck could operate freely, without the Spanish blockade. He continued this operation until this land also was ceded to Overbeck, with the Sultan receiving an annual payment of $5,000, by a treaty signed in 1878.
After a series of transfers, Overbeck tried to sell the territory to Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy but all rejected his offer. Overbeck then co-operated with the British Dent brothers (Alfred Dent and Edward Dent) for financial backing to develop the land, with the Dent company persuading him that any investors would need guarantees of British military and diplomatic support. Overbeck agreed to this co-operation, especially with regard to the counterclaims of the Sultan of Sulu, part of whose territory in the Sulu Archipelago had been occupied by Spain. Overbeck, however, withdrew in 1879 and his treaty rights were transferred to Alfred Dent, who in 1881 formed the North Borneo Provisional Association Ltd to administer the territory. In the following year, Kudat was made its capital but due to frequent pirate attacks, the capital was moved to Sandakan in 1884. To prevent further disputes over intervention, the governments of the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany signed the Madrid Protocol of 1885, recognising the sovereignty of the King of Spain over the Sulu Archipelago in return for the relinquishment of all Spanish claims over northern Borneo. The arrival of the company brought prosperity to the residents of northern Borneo, with the company allowing indigenous communities to continue their traditional lifestyles, but imposing laws against headhunting, ethnic feuds, slave trade, and piracy. North Borneo then became a protectorate of the United Kingdom in 1888 despite facing local resistance from 1894 to 1900 by Mat Salleh and Antanum in 1915.
The Japanese forces landed in Labuan on 3 January 1942, during the Second World War, and later invaded the rest of northern Borneo. From 1942 to 1945, Japanese forces occupied North Borneo, along with most of the rest of the island, as part of the Empire of Japan. The British saw Japanese advances in the area as motivated by political and territorial ambitions rather than economic factors. The residing British and the locals were compelled to obey and gave in to the brutality of the Japanese. The occupation drove many people from coastal towns to the interior, fleeing the Japanese and seeking food. The Malays generally appeared to be favoured by the Japanese, although some of them faced repression, whilst other races such as the Chinese and indigenous peoples were severely repressed. The Chinese were already resisting the Japanese occupation, especially with the Sino-Japanese War in Mainland China. Local Chinese formed a resistance, known as the Kinabalu Guerillas, led by Albert Kwok, with broad support from various ethnic groups in northern Borneo such as Dusun, Murut, Suluk and Illanun peoples. The movement was also supported by Mustapha Harun. Kwok along with many other sympathisers were, however, executed after the Japanese foiled their movement in the Jesselton Revolt.
As part of the Borneo Campaign to retake the territory, Allied forces bombed most of the major towns under Japanese control, including Sandakan, which was razed to the ground. The Japanese ran a brutal prisoner of war camp known as Sandakan camp for those siding with the British. The majority of the POWs were British and Australian soldiers captured after the fall of Malaya and Singapore. The prisoners suffered notoriously inhuman conditions, and amidst continuous Allied bombardments, the Japanese forced them to march into Ranau, which is about 260 kilometres away, in an event known as the Sandakan Death March. The number of prisoners were reduced to 2,345, with many of them killed en route by either friendly fire or by the Japanese. Only six of the several hundred Australian prisoners lived to see the war's end. In addition, of the total of 17,488 Javanese labourers brought in by the Japanese during the occupation, only 1,500 survived mainly due to starvation, harsh working conditions and maltreatment. In March 1945, Australian forces launched Operation Agas in order to gather intelligence in the region and launch guerilla warfare against the Japanese. The war ended on 10 September 1945 after the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) succeeded in the battle of North Borneo.
After the Japanese surrender, North Borneo was administered by the British Military Administration and on 15 July 1946 became a British Crown Colony. The Crown Colony of Labuan was integrated into this new colony. During the ceremony, both the Union Jack and Chinese flag were raised from the bullet-ridden Jesselton Survey Hall building. The Chinese were represented by Philip Lee, part of the resistance movement against the Japanese, who eventually supported the transfer of power to the Crown colony. He said: "Let their blood be the pledge of what we wish to be—His Majesty's most devoted subjects."
Due to massive destruction in the town of Sandakan since the war, Jesselton was chosen to replace the capital with the Crown continued to rule North Borneo until 1963. The Crown colony government established many departments to oversee the welfare of its residents and to revive the economy of North Borneo after the war. Upon Philippine independence in 1946, seven of the British-controlled Turtle Islands (including Cagayan de Tawi-Tawi and Mangsee Islands) off the north coast of Borneo were ceded to the Philippines as had been negotiated by the American and British colonial governments.
On 31 August 1963, North Borneo attained self-government. The Cobbold Commission was set up in 1962 to determine whether the people of Sabah and Sarawak favoured the proposed union of the Federation of Malaysia, and found that the union was generally favoured by the people. Most ethnic community leaders of Sabah, namely, Mustapha Harun representing the native Muslims, Donald Stephens representing the non-Muslim natives, and Khoo Siak Chew representing the Chinese, would eventually support the union. After discussion culminating in the Malaysia Agreement and 20-point agreement, on 16 September 1963 North Borneo (as Sabah) was united with Malaya, Sarawak and Singapore, to form the independent Federation of Malaysia.
From before the formation of Malaysia until 1966, Indonesia adopted a hostile policy towards the British-backed Malaya, leading after union to the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation. This undeclared war stemmed from what Indonesian President Sukarno perceived as an expansion of British influence in the region and his intention to wrest control over the whole of Borneo under the Greater Indonesian concept. Meanwhile, the Philippines, beginning with president Diosdado Macapagal on 22 June 1962, claims Sabah from cession by heirs of the Sultanate of Sulu. Macapagal, considering Sabah to be property of the Sultanate of Sulu, saw the attempt to integrate Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei into the Federation of Malaysia as "trying to impose authority of Malaya into these states".
Following the successful formation of Malaysia, Donald Stephens became the first chief minister of Sabah. The first Governor Yang di-Pertua Negara (which later changed to Yang di-Pertua Negeri in 1976) was Mustapha Harun. The leaders of Sabah demanded that their freedom of religion be respected, that all lands in the territory be under the power of state government, and that native customs and traditions be respected and upheld by the federal government; declaring that in return Sabahans would pledge their loyalty to the Malaysian federal government. An oath stone was officially officiated by the first Chief Minister Donald Stephens on 31 August 1964 in Keningau as a remembrance to the agreement and promise for reference in the future. Sabah held its first state election in 1967. In the same year, the state capital name of "Jesselton" was renamed to "Kota Kinabalu".
An airplane crash on 6 June 1976 killed Stephens along with four other state cabinet ministers. On 14 June 1976, the state government of Sabah led by the new chief minister Harris Salleh signed an agreement with Petronas, the federal government-owned oil and gas company, granting it the right to extract and earn revenue from petroleum found in the territorial waters of Sabah in exchange for 5% in annual revenue as royalties based on the 1974 Petroleum Development Act. The state government of Sabah ceded Labuan to the Malaysian federal government, and Labuan became a federal territory on 16 April 1984. In 2000, the state capital Kota Kinabalu was granted city status, making it the 6th city in Malaysia and the first city in the state. Prior to a territorial dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia since 1969 over two islands of Ligitan and Sipadan in the Celebes Sea, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a final decision to award both islands to Malaysia in 2002 based on their "effective occupation".
Sabah (together with its neighbour Sarawak) has a greater level of autonomy in administration, immigration, and judiciary which differentiates it from the Malaysian Peninsula states. The Yang di-Pertua Negeri is the head of state although its functions are largely ceremonial. Next in the hierarchy are the state legislative assembly and the state cabinet. The chief minister is the head of government as well the leader of the state cabinet. The legislature is based on the Westminster system and therefore the chief minister is appointed based on his or her ability to command the majority of the state assembly. While local authorities being fully appointed by the state government owing to the suspension of local elections by the federal government. Legislation regarding state elections is within the powers of the federal government and not the state. The assembly meets at the state capital, Kota Kinabalu. Members of the state assembly are elected from 73 constituencies which are delineated by the Election Commission of Malaysia and do not necessarily have the same voter population sizes. A general election for representatives in the state assembly must be held every five years, when the seats are subject of universal suffrage for all citizens above 21 years of age. Sabah is also represented in the federal parliament by 25 members elected from the same number of constituencies.
Prior to the formation of Malaysia in 1963, the then North Borneo interim government submitted a 20-point agreement to the Malayan government as conditions before North Borneo would join the federation. Subsequently, North Borneo legislative assembly agreed on the formation of Malaysia on the conditions that North Borneo's rights would be safeguarded. North Borneo then entered Malaysia as an autonomous state with autonomous laws in immigration control and Native Customary Rights (NCR), and the territory name was changed to "Sabah". However, under the administration of the United Sabah National Organisation (USNO) led by Mustapha Harun, this autonomy has been gradually eroded with federal government influence and hegemony with a popular belief amongst Sabahans that both USNO and UMNO have been working together in permitting illegal immigrants from the southern Philippines and Indonesia to stay in the state and become citizens to vote for Muslim parties. This was continued under the Sabah People's United Front (BERJAYA) administration led by Harris Salleh with a total of 73,000 Filipino refugees from the southern Philippines were registered. In addition, the cession of Labuan island to federal government by the Sabah state government under BERJAYA rule and unequal sharing and exploitation of Sabah's resources of petroleum have become grievances often raised by Sabahans, which has resulted in strong anti-federal sentiments and even occasional call for secession from the federation amongst the people of Sabah.
Until the 2008 Malaysian general election, Sabah along with the states of Kelantan and Terengganu, were the only three states in Malaysia that had ever been ruled by opposition parties not part of the ruling BN coalition. Under Joseph Pairin Kitingan, PBS formed the state government after winning the 1985 state election and ruled Sabah until 1994. In the 1994 state election, despite PBS winning the elections, subsequent cross-overs of PBS assembly members to the BN component party resulted in BN having majority of seats and hence took over the helm of the state government. A unique feature of Sabah politics was a policy initiated by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in 1994 whereby the chief minister's post is rotated among the coalition parties every two years regardless of the party in power at the time, thus theoretically giving an equal amount of time for each major ethnic group to rule the state. However, in practice this system was problematic as it is too short for any leader to carry out long-term plans. This practice was then since stopped. Political intervention by the federal authorities, for example, an introduction and later abolition of the chief minister's post and earlier PBS-BERJAYA conflict in 1985, along with co-opting rival factions in East Malaysia, are examples of political tactics used by the then UMNO-led federal government to control and manage the autonomous power of the Borneo states. The federal government however tend to view that these actions are justifiable as the display of parochialism amongst East Malaysians is not in harmony with nation building. This complicated Federal-State relationship has become a source of major contention in Sabah politics.
In the 2018 general election, Shafie Apdal's Sabah Heritage Party (WARISAN) secured an electoral pact with the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and People's Justice Party (PKR) of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition. On 9 May 2018, this coalition and the Barisan Nasional ended in a tie. However, as six BN elected representatives crossed over to WARISAN, and after a short-lived constitutional crisis, a coalition of WARISAN, DAP and PKR formed a majority government on 12 May 2018 and became effective since that day. In conjunction with the celebration of Malaysia Day in 2018 under the new government, Prime Minister Mahathir has promised to restore Sabah (together with Sarawak) status as an equal partner to Malaya who together forming the Malaysian federation in accordance to the Malaysia Agreement. However, through the process of the proposed amendment to the Constitution of Malaysia in 2019, the bill for the amendment failed to pass following the failure to reach two-thirds majority support (148 votes) in the Parliament with only 138 agreed with the move while 59 abstained from the voting.
Sabah consists of five administrative divisions, which are in turn divided into 26 districts. For each district, the state government appoints a village headman (known as "ketua kampung") for each village. The administrative divisions are inherited from the British administration, which are before administered as province. During the British rule, a Resident was appointed to govern each division and provided with a palace ("Istana"). The post of the Resident was abolished and replaced with district officers for each of the district when North Borneo became part of Malaysia. As in the rest of Malaysia, local government comes under the purview of state government. However, ever since the suspension of local government elections in the midst of the Malayan Emergency, which was much less intense in Sabah than it was in the rest of the country, there have been no local elections. Local authorities have their officials appointed by the executive council of the state government.
The Ninth Schedule of the Constitution of Malaysia states that the Malaysian federal government is solely responsible for foreign policy and military forces in the country. Before the formation of Malaysia, North Borneo security was the responsibility of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In the wake of threats of "annexation" from the Philippines after President Ferdinand Marcos signed a bill by including Sabah as part the Republic of the Philippines on its maritime baselines in the Act of Congress on 18 September 1968, the British responds in the next day by sending their Hawker Hunter fighter-bomber jets to Kota Kinabalu with the jets stopped over at the Clark Air Base not far from the Philippines capital of Manila. British Army senior officer Michael Carver then reminded the Philippines that Britain would honour its obligations under the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) if fighting broke out. In addition, a large flotilla of British warships would sail to Philippines waters near Sabah en route from Singapore along with the participation of ANZUS forces. The AMDA treaty have since been replaced by the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) although the present treaty does not include East Malaysian states as its main priority, British security protection intervention can still be included over the two states. Citing in 1971 when British Prime Minister Edward Heath been asked in Parliament of London on what threats the British intended to counter under the FPDA, the Prime Minister replied: to "forces outside [Malaysia] in southern Thailand and north of the Malaysian border".
The area in eastern Sabah facing the southern Philippines and northern Indonesia have since been put under the Eastern Sabah Security Command (ESSCOM) and Eastern Sabah Security Zone (ESSZONE) following the infiltration of militants, illegal immigrants and smuggling of goods and subsidies items into and from the southern Philippines and Indonesia.
Sabah has seen several territorial disputes with Malaysia's neighbours Indonesia and the Philippines. In 2002, both Malaysia and Indonesia submitted to arbitration by the ICJ on a territorial dispute over the Ligitan and Sipadan islands which were later won by Malaysia. There are also several other disputes yet to be settled with Indonesia over the overlapping claims on the Ambalat continental shelf in the Celebes Sea and land border dispute between Sabah and North Kalimantan. Malaysia's claim over a portion of the Spratly Islands is also based on sharing a continental shelf with Sabah.
The Philippines has a territorial claim over much of the eastern part of Sabah. It claims that the territory is connected with the Sultanate of Sulu and was only leased to the North Borneo Chartered Company in 1878 with the Sultanate's sovereignty never being relinquished. Malaysia however, considers this dispute as a "non-issue", as it interprets the 1878 agreement as that of cession and that it deems that the residents of Sabah had exercised their right to self-determination when they joined to form the Malaysian federation in 1963. The Philippine claim can be originated based on three historical events; such as the Brunei Civil War from 1660 until 1673, treaty between Dutch East Indies and the Bulungan Sultanate in 1850 and treaty between Sultan Jamal ul-Azam with Overbeck in 1878.
Further attempts by several Filipino politicians such as Ferdinand Marcos to "destabilise" Sabah proved to be futile and led to the Jabidah massacre in Corregidor Island, Philippines. As a consequence, this led the Malaysian government to once supporting the insurgency in southern Philippines. Although the Philippine claim to Sabah has not been actively pursued for some years, some Filipino politicians are promising to bring it up again, while the Malaysian government asks the Philippines not to threaten ties over such issue. The Royal Malaysia Police and the Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister made a proposal to ban barter trade between Malaysia and the Philippines as it was seen only benefited to one side and threatening the security of the state. This was enforced then although facing numerous opposition from Filipino resident on the nearest Philippine islands due to the raise of the living cost in their region after the ban as well from the Malaysian opposition parties, while receiving positive welcomes by Sabahans residents and politicians. The barter trade activity was resumed on 1 February 2017 with the increase of security surveillance and enforcement from both Malaysia and the Philippines authorities to jointly secure their borders. Despite the return of barter trade activity, the state of Sabah has maintained they will always be cautious on their trade with the Philippines. In 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak have agreed to set aside the two countries’ dispute over Sabah for the meantime.
The total land area of Sabah is nearly surrounded by the South China Sea in the west, Sulu Sea in the northeast and Celebes Sea in the southeast. Sabah has a total of coastline, of which have been eroding. Because of Sabah coastline facing three seas, the state receive an extensive marine resources. In 1961, Sabah including neighbouring Sarawak, which had been included in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) through the participation of the United Kingdom, became joint associate members of the IMO. Its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is much larger towards the South China Sea and Celebes Sea than to the Sulu Sea. The state coastline is covered with mangrove and nipah forests. The mangroves cover about 331,325 hectares of the state land and constitute 57% of the total mangroves in the country. Both coastal areas in the west coast and east coast are entirely dominating by sand beaches, while in sheltered areas the sand was mixed with mud. The northern area of Tanjung Simpang Mengayau has a type of pocket beach. The areas in the west coast has a large freshwater wetlands, with the Klias Peninsula hosts a large area of tidal wetlands and a wetland centre known as the Kota Kinabalu Wetland Centre was designated as a Ramsar site in 2016. The western part of Sabah is generally mountainous, containing three highest peak. The main mountain ranges is the Crocker Range with several mountains varying height from about 1,000 metres to 4,000 metres. Adjacent to the Crocker Range is the Trus Madi Range with Mount Trus Madi, with a height of 2,642 metres. The highest peak is the Mount Kinabalu, with a height around 4,095 metres. It is one of the highest peak between the Himalayas and New Guinea. While located not far from Mount Kinabalu is Mount Tambuyukon, with a height of 2,579 metres.
