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Pope Innocent III
Pope Innocent III (; 1160 or 1161 – 16 July 1216), born Lotario dei Conti di Segni (anglicized as Lothar of Segni) reigned from 8 January 1198 to his death.
Pope Innocent was one of the most powerful and influential of the medieval popes. He exerted a wide influence over the Christian states of Europe, claiming supremacy over all of Europe's kings. He was central in supporting the Catholic Church's reforms of ecclesiastical affairs through his decretals and the Fourth Lateran Council. This resulted in a considerable refinement of Western canon law. He is furthermore notable for using interdict and other censures to compel princes to obey his decisions, although these measures were not uniformly successful.
Innocent greatly extended the scope of the crusades, directing crusades against Muslim Spain and the Holy Land as well as the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France.
He organized the Fourth Crusade of 1202–1204, which ended in the sack of Constantinople. Although the attack on Constantinople went against his explicit orders, and the Crusaders were subsequently excommunicated, Innocent reluctantly accepted this result, seeing it as the will of God to reunite the Latin and Orthodox Churches. In the event, the sack of Constantinople and the subsequent period of "Frankokratia" heightened the hostility between the Latin and Greek churches. (The Byzantine empire was restored in 1261 but never regained its former strength, finally falling in 1453.)
Lotario de' Conti was born in Gavignano, Italy, near Anagni. His father Count Trasimund of Segni was a member of a famous house, Conti di Segni (Earl of Segni), which produced nine popes including Gregory IX, Alexander IV and Innocent XIII. Lotario was the nephew of Pope Clement III; his mother, Claricia Scotti (Romani de Scotti), was from the same noble Roman family.
Lotario received his early education in Rome, probably at the Benedictine abbey of St Andrea al Celio, under Peter Ismael; he studied theology in Paris under the theologians Peter of Poitiers, Melior of Pisa, and Peter of Corbeil, and (possibly) jurisprudence in Bologna, according to the "Gesta" (between 1187 and 1189). As Pope, Lotario was to play a major role in the shaping of canon law through conciliar canons and decretal letters.
Shortly after the death of Alexander III (30 August 1181) Lotario returned to Rome and held various ecclesiastical offices during the short reigns of Lucius III, Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, reaching the rank of Cardinal-Deacon in 1190.
As a cardinal, Lotario wrote "De miseria humanae conditionis" (On the Misery of the Human Condition). The work was very popular for centuries, surviving in more than 700 manuscripts. Although he never returned to the complementary work he intended to write, "On the Dignity of Human Nature", Bartolomeo Facio (1400–1457) took up the task writing "De excellentia ac praestantia hominis".
Celestine III died on 8 January 1198. Before his death he had urged the College of Cardinals to elect Giovanni di San Paolo as his successor, but Lotario de' Conti was elected pope in the ruins of the ancient Septizodium, near the Circus Maximus in Rome after only two ballots on the very day on which Celestine III died. He was only thirty-seven years old at the time. He took the name Innocent III, maybe as a reference to his predecessor Innocent II (1130–1143), who had succeeded in asserting the Papacy's authority over the emperor (in contrast with Celestine III's recent policy).
As pope, Innocent III began with a very wide sense of his responsibility and of his authority. During Innocent III's reign, the papacy was at the height of its powers. He was considered to be the most powerful person in Europe at the time. In 1198, Innocent wrote to the prefect Acerbius and the nobles of Tuscany expressing his support of the medieval political theory of the sun and the moon. His papacy asserted the absolute spiritual authority of his office, while still respecting the temporal authority of kings.
The Muslim recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 was to him a divine judgment on the moral lapses of Christian princes. He was also determined to protect what he called "the liberty of the Church" from inroads by secular princes. This determination meant, among other things, that princes should not be involved in the selection of bishops, and it was focused especially on the "patrimonium" of the papacy, the section of central Italy claimed by the popes and later called the Papal States. The patrimonium was routinely threatened by Hohenstaufen German kings who, as Roman emperors, claimed it for themselves. Emperor Henry VI expected his infant son Frederick to bring Germany, Italy, and Sicily under a single ruler, which would leave the Papal States exceedingly vulnerable.
Henry's early death left his 3-year-old son, Frederick, as king of Sicily. Henry VI's widow, Constance of Sicily, ruled over Sicily for her young son before he reached the age of majority. She was as eager to remove German power from the kingdom of Sicily as was Innocent III. Before her death in 1198, she named Innocent as guardian of the young Frederick until he reached his maturity. In exchange, Innocent was also able to recover papal rights in Sicily that had been surrendered decades earlier to King William I of Sicily by Pope Adrian IV. The Pope invested the young Frederick II as King of Sicily in November 1198. He also later induced Frederick II to marry Constance of Aragon, the widow of King Emeric of Hungary, in 1209.
Innocent was concerned that the marriage of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily gave the Hohenstaufens a claim to all the Italian peninsula with the exception of the Papal States, which would be surrounded by Imperial territory.
After the death of Emperor Henry VI, who had recently also conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, the succession became disputed: as Henry's son Frederick was still a small child, the partisans of the Staufen dynasty elected Henry's brother, Philip, Duke of Swabia, king in March 1198, whereas the princes opposed to the Staufen dynasty elected Otto, Duke of Brunswick, of the House of Welf. King Philip II of France supported Philip's claim, whereas King Richard I of England supported his nephew Otto.
In 1201, the pope openly espoused the side of Otto IV, whose family had always been opposed to the house of Hohenstaufen.
It is the business of the pope to look after the interests of the Roman empire, since the empire derives its origin and its final authority from the papacy; its origin, because it was originally transferred from Greece by and for the sake of the papacy...its final authority, because the emperor is raised to his position by the pope who blesses him, crowns him and invests him with the empire...Therefore, since three persons have lately been elected king by different parties, namely the youth [Frederick, son of Henry VI], Philip [of Hohenstaufen, brother of Henry VI], and Otto [of Brunswick, of the Welf family], so also three things must be taken into account in regard to each one, namely: the legality, the suitability and the expediency of his election...Far be it from us that we should defer to man rather than to God, or that we should fear the countenance of the powerful...On the foregoing grounds, then, we decide that the youth should not at present be given the empire; we utterly reject Philip for his manifest unfitness and we order his usurpation to be resisted by all...since Otto is not only himself devoted to the church, but comes from devout ancestors on both sides...therefore we decree that he ought to be accepted and supported as king, and ought to be given the crown of empire, after the rights of the Roman church have been secured."Papal Decree on the choice of a German King, 1201"
The confusion in the Empire allowed Innocent to drive out the imperial feudal lords from Ancona, Spoleto and Perugia, who had been installed by Emperor Henry VI. On 3 July 1201, the papal legate, Cardinal-Bishop Guido of Palestrina announced to the people, in the cathedral of Cologne, that Otto IV had been approved by the pope as Roman king and threatened with excommunication all those who refused to acknowledge him. At the same time, Innocent encouraged the cities in Tuscany to form a league, called the League of San Genesio against German imperial interests in Italy, and they placed themselves under Innocent's protection.
In May 1202, Innocent issued the decree "Venerabilem", addressed to the Duke of Zähringen, in which he explained his thinking on the relation between the papacy and the Empire. This decree was afterwards embodied in the "Corpus Juris Canonici", contained the following items:
Despite papal support, Otto could not oust his rival Philip until the latter was murdered in a private feud. His rule now undisputed, Otto reneged on his earlier promises and now set his sights on reestablishing Imperial power in Italy and claiming even the Kingdom of Sicily. Given the papal interest to keep Germany and Sicily apart, Innocent now supported his ward, King Frederick of Sicily, to resist Otto's advances and restore the Staufen dynasty to the Holy Roman Empire. Frederick was duly elected by the Staufen partisans.
The conflict was decided by the Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, which pitted Otto, allied to King John of England against Philip II Augustus. Otto was defeated by the French and thereafter lost all influence. He died on 19 May 1218, leaving Frederick II the undisputed emperor. Meanwhile, King John was forced to acknowledge the Pope as his feudal lord and accept Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his turn, Frederick II would later become a bitter opponent of the papacy once his empire was secure.
Innocent III played further roles in the politics of Norway, France, Sweden, Bulgaria, Spain and England. At the request of England's King John, Pope Innocent III declared the Magna Carta annulled, resulting in a rebellion by the English Barons who rejected the disenfranchisement.
Innocent III was a vigorous opponent of religious heresy and undertook campaigns to extirpate it. At the beginning of his pontificate, he focused on the Albigenses (Cathars), a sect that had become widespread in southwestern France, then under the control of local princes such as the Counts of Toulouse. The Cathars rejected the Christian authority and teachings of the Catholic Church, denouncing it as corrupt. In 1198, Innocent III dispatched a monk named Rainier to visit France with the power to excommunicate heretics, and orders to local temporal authorities to confiscate the lands of heretics or "as became Christians to deal with them more severely."
In 1208, Innocent's legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered by unknown assailants commonly believed to be friends of Count Raymond of Toulouse (who was not a Cathar himself but was seen as supportive of them). This caused Innocent to change his methods from words to weapons, calling upon King Philip II Augustus of France to suppress the Albigenses. Prosecuted primarily by the French crown under the generalship of Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, a campaign was launched. The Albigensian Crusade led to the deaths of approximately 20,000 men, women and children, Cathar and Catholic alike, decimating the number of practising Cathars and diminishing the region's distinct culture. The conflict took on a political flavor, directed not only against heretical Christians, but also the nobility of Toulouse and vassals of the Crown of Aragon, and finally brought the region firmly under the control of the king of France. King Peter II of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, was directly involved in the conflict, and was killed in the course of the Battle of Muret in 1213. The conflict largely ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1229, in which the integration of the Occitan territory in the French crown was agreed upon.
Pope Innocent III spent a majority of his tenure as Pope (1198–1216) preparing for a great crusade on the Holy Land. His first attempt was the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) which he decreed by the papal bull "Post miserabile" in 1198. Unlike past popes, Innocent III displayed interest in leading the crusade himself, rather than simply instigating it and allowing secular leaders to organize the expedition according to their own aspirations.
Innocent III's first order of business in preaching the crusade was to send missionaries to every Catholic state to endorse the campaign. He sent Peter of Capua to the kings of France and England with specific instructions to convince them to settle their differences, resulting in a truce of five years between the two nations, beginning in 1199. The intent of the truce was not to allow the two kings to lead the crusade, but rather to free their resources to assist the Crusade. For the army's leadership, Innocent aimed his pleas at the knights and nobles of Europe, succeeding in France, where many lords answered the pope's call, including the army's two eventual leaders, Theobald of Champagne and Boniface, marquis of Montferrat. The pope's calls to action were not received with as much enthusiasm in England or Germany, and the expedition became mainly a French affair.
The Fourth Crusade was an expensive endeavor. Innocent III chose to raise funds with a new approach: requiring all clergy to donate one fortieth of their income. This marked the first time a pope ever imposed a direct tax on the clergy. He faced many difficulties in collecting this tax, including corrupt tax collectors and disregard in England. He also sent envoys to King John of England and King Philip of France, who pledged to contribute to the campaign, and John also declared his support for the clerical tax in his kingdom. The crusaders themselves also contributed funds: Innocent declared that those who took the crusader's vow, but could no longer fulfill it, could be released by a contribution of funds. The pope put Archbishop Hubert Walter in charge of collecting these dues.
At the onset of the crusade, the intended destination was Egypt, as the Christians and Muslims were under a truce at the time. An agreement was made between the French Crusaders and the Venetians. The Venetians would supply vessels and supplies for the crusaders and in return, the crusaders would pay 85,000 marks (£200,000). Innocent gave his approval of this agreement under two conditions: a representative of the pope must accompany the crusade, and the attack on any other Christians was strictly forbidden. The French failed to raise sufficient funds for payment of the Venetians. As a result, the Crusaders diverted the crusade to the Christian city of Zara at the will of the Venetians to subsidize the debt. This diversion was adopted without the consent of Innocent III, who threatened excommunication to any who took part in the attack. A majority of the French ignored the threat and attacked Zara, and were excommunicated by Innocent III, but soon were forgiven so as to continue the crusade. A second diversion then occurred when the crusaders decided to conquer Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. This diversion was taken without any knowledge by Innocent III, and he did not learn of it until after the city had been captured.
Innocent viewed the capture of Constantinople as a way to reunite the schismatic Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The pope excommunicated the Crusaders who attacked Christian cities, but was unable to halt or overturn their actions. Erroneously, he felt that the Latin presence would bring about a reconciliation between the Eastern and Western Churches. His tactics ultimately failed due to the significant differences between the two churches. The crusade did lead to the start of the Latin Empire's rule of Constantinople, which lasted for the next sixty years.
In 1209, Francis of Assisi led his first eleven followers to Rome to seek permission from Pope Innocent III to found a new religious Order, which was ultimately granted. Upon entry to Rome, the brothers encountered Bishop Guido of Assisi, who had in his company Giovanni di San Paolo, the Cardinal Bishop of Sabina. The Cardinal, who was the confessor of Pope Innocent III, was immediately sympathetic to Francis and agreed to represent Francis to the pope. Reluctantly, Pope Innocent agreed to meet with Francis and the brothers the next day. After several days, the pope agreed to admit the group informally, adding that when God increased the group in grace and number, they could return for an official admittance. The group was tonsured. This was important in part because it recognized Church authority and protected his followers from possible accusations of heresy, as had happened to the Waldensians decades earlier. Though Pope Innocent initially had his doubts, following a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the Basilica of St. John Lateran (the cathedral of Rome, thus the 'home church' of all Christendom), he decided to endorse Francis's Order. This occurred, according to tradition, on 16 April 1210, and constituted the official founding of the Franciscan Order. The group, then the "Lesser Brothers" ("Order of Friars Minor" also known as the "Franciscan Order"), preached on the streets and had no possessions. They were centered in Porziuncola, and preached first in Umbria, before expanding throughout Italy.
On 15 November 1215 Innocent opened the Fourth Lateran Council, considered the most important church council of the Middle Ages. By its conclusion it issued seventy reformatory decrees. Among other things, it encouraged creating schools and holding clergy to a higher standard than the laity. Canon 18 forbade clergymen to participate in the practice of the judicial ordeal, effectively banning its use.
In order to define fundamental doctrines, the council reviewed the nature of the Eucharist, the ordered annual confession of sins, and prescribed detailed procedures for the election of bishops. The council also mandated a strict lifestyle for clergy. Canon 68 states: Jews and Muslims shall wear a special dress to enable them to be distinguished from Christians so that no Christian shall come to marry them ignorant of who they are. Canon 69 forbade "that Jews be given preferment in public office since this offers them the pretext to vent their wrath against the Christians." It assumes that Jews blaspheme Christ, and therefore, as it would be "too absurd for a blasphemer of Christ to exercise power over Christians", Jews should not be appointed to public offices.
The Council had set the beginning of the Fifth Crusade for 1217, under the direct leadership of the Church. After the Council, in the spring of 1216, Innocent moved to northern Italy in an attempt to reconcile the maritime cities of Pisa and Genoa by removing the excommunication cast over Pisa by his predecessor Celestine III and concluding a pact with Genoa.
Innocent III, however, died suddenly at Perugia on 16 June 1216. He was buried in the cathedral of Perugia, where his body remained until Pope Leo XIII had it transferred to the Lateran in December 1891.
Innocent is one of two popes (the other being Gregory IX) among the 23 historical figures depicted in marble relief portraits above the gallery doors of the U.S. House of Representatives in honor of their influence on the development of American law.
His Latin works include "De miseria humanae conditionis", a tract on asceticism that Innocent III wrote before becoming pope, and "De sacro altaris mysterio", a description and exegesis of the liturgy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24455 |
Polyvinyl chloride
Polyvinyl chloride (; colloquial: polyvinyl, vinyl; abbreviated: PVC) is the world's third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer (after polyethylene and polypropylene). About 40 million tons of PVC are produced each year.
PVC comes in two basic forms: rigid (sometimes abbreviated as RPVC) and flexible. The rigid form of PVC is used in construction for pipe and in profile applications such as doors and windows. It is also used in making bottles, non-food packaging, food-covering sheets, and cards (such as bank or membership cards). It can be made softer and more flexible by the addition of plasticizers, the most widely used being phthalates. In this form, it is also used in plumbing, electrical cable insulation, imitation leather, flooring, signage, phonograph records, inflatable products, and many applications where it replaces rubber. With cotton or linen, it is used in the production of canvas.
Pure polyvinyl chloride is a white, brittle solid. It is insoluble in alcohol but slightly soluble in tetrahydrofuran.
PVC was accidentally synthesized in 1872 by German chemist Eugen Baumann. The polymer appeared as a white solid inside a flask of vinyl chloride that had been left exposed to sunlight. In the early 20th century the Russian chemist Ivan Ostromislensky and Fritz Klatte of the German chemical company Griesheim-Elektron both attempted to use PVC in commercial products, but difficulties in processing the rigid, sometimes brittle polymer thwarted their efforts. Waldo Semon and the B.F. Goodrich Company developed a method in 1926 to plasticize PVC by blending it with various additives. The result was a more flexible and more easily processed material that soon achieved widespread commercial use.
Polyvinyl chloride is produced by polymerization of the vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), as shown.
About 80% of production involves suspension polymerization. Emulsion polymerization accounts for about 12%, and bulk polymerization accounts for 8%. Suspension polymerization affords particles with average diameters of 100–180 μm, whereas emulsion polymerization gives much smaller particles of average size around 0.2 μm. VCM and water are introduced into the reactor along with a polymerization initiator and other additives. The contents of the reaction vessel are pressurized and continually mixed to maintain the suspension and ensure a uniform particle size of the PVC resin. The reaction is exothermic and thus requires cooling. As the volume is reduced during the reaction (PVC is denser than VCM), water is continually added to the mixture to maintain the suspension.
The polymerization of VCM is started by compounds called initiators that are mixed into the droplets. These compounds break down to start the radical chain reaction. Typical initiators include dioctanoyl peroxide and dicetyl peroxydicarbonate, both of which have fragile O-O bonds. Some initiators start the reaction rapidly but decay quickly, and other initiators have the opposite effect. A combination of two different initiators is often used to give a uniform rate of polymerization. After the polymer has grown by about 10 times, the short polymer precipitates inside the droplet of VCM, and polymerization continues with the precipitated, solvent-swollen particles. The weight average molecular weights of commercial polymers range from 100,000 to 200,000, and the number average molecular weights range from 45,000 to 64,000.
Once the reaction has run its course, the resulting PVC slurry is degassed and stripped to remove excess VCM, which is recycled. The polymer is then passed through a centrifuge to remove water. The slurry is further dried in a hot air bed, and the resulting powder is sieved before storage or pelletization. Normally, the resulting PVC has a VCM content of less than 1 part per million. Other production processes, such as micro-suspension polymerization and emulsion polymerization, produce PVC with smaller particle sizes (10 μm vs. 120–150 μm for suspension PVC) with slightly different properties and with somewhat different sets of applications.
PVC may be manufactured from either naphtha or ethylene feedstock.
However, in China, where there are substantial stocks, coal is the main starting material for the Calcium carbide process. The acetylene so generated is then converted to VCM which usually involves the use of a mercury based catalyst. The process is also very energy intensive with much waste generated.
The polymers are linear and are strong. The monomers are mainly arranged head-to-tail, meaning that there are chlorides on alternating carbon centres. PVC has mainly an atactic stereochemistry, which means that the relative stereochemistry of the chloride centres are random. Some degree of syndiotacticity of the chain gives a few percent crystallinity that is influential on the properties of the material. About 57% of the mass of PVC is chlorine. The presence of chloride groups gives the polymer very different properties from the structurally related material polyethylene. The density is also higher than these structurally related plastics.
About half of the world's PVC production capacity is in China despite the closure of many Chinese PVC plants due to issues complying with environmental regulations and poor capacities of scale. The largest single producer of PVC as of 2018 is Shin-Etsu Chemical of Japan, with a global share of around 30%. The other major suppliers are based in North America and Western Europe.
The product of the polymerization process is unmodified PVC. Before PVC can be made into finished products, it always requires conversion into a compound by the incorporation of additives (but not necessarily all of the following) such as heat stabilizers, UV stabilizers, plasticizers, processing aids, impact modifiers, thermal modifiers, fillers, flame retardants, biocides, blowing agents and smoke suppressors, and, optionally, pigments. The choice of additives used for the PVC finished product is controlled by the cost performance requirements of the end use specification (underground pipe, window frames, intravenous tubing and flooring all have very different ingredients to suit their performance requirements). Previously, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were added to certain PVC products as flame retardants and stabilizers.
Most vinyl products contain plasticizers which are used to make the material softer and more flexible and lowering the glass transition temperature. Plasticizers work by increasing the space and acting as a lubricant between the PVC polymer chains. Higher levels of plasticizer result in softer PVC compounds and decreasing tensile strength.
A wide variety of substances can be used as plasticizers including phthalates, adipates, trimellitates, polymeric plasticizers and expoxidized vegetable oils. PVC compounds can be created with a very wide range of physical and chemical properties based on the types and amounts of plasticizers and other additives used. Additional selection criteia include their compatibility with the polymer, volatility levels, cost, chemical resistance, flammability and processing characteristics. These materials are usually oily colourless substances that mix well with the PVC particles. About 90% of the plasticizer market, estimated to be millions of tons per year worldwide, is dedicated to PVC.
The most common class of plasticizers used in PVC is phthalates, which are diesters of phthalic acid. Phthalates can be categorized as high and low, depending on their molecular weight. Low phthalates such as DEHP and DBP have increased health risks and are generally being phased out. High-molecular-weight phthalates such as DINP, DIDP and DOP are generally considered safer.
While di-2-ethylhexylphthalate (DEHP) has been medically approved for many years for use in medical devices, it was permanently banned for use in children's products in the US in 2008 by US Congress; the PVC-DEHP combination had proved to be very suitable for making blood bags because DEHP stabilizes red blood cells, minimizing hemolysis (red blood cell rupture). However, DEHP is coming under increasing pressure in Europe. The assessment of potential risks related to phthalates, and in particular the use of DEHP in PVC medical devices, was subject to scientific and policy review by the European Union authorities, and on 21 March 2010, a specific labeling requirement was introduced across the EU for all devices containing phthalates that are classified as CMR (carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction). The label aims to enable healthcare professionals to use this equipment safely, and, where needed, take appropriate precautionary measures for patients at risk of over-exposure.
DEHP alternatives, which are gradually replacing it, are adipates, butyryltrihexylcitrate (BTHC), cyclohexane-1,2-dicarboxylic acid diisononylester (DINCH), di(2-ethylhexyl)terephthalate, polymerics and trimellitic acid, 2-ethylhexylester (TOTM).
Liquid mixed metal stabilisers are used in several PVC flexible applications such as calendered films, extruded profiles, injection moulded soles and footwear, extruded hoses and plastisols where PVC paste is spread on to a backing (flooring, wall covering, artificial leather). Liquid mixed metal stabiliser systems are primarily based on barium, zinc and calcium carboxylates. In general liquid mixed metals like BaZn, CaZn require the addition of co-stabilisers, antioxidants and organo-phosphites to provide optimum performance.
BaZn stabilisers have successfully replaced cadmium-based stabilisers in Europe in many PVC semi-rigid and flexible applications.
In Europe, particularly Belgium, there has been a commitment to eliminate the use of cadmium (previously used as a part component of heat stabilizers in window profiles) and phase out lead-based heat stabilizers (as used in pipe and profile areas) such as liquid autodiachromate and calcium polyhydrocummate by 2015. According to the final report of Vinyl 2010 cadmium was eliminated across Europe by 2007. The progressive substitution of lead-based stabilizers is also confirmed in the same document showing a reduction of 75% since 2000 and ongoing. This is confirmed by the corresponding growth in calcium-based stabilizers, used as an alternative to lead-based stabilizers, more and more, also outside Europe.
Tin-based stabilizers are mainly used in Europe for rigid, transparent applications due to the high temperature processing conditions used. The situation in North America is different where tin systems are used for almost all rigid PVC applications.
Tin stabilizers can be divided into two main groups, the first group containing those with tin-oxygen bonds and the second group with tin-sulfur bonds.
One of the most crucial additives are heat stabilizers. These agents minimize loss of HCl, a degradation process that starts above 70 °C (158 °F). Once dehydrochlorination starts, it is autocatalytic. Many diverse agents have been used including, traditionally, derivatives of heavy metals (lead, cadmium). Metallic soaps (metal "salts" of fatty acids) are common in flexible PVC applications, species such as calcium stearate. Addition levels vary typically from 2% to 4%. Tin Mercaptides are widely used globally in rigid PVC applications due to their high efficiency and proven performance. Typical usage levels are 0.3 (pipe) to 2.5phr (foam) depending on the application. Tin stabilizers are the preferred stabilizers for high output PVC and CPVC extrusion. Tin stabilizers have been in use for over 50 years by companies such as PMC Organometallix and its predecessors. The choice of the best PVC stabilizer depends on its cost effectiveness in the end use application, performance specification requirements, processing technology and regulatory approvals.
PVC is a thermoplastic polymer. Its properties are usually categorized based on rigid and flexible PVCs.
PVC has high hardness and mechanical properties. The mechanical properties enhance with the molecular weight increasing but decrease with the temperature increasing. The mechanical properties of rigid PVC (uPVC) are very good; the elastic modulus can reach 1500-3,000 MPa. The soft PVC (flexible PVC) elastic limit is 1.5–15 MPa.
The heat stability of raw PVC is very poor, so the addition of a heat stabilizer during the process is necessary in order to ensure the product's properties. Traditional product PVC has a maximum operating temperature around 140 °F (60 °C) when heat distortion begins to occur. Melting temperatures range from to 500 °F (260 °C) depending upon manufacture additives to the PVC. The linear expansion coefficient of rigid PVC is small and has good flame retardancy, the limiting oxygen index (LOI) being up to 45 or more. The LOI is the minimum concentration of oxygen, expressed as a percentage, that will support combustion of a polymer and noting that air has 20% content of oxygen.
As a thermoplastic, PVC has an inherent insulation that aids in reducing condensation formation and resisting internal temperature changes for hot and cold liquids.
PVC is a polymer with good insulation properties, but because of its higher polar nature the electrical insulating property is inferior to non-polar polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene.
Since the dielectric constant, dielectric loss tangent value, and volume resistivity are high, the corona resistance is not very good, and it is generally suitable for medium or low voltage and low frequency insulation materials.
PVC is chemically resistant to acids, salts, bases, fats, and alcohols, making it resistant to the corrosive effects of sewage, which is why it is so extensively utilized in sewer piping systems. It is also resistant to some solvents, this, however, is reserved mainly for uPVC (unplasticized PVC). Plasticized PVC, also known as PVC-P, is in some cases less resistant to solvents. For example, PVC is resistant to fuel and some paint thinners. Some solvents may only swell it or deform it but not dissolve it, but some, like tetrahydrofuran or acetone, may damage it.
Roughly half of the world's polyvinyl chloride resin manufactured annually is used for producing pipes for municipal and industrial applications. In the private homeowner market, it accounts for 66% of the household market in the U.S., and in household sanitary sewer pipe applications, it accounts for 75%. Buried PVC pipes in both water and sanitary sewer applications that are in diameter and larger are typically joined by means of a gasket-sealed joint. The most common type of gasket utilized in North America is a metal reinforced elastomer, commonly referred to as a Rieber sealing system. Its light weight, low cost, and low maintenance make it attractive. However, it must be carefully installed and bedded to ensure longitudinal cracking and overbelling does not occur. Additionally, PVC pipes can be fused together using various solvent cements, or heat-fused (butt-fusion process, similar to joining high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe), creating permanent joints that are virtually impervious to leakage.
In February 2007 the California Building Standards Code was updated to approve the use of chlorinated polyvinyl chloride (CPVC) pipe for use in residential water supply piping systems. CPVC has been a nationally accepted material in the U.S. since 1982; California, however, has permitted only limited use since 2001. The Department of Housing and Community Development prepared and certified an environmental impact statement resulting in a recommendation that the commission adopt and approve the use of CPVC. The commission's vote was unanimous, and CPVC has been placed in the 2007 California Plumbing Code.
PVC is commonly used as the insulation on electrical cables such as teck; PVC used for this purpose needs to be plasticized.
Flexible PVC coated wire and cable for electrical use has traditionally been stabilised with lead, but these are being replaced with calcium-zinc based systems.