These mountains and hills are traversed by an extensive network of river valleys and are in most cases covered with dense rainforest. There are lower ranges of hills extending towards the western coasts, southern plains, and the interior or central part of Sabah. The central and eastern portion of Sabah are generally lower mountain ranges and plains with occasional hills. In the east coast located the Kinabatangan River, which is the second longest river in Malaysia after Rajang River in Sarawak with a length of 560 kilometres. The river begins from the western ranges and snakes its way through the central region towards the east coast out into the Sulu Sea. Other major rivers including the Kalabakan River, Kolopis River, Liwagu River, Padas River, Paitan River, Segama River and Sugut River, in addition to Babagon River, Bengkoka River, Kadamaian River, Kalumpang River, Kiulu River, Mawao River, Membakut River, Mesapol River, Nabawan River, Papar River, Pensiangan River, Tamparuli River and Wario River.
The land of Sabah is located in a tropical geography with equatorial climate. It experiences two monsoon seasons of northeast and southwest. The northeast monsoon occurs from November to March with heavy rains, while the southwest monsoon prevails from May to September with less rainfall. It also received two inter-monsoon season from April to May and September to October. The average daily temperature varies from to , with a considerable amount of rain from 1,800 millimetres to 4,000 millimetres. The coastal areas occasionally experience severe storms as the state is situated south of the typhoon belt. Due to its location is very close to the typhoon belt, Sabah experience the worst Tropical Storm Greg on 25 December 1996. The storm left more than 100 people dead, with another 200–300 missing, 3,000–4,000 people left homeless. As Sabah also lies within the Sunda Plate with a compression from the Australian and Philippine Plate, it is prone to earthquake with the state itself have experienced three major earthquakes since 1923, with the 2015 earthquake being the latest major earthquake. The Crocker Ranges together with Mount Kinabalu was formed since during the middle Miocene period after being uplifted by the Sabah Orogeny through compression.
The jungles of Sabah host a diverse array of plant and animal species. Most of Sabah's biodiversity is located in the forest reserve areas, which formed half of its total landmass of 7.34 million hectares. Its forest reserve are part of the 20 million hectares equatorial rainforests demarcated under the "Heart of Borneo" initiative. The forests surrounding the river valley of Kinabatangan River is the largest forest-covered floodplain in Malaysia. The Crocker Range National Park is the largest national park in the state, covering an area of 139,919 hectares. Most of the park area are covered in dense forest and important as a water catchment area with its headwater connecting to five major rivers in the west coast area. Kinabalu National Park was inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000 for its richness in plant diversity combined with its unique geological, topographical, and climatic conditions. The park hosts more than 4,500 species of flora and fauna, including 326 bird and around 100 mammal species along with over 110 land snail species.
Tiga Island is formed through the eruption of mud volcano in 1897. The island is now part of the Tiga Island National Park together with Kalampunian Besar and Kalampunian Damit islands as a tourist attractions, with a mud bath tourism. The Tunku Abdul Rahman National Park is a group of five islands of Gaya, Manukan, Mamutik, Sapi and Sulug. These islands are believed to once connected to the Crocker Range but separated when sea levels rose since the last ice age. The Tun Mustapha Marine Park is the largest marine park located in the north of Sabah. It covers the three major islands of Banggi, Balambangan and Malawali. Another marine park is the Tun Sakaran Marine Park located in the south-east of Sabah. The park comprising the islands of Bodgaya, Boheydulang, Sabangkat and Salakan along with sand cays of Maiga, Mantabuan and Sibuan. Bodgaya is gazetted as a forest reserve, while Boheydulang as a bird sanctuary. These islands are formed by Quaternary pyroclastic material that was ejected during explosive volcanic activities.
The Tawau Hills National Park established as a natural water catchment area. The park contains rugged volcanic landscapes including a hot spring and spectacular waterfalls. Bordering the Philippine Turtle Islands is the Turtle Islands National Park, it consists of three islands of Selingaan, Bakkungan Kechil and Gulisaan which is notable as the nesting place for green turtle and hawksbill sea turtle. Other important wildlife regions in Sabah include the Maliau Basin, Danum Valley, Tabin, Imbak Canyon and Sepilok. These places are either designated as national parks, wildlife reserves, virgin jungle reserves, or protection forest reserve. Beyond the coasts of Sabah lie a number of islands rich with coral reefs such as Ligitan, Sipadan, Selingaan, Tiga and Layang-Layang (Swallow Reef). Other main islands including the Jambongan, Timbun Mata, Bum Bum and the divided Sebatik. The Sabah state government has enacted several laws to protect its forests and endangered wildlife species under the Animals Ordinance 1962, Forest Enactment 1968 and the Wildlife Conservation Enactment 1997 among others. Under the Wildlife Conservation Enactment, any persons hunting inside conservation lands are liable for imprisonment for five years and fined with RM50,000. The state government also plans to implement seasonal huntings as part of its conservation efforts to prevent the continuous lose of its endangered wildlife species while maintaining the state indigenous hunting traditions.
Since the post-World War II timber boom driven by the need of raw materials from industrial countries, Sabah forests have been gradually eroded by uncontrolled timber exploitation and the conversion of Sabah forest lands into palm oil plantations. Since 1970, forestry sector have contributed for over 50% of the state revenue, of which a study conducted in 1997 revealed the state had almost depleted all of its virgin forests outside the conservation areas. The state government were determined to maintain the state biodiversity while to make sure the state economy continue to alive. While in the same time facing hard task to control such activities although there is laws to prevent it. The need for development and basic necessities also became an issue while to preserving the nature. Mining activities had directly released pollutants of heavy metals into rivers, reservoirs, ponds and affecting groundwater through the leaching of mine tailings. An environmental report released in 1994 reported the presence of heavy metal at the Damit/Tuaran River that exceeded the water quality safe levels for consumption. The water in Liwagu River also reported the presence of heavy metal which was believed to be originated from the Mamut Mine. Forest fire also have become the latest concern due to drought and fires set by irresponsible farmers or individuals such as what happened in the 2016 forest fires where thousand hectares of forest reserve areas in Binsuluk of the west coast Sabah are lost.
Rampant fish bombing has destroyed many coral reefs and affecting fisheries production in the state. Moreover, the illegal activities of the extraction of river sand and gravel in the rivers of Padas, Papar and Tuaran had become the latest concern along with the wildlife and marine hunting and poaching. Due to severe deforestation along with massive wildlife and marine poaching, the Sumatran rhino have been declared as extinct in early 2015. Some other species that was threatened with extinction is banteng, bearded pig, clouded leopard, dugong, elephant, false gharial, green turtle, hawksbill sea turtle, orangutan, pangolin, proboscis monkey, river shark, roughnose stingray, sambar deer, shark and sun bear. Although the indigenous community are also involved in hunting, they hunt based on their spiritual believes and practice, and on a small scale, which differentiates them from poachers. Well-known indigenous practices, such as ""maganu totuo"" or ""montok kosukopan"", ""tuwa di powigian"", ""managal"" or ""tagal"" and ""meminting"", have helped to maintain resources and prevent their depletion.
Sabah's economy is mainly based on primary sector such as agriculture, forestry and petroleum. Currently, the tertiary sector plays an important part to the state economy, especially in tourism and services. With its richness in biodiversity, the state is offering ecotourism. Although in recent years the tourism industry has been affected by attacks and kidnapping of tourists by militant groups based in the southern Philippines, it remained stable with the increase of security in eastern Sabah and the Sulu Sea. The tourism sector contribute 10% share of the state Gross domestic product (GDP) and was predicted to increase more. Majority of the tourists come from China (60.3%), followed by South Korea (33.9%), Australia (16.3%) and Taiwan (8.3%). Tourism plays a crucial role in the state's economy as the third largest income generating sectors with the state itself recorded a total of 3,879,413 tourist arrivals in 2018, a growth of 5.3% compared to 3,684,734 in 2017. Since the 1950s, rubber and copra are the main source of agricultural economy of North Borneo. The timber industry start to emerged in the 1960s due to high demand of raw materials from industrial countries. This was however replaced by petroleum in the 1970s after the discovery of oil in the area of west coast Sabah. In the same year, cocoa and palm oil was added to the list. The Sabah state government managed to increase the state fund from RM6 million to RM12 billion and poverty was down by almost half to 33.1% in 1980. The state rapid development on primary sector has attracted those job seekers in neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines as the state labour force itself are not sufficient. The state GDP at the time ranked behind Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, being the third richest although the manufacturing sector remained small. However, by 2000, the state started to become the poorest as it still dependent on natural resources as its primary sources of income comparing to those secondary sector producer states. Thus the Sabah Development Corridor (SDC) was established in 2008 by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi with a total investment of RM105 billion for 18 years to increase the state GDP to RM63.2 billion by 2025. Around RM5.83 billion were allocated each year for infrastructures development along with the creation of 900,000 jobs. The federal government targeted to eradicate hardcore poverty by the end Ninth Malaysia Plan (9MP) with overall poverty halved from 23% in 2004 to 12% in 2010 and 8.1% in 2012. Since its establishment in 2008, the state GDP increase to 10.7% which was higher than the national economic growth of 4.8% and the world economic growth of 2.7%. Following the world financial crisis in 2009, Sabah GDP recorded 4.8% growth compared to −1.5% for national level and −0.4% for world level.
From 2010 to 2011, the state experienced a slower growth due to weaker performance on the oil and gas sector. Based on 2014 survey, Sabah GDP recorded a 5.0% growth and remained as the largest contributor in agriculture sector with 18.1%, followed by Sarawak, Johor, Pahang and Perak. Its GDP per capita however are still lowest with RM19,672, the third lowest after Kelantan (RM11,815) and Kedah (RM17,321) from all 13 states. In the same year, the state export value stood at RM45.3 billion with an import value of RM36.5 billion. Machinery and transportation equipment accounted for most of the imported products followed by fuel, mineral lubricants and others. While Sabah mostly exports raw petroleum and palm oil. The state currently has a total of eight ports with two in Sepanggar while each one in Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, Tawau, Kudat, Kunak and Lahad Datu that was operated and maintained by the Sabah Ports Authority owned by Suria Group. As part of the Eleventh Malaysia Plan (11MP), the federal government has approved an allocation of RM800 million to expand the cargo handling of Sapangar Bay Container Port from 500,000 to 1.25 million TEUs per annum as well to accommodate larger ship like Panamax-size vessels. An additional allocation of RM333.51 million was given in the same year, making it a total of RM1.13 billion with the project will start in 2017. The fisheries industries remain the important part of Sabah primary sector economy with a contribution for about 200,000 metric tonnes of fish worth RM700 annually as well contributing 2.8% to the state annual GDP. While the aquaculture and marine fish cage sector have produce 35,000 metric tons of brackish and fresh waters aquaculture and 360 metric ton of groupers, wrasses, snappers and lobsters worth around RM60 million and RM13 million respectively. Sabah is also one of the producer of seaweed, with most of the farms are located in the seas around Semporna. Although recently the seaweed industry was heavily affected by spate of kidnappings perpetrated by the southern-Philippine-based Abu Sayyaf militant group.
As of 2015, Sabah was producing 180,000 barrel of oil equivalent per day and currently receives 5% oil royalty (percentage of oil production paid by the mining company to the lease owner) from Petronas over oil explorations in Sabah territorial waters based on the 1974 Petroleum Development Act. Majority of the oil and gas deposits are located on Sabah Trough basin in the west coast side. Sabah was also given a 10% stake in Petronas liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Bintulu, Sarawak. Income inequality and the high cost living remain the major economic issues in Sabah. The high cost living has been blamed on the Cabotage Policy, although the cause was due to the smaller trade volumes, cost of transport and efficiency of port to handle trade. The government has set to review the Cabotage Policy even thought the cause was due to other reasons with the World Bank has stated that the result was due to weak distribution channels, high handling charges and inefficient inland transportation. It was finally agreed to exempt the policy from 1 June 2017; with foreign ships will go directly to ports in the East without need to go to West Malaysia although Cabotage Policy on transshipment of goods within Sabah and Sarawak and the federal territory of Labuan remain. Prime Minister Najib also promised to narrow development gap between Sabah and the Peninsular by improving and built more infrastructures in the state, in which it was continued under the Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration where the new federal government also said the state should develop in par with Peninsular with the federal government will be consistent in commitment to helping develop the state as stated by Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. Based on a latest record, the total unemployment in the state have been reduced from 5.1% (2014) to 4.7% (2015), although the number of unemployment was still high. Slum is almost non-existent in Malaysia but due to the high number of refugees arriving from the troubling southern Philippines, Sabah has since saw a significant rise on its numbers. To eliminate water pollution and improve a better hygiene, the Sabah state government are working to relocate them into a better housing settlement. As part of the BIMP-EAGA, Sabah also continued to position itself as a main gateway for regional investments. Foreign investment are mainly concentrated in the Kota Kinabalu Industrial Park (KKIP) areas. Although country such as Japan have mainly focusing their various development and investment projects in the interior and islands since after the end of Second World War. Following America's abandonment in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPPA) economic agreements in early 2017, Sabah began to turns its trade to China and India markets. To further accelerate its economic growth, Sabah also targets several more countries as its main trade partners including Germany, South Korea, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates as the destinations of exports for food-based products, Brunei, Indonesia, Taiwan, the United States and New Zealand as the destinations for palm oil and logistics sector, Russia as the destination for the oil and gas industry and Japan and Vietnam as the destinations for the wood-based furniture industry.
Sabah's public infrastructure are still lagged behind mostly due to its geographical challenges as the second largest state in Malaysia. The Sabah Ministry of Infrastructure Development (formerly known as Ministry of Communication and Works) is responsible for all public infrastructure planning and development in the state. To narrow the development gap, the federal government are working to build more infrastructures and improve the already available one. In 2013, Sabah state government allocates RM1.583 billion for infrastructure and public facilities development, of which the state were allocated another RM4.07 billion by the federal government in 2015 Malaysian Budget. Since the Eight Malaysia Plan (8MP) until 2014, a total of RM11.115 billion has been allocated for various infrastructure projects in the state. Under the Tenth Malaysia Plan (10MP), infrastructure in the rural areas was given attention with the increase of rural water, electricity supply and road coverage. Further large infrastructure allocation were delivered to both Sabah and Sarawak under the 2020 Malaysian Budget which include budget on improving connectivity and developing digital infrastructures for high speed internet in the rural areas.
Electricity distribution in the state as well in the Federal Territory of Labuan are operated and managed by the Sabah Electricity Sdn. Bhd. (SESB). Sabah electrics are mostly generated from diesel power plant, hydropower and combined cycle power plants. The only main hydroelectric plant is the Tenom Pangi Dam. The combined cycle power plant called Kimanis Power Plant was completed in 2014, supplying 300 MW, with 285 MW nominal capacity. The plant is a joint venture between Petronas and NRG Consortium that also includes facilities such as gas pipeline of Sabah–Sarawak Gas Pipeline and a terminal of Sabah Oil and Gas Terminal. There is another two combined cycle power plants with a capacity of 380 MW operated by Ranhill Holdings Berhad. In 2009, the electricity coverage covers 67% of the state population and by 2011 increase to 80%. The coverage reach 100% in 2012 after an allocation of RM962.5 million from the federal government were given to expand the coverage under the 2012 National Budget. The electrical grid is divided into two of West Coast and East Coast which has been integrated since 2007. The West Coast Grid supplies electricity to Kota Kinabalu, Papar, Beaufort, Keningau, Kota Belud, Kota Marudu, Kudat and Labuan with a capacity of 488.4 MW and maximum demand of 396.5 MW. While the East Coast Grid supplies electricity to the major towns of Sandakan, Kinabatangan, Lahad Datu, Kunak, Semporna and Tawau with a capacity of 333.02 MW and maximum demand of 203.3 MW.
In 2018, the federal government has announced that Sabah electrical grid will be upgraded to reduce power interruption. Neighbouring Sarawak has also previously announced intention to provide additional electricity power to Sabah with full export will be finalised in 2021. Electricity interconnection between Sabah, the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan and the Philippine province of Palawan as well for the whole Mindanao islands are also in the process as part of the BIMP-EAGA and Borneo-Mindanao power interconnection under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Power Grid; with the interconnection with Palawan is expected to be commenced in the nearest future. Since 2007, there is an attempt to establish a coal power plant in Lahad Datu which receiving opposition from local residents and non-governmental organisations for the pollution that would be caused by the plant. Thus Sabah has start to exploring alternative ways to generate electricity with the usage of renewable energy such as solar, mini hydro, biomass, geothermal and micro-algae and tidal technologies. The Japanese government has extended aid totalling RM172,190.93 for the solar electrification project in the island of Larapan in Sabah's east coast in 2010. In 2016, a research by United States GeothermEx Inc. and Jacobs New Zealand indicated the existence of an active geothermal system centred around the flanks of Mount Maria on Apas Kiri where it is suitable for Malaysia's first geothermal plant. The construction for the first geothermal plant that expected to be completed in 2017 however was abandoned by the previous government in the mid-2016 with no sign of further progress. A South Korean company GS Caltex also sets to built Malaysia's first bio-butanol plant in the state.