In a fire, PVC-coated wires can form hydrogen chloride fumes; the chlorine serves to scavenge free radicals and is the source of the material's fire retardance. While hydrogen chloride fumes can also pose a health hazard in their own right, it dissolves in moisture and breaks down onto surfaces, particularly in areas where the air is cool enough to breathe, and is not available for inhalation. Frequently in applications where smoke is a major hazard (notably in tunnels and communal areas), PVC-free cable insulation is preferred, such as low smoke zero halogen (LSZH) insulation.
PVC is a common, strong but lightweight plastic used in construction. It is made softer and more flexible by the addition of plasticizers. If no plasticizers are added, it is known as uPVC (unplasticized polyvinyl chloride) or rigid PVC.
uPVC is extensively used in the building industry as a low-maintenance material, particularly in Ireland, the United Kingdom, in the United States and Canada. In the U.S. and Canada it is known as vinyl or vinyl siding. The material comes in a range of colors and finishes, including a photo-effect wood finish, and is used as a substitute for painted wood, mostly for window frames and sills when installing insulated glazing in new buildings; or to replace older single-glazed windows, as it does not decompose and is weather-resistant. Other uses include fascia, and siding or weatherboarding. This material has almost entirely replaced the use of cast iron for plumbing and drainage, being used for waste pipes, drainpipes, gutters and downspouts. uPVC is known as having strong resistance against chemicals, sunlight, and oxidation from water.
Polyvinyl chloride is formed in flat sheets in a variety of thicknesses and colors. As flat sheets, PVC is often expanded to create voids in the interior of the material, providing additional thickness without additional weight and minimal extra cost (see Closed-cell PVC foamboard). Sheets are cut using saws and rotary cutting equipment. Plasticized PVC is also used to produce thin, colored, or clear, adhesive-backed films referred to simply as vinyl. These films are typically cut on a computer-controlled plotter (see Vinyl cutter) or printed in a wide-format printer. These sheets and films are used to produce a wide variety of commercial signage products, including car body stripes and stickers.
PVC fabric is water-resistant, used for its weather-resistant qualities in coats, skiing equipment, shoes, jackets, aprons, and sports bags.
PVC fabric has a niche role in speciality clothing, either to create an artificial leather material or at times simply for its effect. PVC clothing is common in Goth, Punk, clothing fetish and alternative fashions. PVC is less expensive than rubber, leather or latex, which it is used to simulate.
The two main application areas for single-use medically approved PVC compounds are flexible containers and tubing: containers used for blood and blood components, for urine collection or for ostomy products and tubing used for blood taking and blood giving sets, catheters, heart-lung bypass sets, hemodialysis sets etc. In Europe the consumption of PVC for medical devices is approximately 85,000 tons each year. Almost one third of plastic-based medical devices are made from PVC.
The reasons for using flexible PVC in these applications for over 50 years are numerous and based on cost effectiveness linked to transparency, light weight, softness, tear strength, kink resistance, suitability for sterilization and biocompatibility.
Flexible PVC flooring is inexpensive and used in a variety of buildings, including homes, hospitals, offices, and schools. Complex and 3D designs are possible, which are then protected by a clear wear layer. A middle vinyl foam layer also gives a comfortable and safe feel. The smooth, tough surface of the upper wear layer prevents the buildup of dirt, which prevents microbes from breeding in areas that need to be kept sterile, such as hospitals and clinics.
PVC may be extruded under pressure to encase wire rope and aircraft cable used for general purpose applications. PVC coated wire rope is easier to handle, resists corrosion and abrasion, and may be color-coded for increased visibility. It is found in a variety of industries and environments both indoor and out.
PVC has been used for a host of consumer products. One of its earliest mass-market consumer applications was vinyl record production. More recent examples include wallcovering, greenhouses, home playgrounds, foam and other toys, custom truck toppers (tarpaulins), ceiling tiles and other kinds of interior cladding.
PVC piping is cheaper than metals used in musical instrument making; it is therefore a common alternative when making instruments, often for leisure or for rarer instruments such as the contrabass flute.
PVC can be usefully modified by chlorination, which increases its chlorine content to or above 67%. Chlorinated polyvinyl chloride, (CPVC), as it is called, is produced by chlorination of aqueous solution of suspension PVC particles followed by exposure to UV light which initiates the free-radical chlorination. The reaction produces CPVC, which can be used in hotter and more corrosive environments than PVC.
Degradation during service life, or after careless disposal, is a chemical change that drastically reduces the average molecular weight of the polyvinyl chloride polymer. Since the mechanical integrity of a plastic depends on its high average molecular weight, wear and tear inevitably weakens the material. Weathering degradation of plastics results in their surface embrittlement and microcracking, yielding microparticles that continue on in the environment. Also known as microplastics, these particles act like sponges and soak up persistent organic pollutants (POPs) around them. Thus laden with high levels of POPs, the microparticles are often ingested by organisms in the biosphere.
However there is evidence that three of the polymers (HDPE, LDPE, and PP) consistently soaked up POPs at concentrations an order of magnitude higher than did the remaining two (PVC and PET). After 12 months of exposure, for example, there was a 34-fold difference in average total POPs amassed on LDPE compared to PET at one location. At another site, average total POPs adhered to HDPE was nearly 30 times that of PVC. The researchers think that differences in the size and shape of the polymer molecules can explain why some accumulate more pollutants than others.
The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus effectively degrades plasticized PVC. Phanerochaete chrysosporium was grown on PVC in a mineral salt agar. Phanerochaete chrysosporium, Lentinus tigrinus, Aspergillus niger, and Aspergillus sydowii can effectively degrade PVC.
Phthalates, which are incorporated into plastics as plasticizers, comprise approximately 70% of the U.S. plasticizer market; phthalates are by design not covalently bound to the polymer matrix, which makes them highly susceptible to leaching. Phthalates are contained in plastics at high percentages. For example, they can contribute up to 40% by weight to intravenous medical bags and up to 80% by weight in medical tubing. Vinyl products are pervasive—including toys, car interiors, shower curtains, and flooring—and initially release chemical gases into the air. Some studies indicate that this outgassing of additives may contribute to health complications, and have resulted in a call for banning the use of DEHP on shower curtains, among other uses. Japanese car companies Toyota, Nissan, and Honda eliminated the use of PVC in car interiors since 2007.
In 2004 a joint Swedish-Danish research team found a statistical association between allergies in children and indoor air levels of DEHP and BBzP (butyl benzyl phthalate), which is used in vinyl flooring. In December 2006, the European Chemicals Bureau of the European Commission released a final draft risk assessment of BBzP which found "no concern" for consumer exposure including exposure to children.
Risk assessments have led to the classification of low molecular weight and labeling as Category 1B Reproductive agents. Three of these phthalates, DBP, BBP and DEHP were included on annex XIV of the REACH regulation in February 2011 and will be phased out by the EU by February 2015 unless an application for authorisation is made before July 2013 and an authorisation granted. DIBP is still on the REACH Candidate List for Authorisation. Environmental Science & Technology, a peer reviewed journal published by the American Chemical Society states that it is completely safe.
In 2008 the European Union's Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) reviewed the safety of DEHP in medical devices. The SCENIHR report states that certain medical procedures used in high risk patients result in a significant exposure to DEHP and concludes there is still a reason for having some concerns about the exposure of prematurely born male babies to medical devices containing DEHP. The Committee said there are some alternative plasticizers available for which there is sufficient toxicological data to indicate a lower hazard compared to DEHP but added that the functionality of these plasticizers should be assessed before they can be used as an alternative for DEHP in PVC medical devices. Risk assessment results have shown positive results regarding the safe use of High Molecular Weight Phthalates. They have all been registered for REACH and do not require any classification for health and environmental effects, nor are they on the Candidate List for Authorisation. High phthalates are not CMR (carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction), neither are they considered endocrine disruptors.
In the EU Risk Assessment the European Commission has confirmed that Di-isononyl phthalate (DINP) and Di-isodecyl phthalate (DIDP) pose no risk to either human health or the environment from any current use.
The European Commission's findings (published in the EU Official Journal on 13 April 2006) confirm the outcome of a risk assessment involving more than 10 years of extensive scientific evaluation by EU regulators.
Following the recent adoption of EU legislation with the regard to the marketing and use of DINP in toys and childcare articles, the risk assessment conclusions clearly state that there is no need for any further measures to regulate the use of DINP.
In Europe and in some other parts of the world, the use of DINP in toys and childcare items has been restricted as a precautionary measure. In Europe, for example, DINP can no longer be used in toys and childcare items that can be put in the mouth even though the EU scientific risk assessment concluded that its use in toys does not pose a risk to human health or the environment.
The rigorous EU risk assessments, which include a high degree of conservatism and built-in safety factors, have been carried out under the strict supervision of the European Commission and provide a clear scientific evaluation on which to judge whether or not a particular substance can be safely used.
The FDA Paper titled "Safety Assessment of Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP)Released from PVC Medical Devices" states that [3.2.1.3] Critically ill or injured patients may be at increased risk of developing adverse health effects from DEHP, not only by virtue of increased exposure relative to the general population, but also because of the physiological and pharmacodynamic changes that occur in these patients compared to healthy individuals.
Lead had previously been frequently added to PVC to improve workability and stability. Lead has been shown to leach into drinking water from PVC pipes.
In Europe (EU 28) the use of lead-based stabilizers was gradually replaced. The VinylPlus voluntary commitment which began in 2000, saw European Stabiliser Producers Association (ESPA) members complete the replacement of Pb-based stabilisers in 2015.
In the early 1970s, the carcinogenicity of vinyl chloride (usually called vinyl chloride monomer or VCM) was linked to cancers in workers in the polyvinyl chloride industry. Specifically workers in polymerization section of a B.F. Goodrich plant near Louisville, Kentucky, were diagnosed with liver angiosarcoma also known as hemangiosarcoma, a rare disease. Since that time, studies of PVC workers in Australia, Italy, Germany, and the UK have all associated certain types of occupational cancers with exposure to vinyl chloride, and it has become accepted that VCM is a carcinogen. Technology for removal of VCM from products has become stringent, commensurate with the associated regulations.
PVC produces HCl upon combustion almost quantitatively related to its chlorine content. Extensive studies in Europe indicate that the chlorine found in emitted dioxins is not derived from HCl in the flue gases. Instead, most dioxins arise in the condensed solid phase by the reaction of inorganic chlorides with graphitic structures in char-containing ash particles. Copper acts as a catalyst for these reactions.
Studies of household waste burning indicate consistent increases in dioxin generation with increasing PVC concentrations. According to the EPA dioxin inventory, landfill fires are likely to represent an even larger source of dioxin to the environment. A survey of international studies consistently identifies high dioxin concentrations in areas affected by open waste burning and a study that looked at the homologue pattern found the sample with the highest dioxin concentration was "typical for the pyrolysis of PVC". Other EU studies indicate that PVC likely "accounts for the overwhelming majority of chlorine that is available for dioxin formation during landfill fires."
The next largest sources of dioxin in the EPA inventory are medical and municipal waste incinerators. Various studies have been conducted that reach contradictory results. For instance a study of commercial-scale incinerators showed no relationship between the PVC content of the waste and dioxin emissions. Other studies have shown a clear correlation between dioxin formation and chloride content and indicate that PVC is a significant contributor to the formation of both dioxin and PCB in incinerators.
In February 2007, the Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee of the US Green Building Council (USGBC) released its report on a PVC avoidance related materials credit for the LEED Green Building Rating system. The report concludes that "no single material shows up as the best across all the human health and environmental impact categories, nor as the worst" but that the "risk of dioxin emissions puts PVC consistently among the worst materials for human health impacts."
In Europe the overwhelming importance of combustion conditions on dioxin formation has been established by numerous researchers. The single most important factor in forming dioxin-like compounds is the temperature of the combustion gases. Oxygen concentration also plays a major role on dioxin formation, but not the chlorine content.
The design of modern incinerators minimises PCDD/F formation by optimising the stability of the thermal process. To comply with the EU emission limit of 0.1 ng I-TEQ/m3 modern incinerators operate in conditions minimising dioxin formation and are equipped with pollution control devices which catch the low amounts produced. Recent information is showing for example that dioxin levels in populations near incinerators in Lisbon and Madeira have not risen since the plants began operating in 1999 and 2002 respectively.
Several studies have also shown that removing PVC from waste would not significantly reduce the quantity of dioxins emitted. The European Union Commission published in July 2000 a Green Paper on the Environmental Issues of PVC. " The Commission states (page 27) that it has been suggested that the reduction of the chlorine content in the waste can contribute to the reduction of dioxin formation, even though the actual mechanism is not fully understood. The influence on the reduction is also expected to be a second or third order relationship. It is most likely that the main incineration parameters, such as the temperature and the oxygen concentration, have a major influence on the dioxin formation". The Green Paper states further that at the current levels of chlorine in municipal waste, there does not seem to be a direct quantitative relationship between chlorine content and dioxin formation.
A study commissioned by the European Commission on "Life Cycle Assessment of PVC and of principal competing materials" states that "Recent studies show that the presence of PVC has no significant effect on the amount of dioxins released through incineration of plastic waste."
The European waste hierarchy refers to the five steps included in the article 4 of the Waste Framework Directive:
The European Commission has set new rules to promote the recovery of PVC waste for use in a number of construction products. It says: "The use of recovered PVC should be encouraged in the manufacture of certain construction products because it allows the reuse of old PVC ... This avoids PVC being discarded in landfills or incinerated causing release of carbon dioxide and cadmium in the environment".
In Europe, developments in PVC waste management have been monitored by Vinyl 2010, established in 2000. Vinyl 2010's objective was to recycle 200,000 tonnes of post-consumer PVC waste per year in Europe by the end of 2010, excluding waste streams already subject to other or more specific legislation (such as the European Directives on End-of-Life Vehicles, Packaging and Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment).
Since June 2011, it is followed by VinylPlus, a new set of targets for sustainable development. Its main target is to recycle 800,000 tonnes/year of PVC by 2020 including 100,000 tonnes of "difficult to recycle" waste. One facilitator for collection and recycling of PVC waste is Recovinyl. The reported and audited mechanically recycled PVC tonnage in 2016 was 568,695 tonnes which in 2018 had increased to 739,525 tonnes
One approach to address the problem of waste PVC is also through the process called Vinyloop. It is a mechanical recycling process using a solvent to separate PVC from other materials. This solvent turns in a closed loop process in which the solvent is recycled. Recycled PVC is used in place of virgin PVC in various applications: coatings for swimming pools, shoe soles, hoses, diaphragms tunnel, coated fabrics, PVC sheets. This recycled PVC's primary energy demand is 46 percent lower than conventional produced PVC. So the use of recycled material leads to a significant better ecological footprint. The global warming potential is 39 percent lower.
In November 2005 one of the largest hospital networks in the U.S., Catholic Healthcare West, signed a contract with B. Braun Melsungen for vinyl-free intravenous bags and tubing.
In January 2012 a major U.S. West Coast healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, announced that it will no longer buy intravenous (IV) medical equipment made with polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and DEHP (di-2-ethyl hexyl phthalate) type plasticizers.
In 1998, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) arrived at a voluntary agreement with manufacturers to remove phthalates from PVC rattles, teethers, baby bottle nipples and pacifiers.
Plasticized PVC is a common material for medical gloves. Due to vinyl gloves having less flexibility and elasticity, several guidelines recommend either latex or nitrile gloves for clinical care and procedures that require manual dexterity and/or that involve patient contact for more than a brief period. Vinyl gloves show poor resistance to many chemicals, including glutaraldehyde-based products and alcohols used in formulation of disinfectants for swabbing down work surfaces or in hand rubs. The additives in PVC are also known to cause skin reactions such as allergic contact dermatitis. These are for example the antioxidant bisphenol A, the biocide benzisothiazolinone, propylene glycol/adipate polyester and ethylhexylmaleate.
PVC is made from fossil fuels including natural gas. The production process also uses sodium chloride. Recycled PVC is broken down into small chips, impurities removed, and the product refined to make pure PVC. It can be recycled roughly seven times and has a lifespan of around 140 years.
In the UK, approximately 400 tonnes of PVC are recycled every month. Property owners can recycle it through nationwide collection depots. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), for example, after initially rejecting PVC as material for different temporary venues of the London Olympics 2012, has reviewed its decision and developed a policy for its use. This policy highlighted that the functional properties of PVC make it the most appropriate material in certain circumstances while taking into consideration the environmental and social impacts across the whole life cycle, e.g. the rate for recycling or reuse and the percentage of recycled content. Temporary parts, like roofing covers of the Olympic Stadium, the Water Polo Arena, and the Royal Artillery Barracks, would be deconstructed and a part recycled in the VinyLoop process. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24458 |
Profession
A profession is an occupation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain. The term is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term "profession libérale". Originally borrowed by English users in the 19th century, it has been re-borrowed by international users from the late 20th, though the (upper-middle) class overtones of the term do not seem to survive retranslation: "liberal professions" are, according to the European Union's Directive on Recognition of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC), "those practiced on the basis of relevant professional qualifications in a personal, responsible and professionally independent capacity by those providing intellectual and conceptual services in the interest of the client and the public".
It has been said that a profession is not a trade and not an industry.
Medieval and early modern tradition recognized only three professions: divinity, medicine, and law – the so-called "learned professions".
Major milestones which may mark an occupation being identified as a profession include:
Applying these milestones to the historical sequence of development in the United States shows surveying achieving professional status first (note that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as land surveyors before entering politics), followed by medicine, actuarial science, law, dentistry, civil engineering, logistics, architecture and accounting.
With the rise of technology and occupational specialization in the 19th century, other bodies began to claim professional status: mechanical engineering, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, psychology, nursing, teaching, librarianship, optometry and social work, each of which could claim, using these milestones, to have become professions by 1900.
Just as some professions rise in status and power through various stages, others may decline. Disciplines formalized more recently, such as architecture, now have equally long periods of study associated with them.
Although professions may enjoy relatively high status and public prestige, not all professionals earn high salaries, and even within specific professions there exist significant inequalities of compensation; in law, for example, a corporate/insurance defense lawyer working on a billable-hour basis may earn several times what a prosecutor or public defender earns.
A profession arises when any trade or occupation transforms itself through ""the development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship, and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly rights.""
Originally, any regulation of the professions was self-regulation through bodies such as the College of Physicians or the Inns of Court. With the growing role of government, statutory bodies have increasingly taken on this role, their members being appointed either by the profession or (increasingly) by government. Proposals for the introduction or enhancement of statutory regulation may be welcomed by a profession as protecting clients and enhancing its quality and reputation, or as restricting access to the profession and hence enabling higher fees to be charged. It may be resisted as limiting the members' freedom to innovate or to practice as in their professional judgement they consider best.
An example was in 12, when the British government proposed wide statutory regulation of psychologists. The inspiration for the change was a number of problems in the psychotherapy field, but there are various kinds of psychologist including many who have no clinical role and where the case for regulation was not so clear. Work psychology brought especial disagreement, with the British Psychological Society favoring statutory regulation of "occupational psychologists" and the Association of Business Psychologists resisting the statutory regulation of "business psychologists" – descriptions of professional activity which it may not be easy to distinguish.
Besides regulating access to a profession, professional bodies may set examinations of competence and enforce adherence to an ethical code. There may be several such bodies for one profession in a single country, an example being the accountancy bodies of the United Kingdom (ACCA, CAI, CIMA, CIPFA, ICAEW and ICAS), all of which have been given a Royal Charter, although their members are not necessarily considered to hold equivalent qualifications, and which operate alongside further bodies (AAPA, IFA, CPAA). Another example of a regulatory body that governs a profession is the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, which governs the conduct, rights, obligations and duties of salaried teachers working in educational institutions in Hong Kong.
The engineering profession is highly regulated in some countries (Canada and USA) with a strict licensing system for Professional Engineer that controls the practice but not in others (UK) where titles and qualifications are regulated Chartered Engineer but practice is not regulated.
Typically, individuals are required by law to be qualified by a local professional body before they are permitted to practice in that profession. However, in some countries, individuals may not be required by law to be qualified by such a professional body in order to practice, as is the case for accountancy in the United Kingdom (except for auditing and insolvency work which legally require qualification by a professional body). In such cases, qualification by the professional bodies is effectively still considered a prerequisite to practice as most employers and clients stipulate that the individual hold such qualifications before hiring their services. For example, in order to become a fully qualified teaching professional in Hong Kong working in a state or government-funded school, one needs to have successfully completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Education ("PGDE") or a bachelor's degree in Education ("BEd") at an approved tertiary educational institution or university. This requirement is set out by the Educational Department Bureau of Hong Kong, which is the governmental department that governs the Hong Kong education sector.
Professions tend to be autonomous, which means they have a high degree of control of their own affairs: ""professionals are autonomous insofar as they can make independent judgments about their work"". This usually means ""the freedom to exercise their professional judgement.""
However, it also has other meanings. ""Professional autonomy is often described as a claim of professionals that has to serve primarily their own interests...this professional autonomy can only be maintained if members of the profession subject their activities and decisions to a critical evaluation by other members of the profession "" The concept of autonomy can therefore be seen to embrace not only judgement, but also self-interest and a continuous process of critical evaluation of ethics and procedures from within the profession itself.
One major implication of professional autonomy is the traditional ban on corporate practice of the professions, especially accounting, architecture, medicine, and law. This means that in many jurisdictions, these professionals cannot do business through regular for-profit corporations and raise capital rapidly through initial public offerings or flotations. Instead, if they wish to practice collectively they must form special business entities such as partnerships or professional corporations, which feature (1) reduced protection against liability for professional negligence and (2) severe limitations or outright prohibitions on ownership by non-professionals. The obvious implication of this is that all equity owners of the professional business entity must be professionals themselves. This avoids the possibility of a non-professional owner of the firm telling a professional how to do his or her job and thereby protects professional autonomy. The idea is that the "only" non-professional person who should be telling the professional what to do is the "client"; in other words, professional autonomy preserves the integrity of the two-party professional-client relationship. Above this client-professional relationship the profession requires the professional to use their autonomy to follow the rules of ethics that the profession requires. But because professional business entities are effectively locked out of the stock market, they tend to grow relatively slowly compared to public corporations.
Professions enjoy a high social status, regard and esteem conferred upon them by society. This high esteem arises primarily from the higher social function of their work, which is regarded as vital to society as a whole and thus of having a special and valuable nature. All professions involve technical, specialized and highly skilled work often referred to as ""professional expertise."" Training for this work involves obtaining degrees and professional qualifications (see Licensure) without which entry to the profession is barred (occupational closure). Updating skills through continuing education is required through training.
All professions have power. This power is used to control its own members, and also its area of expertise and interests. A profession tends to dominate, police and protect its area of expertise and the conduct of its members, and exercises a dominating influence over its entire field which means that professions can act monopolist, rebuffing competition from ancillary trades and occupations, as well as subordinating and controlling lesser but related trades. A profession is characterized by the power and high prestige it has in society as a whole. It is the power, prestige and value that society confers upon a profession that more clearly defines it. The power of professions has led to them being referred to as conspiracies against the laity.
On the other hand, professionals acquire some of their power and authority in organizations from their expertise and knowledge. As such they can bend rules, reduce bureaucratic inertia and increase problem solving and adaptability.
Public Service as a Profession to Moderate Abuses of Power
There is considerable agreement about defining the characteristic features of a profession. They have a "professional association, cognitive base, institutionalized training, licensing, work autonomy, colleague control... (and) code of ethics", to which Larson then also adds, "high standards of professional and intellectual excellence," (Larson, p. 221) that "professions are occupations with special power and prestige", (Larson, p.x) and that they comprise "an exclusive elite group," (Larson, p. 20) in all societies. Members of a profession have also been defined as "workers whose qualities of detachment, autonomy, and group allegiance are more extensive than those found among other groups...their attributes include a high degree of systematic knowledge; strong community orientation and loyalty; self-regulation; and a system of rewards defined and administered by the community of workers."
A profession has been further defined as: "a special type of occupation...(possessing) corporate solidarity...prolonged specialized training in a body of abstract knowledge, and a collectivity or service orientation...a vocational sub-culture which comprises implicit codes of behavior, generates an esprit de corps among members of the same profession, and ensures them certain occupational advantages...(also) bureaucratic structures and monopolistic privileges to perform certain types of work...professional literature, legislation, etc."
A critical characteristic of a profession is the need to cultivate and exercise professional "discretion" - that is, the ability to make case by case "judgements" that cannot be determined by an absolute rule or instruction.
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Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse FRS (; 6 April 1810 – 23 August 1888), known to his friends as Henry, was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse created and stocked the first public aquarium at the London Zoo in 1853, and coined the term "aquarium" when he published the first manual, "The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea", in 1854. His work was the catalyst for an aquarium craze in early Victorian England.
Gosse was also the author of "Omphalos", an attempt to reconcile the geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation. After his death, Gosse was portrayed as a despotic father of uncompromising religious views in "Father and Son" (1907), a memoir written by his son, Edmund Gosse, a poet and critic.
Philip Henry Gosse was born in Worcester in 1810 of an itinerant painter of miniature portraits and a lady's maid. He spent his childhood mostly in Poole, Dorset, where his aunt, Susan Bell, taught him to draw and introduced him to zoology. She had similarly taught her own son, Thomas Bell, who was twenty years older and later became a great friend to Gosse.
At fifteen he began work as a clerk in the counting house of George Garland and Sons in Poole. In 1827 he sailed to Newfoundland to serve as a clerk in the Carbonear premises of Slade, Elson and Co. There he became a dedicated, self-taught student of Newfoundland entomology, "the first person systematically to investigate and to record the entomology" of the island. In 1832 Gosse experienced a religious conversion and, as he said, "solemnly, deliberately and uprightly, took God for my God."
In 1835 he left Newfoundland for Compton, Lower Canada (Quebec), where he farmed unsuccessfully for three years. He originally tried to establish a commune with two of his religious friends. The experience deepened his love for natural history, and locals referred to him as "that crazy Englishman who goes about picking up bugs." During this time he became a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal and submitted specimens to its museum.
In 1838 Gosse taught eight months for Reuben Saffold, the owner of Belvoir plantation, near Pleasant Hill, Alabama. In this period, planters often hired private tutors to teach their children. Gosse also studied and drew the local flora and fauna, assembling an unpublished volume, "Entomologia Alabamensis", on insect life in the state. The cotton plantation was in the Black Belt of Alabama, and Saffold held numerous enslaved laborers. Gosse recorded his negative impressions of slavery, later published as "Letters from Alabama" (1859).
Returning to England in 1839, Gosse was hard pressed to make a living, subsisting on eightpence a day ("one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread"). His fortunes began to improve when John Van Voorst, the leading publisher of naturalist writing, agreed, on the recommendation of Thomas Bell, to publish his "Canadian Naturalist" (1840). The book, set as a conversation between a father and his son (a son Gosse did not yet have), was widely praised. It is now considered to demonstrate that Gosse "had a practical grasp of the importance of conservation, far ahead of his time."
Gosse opened a "Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentlemen" while keeping detailed records of his microscopic investigations of pond life, especially cyclopidae and rotifera. He also began to preach to the Wesleyan Methodists and lead a Bible class. In 1842, he became so captivated by the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ that he severed his connection with the Methodists and joined the Plymouth Brethren. These dissenters emphasized the Second Coming while rejecting liturgy and an ordained ministry—although they otherwise endorsed the traditional doctrines of Christianity as represented by the creeds of the Methodist and the Anglican Church.
In 1843, Gosse gave up the school to write "An Introduction to Zoology" for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and to draw some of the illustrations. Writing the work inspired him to further his interest in the flora and fauna of the seashore. He showed in his book that he was a creationist, which was typical of pre-Darwinian naturalists.
In October 1844 Gosse sailed to Jamaica, where he served as a professional collector for dealer Hugh Cuming. Although Gosse worked hard during his eighteen months on the island, he later called this period his " 'holiday' in Jamaica." Gosse's study specialized in birds, and Gosse has been called "the father of Jamaican ornithology." Gosse hired black youths as assistants and especially praised one of them, Samuel Campbell, in his Jamaican books. For Christian companionship he enjoyed the company of Moravian missionaries and their black converts, and he preached regularly to the Moravian congregation.
On his return to London in 1846, Gosse wrote a trilogy on the natural history of Jamaica including "A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica" (1851). It is described as "written in a congenial style and firmly established his reputation both as a naturalist and a writer."
In the field of herpetology, Gosse described several new species of reptiles endemic to Jamaica.
Back in England, Gosse wrote books in his field and out; he produced a quick volume for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was "Monuments of Ancient Egypt", a land he had never visited and never would. As his financial situation stabilized, Gosse courted Emily Bowes, a forty-one-year-old member of the Brethren, who was both a strong personality and a gifted writer of evangelical tracts. They married in November 1848, and their union was an extremely happy one. As D. J. Taylor has written, "the word 'uxorious' seems to have minted to define" Gosse. Gosse's only son was born on 21 September 1849. Gosse noted the event in his diary with the words, "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica"—an amusing conjunction which Edmund later described as demonstrating only the order of events: the boy had arrived first.
Gosse wrote a succession of books and articles on natural history, some of which were (in his own words) "pot-boilers" for religious publications. (At the time, accounts of God's creation were considered appropriate Sabbath reading for children.) As L. C. Croft has written,
"Much of Gosse's success was due to the fact that he was essentially a field naturalist who was able to impart to his readers something of the thrill of studying living animals at first hand rather than the dead disjointed ones of the museum shelf. In addition to this he was a skilled scientific draughtsman who was able to illustrate his books himself."
Suffering from headaches, perhaps the result of overwork, Gosse, with his family, began to spend more time away from London on the Devon coast. Here along the sea shore, Gosse began serious experimentation with ways to sustain sea creatures so that they could be examined "without diving to gaze on them." Although there had been attempts to construct what had previously been called an "aquatic vivarium" (a name Gosse found "awkward and uncouth"), Gosse published "The Aquarium" in 1854 and set off a mid-Victorian craze for household aquariums. The book was financially profitable for Gosse, and "the reviews were full of praise". Even in this work, Gosse used natural science to point to the necessity of salvation through the blood of Christ. In 1856 Gosse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which, because he had no university position or inherited wealth, gave him "a standing he otherwise lacked."
A few months before Gosse was honoured, his wife discovered that she had breast cancer. Rather than undergo surgery (a risky procedure in 1856), the Gosses decided to submit to the ointments of an American doctor, Jesse Weldon Fell, who if not a charlatan, was certainly on the fringe of contemporary medical practice. After much suffering, Emily Gosse died on 9 February 1857. She entrusted her husband with their son's salvation, and perhaps her death drove Gosse into his "strange severities and eccentric prohibitions."
In the months following Emily's death, Gosse worked with remarkable diligence on a book that he may have viewed as the most important of his career. Although a failure both financially and intellectually, it is the book by which he is best remembered. Gosse believed that he had discovered a theory that might neatly resolve the seeming contradiction in the age of the earth between the evidence of God's Word and the evidence of His creation as expounded by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell. In 1857, two years before the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species", Gosse published "Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot" and thereby created what has been called the Omphalos hypothesis.
In what Stephen Jay Gould has called "glorious purple prose," Gosse argued that if one assumed creation "ex nihilo", there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred. ""Omphalos"" is Greek for ""navel"," and Gosse argued that the first man, Adam, did not require a navel because he was never born; nevertheless he must have had one, as do all complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew. Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record—even coprolites—might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but which may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation.
The general response was "as the "Westminster Review" put it, that Gosse's theory was 'too monstrous for belief.'" Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind." Journalists later sniggered that God had apparently hidden fossils in the rocks to tempt geologists to infidelity.
"Omphalos" sold poorly and was eventually rebound with a new title, "Creation", "in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales." The problem was not with the title. In 1869 most of the edition was sold as waste paper.
According to Edmund Gosse, his father's career was destroyed by his "strange act of wilfulness" in publishing "Omphalos"; Edmund claimed his father had "closed the doors upon himself forever." But, during the next three years Gosse published more than thirty scientific papers and four books.
By this time Gosse and his son had moved permanently from London to St Marychurch, Devon. (Gosse refused to use the "St" and even gave his address as Torquay so as not to have anything to do with the "so-called Church of England.") He soon became the pastor and overseer of the Brethren meeting. It was first held in a loft over a stable but shortly, under Gosse's preaching and peacemaking, in finer quarters—which he perhaps financed himself. His son said "he soon lost confidence in the Plymouth Brethren also, and for the last thirty years of his life he was really unconnected with any Christian body whatsoever."
During this period, Gosse made a special study of sea anemone (Actiniae) and in 1860 published "Actinologia Britannica". Reviewers especially praised the colour lithographs made from Gosse's watercolours. The "Literary Gazette" said that Gosse now stood "alone and unrivalled in the extremely difficult art of drawing objects of zoology so as to satisfy the requirements of science" as well as providing "vivid aesthetic impressions."
In 1860 he met and married Eliza Brightwen (1813–1900), a kindly, tolerant Quaker who shared Gosse's intense interest in both natural history and the well-being of his son. Gosse's second marriage was as happy as his first. In 1862 he wrote that Eliza was "a true yoke-fellow, in love, in spirit and in service."
By this time Gosse was "very comfortably off" with the earnings from his books and dividends from his investments. In 1864 Eliza received a substantial legacy that allowed Gosse to retire from his career as a professional writer and live in "congenial obscurity." The Gosses lived simply, invested some of their income and gave more away to charity, especially to foreign missionaries, including ones sent to the "Popish, priest-ridden Irish."
To Gosse's great grief, his son rejected Christianity—though almost certainly not as early or as dramatically as Edmund portrayed the break in "Father and Son". But Gosse sponsored the publication of Edmund's early poetry, which gave the younger man entrée to new friends of literary importance, and the two men "came out of the years of conflict with their relationship wary but intact." Henry and Eliza welcomed Edmund's wife to the family and enjoyed visits with their three grandchildren.
Meanwhile, the ever active Gosse had taken up the study of orchids and exchanged a number of letters on the subject with Darwin, though he never published on this subject himself. His penultimate enthusiasm was with the genitalia of butterflies, about which he published a paper in the "Transactions of the Linnean Society" But before his death he returned to rotifera, with much of his research appearing in a two-volume study written with another zoologist, Charles Thomas Hudson.
His wife recalled that Gosse's final illness may have been caused by his becoming chilled while trying to adjust his telescope at an open window on a winter night. Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else.
After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, "The Life of Philip Henry Gosse" (1890). After reading it, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained "the germ of a great book." Edmund Gosse revised his material and first published his notable memoir anonymously as "Father and Son" in 1907. It has never gone out of print in more than a hundred years. The reaction of readers to Henry's personality and character, as represented in "Father and Son", has included phrases such as "scientific crackpot," "bible-soaked romantic," "a stern and repressive father," and a "pulpit-thumping Puritan throwback to the seventeenth century."
A modern editor of "Father and Son" has rejected this portrait of Philip Henry Gosse, on the grounds that his own "writings reveal a genuinely sweet character." Ann Thwaite, the biographer of both Gosses, has established just how inaccurate Edmund's recollections of his childhood were. Henry James remarked that Edmund Gosse had "a genius for inaccuracy." Although Edmund went out of his way to declare that the story of "Father and Son" was "scrupulously true," Thwaite cites a dozen occasions on which either Edmund's "memory betray[ed] him—he admitted it was 'like a colander'"—or he "changed things deliberately to make a better story." Thwaite argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father's superior abilities, by demolishing the latter's character.
Playwright Dennis Potter adapted "Father and Son" as the television play "Where Adam Stood", first broadcast on BBC One in 1976. Gosse was played by Alan Badel. Reviewers said that the play portrayed Gosse more sympathetically than did Edmund Gosse's book.
"Father and Son" was also adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2005 by Nick Warburton. Roger Allam played Gosse and Derek Jacobi, Edmund.
Ann Lingard's novel "Seaside Pleasures" (2014) explores the relationship of Gosse and his wife Emily from the point of view of a female student in his shore-class. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24464 |
President of the European Commission
The president of the European Commission is the head of the European Commission, the executive branch of the :European Union. The president of the Commission leads a cabinet of commissioners, referred to as the "college", collectively accountable to the European Parliament. The president is empowered to allocate portfolios amongst, reshuffle or dismiss commissioners as necessary. The college directs the Commission's civil service, sets the policy agenda and determines the legislative proposals it produces.
(The Commission is the only body that can propose EU laws.
The president of the Commission also represents the EU abroad, together with the president of the European Council and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
The post was established in 1958. Each new president is nominated by the European Council and formally elected by the European Parliament, for a five-year term.
In July 2019, the European Council nominated Ursula von der Leyen to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker, and she was elected the 13th president of the European Commission by the European Parliament on 16 July. Von der Leyen assumed office on 1 December 2019, following the approval of her college of commissioners by the European Parliament.
The present Commission was established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957; it also replaced the High Authority and the Commission of Euratom in 1967. The Commission's first president was Walter Hallstein (see Hallstein Commission) who started consolidating European law and began to impact on national legislation. National governments at first took little heed of his administration, with the president having to stamp the Commission's authority early on. With the aid of the European Court of Justice, the Commission began to be taken more seriously.
In 1965, Hallstein put forward his proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy, which would give the Community its own financial resources while giving more power to the Commission and Parliament and removing the veto power over Agriculture in the Council. These proposals led to an immediate backlash from France. Hallstein knew the proposals would be contentious, and took personal charge of drafting them, over-riding the Agriculture Commissioner. However he did gain the support of Parliament through his proposals to increase its powers, and he also presented his policy to Parliament a week before he submitted them to the Council. He aimed to demonstrate how he thought the Community ought to be run, in the hopes of generating a wave of pro-Europeanism big enough to get past the objections of member states. However, in this it proved that, despite its past successes, Hallstein was overconfident in his risky proposals.
In reaction to Hallstein's proposals and actions, then-French president Charles de Gaulle, who was sceptical of the rising supranational power of the Commission, accused Hallstein of acting as if he were a head of state. France eventually withdrew its representative from the Council, triggering the notorious "empty chair crisis". Although this was resolved under the "Luxembourg compromise", Hallstein became the scapegoat for the crisis. The Council refused to renew his term, despite his being the most 'dynamic' leader until Jacques Delors.
Hallstein's work did position the Commission as a substantial power. The presidents were involved in the major political projects of the day in the 1970s, such as the European Monetary Union. In 1970, President Jean Rey secured the Community's own financial resources, and in 1977, President Roy Jenkins became the first Commission president to attend a G7 summit on behalf of the Community.
However, owing to problems such as the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis, economic hardship reduced the priority of European integration, with only the president trying to keep the idea alive. The member states had the upper hand, and they created the European Council to discuss topical problems, yet the Council was unable to keep the major projects on track such as the Common Agricultural Policy. The Community entered a period of eurosclerosis, owing to economic difficulties and disagreements on the Community budget, and by the time of the Thorn Commission the president was unable to exert his influence to any significant extent.
However, the Commission began to recover under President Jacques Delors' Commission. He is seen as the most successful president, being credited with having given the Community a sense of direction and dynamism. The "International Herald Tribune" noted the work of Delors at the end of his second term in 1992: "Mr. Delors rescued the European Community from the doldrums. He arrived when Europessimism was at its worst. Although he was a little-known (outside France) finance minister and former MEP, he breathed life and hope into the EC and into the dispirited Brussels Commission. In his first term, from 1985 to 1988, he rallied Europe to the call of the single market, and when appointed to a second term he began urging Europeans toward the far more ambitious goals of economic, monetary and political union."
But Delors not only turned the Community around, he signalled a change in the Presidency. Before he came to power, the Commission president still was a position of first among equals; when he left office, he was the undisputed icon and leader of the Community. His tenure had produced a strong Presidency and a strong Commission as the president became more important. Following treaties cemented this change, with the president being given control over the allocation of portfolios and being able to force the resignation of Commissioners. When President Romano Prodi took office with the new powers of the Treaty of Amsterdam, he was dubbed by the press as Europe's first Prime Minister. President Delors' work had increased the powers of the Parliament, whose support he had enjoyed. However, later Commissions did not enjoy the same support, and in 1999, the European Parliament used its powers to force the Santer Commission to resign.
Historically, the Council appointed the Commission president and the whole body by unanimity without input from Parliament. However, with the Treaty on European Union in 1993, the European Parliament, the body elected directly by the citizens of the European Union, gained the right to be consulted on the appointment of the president and to veto the Commission as a whole. Parliament decided to interpret its right to be consulted as a right to veto the president, which the Council reluctantly accepted. This right of veto was formalised in the Amsterdam Treaty. The Treaty of Nice changed the Council's vote from a unanimous choice to one that merely needed a qualified majority. This meant that the weight of the Parliament in the process increased resulting in a quasi-parliamentary system where one group could be in government. This became evident when numerous candidates were put forward in 2004, and a centre-right vote won out over left-wing groups, France and Germany. José Manuel Barroso, elected Commission president that year, was then forced to back down over his choice of Commissioners, owing to Parliament's threat that it would not approve his Commission.
In 2009, the European People's Party (EPP) endorsed Barroso as its candidate for Commission president, and the EPP subsequently retained its position as largest party in that year's election. The Socialists responded by pledging to put forward a rival candidate at future elections. Once again, Barroso was forced by Parliament to make a change to his proposed Commission, but eventually received assent. However, in exchange for approval, Parliament forced some concessions from Barroso in terms of Parliamentary representation at Commission and international meetings. On 7 September 2010, Barroso gave the first US-style State of the Union address to Parliament, which focused primarily on the EU's economic recovery and human rights. The speech was to be annual.
Article 17 of the Treaty on European Union, as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon, lays out the procedure for appointing the president and their team. The European Council votes by qualified majority for a nominee for the post of President, taking account of the latest European elections. This proposal is then put before Parliament which must approve or veto the appointment. If an absolute majority of MEPs support the nominee, they are elected. The president then, together with the Council, puts forward their team to the Parliament to be scrutinised. The Parliament normally insists that each one of them appear before the parliamentary committee that corresponds to their prospective portfolio for a public hearing. The Parliament then votes on the Commission as a whole; if approved, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, appoints the president and their team to office.
Qualified majority in the Council has led to more candidates being fielded while there has been greater politicisation due to the involvement of Parliament and the change of policy direction in the EU from the creation of the single market to reform of it. However, despite this, the choice within the Council remains largely behind closed doors. During the appointment of Santer, discussions were kept "in camera" (private), with the media relying on insider leaks. MEPs were angry with the process, against the spirit of consultation that the new EU treaty brought in. Pauline Green MEP, leader of the Socialist group, stated that her group thought "Parliament should refuse to condone a practice which so sullies the democratic process". There were similar deals in 1999 and 2004 saw a repeat of Santer's appointment when Barroso was appointed through a series of secret meetings between leaders with no press releases on the negotiations being released. This was sharply criticised by MEPs such as the ALDE group leader Graham Watson who described the procedure as a "Justus Lipsius carpet market" producing only the "lowest common denominator"; while Green-EFA co-leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit asked Barroso after his first speech "If you are the best candidate, why were you not the first?"
The candidate selected by the Council has often been a leading national politician, but this is not a requirement. The choice of President must take into account the result of the latest Parliamentary elections (for example, by choosing the candidate supported by the largest European political party in particular, or at least someone from that political family the "Spitzenkandidat" principle, below but this is a convention not an obligation). That provision was not in force in the nomination in 2004, but the centre-right EPP, which won the election, pressured for a candidate from its own ranks. In the end, the EPP candidate, José Manuel Barroso, was chosen. On the same basis, the EPP endorsed again Barroso for a second term during the 2009 European election campaign and, being largest again after that election, was able to secure his nomination by the European Council.
Further criteria seen to be influencing the choice of the Council include: which area of Europe the candidate comes from, favoured as Southern Europe in 2004; the candidate's political influence, credible yet not overpowering members; language, proficiency in French considered necessary by France; and degree of integration, their state being a member of both the eurozone and the Schengen Agreement.
There has been an assumption that there is a rolling agreement along these lines, that a president from a large state is followed by a president from a small state, and one from the political left will be followed by one from the political right: Roy Jenkins (British socialist) was followed by Gaston Thorn (Luxembourgish liberal), Jacques Delors (French socialist), Jacques Santer (Luxembourgish Christian democrat), Romano Prodi (Italian left-wing Christian democrat) and Jose Barroso (Portuguese Christian democrat). However, despite these assumptions, these presidents have usually been chosen during political battles and coalition-building. Delors was chosen following a Franco-British disagreement over Claude Cheysson, Santer was a compromise after Britain vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene, and Prodi was backed by a coalition of thirteen states against the Franco-German preference for Guy Verhofstadt.
In February 2008, President Barroso admitted that despite the president having in theory as much legitimacy as heads of governments, in practice it was not the case. The low voter turnout creates a problem for the president's legitimacy, with the lack of a "European political sphere", but analysts claim that if citizens were voting for a list of candidates for the post of President, turn out would be much higher than that seen in recent years.
Under the Treaty of Lisbon the European Council has to take into account the results of the latest European elections and, furthermore, the Parliament elects, rather than simply approve, the Council's proposed candidate. This was taken as the parliament's cue to have its parties run with candidates for the president of the Commission with the candidate of the winning party being proposed by the Council. This was partly put into practice in 2004 when the European Council selected a candidate from the political party which secured a plurality of votes in that year's election. However, at that time only a minor party had run with a specific candidate: the then fourth-placed European Green Party, which had the first true pan-European political party with a common campaign, put forward Daniel Cohn-Bendit and lost even its fourth place in the following election, becoming only the fifth-largest group in 2009 and diminishing its candidate's chances further. However, the victorious EPP only mentioned four or five people as candidates for president.
There have been plans to strengthen the European political parties for them to propose candidates for future elections. The European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party indicated, in its October 2007 congress, its intention to forward a candidate for the post as part of a common campaign but failed to do so. However, the EPP selected Barroso as its candidate and, as the largest party, it was able to ensure his turn was renewed.
The Socialists, disappointed at the 2009 election, agreed to put forward a candidate for Commission President at all subsequent elections. After a campaign within that party to have open primaries for said candidate, the PES Congress gathering in Brussels in November 2011 decided that the PES would designate its candidate for Commission president through primaries taking place in January 2014 in each of its member parties and organisations, before a ratification of the results by an Extraordinary PES Congress in February 2014.
The (German for 'lead candidate') process is the method of linking European Parliament elections by having each major political group in Parliament nominating their candidate for Commission President prior to the Parliamentary elections. The of the largest party would then have a mandate to assume the Commission Presidency. This process was first run in 2014, and its legitimacy was contested by the Council.
According to the treaties, the president of the European Commission is nominated by the European Council. Until 2004, this nomination was based on an informal consensus for a common candidate. However, in 2004 the centre-right EPP rejected the consensus approach ahead of the European Council meeting, and pushed through its own candidate, Barroso. The approach of national governments was to appoint the various high-profile jobs in EU institutions (European Council president, High Representative and so on) dividing them according along geographic, political and gender lines. This also led to fairly low-profile figures in some cases, for it avoided candidates who had either made enemies of some national governments or who were seen as potentially challenging the Council or certain member states.
Unease had built up around the secretive power play that was involved in these appointments, leading to a desire for a more democratic process. At the end of 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force. It amended the appointment of the Commission President in the Treaty on European Union Article 17.7 to add the wording "taking into account the elections to the European Parliament", so that Article 17.7 now included the wording
In 2013, in preparation for the European election of 2014, Martin Schulz, then President of the European Parliament campaigned for European political parties to name lead candidates for the post of President of the European Commission; his own party group, the centre-left Party of European Socialists named Schulz as its lead candidate (). The EPP held an election Congress in Dublin, where Jean-Claude Juncker beat his rival Michel Barnier and subsequently ran as the EPP's lead candidate. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party and the European Green Party also selected lead candidates. The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists did not name a candidate, objecting to the principle of and its "tenuous" basis in law. The German term for lead candidates caught on, and they became known informally as .
The EPP won a plurality (29%) in the 2014 election, and Jean-Claude Juncker, its lead candidate, was nominated by the European Council. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán were the only members of the council to object to his selection.
Some commentators argued that this amendment did not entitle the political parties of the Parliament to nominate candidates for the president of the Commission, and that such an interpretation would amount to a "power grab" at the expense of the European Council. The Council found itself taken off guard by how the process took off, and had backed themselves into a corner in having to approve the Parliament's candidate. Following the appointment, leaders vowed to review the process.
On the other hand, it has also been argued that it is still insufficiently democratic and needs to be replaced with a more direct system. Some suggestions toward this have been electing the president via a transnational list, having a direct election, and holding primary elections. Parliamentary proposals to enact some of these in advance of the 2019 election have been opposed by some in the Council.
The president is elected for a renewable five-year term starting five months after the elections to the European Parliament. These were brought into alignment via the Maastricht Treaty (prior to which the Commission had a four-year term of office) and the elections take place in June every five years (in years ending in 4 and 9). This alignment has led to a closer relationship between the elections and the president himself with the above-mentioned proposals for political parties running with candidates.
The president and his Commission may be removed from office by a vote of censure from Parliament. Parliament has never done this to date, however the imminence of such a vote in 1999, due to allegations of financial mismanagement, led to the Santer Commission resigning on its own accord, before the Parliamentary vote.
The president of the European Commission is the most powerful position in the European Union, controlling the Commission which collectively has the right of initiative on Union legislation (only on matters delegated to it by member states for collective action, as determined by the treaties) and is responsible for ensuring its enforcement. The president controls the policy agenda of the Commission for their term and in practice no policy can be proposed without the president's agreement.
The role of the president is to lead the Commission, and give direction to the Commission and the Union as a whole. The treaties state that "the Commission shall work under the political guidance of its president" (Article 219 TEC), this is conducted through their calling and chairing of meetings of the college of Commissioners, their personal cabinet and the meetings of the heads of each commissioner's cabinet (the Hebdo). The president may also force a Commissioner to resign. The work of the Commission as a body is based on the principle of Cabinet collective responsibility, however in their powers they act as more than a first among equals. The role of the president is similar to that of a national Prime Minister chairing a cabinet.
The president also has responsibility for representing the Commission in the Union and beyond. For example, they are a member of the European Council and takes part in debates in Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Outside the Union they attend the meetings of the G8 to represent the Union. However, in foreign affairs, the president does have to compete with several Commissioners with foreign affairs related portfolios: the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the president of the European Council.
The presidential system had started to develop since Jacques Delors and has since been cemented. However, externally they are still dependent on support from the Council and Parliament. Delors had enjoyed the Parliament's and the Council's support for his whole term, during which, through treaty changes, the Parliament increased in powers and, through the accession of new Member States, the Council increased in membership. The membership is now so large the president is increasingly unable to garner the support of all the states, even though the job is supposed to try to keep everyone happy. The Parliament now has more powers over the Commission and can reject its proposals, although the Commission has little power over Parliament, such as the ability to dissolve it to call new elections.
The president's office is on the top, 13th, floor of the Berlaymont building in Brussels. The president receives their political guidance from their cabinet, the head of which acts as a political bodyguard for the president. Such factors can lead to an isolation of the president from outside events. For the European Civil Service the president has a very high status, due to their immense authority and symbolism within the body. The president exercises further authority through the legal service and Secretariat-General of the Commission. The former has the power to strike down proposals on legal technicalities while the latter organises meetings, agendas and minutes. The president's control over these areas gives them further political tools when directing the work of the Commission. This has also increased the presidential style of the Commission president.
With the reorganisation of leading EU posts under the Lisbon Treaty, there was some criticism of each post's vague responsibilities. Ukrainian ambassador to the EU Andriy Veselovsky praised the framework and clarified it in his own terms: The Commission president speaks as the EU's "government" while the president of the European Council is a "strategist". The High Representative specialises in "bilateral relations" while the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy deals in technical matters such as the free trade agreement with Ukraine. The president of the European Parliament meanwhile articulates the EU's values.
The MEP and author of several EU text books Richard Corbett has suggested that, instead of every EU institution having a "president", it would have been clearer if they had been named differently, with a "Speaker" of the Parliament, a "Governor" of the Central Bank, a "Chairman" of the (ordinary) Council of Ministers, a "president" of the European Council, and a "Prime Commissioner".
Despite the recent presidential style, the president has also begun to lose ground to the larger member states as countries such as France, Italy, the UK and Germany seek to sideline its role. This may increase with the recent creation of the permanent president of the European Council. There has been disagreement and concern over competition between the president of the European Council Van Rompuy and the Commission president Barroso due to the vague language of the treaty. Some clarifications see Van Rompuy as the "strategist" and Barroso as a head of government. In terms of economic planning Van Rompuy saw the Commission as dealing with the content of the plan and the European Council as dealing with the means and implementing it. Despite weekly breakfasts together there was a certain extent of rivalry between the two, as well as with the High Representative. At international summits, both presidents go at the same time to represent the Union, with, in principle, the Commission president speaking on economic questions and the European Council president on political questions, although this division is often hard to maintain in practice.
Although there are concerns that this competition with the new European Council president would lead to increased infighting, there are provisions for combining the two offices. The European Council president may not hold a national office, such as a Prime Minister of a member state, but there is no such restraint on European offices. So the Commission president, who already sits in the European Council, could also be appointed as its president. This would allow the European Council to combine the position, with its powers, of both executive bodies into a single president of the European Union.
The basic monthly salary of the president is fixed at 138% of the top civil service grade which, in 2013, amounted to €25,351 per month or €304,212 per year plus an allowance for a residence equal to 15% of salary as well as other allowances including for children's schooling and household expenses.
This section firstly presents a lists over presidents of the three executives that were merged in 1967 following the Merger Treaty, namely the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (from 1952), and the commissions of the European Atomic Energy Community and the European Economic Community (both from 1958). Secondly, a list is given over the presidents after the merger, when the single position presided over the Commission of the European Communities, until 2009 when the Treaty of Lisbon renamed of the institution, creating the president of the European Commission.
The European Economic Community was established by the Treaty of Rome, presently known as the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union; a founding treaty of the union, which explains that the enumeration of presidents which ends with the present position starts with the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community. The European Union is also the legal successor of the European Economic Community, or the European Community as it was named between 1993 and 2009. The establishment of the European Union in 1993 upon the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty (formally the Treaty on European Union) did not affect the name of the position.
Upon its entry into force in 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon renamed the Commission of the European Communities the European Commission, reflecting the "de facto" name as well as the fact that the European Communities pillar was abolished along with the rest of the pillar system.
Parties
* Von der Leyen's term will begin on 1 December 2019. It was postponed due to a need to select a Romanian commissioner after the original appointee was rejected by European Parliament. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24468 |
Phonograph
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, is a device for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the "graphophone", including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term "gramophone" for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, and the sound and equalization systems.
The disc phonograph record was the dominant audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century. In the 1980s, phonograph use on a standard record player declined sharply due to the rise of the cassette tape, compact disc, and other digital recording formats. However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 1990s. The original recordings of musicians, which may have been recorded on tape or digital methods, are sometimes re-issued on vinyl.
Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called "decks". In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record players or, most recently, turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker.The term "phonograph" ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words ("phonē", "sound" or "voice") and ("graphē", "writing"). The similar related terms "gramophone" (from the Greek γράμμα "gramma" "letter" and φωνή "phōnē" "voice") and "graphophone" have similar root meanings. The roots were already familiar from existing 19th-century words such as "photograph" ("light writing"), "telegraph" ("distant writing"), and "telephone" ("distant sound"). The new term may have been influenced by the existing words "phonographic" and "phonography", which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 "The New York Times" carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.
Arguably, any device used to record sound or reproduce recorded sound could be called a type of "phonograph", but in common practice the word has come to mean historic technologies of sound recording, involving audio-frequency modulations of a physical trace or groove. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, "Phonograph", "Gramophone", "Graphophone", "Zonophone", "Graphonole" and the like were still brand names specific to various makers of sometimes very different (i.e. cylinder and disc) machines; so considerable use was made of the generic term "talking machine", especially in print. "Talking machine" had earlier been used to refer to complicated devices which produced a crude imitation of speech, by simulating the workings of the vocal cords, tongue, and lips – a potential source of confusion both then and now.
In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company. Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in 1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term; it has been so used in the UK and most Commonwealth countries ever since. The term "phonograph" was usually restricted to machines that used cylinder records.
"Gramophone" generally referred to a wind-up machine. After the introduction of the softer vinyl records, -rpm LPs (long-playing records) and 45-rpm "single" or two-song records, and EPs (extended-play recordings), the common name became "record player" or "turntable". Often the home record player was part of a system that included a radio ("radiogram") and, later, might also play audiotape cassettes. From about 1960, such a system began to be described as a "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) or a "stereo" (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s).
In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's upstart Gramophone, a very different machine which played discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs). "Talking machine" was the comprehensive generic term, but from about 1902 on, the general public was increasingly applying the word "phonograph" indiscriminately to both cylinder and disc machines and to the records they played. By the time of the First World War, the mass advertising and popularity of the Victrola (a line of disc-playing machines characterized by their concealed horns) sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company was leading to widespread generic use of the word "victrola" for any machine that played discs, which were generally called "phonograph records" or simply "records", but almost never "Victrola records".