All pipes water supply in the state was managed by the Sabah State Water Department, an agency under the control of Sabah Ministry of Infrastructure Development. Operating with 73 water treatments plants, an average of 1.19 billion litres of water are distributed daily to meet Sabahan residents demands. The coverage of water supply in major towns has reach 100% while in rural areas, the coverage still around 75% with total public pipes length up to 15,031 kilometres. The only water supply dam in the state is the Babagon Dam which holds 21,000 million litres of water. To meet the increase demands, another dam named as Kaiduan Dam was being proposed to be built although being met with protest from local villagers who living on the proposed site. Sabah has a natural gas demand of per day at standard conditions in 2013, which increase to per day in 2015. As Malaysia's liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) are much cheaper through the subsidy that was given by the federal government, it was found out in 2015 that around 20,000 LPG cylinders in Sabah east coast were smuggled by immigrants from neighbouring Indonesia and the southern Philippines in a monthly basis to their countries that leading to many Sabahans hard to retrieve enough supplies of LPG. As a counter-measure, the Malaysian Ministry of Domestic Trade, Co-operatives and Consumerism (MDTCAC) has temporarily cancelled all permits to sell gas cylinders into neighbouring countries with a new policy will be implemented to control such illegal activities.
Telecommunication in Sabah and Sarawak were originally administered by Posts and Telecommunication Department until 1967, and maintained by the British Cable & Wireless Communications before all telecommunications management in the state been takeover by Peninsular-based company. The British telecommunication company have establish a submarine cable that linking Kota Kinabalu with Singapore and Hong Kong. Following the expansion of the Peninsular-based company on 1 January 1968, Sabah Posts and Telecommunication Department was merged with the Peninsular telecommunication department to formed Telecommunications Department Malaysia. All operations under Telecommunications Department Malaysia was then transferred to Syarikat Telekom Malaysia Berhad (STM) which become a public listed company in 1991 with the federal government retained a majority shareholding. There are also other telecommunication companies operating in the state although only providing cellular phone facilities. In 2006, the state has the lowest Direct Exchange Line (DEL) penetration rate, with cellular and internet dial-up penetrations rate only 6.5 per 100 inhabitants. Most residents from the low income groups would rather use mobile phones internet or use internet at their offices instead of setting up internet access at home due to the expensive cost and slow services. Until the end of 2014, there were only 934 telecommunication hotspots in Sabah. Due to this, the government are working to increase the penetration and capability of internet connection as well to bridge the gap between Sabah and the Peninsular. From 2016, Unifi fibre optic coverage began to expanded to other towns aside from the main city and major towns, alongside Celcom and Maxis by the following year with a speed up to 100 Mbit/s. In 2019, Digi launches its home fibre broadband in Sabah with speed up to 1 Gbit/s. The mobile telecommunications in Sabah are mostly use 4G and 3G and there is also a free rural Wi-Fi services provided by the federal government known as the "Kampung Tanpa Wayar 1Malaysia" (KTW) although Malaysia's government-provided public internet speeds are among the slower than many other countries.
The previous state internet traffic are routed through a hub in Malaysia's capital of Kuala Lumpur, passing through a submarine cable connecting the Peninsular with Kota Kinabalu. The systems are considered as costly and inefficient especially due to the price of leasing bandwidth with the large distance. In 2000, there is a plan to establish Sabah own internet hub but the plan was unreachable due to the high cost and low usage rates in the state. Other alternative plan including using the Brunei internet gateway in a short term before establishing Sabah own gateway. By 2016, the federal government has start to establish the first internet gateway for East Malaysia with the laying of 60 terabyte submarine cable which are developed by a private company named Xiddig Cellular Communications Sdn. Bhd. at a cost of about RM850 million through the Private Funding Initiative (PFI). Under the 2015 Malaysian Budget project of 1Malaysia Cable System Project (SKR1M), a new submarine cable for high speed internet has been built from Kota Kinabalu to Pahang in the Peninsular which completed in 2017. The 1Malaysia submarine cable system linking the state capital with Miri, Bintulu and Kuching in Sarawak together with Mersing in Johor with an increase of bandwidth capacity up to 12 terabyte per second. Another submarine cable, the BIMP-EAGA Submarine and Terrestrial (BEST) Cable Project is currently being built from Kota Kinabalu to Tawau to connecting Sabah with Brunei, Kalimantan and Mindanao which will be completed in 2018. In early 2016, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the state government and China's largest networking company, Huawei to set Sabah to become information and communications technology (ICT) hub by leveraging on Huawei's ICT expertise. More free high speed Wi-Fi hotspots are being planned in Sabah, especially to the state capital.
The Malaysian federal government previously planning to launch a state television known as TV Sabah by which the plan was only replaced by TVi (rebranded as TV Okey). The government also operate another two state radio channels, namely Sabah FM and Sabah vFM along with district channels such as Sandakan FM, Tawau FM and Keningau FM. Other radio channels such as KK FM is operated by Universiti Malaysia Sabah, while Bayu FM is only available through Astro, the Malaysian main satellite television. Several newly independent radio station have been launched in the state, namely Kupi-Kupi FM in 2016, KK12FM and VOKFM in 2017. Other Peninsular-based radio stations also had set up their offices in the state to tap the emerging market. Sabahan DJs are mostly hired and local state songs will be played to meet Sabahan listeners taste and slang. Television broadcasting in the state are divided into terrestrial and satellite television. As Malaysia aims for digital television transition, all analogue signal will be shutdown soon. There is two types of free-to-air television provider such as MYTV Broadcasting (digital terrestrial) and Astro NJOI (satellite), while an IPTV via the Unifi TV through Unifi fibre optic internet subscription. The state first established newspaper is the Sabah Times (rebranded as the New Sabah Times), founded by Fuad Stephens, who became the first Chief Minister of Sabah. Other main newspapers include the independent Daily Express, Overseas Chinese Daily News, the Sarawak-based The Borneo Post, the Peninsular-based Sin Chew Daily and the Brunei-based Borneo Bulletin.
Sabah has a total of road network in 2016, of which are sealed road. Before the formation of Malaysia, the state together with Sarawak only has rudimentary road systems. Most trunk roads was then constructed from the 1970s until the 1980s under the World Bank loans. In 2005, 61% of road coverage in the state were still gravel and unpaved, comprising federal roads and state roads, of which are sealed while the remaining were gravel and unpaved roads. This led to great disparity between roads in the state with those in the Peninsular, with only 38.9% are sealed while 89.4% have been sealed in the Peninsular. Due to this, SDC was implemented to expand the road coverage in Sabah along with the construction of Pan-Borneo Highway. Since the 9MP, various road projects has been undertaken under the SDC and around RM50 million has been spent to repairs Sabah main roads since the 8MP. The high cost to repair roads frequently has led the Sabah state government to find other alternative ways to connecting every major districts by tunnelling roads through highlands which will also saving time and fuel as the distance being shortened as well to bypass landslides. In early 2016, the expansion project of Pan-Borneo Highway has been launched to expand the road size from single carriageway to four-lane road, while city highway been expand from four-lane to eight-lane as well with the construction of new routes which will connecting the state with Sarawak, Brunei and the Trans Kalimantan Highway in Indonesia. The project is divided into two packages: the first package covering the West Coast area will complete in 2021, while the second covering the East Coast area will finish in 2022. All state roads are maintained under the state's Public Works Department, while federal roads maintained by the national Public Works Department.
Sabah uses a dual carriageway with the left-hand traffic rule. All major towns in Sabah provide public transportation services such as buses, taxis and vans along with Grab services. The KK Sentral operating express bus services from the city to Beaufort, Sipitang, Menumbok, Lawas and Brunei. The BRT Kota Kinabalu is currently under construction to provide bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Sabah's capital. A rail transport through the Western Line operated by the Sabah State Railway provides daily services for commuters, travellers, as well as for cargo transportation. A separate company owned by Sutera Harbour known as the North Borneo Railway operates leisure tour for tourists. The train station and terminal is located in Tanjung Aru, not far from the city airport. Other main stations including in Papar, Beaufort and Tenom. The current Aeropod projects on the main station in Tanjung Aru will modernise the station and provide a provision for future light rail transit (LRT). In early 2016, the state government has purchased a new diesel multiple unit (DMU) for about RM8 million to replace the old train used between Beaufort and Tenom while the rail line from Halogilat and Tenom will be upgrading by the federal government at the cost of RM99.5 million along with the arrival of another three DMUs that will be received in early 2018. Kota Kinabalu International Airport is the main gateway to Sabah. In 2005, the Malaysian federal government approved major renovation and refurbishment works to the main terminal (Terminal 1) as well as a runway expansion with construction began in 2006. As a result of the expansion, the airport is able to accommodate large passenger aircraft such as the Boeing 747. It has also become the second busiest airport in Malaysia, after Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) in West Malaysia. In 2018, the Malaysia Airlines conducts test flight for its new long-range capability passenger aircraft of Airbus A350 to the airport from Kuala Lumpur as a replacement to the largest aircraft of Airbus A380 since it is too large for Malaysian aviation markets. Other smaller airports in Sabah including Kudat Airport, Lahad Datu Airport, Sandakan Airport and Tawau Airport. Layang-Layang Airport in Swallow Reef served as a military and civilian airport. Three airlines fly from Peninsular Malaysia to Sabah: Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, and Malindo Air. Sabah Air is a helicopter chartered flight company owned by the Sabah state government, serving flights for aerial sightseeing to interested customers as well for the transportation of state government servants.
Sabah has a total of eight ports operating in Sepanggar, Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, Tawau, Kudat, Kunak and Lahad Datu. The Sapangar Bay Container Port is the main transshipment hub for the BIMP-EAGA region. Another port, the Sapangar Bay Oil Terminal is the main terminal for refined petroleum products and liquid chemical in the West Coast. Kota Kinabalu Port remain as a general cargo port. While all ports in the northern and eastern Sabah served to handle palm oil related products such as fertiliser, palm kernel as well for general cargo. Ferry service in the West Coast side provide trips to Labuan from the Jesselton Point Waterfront and Menumbok Ferry Terminal in Kuala Penyu. In the East Coast, the service are provided from the Tawau Ferry Terminal to Nunukan and Tarakan in Kalimantan, Indonesia. There is also ferry services from Sandakan to Zamboanga City and a new one that was planned from Kudat to Buliluyan, Bataraza of Palawan in the Philippines, but both services were terminated at the moment due to lack of security enforcement from the Philippine side prior to the persistent attack by pirates and kidnapping by militant groups based in the Sulu Archipelago of the southern Philippines. The planned ferry service from Kudat to Palawan was restored on 1 February 2017 after the increasing of security enforcement from the Philippines side, but were postponed again until present mainly due to both ferry operators from Malaysia and the Philippines facing difficulties in complying with the necessary requirements and permits imposed by both national and state authorities.
Sabah has four major government hospitals: Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Hospital II, Duchess of Kent Hospital and Tawau Hospital followed by 13 other government districts hospitals, women and children hospital, mental hospital, public health clinics, 1Malaysia clinics and rural clinics. Besides government-owned hospitals and clinics, there are also a number of private hospitals such as: Gleneagles Kota Kinabalu, KPJ Specialist Hospital, Damai Specialist Centre (DSC), Rafflesia Specialist Centre (RSC) and Jesselton Medical Centre (JMC). There is also an addiction treatment facility known as Solace Sabah in the state capital to treat problems related to alcoholism and drug addiction.
In 2011, the state's doctor-patient ratio was 1:2,480 – lower than the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 1 doctor to 600 patients. Because of the heavy workload and lack of interest from younger graduates, Sabah is facing the shortage of doctors. Many doctors who once served under the government hospitals have decided to move to private hospitals instead because of the heavy workload with low salaries in government hospitals although private hospitals won't easily recruiting them with some applications have been turned down. Thus to prevent the continuous shortage of doctors, the federal government has initiated various measure to produce more physicians with massive funds has been allocated to healthcare sector in every year country budget.
All primary and secondary schools are under the jurisdiction and observation of the Sabah State Education Department, under the guidance of the national Ministry of Education. The oldest schools in Sabah are: St. Michael's School Sandakan (1886), St. Michael's School Penampang (1888), All Saints' School, Likas (1903) and St. Patrick's School Tawau (1917). Based on 2013 statistics, Sabah has a total of 207 government secondary schools, five international schools (comprising Charis International School, Kinabalu International School, Sayfol International School, as well the Indonesian School of Kota Kinabalu and Japanese School of Kota Kinabalu). and nine Chinese independent schools. Sabah has a considerable number of indigenous students enrolled in Chinese schools.
Sabah state government also emphasises pre-school education in the state. This was followed with the aid from Sabah Foundation (Yayasan Sabah) and Nestlé who helped to establish pre-schools in the state. Sabah has two public universities: Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) and Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). Universiti Tun Abdul Razak (UNIRAZAK) has set up their regional centre in Kota Kinabalu. As of 2016, there is around 15 private colleges, two private university colleges together with other newly established colleges. In 1960, the overall literacy rate in North Borneo was only 24%. The recent findings in 2011 found the literacy rate have increase to 79%. Most of secondary schools leavers also did not continue their studies after completing their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) mainly due to financial burden as well because of the lack of interest and confidence to continue their studies in local higher learning institutes, with a survey in 2015 saw only 16,000 out of more than 20,000 secondary schools leavers continuing their studies.
In early 2016, Sabah had a total number of 42,047 teachers teaching in various pre-schools, primary and secondary schools. Following the decentralisation of power from the federal government to state government as well to improve the education in the state, there has been a target to reach 90% of teachers from Sabahans itself. Sabah State Library are the main public library in the state. There is another 11 Indonesian schools (beside the main Indonesian school in the state capital) spreading across Sabah mainly for Indonesian migrants children residing in the state. Since 2014, Filipino migrants children also have been enrolled to recently established Alternative Learning Centre (ALC) that was set-up by Filipino volunteers in Sabah with a collaboration with various local non-governmental organisations (NGO).
The 2015 Malaysian Census reported the population of Sabah at 3,543,500, being the third most populous state in Malaysia with the highest non-citizens population at 870,400. However, as Malaysia is one of the least densely populated countries in Asia, Sabah is particularly sparsely populated with most of the population concentrated in the coastal areas since towns and urban centres have massively expanded. People from Sabah are generally called Sabahans and identify themselves as such. There are an estimated 42 ethnic groups with over 200 sub-ethnic groups with separate own languages, cultures and belief systems. The three largest indigenous groups in Sabah are the Kadazan-Dusun, Bajau and the Murut. There are large Malay, Suluk and other Bumiputera ethnic minorities, while the Chinese makes up the main non-indigenous population. High migration to the state was noticeable in the 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of Filipino refugees, mostly the Moros, began arriving due to the Moro conflict in the county. There are also Indonesian labourers from Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Lesser Sunda Islands.
Islam is the predominant religion in Sabah, although its society remained secular. In the 2010 census, the percentage of Muslims was around 65.4%, while that of Christians was 26.6% and that of Buddhists 6.1%. In 1960, the population percentage of Muslims was only 37.9%, roughly the same as Animists (33.3%), while the percentage of Christians was 16.6% and those of other religions 12.2%. The increase was mainly contributed through the uncontrolled high immigration and controversial mass conversions in recent decades. Several other religions, such as Chinese folk religion as well as the Indian religions of Hinduism and Sikhism, are also practised in the state.
Malay is the main language spoken in the state, although with a different creole from Sarawak Malay and Peninsular Malay. The state has its own slang for Malay which originated either from indigenous words, Brunei Malay, Suluk, Cocos Malay and Indonesian language. The indigenous languages of Sabah can be divided into four language families of Dusunic, Murutic, Paitanic and Sama–Bajau. As the Hakka forms the majority of Chinese in Sabah, the Hakka dialect is the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect in the state apart from Cantonese and Hokkien dialects.
Following the change of the government after the 2018 general election, the new Sabah government has stated that there is no restriction on the usage of English in the state, adding that even if the Education Ministry stated that it is unlawful for English be used in Sabah, the restrictions will not be allowed to be imposed in the state with the state government will undo the previous improper law since the restrictions will only making damage to their younger generations especially when they need to work in private firms or organisations that require English proficiency. The new state government also stated that they will look into the matters if there is a need for a change in the state law.
Sabah culture is diverse due to a wide range of different ethnicity. In the coastal areas, Sabahan culture has been influenced by the Bruneian Malays and West Coast Bajaus on the west coast side while in the east coast it is influenced by either East Coast Bajau, Bugis and Suluk cultures with Islam being the important part of their lives. Christianity plays an important part to the indigenous cultures in the interior side in the daily lives of the Kadazan-Dusun, Lundayeh, Murut and Rungus beside their old practice of the traditional Animism and Paganism.
There is a number of cultural villages exhibiting Sabah indigenous cultures such as the Borneo Cultural Village, Mari Mari Cultural Village and Monsopiad Cultural Village, where cultural performances are also performed. Sabah Museum houses a number of collection of various artefacts, brassware and ceramics covering the diverse culture of Sabah, natural history, trade history and Islamic civilisation together with an ethnobotanical garden and science and technology centre. Other museums include the Agop Batu Tulug Museum, Agnes Keith House, Sandakan Heritage Museum, Teck Guan Cocoa Museum and 3D Wonders Museum. There is also a number of preserved British, German and Japanese colonial architecture such as the Atkinson Clock Tower, Batu Tinagat Lighthouse, Jesselton Hotel, ruins of Kinarut Mansion, the Sabah Tourism Board building, Tawau Bell Tower together with a number of memorials and monuments. Other unique tourist attractions include the "Rumah Terbalik" (Upside Down House) and Borneo Ant House.
Handicraft and souvenir productions are part of the tourism products in Sabah. In addition, the Sabah Crafts Exotica programme has been held annually since 2011 in different small local museums. Following the various initiatives by state government to encourage local entrepreneurs for state handicrafts, there were a total of 526 entrepreneurs in 2012 which increased to 1,483 in 2013 and 1,702 in 2014 with total sales value up from RM31 million to RM56 million.