After electrical disc-playing machines appeared on the market in the late 1920s, often combined with a radio receiver, the term "record player" was increasingly favored by the public. Manufacturers, however, typically advertised such combinations as "radio-phonographs". Portable record players (no radio included), with a latched cover and an integrated power amplifier and loudspeaker, were becoming popular as well, especially in schools and for use by children and teenagers.
In the years following the Second World War, as "hi-fi" (high-fidelity, monophonic) and, later, "stereo" (stereophonic) component sound systems slowly evolved from an exotic specialty item into a common feature of American homes, the description of the record-spinning component as a "record changer" (which could automatically play through a stacked series of discs) or a "turntable" (which could hold only one disc at a time) entered common usage. By the 1980s, the use of a "record changer" was widely disparaged. So, the "turntable" emerged triumphant and retained its position to the present. Through all these changes, however, the discs have continued to be known as "phonograph records" or, much more commonly, simply as "records".
"Gramophone", as a brand name, was not used in the United States after 1902, and the word quickly fell out of use there, although it has survived in its nickname form, "Grammy", as the name of the Grammy Awards. The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, resembling a Victor disc machine with a taper arm.
Modern amplifier-component manufacturers continue to label the input jack which accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the "phono" input, abbreviated from "phonograph".
In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June, 1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August, 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual "conversazione", along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone.
Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone. Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008. Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877.
Direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as tuning forks had been made by English physician Thomas Young in 1807, but the first known device for recording airborne speech, music and other sounds is the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by French typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. In this device, sound waves travelling through the air vibrated a parchment diaphragm which was linked to a bristle, and the bristle traced a line through a thin coating of soot on a sheet of paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder. The sound vibrations were recorded as undulations or other irregularities in the traced line. Scott's phonautograph was intended purely for the visual study and analysis of the tracings. Reproduction of the recorded sound was not possible with the original phonautograph.
In 2008, phonautograph recordings made by Scott were played back as sound by American audio historians, who used optical scanning and computer processing to convert the traced waveforms into digital audio files. These recordings, made circa 1860, include fragments of two French songs and a recitation in Italian.
Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute.
Cros proposed the use of photoengraving, a process already in use to make metal printing plates from line drawings, to convert an insubstantial phonautograph tracing in soot into a groove or ridge on a metal disc or cylinder. This metal surface would then be given the same motion and speed as the original recording surface. A stylus linked to a diaphragm would be made to ride in the groove or on the ridge so that the stylus would be moved back and forth in accordance with the recorded vibrations. It would transmit these vibrations to the connected diaphragm, and the diaphragm would transmit them to the air, reproducing the original sound.
An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a "phonographe", but Cros himself favored the word "paleophone", sometimes rendered in French as "voix du passé" (voice of the past) but more literally meaning "ancient sound", which accorded well with his vision of his invention's potential for creating an archive of sound recordings that would be available to listeners in the distant future.
Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception.
Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.
Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone. His first experiments were with waxed paper.
He announced his invention of the first "phonograph", a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: "Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?" The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."
Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph: I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.
From my experiments on the telephone I knew of how to work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: ' Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such records to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.
Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it. The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.
The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct."
The Argus (Melbourne) newspaper reported on an 1878 demonstration at the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a very cracked voice."
Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation.
Playback was accomplished by exactly repeating the recording procedure, the only difference being that the recorded foil now served to vibrate the stylus, which transmitted its vibrations to the diaphragm and onward into the air as audible sound. Although Edison's very first experimental tinfoil phonograph used separate and somewhat different recording and playback assemblies, in subsequent machines a single diaphragm and stylus served both purposes. One peculiar consequence was that it was possible to overdub additional sound onto a recording being played back. The recording was heavily worn by each playing, and it was nearly impossible to accurately remount a recorded foil after it had been removed from the cylinder. In this form, the only practical use that could be found for the phonograph was as a startling novelty for private amusement at home or public exhibitions for profit.
Edison's early patents show that he was aware that sound could be recorded as a spiral on a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct".
Edison's patent specified that the audio recording be embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated incised recording using wax-coated cylinders was patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone.
The use of a flat recording surface instead of a cylindrical one was an obvious alternative which thought-experimenter Charles Cros initially favored and which practical experimenter Thomas Edison and others actually tested in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The oldest surviving example is a copper electrotype of a recording cut into a wax disc in 1881. The commercialization of sound recording technology was initially aimed at use for business correspondence and transcription into writing, in which the cylindrical form offered certain advantages, the storage of large numbers of records seemed unlikely, and the ease of producing multiple copies was not a consideration.
In 1887, Emile Berliner patented a variant of the phonograph which he named the Gramophone. Berliner's approach was essentially the same one proposed, but never implemented, by Charles Cros in 1877. The diaphragm was linked to the recording stylus in a way that caused it to vibrate laterally (side to side) as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc very thinly coated with a compound of beeswax. The zinc disc was then immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched a groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played. With some later improvements the flat discs of Berliner could be produced in large quantities at much lower cost than the cylinders of Edison's system.
In May 1889, in San Francisco, the first "phonograph parlor" opened. It featured a row of coin-operated machines, each supplied with a different wax cylinder record. The customer selected a machine according to the title that it advertised, inserted a nickel, then heard the recording through stethoscope-like listening tubes. By the mid-1890s, most American cities had at least one phonograph parlor. The coin-operated mechanism was invented by Louis T. Glass and William S. Arnold. The cabinet contained an Edison Class M or Class E phonograph. The Class M was powered by a wet-cell glass battery that would spill dangerous acid if it tipped over or broke. The Class E sold for a lower price and ran on 120 V DC.
The phenomenon of phonograph parlors peaked in Paris around 1900: in Pathé's luxurious salon, patrons sat in plush upholstered chairs and chose from among many hundreds of available cylinders by using speaking tubes to communicate with attendants on the floor below.
By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") literally thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)
Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording,
although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial.
Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of "Au clair de la lune" made on April 9, 1860.
The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact.
A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", not preserved, has been called the first instance of recorded verse.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording.
Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present.
Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.
Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877 the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had hit upon the secret of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system.
Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after his invention of the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate.
In 1879 Hubbard got Bell interested in improving the phonograph, and it was agreed that a laboratory should be set up in Washington. Experiments were also to be conducted on the transmission of sound by light, which resulted in the selenium-celled Photophone.
By 1881, the Volta associates had succeeded in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used. Rather than apply for a patent at that time, however, they deposited the machine in a sealed box at the Smithsonian, and specified that it was not to be opened without the consent of two of the three men.
The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables.
One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter was granted on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.
The preserved Bell and Tainter records are of both the lateral cut and the Edison-style "hill-and-dale" (up-and-down) styles. Edison for many years used the "hill-and-dale" method on both his cylinders and Diamond Disc records, and Emile Berliner is credited with the invention of the lateral cut, acid-etched Gramophone record in 1887. The Volta associates, however, had been experimenting with both formats and directions of groove modulation as early as 1881.
The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.
In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886 and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the first Dictaphone.
After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records.
Shortly after American Graphophone's creation, Jesse H. Lippincott used nearly $1 million of an inheritance to gain control of it, as well as the rights to the Graphophone and the Bell and Tainter patents. Not long later Lippincott purchased the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He then created the North American Phonograph Company to consolidate the national sales rights of both the Graphophone and the Edison Speaking Phonograph. In the early 1890s Lippincott fell victim to the unit's mechanical problems and also to resistance from stenographers.
A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with "nickel-in-the-slot" entertainment phonograph demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company.
The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment.
Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped; cylinders could not be until 1901–1902 when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison.
Recordings made on a cylinder remain at a constant linear velocity for the entirety of the recording, while those made on a disc have a higher linear velocity at the outer portion of the groove compared to the inner portion.
Edison's patented recording method recorded with vertical modulations in a groove. Berliner utilized a laterally modulated groove.
Though Edison's recording technology was better than Berliner's, there were commercial advantages to a disc system since the disc could be easily mass-produced by molding and stamping and it required less storage space for a collection of recordings.
Berliner successfully argued that his technology was different enough from Edison's that he did not need to pay royalties on it, which reduced his business expenses.
Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records, and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (12.7 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had very poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. By late 1901, ten-inch (25 cm) records were marketed by Johnson and Berliner's Victor Talking Machine Company, and Berliner had sold his interests. In 1904, discs were first pressed with music on both sides and capable of around seven minutes total playing time, as opposed to the cylinder's typical duration on two minutes at that time. As a result of this and the fragility of wax cylinders in transit and storage, cylinders sales declined. Edison felt the increasing commercial pressure for disc records, and by 1912, though reluctant at first, his production of disc records was in full swing. This was the Edison Disc Record. Nevertheless, he continued to manufacture cylinders until 1929 and was last to withdraw from that market.
From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922.
Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78 rpm, 45 rpm, 33⅓ rpm, and all other analogue disc records popular for use in sound recording. See gramophone record.
The 1920s brought improved radio technology and radio sales, bringing many phonograph dealers to near financial ruin. With efforts at improved audio fidelity, the big record companies succeeded in keeping business booming through the end of the decade, but the record sales plummeted during the Great Depression, with many companies merging or going out of business.
Record sales picked up appreciably by the late 30s and early 40s, with greater improvements in fidelity and more money to be spent. By this time home phonographs had become much more common, though it wasn't until the 1940s that console radio/phono set-ups with automatic record changers became more common.
In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene.
Booms in record sales returned after the Second World War, as industry standards changed from 78s to vinyl, long-playing records (commonly called record albums), which could contain an entire symphony, and 45s which usually contained one hit song popularized on the radio – thus the term "single" record – plus another song on the back or "flip" side. An "extended play" version of the 45 was also available, designated 45 EP, which provided capacity for longer musical selections, or for two regular-length songs per side.
Shortcomings include surface noise caused by dirt or abrasions (scratches) and failure caused by deep surface scratches causing skipping of the stylus forward and missing a section, or groove lock, causing a section to repeat, usually punctuated by a popping noise. This was so common that the phrase: "you sound like a broken record,” was coined, referring to someone who is being annoyingly repetitious.
In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of the "Wall Street Journal". Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of "Radio & Television News" magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $49.95 ($ in ) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available.
By the 1960s, cheaper portable record players and record changers which played stacks of records in wooden console cabinets were popular, usually with heavy and crude tonearms in the portables. The consoles were often equipped with better quality pick-up cartridges. Even pharmacies stocked 45 rpm records at their front counters. Rock music played on 45s became the soundtrack to the 1960s as people bought the same songs that were played free of charge on the radio. Some record players were even tried in automobiles, but were quickly displaced by 8-track and cassette tapes.
High fidelity made great advances during the 1970s, as turntables became very precise instruments with belt or direct drive, jewel-balanced tonearms, some with electronically controlled linear tracking and magnetic cartridges. Some cartridges had frequency response above 30 kHz for use with CD-4 quadraphonic 4 channel sound. A high fidelity component system which cost well under $1,000 could do a very good job of reproducing very accurate frequency response across the human audible spectrum from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz with a $200 turntable which would typically have less than 0.05% wow and flutter and very low rumble (low frequency noise). A well-maintained record would have very little surface noise.
A novelty variation on the standard format was the use of multiple concentric spirals with different recordings. Thus when the record was played multiple times, different recordings would play, seemingly at random. These were often utilized in talking toys and games.
Records themselves became an art form because of the large surface onto which graphics and books could be printed, and records could be molded into unusual shapes, colors, or with images (picture discs). The turntable remained a common element of home audio systems well after the introduction of other media, such as audio tape and even the early years of the compact disc as a lower-priced music format. However, even though the cost of producing CDs fell below that of records, CDs remained a higher-priced music format than either cassettes or records. Thus, records were not uncommon in home audio systems into the early 1990s.
By the turn of the 21st century, the turntable had become a niche product, as the price of CD players, which reproduce music free of pops and scratches, fell far lower than high-fidelity tape players or turntables. Nevertheless, there is some increase in interest; many big-box media stores carry turntables, as do professional DJ equipment stores. Most low-end and mid-range amplifiers omit the phono input; but on the other hand, low-end turntables with built-in phono pre-amplifiers are widely available. Some combination systems include a basic turntable, a CD player, a cassette deck. and a radio, in a retro-styled cabinet. Records also continue to be manufactured and sold today, albeit in smaller quantities than in the disc phonograph's heyday.
Inexpensive record players typically used a flanged steel stamping for the turntable structure. A rubber disc would be secured to the top of the stamping to provide traction for the record, as well as a small amount of vibration isolation. The spindle bearing usually consisted of a bronze bushing. The flange on the stamping provided a convenient place to drive the turntable by means of an "idler wheel" (see below). While light and cheap to manufacture, these mechanisms had low inertia, making motor speed instabilities more pronounced.
Costlier turntables made from heavy aluminium castings have greater balanced mass and inertia, helping minimize vibration at the stylus, and maintaining constant speed without wow or flutter, even if the motor exhibits cogging effects. Like stamped steel turntables, they were topped with rubber. Because of the increased mass, they usually employed ball bearings or roller bearings in the spindle to reduce friction and noise. Most are belt or direct drive, but some use an idler wheel. A specific case was the Swiss "Lenco" drive, which possessed a very heavy turntable coupled via an idler wheel to a long, tapered motor drive shaft. This enabled stepless rotation or speed control on the drive. Because of this feature the Lenco became popular in the late 1950s with dancing schools, because the dancing instructor could lead the dancing exercises at different speeds.
By the early 1980s, some companies started producing very inexpensive turntables that displaced the products of companies like BSR. Commonly found in "all-in-one" stereos from assorted far-east manufacturers, they used a thin plastic table set in a plastic plinth, no mats, belt drive, weak motors, and often, lightweight plastic tonearms with no counterweight. Most used sapphire pickups housed in ceramic cartridges, and they lacked several features of earlier units, such as auto-start and record-stacking. While not as common now that turntables are absent from the cheap "all-in-one" units, this type of turntable has made a strong resurgence in nostalgia-marketed record players.
From the earliest phonograph designs, many of which were powered by spring-wound mechanisms, a speed governor was essential. Most of these employed some type of flywheel-friction disc to control the speed of the rotating cylinder or turntable; as the speed increased, centrifugal force caused a brake—often a felt pad—to rub against a smooth metal surface, slowing rotation. Electrically powered turntables, whose rotational speed was governed by other means, eventually made their mechanical counterparts obsolete. The mechanical governor was, however, still employed in some toy phonographs (such as those found in talking dolls) until they were replaced by digital sound generators in the late 20th century.
Many modern players have platters with a continuous series of strobe markings machined or printed around their edge. Viewing these markings in artificial light at mains frequency produces a stroboscopic effect, which can be used to verify proper rotational speed. Additionally, the edge of the turntable can contain magnetic markings to provide feedback pulses to an electronic speed-control system.
Earlier designs used a rubberized idler-wheel drive system. However, wear and decomposition of the wheel, as well as the direct mechanical coupling to a vibrating motor, introduced low-frequency noise ("rumble") and speed variations ("wow and flutter") into the sound. These systems generally used a synchronous motor which ran at a speed synchronized to the frequency of the AC power supply. Portable record players typically used an inexpensive shaded-pole motor. At the end of the motor shaft there was a stepped driving capstan; to obtain different speeds, the rubber idler wheel was moved to contact different steps of this capstan. The idler was pinched against the bottom or inside edge of the platter to drive it.
Until the 1970s, the idler-wheel drive was the most common on turntables, except for higher-end audiophile models. However, even some higher-end turntables, such as the Lenco, Garrard, EMT, and Dual turntables, used idler-wheel drive.
Belt drives brought improved motor and platter isolation compared to idler-wheel designs. Motor noise, generally heard as low-frequency rumble, is greatly reduced. The design of the belt drive turntable allows for a less expensive motor than the direct-drive turntable to be used. The elastomeric belt absorbs motor vibrations and noise which could otherwise be picked up by the stylus. It also absorbs small, fast speed variations, caused by "cogging", which in other designs are heard as "flutter."
The "Acoustical professional" turntable (earlier marketed under Dutch ""Jobo prof"") of the 1960s however possessed an expensive German drive motor, the ""Pabst Aussenläufer"" ("Pabst outrunner"). As this motor name implied, the rotor was on the outside of the motor and acted as a flywheel ahead of the belt-driven turntable itself. In combination with a steel to nylon turntable bearing (with molybdenum disulfide inside for lifelong lubrication) very low wow, flutter and rumble figures were achieved.
Direct-drive turntables drive the platter directly without utilizing intermediate wheels, belts, or gears as part of a drive train. The platter functions as a motor armature. This requires good engineering, with advanced electronics for acceleration and speed control. Matsushita's Technics division introduced the first commercially successful direct drive platter, model SP10, in 1969, which was joined by the Technics SL-1200 turntable, in 1972. Its updated model, SL-1200MK2, released in 1978, had a stronger motor, a convenient pitch control slider for beatmatching and a stylus illuminator, which made it the long-standing favourite among disc jockeys ("see "Turntablism""). By the beginnings of the 80s, lowering of costs in microcontroller electronics made direct drive turntables more affordable.
The evaluation of the "best" drive technology is not clear and more depending on the implementation than on the drive technology itself. Technical measurements show that similarly low flutter (0.025% WRMS) and rumble (−78 dB weighed) figures are possible for high quality turntables, be they belt drive or direct drive.
Audiophile grade turntables start at a few hundred dollars and range upwards of $100,000, depending on the complexity and quality of design and manufacture. The common view is that there are diminishing returns with an increase in price – a turntable costing $1,000 would not sound significantly better than a turntable costing $500; nevertheless, there exists a large choice of expensive turntables.
The tone arm (or tonearm) holds the pickup cartridge over the groove, the stylus tracking the groove with the desired force to give the optimal compromise between good tracking and minimizing wear of the stylus and record groove. At its simplest, a tone arm is a pivoted lever, free to move in two axes (vertical and horizontal) with a counterbalance to maintain tracking pressure.
However, the requirements of high-fidelity reproduction place more demands upon the arm design. In a perfect world:
These demands are contradictory and impossible to realize (massless arms and zero-friction bearings do not exist in the real world), so tone arm designs require engineering compromises. Solutions vary, but all modern tonearms are at least relatively lightweight and stiff constructions, with precision, very low friction pivot bearings in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Most arms are made from some kind of alloy (the cheapest being aluminium), but some manufacturers use balsa wood, while others use carbon fiber or graphite. The latter materials favor a straight arm design; alloys' properties lend themselves to S-type arms.
The tone arm got its name before the age of electronics. It originally served to conduct actual sound waves from a purely mechanical "pickup" called a "sound box" or "reproducer" to a so-described "amplifying" horn. The earliest electronic record players, introduced at the end of 1925, had massive electromagnetic pickups that contained a horseshoe magnet, used disposable steel needles, and weighed several ounces. Their full weight rested on the record, providing ample "tracking force" to overcome their low compliance but causing rapid record wear. The tone arms were rudimentary and remained so even after lighter crystal pickups appeared about ten years later. When fine-grooved vinyl records were introduced in the late 1940s, still smaller and lighter crystal (later, ceramic) cartridges with semi-permanent jewel styluses became standard. In the mid-1950s these were joined by a new generation of magnetic cartridges that bore little resemblance to their crude ancestors. Far smaller tracking forces became possible and the "balanced arm" came into use.
Prices varied widely. The well-known and extremely popular high-end S-type SME arm of the 1970–1980 era not only had a complicated design, it was also very costly. On the other hand, even some cheaper arms could be of professional quality: the "All Balance" arm, made by the now-defunct Dutch company Acoustical, was only €30 [equivalent]. It was used during that period by all official radio stations in the Dutch Broadcast studio facilities of the NOS, as well as by the pirate radio station Veronica. Playing records from a boat in international waters, the arm had to withstand sudden ship movements. Anecdotes indicate this low-cost arm was the only one capable of keeping the needle firmly in the groove during heavy storms at sea.
Quality arms employ an adjustable counterweight to offset the mass of the arm and various cartridges and headshells. On this counterweight, a calibrated dial enables easy adjustment of stylus force. After perfectly balancing the arm, the dial itself is "zeroed"; the stylus force can then be dialed in by screwing the counterweight towards the fulcrum. (Sometimes a separate spring or smaller weight provides fine tuning.) Stylus forces of 10 to 20 mN (1 to 2 grams-force) are typical for modern consumer turntables, while forces of up to 50 mN (5 grams) are common for the tougher environmental demands of party deejaying or turntablism.
Of special adjustment consideration, Stanton cartridges of the 681EE(E) series [and others like them] feature a small record brush ahead of the cartridge. The upforce of this brush, and its added drag require compensation of both tracking force (add 1 gram) and anti-skating adjustment values (see next paragraph for description).
Even on a perfectly flat LP, tonearms are prone to two types of tracking errors that affect the sound. As the tonearm tracks the groove, the stylus exerts a frictional force tangent to the arc of the groove, and since this force does not intersect the tone arm pivot, a clockwise rotational force (moment) occurs and a reaction "skating force" is exerted on the stylus by the record groove wall away from center of the disc. Modern arms provide an "anti-skate" mechanism, using springs, hanging weights, or magnets to produce an offsetting counter-clockwise force at the pivot, making the net lateral force on the groove walls near zero.
The second error occurs as the arm sweeps in an arc across the disc, causing the angle between the cartridge head and groove to change slightly. A change in angle, albeit small, will have a detrimental effect (especially with stereo recordings) by creating different forces on the two groove walls, as well as a slight timing shift between left/right channels. Making the arm longer to reduce this angle is a partial solution, but less than ideal. A longer arm weighs more, and only an infinitely long [pivoted] arm would reduce the error to zero. Some designs (Burne-Jones, and Garrard "Zero" series) use dual arms in a parallelogram arrangement, pivoting the cartridge head to maintain a constant angle as it moves across the record. Unfortunately this "solution" creates more problems than it solves, compromising rigidity and creating sources of unwanted noise.
The pivoted arm produces yet another problem which is unlikely to be significant to the audiophile, though. As the master was originally cut in a linear motion from the edge towards the center, but the stylus on the pivoted arm always draws an arc, this causes a timing drift that is most significant when digitizing music and beat mapping the data for synchronization with other songs in a DAW or DJ software unless the software allows building a non-linear beat map. As the contact point of the stylus on the record wanders farther from the linear path between the starting point and center hole, the tempo and pitch tend to decrease towards the middle of the record, until the arc reaches its apex. After that the tempo and pitch increase towards the end as the contact point comes closer to the linear path again. Because the surface speed of the record is lower at the end, the relative speed error from the same absolute distance error is higher at the end, and the increase in tempo is more notable towards the end than the decrease towards the middle. This can be somewhat reduced by a curved arm pivoted so that the end point of the arc stays farther from the linear path than the starting point, or by a long straight arm that pivots perpendicularly to the linear path in the middle of the record. However the tempo droop at the middle can only be completely avoided by a linear tracking arm.
If the arm is not pivoted, but instead carries the stylus along a radius of the disc, there is no skating force and little to no cartridge angle error. Such arms are known as "linear tracking" or "tangential" arms. These are driven along a track by various means, from strings and pulleys, to worm gears or electromagnets. The cartridge's position is usually regulated by an electronic servomechanism or mechanical interface, moving the stylus properly over the groove as the record plays, or for song selection.
There are long-armed and short-armed linear arm designs. On a perfectly flat record a short arm will do, but once the record is even slightly warped, a short arm will be troublesome. Any vertical motion of the record surface at the stylus contact point will cause the stylus to considerably move longitudinally in the groove. This will cause the stylus to ride non-tangentially in the groove and cause a stereo phase error as well as pitch error every time the stylus rides over the warp. Also the arm track can come into touch with the record. A long arm will not completely eliminate this problem but will tolerate warped records much better.
Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
Of note are Rabco's SL-8, followed by Bang & Olufsen with its Beogram 4000 model in 1972. These models positioned the track outside the platter's edge, as did turntables by Harman Kardon, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, etc. A 1970s design from Revox harkened back to the 1950s attempts (and, record lathes), positioning the track directly over the record. An enclosed bridge-like assembly is swung into place from the platter's right edge to its middle. Once in place, a short tonearm under this "bridge" plays the record, driven across laterally by a motor. The Sony PS-F5/F9 (1983) uses a similar, miniaturized design, and can operate in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The Technics SL-10, introduced in 1981, was the first direct drive linear tracking turntable, and placed the track and arm on the underside of the rear-hinged dust cover, to fold down over the record, similar to the SL-Q6 pictured.
The earliest Edison phonographs used horizontal, spring-powered drives to carry the stylus across the recording at a pre-determined rate. But, historically as a whole, the linear tracking systems never gained wide acceptance, due largely to their complexity and associated production/development costs. The resources it takes to produce one incredible linear turntable could produce several excellent ones. Some of the most sophisticated and expensive tonearms and turntable units ever made are linear trackers, from companies such as Rockport and Clearaudio. In theory, it seems nearly ideal; a stylus replicating the motion of the recording lathe used to cut the "master" record could result in minimal wear and maximum sound reproduction. In practice, in vinyl's heyday it was generally too much too late.
Since the early 1980s, an elegant solution has been the near-frictionless air bearing linear arm that requires no tracking drive mechanism other than the record groove. This provides a similar benefit as the electronic linear tonearm without the complexity and necessity of servo-motor correction for tracking error. In this case the trade-off is the introduction of pneumatics in the form of audible pumps and tubing. A more elegant solution is the mechanically driven low-friction design, also driven by the groove. Examples include Souther Engineering (U.S.A.), Clearaudio (Germany), and Aura (Czech Republic). This design places an exceeding demand upon precision engineering due to the lack of pneumatics.
Historically, most high-fidelity "component" systems (preamplifiers or receivers) that accepted input from a phonograph turntable had separate inputs for both ceramic and magnetic cartridges (typically labeled "CER" and "MAG"). One piece systems often had no additional phono inputs at all, regardless of type.
Most systems today, if they accept input from a turntable at all, are configured for use only with magnetic cartridges. Manufacturers of high-end systems often have in-built moving coil amplifier circuitry, or outboard head-amplifiers supporting either moving magnet or moving coil cartridges that can be plugged into the line stage.
Additionally, cartridges may contain styli or needles that can be separated according to their tip: Spherical styli, and elliptical styli. Spherical styli have their tip shaped like one half of a sphere, and elliptical styli have their tip shaped like one end of an ellipse. Spherical styli preserve more of the groove of the record than elliptical styli, while elliptical styli offer higher sound quality.
Early electronic phonographs used a piezo-electric "crystal" for pickup (though the earliest electronic phonographs used crude magnetic pick-ups), where the mechanical movement of the stylus in the groove generates a proportional electrical voltage by creating stress within a crystal (typically Rochelle salt). Crystal pickups are relatively robust, and produce a substantial signal level which requires only a modest amount of further amplification. The output is not very linear however, introducing unwanted distortion. It is difficult to make a crystal pickup suitable for quality stereo reproduction, as the stiff coupling between the crystal and the long stylus prevents close tracking of the needle to the groove modulations. This tends to increase wear on the record, and introduces more distortion. Another problem is the hygroscopic nature of the crystal itself: it absorbs moisture from the air and may dissolve. The crystal was protected by embedding it in other materials, without hindering the movement of the pickup mechanism itself. After a number of years, the protective jelly often deteriorated or leaked from the cartridge case and the full unit needed replacement.
The next development was the "ceramic" cartridge, a piezoelectric device that used newer and better materials. These were more sensitive, and offered greater "compliance", that is, lack of resistance to movement and so increased ability to follow the undulations of the groove without gross distorting or jumping out of the groove. Higher compliance meant lower tracking forces and reduced wear to both the disc and stylus. It also allowed ceramic stereo cartridges to be made.
During the 1950s to 1970s, ceramic cartridge became common in low quality phonographs, but better high-fidelity (or "hi-fi") systems used magnetic cartridges, and the availability of low cost magnetic cartridges from the 1970s onwards made ceramic cartridges obsolete for essentially all purposes. At the seeming end of the market lifespan of ceramic cartridges, someone accidentally discovered that by terminating a specific ceramic mono cartridge (the Ronette TX88) not with the prescribed 47 kΩ resistance, but with approx. 10 kΩ, it could be connected to the moving magnet (MM) input too. The result, a much smoother frequency curve extended the lifetime for this popular and very cheap type.
There are two common designs for magnetic cartridges, moving magnet (MM) and moving coil (MC) (originally called "dynamic"). Both operate on the same physics principle of electromagnetic induction. The moving magnet type was by far the most common and more robust of the two, though audiophiles often claim that the moving coil system yields higher fidelity sound.
In either type, the stylus itself, usually of diamond, is mounted on a tiny metal strut called a cantilever, which is suspended using a collar of highly compliant plastic. This gives the stylus the freedom to move in any direction. On the other end of the cantilever is mounted a tiny permanent magnet (moving magnet type) or a set of tiny wound coils (moving coil type). The magnet is close to a set of fixed pick-up coils, or the moving coils are held within a magnetic field generated by fixed permanent magnets. In either case, the movement of the stylus as it tracks the grooves of a record causes a fluctuating magnetic field, which causes a small electric current to be induced in the coils. This current closely follows the sound waveform cut into the record, and may be transmitted by wires to an electronic amplifier where it is processed and amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. Depending upon the amplifier design, a phono-preamplifier may be necessary.
In most moving magnet designs, the stylus itself is detachable from the rest of the cartridge so it can easily be replaced. There are three primary types of cartridge mounts. The most common type is attached using two small screws to a headshell that then plugs into the tonearm, while another is a standardized "P-mount" or "T4P" cartridge (invented by Technics in 1980 and adopted by other manufacturers) that plugs directly into the tonearm. Many P-mount cartridges come with adapters to allow them to be mounted to a headshell. The third type is used mainly in cartridges designed for DJ use and it has a standard round headshell connector. Some mass market turntables use a proprietary integrated cartridge that cannot be upgraded.
An alternative design is the "moving iron" variation on moving magnet used by ADC, Grado, Stanton/Pickering 681 series, Ortofon OM and VMS series, and the MMC cartridge of Bang & Olufsen. In these units, the magnet itself sits behind the four coils and magnetises the cores of all four coils. The moving iron cross at the other end of the coils varies the gaps between itself and each of these cores, according to its movements. These variations lead to voltage variations as described above.
Famous brands for magnetic cartridges are: Grado, Stanton/Pickering (681EE/EEE), B&O (MM types for its two, non-compatible generations of parallel arm design), Shure (V15 Type I to V), Audio-Technica, Nagaoka, Dynavector, Koetsu, Ortofon, Technics, Denon and ADC.
Strain gauge or "semiconductor" cartridges do not generate a voltage, but act like a variable resistor, whose resistance directly depends on the movement of the stylus. Thus, the cartridge "modulates" an external voltage supplied by the (special) preamplifier. These pickups were marketed by Euphonics, Sao Win, and Panasonic/Technics, amongst others.
The main advantages (compared to magnetic carts are):
The main disadvantage is the need of a special preamplifier that supplies a steady current (typically 5mA) to the semiconductor elements and handles a special equalization than the one needed for magnetic cartridges.
A high-end strain-gauge cartridge is currently sold by an audiophile company, with special preamplifiers available.
Electrostatic cartridges were marketed by Stax in the 1950 and 1960 years. They needed individual operating electronics or preamplifiers.
A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean.
An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality.
A smooth-tipped "stylus" (in popular usage often called a "needle" due to the former use of steel needles for the purpose) is used to play the recorded groove. A special chisel-like stylus is used to engrave the groove into the "master record".
The stylus is subject to hard wear as it is the only small part that comes into direct contact with the spinning record. In terms of the pressure imposed on its minute areas of actual contact, the forces it must bear are enormous. There are three desired qualities in a stylus: first, that it faithfully follows the contours of the recorded groove and transmits its vibrations to the next part in the chain; second, that it does not damage the recorded disc; and third, that it is resistant to wear. A worn-out, damaged or defective stylus tip will degrade audio quality and injure the groove.
Different materials for the stylus have been used over time. Thomas Edison introduced the use of sapphire in 1892 and the use of diamond in 1910 for his cylinder phonographs. The Edison Diamond Disc players (1912–1929), when properly played, hardly ever required the stylus to be changed. The styli for vinyl records were also made out of sapphire or diamond. A specific case is the specific stylus type of Bang & Olufsen's (B&O) moving magnet cartridge MMC 20CL, mostly used in parallel arm B&O turntables in the 4002/6000 series. It uses a sapphire stem on which a diamond tip is fixed by a special adhesive. A stylus tip mass as low as 0.3 milligram is the result and full tracking only requires 1 gram of stylus force, reducing record wear even further. Maximum distortion (2nd harmonic) fell below 0.6%.
Other than the Edison and European Pathé disc machines, early disc players, both external horn and internal horn "Victrola" style models, normally used very short-lived disposable needles. The most common material was steel, although other materials such as copper, tungsten, bamboo and cactus were used. Steel needles needed to be replaced frequently, preferably after each use, due to their very rapid wear from bearing down heavily on the mildly abrasive shellac record. Rapid wear was an essential feature so that their imprecisely formed tips would be quickly worn into compliance with the groove's contours. Advertisements implored customers to replace their steel needles after each record side. Steel needles were inexpensive, e.g., a box of 500 for 50 US cents, and were widely sold in packets and small tins. They were available in different thicknesses and lengths. Thick, short needles produced strong, loud tones while thinner, longer needles produces softer, muted tones. In 1916, in the face of a wartime steel shortage, Victor introduced their "Tungs-Tone" brand extra-long-playing needle, which was advertised to play between 100 and 300 records. It consisted of a brass shank into which a very hard and strong tungsten wire, somewhat narrower than the standard record groove, had been fitted. The protruding wire wore down, but not out, until it was worn too short to use. Later in the 78 rpm era, hardened steel and chrome-plated needles came on the market, some of which were claimed to play 10 to 20 record sides each.
When sapphires were introduced for the 78 rpm disc and the LP, they were made by tapering a stem and polishing the tip to a sphere with a radius of around 70 and 25 micrometers respectively. A sphere is not equal to the form of the cutting stylus and by the time diamond needles came to the market, a whole discussion was started on the effect of circular forms moving through a non-circular cut groove. It can be easily shown that vertical, so called "pinching" movements were a result and when stereophonic LPs were introduced, unwanted vertical modulation was recognized as a problem. Also, the needle started its life touching the groove on a very small surface, giving extra wear on the walls.
Another problem is in the tapering along a straight line, while the side of the groove is far from straight. Both problems were attacked together: by polishing the diamond in a certain way that it could be made doubly elliptic. 1) the side was made into one ellipse as seen from behind, meaning the groove touched along a short line and 2) the ellipse form was also polished as seen from above and curvature in the direction of the groove became much smaller than 25 micrometers e.g. 13 micrometers. With this approach a number of irregularities were eliminated. Furthermore, the angle of the stylus, which used to be always sloping backwards, was changed into the forward direction, in line with the slope the original cutting stylus possessed. These styli were expensive to produce, but the costs were effectively offset by their extended lifespans.
The next development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC, fitted as standard on quadraphonic cartridges, and marketed as an extra on some high-end cartridges.
The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC records "worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus, played "as new" with the Shibata profile.
Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface, improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975), "Ogura" (1978), Van den Hul (1982). Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure), "Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or "Stereohedron" (Stanton).
A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc. This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped stylus, such as the Namiki (1985) design, and Fritz Gyger (1989) design. This type of stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant" (Ortofon).
It is important to point out that most of those stylus profiles are still being manufactured and sold, together with the more common spherical and elliptical profiles. This is despite the fact that production of CD-4 quadraphonic records ended by the late 1970s.
Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927.
To solve this problem, in 1930, RCA Victor made unbreakable records by mixing polyvinyl chloride with plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in motion picture discs, and experimentally, in home records, the same year. However, with Sound-on-film achieving supremacy over sound-on-disc by 1931, the need for unbreakable records diminished and the production of vinyl home recordings was dropped as well, for the time being.
The Victrolac formula improved throughout the 1930s, and by the late 30s the material, by then called vinylite, was being used in records sent to radio stations for radio program records, radio commercials, and later, DJ copies of phonograph records, because vinyl records could be sent through the mail to radio stations without breaking. During WWII, there was a shortage of shellac, which had to be imported from Asia, and the U.S. government banned production of shellac records for the duration of the war. Vinylite was made domestically, though, and was being used for V-discs during the war. Record company engineers took a much closer look at the possibilities of vinyl, possibly that it might even replace shellac as the basic record material. After the war, RCA Victor and Columbia, by far the two leading records companies in America, perfected two new vinyl formats, which were both introduced in 1948, when the 33 RPM LP was introduced by Columbia and the 45 RPM single was introduced by RCA Victor. For a few years thereafter, however, 78 RPM records continued to be made in shellac until that format was phased out around 1958.
Early "acoustical" record players used the stylus to vibrate a diaphragm that radiated the sound through a horn. Several serious problems resulted from this:
The introduction of electronic amplification allowed these issues to be addressed. Records are made with boosted high frequencies and reduced low frequencies, which allow for different ranges of sound to be produced. This reduces the effect of background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the low-frequency undulations.
During playback, the high frequencies must be rescaled to their original, flat frequency response—known as "equalization"—as well as being amplified. A phono input of an amplifier incorporates such equalization as well as amplification to suit the very low level output from a modern cartridge. Most hi-fi amplifiers made between the 1950s and the 1990s and virtually all DJ mixers are so equipped.
The widespread adoption of digital music formats, such as CD or satellite radio, has displaced phonograph records and resulted in phono inputs being omitted in most modern amplifiers. Some newer turntables include built-in preamplifiers to produce line-level outputs. Inexpensive and moderate performance discrete phono preamplifiers with RIAA equalization are available, while high-end audiophile units costing thousands of dollars continue to be available in very small numbers. Phono inputs are starting to reappear on amplifiers in the 2010s due to the vinyl revival.
Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard. Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI, HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them.
Turntables continue to be manufactured and sold in the 2010s, although in small numbers. While some audiophiles still prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of digital music sources (mainly compact discs), they represent a minority of listeners. As of 2015 the sale of vinyl LP's has increased 49–50% percent from the previous year although small in comparison to the sale of other formats which although more units were sold (Digital Sales, CDs) the more modern formats experienced a decline in sales. The quality of available record players, tonearms, and cartridges has continued to improve, despite diminishing demand, allowing turntables to remain competitive in the high-end audio market. Vinyl enthusiasts are often committed to the refurbishment and sometimes tweaking of vintage systems.
In 2017, vinyl LP sales were slightly decreased, at a rate of 5%, in comparison to previous years' numbers, regardless of the noticeable rise of vinyl records sales worldwide.
Updated versions of the 1970s era Technics SL-1200 (production ceased in 2010) have remained an industry standard for DJs to the present day. Turntables and vinyl records remain popular in mixing (mostly dance-oriented) forms of electronic music, where they allow great latitude for physical manipulation of the music by the DJ.
In hip hop music and occasionally in other genres, the turntable is used as a musical instrument by DJs, who use turntables along with a DJ mixer to create unique rhythmic sounds. Manipulation of a record as part of the music, rather than for normal playback or mixing, is called turntablism. The basis of turntablism, and its best known technique, is "scratching", pioneered by Grand Wizzard Theodore. It was not until Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" in 1983 that the turntablism movement was recognized in popular music outside of a hip hop context. In the 2010s, many hip hop DJs use DJ CD players or digital record emulator devices to create scratching sounds; nevertheless, some DJs still scratch with vinyl records.
The laser turntable uses a laser as the pickup instead of a stylus in physical contact with the disk. It was conceived of in the late 1980s, although early prototypes were not of usable audio quality. Practical laser turntables are now being manufactured by ELPJ. They are favoured by record libraries and some audiophiles since they eliminate physical wear completely.
Experimentation is in progress in retrieving the audio from old records by scanning the disc and analysing the scanned image, rather than using any sort of turntable.
Although largely replaced since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, record albums still sell in small numbers and are available through numerous sources. In 2008, LP sales grew by 90% over 2007, with 1.9 million records sold.
USB turntables have a built-in audio interface, which transfers the sound directly to the connected computer. Some USB turntables transfer the audio without equalization, but are sold with software that allows the EQ of the transferred audio file to be adjusted. There are also many turntables on the market designed to be plugged into a computer via a USB port for needle dropping purposes.
Responding to longtime calls by fans and disc jockeys, Panasonic Corp. said it is reviving Technics turntables–the series that remains a de facto standard player supporting nightclub music scenes.
The new analog turntable, which would come with new direct-drive motor technologies that Panasonic says would improve the quality of sound, would be released sometime between April 2016 and March 2017, the Japanese electronics company announced on September 2, 2015.
anged Ethnography." Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24471 |
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne ( , also , , ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.
Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all".
The Cézannes came from the commune of Saint-Sauveur (Hautes-Alpes, Occitania). Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence. On 22 February, he was baptized in the Église de la Madeleine, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents, and became a devout Catholic later in life. His father, Louis Auguste Cézanne (1798–1886), a native of Saint-Zacharie (Var), was the co-founder of a banking firm (Banque Cézanne et Cabassol) that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.
His mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert (1814–1897), was "vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence". It was from her that Cézanne got his conception and vision of life. He also had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day.
At the age of ten Cézanne entered the Saint Joseph school in Aix. In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix (now Collège Mignet), where he became friends with Émile Zola, who was in a less advanced class, as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who came to be known as "Les Trois Inséparables" (The Three Inseparables). He stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar. In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing in Aix, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk. From 1858 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, while also receiving drawing lessons.
Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursue his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861. He was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already living in the capital at the time. Eventually, his father reconciled with Cézanne and supported his choice of career. Cézanne later received an inheritance of 400,000 francs from his father, which rid him of all financial worries.
In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Initially the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and disciple, in which Pissarro exerted a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.
Cézanne's early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style. Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.
Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example). Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore binocular vision graphically, rendering slightly different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective. His interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era and from reading Hippolyte Taine’s Berkelean theory of spatial perception. Cézanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as sick retinas, pure vision, and the influence of the steam railway.
Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In that year, through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine Guillemet, he exhibited "Portrait de M. L. A.", probably "Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement"", 1866 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), his first and last successful submission to the Salon.
Before 1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists (at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877). In later years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until 1895, when the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Despite the increasing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.
He concentrated on a few subjects and was equally proficient in each of these genres: still lifes, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last, Cézanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a lack of available nude models. Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects. His still lifes are at once decorative in design, painted with thick, flat surfaces, yet with a weight reminiscent of Gustave Courbet. The 'props' for his works are still to be found, as he left them, in his studio (atelier), in the suburbs of modern Aix.
Cézanne's paintings were not well received among the petty bourgeoisie of Aix. In 1903 Henri Rochefort visited the auction of paintings that had been in Zola's possession and published on 9 March 1903 in L'Intransigeant a highly critical article entitled "Love for the Ugly". Rochefort describes how spectators had supposedly experienced laughing fits, when seeing the paintings of "an ultra-impressionist named Cézanne". The public in Aix was outraged, and for many days, copies of L'Intransigeant appeared on Cézanne's door-mat with messages asking him to leave the town "he was dishonouring".
One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the field. After working for two hours he decided to go home; but on the way he collapsed. He was taken home by a passing driver. His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. On the following day, he intended to continue working, but later on he fainted; the model with whom he was working called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it. He died a few days later, on 22 October 1906 of pneumonia and was buried at the Saint-Pierre Cemetery in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence.
Various periods in the work and life of Cézanne have been defined.
In 1863 Napoleon III created by decree the Salon des Refusés, at which paintings rejected for display at the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts were to be displayed. The artists of the refused works included the young Impressionists, who were considered revolutionary. Cézanne was influenced by their style but his social relations with them were inept—he seemed rude, shy, angry, and given to depression. His works of this period are characterized by dark colours and the heavy use of black. They differ sharply from his earlier watercolours and sketches at the École Spéciale de dessin at Aix-en-Provence in 1859, and their violence of expression is in contrast to his subsequent works.
In 1866–67, inspired by the example of Courbet, Cézanne painted a series of paintings with a palette knife. He later called these works, mostly portraits, "une couillarde" ("a coarse word for ostentatious virility"). Lawrence Gowing has written that Cézanne's palette knife phase "was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment".
Among the "couillarde" paintings are a series of portraits of his uncle Dominique in which Cézanne achieved a style that "was as unified as Impressionism was fragmentary".
Later works of the dark period include several erotic or violent subjects, such as "Women Dressing" (), "The Rape" (), and "The Murder" (), which depicts a man stabbing a woman who is held down by his female accomplice.
After the start of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, Cézanne and his mistress, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, left Paris for L'Estaque, near Marseille, where he changed themes to predominantly landscapes. He was declared a draft dodger in January 1871, but the war ended the next month, in February, and the couple moved back to Paris, in the summer of 1871. After the birth of their son Paul in January 1872, in Paris, they moved to Auvers in Val-d'Oise near Paris. Cézanne's mother was kept a party to family events, but his father was not informed of Hortense for fear of risking his wrath. The artist received from his father a monthly allowance of 100 francs.
Camille Pissarro lived in Pontoise. There and in Auvers he and Cézanne painted landscapes together. For a long time afterwards, Cézanne described himself as Pissarro's pupil, referring to him as "God the Father", as well as saying: "We all stem from Pissarro." Under Pissarro's influence Cézanne began to abandon dark colours and his canvases grew much brighter.
Leaving Hortense in the Marseille region, Cézanne moved between Paris and Provence, exhibiting in the first (1874) and third Impressionist shows (1877). In 1875, he attracted the attention of the collector Victor Chocquet, whose commissions provided some financial relief. But Cézanne's exhibited paintings attracted hilarity, outrage, and sarcasm. Reviewer Louis Leroy said of Cézanne's portrait of Chocquet: "This peculiar looking head, the colour of an old boot might give [a pregnant woman] a shock and cause yellow fever in the fruit of her womb before its entry into the world."
In March 1878, Cézanne's father found out about Hortense and threatened to cut Cézanne off financially, but, in September, he relented and decided to give him 400 francs for his family. Cézanne continued to migrate between the Paris region and Provence until Louis-Auguste had a studio built for him at his home, Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, in the early 1880s. This was on the upper floor, and an enlarged window was provided, allowing in the northern light but interrupting the line of the eaves; this feature remains. Cézanne stabilized his residence in L'Estaque. He painted with Renoir there in 1882 and visited Renoir and Monet in 1883.
In the early 1880s the Cézanne family stabilized their residence in Provence where they remained, except for brief sojourns abroad, from then on. The move reflects a new independence from the Paris-centered impressionists and a marked preference for the south, Cézanne's native soil. Hortense's brother had a house within view of Montagne Sainte-Victoire at Estaque. A run of paintings of this mountain from 1880 to 1883 and others of Gardanne from 1885 to 1888 are sometimes known as "the Constructive Period".
The year 1886 was a turning point for the family. Cézanne married Hortense. In that year also, Cézanne's father died, leaving him the estate purchased in 1859; he was 47. By 1888 the family was in the former manor, Jas de Bouffan, a substantial house and grounds with outbuildings, which afforded a new-found comfort. This house, with much-reduced grounds, is now owned by the city and is open to the public on a restricted basis.
For many years it was believed that Cézanne broke off his friendship with Émile Zola, after the latter used him, in large part, as the basis for the unsuccessful and ultimately tragic fictitious artist Claude Lantier, in the novel "L'Œuvre".
Recently letters have been discovered that refute this. A letter from 1887 demonstrates that their friendship did endure for at least some time after.
Cézanne's idyllic period at Jas de Bouffan was temporary. From 1890 until his death he was beset by troubling events and he withdrew further into his painting, spending long periods as a virtual recluse. His paintings became well-known and sought after and he was the object of respect from a new generation of painters.
The problems began with the onset of diabetes in 1890, destabilizing his personality to the point where relationships with others were again strained. He traveled in Switzerland, with Hortense and his son, perhaps hoping to restore their relationship. Cézanne, however, returned to Provence to live; Hortense and Paul junior, to Paris. Financial need prompted Hortense's return to Provence but in separate living quarters. Cézanne moved in with his mother and sister. In 1891 he turned to Catholicism.
Cézanne alternated between painting at Jas de Bouffan and in the Paris region, as before. In 1895, he made a germinal visit to Bibémus Quarries and climbed Montagne Sainte-Victoire. The labyrinthine landscape of the quarries must have struck a note, as he rented a cabin there in 1897 and painted extensively from it. The shapes are believed to have inspired the embryonic "Cubist" style. Also in that year, his mother died, an upsetting event but one which made reconciliation with his wife possible. He sold the empty nest at Jas de Bouffan and rented a place on Rue Boulegon, where he built a studio.
The relationship, however, continued to be stormy. He needed a place to be by himself. In 1901 he bought some land along the Chemin des Lauves, an isolated road on some high ground at Aix, and commissioned a studio to be built there (now open to the public). He moved there in 1903. Meanwhile, in 1902, he had drafted a will excluding his wife from his estate and leaving everything to his son. The relationship was apparently off again; she is said to have burned the mementos of his mother.
From 1903 to the end of his life he painted in his studio, working for a month in 1904 with Émile Bernard, who stayed as a house guest. After his death it became a monument, Atelier Paul Cézanne, or les Lauves.
Cézanne's stylistic approaches and beliefs regarding how to paint were analyzed and written about by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who is primarily known for his association with phenomenology and existentialism. In his 1945 essay entitled "Cézanne's Doubt", Merleau-Ponty discusses how Cézanne gave up classic artistic elements such as pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color in an attempt to get a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that an eye observes. He wanted to see and sense the objects he was painting, rather than think about them. Ultimately, he wanted to get to the point where "sight" was also "touch". He would take hours sometimes to put down a single stroke because each stroke needed to contain "the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style". A still life might have taken Cézanne one hundred working sessions while a portrait took him around one hundred and fifty sessions. Cèzanne believed that while he was painting, he was capturing a moment in time, that once passed, could not come back. The atmosphere surrounding what he was painting was a part of the sensational reality he was painting. Cèzanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting."
Cézanne's works were rejected numerous times by the official Salon in Paris and ridiculed by art critics when exhibited with the Impressionists. Yet during his lifetime Cézanne was considered a master by younger artists who visited his studio in Aix.
Along with the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the work of Cézanne, with its sense of immediacy and incompletion, critically influenced Matisse and others prior to Fauvism and Expressionism. After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in a large museum-like retrospective in Paris, September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.
Inspired by Cézanne, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote:
Cézanne is one of the greatest of those who changed the course of art history . . . From him we have learned that to alter the coloring of an object is to alter its structure. His work proves without doubt that painting is not—or not any longer—the art of imitating an object by lines and colors, but of giving plastic [solid, but alterable] form to our nature. ("Du "Cubisme"", 1912)
Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art. Picasso referred to Cézanne as "the father of us all" and claimed him as "my one and only master!" Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Kasimir Malevich, Georges Rouault, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne's genius.
Cézanne's painting "The Boy in the Red Vest" was stolen from a Swiss museum in 2008. It was recovered in a Serbian police raid in 2012.
The 2016 film "Cézanne and I" explores the friendship between the artist and Émile Zola.
On 10 May 1999, Cézanne's painting "Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier" sold for $60.5 million, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time. As of 2006, it was the most expensive still life ever sold at an auction. One of Cézanne's "The Card Players" was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($ million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($ million today), either price signifying a new mark for highest price for a painting up to that date. The record price was surpassed in November 2017 by Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24472 |
Pope Innocent VI
Pope Innocent VI (; 1282 or 1295 – 12 September 1362), born Étienne Aubert, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 18 December 1352 to his death in 1362. He was the fifth Avignon pope and the only one with the pontifical name of "Innocent".
Étienne's father was Adhemar Aubert (1260-?), seigneur de Montel-de-Gelat in Limousin province. He was a native of the hamlet of Les Monts, Diocese of Limoges (today part of the commune of Beyssac, "département" of Corrèze), and, after having taught civil law at Toulouse, he became successively Bishop of Noyon in 1338 and Bishop of Clermont in 1340. On 20 September 1342, he was raised to the position of Cardinal Priest of SS. John and Paul. He was made cardinal-bishop of Ostia and Velletri on 13 February 1352, by Pope Clement VI, whom he succeeded.
Etienne was crowned pope on 30 December 1352 by Cardinal Gaillard de la Mothe after the papal conclave of 1352. Upon his election, he revoked a signed agreement stating the college of cardinals was superior to the pope. His subsequent policy compares favourably with that of the other Avignon Popes. He introduced many needed reforms in the administration of church affairs, and through his legate, Cardinal Albornoz, who was accompanied by Rienzi, he sought to restore order in Rome. In 1355, Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, was crowned in Rome with Innocent's permission, after having made an oath that he would quit the city on the day of the ceremony.
It was largely through the exertions of Innocent VI that the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) between France and England was brought about. During his pontificate, the Byzantine emperor John V Palaeologus offered to submit the Greek Orthodox Church to the Roman See in return for assistance against John VI Cantacuzenus. The resources at the disposal of the Pope, however, were all required for exigencies nearer home, and the offer was declined.
Most of the wealth accumulated by John XXII and Benedict XII had been lost during the extravagant pontificate of Clement VI. Innocent VI economised by cutting the chapel staff ("capellani capelle") from twelve to eight. Works of art were sold rather than commissioned. His pontificate was dominated by the war in Italy and by Avignon's recovery from the plague, both of which made draining demands on his treasury. By 1357, he was complaining of poverty.
Innocent VI was a liberal patron of letters. If the extreme severity of his measures against the Fraticelli is ignored, he retains a high reputation for justice and mercy. However, St. Bridget of Sweden denounced him as a persecutor of Christians. He died on 12 September 1362 and was succeeded by Urban V. Today his tomb can be found in the Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction, the Carthusian monastery in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24473 |
Polyandry
Polyandry (; from "poly-", "many" and ἀνήρ "anēr", "man") is a form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time. Polyandry is contrasted with polygyny, involving one male and two or more females. If a marriage involves a plural number of "husbands and wives" participants of each gender, then it can be called polygamy, group or conjoint marriage. In its broadest use, polyandry refers to sexual relations with multiple males within or without marriage.
Of the 1,231 societies listed in the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas, 186 were found to be monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and 4 had polyandry. Polyandry is less rare than this figure suggests, as it considered only those examples found in the Himalayan mountains (28 societies). More recent studies have found more than 50 other societies practicing polyandry.
Fraternal polyandry is practiced among Tibetans in Nepal and parts of China, in which two or more brothers are married to the same wife, with the wife having equal "sexual access" to them. It is associated with "partible paternity", the cultural belief that a child can have more than one father.
Polyandry is believed to be more likely in societies with scarce environmental resources. It is believed to limit human population growth and enhance child survival. It is a rare form of marriage that exists not only among peasant families but also among the elite families. For example, polyandry in the Himalayan mountains is related to the scarcity of land. The marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife allows family land to remain intact and undivided. If every brother married separately and had children, family land would be split into unsustainable small plots. In contrast, very poor persons not owning land were less likely to practice polyandry in Buddhist Ladakh and Zanskar. In Europe, the splitting up of land was prevented through the social practice of impartible inheritance. With most siblings disinherited, many of them became celibate monks and priests.
Polyandrous mating systems are also a common phenomenon in the animal kingdom.
Unlike fraternal polyandry where a woman will receive a number of husbands simultaneously, a woman will acquire one husband after another in sequence.
This form is flexible. These men may or may not be related. And it may or may not incorporate a hierarchical system, where one husband is considered "primary" and may be allotted certain rights or privileges not awarded to secondary husbands. Such as, biologically fathering a child.
In this particular system, the "secondary" husbands have the power to succeed the primary if he were to become severely ill or be away from the home for a long period of time or is otherwise rendered incapable of fulfilling his husbandly duties.
Successional polyandry can likewise be egalitarian, where all husbands are equal in status and receive the same rights and privileges. In this system, each husband will have a wedding ceremony and share paternity of whatever children she may bear.
"Other Classifications: Secondary"
Another form of polyandry is a combination of polyandry and polygyny, as women are married to several men simultaneously and the same men are married to several women. It is found in some tribes of native Americans as well as villages in northern Nigeria and the northern cameroons.
"Other Classifications: Equal polygamy, Polygynandry"
The system results in less land fragmentation, and a diversification of domestic activities.
Fraternal polyandry (from the Latin "frater"—brother), also called adelphic polyandry (from the Greek ""—brother), is a form of polyandry in which a woman is married to two or more men who are brothers. Fraternal polyandry was (and sometimes still is) found in certain areas of Tibet, Nepal, and Northern India, central African cultures where polyandry was accepted as a social practice. The Toda people of southern India practice fraternal polyandry, but monogamy has become prevalent recently. In contemporary Hindu society, polyandrous marriages in agrarian societies in the Malwa region of Punjab seem to occur to avoid division of farming land.
Fraternal polyandry achieves a similar goal to that of primogeniture in 19th-century England. Primogeniture dictated that the eldest son inherited the family estate, while younger sons had to leave home and seek their own employment. Primogeniture maintained family estates intact over generations by permitting only one heir per generation. Fraternal polyandry also accomplishes this, but does so by keeping all the brothers together with just one wife so that there is only one set of heirs per generation. This strategy appears less successful the larger the fraternal sibling group is.