Every ethnic groups in Sabah are known for their traditional music instruments, the coastal people of Bajau, Brunei Malays, Bugis, Illanun, Kedayan and Suluks known for their gendang, kompang and kulintangan; while the interior people such as the Dusun known with their bungkau, sompoton and turali, the Lun Bawang/Lun Dayeh with their bass, the Kadazan with their tongkungon, the Murut with their tagunggak, the Rungus with their sundatang, tontog and turuding; suling is mostly played by all the interior ethnic groups of Kadazan-Dusun, Murut, Rungus and Lun Bawang/Lun Dayeh in the state. Every ethnic groups also known for their traditional dances; both Kadazan-Dusun were known for their "Sumazau" dance, the Murut with their "Magunatip", the Rungus with their "Mongigol Sumundai", The Lun Bawang/Lun Dayeh with their "Alai Busak Baku", the Brunei Malays with their "Adai-Adai", the West Coast Bajau with their "Limbai" and "Kuda Pasu", the East Coast Bajau and Suluk with their "Pangalay" (also known as "Daling-Daling" or "Mengalai"), Bisaya with their "Liliput" and the Cocos Malays with their "Dansa" and "Nona Mansaya" along with many other dances from other sub-ethnic groups. Beside that, the state of Sabah is also known for batik production though the industry are still small than the major batik producer states in the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The state batik has since been commercialise to enter the international market.
Notable dishes in Sabah include the Beaufort mee, bosou, hinava, ngiu chap, pinasakan, Sipitang satay, Tuaran mee, tuhau, the bambangan fruit ("mangifera pajang") along with many others. Apart from these, Sabah also features a number of snacks like amplang, cincin, lidah, roti kahwin, UFOs pinjaram and Sandakan tart and dessert like lamban, nuba tingaa, punjung, sinamu and Tuaran coconut pudding. Every ethnic group has its own cuisine with different styles of preparing, cooking, serving and eating the food. Examples of Sabah-based companies promoting dairy product and state drinks are like the Desa Cattle, Tenom coffee and Sabah Tea. The indigenous people features a number of alcoholic drinks such as bahar, kinomol, lihing, montoku, sagantang, sikat and tuak; with the state itself becoming the third-highest in alcohol consumption in the country after Kuala Lumpur and Sarawak. The English Tea House and Restaurant in Sandakan is another attraction promoting the British tea culture. Other international shops and restaurants such as for Western food, Middle Eastern food, Bruneian food, Indonesian food, Filipino food, Japanese food, Korean food, Taiwanese food, Thai food and Vietnamese food have their presence there. The increasing number of tourists on the purpose of culinary tourism has since raised the local awareness on the importance of local food to state tourism.
Much of the information of the territory was kept in the records of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (since 1820) and British North Borneo Herald (since 1883). Joseph Hatton published one of the earliest book titled "North Borneo – Explorations and Adventures in the Equator" (1886) based on the exploration notes leave by his son Frank Hatton who served under the North Borneo Chartered Company, his son was accidentally killed during his journey in Segama River on North Borneo. Ada Pryer wrote a book about her life in North Borneo titled "A Decade in Borneo" (1894, re-issued 2001) as her husband, William Pryer also served for the North Borneo Chartered Company. The earliest known footage of North Borneo is from three American movies by Martin and Osa Johnson titled "Jungle Adventures" (1921), "Jungle Depths of Borneo" (1937) and "Borneo" (1937). Australian author Wendy Law Suart lived in North Borneo capital between 1949 and 1953 and wrote a book titled "The Lingering Eye – Recollections of North Borneo" based on her experiences there.
An English author K.G. Tregonning wrote a book about his travel to Jesselton from Singapore in a book titled "North Borneo" (1960). Various other American films have been taken in the state, such as the "Three Came Home" (1950), a Hollywood film based on the memoir of Agnes Newton Keith in her book depicting the situation of World War II in Sandakan. Keith also wrote three other books about the state, such as "Land Below the Wind", "White Man Returns" and "Beloved Exiles". A Japanese film called "Sandakan No. 8" (1974) directed by Kei Kumai tells the story of prostitution by "Karayuki-san" in Sandakan Japanese brothel based on the 1972 book "Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class" by Yamazaki Tomoko. In the Earl Mac Rauch novelisation of the American "Buckaroo Banzai" novel (Pocket Books, 1984; repr. 2001), as well in the DVD film, Buckaroo's archenemy Hanoi Xan is said to have his secret base in Sabah, in a "relic city of caves". "Bat*21" (1988), another American film depicting the Vietnam War was shot at various locations in the suburbs north of Kota Kinabalu, including Menggatal, Telipok, Kayu Madang and Lapasan. Another English author Redmond O'Hanlon also wrote a book titled "Into the Heart of Borneo" (1984) about Borneo island. While Sydney-based Australian author Lynette Ramsay Silver wrote two books about the history of Sabah such as "Sandakan – A Conspiracy of Silence" (1998) and "Blood Brothers – Sabah and Australia 1942–1945" (2010). In early 2016, a "Roll of Honour" immortalising 2,479 British and Australian soldiers who died in Sabah during the World War II has been presented by a British Royal Artillery veteran to Sabah State Tourism, Culture and Environment Department, the roll lists a record of the identity of every prisoner of war (POW) during the Sandakan Death March. In 2017, an English woman named Mary Christina Lewin (Tina Rimmer) who had lived in North Borneo since 1949, was given the ‘Sabah Cultural Icon’ as the first person to receive the award for her lifelong contribution to the people in the territory and her biggest role as educationist and artist who portrayed the life scene of North Borneo through her artworks.
Following the beginning of Malaysian films in 1970s along with the foundation of Sabah Film Production, several local films have been produced and filmed in the state by the state production, among those are "Keluarga Si Comat" (1975) and "Hapuslah Air Matamu" (1976) (produced with a collaboration with Indonesian Film Production). Abu Bakar Ellah (popularly known as Ampal) then became the leading artist of Sabah comedy film with his film titled "Orang Kita". In the present day, state-produced dramas and documentaries are usually aired either on TVi, TV1 or TV2 while state musics aired on radios through Bayu FM, Kupi-Kupi FM, Sabah FM and Sabah vFM. Sabah was featured in the British popular reality show of "" and the American show of "Eco-Challenge Borneo" in 2000. In 2001, the state was featured in a 2001 Filipino documentary titled "Sabah: Ang Bagong Amerika?" by Vicky Morales on the story of Filipino immigrants from the Sulu Archipelago escaping poverty and starvation in the Philippines by entering Sabah illegally to earn livehood but facing risk being caught, tortured and deported as Malaysian laws are getting strict on illegal migration. In 2003, the state was featured on "The Amazing Race" for the first time as well on a 2009 Hong Kong drama of "Born Rich". The state was also featured in a 2014 American documentary of "Sacred Planet" and featured again in a new edition of "The Amazing Race" as well on a Korean reality show programme titled the "Law of the Jungle", both in 2014. In early 2017, Hong Kong film industry once again choose Sabah as one of the location for a new romance film titled "She Will Be Loved".
Sabahans observe a number of holidays and festivals throughout the year. Apart from the national Independence Day, Malaysia Day celebrations and the State Governor's birthday, Sabah has start to celebrates Sabah Self-government Day on 31 August. Every ethnic groups celebrate their own festivals and the culture of open house ("rumah terbuka") with the visits of families and friends from other races and religion are a norm especially with the interracial marriage between different ethnic groups of different background. Sabah are the only state in Malaysia to declare the Kaamatan celebration a public holiday. Both Sabah and Sarawak are also the only two states in Malaysia that declare Good Friday a public holiday. Many festivals are being held annually in Sabah such as the Bon Odori Festival, Sabah Jazz, Borneo Bird Festival, Borneo Bug Fest, Borneo Eco Film Festival, Kota Kinabalu Food Fest, Kota Kinabalu Jazz Festival, Sabah Dragon Boat Festival, Sabah Fest, Sabah International Folklore Festival and Sabah Sunset Music Festival.
North Borneo sent its own teams to participate in the 1956 Summer Olympic Games, 1958 and 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, as well on the 1962 Asian Games before its athletes started representing Malaysia after 1963. To produce more athletes and to improve and raise the standard of sports in the state after Sabah became part of Malaysia, the Sabah State Sports Council was established in 1972. In addition, the Sabah Sports and Cultural Board Sports was created on 1 September 1976 before being frozen in December 1978 for more than two years until 1 January 1981 due to specific reasons. On 31 December 1996, the board been split into Sport Authority of Sabah and Sabah Cultural Board with a new board been established as the Sabah Sports Board that was maintained until present. Sabah became the host of SUKMA Games in 2002. The state also sending its teams to representing Malaysia at the Southeast Asian Games. Beside focusing to main sports, Sabah also features 11 traditional sports.
There are 12 sports complex within the state together with three main stadiums. Likas Stadium is the main stadium for the state football association of Sabah FA, followed by Penampang Stadium and Tawau Stadium. Sabah FA was founded in 1963 with the association have won one title each on the Malaysia FA Cup in 1995, Malaysia Premier League in 1996, President Cup Malaysia in 1999, 13 titles in the past Borneo Cup and 11 titles in the women's football Tun Sharifah Rodziah Cup. The association was returned to private sector in early 1996, which had long under the purview of the state government. But following the argument between the association and Sabah Sports Board, Sabah FA was suspended by the state sports council on 15 January 1998 and the management was put under the national sport ministry. The move was seen as breaching FIFA rules that stated there should be no government interference on football organisations. The persistent problems plaguing the Sabah FA since 1980s have significantly deteriorating the team performances and demoralising players in addition to the scandals that have embroiling the Malaysian football in 1994. In 2019, both Sabah and Sarawak Sports Ministries work together to establish the East Malaysia Sports Commission to facilitate the organisation of more sports programmes in the two territories including other places in the Borneo islands. With the increase of youth interests on e-sports, Sabah government also targeting to develop the sports as part of the tourism development in the state.
Sabah is a sister state/province to Jiangxi Province in China, and Ratchaburi Province in Thailand. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28678 |
Sarkel
Sarkel (or Sharkil, literally "white house" in Khazar language) was a large limestone-and-brick fortress in the present-day Rostov Oblast of Russia, on the left bank of the lower Don River.
It was built by the Khazars with Byzantine assistance in the 830s or 840s. It was named Sarkel, or 'white-house', because of the white limestone bricks used in its construction.
Sarkel was located on a hill, on the left bank of the Don River. It is currently under water, after the construction of the Tsimlyansk Reservoir. The left bank of the river was much lower, compared to the right, so a lot of it was flooded.
Across the Don River from Sarkel, on the right bank, there was located another large Khazar fortress roughly contemporary with Sarkel. This site is known as , although its ancient name is unknown. It is still there, on the much higher right bank, although suffering from erosion because of encroaching water.
Sarkel was built to protect the north-western border of the Khazar state in 833. The Khazars asked their ally, Byzantine emperor Theophilus, for engineers to build a fortified capital, and Theophilus sent his chief engineer Petronas Kamateros. In recompense for these services, the Khazar khagan ceded Chersonesos and some other Crimean dependencies to Byzantium.
Historians have been unable to determine why such a strong fortress was built on the Don. They generally assert that the costly construction must have been due to the rise of a strong regional power that posed a threat to the Khazars. Alexander Vasiliev and George Vernadsky, among others, argue that Sarkel was built to defend a vital portage between the Don and the Volga from the Rus' Khaganate. Other historians believe this polity was situated many hundred miles to the north. Another nascent power, the Hungarians, was not particularly threatening to the Khazars as long as they paid tribute to the khagan.
Constantine Porphyrogenitus records in his work De Administrando Imperio that the Khazars asked the Emperor Teophilos to have the fortress of Sarkel built for them. His record is connected to the Hungarians on the basis that the new fortress must have become necessary because of the appearance of a new enemy of the Khazars, and other peoples could not be taken into account as the Khazars’ enemies at that time. In the 10th century, a Persian explorer and geographer Ahmad ibn Rustah mentioned that the Khazars entrenched themselves against the attacks of the Hungarians.
The city served as a bustling commercial center, as it controlled the Volga-Don portage, which was used by the Rus to cross from the Black Sea to the Volga and thence to the Caspian and Baltic; the route was known as the "Khazarian Way". A garrison fortified at Sarkel included Oghuz and Pecheneg mercenaries.
Sarkel's fortress and city were captured by Kievan Rus' under prince Sviatoslav I in 965. The city was renamed Belaya Vezha (Slavic for "White Tower" or "White Fortress") and settled by Slavs. It remained Slavic until the 12th century, when the district was taken over by the Kipchaks.
Mikhail Artamonov excavated the site in the 1930s. It was the most ambitious excavation of a Khazar site ever undertaken. Among many Khazar and Rus items, Artamonov discovered Byzantine columns used in the construction of Sarkel. The site is now submerged by the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, so no further excavations may be conducted. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28680 |
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb "to stream" refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner; the term refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself, and is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it.
A client end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio content before the entire file has been transmitted. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). For example, in the 1930s, elevator music was among the earliest popular music available as streaming media; nowadays Internet television is a common form of streamed media. The term "streaming media" can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered "streaming text".
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is.
There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Some popular streaming services include Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, the video sharing website YouTube, and other sites which stream films and television shows; Apple Music and Spotify, which stream music; and video game live streaming sites such as Mixer and Twitch.
In the early 1920s, George O. Squier was granted patents for a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, which was the technical basis for what later became "Muzak", a technology streaming continuous music to commercial customers without the use of radio. Attempts to display media on computers date back to the earliest days of computing in the mid-20th century. However, little progress was made for several decades, primarily due to the high cost and limited capabilities of computer hardware. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, consumer-grade personal computers became powerful enough to display various media. The primary technical issues related to streaming were having enough CPU power bus bandwidth to support the required data rates, creating low-latency interrupt paths in the operating system to prevent buffer underrun, and enabling skip-free streaming of the content. However, computer networks were still limited in the mid-1990s, and audio and video media were usually delivered over non-streaming channels, such as by downloading a digital file from a remote server and then saving it to a local drive on the end user's computer or storing it as a digital file and playing it back from CD-ROMs.
In 1990 the first commercial Ethernet switch was introduced by Kalpana, which enabled the more powerful computer networks that lead to the first streaming video solutions used by schools and corporations. In the mid 1990s the World Wide Web was established, but streaming audio would not be practical until years later.
Practical streaming media was only made possible with advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. Raw digital audio encoded with pulse-code modulation (PCM) requires a bandwidth of 1.4Mbit/s for uncompressed CD audio, while raw digital video requires a bandwidth of 168Mbit/s for SD video and over 1000Mbit/s for FHD video.
The most important compression technique that enabled practical streaming media is the discrete cosine transform (DCT), a form of lossy compression first proposed in 1972 by Nasir Ahmed, who developed the algorithm with T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at the University of Texas in 1973. The DCT algorithm formed the basis for the first practical video coding format, H.261, in 1988. It was initially used for online video conferencing. It was followed by more popular DCT-based video coding standards, most notably MPEG video formats from 1991 onwards.
The DCT algorithm was adapted into the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987. The MDCT algorithm is fundamental to the MP3 audio format introduced in 1994, and especially the more widely used Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format introduced in 1999.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, users had increased access to computer networks, especially the Internet. During the early 2000s, users had access to increased network bandwidth, especially in the "last mile".
These technological improvements facilitated the streaming of audio and video content to computer users in their homes and workplaces. There was also an increasing use of standard protocols and formats, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML as the Internet became increasingly commercialized, which led to an infusion of investment into the sector.
The band Severe Tire Damage was the first group to perform live on the Internet. On June 24, 1993, the band was playing a gig at Xerox PARC while elsewhere in the building, scientists were discussing new technology (the Mbone) for broadcasting on the Internet using multicasting. As proof of PARC's technology, the band's performance was broadcast and could be seen live in Australia and elsewhere. In a March 2017 interview, band member Russ Haines stated that the band had used approximately "half of the total bandwidth of the internet" to stream the performance, which was a 152-by-76 pixel video, updated eight to twelve times per second, with audio quality that was "at best, a bad telephone connection".
Microsoft Research developed Microsoft TV application compiled under Microsoft Windows Studio Suite and tested in conjunction with Connectix QuickCam. RealNetworks pioneered the broadcast of a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners over the Internet in 1995. The first symphonic concert on the Internet—a collaboration between the Seattle Symphony and guest musicians Slash, Matt Cameron, and Barrett Martin—took place at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington, on November 10, 1995. "Word Magazine" featured the first ever streaming soundtracks on the Internet when it launched in 1995.
"Metropolitan Opera Live in HD" streams live performances of the Metropolitan Opera. For the 2013–2014 season, ten operas were transmitted via satellite into at least two thousand theaters in sixty-six countries.
The term "streaming" was first used for tape drives manufactured by Data Electronics Inc. that were meant to slowly ramp up and run for the entire track; slower ramp times lowered drive costs. "Streaming" was applied in the early 1990s as a better description for video on demand and later live video on IP networks. It was first done by Starlight Networks for video streaming and Real Networks for audio streaming. Such video had previously been referred to by the misnomer "store and forward video."
The first commercial streaming product appeared in late 1992 and was named StarWorks. StarWorks enabled on-demand MPEG-1 full-motion videos to be randomly accessed on corporate Ethernet networks. Starworks was from Starlight Networks, who also pioneered live video streaming on Ethernet and via Internet Protocol over satellites with Hughes Network Systems. Other early companies who created streaming media technology include RealNetworks (then known as Progressive Networks) and Protocomm both prior to wide spread World Wide Web usage and once the web became popular in the late 90s, streaming video on the internet blossomed from startups such as VDOnet, acquired by RealNetworks, and Precept, acquired by Cisco.