Some forms of polyandry appear to be associated with a perceived need to retain aristocratic titles or agricultural lands within kin groups, and/or because of the frequent absence, for long periods, of a man from the household. In Tibet the practice was particularly popular among the priestly Sakya class.
The female equivalent of fraternal polyandry is sororate marriage.
Anthropologist Stephen Beckerman points out that at least 20 tribal societies accept that a child could, and ideally should, have more than one father, referring to it as "partible paternity". This often results in the shared nurture of a child by multiple fathers in a form of polyandric relation to the mother, although this is not always the case. One of the most well known examples is that of Trobriand "virgin birth". The matrilineal Trobriand Islanders recognize the importance of sex in reproduction but do not believe the male makes a contribution to the constitution of the child, who therefore remains attached to their mother's lineage alone. The mother's non-resident husbands are not recognized as fathers, although the mother's co-resident brothers are, since they are part of the mother's lineage.
According to inscriptions describing the reforms of the Sumerian king Urukagina of Lagash (ca. 2300 BC), the earlier custom of polyandry in his country was abolished, on pain of the woman taking multiple husbands being stoned upon which her crime is written.
An extreme gender imbalance has been suggested as a justification for polyandry. For example, the selective abortion of female fetuses in India has led to a significant margin in sex ratio and, it has been suggested, results in related men "sharing" a wife.
Polyandry in Tibet was a common practice and continues to a lesser extent today. A survey of 753 Tibetan families by Tibet University in 1988 found that 13% practiced polyandry. Polyandry in India still exists among minorities, and also in Bhutan, and the northern parts of Nepal. Polyandry has been practised in several parts of India, such as Rajasthan, Ladakh and Zanskar, in the Jaunsar-Bawar region in Uttarakhand, among the Toda of South India.
It also occurs or has occurred in Nigeria, the Nymba, and some pre-contact Polynesian societies, though probably only among higher caste women. It is also encountered in some regions of Yunnan and Sichuan regions of China, among the Mosuo people in China (who also practice polygyny as well), and in some sub-Saharan African such as the Maasai people in Kenya and northern Tanzania and American indigenous communities. The Guanches, the first known inhabitants of the Canary Islands, practiced polyandry until their disappearance. The Zo'e tribe in the state of Pará on the Cuminapanema River, Brazil, also practice polyandry.
Hames. "A Survey of Non-Classical Polyandry". Human Nature An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective ISSN 1045-6767 Volume 23 Number 2 Hum Nat (2012) 23:149-172 DOI 10.1007/s12110-012-9144-x 12 Jun 2012.
There is at least one reference to polyandry in the ancient Hindu epic "Mahabharata". Draupadi married the five Pandava brothers, as this is what she chose in a previous life. This ancient text remains largely neutral to the concept of polyandry, accepting this as her way of life. However, in the same epic, when questioned by Kunti to give an example of polyandry, Yudhishthira cites Gautam-clan Jatila (married to seven Saptarishis) and Hiranyaksha's sister Pracheti (married to ten brothers), thereby implying a more open attitude toward polyandry in Vedic society.
The Hebrew Bible contains no examples of women married to more than one man, but its description of adultery clearly implies that polyandry is unacceptable and the practice is unknown in Jewish tradition. In addition, the children from other than the first husband are considered illegitimate, unless he has already divorced her or died (i.e., a mamzer), being a product of an adulterous relationship.
Most Christian denominations in the Western world strongly advocate monogamous marriage, and a passage from the Pauline epistles () can be interpreted as forbidding polyandry.
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and other early Latter-day Saints, practiced polygynous marriages. The practice was officially ended with the 1890 Manifesto. Polyandrous marriages did exist, albeit in significantly less numbers, in early LDS history.
Although Islamic marital law allows men to have up to four wives, polyandry is prohibited in Islam.
Polyandrous marriages were practiced in pre-Islamic Arabian cultures, but were outlawed during the rise of Islam. Nikah Ijtimah was a pagan tradition of polyandry in older Arab regions which was condemned and abolished during the rise of Islam.
Polyandrous behavior is quite widespread in the animal kingdom, occurring for example in insects, fish, birds, and mammals.
Types of mating, marriage and lifestyle: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24474 |
Polygamy
Polygamy (from Late Greek , "polygamía", "state of marriage to many spouses") is the practice of marrying multiple spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at a time, sociologists call this polygyny. When a woman is married to more than one husband at a time, it is called polyandry. If a marriage includes multiple husbands and wives, it can be called a group marriage.
In contrast, monogamy is marriage consisting of only two parties. Like "monogamy", the term "polygamy" is often used in a "de facto" sense, applied regardless of whether the state recognizes the relationship. In sociobiology and zoology, researchers use "polygamy" in a broad sense to mean any form of multiple mating.
Worldwide, different societies variously encourage, accept or outlaw polygamy. Of societies which allow or tolerate polygamy, in the vast majority of cases the form accepted is polygyny. According to the Ethnographic Atlas (1998), of 1,231 societies noted, 588 had frequent polygyny, 453 had occasional polygyny, 186 were monogamous and 4 had polyandry; although more recent research suggests polyandry may be more common than previously thought. In cultures which practice polygamy, its prevalence among that population is often connected to class and socioeconomic status.
From a legal point of view, in many countries, although marriage is legally monogamous (a person can only have one spouse, and bigamy is illegal), adultery is not illegal, leading to a situation of "de facto" polygamy being allowed, although without legal recognition for non-official "spouses".
According to scientific studies, the human mating system is considered to be primarily monogamous, with cultural practice of polygamy to be in the minority, based on both surveys of world populations, and on characteristics of human reproductive physiology.
Polygamy exists in three specific forms:
Polygyny, the practice wherein a man has more than one wife at the same time, is by far the most common form of polygamy. Many Muslim-majority countries and some countries with sizable Muslim minorities accept polygyny to varying extents both legally and culturally; some secular countries like India also accept it to varying degrees. Islamic law or sharia law is a religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition which allows polygyny. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the hadith. In Arabic, the term "sharīʿah" refers to God's (Arabic: الله Allāh) immutable divine law and is contrasted with "fiqh", which refers to its human scholarly interpretations.
Polygyny is more widespread in Africa than on any other continent, especially in West Africa, and some scholars see the slave trade's impact on the male-to-female sex ratio as a key factor in the emergence and fortification of polygynous practices in regions of Africa.
Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas demonstrated an historical correlation between the practice of extensive shifting horticulture and polygamy in the majority of sub-Saharan African societies. Drawing on the work of Ester Boserup, Goody notes that the sexual division of labour varies between the male-dominated intensive plough-agriculture common in Eurasia and the extensive shifting horticulture found in sub-Saharan Africa. In some of the sparsely-populated regions where shifting cultivation takes place in Africa, women do much of the work. This favours polygamous marriages in which men seek to monopolize the production of women "who are valued both as workers and as child bearers". Goody however, observes that the correlation is imperfect and varied, and also discusses more traditionally male-dominated though relatively extensive farming systems such as those that exist in much of West Africa, especially in the West African savanna, where more agricultural work is done by men, and where polygyny is desired by men more for the generation of male offspring whose labor is valued.
Anthropologists Douglas R. White and Michael L. Burton discuss and support Jack Goody's observation regarding African male farming systems in "Causes of Polygyny: Ecology, Economy, Kinship, and Warfare" where these authors note:
An analysis by James Fenske (2012) found that child mortality and ecologically-related economic shocks had a significant association with rates of polygamy in subsaharan Africa, rather than female agricultural contributions (which are typically relatively small in the West African savanna and sahel, where polygyny rates are higher), finding that polygyny rates decrease significantly with child mortality rates.
Polygynous marriages fall into two types: "sororal polygyny", in which the co-wives are sisters, and "non-sororal", where the co-wives are not related. Polygyny offers husbands the benefit of allowing them to have more children, may provide them with a larger number of productive workers (where workers are family), and allows them to establish politically useful ties with a greater number of kin groups. Senior wives can benefit as well when the addition of junior wives to the family lightens their workload. Wives', especially senior wives', status in a community can increase through the addition of other wives, who add to the family's prosperity or symbolize conspicuous consumption (much as a large house, domestic help, or expensive vacations operate in a western country). For such reasons, senior wives sometimes work hard or contribute from their own resources to enable their husbands to accumulate the bride price for an extra wife.
Polygyny may also result from the practice of levirate marriage. In such cases, the deceased man's heir may inherit his assets and wife; or, more usually, his brothers may marry the widow. This provides support for the widow and her children (usually also members of the brothers' kin group) and maintains the tie between the husbands' and wives' kin groups. The sororate resembles the levirate, in that a widower must marry the sister of his dead wife. The family of the late wife, in other words, must provide a replacement for her, thus maintaining the marriage alliance. Both levirate and sororate may result in a man having multiple wives.
In monogamous societies, wealthy and powerful men established enduring relationships with, and established separate household for, multiple female partners, aside from their legitimate wives; a practice accepted in Imperial China up until the Qing Dynasty of 1636–1912. This constitutes a form of "de facto" polygyny referred to as concubinage.
Marriage is the moment at which a new household is formed, but different arrangements may occur depending upon the type of marriage and some polygamous marriages do not result in the formation of a single household. In many polygynous marriages the husband's wives may live in separate households. They can thus be described as a "series of linked nuclear families with a 'father' in common".
Polyandry, the practice of a woman having more than one husband at the one time, is much less prevalent than polygyny and is now illegal in virtually every country in the world. It takes place only in remote communities.
Polyandry is believed to be more common in societies with scarce environmental resources, as it is believed to limit human population growth and enhance child survival. It is a rare form of marriage that exists not only among poor families, but also the elite. For example, in the Himalayan Mountains polyandry is related to the scarcity of land; the marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife allows family land to remain intact and undivided. If every brother married separately and had children, family land would be split into unsustainable small plots. In Europe, this outcome was avoided through the social practice of impartible inheritance, under which most siblings would be disinherited.
"Fraternal polyandry" was traditionally practiced among nomadic Tibetans in Nepal, parts of China and part of northern India, in which two or more brothers would marry the same woman. It is most common in societies marked by high male mortality. It is associated with "partible paternity", the cultural belief that a child can have more than one father.
"Non-fraternal polyandry" occurs when the wives' husbands are unrelated, as among the Nayar tribe of India, where girls undergo a ritual marriage before puberty, and the first husband is acknowledged as the father of all her children. However, the woman may never cohabit with that man, taking multiple lovers instead; these men must acknowledge the paternity of their children (and hence demonstrate that no caste prohibitions have been breached) by paying the midwife. The women remain in their maternal home, living with their brothers, and property is passed matrilineally. A similar form of matrilineal, de facto polyandry can be found in the institution of walking marriage among the Mosuo tribe of China.
Serial monogamy refers to remarriage after divorce or death of a spouse from a monogamous marriage, i.e. multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time (a series of monogamous relationships).
According to Danish scholar Miriam K. Zeitzen, anthropologists treat serial monogamy, in which divorce and remarriage occur, as a form of polygamy as it also can establish a series of households that may continue to be tied by shared paternity and shared income. As such, they are similar to the household formations created through divorce and serial monogamy.
Serial monogamy creates a new kind of relative, the "ex-". The "ex-wife", for example, can remain an active part of her "ex-husband's" life, as they may be tied together by legally or informally mandated economic support, which can last for years, including by alimony, child support, and joint custody. Bob Simpson, the British social Anthropologist, notes that it creates an "extended family" by tying together a number of households, including mobile children. He says that Britons may have ex‑wives or ex‑brothers‑in‑law, but not an "ex‑child". According to him, these "unclear families" do not fit the mold of the monogamous nuclear family.
Group marriage is a non-monogamous marriage-like arrangement where three or more adults live together, all considering themselves partners, sharing finances, children, and household responsibilities. Polyamory is on a continuum of family-bonds that includes group marriage. The term does not refer to bigamy as no claim to being married in formal legal terms is made.
Buddhism does not regard marriage as a sacrament - it is purely a secular affair, and normally Buddhist monks do not participate in it (though in some sects priests and monks do marry). Hence marriage receives no religious sanction. Forms of marriage, in consequence, vary from country to country. The Parabhava Sutta states that "a man who is not satisfied with one woman and seeks out other women is on the path to decline". Other fragments in the Buddhist scripture seem to treat polygamy unfavorably, leading some authors to conclude that Buddhism generally does not approve of it or alternatively regards it as a tolerated, but subordinate, marital model.
Thailand legally recognized polygamy until 1955. Myanmar outlawed polygyny from 2015. In Sri Lanka, polyandry was legal in the kingdom of Kandy, but outlawed by British after conquering the kingdom in 1815. When the Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, the concubines of others were added to the list of inappropriate partners. Polyandry in Tibet was common traditionally, as was polygyny, and having several wives or husbands was never regarded as having sex with inappropriate partners.
Most typically, fraternal polyandry is practiced, but sometimes father and son have a common wife, which is a unique family structure in the world. Other forms of marriage are also present, like group marriage and monogamous marriage. Polyandry (especially fraternal polyandry) is also common among Buddhists in Bhutan, Ladakh, and other parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Some pre-Christian Celtic pagans were known to practice polygamy, although the Celtic peoples wavered between it, monogamy and polyandry depending on the time period and area. In some areas this continued even after Christianization began, for instance the Brehon Laws of Gaelic Ireland explicitly allowed for polygamy, especially amongst the noble class. Some modern Celtic pagan religions accept the practice of polygamy to varying degrees, though how widespread the practice is within these religions is unknown.
Polygamy is not forbidden in the Old Testament. Although the New Testament is largely silent on polygamy, some point to Jesus's repetition of the earlier scriptures, noting that a man and a wife "shall become one flesh". However, some look to Paul's writings to the Corinthians: "Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, 'The two will become one flesh. Supporters of polygamy claim this indicates that the term refers to a physical, rather than spiritual, union.
Some Christian theologians argue that in and referring to Jesus explicitly states a man should have only one wife:
The Bible states in the New Testament that polygamy (including adulterous relationships, as evident from verses condemning sexual immorality) should not be practiced by certain church leaders. 1 Timothy states that certain Church leaders should have but one wife: "A "bishop" then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach" (chapter 3, verse 2; see also verse 12 regarding deacons having only one wife). Similar counsel is repeated in the first chapter of the Epistle to Titus.
Periodically, Christian reform movements that have aimed at rebuilding Christian doctrine based on the Bible alone ("sola scriptura") have at least temporarily accepted polygyny as a Biblical practice. For example, during the Protestant Reformation, in a document referred to simply as ""Der Beichtrat"" (or ""The Confessional Advice"" ), Martin Luther granted the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who, for many years, had been living "constantly in a state of adultery and fornication", a dispensation to take a second wife. The double marriage was to be done in secret, however, to avoid public scandal. Some fifteen years earlier, in a letter to the Saxon Chancellor Gregor Brück, Luther stated that he could not "forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture." (""Ego sane fateor, me non posse prohibere, si quis plures velit uxores ducere, nec repugnat sacris literis."")
In Sub-Saharan Africa, there has often been a tension between the Christian insistence on monogamy and traditional polygamy. For instance, Mswati III, the Christian king of Swaziland, has 15 wives. In some instances in recent times there have been moves for accommodation; in other instances, churches have resisted such moves strongly. African Independent Churches have sometimes referred to those parts of the Old Testament that describe polygamy in defending the practice.
The Roman Catholic Church condemns polygamy; the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" lists it in paragraph 2387 under the head "Other offenses against the dignity of marriage" and states that it "is not in accord with the moral law." Also in paragraph 1645 under the head "The Goods and Requirements of Conjugal Love" states "The unity of marriage, distinctly recognized by our Lord, is made clear in the equal personal dignity which must be accorded to husband and wife in mutual and unreserved affection. Polygamy is contrary to conjugal love which is undivided and exclusive."
Saint Augustine saw a conflict with Old Testament polygamy. He refrained from judging the patriarchs, but did not deduce from their practice the ongoing acceptability of polygyny. On the contrary, he argued that the polygamy of the Fathers, which was tolerated by the Creator because of fertility, was a diversion from His original plan for human marriage. Augustine wrote: "That the good purpose of marriage, however, is better promoted by one husband with one wife, than by a husband with several wives, is shown plainly enough by the very first union of a married pair, which was made by the Divine Being Himself."
Augustine taught that the reason patriarchs had many wives was not because of fornication, but because they wanted more children. He supported his premise by showing that their marriages, in which husband was the head, were arranged according to the rules of good management: those who are "in command" ("quae principantur") in their society were always singular, while "subordinates" ("subiecta") were multiple. He gave two examples of such relationships: "dominus-servus" - master-servant (in older translation: "slave") and "God-soul". The Bible often equates worshiping multiple gods, i.e. idolatry to fornication. Augustine relates to that: "On this account there is no True God of souls, save One: but one soul by means of many false gods may commit fornication, but not be made fruitful."
As tribal populations grew, fertility was no longer a valid justification of polygamy: it "was lawful among the ancient fathers: whether it be lawful now also, I would not hastily pronounce (utrum et nunc fas sit, non temere dixerim). For there is not now necessity of begetting children, as there then was, when, even when wives bear children, it was allowed, in order to a more numerous posterity, to marry other wives in addition, which now is certainly not lawful."
Augustine saw marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman, which may not be broken. It was the Creator who established monogamy: "Therefore, the first natural bond of human society is man and wife." Such marriage was confirmed by the Saviour in the Gospel of Matthew (Mat 19:9) and by His presence at the wedding in Cana (John 2:2). In the Church—the City of God—marriage is a sacrament and may not and cannot be dissolved as long as the spouses live: "But a marriage once for all entered upon in the City of our God, where, even from the first union of the two, the man and the woman, marriage bears a certain sacramental character, can in no way be dissolved but by the death of one of them." In chapter 7, Augustine pointed out that the Roman Empire forbad polygamy, even if the reason of fertility would support it: "For it is in a man's power to put away a wife that is barren, and marry one of whom to have children. And yet it is not allowed; and now indeed in our times, and after the usage of Rome (nostris quidem iam temporibus ac more Romano), neither to marry in addition, so as to have more than one wife living." Further on he notices that the Church's attitude goes much further than the secular law regarding monogamy: It forbids remarrying, considering such to be a form of fornication: "And yet, save in the City of our God, in His Holy Mount, the case is not such with the wife. But, that the laws of the Gentiles are otherwise, who is there that knows not."
The Council of Trent condemns polygamy: "If any one saith, that it is lawful for Christians to have several wives at the same time, and that this is not prohibited by any divine law; let him be anathema.."
In modern times a minority of Roman Catholic theologians have argued that polygamy, though not ideal, can be a legitimate form of Christian marriage in certain regions, in particular Africa. The Roman Catholic Church teaches in its Catechism that
polygamy is not in accord with the moral law. [Conjugal] communion is radically contradicted by polygamy; this, in fact, directly negates the plan of God that was revealed from the beginning, because it is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive.
The illegality of polygamy in certain areas creates, according to certain Bible passages, additional arguments against it. Paul the Apostle writes "submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience" (Romans 13:5), for "the authorities that exist have been established by God." (Romans 13:1) St Peter concurs when he says to "submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right." (1 Peter 2:13,14) Pro-polygamists argue that, as long as polygamists currently do not obtain legal marriage licenses nor seek "common law marriage status" for additional spouses, no enforced laws are being broken any more than when monogamous couples similarly co-habitate without a marriage license.
The Lutheran World Federation hosted a regional conference in Africa, in which the acceptance of polygamists into full membership by the Lutheran Church in Liberia was defended as being permissible. The Lutheran Church in Liberia, however, does not permit polygamists who have become Christians to marry more wives after they have received the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Evangelical Lutheran missionaries in Maasai also tolerate the practice of polygamy and in Southern Sudan, some polygamists are becoming Lutheran Christians.
The 1988 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion ruled that polygamy was permissible in certain circumstances:
In accordance with what Joseph Smith indicated was a revelation, the practice of plural marriage, the marriage of one man to two or more women, was instituted among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1840s. Despite Smith's revelation, the 1835 edition of the 101st Section of the "Doctrine and Covenants", written after the doctrine of plural marriage began to be practiced, publicly condemned polygamy. This scripture was used by John Taylor in 1850 to quash Mormon polygamy rumors in Liverpool, England. Polygamy was made illegal in the state of Illinois during the 1839–44 Nauvoo era when several top Mormon leaders, including Smith, Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball took multiple wives. Mormon elders who publicly taught that all men were commanded to enter plural marriage were subject to harsh discipline. On 7 June 1844 the "Nauvoo Expositor" criticized Smith for plural marriage.
After Joseph Smith was killed by a mob on 27 June 1844, the main body of Latter Day Saints left Nauvoo and followed Brigham Young to Utah where the practice of plural marriage continued. In 1852, Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS Church, publicly acknowledged the practice of plural marriage through a sermon he gave. Additional sermons by top Mormon leaders on the virtues of polygamy followed. Controversy followed when polygamy became a social cause, writers began to publish works condemning polygamy. The key plank of the Republican Party's 1856 platform was "to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery". In 1862, Congress issued the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act which clarified that the practice of polygamy was illegal in all US territories. The LDS Church believed that their religiously based practice of plural marriage was protected by the United States Constitution, however, the unanimous 1878 Supreme Court decision "Reynolds v. United States" declared that polygamy was not protected by the Constitution, based on the longstanding legal principle that "laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices."
Increasingly harsh anti-polygamy legislation in the US led some Mormons to emigrate to Canada and Mexico. In 1890, LDS Church president Wilford Woodruff issued a public declaration (the Manifesto) announcing that the LDS Church had discontinued new plural marriages. Anti-Mormon sentiment waned, as did opposition to statehood for Utah. The Smoot Hearings in 1904, which documented that the LDS Church was still practicing polygamy spurred the LDS Church to issue a Second Manifesto again claiming that it had ceased performing new plural marriages. By 1910 the LDS Church excommunicated those who entered into, or performed, new plural marriages. Even so, many plural husbands and wives continued to cohabit until their deaths in the 1940s and 1950s.
Enforcement of the 1890 Manifesto caused various splinter groups to leave the LDS Church in order to continue the practice of plural marriage. Polygamy among these groups persists today in Utah and neighboring states as well as in the spin-off colonies. Polygamist churches of Mormon origin are often referred to as "Mormon fundamentalist" even though they are not a part of the LDS Church. Such fundamentalists often use a purported 1886 revelation to John Taylor as the basis for their authority to continue the practice of plural marriage. "The Salt Lake Tribune" stated in 2005 there were as many as 37,000 fundamentalists with less than half of them living in polygamous households.
On 13 December 2013, US Federal Judge Clark Waddoups ruled in "Brown v. Buhman" that the portions of Utah's anti-polygamy laws which prohibit multiple cohabitation were unconstitutional, but also allowed Utah to maintain its ban on multiple marriage licenses. Unlawful cohabitation, where prosecutors did not need to prove that a marriage ceremony had taken place (only that a couple had lived together), had been the primary tool used to prosecute polygamy in Utah since the 1882 Edmunds Act.
The Council of Friends (also known as the Woolley Group and the Priesthood Council) was one of the original expressions of Mormon fundamentalism, having its origins in the teachings of Lorin C. Woolley, a dairy farmer excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1924. Several Mormon fundamentalist groups claim lineage through the Council of Friends, including but not limited to, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS Church), the Apostolic United Brethren, the Centennial Park group, the Latter Day Church of Christ, and the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Community of Christ, known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church) prior to 2001, has never sanctioned polygamy since its foundation in 1860. Joseph Smith III, the first Prophet-President of the RLDS Church following the reorganization of the Church, was an ardent opponent of the practice of plural marriage throughout his life. For most of his career, Smith denied that his father had been involved in the practice and insisted that it had originated with Brigham Young. Smith served many missions to the western United States, where he met with and interviewed associates and women claiming to be widows of his father, who attempted to present him with evidence to the contrary. Smith typically responded to such accusations by saying that he was "not positive nor sure that was innocent", and that if, indeed, the elder Smith had been involved, it was still a false practice. However, many members of the Community of Christ and some of the groups that were formerly associated with it are not convinced that Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage and feel that the evidence that he did is flawed.
The Rig Veda mentions that during the Vedic period, a man could have more than one wife. The practice is attested in epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Dharmashastras permit a man to marry women of lower castes provided that the first wife was of equal caste. Despite its existence, it was most usually practiced by men of higher castes and higher status. Common people were only allowed a second marriage if the first wife could not bear a son.
According to Vishnu Smriti, the number of wives is linked to the caste system:
This linkage of the number of permitted wives to the caste system is also supported by Baudhayana Dharmasutra and Paraskara Grihyasutra.
The Apastamba Dharmasutra and Manusmriti allow a second wife if the first one is unable to discharge her religious duties or is unable to bear a son.
For a Brahmana, only one wife could rank as the chief consort who performed the religious rites ("dharma-patni") along with the husband. The chief consort had to be of an equal caste. If a man married several women from the same caste, then eldest wife is the chief consort. Hindu kings commonly had more than one wife and are regularly attributed four wives by the scriptures. They were: Mahisi who was the chief consort, Parivrkti who had no son, Vaivata who is considered the favorite wife and the Palagali who was the daughter of the last of the court officials.
Traditional Hindu law allowed polygamy if the first wife could not bear a son.
The Hindu Marriage Act was enacted in 1955 by the Indian Parliament and made polygamy illegal for everyone in India except for Muslims. Prior to 1955, polygamy was permitted for Hindus. Marriage laws in India are dependent upon the religion of the parties in question.
In Islamic marital jurisprudence, under reasonable and warranted conditions, a Muslim man may have more than one wife at the same time, up to a total of four. Muslim women are not permitted to have more than one husband at the same time under any circumstances.
Based on verse 30:21 of Quran the ideal relationship is the comfort that a couple find in each other's embrace:
The polygyny that is allowed in the Quran is for special situations. There are strict requirements to marrying more than one woman, as the man must treat them equally financially and in terms of support given to each wife, according to Islamic law. However, Islam advises monogamy for a man if he fears he can't deal justly with his wives. This is based on verse 4:3 of Quran which says:
Muslim women are not allowed to marry more than one husband at once. However, in the case of a divorce or their husbands' death they can remarry after the completion of Iddah, as divorce is legal in Islamic law. A non-Muslim woman who flees from her non-Muslim husband and accepts Islam has the option to remarry without divorce from her previous husband, as her marriage with non-Muslim husband is Islamically dissolved on her fleeing. A non-Muslim woman captured during war by Muslims, can also remarry, as her marriage with her non-Muslim husband is Islamically dissolved at capture by Muslim soldiers. This permission is given to such women in verse 4:24 of Quran. The verse also emphasizes on transparency, mutual agreement and financial compensation as prerequisites for matrimonial relationship as opposed to prostitution; it says:
Muhammad was monogamously married to Khadija, his first wife, for 25 years, until she died. After her death, he married multiple women, mostly widows, for social and political reasons. He had a total of nine wives, but not all at the same time, depending on the sources in his lifetime. The Qur'an does not give preference in marrying more than one wife. One reason cited for polygyny is that it allows a man to give financial protection to multiple women, who might otherwise not have any support (e.g. widows). However, the wife can set a condition, in then marriage contract, that the husband cannot marry another woman during their marriage. In such a case, the husband cannot marry another woman as long as he is married to his wife. According to traditional Islamic law, each of those wives keeps their property and assets separate; and are paid mahar and maintenance separately by their husband. Usually the wives have little to no contact with each other and lead separate, individual lives in their own houses, and sometimes in different cities, though they all share the same husband.
In most Muslim-majority countries, polygyny is legal with Kuwait being the only one where no restrictions are imposed on it. The practice is illegal in Muslim-majority Turkey, Tunisia, Albania, Kosovo and Central Asian countries.
Countries that allow polygyny typically also require a man to obtain permission from his previous wives before marrying another, and require the man to prove that he can financially support multiple wives. In Malaysia and Morocco, a man must justify taking an additional wife at a court hearing before he is allowed to do so. In Sudan, the government encouraged polygyny in 2001 to increase the population.
The Torah contains a few specific regulations that apply to polygamy, such as Exodus 21:10: "If he take another wife for himself; her food, her clothing, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish". , states that a man must award the inheritance due to a first-born son to the son who was actually born first, even if he hates that son's mother and likes another wife more; and states that the king shall not have too many wives.
The Torah may distinguish concubines and "sub-standard" wives with the prefix "to" (e.g., lit. "took to wives"). Despite these nuances to the biblical perspective on polygamy, many important figures had more than one wife, such as in the instances of Esau (Gen 26:34; 28:6-9), Jacob (Gen 29:15-28), Elkanah (1 Samuel 1:1-8), David (1 Samuel 25:39-44; 2 Samuel 3:2-5; 5:13-16), and Solomon (1 Kings 11:1-3).
Multiple marriage was considered a realistic alternative in the case of famine, widowhood, or female infertility like in the practice of levirate marriage, wherein a man was required to marry and support his deceased brother's widow, as mandated by . Despite its prevalence in the Hebrew Bible, scholars do not believe that polygyny was commonly practiced in the biblical era because it required a significant amount of wealth. Michael Coogan, in contrast, states that "Polygyny continued to be practiced well into the biblical period, and it is attested among Jews as late as the second century CE".
The monogamy of the Roman Empire was the cause of two explanatory notes in the writings of Josephus describing how the polygamous marriages of Herod the Great were permitted under Jewish custom.
The rabbinical era that began with the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE saw a continuation of some degree of legal acceptance for polygamy. In the Babylonian Talmud (BT), Kiddushin 7a, its states, "Raba said: 'Be thou betrothed to half of me,' she is betrothed: 'half of thee be betrothed to me,' she is not betrothed." The BT during a discussion of Levirate marriage in Yevamot 65a appears to repeat the precedent found in Exodus 21:10: "Raba said: a man may marry wives in addition to the first wife; provided only that he possesses the means to maintain them". The Jewish Codices began a process of restricting polygamy in Judaism.
Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah maintained that polygamous unions were permissible from a legal point of view, which was contrary to his personal opinion. The Mishneh Torah, while maintaining the right to multiple spouses, and the requirement to provide fully for each as indicated in previously cited sources, went further: "He may not, however, compel his wives to live in the same courtyard. Instead, each one is entitled to her own household".
The Shulchan Aruch builds on all of the previous works by adding further nuances: "...but in any event, our sages have advised well not to marry more than four wives, in order that he can meet their conjugal needs at least once a month. And in a place where it is customary to marry only one wife, he is not permitted to take another wife on top of his present wife." As can be seen, while the tradition of the rabbinic period began with providing legal definition for the practice of polygamy (although this does not indicate the frequency with which polygamy in fact occurred) that corresponded to precedents in the Tanakh, by the time of the Codices the rabbis had greatly reduced or eliminated sanction of the practice.
Most notable in the rabbinic period on the issue of polygamy, though more specifically for Ashkenazi Jews, was the synod of Rabbeinu Gershom. About 1000 CE he called a synod which decided the following particulars: (1) prohibition of polygamy; (2) necessity of obtaining the consent of both parties to a divorce; (3) modification of the rules concerning those who became apostates under compulsion; (4) prohibition against opening correspondence addressed to another.
In the modern day, polygamy is almost nonexistent in Rabbinic Judaism. Ashkenazi Jews have continued to follow Rabbenu Gershom's ban since the 11th century. Some Mizrahi Jewish communities (particularly Yemenite Jews and Persian Jews) discontinued polygyny more recently, after they immigrated to countries where it was forbidden or illegal. Israel prohibits polygamy by law. In practice, however, the law is loosely enforced, primarily to avoid interference with Bedouin culture, where polygyny is practiced. Pre-existing polygynous unions among Jews from Arab countries (or other countries where the practice was not prohibited by their tradition and was not illegal) are not subject to this Israeli law. But Mizrahi Jews are not permitted to enter into new polygamous marriages in Israel. However polygamy may still occur in non-European Jewish communities that exist in countries where it is not forbidden, such as Jewish communities in Iran and Morocco.
Among Karaite Jews, who do not adhere to rabbinic interpretations of the Torah, polygamy is almost non-existent today. Like other Jews, Karaites interpret to mean that a man can only take a second wife if his first wife gives her consent (Keter Torah on Leviticus, pp. 96–97) and Karaites interpret Exodus 21:10 to mean that a man can only take a second wife if he is capable of maintaining the same level of marital duties due to his first wife; the marital duties are 1) food, 2) clothing, and 3) sexual gratification. Because of these two biblical limitations and because most countries outlaw it, polygamy is considered highly impractical, and there are only a few known cases of it among Karaite Jews today.
Israel has made polygamy illegal. Provisions were instituted to allow for existing polygamous families immigrating from countries where the practice was legal. Furthermore, former chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef has come out in favor of legalizing polygamy and the practice of pilegesh (concubine) by the Israeli government.
Tzvi Zohar, a professor from the Bar-Ilan University, recently suggested that based on the opinions of leading halachic authorities, the concept of concubines may serve as a practical Halachic justification for premarital or non-marital cohabitation.
In 2000, the United Nations Human Rights Committee reported that polygamy violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), citing concerns that the lack of "equality of treatment with regard to the right to marry" meant that polygamy, restricted to polygyny in practice, violates the dignity of women and should be outlawed. Specifically, reports to UN Committees have noted violations of ICCPR due to these inequalities and reports to the UN General Assembly have recommended it be outlawed.
ICCPR does not apply to countries that have not signed it, which includes many Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Malaysia, Brunei, Oman, and South Sudan.
Canada has taken a strong stand against polygamy, and the Canadian Department of Justice has argued that polygyny is a violation of International Human Rights Law, as a form of gender discrimination. In Canada, the federal Criminal Code applies throughout the country. It extends the definition of polygamy to having any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time. Also anyone who assists, celebrates, or is a part to a rite, ceremony, or contract that sanctions a polygamist relationship is guilty of polygamy. Polygamy is an offence punishable by up to five years in prison. In 2017, two Canadian religious leaders were found guilty of practicing polygamy by the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Both of them are former bishops of the Mormon denomination of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
Polygamous marriages are not recognized in Russia. The Family Code of Russia states that a marriage can only be contracted between a man and a woman, neither of whom is married to someone else. Furthermore, Russia does not recognize polygamous marriages that had been contracted in other countries. However, "de facto" polygamy or multiple cohabitation in and of itself is not a crime. Due to the shortage of men in Russia's population, it is not uncommon for men to father children with multiple women, and sometimes that results in households that are openly "de facto" polygamous.
Bigamy is illegal in the United Kingdom. "De facto" polygamy (having multiple partners at the same time) is not a criminal offence, provided the person does not register more than one marriage at the same time. In the UK, adultery is not a criminal offense (it is only a ground for divorce). In a written answer to the House of Commons, "In Great Britain, polygamy is only recognized as valid in law in circumstances where the marriage ceremony has been performed in a country whose laws permit polygamy and the parties to the marriage were domiciled there at the time. In addition, immigration rules have generally prevented the formation of polygamous households in this country since 1988."
The 2010 Government in the UK decided that Universal Credit (UC), which replaces means-tested benefits and tax credits for working-age people and will not be completely introduced until 2021, will not recognize polygamous marriages. A House of Commons Briefing Paper states "Treating second and subsequent partners in polygamous relationships as separate claimants could in some situations mean that polygamous households receive more under Universal Credit than they do under the current rules for means-tested benefits and tax credits. This is because, as explained above, the amounts which may be paid in respect of additional spouses are lower than those which generally apply to single claimants." There is currently no official statistics data on cohabiting polygamous couples who have arranged marriage in religious ceremonies.
In October 2017 there was media attention in the UK concerning website over a dating website offering Muslim men an opportunity to seek second or third wives. The website had 100 000 users of which 25 000 were in the UK. Website founder Azad Chaiwala created the website when he was seeking a second wife for himself.
Polygamy is illegal in 49 United States. Utah is the only state where it is a civil infraction rather than a crime as of 2020. Federal legislation to outlaw the practice was endorsed as constitutional in 1878 by the Supreme Court in "Reynolds v. United States," despite the religious objections of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
On 13 December 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.
Individualist feminism and advocates such as Wendy McElroy and journalist Jillian Keenan support the freedom for adults to voluntarily enter polygamous marriages.
Authors such as Alyssa Rower and Samantha Slark argue that there is a case for legalizing polygamy on the basis of regulation and monitoring of the practice, legally protecting the polygamous partners and allowing them to join mainstream society instead of forcing them to hide from it when any public situation arises.
In an October 2004 op-ed for "USA Today", George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley argued that, as a simple matter of equal treatment under law, polygamy ought to be legal. Acknowledging that underage girls are sometimes coerced into polygamous marriages, Turley replied that "banning polygamy is no more a solution to child abuse than banning marriage would be a solution to spousal abuse".
Stanley Kurtz, a conservative fellow at the Hudson Institute, rejects the decriminalization and legalization of polygamy. He stated:
In January 2015, Pastor Neil Patrick Carrick of Detroit, Michigan, brought a case ("Carrick v. Snyder") against the State of Michigan that the state's ban of polygamy violates the Free Exercise and Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24475 |
Penectomy
Penectomy is penis removal through surgery, generally for medical or personal reasons.
Cancer, for example, sometimes necessitates removal of part or all of the penis. The amount of penis removed depends on the severity of the cancer. Some men have only the tip of their penis removed. For others with more advanced cancer, the entire penis must be removed.
In rare instances, botched circumcisions have also resulted in full or partial penectomies, as with David Reimer.
Fournier gangrene can also be a reason for penectomy and/or orchiectomy.
Because of the rarity of cancers which require the partial or total removal of the penis, support from people who have had the penis removed can be difficult to find locally. Website support networks are available. For instance, the American Cancer Society's Cancer Survivors Network website provides information for finding support networks. Phalloplasty is also an option for surgical reconstruction of a penis.
Sexual support therapists and specialists are available nationally in the United States and can be accessed through the specialist cancer services. Many surgeons or hospitals will also provide this information post operatively. Local government health services departments may be able to provide advice, names, and contact numbers.
Genital surgical procedures for trans women undergoing genital reconstruction surgery do not usually involve the complete removal of the penis. Instead, part or all of the glans is usually kept and reshaped as a clitoris, while the skin of the penile shaft may also be inverted to form the vagina (some more recently developed procedures, such as that used by Dr. Suporn Watanyusakul use the scrotum to form the vaginal walls, and the skin of the penile shaft to form the labia majora). When procedures such as this are not possible, other procedures such as colovaginoplasty are used which may involve the removal of the penis. Some trans women have undergone penectomies, however this is much rarer.
Issues related to the removal of the penis appear in psychology, for example in the condition known as castration anxiety, which happens as a result of a man having anxiety as to whether he may at some point become castrated.
People who are third gender will sometimes want an emasculation by choosing to have their penis, testicles, or both removed.
Male members in the sect of skoptsy (Russian: скопцы, "castrated") were required to become castrated, either only the testicles ("lesser seal") or also the penis ("greater seal"). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24479 |
Provirus
A provirus is a virus genome that is integrated into the DNA of a host cell. In the case of bacterial viruses (bacteriophages), proviruses are often referred to as prophages. However, it is important to note that proviruses are distinctly different from prophages and these terms should not be used interchangeably. Unlike prophages, proviruses do not excise themselves from the host genome when the host cell is stressed.
This state can be a stage of virus replication, or a state that persists over longer periods of time as either inactive viral infections or an endogenous viral element. In inactive viral infections the virus will not replicate itself except through replication of its host cell. This state can last over many host cell generations.
Endogenous retroviruses are always in the state of a provirus. When a (nonendogenous) retrovirus invades a cell, the RNA of the retrovirus is reverse-transcribed into DNA by reverse transcriptase, then inserted into the host genome by an integrase.
A provirus does not directly make new DNA copies of itself while integrated into a host genome in this way. Instead, it is passively replicated along with the host genome and passed on to the original cell's offspring; all descendants of the infected cell will also bear proviruses in their genomes. This is known as lysogenic viral reproduction. Integration can result in a latent infection or a productive infection. In a productive infection, the provirus is transcribed into messenger RNA which directly produces new virus, which in turn will infect other cells via the lytic cycle. A latent infection results when the provirus is transcriptionally silent rather than active.
A latent infection may become productive in response to changes in the host's environmental conditions or health; the provirus may be activated and begin transcription of its viral genome. This can result in the destruction of its host cell because the cell's protein synthesis machinery is hijacked to produce more viruses.
Proviruses may account for approximately 8% of the human genome in the form of inherited endogenous retroviruses.
A provirus not only refers to a retrovirus but is also used to describe other viruses that can integrate into the host chromosomes, another example being adeno-associated virus.
Not only eukaryotic viruses integrate into the genomes of their hosts; many bacterial and archaeal viruses also employ this strategy of propagation. All families of bacterial viruses with circular (single-stranded or double-stranded) DNA genomes or replicating their genomes through a circular intermediate (e.g., tailed dsDNA viruses) have temperate members. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24481 |
Parade
A parade is a procession of people, usually organized along a street, often in costume, and often accompanied by marching bands, floats, or sometimes large balloons. Parades are held for a wide range of reasons, but are usually celebrations of some kind. In British English, the term 'parade' is usually reserved for either military parades or other occasions where participants march in formation; for celebratory occasions, the word procession is more usual. In the Canadian Forces, the term also has several less formal connotations.
Protest demonstrations can also take the form of a parade, but such cases are usually referred to as a march instead.
The parade float got its name because the first floats were decorated barges that were towed along canals with ropes held by parade marchers on the shore. Floats were occasionally propelled from within by concealed oarsmen, but the practice was abandoned because of the high incidence of drowning when the lightweight and unstable frames capsized. Strikingly, among the first uses of grounded floats — towed by horses — was a ceremony in memory of recently drowned parade oarsmen. Today, parade floats are traditionally pulled by motor vehicles or are powered themselves.
Multiple grand marshals may often be designated for an iteration of the parade, and may or may not be in actual attendance due to circumstances (including death). A "community grand marshal" or other designations may be selected alongside a "grand marshal" to lead the front or other parts of the parade.
Since the advent of such technology, it became possible for aircraft and boats to parade. A flypast is an aerial parade of anything from one to dozens of aircraft, both in commercial context at airshows and also to mark, e.g., national days or significant anniversaries. They are particularly common in the United Kingdom, where they are often associated with Royal occasions. Similarly, for ships, there may be a sail-past of, e.g., tall ships (as was seen during Trafalgar 200) or other sailing vessels as during the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of World War II.
The longest parade in the world is the Hanover Schützenfest that takes place in Hanover every year during the Schützenfest. The parade is long with more than 12,000 participants from all over the world, among them more than 100 bands and around 70 floats and carriages.
At the end of hostilities in Europe in 1944-45, "victory parades" were a common feature throughout the recently liberated territories. For example, on 3 September 1944, the personnel of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division marched six abreast to the music of massed regimental pipe and drum bands through the streets of Dieppe, France to commemorate the liberation of the city from German occupation, as well as commemorate the loss of over 900 soldiers from that formation during the Dieppe Raid two years earlier. On the Moscow Victory Parade of 1945 held in Moscow, Soviet Union in June 1945, the Red Army commemorated Victory in Europe with a parade and the ceremonial destruction of captured Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS standards. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24484 |
Priority queue
In computer science, a priority queue is an abstract data type similar to regular queue or stack data structure in which each element additionally has a "priority" associated with it. In a priority queue, an element with high priority is served before an element with low priority. In some implementations, if two elements have the same priority, they are served according to the order in which they were enqueued, while in other implementations, ordering of elements with the same priority is undefined.
While priority queues are often implemented with heaps, they are conceptually distinct from heaps. A priority queue is a concept like "a list" or "a map"; just as a list can be implemented with a linked list or an array, a priority queue can be implemented with a heap or a variety of other methods such as an unordered array.
A priority queue must at least support the following operations:
In addition, "peek" (in this context often called "find-max" or "find-min"), which returns the highest-priority element but does not modify the queue, is very frequently implemented, and nearly always executes in "O"(1) time. This operation and its "O"(1) performance is crucial to many applications of priority queues.
More advanced implementations may support more complicated operations, such as "pull_lowest_priority_element", inspecting the first few highest- or lowest-priority elements, clearing the queue, clearing subsets of the queue, performing a batch insert, merging two or more queues into one, incrementing priority of any element, etc.
One can imagine a priority queue as a modified queue, but when one would get the next element off the queue, the highest-priority element is retrieved first.
Stacks and queues may be modeled as particular kinds of priority queues. As a reminder, here is how stacks and queues behave:
In a stack, the priority of each inserted element is monotonically increasing; thus, the last element inserted is always the first retrieved. In a queue, the priority of each inserted element is monotonically decreasing; thus, the first element inserted is always the first retrieved.
There are a variety of simple, usually inefficient, ways to implement a priority queue. They provide an analogy to help one understand what a priority queue is. For instance, one can keep all the elements in an unsorted list. Whenever the highest-priority element is requested, search through all elements for the one with the highest priority. (In big "O" notation: "O"(1) insertion time, "O"("n") pull time due to search.)
To improve performance, priority queues typically use a heap as their backbone, giving "O"(log "n") performance for inserts and removals, and "O"("n") to build initially from a set of "n" elements. Variants of the basic heap data structure such as pairing heaps or Fibonacci heaps can provide better bounds for some operations.
Alternatively, when a self-balancing binary search tree is used, insertion and removal also take "O"(log "n") time, although building trees from existing sequences of elements takes "O"("n" log "n") time; this is typical where one might already have access to these data structures, such as with third-party or standard libraries.
From a computational-complexity standpoint, priority queues are congruent to sorting algorithms. The section on the equivalence of priority queues and sorting algorithms, below, describes how efficient sorting algorithms can create efficient priority queues.
There are several specialized heap data structures that either supply additional operations or outperform heap-based implementations for specific types of keys, specifically integer keys. Suppose the set of possible keys is {1, 2, ..., C}.
For applications that do many "peek" operations for every "extract-min" operation, the time complexity for peek actions can be reduced to "O"(1) in all tree and heap implementations by caching the highest priority element after every insertion and removal. For insertion, this adds at most a constant cost, since the newly inserted element is compared only to the previously cached minimum element. For deletion, this at most adds an additional "peek" cost, which is typically cheaper than the deletion cost, so overall time complexity is not significantly impacted.
Monotone priority queues are specialized queues that are optimized for the case where no item is ever inserted that has a lower priority (in the case of min-heap) than any item previously extracted. This restriction is met by several practical applications of priority queues.
The semantics of priority queues naturally suggest a sorting method: insert all the elements to be sorted into a priority queue, and sequentially remove them; they will come out in sorted order. This is actually the procedure used by several sorting algorithms, once the layer of abstraction provided by the priority queue is removed. This sorting method is equivalent to the following sorting algorithms:
A sorting algorithm can also be used to implement a priority queue. Specifically, Thorup says:
We present a general deterministic linear space reduction from priority queues to sorting implying that if we can sort up to "n" keys in "S"("n") time per key, then there is a priority queue supporting "delete" and "insert" in "O"("S"("n")) time and "find-min" in constant time.
That is, if there is a sorting algorithm which can sort in "O"("S") time per key, where "S" is some function of "n" and word size, then one can use the given procedure to create a priority queue where pulling the highest-priority element is "O"(1) time, and inserting new elements (and deleting elements) is "O"("S") time. For example, if one has an "O"("n" log log "n") sort algorithm, one can create a priority queue with "O"(1) pulling and "O"(log log "n") insertion.
A priority queue is often considered to be a "container data structure".
The Standard Template Library (STL), and the C++ 1998 standard, specifies codice_1 as one of the STL container adaptor class templates. However, it does not specify how two elements with same priority should be served, and indeed, common implementations will not return them according to their order in the queue. It implements a max-priority-queue, and has three parameters: a comparison object for sorting such as a function object (defaults to less if unspecified), the underlying container for storing the data structures (defaults to std::vector), and two iterators to the beginning and end of a sequence. Unlike actual STL containers, it does not allow iteration of its elements (it strictly adheres to its abstract data type definition). STL also has utility functions for manipulating another random-access container as a binary max-heap. The Boost libraries also have an implementation in the library heap.
Python's heapq module implements a binary min-heap on top of a list.
Java's library contains a class, which implements a min-priority-queue.
Scala's library contains a PriorityQueue class, which implements a max-priority-queue.
Go's library contains a container/heap module, which implements a min-heap on top of any compatible data structure.
The Standard PHP Library extension contains the class SplPriorityQueue.
Apple's Core Foundation framework contains a CFBinaryHeap structure, which implements a min-heap.
Priority queuing can be used to manage limited resources such as bandwidth on a transmission line from a network router. In the event of outgoing traffic queuing due to insufficient bandwidth, all other queues can be halted to send the traffic from the highest priority queue upon arrival. This ensures that the prioritized traffic (such as real-time traffic, e.g. an RTP stream of a VoIP connection) is forwarded with the least delay and the least likelihood of being rejected due to a queue reaching its maximum capacity. All other traffic can be handled when the highest priority queue is empty. Another approach used is to send disproportionately more traffic from higher priority queues.
Many modern protocols for local area networks also include the concept of priority queues at the media access control (MAC) sub-layer to ensure that high-priority applications (such as VoIP or IPTV) experience lower latency than other applications which can be served with best effort service. Examples include IEEE 802.11e (an amendment to IEEE 802.11 which provides quality of service) and ITU-T G.hn (a standard for high-speed local area network using existing home wiring (power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables).
Usually a limitation (policer) is set to limit the bandwidth that traffic from the highest priority queue can take, in order to prevent high priority packets from choking off all other traffic. This limit is usually never reached due to high level control instances such as the Cisco Callmanager, which can be programmed to inhibit calls which would exceed the programmed bandwidth limit.
Another use of a priority queue is to manage the events in a discrete event simulation. The events are added to the queue with their simulation time used as the priority. The execution of the simulation proceeds by repeatedly pulling the top of the queue and executing the event thereon.
"See also": Scheduling (computing), queueing theory
When the graph is stored in the form of adjacency list or matrix, priority queue can be used to extract minimum efficiently when implementing Dijkstra's algorithm, although one also needs the ability to alter the priority of a particular vertex in the priority queue efficiently.
Huffman coding requires one to repeatedly obtain the two lowest-frequency trees. A priority queue is one method of doing this.
Best-first search algorithms, like the A* search algorithm, find the shortest path between two vertices or nodes of a weighted graph, trying out the most promising routes first. A priority queue (also known as the "fringe") is used to keep track of unexplored routes; the one for which the estimate (a lower bound in the case of A*) of the total path length is smallest is given highest priority. If memory limitations make best-first search impractical, variants like the SMA* algorithm can be used instead, with a double-ended priority queue to allow removal of low-priority items.
The Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes (ROAM) algorithm computes a dynamically changing triangulation of a terrain. It works by splitting triangles where more detail is needed and merging them where less detail is needed. The algorithm assigns each triangle in the terrain a priority, usually related to the error decrease if that triangle would be split. The algorithm uses two priority queues, one for triangles that can be split and another for triangles that can be merged. In each step the triangle from the split queue with the highest priority is split, or the triangle from the merge queue with the lowest priority is merged with its neighbours.
Using min heap priority queue in Prim's algorithm to find the minimum spanning tree of a connected and undirected graph, one can achieve a good running time. This min heap priority queue uses the min heap data structure which supports operations such as "insert", "minimum", "extract-min", "decrease-key". In this implementation, the weight of the edges is used to decide the priority of the vertices. Lower the weight, higher the priority and higher the weight, lower the priority.
Parallelization can be used to speed up priority queues. There are three different methods to parallelize priority queues. The easiest approach is to simply parallelize the individual operations, like "insert" or "extractMin". Another method allows the concurrent access of multiple processes to the same priority queue. The last method uses operations that work on formula_2 elements, instead of just one element. For example, "extractMin" will remove the first formula_2 elements with the highest priority.
An easy way to parallelize priority queues is to parallelize the individual operations. That means, the queue works like a sequential one, but the individual operations are sped up by using several processors. The maximum Speedup for this technique is limited by formula_4 because there are sequential implementations for priority queues whose slowest operation runs in formula_4 (e.g. binomial heap).
The operations "insert", "extract-min", "decrease-key" and "delete" can be executed in constant time on a Concurrent Read, Exclusive Write (CREW) PRAM with formula_4 processors, where formula_7 is the size of the priority queue. In the following the queue is implemented as binomial heap. After every operation only three trees of the same order are allowed and the smallest root of the trees of order formula_8 is smaller than all roots of trees of higher order.
Below, pseudocode for "insert" is shown.
The concept for constant time "insert" and "extract-min" can be extended to achieve a constant time for "delete" as well. The "decrease-key" operation can then be implemented as "delete" and a following "insert". So the "decrease-key" operation is also a constant time operation.
The advantage of this type of parallelizing the priority queue is, that it can be used like a usual sequential one. But the maximum speedup is only formula_4. This speedup is further limited in practice, because there is additional effort for the communication between the different processors.
If the priority queue allows concurrent access, multiple processes can perform operations concurrently on that priority queue. However, this raises two issues. First of all, the definition of the semantics of the individual operations is no longer obvious. For example, if two processes want to extract the element with the highest priority, should they get the same element or different ones? This restricts parallelism on the level of the program using the priority queue. In addition, because multiple processes have access to the same element, this leads to contention.
The concurrent access to a priority queue can be implemented on a Concurrent Read, Concurrent Write (CRCW) PRAM model. In the following the priority queue is implemented as a skip list. In addition, an atomic synchronization primitive, CAS, is used to make the skip list lock-free. The nodes of the skip list consists of a unique key, a priority, an array of pointers, for each level, to the next nodes and a "delete" mark. The "delete" mark marks if the node is about to be deleted by a process. This ensures that other processes can react to the deletion appropriately.
If the concurrent access to a priority queue is allowed, conflicts may arise between two processes. For example, a conflict arises if one process is trying to insert a new node, but at the same time another process is about to delete the predecessor of that node. There is a risk that the new node is added to the skip list, yet it is not longer reachable. ()
For this type of parallelization new operations are introduced, that operate on formula_2 elements simultaneously instead of only one.
The new operation "k_extract-min" then deletes the formula_2 smallest elements of the priority queue and returns those. The queue is parallelized on distributed memory. Each processor has its own local memory and a local (sequential) priority queue. The elements of the global (parallel) priority queue are distributed across all processors.
A "k_insert" operation assigns the elements uniformly random to the processors which insert the elements into their local queues. Note that single elements can still be inserted into the queue. Using this strategy the global smallest elements are in the union of the local smallest elements of every processor with high probability. Thus each processor holds a representative part of the global priority queue.
This property is used when "k_extract-min" is executed, as the smallest formula_23 elements of each local queue are removed and collected in a result set. The elements in the result set are still associated with their original processor. The number of elements formula_23 that is removed from each local queue depends on formula_2 and the number of processors formula_26.
By parallel selection the formula_2 smallest elements of the result set are determined. With high probability these are the global formula_2 smallest elements. If not, formula_23 elements are again removed from each local queue and put into the result set. This is done until the global formula_2 smallest elements are in the result set. Now these formula_2 elements can be returned. All other elements of the result set are inserted back into their local queues. The running time of "k_extract-min" is expected formula_32, where formula_33 and formula_7
is the size of the priority queue.
The priority queue can be further improved by not moving the remaining elements of the result set directly back into the local queues after a "k_extract-min" operation. This saves moving elements back and forth all the time between the result set and the local queues.
By removing several elements at once a considerable speedup can be reached. But not all algorithms can use this kind of priority queue. Dijkstra's algorithm for example can not work on several nodes at once. The algorithm takes the node with the smallest distance from the priority queue and calculates new distances for all its neighbor nodes. If you would take out formula_2 nodes, working at one node could change the distance of another one of the formula_2 nodes. So using k-element operations destroys the label setting property of Dijkstra's algorithm. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24485 |
Pāramitā
Pāramitā (Sanskrit, Pali) or pāramī (Pāli), is a Buddhist term often translated as "perfection". It is described in Buddhist commentaries as noble character qualities generally associated with enlightened beings. "Pāramī" and "pāramitā" are both terms in Pali but Pali literature makes greater reference to "pāramī," while Mahayana texts generally utilize the Sanskrit "pāramitā."
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. describes the etymology of the term:
Theravada teachings on the "pāramīs" can be found in late canonical books and post-canonical commentaries. Theravada commentator Dhammapala describes them as noble qualities usually associated with bodhisattvas. American scholar monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu, describes them as perfections "(paramī)" of character necessary to achieve enlightenment as one of the three enlightened beings, a "samma sambuddha" a "pacceka-buddha" or an "arahant".
In the Pāli Canon, the "Buddhavaṃsa" of the "Khuddaka Nikāya" lists the ten perfections ("dasa pāramiyo") as:
Two of the above virtues, mettā and "upekkhā", also are brahmavihāras.