Microsoft developed a media player known as ActiveMovie in 1995 that allowed streaming media and included a proprietary streaming format, which was the precursor to the streaming feature later in Windows Media Player 6.4 in 1999. In June 1999 Apple also introduced a streaming media format in its QuickTime 4 application. It was later also widely adopted on websites along with RealPlayer and Windows Media streaming formats. The competing formats on websites required each user to download the respective applications for streaming and resulted in many users having to have all three applications on their computer for general compatibility.
In 2000 Industryview.com launched its "world's largest streaming video archive" website to help businesses promote themselves. Webcasting became an emerging tool for business marketing and advertising that combined the immersive nature of television with the interactivity of the Web. The ability to collect data and feedback from potential customers caused this technology to gain momentum quickly.
Around 2002, the interest in a single, unified, streaming format and the widespread adoption of Adobe Flash prompted the development of a video streaming format through Flash, which was the format used in Flash-based players on video hosting sites. The first popular video streaming site, YouTube, was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005. It initially used a Flash-based player, which played MPEG-4 AVC video and AAC audio, but now defaults to HTML5 video. Increasing consumer demand for live streaming has prompted YouTube to implement a new live streaming service to users. The company currently also offers a (secured) link returning the available connection speed of the user.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) revealed through its 2015 earnings report that streaming services were responsible for 34.3 percent of the year's total music industry's revenue, growing 29 percent from the previous year and becoming the largest source of income, pulling in around $2.4 billion. US streaming revenue grew 57 percent to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2016 and accounted for almost half of industry sales.
The term "streaming wars" was coined to discuss the new era of competition between video streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max and Apple TV+.
These advances in computer networking, combined with powerful home computers and modern operating systems, made streaming media practical and affordable for ordinary citizens. Stand-alone Internet radio devices emerged to offer listeners a no-computer option for listening to audio streams. These audio streaming services have become increasingly popular over recent years, as streaming music hit a record of 118.1 billion streams in 2013. In general, multimedia content has a large volume, so media storage and transmission costs are still significant. To offset this somewhat, media are generally compressed for both storage and streaming. Increasing consumer demand for streaming of high definition (HD) content has led the industry to develop a number of technologies such as WirelessHD or ITU-T G.hn, which are optimized for streaming HD content without forcing the user to install new networking cables. In 1996, digital pioneer Marc Scarpa produced the first large-scale, online, live broadcast in history, the Adam Yauch-led Tibetan Freedom Concert, an event that would define the format of social change broadcasts. Scarpa continued to pioneer in the streaming media world with projects such as Woodstock '99, Townhall with President Clinton, and more recently Covered CA's campaign "Tell a Friend Get Covered" which was live streamed on YouTube.
A media stream can be streamed either "live" or "on demand". Live streams are generally provided by a means called "true streaming". True streaming sends the information straight to the computer or device without saving the file to a hard disk. On-demand streaming is provided by a means called "progressive streaming" or "progressive download". Progressive streaming saves the file to a hard disk and then is played from that location. On-demand streams are often saved to hard disks and servers for extended amounts of time; while the live streams are only available at one time only (e.g., during the football game). Streaming media is increasingly being coupled with use of social media. For example, sites such as YouTube encourage social interaction in webcasts through features such as live chat, online surveys, user posting of comments online and more. Furthermore, streaming media is increasingly being used for social business and e-learning. Due the popularity of the streaming medias, many developers have introduced free HD movie streaming apps for the people who use smaller devices such as tablets and smartphones for everyday purposes.
The Horowitz Research State of Pay TV, OTT and SVOD 2017 report said that 70 percent of those viewing content did so through a streaming service, and that 40 percent of TV viewing was done this way, twice the number from five years earlier. Millennials, the report said, streamed 60 percent of content.
One of the movie streaming industry's largest impacts was on the DVD industry, which effectively met its demise with the mass popularization of online content. The rise of media streaming caused the downfall of many DVD rental companies such as Blockbuster. In July 2015, "The New York Times" published an article about Netflix's DVD services. It stated that Netflix was continuing their DVD services with 5.3 million subscribers, which was a significant drop from the previous year. On the other hand, their streaming services had 65 million members.
Music streaming is one of the most popular ways in which consumers interact with streaming media. In the age of digitization, the private consumption of music transformed into a public good largely due to one player in the market: Napster.
Napster, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network where users could upload and download MP3 files freely, broke all music industry conventions when it launched in early 1999 out of Hull, Massachusetts. The platform was developed by Shawn and John Fanning as well as Sean Parker. In an interview from 2009, Shawn Fanning explained that Napster " was something that came to me as a result of seeing a sort of an unmet need and the passion people had for being able to find all this music, particularly a lot of the obscure stuff which wouldn't be something you go to a record store and purchase, so it felt like a problem worth solving."
Not only did this development disrupt the music industry by making songs that previously required payment to acquire freely accessible to any Napster user, it demonstrated the power of P2P networks in turning any digital file into a public, shareable good. For the brief period of time that Napster existed, mp3 files fundamentally changed as a type of good. Songs were no longer financially excludable – barring access to a computer with internet access – and they were not rival, meaning if one person downloaded a song it did not diminish another user from doing the same. Napster, like most other providers of public goods, faced the problem of free riding. Every user benefits when an individual uploads an mp3 file, but there is no requirement or mechanism that forces all users to share their music. Thus, Napster users were incentivized to let others upload music without sharing any of their own files.
This structure revolutionized the consumer's perception of ownership over digital goods – it made music freely replicable. Napster quickly garnered millions of users, growing faster than any other business in history. At the peak of its existence, Napster boasted about 80 million users globally. The site gained so much traffic that many college campuses had to block access to Napster because it created network congestion from so many students sharing music files.
The advent of Napster sparked the creation of numerous other P2P sites including LimeWire (2000), BitTorrent (2001), and the Pirate Bay (2003). The reign of P2P networks was short lived. The first to fall was Napster in 2001. Numerous lawsuits were filed against Napster by various record labels, all of which were subsidiaries of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, or EMI. In addition to this, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also filed a lawsuit against Napster on the grounds of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, which ultimately led Napster to shutting down in 2001. In an interview with Gary Stiffelman, who represents Eminem, Aerosmith, and TLC, he explained why Napster was a problem for record labels: loss in revenue. In an interview with the "New York Times", Stiffelman said, "I’m not an opponent of artists’ music being included in these services, I'm just an opponent of their revenue not being shared."
The lawsuit "A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc." fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with music streaming. It was argued on 2 October 2000 and was decided on 12 February 2001. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a P2P file sharing service could be held liable for contributory and vicarious infringement of copyright, serving as a landmark decision for Intellectual property law.
The first issue that the Court addressed was "fair use," which says that otherwise infringing activities are permissible so long as it is for purposes "such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching [...] scholarship, or research." Judge Beezer, the Judge for this case, noted that Napster claimed that its services fit "three specific alleged fair uses: sampling, where users make temporary copies of a work before purchasing; space-shifting, where users access a sound recording through the Napster system that they already own in audio CD format; and permissive distribution of recordings by both new and established artists." Judge Beezer found that Napster did not fit these criteria, instead enabling their users to repeatedly copy music, which would affect the market value of the copyrighted good.
The second claim by the plaintiffs was that Napster was actively contributing to copyright infringement since it had knowledge of widespread file sharing on their platform. Since Napster took no action to reduce infringement and financially benefited from repeated use, the Court ruled against the P2P site. The court found that "as much as eighty-seven percent of the files available on Napster may be copyrighted and more than seventy percent may be owned or administered by plaintiffs."
The injunction ordered against Napster ended the brief period in which music streaming was a public good – non-rival and non-excludable in nature. Other P2P networks had some success at sharing mp3's, though they all met a similar fate in court. The ruling set the precedent that copyrighted digital content cannot be freely replicated and shared unless given consent by the owner, thereby strengthening the property rights of artists and record labels alike.
Although music streaming is no longer a freely replicable public good, streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Prime Music have shifted music streaming to a club-type good. While some platforms, most notably Spotify, give customers access to a freemium service that enables the use of limited features for exposure to advertisements, most companies operate under a premium subscription model. Under such circumstances, music streaming is financially excludable, requiring that customers pay a monthly fee for access to a music library, but non-rival, since one customer's use does not impair another's.
Music streaming platforms have grown rapidly in popularity in recent years. Spotify has over 207 million users, as of 1 January 2019, in 78 different countries, Apple Music has about 60 million, and SoundCloud has 175 million. All platforms provide varying degrees of accessibility. Apple Music and Prime Music only offer their services for paid subscribers, whereas Spotify and SoundCloud offer freemium and premium services. Napster, owned by Rhapsody since 2011, has resurfaced as a music streaming platform offering subscription based services to over 4.5 million users as of January 2017. As music streaming providers have proliferated and competition has pushed the price of subscriptions down, music piracy rates have also fallen (see chart to the right).
The music industry's response to music streaming was initially negative. Along with music piracy, streaming services disrupted the market and contributed to the fall in revenue from $14.6 billion in revenue in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009 for the U.S. CD's and single-track downloads were not selling because content was freely available on the Internet. The result was that record labels invested more in artists that were "safe" – chart music became more appealing to producers than bands with unique sounds. In 2018, however, music streaming revenue exceeded that of traditional revenue streams (e.g. record sales, album sales, downloads). 2017 alone saw a 41.1% increase in streaming revenue alone and an 8.1% increase in overall revenue. Streaming revenue is one of the largest driving forces behind the growth in the music industry. In an interview, Jonathan Dworkin, a senior vice president of strategy and business development at Universal, said that "we cannot be afraid of perpetual change, because that dynamism is driving growth."
A broadband speed of 2 Mbit/s or more is recommended for streaming standard definition video without experiencing buffering or skips, especially live video, for example to a Roku, Apple TV, Google TV or a Sony TV Blu-ray Disc Player. 5 Mbit/s is recommended for High Definition content and 9 Mbit/s for Ultra-High Definition content. Streaming media storage size is calculated from the streaming bandwidth and length of the media using the following formula (for a single user and file) requires a storage size in megabytes which is equal to length (in seconds) × bit rate (in bit/s) / (8 × 1024 × 1024). For example, one hour of digital video encoded at 300 kbit/s (this was a typical broadband video in 2005 and it was usually encoded in a 320 × 240 pixels window size) will be:
(3,600 s × 300,000 bit/s) / (8×1024×1024) requires around 128 MB of storage.
If the file is stored on a server for on-demand streaming and this stream is viewed by 1,000 people at the same time using a Unicast protocol, the requirement is 300 kbit/s × 1,000 = 300,000 kbit/s = 300 Mbit/s of bandwidth. This is equivalent to around 135 GB per hour. Using a multicast protocol the server sends out only a single stream that is common to all users. Therefore, such a stream would only use 300 kbit/s of serving bandwidth. See below for more information on these protocols. The calculation for live streaming is similar. Assuming that the seed at the encoder is 500 kbit/s and if the show lasts for 3 hours with 3,000 viewers, then the calculation is number of MBs transferred = encoder speed (in bit/s) × number of seconds × number of viewers / (8 × 1024 × 1024). The results of this calculation are as follows: number of MBs transferred = 500 x 1024 (bit/s) × 3 × 3,600 ( = 3 hours) × 3,000 (number of viewers) / (8 × 1024 × 1024) = 1,977,539 MB
The audio stream is compressed to make the file size smaller using an audio coding format such as MP3, Vorbis, AAC or Opus. The video stream is compressed using a video coding format to make the file size smaller. Video coding formats include H.264, HEVC, VP8 or VP9. Encoded audio and video streams are assembled in a container "bitstream" such as MP4, FLV, WebM, ASF or ISMA. The bitstream is delivered from a streaming server to a streaming client (e.g., the computer user with their Internet-connected laptop) using a transport protocol, such as Adobe's RTMP or RTP. In the 2010s, technologies such as Apple's HLS, Microsoft's Smooth Streaming, Adobe's HDS and non-proprietary formats such as MPEG-DASH have emerged to enable adaptive bitrate streaming over HTTP as an alternative to using proprietary transport protocols. Often, a streaming transport protocol is used to send video from an event venue to a "cloud" transcoding service and CDN, which then uses HTTP-based transport protocols to distribute the video to individual homes and users. The streaming client (the end user) may interact with the streaming server using a control protocol, such as MMS or RTSP.
The quality of the interaction between servers and users is based on the workload of the streaming service; as more users attempt to access a service, the more quality is affected unless there is enough bandwidth or the host is using enough proxy networks. ๗ Deploying clusters of streaming servers is one such method where there are regional servers spread across the network, managed by a singular, central server containing copies of all the media files as well as the IP addresses of the regional servers. This central server then uses load balancing and scheduling algorithms to redirect users to nearby regional servers capable of accommodating them. This approach also allows the central server to provide streaming data to both users as well as regional servers using FFMpeg libraries if required, thus demanding the central server to have powerful data-processing and immense storage capabilities. In return, workloads on the streaming backbone network are balanced and alleviated, allowing for optimal streaming quality.
Designing a network protocol to support streaming media raises many problems. Datagram protocols, such as the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), send the media stream as a series of small packets. This is simple and efficient; however, there is no mechanism within the protocol to guarantee delivery. It is up to the receiving application to detect loss or corruption and recover data using error correction techniques. If data is lost, the stream may suffer a dropout. The Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and the Real-time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) were specifically designed to stream media over networks. RTSP runs over a variety of transport protocols, while the latter two are built on top of UDP.
Another approach that seems to incorporate both the advantages of using a standard web protocol and the ability to be used for streaming even live content is adaptive bitrate streaming. HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming is based on HTTP progressive download, but contrary to the previous approach, here the files are very small, so that they can be compared to the streaming of packets, much like the case of using RTSP and RTP. Reliable protocols, such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), guarantee correct delivery of each bit in the media stream. However, they accomplish this with a system of timeouts and retries, which makes them more complex to implement. It also means that when there is data loss on the network, the media stream stalls while the protocol handlers detect the loss and retransmit the missing data. Clients can minimize this effect by buffering data for display. While delay due to buffering is acceptable in video on demand scenarios, users of interactive applications such as video conferencing will experience a loss of fidelity if the delay caused by buffering exceeds 200 ms.
Unicast protocols send a separate copy of the media stream from the server to each recipient. Unicast is the norm for most Internet connections, but does not scale well when many users want to view the same television program concurrently. Multicast protocols were developed to reduce the server/network loads resulting from duplicate data streams that occur when many recipients receive unicast content streams independently. These protocols send a single stream from the source to a group of recipients. Depending on the network infrastructure and type, multicast transmission may or may not be feasible. One potential disadvantage of multicasting is the loss of video on demand functionality. Continuous streaming of radio or television material usually precludes the recipient's ability to control playback. However, this problem can be mitigated by elements such as caching servers, digital set-top boxes, and buffered media players.
IP Multicast provides a means to send a single media stream to a group of recipients on a computer network. A multicast protocol, usually Internet Group Management Protocol, is used to manage delivery of multicast streams to the groups of recipients on a LAN. One of the challenges in deploying IP multicast is that routers and firewalls between LANs must allow the passage of packets destined to multicast groups. If the organization that is serving the content has control over the network between server and recipients (i.e., educational, government, and corporate intranets), then routing protocols such as Protocol Independent Multicast can be used to deliver stream content to multiple Local Area Network segments. As in mass delivery of content, multicast protocols need much less energy and other resources, widespread introduction of reliable multicast (broadcast-like) protocols and their preferential use, wherever possible, is a significant ecological and economic challenge. Peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols arrange for prerecorded streams to be sent between computers. This prevents the server and its network connections from becoming a bottleneck. However, it raises technical, performance, security, quality, and business issues.
Useful – and typical – applications of the "streaming" concept are, for example, long video lectures performed "online" on the Internet. An advantage of this presentation is that these lectures can be very long, although they can always be interrupted or repeated at arbitrary places. There are also new marketing concepts. For example, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra sells Internet live streams of whole concerts, instead of several CDs or similar fixed media, by their so-called "Digital Concert Hall" using YouTube for "trailing" purposes only. These "online concerts" are also spread over a lot of different places – cinemas – at various places on the globe. A similar concept is used by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There also is a livestream from the International Space Station.
Media that is live streamed can be recorded through certain media players such as VLC player, or through the use of a screen recorder. Live-streaming platforms such as Twitch may also incorporate a video on demand system that allows automatic recording of live broadcasts so that they can be watched later. The popular site, YouTube also has recordings of live broadcasts, including television shows aired on major networks. These streams have the potential to be recorded by anyone who has access to them, whether legally or otherwise.
Streaming copyrighted content can involve making infringing copies of the works in question. The recording and distribution of streamed content is also an issue for many companies that rely on revenue based on views or attendance.
The net greenhouse gas emissions from streaming music have been estimated at between 200 and 350 million kilograms per year in the United States, according to a 2019 study. This is an increase from emissions in the pre-digital music period, which were estimated at "140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million in 2000."
There are several ways to decrease greenhouse gas emissions associated with streaming music, including efforts to make data centers carbon neutral, by converting to electricity produced from renewable sources. On an individual level, purchase of a physical CD may be more environmentally friendly if it is to be played more than 27 times. Another option for reducing energy use can be downloading the music for offline listening, to reduce the need for streaming over distance. The Spotify service has a built-in local cache to reduce the necessity of repeating song streams. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28682 |
Session Initiation Protocol
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating real-time sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications. SIP is used for signaling and controlling multimedia communication sessions in applications of Internet telephony for voice and video calls, in private IP telephone systems, in instant messaging over Internet Protocol (IP) networks as well as mobile phone calling over LTE (VoLTE).
The protocol defines the specific format of messages exchanged and the sequence of communications for cooperation of the participants. SIP is a text-based protocol, incorporating many elements of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). A call established with SIP may consist of multiple media streams, but no separate streams are required for applications, such as text messaging, that exchange data as payload in the SIP message.
SIP works in conjunction with several other protocols that specify and carry the session media. Most commonly, media type and parameter negotiation and media setup are performed with the Session Description Protocol (SDP), which is carried as payload in SIP messages. SIP is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer protocol, and can be used with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). For secure transmissions of SIP messages over insecure network links, the protocol may be encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS). For the transmission of media streams (voice, video) the SDP payload carried in SIP messages typically employs the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) or the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).
SIP was originally designed by Mark Handley, Henning Schulzrinne, Eve Schooler and Jonathan Rosenberg in 1996 to facilitate establishing multicast multimedia sessions on the Mbone. The protocol was standardized as in 1999. In November 2000, SIP was accepted as a 3GPP signaling protocol and permanent element of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture for IP-based streaming multimedia services in cellular networks. In June 2002 the specification was revised in and various extensions and clarifications have been published since.
SIP was designed to provide a signaling and call setup protocol for IP-based communications supporting the call processing functions and features present in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) with a vision of supporting new multimedia applications. It has been extended for video conferencing, streaming media distribution, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer, Internet fax and online games.
SIP is distinguished by its proponents for having roots in the Internet community rather than in the telecommunications industry. SIP has been standardized primarily by the IETF, while other protocols, such as H.323, have traditionally been associated with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
SIP is only involved in the signaling operations of a media communication session and is primarily used to set up and terminate voice or video calls. SIP can be used to establish two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions. It also allows modification of existing calls. The modification can involve changing addresses or ports, inviting more participants, and adding or deleting media streams. SIP has also found applications in messaging applications, such as instant messaging, and event subscription and notification.
SIP works in conjunction with several other protocols that specify the media format and coding and that carry the media once the call is set up. For call setup, the body of a SIP message contains a Session Description Protocol (SDP) data unit, which specifies the media format, codec and media communication protocol. Voice and video media streams are typically carried between the terminals using the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) or Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).
Every resource of a SIP network, such as user agents, call routers, and voicemail boxes, are identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The syntax of the URI follows the general standard syntax also used in Web services and e-mail. The URI scheme used for SIP is "sip" and a typical SIP URI has the form "sip:username@domainname" or "sip:username@hostport", where "domainname" requires DNS SRV records to locate the servers for SIP domain while "hostport" can be an IP address or a fully qualified domain name of the host and port. If secure transmission is required, the scheme "sips" is used.
SIP employs design elements similar to the HTTP request and response transaction model. Each transaction consists of a client request that invokes a particular method or function on the server and at least one response. SIP reuses most of the header fields, encoding rules and status codes of HTTP, providing a readable text-based format.
SIP can be carried by several transport layer protocols including Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). SIP clients typically use TCP or UDP on port numbers 5060 or 5061 for SIP traffic to servers and other endpoints. Port 5060 is commonly used for non-encrypted signaling traffic whereas port 5061 is typically used for traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS).
SIP-based telephony networks often implement call processing features of Signaling System 7 (SS7), for which special SIP protocol extensions exist, although the two protocols themselves are very different. SS7 is a centralized protocol, characterized by a complex central network architecture and dumb endpoints (traditional telephone handsets). SIP is a client-server protocol of equipotent peers. SIP features are implemented in the communicating endpoints, while the traditional SS7 architecture is in use only between switching centers.
The network elements that use the Session Initiation Protocol for communication are called "SIP user agents". Each "user agent" (UA) performs the function of a "user agent client" (UAC) when it is requesting a service function, and that of a "user agent server" (UAS) when responding to a request. Thus, any two SIP endpoints may in principle operate without any intervening SIP infrastructure. However, for network operational reasons, for provisioning public services to users, and for directory services, SIP defines several specific types of network server elements. Each of these service elements also communicates within the client-server model implemented in user agent clients and servers.
A user agent is a logical network endpoint that sends or receives SIP messages and manages SIP sessions. User agents have client and server components. The user agent client (UAC) sends SIP requests. The user agent server (UAS) receives requests and returns a SIP response. Unlike other network protocols that fix the roles of client and server, e.g., in HTTP, in which a web browser only acts as a client, and never as a server, SIP requires both peers to implement both roles. The roles of UAC and UAS only last for the duration of a SIP transaction.
A SIP phone is an IP phone that implements client and server functions of a SIP user agent and provides the traditional call functions of a telephone, such as dial, answer, reject, call hold, and call transfer. SIP phones may be implemented as a hardware device or as a softphone. As vendors increasingly implement SIP as a standard telephony platform, the distinction between hardware-based and software-based SIP phones is blurred and SIP elements are implemented in the basic firmware functions of many IP-capable communications devices such as smartphones.
In SIP, as in HTTP, the user agent may identify itself using a message header field ("User-Agent"), containing a text description of the software, hardware, or the product name. The user agent field is sent in request messages, which means that the receiving SIP server can evaluate this information to perform device-specific configuration or feature activation. Operators of SIP network elements sometimes store this information in customer account portals, where it can be useful in diagnosing SIP compatibility problems or in the display of service status.
A proxy server is a network server with UAC and UAS components that functions as an intermediary entity for the purpose of performing requests on behalf of other network elements. A proxy server primarily plays the role of call routing; it sends SIP requests to another entity closer to it destination. Proxies are also useful for enforcing policy, such as for determining whether a user is allowed to make a call. A proxy interprets, and, if necessary, rewrites specific parts of a request message before forwarding it.
SIP proxy servers that route messages to more than one destination are called forking proxies. The forking of a SIP request establishes multiple dialogs from the single request. Thus, a call may be answered from one of multiple SIP endpoints. For identification of multiple dialogs, each dialog has an identifier with contributions from both endpoints.
A redirect server is a user agent server that generates 3xx (redirection) responses to requests it receives, directing the client to contact an alternate set of URIs. A redirect server allows proxy servers to direct SIP session invitations to external domains.
A registrar is a SIP endpoint that provides a location service. It accepts REGISTER requests, recording the address and other parameters from the user agent. For subsequent requests, it provides an essential means to locate possible communication peers on the network. The location service links one or more IP addresses to the SIP URI of the registering agent. Multiple user agents may register for the same URI, with the result that all registered user agents receive the calls to the URI.
SIP registrars are logical elements, and are often co-located with SIP proxies. To improve network scalability, location services may instead be located with a redirect server.
Session border controllers serve as middleboxes between user agents and SIP servers for various types of functions, including network topology hiding and assistance in NAT traversal.
Gateways can be used to interconnect a SIP network to other networks, such as the public switched telephone network, which use different protocols or technologies.
SIP is a text-based protocol with syntax similar to that of HTTP. There are two different types of SIP messages: requests and responses. The first line of a request has a "method", defining the nature of the request, and a Request-URI, indicating where the request should be sent. The first line of a response has a "response code".
Requests initiate a functionality of the protocol. They are sent by a user agent client to the server, and are answered with one or more SIP responses, which return a result code of the transaction, and generally indicate the success, failure, or other state of the transaction.
Responses are sent by the user agent server indicating the result of a received request. Several classes of responses are recognized, determined by the numerical range of result codes:
SIP defines a transaction mechanism to control the exchanges between participants and deliver messages reliably. A transaction is a state of a session, which is controlled by various timers. Client transactions send requests and server transactions respond to those requests with one or more responses. The responses may include provisional responses with a response code in the form "1xx", and one or multiple final responses (2xx – 6xx).
Transactions are further categorized as either type "invite" or type "non-invite". Invite transactions differ in that they can establish a long-running conversation, referred to as a "dialog" in SIP, and so include an acknowledgment (ACK) of any non-failing final response, e.g., "200 OK".
The Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) is the SIP-based suite of standards for instant messaging and presence information. Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP) allows instant message sessions and file transfer.
The SIP developer community meets regularly at conferences organized by SIP Forum to test interoperability of SIP implementations. The TTCN-3 test specification language, developed by a task force at ETSI (STF 196), is used for specifying conformance tests for SIP implementations.
When developing SIP software or deploying a new SIP infrastructure, it is important to test capability of servers and IP networks to handle certain call load: number of concurrent calls and number of calls per second. SIP performance tester software is used to simulate SIP and RTP traffic to see if the server and IP network are stable under the call load. The software measures performance indicators like answer delay, answer/seizure ratio, RTP jitter and packet loss, round-trip delay time.
"SIP connection" is a marketing term for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services offered by many Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs). The service provides routing of telephone calls from a client's private branch exchange (PBX) telephone system to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Such services may simplify corporate information system infrastructure by sharing Internet access for voice and data, and removing the cost for Basic Rate Interface (BRI) or Primary Rate Interface (PRI) telephone circuits.
SIP trunking is a similar marketing term preferred for when the service is used to simplify a telecom infrastructure by sharing the carrier access circuit for voice, data, and Internet traffic while removing the need for PRI circuits.
SIP-enabled video surveillance cameras can initiate calls to alert the operator of events, such as motion of objects in a protected area.
SIP is used in audio over IP for broadcasting applications where it provides an interoperable means for audio interfaces from different manufacturers to make connections with one another.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Advanced Networking Technologies Division provides a public-domain Java implementation that serves as a reference implementation for the standard. The implementation can work in proxy server or user agent scenarios and has been used in numerous commercial and research projects. It supports in full and a number of extension RFCs including (event notification) and (reliable provisional responses).
Numerous other commercial and open-source SIP implementations exist. See List of SIP software.
SIP-I, Session Initiation Protocol with encapsulated ISUP, is a protocol used to create, modify, and terminate communication sessions based on ISUP using SIP and IP networks. Services using SIP-I include voice, video telephony, fax and data. SIP-I and SIP-T are two protocols with similar features, notably to allow ISUP messages to be transported over SIP networks. This preserves all of the detail available in the ISUP header. SIP-I was defined by the ITU-T, whereas SIP-T was defined by the IETF.
Concerns about the security of calls via the public internet have been addressed by encryption of the SIP protocol for secure transmission. The URI scheme SIPS is used to mandate that SIP communication be secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS). SIPS URIs take the form sips:user@example.com.
End-to-end encryption of SIP is only possible if there is a direct connection between communication endpoints. While a direct connection can be made via Peer-to-peer SIP or via a VPN between the endpoints, most SIP communication involves multiple hops, with the first hop being from a user agent to the user agent's ITSP. For the multiple-hop case, SIPS will only secure the first hop; the remaining hops will normally not be secured with TLS and the SIP communication will be insecure. In contrast, the HTTPS protocol provides end-to-end security as it is done with a direct connection and does not involve the notion of hops.
The media streams (audio and video), which are separate connections from the SIPS signaling stream, may be encrypted using the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). The key exchange for SRTP is performed with SDES (), or with ZRTP (). When SDES is used, the keys will be transmitted via insecure SIP unless SIPS is used. One may also add a MIKEY () exchange to SIP to determine session keys for use with SRTP. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28684 |
Squatting
Squatting is the action of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land or a building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use. Author Robert Neuwirth suggested in 2004 that there were one billion squatters globally.
Squatting occurs worldwide and tends to occur when people who are poor and homeless find empty buildings or land to occupy for housing. It has a long history, broken down by country below. In developing countries and least developed countries, shanty towns often begin as squatted settlements. There are pavement dwellers in India and South Africa, represented by groups such as Slum Dwellers International and Abahlali baseMjondolo. In Hong Kong there are rooftop slums. In Brazil, there are favelas and large social movements of thousands of people such as the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST) and the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). Squatted settlements are known in Spanish-speaking countries under terms such as villa miseria (Argentina), pueblos jóvenes (Peru), okupas (Chile, Spain) and asentamiento irregulares (Guatemala, Uruguay).
In industrialized countries, there are often squats and also political squatting movements, which can be anarchist, autonomist, or socialist in nature. Oppositional movements from the 1960s and 1970s created freespaces such as Freetown Christiania in Denmark or Ruigoord in the Netherlands. Each local situation determines the context, for example in Italy there are self-managed social centres and in Athens, Greece, there are refugee squats. In England and Wales, there were estimated to be 50,000 squatters in the late 1970s.
The majority of squatting is residential in nature. Squatting tends to occur when a poor and homeless population sees derelict property or land. According to author Robert Neuwirth, there were over 1 billion (one in seven) squatters worldwide in 2004. If current trends continue, this will increase to 2 billion by 2030 (one in four), and 3 billion by 2050 (one in three). However, despite the numbers of people squatting, according to academic Kesia Reeve, "squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualised, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement."
In many of the world's poorer countries, there are extensive slums or shanty towns, typically built on the edges of major cities and consisting almost entirely of self-constructed housing built without the landowner's permission. While these settlements may, in time, grow to become both legalised and indistinguishable from normal residential neighbourhoods, they often start off as squats with minimal basic infrastructure. Thus, there is no sewerage system, drinking water must be bought from vendors or carried from a nearby tap, and if there is electricity, it is stolen from a passing cable. Such settlements also exist in industrialized countries, such as for example Cañada Real on the outskirts of Madrid.
Squatting can be related to political movements, such as anarchist, autonomist, or socialist. It can be a means to conserve buildings or a protest action. Squats can be used by local communities as free shops, cafés, venues, pirate radio stations or as multi-purpose autonomous social centres.
Dutch sociologist Hans Pruijt separates types of squatters into five distinct categories:
In many countries, squatting is in itself a crime; in others, it is only seen as a civil conflict between the owner and the occupants. Property law and the state have traditionally favoured the property owner. However, in many cases where squatters had "de facto" ownership, laws have been changed to legitimize their status. Squatters often claim rights over the spaces they have squatted by virtue of occupation, rather than ownership; in this sense, squatting is similar to (and potentially a necessary condition of) adverse possession, by which a possessor of real property without title may eventually gain legal title to the real property.
Anarchist Colin Ward comments: "Squatting is the oldest mode of tenure in the world, and we are all descended from squatters. This is as true of the Queen [of the United Kingdom] with her as it is of the 54 percent of householders in Britain who are owner-occupiers. They are all the ultimate recipients of stolen land, for to regard our planet as a commodity offends every conceivable principle of natural rights."
Others have a different view. UK police official Sue Williams, for example, has stated that "Squatting is linked to anti-social behaviour and can cause a great deal of nuisance and distress to local residents. In some cases there may also be criminal activities involved."
The public attitude toward squatting varies, depending on legal aspects, socioeconomic conditions, and the type of housing occupied by squatters. In particular, while squatting of municipal buildings may be treated leniently, squatting of private property often leads to strong negative reaction on the part of the public and authorities. Squatting, when done in a positive and progressive manner, can be viewed as a way to reduce crime and vandalism to vacant properties, depending on the squatter's ability and willingness to conform to certain socioeconomic norms of the community in which they reside. Moreover, squatters can contribute to the maintenance or upgrading of sites that would otherwise be left unattended, the neglect of which would create (and has created) abandoned, dilapidated and decaying neighborhoods within certain sections of moderately to highly urbanized cities or boroughs, one such example being New York City's Lower Manhattan from roughly the 1970s to the post-9/11 era of the New Millennium.
Adverse possession, also known as squatter's rights, is a method of acquiring title to property through possession for a statutory period under certain conditions. Countries where this principle exists include England and the United States, based on common law. However, some non-common law jurisdictions have laws similar to adverse possession. For example, Louisiana has a legal doctrine called acquisitive prescription, which is derived from French law.
The Zabbaleen settlement and the City of the Dead are both well-known squatter communities in Cairo, Egypt.
There are large squatter communities in Kenya, such as Kibera in Nairobi.
An estimated 1,000 people live in the Grande Hotel Beira in Mozambique.
Informal settlements in Zambia, particularly around Lusaka, are known as kombonis.
In South Africa, squatters tend to live in informal settlements or squatter camps on the outskirts of the larger cities, often but not always near townships. In the mid-1990s, an estimated 7.7 million South Africans lived in informal settlements: a fifth of the country's population. The number has grown rapidly in the post-apartheid era. Many buildings, particularly in the inner city of Johannesburg have also been occupied by squatters. Property owners or government authorities can usually evict squatters after following certain legal procedures including requesting a court order.
In Durban, the city council routinely evicts without a court order in defiance of the law, and there has been sustained conflict between the city council and a shack dwellers' movement known as Abahlali baseMjondolo. The organisation has represented the squatters in land occupations such as the Macassar Village in 2009 and Marikana in 2013. It has also fought against the KZN Slums Act.
There have been a number of similar conflicts between shack dwellers, some linked with the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the city council in Cape Town. One of the most high-profile cases was the eviction of squatters in the N2 Gateway homes in the suburb of Delft, where over 20 residents were shot, including a three-year-old child. There have been numerous complaints about the legality of the government's actions. Many of the families then squatted on Symphony Way, a main road in the township of Delft,before being forced to move to a camp called Blikkiesdorp.
In China, informal settlements are known as urban villages.
Israeli settlements are communities of Israeli citizens living in the Palestinian territories. The international community considers the settlements in occupied territory to be illegal,
In March 2018, Israeli settlers were evicted from a house they had illegally occupied in Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. The fifteen families had argued that they had bought the house, but the High Court of Justice ruled that they had to leave. The Israel Defense Forces declared the building a closed military zone and it was unclear if the Palestinian owners could regain possession. The settlers had already occupied the house and been evicted in 2012. In October 2018, Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court stated that Israel's planned demolition of Bedouin village Khan al-Ahmar could constitute a war crime.
Squatters in Malaysia live on both privately owned and government-owned land. Some squatters have lived on land owned by national electricity company Tenaga Nasional for over five decades.
In Thailand, although evictions have reduced their visibility or numbers in urban areas, many squatters still occupy land near railroad tracks, under overpasses, and waterways. Commercial squatting is common in Thailand, where businesses temporarily seize nearby public real estate (such as sidewalks, roadsides, beaches, etc.) and roll out their enterprise, and at closing time they fold it in and lock it up, thus avoiding the extra cost of having to rent more property.
In Mumbai, there are an estimated 10 to 12 million inhabitants, and six million of them are squatters. The squatters live in a variety of ways. Some possess two- or three-story homes built out of brick and concrete which they have inhabited for years. Geeta Nagar is a squatter village based beside the Indian Navy compound at Colaba. Squatter Colony in Malad East has existed since 1962, and now, people living there pay a rent to the city council of 100 rupees a month. Dharavi is a community of one million squatters. The stores and factories situated there are mainly illegal and so are unregulated, but it is suggested that they do over $1 million in business every day.
Other squatters are pavement dwellers, with very few possessions. Activists such as Jockin Arputham, Prema Gopalan and Sheela Patel are working for better living conditions for slum dwellers, through organisations such as Mahila Milan and Slum Dwellers International.
In the 2016 Mathura clash, members of Azad Bharat Vidhik Vaicharik Kranti Satyagrahi (Free India Legal Ideas Revolutionary Protesters) who had been living in Mathura's largest public park Jawahar Bagh for two years were evicted in a large police operation. At least 24 squatters were killed.
Squatting is a major issue in the Philippines especially but not exclusively in urban areas of the Philippines. Squatting gained notice right after World War II, when people whose homes were destroyed by war were left homeless. They built makeshift houses called "barong-barong" on abandoned private land.
In the late 20th century, the squatter population largely grew but the Philippine government has made separate attempts over the years to transfer some squatters to low-cost housing projects, such as projects in Tondo (in the former Smokey Mountain landfill), Taguig (BLISS Housing Project), and Rodriguez, Rizal.
Philippine law, and society more generally, distinguishes between squatters who squat because of poverty and "professional squatters" who squat in hopes of getting a payment to leave the property.
Philippine-based media and journalists refer squatters as "informal settlers."
Gecekondu (plural gecekondular) is a Turkish word meaning a house put up quickly without proper permissions, a squatter's house, and by extension, a shanty or shack. Gecekondu bölgesi is a neighborhood made of these informal settlements. Shortly after the eviction of Gezi Park, Don Kişot (Quixote) was occupied and stated to be Istanbul's first occupied and self-managed social centre. There are, or have been, several other political squats in İstanbul: Caferağa in Kadıköy was a squatted neighbourhood house evicted in December 2014. "Caferağa brings life, people, and productivity into that old rotting house" said local Turan Yildirim.
Elsewhere in Turkey, a place was occupied in Beşiktaş on March 18, 2014 and named Berkin Elvan Student House after a 15-year-old boy who was shot during the Gezi protests and later died. Atopya was squatted in Ankara in June 2014 by anarchists, who claimed it was the city's first political squat.
In many European countries, there are squatted houses used as residences and also larger squatted projects where people pursue social and cultural activities. An examples of the latter is a former military barracks called Metelkova in Slovenia.
Squat Milada in Prague, Czech Republic was occupied in 1997 and evicted in 2009. Its longevity was in part due to the building not existing in the Land Registry. Klinika was an occupied social centre between 2014 and 2019.
There was a big squatting movement in the newly formed state of Austria following the First World War. Famine was a significant problem for many people in Austria and the "Siedler" (settler) movement developed as these people tried to create shelter and a source of food for themselves. The Ernst Kirchweger Haus (EKH) in Vienna was squatted as a social centre in 1990 and legalised in 2008. Nowadays from time to time empty buildings are squatted and in the most instances given up after negotiations with the authorities. There are some exceptions like in 2014, when about 1,500 riot police officers, a tank-like police vehicle, a police water cannon and helicopters have been used to clear a building occupied by the group "Pizzeria Anarchia" in Vienna.
Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark is an independent community of almost 900 people founded in 1971 on the site of an abandoned military zone. In Copenhagen, as in other European cities such as Berlin and Amsterdam, the squatter movement was large in the 1980s. It was a social movement, providing housing and alternative culture. A flashpoint came in 1986 with the Battle of Ryesgade. Another flashpoint came in 2007 when Ungdomshuset was evicted. While not technically a squat until 14 December 2006, it was a social centre used by squatters and people involved in alternative culture more generally. After a year of protests, the city council donated a new building.
In early twentieth century France, several artists who would later become world-famous, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso squatted at the Bateau-Lavoir, in Montmartre, Paris. Paris moved to legitimize some popular artist squats in the mid-2000s by purchasing and renovating the buildings for artist–residents. An example is Les Frigos. In the 2010s there have been several land squats protesting against large infrastructure projects. These are known collectively as Zone to Defend or ZAD (French: zone à défendre), with the most famous one being the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
Starting from December 2012, Greek Police initiated extensive raids in a number of squats in Athens, arresting and charging with offences all illegal occupants (mostly anarchists). Squats including Villa Amalia were evicted. A march in support of the 92 arrestees drew between 3,000 and 8,000 people. After Villa Amalia, Villa Skaramanga and then Villa Lela Karagianni were evicted. Lela Karagianni had been squatted since 1998 and was later reoccupied. The name came from the street, named for a Greek World War II resistance leader of that name. From 2015 onwards Athens has seen refugee squats in response to the European migrant crisis which are anarchist and self-organised. In 2019, several squats in Exarcheia were evicted by the Greek state. Some of the migrants evicted set up a camp outside the Parliament at Syntagma Square.
Squatting in Moldova started with Centro 73 in Chişinău in September 2010. This project was evicted soon after.
The oldest squat in Poland, Rozbrat, was created in 1994 in Poznań. There are also squats in Białystok, Gdańsk, Gliwice, Warsaw and Wrocław.
Geneva in Switzerland had 160 buildings illegally occupied and more than 2,000 squatters, in the middle of the 1990s. The RHINO ("Retour des Habitants dans les Immeubles Non-Occupés," in English: "Return of Inhabitants to Non-Occupied Buildings") was a 19-year-long squat in Geneva. It occupied two buildings on the Boulevard des Philosophes, a few blocks away from the main campus of the University of Geneva. The RHINO organisation often faced legal troubles, and Geneva police evicted the inhabitants on July 23, 2007. There were large riots in Zürich when the Binz occupation was evicted in 2013. The squatters moved to another building.
In the 1970s, squatting in West German cities led to "a self-confident urban counterculture with its own infrastructure of newspapers, self-managed collectives and housing cooperatives, feminist groups, and so on, which was prepared to intervene in local and broader politics". The Autonomen movement protected squats against eviction and participated in radical direct action.
After the German reunification, many buildings were vacated due to the demise of former state-run enterprises and migration to the western parts of Germany, some of which were then occupied by squatters. In Berlin, the now-legalised squats are in desirable areas such as Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Before the reunification, squats in Berlin were mostly located in former West Berlin's borough of Kreuzberg. The squats were mainly for residential and social use. Squatting became known by the term "instandbesetzen", from "instandsetzen" ("renovating") and "besetzen" ("occupying").
Squatters moved into the former factory site of J.A. Topf & Söhne in Erfurt in April 2001 and remained there until they were evicted by police in April 2009. The firm made crematoria for Nazi concentration camps. The squatters ran culture programs which drew attention to the history of the company. The occupation was known simply as "Das Besetzte Haus" (the occupied house) and was one of the most well known actions of left-radicals of that period in Germany. A book about the occupation was published in 2012, titled "Topf & Söhne – Besetzung auf einem Täterort" (Topf & Söhne – Occupation of a crime scene).
Despite being illegal, squats exist in many of the larger cities. Examples are Au in Frankfurt and Rote Flora in Hamburg, although the last open squat of Berlin, Brunnenstraße183, was evicted in November 2009. Legalised housing projects include Hafenstraße and Kiefernstraße.
Squatting can also take place for campaigning purposes, such as the Anatopia project, which protested against a Mercedes-Benz test track.
In Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, there is a small tradition of squatting. In 1919, anarchists occupied a building and were quickly evicted.
Squatters occupied an empty house in downtown Reykjavík on Vatnsstigur street in April 2009. The squatters set up a freeshop and had plans for a social centre, but the occupation was quickly evicted by the police and 22 people were arrested.
Vatnsstigur 4 was briefly resquatted on May 7, 2009, in solidarity with the Rozbrat squat in Poland, which was threatened with eviction.
Also in 2009, a group of graffiti artists called the Pretty Boys occupied Hverfisgata 34. Their intention was to make a clandestine gallery and then when they were not evicted, they legalised the space and called it Gallery Bosnia.
When the Reykjavíkur Akademían (the Reykjavík Academy) was evicted at short notice from Hringbraut 121 in November 2011, it was occupied in protest. The space, which had hosted lectures and also Iceland's trade union and anarchist libraries, was moved to another location but the occupiers were unhappy that the new use of the building would be a guest house for tourists. An art exhibition was organised, with a camera obscura, live music and shadow theatre.
The exact legal position of squatting in Ireland is ambiguous and the mechanisms for removing squatters from properties varies from case to case, sometimes going through the judicial process, other times not. Trespass and occupation of a property is not illegal, but as a definitive process for dealing with squatters does not exist, unlawful evictions do occur, sometimes with the support of the Garda Síochána (Irish Police). However certain 'squatters rights' do exist and can be invoked in the form of adverse possession. An occupant is entitled to legal possession of the title provided they are in continuous and uninterrupted occupation of the property for 12 years. To claim adverse possession the occupant must register an intent to claim the property with the land registry.
Squatting has no major tradition in Ireland, arguably in part due to the perceived strong position of the title holder. It has largely been confined to major cities but with the construction of Ghost estates across the country there has also been a rise in occupations of residential spaces in rural areas. There have been major housing movements and periods of squatting in Ireland, including the activities of the Dublin and Derry Housing Action Committees of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each had a militant campaign which participated in dozens or hundreds of actions and protests in demand of better housing conditions. Many young people emigrated from Ireland in the 1980s and squatted in London.
In 2003 activists calling themselves 'Autonomous Community Spaces' entered 'Disco Disco' in Dublin's Parnell Square to turn the space in a social centre. They were violently evicted 24 hours later. From 2003 to 2004 the Magpie Squat was a residential space which housed activists in Dublin's Upper Leeson Street. It is also where the first meeting was held for the opening of what would become Dublin's first autonomous social centre Seomra Spraoi.
Activists from Occupy Cork squatted a National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) building in Cork in 2010, with the intention of using it as a community resource centre. It was vacated shortly after the occupation. With squatting becoming more public in the 2010s, Dublin hosted the 2014 'International Squatter Convergence', previously held in cities such as Dijon, Berlin and Brighton. Squatting also became popularised by the successful neighbourhood resistance to an attempted eviction of a large community used squatted space in Grangegorman in Dublin city in 2015. The news of the eviction attempt and eventual successful resistance spread across social media and international news. The squatted complex enjoyed widespread support in the area and was also publicly supported by the city's Lord Mayor, Christy Burke and by Irish Times journalist Una Mullally. The building which once housed Neary's Hotel on Parnell St in Dublin's north inner city, was occupied in 2015 and renamed The Barricade Inn by squatters.
In Italy, despite the lack of official data, it appears that about 50,000 buildings all over the country are unused or abandoned and thus subject to squatting. Squatting has no legal basis, but there are many squats used as social centres. The first occupations of abandoned buildings began in 1968 with the left-wing movements Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. Out of the breakup of these two movements was born Autonomia Operaia, which was composed of a Marxist–Leninist and Maoist wing and also an anarchist and more libertarian one. These squats had Marxist-Leninist (but also Stalinist and Maoist) ideals and came from the left wing of Autonomia. The militants of the Italian armed struggle (the New Red Brigades) were connected to these squats. There are many left-wing self-organised occupied projects across Italy such as Cascina Torchiera and Centro Sociale Leoncavallo in Milan and Forte Prenestino in Rome.
This situation has so far received the approval of Italian courts, which have been reluctant to defend the owners’ good reasons. In contrast with the dominant jurisprudence, new case-law (from the Rome Tribunal and the Supreme Court of Cassation) instructs the government to pay damages in case of squatting if the institutions have failed to prevent it.
The Dutch use the term "krakers" to refer to people who squat houses with the aim of living in them (as opposed to people who break into buildings for the purpose of vandalism or theft). Notable squats around the country include ACU and Moira in Utrecht, the Poortgebouw in Rotterdam, OCCII, OT301 and Vrankrijk in Amsterdam, the Grote Broek in Nijmegen, Vrijplaats Koppenhinksteeg in Leiden, De Vloek in the Hague and the Landbouwbelang in Maastricht.
On 1 June 2010, squatting in the Netherlands became illegal and punishable when a decree was sent out that the squatting ban would be enforced from 1 October. In protest, squatters in Amsterdam had occupied a former fire department the week before the law began (returning it to the owners control on 30 September) and a riot occurred on 1 October when the police blocked a protest and led a horse charge upon it. In Nijmegen (on 2 October), there was also a riot. Following legal challenges, on October 28, 2011, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands decided that the eviction of a squat can only occur after an intervention of a judge.
The Dutch government assessed the effectiveness of the new law in 2015, releasing a report giving statistics on arrests and convictions between October 2010 and December 2014. During this time period, 529 people have been arrested for the act of occupying derelict buildings in 213 separate incidents. Of the 529 arrests, 210 were found guilty. Of those convicted, 39 people were imprisoned for the new offence.
Squatting of empty lots with shanty towns became popular in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the shortage of urban accommodation during the rural exodus.
Gradually it was substituted by high-rise blocks (often built quickly and poorly).
It was revived in the mid-1980s during La Movida Madrileña, under the name of the "okupa" (an unofficial spelling applied to "ocupación") movement, when thousands of illegal squatted buildings were legalized. Influenced by the British Levellers, the movement's popularity rose again during the 1990s, once more due to a housing crisis, this time related to the 1992 Summer Olympics and the concomitant urban regeneration. Property speculation and house price inflation continue to catalyze "okupa" activism.
Related to the anarchist movement, "okupas" support the ideal of workers' self-management and create social centers, such as Patio Maravillas in Madrid, which carry out various grassroots activities. The "okupa" movement represents a highly politicized form of squatting, so much so that participants often claim they live in squats as a form of political protest first and foremost. The movement is involved in various other social struggles, including the alter-globalization movement. In 1996, during José María Aznar's presidency, the first specific legislation against squatting was passed and became the prelude to many squat evictions. In the barrio of Lavapiés in Madrid, the Eskalera Karakola was a feminist self-managed squat, which was active from 1996 to 2005 and participated in the nextGENDERation network. Other examples are the Escuela Popular de Prosperidad (La Prospe) o Minuesa.
As of 2007, there were approximately 200 occupied houses in Barcelona. At least 45 of these, as Infousurpa, a collective event calendar, mentions, are used as social and cultural centers – so-called "open houses". A number of popular rock groups have come out of this kind of venue, such as Sin Dios, Extremoduro, Kolumna Durruti, Refugio and Platero y Tú in Madrid and Ojos de Brujo and Gadjo in Barcelona. In 2014, the unsuccessful attempts to evict the long-running social center of Can Vies provoked major riots. Another long-running squat is Can Masdeu.
The Basque Country is another area where a high number of houses have been occupied. There are at least 46 squats, or "" ("youth houses" in Basque). During the 1980s, a house was occupied by squatters in virtually every town, with the booming Basque punk rock thriving on the squatting movement, as it provided the badly needed premises for concerts, exhibitions, and other events. During the last 10 years, at least 15 "gaztetxes" have closed down, often following protests and clashes with the police. The eviction of Kukutza in Bilbao was met with largescale protests. On the outskirts of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the squatted neighbourhood of Errekaleor has around 150 inhabitants.
Parallelly there has been a not-ideologized current of Chabolismo (shanty towns) around big cities.
Initially settled by sedentarized Gitanos and Mercheros, they became known after the 1980s as selling points for heroin and other drugs.
As the Spanish nomads were transferred to public housing, the shanty towns became inhabited by poor immigrants, including Moroccans and Romanian Romas. A famous example is the Cañada Real.
In England, squatting has a long historical tradition. The BBC states that squatting was "a big issue in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and again for the Diggers in the 17th Century [who] were peasants who cultivated waste and common land, claiming it as their rightful due" and that squatting was a necessity after the Second World War when so many were homeless. Mass squats were organised in a number of prominent public buildings in Central London, culminating in the occupation of the Queen Mother’s ex-residence at 144 Piccadilly in 1969 which became known as 'Hippydilly' and made world headline news and the media created what one of the leaders later described as a moral panic. There were estimated to be 50,000 squatters throughout Britain in the late 1970s, with the majority (30,000) living in London. The BBC reported in 2011 that the government estimated that there were "20,000 squatters in the UK" and "650,000 empty properties".
On 1 September 2012, under Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, squatting in residential property was criminalised by the Government, punishable by up to six months in prison or a £5000 fine, or both. The same year saw the first successful prosecution for squatting, resulting in a 12-week jail sentence. However, squatting in a commercial building is still not a criminal offence.
In the late 1960s, people in Northern Ireland were forced to squat through both poverty and a lack of decent housing. In County Tyrone, there were allegations of unfair housing provision on the basis of politics and religion. When a house in the village of Caledon, near Dungannon, was allocated to a young Protestant woman, Emily Beattie, it caused protests. She was secretary to a solicitor who worked for the Unionist councillor who had given her the house and two Catholic families who had been overlooked complained that the same councillor had scotched plans to build houses for Catholics in the Dungannon area. Several days after the woman had moved in, the Catholic squatters in the house next door were evicted. Austin Currie, then a young politician, complained both at the local council and at Stormont about the situation. He then symbolically occupied the woman's house for a few hours, before being evicted by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). One of the policeman was the woman's brother who himself moved into the house later on. The incident quickly became a media sensation and in August the civil rights movement arranged one of its first marches, from Coalisland to Dungannon. This was followed in October by a civil rights march in Derry which was organised by the Derry Housing Action Committee and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. The march was brutally repressed by the RUC.
In 2012 activists from Occupy Belfast squatted a Bank of Ireland building in Belfast city centre and used it as a social space. The occupation lasted several months before it was evicted.
Squatting is a criminal offence in Scotland, punishable by a fine or even imprisonment, under the Trespass (Scotland) Act 1865. The owner or lawful occupier of the property has the right to evict squatters without notice or applying to the court for an eviction order, although when evicting, they cannot do anything that would break the law, for example, use violence.
Nevertheless, the 19th and early 20th centuries saw various land raids in which cottars attempted to occupy land for subsistence farming. In 1948, the Seven Men of Knoydart unsuccessfully squatted land owned by the Nazi-supporting Lord Brocket.
The Forest Café in Edinburgh squatted its old premises in 2011 before moving to a new site.
There have been several road protest land squats such as Bilston Glen and Pollok Free State.
In 2010, a representative of the UK Bailiff Company claimed that the number of people squatting in Wales was at its highest for 40 years. The high number of businesses failing in urban Wales has led to squatting becoming a growing issue in large cities like Swansea and Cardiff. Experts said "the majority [of squatters] are forced into the lifestyle by financial pressures." Based on the internal database of UK Bailiff Company, there were 100 cases of squatting in 2009, the highest for 40 years, following trends estimated by the Advisory Service for Squatters that squatting has doubled in England and Wales since 1995.
As with England, from 1 September 2012, squatting in a residential building was made a criminal offence subject to arrest, fine and imprisonment. In December 2012 Cardiff Squatters Network was formed, to network together squatters citywide, and host "skill-share" workshops on squatting legally in commercial buildings.
In Canada, there are two systems to register the ownership of land. Under the land title system, squatter rights, formally known as adverse possession, were abolished. However, under the registry system, these rights have been preserved. If a person occupies land for the required period of time as set out in provincial limitation acts and during that time no legal action is taken to evict them, then the ownership of the land transfers from the legal owner to the squatter.
The Frances Street Squats in Vancouver were a row of six buildings squatted for nine months in 1990. They were evicted in a large operation and a film was subsequently made, called "The Beat of Frances Street". In recent years, there have been a number of public squats which have brought together the two main contemporary reasons for squatting – homelessness and activism. Examples are the Lafontaine squat in Overdale, a district of Montréal (2001), the Woodward's Squat in Vancouver (2002), the Infirmary Squat in Halifax (2002), the Pope Squat in Toronto (2002), the Seven Year Squat in Ottawa (2002), the Water Street Squat in Peterborough (2003), and the North Star hotel in Vancouver (2006). These were squats organised by anti-poverty groups which tended to have a short life expectancy. The Woodward's building was a derelict department store which had stood empty for nine years. After being evicted from the building, two hundred squatters set up a tent city on the pavement outside. The action is credited with putting in motion the eventual redevelopment of the building. The Peterborough Coalition Against Poverty (PCAP) publicly squatted 1130 Water Street, a building which stood empty after a fire. The group offered to repair the place and return it to its use as low-income housing. City officials agreed to the repairs and then City Council voted to demolish the building. The cost of demolition was $8,900 and the cost of repairs had been projected to be $6,900. The North Star hotel was temporarily squatted as a protest against emptiness by the Vancouver Anti-Poverty Committee.
In 2011, the 'Occupy Toronto squat team' squatted a basement at 238 Queen Street West and offered to take on a lease for 99 cents per year. They were evicted after eight hours.
In the United States, squatting laws vary from state to state and city to city. For the most part, it is rarely tolerated to any degree for long, particularly in cities. There have been a few exceptions, notably in 2002 when the New York City administration agreed to turn over eleven squatted buildings in the Lower East Side to an established non-profit group, on the condition the apartments would be turned over to the tenants as low-income housing cooperatives.
Community organizations have helped the homeless to take over vacant buildings not only as a place to live but also a part of larger campaign to shine a light on inequity in housing and advocate change in housing and land issues. Some of these include the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Take Back the Land and Homes not Jails.
Squatters can be young people living in punk houses, low-income or homeless people, street gang members, or artists. During the Great Recession there were increasing numbers of people squatting foreclosed homes. There were also reports of people resquatting their own foreclosed homes.
Around many South American cities there are shanty towns. Sometimes, the authorities tear the houses down, but often, the squatters simply rebuild again. The houses are built out of whatever material can be scavenged from the local area or bought cheaply. As time goes by, the squatters start to form communities and become more established. The houses are rebuilt piece by piece with more durable materials. In some cases, a deal is reached with the authorities and connections for sewage, drinking water, cable television and electricity are made.
In Peru, the name given to the squatter settlements is pueblos jóvenes. In Colombia and Venezuela they are called 'invasiones' (as in "invading a property", as squatting can be related to a building or an empty lot) and in Argentina they are known as villa miseria.
In Chile the correct term used for the squatting is the similar term used in Spain "Casa Okupa". These houses share similar aspects with other squats around the world, such as being political and activist social centres. They are normally associated with the anarchist movement and they openly identify with the squatting movement, particularly the Movimiento Okupa in Spain. The mayor number of Casas Okupas are located in Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile. They must not be confused with another different housing situation which term is "Tomas". These are particular situations of squatting that could be defined more like Shanty Towns, not necessarily involved with the Okupa movement.
In Brazil, some of the squatter communities are called favelas, and a famous example is Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, estimated to be home of 100,000 people. Favelas are mostly inhabited by the poorest strata, and usually lack much infrastructure and public services, but in some cases, already have reached the structure needed for a city. They are equivalent to slums or shanty towns, and typically occupy unused land (instead of unused or abandoned buildings). There were 25 million people living in favelas all over Brazil, as of 2004.
In São Paulo the largest favela is Heliópolis, with over 200,000 inhabitants. However, its occupied area has been officially recognized as a regular neighborhood of the city. There are also a number of squatter buildings in the inner city, the most famous of which was a 22-storey building called Prestes Maia, whose inhabitants were finally evicted by the police in 2007 after a long conflict with the city administration. Inspired both by this movement and increasing property speculation and gentrification, various occupations in buildings and unoccupied areas in big cities, led by groups such as the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST) or Downtown Roofless Movement (MSTC).
The former Hotel Santos Dumont on Mauá Street in the Luz neighbourhood was occupied in 2007 after being derelict for 17 years. An estimated 1,000 people were living in the building, paying a small amount every month to cover maintenance. The community expels people who fight, use drugs or abuse alcohol.
There are also rural squatter movements in Brazil, such as the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), which has an estimated 1.5 million members.
In the 19th century, the British government claimed to own all of Australia and tried to control land ownership. Wealthy farmers of livestock claimed land for themselves and thus were known as squatters. This type of squatting is covered in greater detail at Squatting (Australian history).
In more recent times, Australia has seen occupations in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was set up in 1972 and is a permanent protest occupation. The 2016 Bendigo Street housing dispute saw squatters successfully contesting road-building plans. The Midnight Star squat was used as an self-managed social centre in a former cinema, before being evicted after being used as a convergence space during the 2002 World Trade Organization meeting. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28685 |
South Holland
South Holland ( ) is a province of the Netherlands with a population of just over 3.7 million as of November 2019 and a population density of about , making it the country's most populous province and one of the world's most densely populated areas. Situated on the North Sea in the west of the Netherlands, South Holland covers an area of , of which is water. It borders North Holland to the north, Utrecht and Gelderland to the east, and North Brabant and Zeeland to the south. The provincial capital is the Dutch seat of government The Hague, while its largest city is Rotterdam. The Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta drains through South Holland into the North Sea. Europe's busiest seaport, the Port of Rotterdam, is located in South Holland.
Archaeological discoveries in Hardinxveld-Giessendam indicate that the area of South Holland has been inhabited since at least ca. 7,500 years before present, probably by nomadic hunter-gatherers. Agriculture and permanent settlements probably originated around 2,000 years later, based on excavations near Vlaardingen. In the classical antiquity, South Holland was part of the Roman Province of Germania Inferior, and the border of the Roman Empire ran along the Old Rhine and reached the North Sea near Katwijk. The Romans built fortresses along the border, such as Praetorium Agrippinae near modern-day Valkenburg, Matilo near modern-day Leiden, and Albaniana near modern-day Alphen aan den Rijn. A city was founded near modern-day Voorburg, Forum Hadriani. It was built according to the grid plan, and facilitated a square, a court, a bathhouse and several temples.
After the departure of the Romans, the area belonged to the Frisian Kingdom, after which it was conquered by the Frankish king Dagobert I in 636. In 690, the Anglo-Saxon monk Willibrord arrived near Katwijk and was granted permission to spread Roman Catholicism by the Frankish king Pepin II. He accordingly founded a church in Oegstgeest, after which the entire area was gradually Christianised. The area was appointed to East Francia in the Treaty of Verdun in 843, after which the king granted lands to Gerolf, who had helped him claim the lands. This was the birth of the County of Holland. Gerolf was later succeeded by Dirk I, who continued to rule Holland under the Frankish king. In 1248, count William II ordered the construction of the Ridderzaal, which was later finished by his son and successor Floris V.
The first city in South Holland to receive city rights was Dordrecht, which did so in 1220. The city retained a dominant position in the area until it was struck by a series of floods in the late 14th century. The same century also saw a series of civil wars, the Hook and Cod wars, concerning the succession of count William IV. Both his daughter Jacqueline and his brother John, the latter supported by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, claimed the throne. The conflict ended in 1490, with John victorious.
Overall, the area of South Holland remained largely agrarian throughout the late Middle Ages. This changed around 1500, when Holland became Europe's most urbanised area. During the Eighty Years' War, the area of South Holland was the scene of the Capture of Brielle, the Siege of Leiden and the assassination of William the Silent.
The United Netherlands declared their independence in 1581, and Holland quickly emerged as the country's dominant province, with important trading cities such as Leiden, Delft, Gouda and Dordrecht. In 1575, the Netherlands' first university was founded in Leiden by William the Silent. The Hague, which had originated around the castle of the counts of Holland, became its new political centre. Both the States of Holland and the States General seated in the Binnenhof. The Dutch Golden Age blossomed in the 17th century. The south of Holland, back then often referred to as the "Zuiderkwartier" (literally "South Quarter"), was the birthplace and residence of scientists such as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Christiaan Huygens, philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, and painters such as Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Steen.
The province of South Holland as it is today has its origins in the period of French rule from 1795 to 1813. This was a time of bewildering changes to the Dutch system of provinces. In 1795, the Batavian Republic was proclaimed and the old order was swept away by a series of constitutional changes in the following years. In the Constitution enacted on 23 April 1798, the old borders were radically changed. The republic was reorganised into eight departments with roughly equal populations. The south of Holland was split up into three departments. The islands in the south were merged with Zeeland and the west of North Brabant to form the Department of the Scheldt and Meuse. The north of the area became the Department of the Delf. A small region in the east of the area became part of the Department of the Rhine, which spanned much of Gelderland and Utrecht. In 1801, the old borders were restored when the department of Holland was created. The reorganisation had been short-lived, but it gave birth to the concept of a division of Holland, creating less dominant provinces. In 1807, Holland was reorganised once again. This time, the department was split in two. The south, what would later become South Holland, was called the Department of Maasland. This also did not last long. In 1810, all the Dutch provinces were integrated into the French Empire, and Maasland was renamed Bouches-de-la-Meuse.
After the defeat of the French in 1813, this organisation remained unchanged for a year or so. When the 1814 Constitution was introduced, most borders were restored to their situation before the French period. The north and south of Holland were reunited as the province of Holland. However, the division hadn't completely been undone. Since its re-establishment in 1814, Holland had always had two King's Commissioners, one for the north and one for the south. Even though the province had been reunited, the two areas were still treated differently in some ways and the idea of dividing Holland remained alive. In 1840, it was decided to once again split Holland into North and South Holland, because the province of Holland was deemed too dominant in area, population and wealth. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, five municipalities were transferred from South Holland to Utrecht; Oudewater in 1970, Woerden in 1989, Vianen in 2002, Leerdam and Zederik in 2019.
The construction of the Nieuwe Waterweg in 1863 marked the start of the growth of the Port of Rotterdam. On 14 May 1940, during the Second World War, the centre of Rotterdam was destroyed by a German bombardment. The subsequent German occupation of the Netherlands resulted in anti-Jewish measures, and many members of Dutch resistance were captured and executed on the Waalsdorpervlakte. At the same time, the Atlantikwall was constructed along the coast. After the Second World War, in 1953, the south of South Holland was heavily struck by the North Sea flood, which took the lives of 677 South Hollanders. After this, the Dutch government decided for the construction of the Delta Works, which came to an end with the completion of the Maeslantkering in 1997.
South Holland covers an area of , of which is water. It borders the North Sea to the west, North Holland to the north, Utrecht and Gelderland to the east, and North Brabant and Zeeland to the south. Beside the dunes along the North Sea coast, the province is almost entirely flat and mostly consists of polders. The centre of South Holland and the area along the coast in the west are largely urban, part of the Randstad conurbation, while the east of the province is more agrarian and belongs to the Groene Hart, literally "Green Heart". The south of the province is a collection of islands in the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. For census reasons, South Holland is divided into four regions: Rijnmond, South, West and East.
The Duin- en Bollenstreek is a region in the north-west of South Holland, around Katwijk, that features coastal dunes and the cultivation of flower bulbs. To the south of the region lie mostly pastures on sand soil, that form the transition to more urban area. This urban area runs along the Old Rhine, from Katwijk via Rijnsburg to Leiden and Zoeterwoude-Rijndijk. South of Leiden and north of The Hague lies an area where a landscape of dunes bordering the North Sea in the west transitions to one of peat more to the east. The easternmost tip of South Holland is part of De Biesbosch, one of the largest national parks of the Netherlands and one of the last freshwater tide areas in Europe. Other parks in South Holland, although no national parks, include Delftse Hout east of Delft, Ackerdijkse Plassen, a bird reserve north of Rotterdam, and Buytenpark and Westerpark near Zoetermeer. The Kagerplassen are a collection of lakes north-east of Leiden, popular for boating, watersports, fishing, camping and walking.
The southern part of South Holland consists of a number of islands of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. Although technically islands in the sense that they are surrounded by rivers, canals or other bodies of water, most of these islands are well connected to the rest of the province via bridges, tunnels and dams. The southern islands, most notably Goeree-Overflakkee (1 on the map), Tiengemeten (2), Hoeksche Waard (6) and Voorne-Putten (4/5), are largely agrarian, while more to the north, the islands are more urban, such as Dordrecht (7), IJsselmonde (9) and Rozenburg (10), while other islands, like Rozenburg (10), are mostly used for petrochemical industry. Together, these cities form the Rijnmond conurbation, centred on the city of Rotterdam. Together with Haaglanden (centred on The Hague) and Delfland (centred on Delft) in the north, and the Drechtsteden to the south-east, this conurbation in turn forms the South Wing of the Randstad conurbation, which spans across South Holland, North Holland and Utrecht.
Other regions in South Holland include Alblasserwaard, Gouwestreek ("The Gouwe Area"), Hoeksche Waard, Krimpenerwaard, Rijnland ("Rhineland"), Rijnstreek ("The Rhine Area"), Vijfheerenlanden and Westland (roughly including Hoek van Holland and the municipalities of Westland and Midden-Delfland).
Like the rest of the Netherlands, South Holland experiences a temperate oceanic climate, a Cfb-class according to the Köppen climate classification. The climate is influenced by the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, which results in relatively cooler summers and milder winters. Rain showers are common in the fall and winter seasons. Because of the flat surface, wind storms are also not uncommon in the winter. Although rain occurs all year long, the first six months of the year are relatively dry. Eastern winds can result in temporary continental climate conditions with relatively warm and dry summers and cold and stormy winters. The temperature varies between the 2 °C and 6 °C in the winter and 17 °C and 20 °C in the summer.
South Holland is divided into 52 municipalities.
The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the region was 163.8 billion € in 2018. This contributes to the gross domestic product of the Netherlands for 21.2%. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 38,700 € or 128% of the EU27 average in the same year. South Holland's labour force amounts 1,661,000 people; 47.1% of the total population. The unemployment rate is 6.1% in 2013.
Main sectors of economical activity in this province are among others:
Two well known scientists originating from South Holland are:
As far as art concerns, several famous painters originate from this province; such as: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28687 |
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