The Theravādin teachings on the pāramīs can be found in canonical books ("Jataka tales", "Apadāna", "Buddhavaṃsa", "Cariyāpiṭaka") and post-canonical commentaries written to supplement the Pāli Canon at a later time, and thus might not be an original part of the Theravādin teachings. The oldest parts of the "Sutta Piṭaka" (for example, "Majjhima Nikāya", "Digha Nikāya", "Saṃyutta Nikāya" and the "Aṅguttara Nikāya") do not have any mention of the pāramīs as a category (though they are all mentioned individually).
Some scholars even refer to the teachings of the pāramīs as a semi-Mahāyāna teaching added to the scriptures at a later time in order to appeal to the interests and needs of the lay community and to popularize their religion. However, these views rely on the early scholarly presumption of Mahāyāna originating with religious devotion and appeal to laity. More recently, scholars have started to open up early Mahāyāna literature, which is very ascetic and expounds the ideal of the monk's life in the forest. Therefore, the practice of the pāramitās in Mahāyāna Buddhism may have been close to the ideals of the ascetic tradition of the śramaṇa.
Bhikkhu Bodhi maintains that, in the earliest Buddhist texts (which he identifies as the first four "nikāyas"), those seeking the extinction of suffering ("nibbana") pursued the noble eightfold path. As time went on, a backstory was provided for the multi-life development of the Buddha; as a result, the ten perfections were identified as part of the path for the bodhisattva (Pāli: "bodhisatta"). Over subsequent centuries, the "pāramīs" were seen as being significant for aspirants to both Buddhahood and arahantship. Bhikkhu Bodhi summarizes:
Religious studies scholar Dale S. Wright states that Mahāyāna texts refer to the "pāramitās" as "bases of training" for those looking to achieve enlightenment. Wright describes the Buddhist "pāramitās" as a set of character ideals that guide self-cultivation and provide a concrete image of the Buddhist ideal.
The Prajñapāramitā sūtras (प्रज्ञापारमिता सूत्र), and a large number of other Mahāyāna texts list six perfections:
This list is also mentioned by the Theravāda commentator Dhammapala, who describes it as a categorization of the same ten perfections of Theravada Buddhism. According to Dhammapala, "Sacca" is classified as both "Śīla" and "Prajñā", "Mettā" and "Upekkhā" are classified as "Dhyāna", and "Adhiṭṭhāna" falls under all six. Bhikkhu Bodhi states that the correlations between the two sets shows there was a shared core before the Theravada and Mahayana schools split.
In the "Ten Stages Sutra", four more pāramitās are listed:
The "Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra" ("महारत्नकूट सूत्र, the Sutra of the Heap of Jewels") also includes these additional four pāramitās with number 8 and 9 switched.
According to the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism, Mahāyāna practitioners have the choice of two practice paths: the path of perfection (Sanskrit: "pāramitāyāna") or the path of tantra (Sanskrit: "tantrayāna"), which is the Vajrayāna.
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche renders "pāramitā" into English as "transcendent action" and then frames and qualifies it:
The pure illusory body is said to be endowed with the six perfections (Sanskrit: "ṣatpāramitā").
The first four perfections are skillful means practice while the last two are wisdom practice. These contain all the methods and skills required for eliminating delusion and fulfilling other's needs. Also, leading from happy to happier states. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24487 |
Outline of physics
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to physics:
Physics – natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.
Physics can be described as all of the following:
History of physics – history of the physical science that studies matter and its motion through space-time, and related concepts such as energy and force
Physics – branch of science that studies matter and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force. Physics is one of the "fundamental sciences" because the other natural sciences (like biology, geology etc.) deal with systems that seem to obey the laws of physics. According to physics, the physical laws of matter, energy and the fundamental forces of nature govern the interactions between particles and physical entities (such as planets, molecules, atoms or the subatomic particles). Some of the basic pursuits of physics, which include some of the most prominent developments in modern science in the last millennium, include:
Gravity, light, physical system, physical observation, physical quantity, physical state, physical unit, physical theory, physical experiment
Theoretical concepts
Mass–energy equivalence, particle, physical field, physical interaction, physical law, fundamental force, physical constant, wave
Physics
This is a list of the primary theories in physics, major subtopics, and concepts.
Index of physics articles | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24489 |
Outline of parapsychology
Parapsychology is a field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24490 |
Outline of public affairs
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to public affairs:
Public affairs – catch-all term that includes public policy as well as public administration, both of which are closely related to and draw upon the fields of political science and economics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24493 |
Progressive music
Progressive music is music that attempts to expand existing stylistic boundaries associated with specific genres of music. The word comes from the basic concept of "progress", which refers to development and growth by accumulation, and is often deployed in the context of distinct genres such as progressive country, progressive folk, progressive jazz, and (most significantly) progressive rock. Music that is deemed "progressive" usually synthesizes influences from various cultural domains, such as European art music, Celtic folk, West Indian, or African. It is rooted in the idea of a cultural alternative and may also be associated with auteur-stars and concept albums, considered traditional structures of the music industry.
As an art theory, the progressive approach falls between formalism and eclecticism. "Formalism" refers to a preoccupation with established external compositional systems, structural unity, and the autonomy of individual art works. Like formalism, "eclecticism" connotates a predilection toward style synthesis or integration. However, contrary to formalist tendencies, eclecticism foregrounds discontinuities between historical and contemporary styles and electronic media, sometimes referring simultaneously to vastly different musical genres, idioms, and cultural codes. In marketing, "progressive" is used to distinguish a product from "commercial" pop music.
Progressive jazz is a form of big band that is more complex or experimental. It originated in the 1940s with arrangers who drew from modernist composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. Its "progressive" features were replete with dissonance, atonality, and brash effects. Progressive jazz was most popularized by the bandleader Stan Kenton during the 1940s. Critics were initially wary of the idiom. Dizzy Gillespie wrote in his autobiography; "They tried to make Stan Kenton a 'white hope,' called modern jazz and my music 'progressive,' then tried to tell me I played 'progressive' music. I said, 'You're full of shit!' 'Stan Kenton? There ain't nothing in my music that's cold, cold like his."
Progressive big band is a style of big band or swing music that was made for listening, with denser, more modernist arrangements and more room to improvise. The online music guide AllMusic states that, along with Kenton, musicians like Gil Evans, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Cal Massey, Frank Foster, Carla Bley, George Gruntz, David Amram, Sun Ra, and Duke Ellington were major proponents of the style.
"Progressive rock" is almost synonymous with "art rock"; the latter is more likely to have experimental or avant-garde influences. Although a unidirectional English "progressive" style emerged in the late 1960s, by 1967, progressive rock had come to constitute a diversity of loosely associated style codes. With the arrival of a "progressive" label, the music was dubbed "progressive pop" before it was called "progressive rock". "Progressive" referred to the wide range of attempts to break with the standard pop music formula. A number of additional factors contributed to the label—lyrics were more poetic, technology was harnessed for new sounds, music approached the condition of "art", some harmonic language was imported from jazz and 19th-century classical music, the album format overtook singles, and the studio, rather than the stage, became the focus of musical activity, which often involved creating music for listening, not dancing.
During the mid 1960s, pop music made repeated forays into new sounds, styles, and techniques that inspired public discourse among its listeners. The word "progressive" was frequently used, and it was thought that every song and single was to be a "progression" from the last. In 1966, the degree of social and artistic dialogue among rock musicians dramatically increased for bands such as the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds who fused elements of composed (cultivated) music with the oral (vernacular) musical traditions of rock. Rock music started to take itself seriously, paralleling earlier attempts in jazz (as swing gave way to bop, a move which did not succeed with audiences). In this period, the popular song began signaling a new possible means of expression that went beyond the three-minute love song, leading to an intersection between the "underground" and the "establishment" for listening publics. The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is credited for setting a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as their own producers.
The music was developed immediately following a brief period in the mid 1960s where creative authenticity among musical artists and consumer marketing coincided with each other. Before the progressive pop of the late 1960s, performers were typically unable to decide on the artistic content of their music. Assisted by the mid 1960s economic boom, record labels began investing in artists, giving them freedom to experiment, and offering them limited control over their content and marketing. The growing student market serviced record labels with the word "progressive", being adopted as a marketing term to differentiate their product from "commercial" pop. Music critic Simon Reynolds writes that beginning with 1967, a divide would exist between "progressive" pop and "mass/chart" pop, a separation which was "also, broadly, one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class." Before progressive/art rock became the most commercially successful British sound of the early 1970s, the 1960s psychedelic movement brought together art and commercialism, broaching the question of what it meant to be an artist in a mass medium. Progressive musicians thought that artistic status depended on personal autonomy, and so the strategy of "progressive" rock groups was to present themselves as performers and composers "above" normal pop practice.
"Proto-prog" is a retrospective label for the first wave of progressive rock musicians. The musicians that approached this genre harnessed modern classical and other genres usually outside of traditional rock influences, longer and more complicated compositions, interconnected songs as medley, and studio composition. Progressive rock itself evolved from psychedelic/acid rock music, specifically a strain of classical/symphonic rock led by the Nice, Procol Harum, and the Moody Blues. Critics assumed King Crimson's debut album "In the Court of the Crimson King" (1969) to be the logical extension and development of late 1960s proto-progressive rock exemplified by the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles. According to Macan, the album may be the most influential to progressive rock for crystallizing the music of earlier "proto-progressive bands [...] into a distinctive, immediately recognizable style". He distinguishes 1970s "classic" prog from late 1960s proto-prog by the conscious rejection of psychedelic rock elements, which proto-progressive bands continued to incorporate.
"Post-progressive" is a term invented to distinguish a type of rock music from the persistent "progressive rock" style associated with the 1970s. In the mid to late 1970s, progressive music was denigrated for its assumed pretentiousness, specifically the likes of Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. According to musicologist John Covach, "by the early 1980s, progressive rock was thought to be all but dead as a style, an idea reinforced by the fact that some of the principal progressive groups has developed a more commercial sound. [...] What went out of the music of these now ex-progressive groups [...] was any significant evocation of art music." In the opinion of King Crimson's Robert Fripp, "progressive" music was an attitude, not a style. He believed that genuinely "progressive" music pushes stylistic and conceptual boundaries outwards through the appropriation of procedures from classical music or jazz, and that once "progressive rock" ceased to cover new ground – becoming a set of conventions to be repeated and imitated – the genre's premise had ceased to be "progressive".
A direct reaction to prog came in the form of the punk movement, which rejected classical traditions, virtuosity, and textural complexity. Post-punk, which author Doyle Green characterizes "as a kind of progressive punk", was played by bands like Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Public Image Ltd, and Joy Division. It differs from punk rock by balancing punk's energy and skepticism with a re-engagement with an art school consciousness, Dadaist experimentalism, and atmospheric, ambient soundscapes. It was also majorly influenced from world music, especially African and Asian traditions. In the same period, new wave music was more sophisticated in production terms than some contemporaneous progressive music, but was largely perceived as simplistic, and thus had little overt appeal to art music or art-music practice. Musicologist Bill Martin writes; "the [Talking] Heads created a kind of new-wave music that was the perfect synthesis of punk urgency and attitude and progressive-rock sophistication and creativity. A good deal of the more interesting rock since that time is clearly 'post-Talking Heads' music, but this means that it is post-progressive rock as well."
"Progressive electronic" is defined by AllMusic as a subgenre of new age music, and a style that "thrives in more unfamiliar territory" where the results are "often dictated by the technology itself." According to Allmusic, "rather than sampling or synthesizing acoustic sounds to electronically replicate them" producers of this music "tend to mutate the original timbres, sometimes to an unrecognizable state." Allmusic also states that, "true artists in the genre also create their own sounds."
In house music, a desire to define precise stylistic strands and taste markets saw the interposition of prefixes like "progressive", "tribal", and "intelligent". According to disc jockey and producer Carl Craig, the term "progressive" was used in Detroit in the early 1980s in reference to Italian disco. The music was dubbed "progressive" because it drew upon the influence of Giorgio Moroder's Euro disco rather than the disco inspired by the symphonic Philadelphia sound. By 1993, progressive house and trance music had emerged in dance clubs. "Progressive house" was an English style of house distinguished by long tracks, big riffs, mild dub inflections, and multitiered percussion. According to Simon Reynolds, the "'progressive' seemed to signify not just its anti-cheese, nongirly credentials, but its severing of house's roots from gay black disco."
In the mid 1990s, the Lowercase movement, a reductive approach towards new digital technologies, was spearheaded by a number of so-called "progressive electronica" artists.
Reynolds posited that "the truly progressive edge in electronic music involves doing things that can't be physically achieved by human beings manipulating instruments in real-time." He criticized terms like "progressive" and "intelligent", arguing that "it's usually a sign that it's gearing up the media game as a prequel to buying into traditional music industry structure of auteur-stars, concept albums, and long-term careers. Above all, it's a sign of impending musical debility, creeping self-importance, and the hemorrhaging away of fun." Reynolds also identifies links between progressive rock and other electronic music genres, and that "many post-rave genres bear an uncanny resemblance to progressive rock: conceptualism, auteur-geniuses, producers making music to impress other producers, [and] showboating virtuosity reborn as the 'science' of programming finesse."
Citations
Sources | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24501 |
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension.
Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.
Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music, which seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.
Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death; the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein; and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patron even though they never actually met each other. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause of his death.
While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as "lacking in elevated thought" and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in Vyatka Governorate (present-day Udmurtia) in the Russian Empire, into a family with a long history of military service. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, had served as a lieutenant colonel and engineer in the Department of Mines, and would manage the Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks. His grandfather, Pyotr Fedorovich Tchaikovsky (né Petro Fedorovych Chaika), was born in the village of Mikolayivka, Poltava Gubernia, Russian Empire (present day Ukraine), and served first as a physician's assistant in the army and later as city governor of Glazov in Vyatka. His great-grandfather, a Cossack named Fyodor Chaika, distinguished himself under Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
Tchaikovsky's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna (née d'Assier), was the second of Ilya's three wives, 18 years her husband's junior and French and German on her father's side. Both Ilya and Alexandra were trained in the arts, including music—a necessity as a posting to a remote area of Russia also meant a need for entertainment, whether in private or at social gatherings. Of his six siblings, Tchaikovsky was close to his sister Alexandra and twin brothers Anatoly and Modest. Alexandra's marriage to Lev Davydov would produce seven children and lend Tchaikovsky the only real family life he would know as an adult, especially during his years of wandering. One of those children, Vladimir Davydov, whom the composer would nickname 'Bob', would become very close to him.
In 1844, the family hired Fanny Dürbach, a 22-year-old French governess. Four-and-a-half-year-old Tchaikovsky was initially thought too young to study alongside his older brother Nikolai and a niece of the family. His insistence convinced Dürbach otherwise. By the age of six, he had become fluent in French and German. Tchaikovsky also became attached to the young woman; her affection for him was reportedly a counter to his mother's coldness and emotional distance from him, though others assert that the mother doted on her son. Dürbach saved much of Tchaikovsky's work from this period, including his earliest known compositions, and became a source of several childhood anecdotes.
Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at age five. Precocious, within three years he had become as adept at reading sheet music as his teacher. His parents, initially supportive, hired a tutor, bought an orchestrion (a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects), and encouraged his piano study for both aesthetic and practical reasons.
However, they decided in 1850 to send Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg. They had both graduated from institutes in Saint Petersburg and the School of Jurisprudence, which mainly served the lesser nobility, and thought that this education would prepare Tchaikovsky for a career as a civil servant. Regardless of talent, the only musical careers available in Russia at that time—except for the affluent aristocracy—were as a teacher in an academy or as an instrumentalist in one of the Imperial Theaters. Both were considered on the lowest rank of the social ladder, with individuals in them enjoying no more rights than peasants.
His father's income was also growing increasingly uncertain, so both parents may have wanted Tchaikovsky to become independent as soon as possible. As the minimum age for acceptance was 12 and Tchaikovsky was only 10 at the time, he was required to spend two years boarding at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence's preparatory school, from his family. Once those two years had passed, Tchaikovsky transferred to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence to begin a seven-year course of studies.
Tchaikovsky's early separation from his mother caused an emotional trauma that lasted the rest of his life and was intensified by her death from cholera in 1854, when he was fourteen. The loss of his mother also prompted Tchaikovsky to make his first serious attempt at composition, a waltz in her memory. Tchaikovsky's father, who had also contracted cholera but recovered fully, sent him back to school immediately in the hope that classwork would occupy the boy's mind. Isolated, Tchaikovsky compensated with friendships with fellow students that became lifelong; these included Aleksey Apukhtin and Vladimir Gerard.
Music, while not an official priority at school, also bridged the gap between Tchaikovsky and his peers. They regularly attended the opera and Tchaikovsky would improvise at the school's harmonium on themes he and his friends had sung during choir practice. "We were amused," Vladimir Gerard later remembered, "but not imbued with any expectations of his future glory". Tchaikovsky also continued his piano studies through Franz Becker, an instrument manufacturer who made occasional visits to the school; however, the results, according to musicologist David Brown, were "negligible".
In 1855, Tchaikovsky's father funded private lessons with Rudolph Kündinger and questioned him about a musical career for his son. While impressed with the boy's talent, Kündinger said he saw nothing to suggest a future composer or performer. He later admitted that his assessment was also based on his own negative experiences as a musician in Russia and his unwillingness for Tchaikovsky to be treated likewise. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course and then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.
On 10 June 1859, the 19-year-old Tchaikovsky graduated as a titular counselor, a low rung on the civil service ladder. Appointed to the Ministry of Justice, he became a junior assistant within six months and a senior assistant two months after that. He remained a senior assistant for the rest of his three-year civil service career.
Meanwhile, the Russian Musical Society (RMS) was founded in 1859 by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (a German-born aunt of Tsar Alexander II) and her protégé, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. Previous tsars and the aristocracy had focused almost exclusively on importing European talent. The aim of the RMS was to fulfill Alexander II's wish to foster native talent. It hosted a regular season of public concerts (previously held only during the six weeks of Lent when the Imperial Theaters were closed) and provided basic professional training in music. In 1861, Tchaikovsky attended RMS classes in music theory taught by Nikolai Zaremba at the Mikhailovsky Palace (now the Russian Museum). These classes were a precursor to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which opened in 1862. Tchaikovsky enrolled at the Conservatory as part of its premiere class. He studied harmony and counterpoint with Zaremba and instrumentation and composition with Rubinstein.
The Conservatory benefited Tchaikovsky in two ways. It transformed him into a musical professional, with tools to help him thrive as a composer, and the in-depth exposure to European principles and musical forms gave him a sense that his art was not exclusively Russian or Western. This mindset became important in Tchaikovsky's reconciliation of Russian and European influences in his compositional style. He believed and attempted to show that both these aspects were "intertwined and mutually dependent". His efforts became both an inspiration and a starting point for other Russian composers to build their own individual styles.
Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's musical talent on the whole and cited him as "a composer of genius" in his autobiography. He was less pleased with the more progressive tendencies of some of Tchaikovsky's student work. Nor did he change his opinion as Tchaikovsky's reputation grew. He and Zaremba clashed with Tchaikovsky when he submitted his First Symphony for performance by the Russian Musical Society in Saint Petersburg. Rubinstein and Zaremba refused to consider the work unless substantial changes were made. Tchaikovsky complied but they still refused to perform the symphony. Tchaikovsky, distressed that he had been treated as though he were still their student, withdrew the symphony. It was given its first complete performance, minus the changes Rubinstein and Zaremba had requested, in Moscow in February 1868.
Once Tchaikovsky graduated in 1865, Rubinstein's brother Nikolai offered him the post of Professor of Music Theory at the soon-to-open Moscow Conservatory. While the salary for his professorship was only 50 rubles a month, the offer itself boosted Tchaikovsky's morale and he accepted the post eagerly. He was further heartened by news of the first public performance of one of his works, his "Characteristic Dances", conducted by Johann Strauss II at a concert in Pavlovsk Park on 11 September 1865 (Tchaikovsky later included this work, re-titled "Dances of the Hay Maidens", in his opera "The Voyevoda").
From 1867 to 1878, Tchaikovsky combined his professorial duties with music criticism while continuing to compose. This activity exposed him to a range of contemporary music and afforded him the opportunity to travel abroad. In his reviews, he praised Beethoven, considered Brahms overrated and, despite his admiration, took Schumann to task for poor orchestration. He appreciated the staging of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" at its inaugural performance in Bayreuth (Germany), but not the music, calling "Das Rheingold" "unlikely nonsense, through which, from time to time, sparkle unusually beautiful and astonishing details". A recurring theme he addressed was the poor state of Russian opera.
In 1856, while Tchaikovsky was still at the School of Jurisprudence and Anton Rubinstein lobbied aristocrats to form the Russian Musical Society, critic Vladimir Stasov and an 18-year-old pianist, Mily Balakirev, met and agreed upon a nationalist agenda for Russian music, one that would take the operas of Mikhail Glinka as a model and incorporate elements from folk music, reject traditional Western practices and use non-Western harmonic devices such as the whole tone and octatonic scales. They saw Western-style conservatories as unnecessary and antipathetic to fostering native talent.
Eventually, Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin became known as the "moguchaya kuchka", translated into English as the "Mighty Handful" or "The Five". Rubinstein criticized their emphasis on amateur efforts in musical composition; Balakirev and later Mussorgsky attacked Rubinstein for his musical conservatism and his belief in professional music training. Tchaikovsky and his fellow conservatory students were caught in the middle.
While ambivalent about much of The Five's music, Tchaikovsky remained on friendly terms with most of its members. In 1869, he and Balakirev worked together on what became Tchaikovsky's first recognized masterpiece, the fantasy-overture "Romeo and Juliet", a work which The Five wholeheartedly embraced. The group also welcomed his Second Symphony, subtitled the "Little Russian". Despite their support, Tchaikovsky made considerable efforts to ensure his musical independence from the group as well as from the conservative faction at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
The infrequency of Tchaikovsky's musical successes, won with tremendous effort, exacerbated his lifelong sensitivity to criticism. Nikolai Rubinstein's private fits of rage critiquing his music, such as attacking the First Piano Concerto, did not help matters. His popularity grew, however, as several first-rate artists became willing to perform his compositions. Hans von Bülow premiered the First Piano Concerto and championed other Tchaikovsky works both as pianist and conductor. Other artists included Adele Aus der Ohe, Max Erdmannsdörfer, Eduard Nápravník and Sergei Taneyev.
Another factor that helped Tchaikovsky's music become popular was a shift in attitude among Russian audiences. Whereas they had previously been satisfied with flashy virtuoso performances of technically demanding but musically lightweight compositions, they gradually began listening with increasing appreciation of the music itself. Tchaikovsky's works were performed frequently, with few delays between their composition and first performances; the publication from 1867 onward of his songs and great piano music for the home market also helped boost the composer's popularity.
During the late 1860s, Tchaikovsky began to compose operas. His first, "The Voyevoda", based on a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, premiered in 1869. The composer became dissatisfied with it, however, and, having re-used parts of it in later works, destroyed the manuscript. "Undina" followed in 1870. Only excerpts were performed and it, too, was destroyed. Between these projects, Tchaikovsky started to compose an opera called "Mandragora", to a libretto by Sergei Rachinskii; the only music he completed was a short chorus of Flowers and Insects.
The first Tchaikovsky opera to survive intact, "The Oprichnik", premiered in 1874. During its composition, he lost Ostrovsky's part-finished libretto. Tchaikovsky, too embarrassed to ask for another copy, decided to write the libretto himself, modelling his dramatic technique on that of Eugène Scribe. Cui wrote a "characteristically savage press attack" on the opera. Mussorgsky, writing to Vladimir Stasov, disapproved of the opera as pandering to the public. Nevertheless, "The Oprichnik" continues to be performed from time to time in Russia.
The last of the early operas, "Vakula the Smith" (Op.14), was composed in the second half of 1874. The libretto, based on Gogol's "Christmas Eve", was to have been set to music by Alexander Serov. With Serov's death, the libretto was opened to a competition with a guarantee that the winning entry would be premiered by the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Tchaikovsky was declared the winner, but at the 1876 premiere, the opera enjoyed only a lukewarm reception. After Tchaikovsky's death, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the opera "Christmas Eve", based on the same story.
Other works of this period include the "Variations on a Rococo Theme" for cello and orchestra, the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet "Swan Lake", and the opera "Eugene Onegin".
Discussion of Tchaikovsky's personal life, especially his sexuality, has perhaps been the most extensive of any composer in the 19th century and certainly of any Russian composer of his time. It has also at times caused considerable confusion, from Soviet efforts to expunge all references to same-sex attraction and portray him as a heterosexual, to efforts at analysis by Western biographers.
Biographers have generally agreed that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. He sought the company of other men in his circle for extended periods, "associating openly and establishing professional connections with them". His first love was reportedly Sergey Kireyev, a younger fellow student at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. According to Modest Tchaikovsky, this was Pyotr Ilyich's "strongest, longest and purest love". The degree to which the composer might have felt comfortable with his sexual desires has, however, remained open to debate. It is still unknown whether Tchaikovsky, according to musicologist and biographer David Brown, "felt tainted within himself, defiled by something from which he finally realized he could never escape" or whether, according to Alexander Poznansky, he experienced "no unbearable guilt" over his sexual desires and "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage".
Relevant portions of his brother Modest's autobiography, where he tells of the composer's same-sex attraction, have been published, as have letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors in which Tchaikovsky openly writes of it. Such censorship has persisted in the Russian government in 2013, resulting in many officials, including the former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, denying his homosexuality outright.
Passages in Tchaikovsky's letters which reveal his homosexual desires have been censored in Russia. In one such passage
he told of a homosexual acquaintance: "Petashenka used to drop by with the criminal intention of observing the Cadet Corps, which is right opposite our windows, but I've been trying to discourage these compromising visits – and with some success." In another one he wrote "After our walk, I offered him some money, which was refused. He does it for the love of art and adores men with beards."
Tchaikovsky lived as a bachelor for most of his life. In 1868 he met Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt. They became infatuated with each other and were engaged to be married, but due to Artôt's refusal to give up the stage or settle in Russia, the relationship ended. Tchaikovsky later claimed she was the only woman he ever loved. In 1877, at the age of 37, he wed a former student, Antonina Miliukova. The marriage was a disaster. Mismatched psychologically and sexually, the couple lived together for only two and a half months before Tchaikovsky left, overwrought emotionally and suffering from acute writer's block. Tchaikovsky's family remained supportive of him during this crisis and throughout his life.
He was also aided by Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, who had begun contact with him not long before the marriage. As well as an important friend and emotional support, she became his patroness for the next 13 years, which allowed him to focus exclusively on composition. While Tchaikovsky called her his "best friend" they agreed to never meet under any circumstances. Tchaikovsky's marital debacle may have forced him to face the full truth about his sexuality; he never blamed Antonina for the failure of their marriage.
Tchaikovsky remained abroad for a year after the disintegration of his marriage. During this time, he completed "Eugene Onegin", orchestrated his Fourth Symphony, and composed the Violin Concerto. He returned briefly to the Moscow Conservatory in the autumn of 1879. For the next few years, assured of a regular income from von Meck, he traveled incessantly throughout Europe and rural Russia, mainly alone, and avoided social contact whenever possible.
During this time, Tchaikovsky's foreign reputation grew and a positive reassessment of his music also took place in Russia, thanks in part to Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's call for "universal unity" with the West at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow in 1880. Before Dostoyevsky's speech, Tchaikovsky's music had been considered "overly dependent on the West". As Dostoyevsky's message spread throughout Russia, this stigma toward Tchaikovsky's music evaporated. An unprecedented acclaim for him even drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of Saint Petersburg, including Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev.
Two musical works from this period stand out. With the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour nearing completion in Moscow in 1880, the 25th anniversary of the coronation of Alexander II in 1881, and the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition in the planning stage, Nikolai Rubinstein suggested that Tchaikovsky compose a grand commemorative piece. Tchaikovsky agreed and finished it within six weeks. He wrote to Nadezhda von Meck that this piece, the "1812 Overture", would be "very loud and noisy, but I wrote it with no warm feeling of love, and therefore there will probably be no artistic merits in it". He also warned conductor Eduard Nápravník that "I shan't be at all surprised and offended if you find that it is in a style unsuitable for symphony concerts". Nevertheless, the overture became, for many, "the piece by Tchaikovsky they know best", particularly well-known for the use of cannon in the scores.
On 23 March 1881, Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris. That December, Tchaikovsky started work on his Piano Trio in A minor, "dedicated to the memory of a great artist". First performed privately at the Moscow Conservatory on the first anniversary of Rubinstein's death, the piece became extremely popular during the composer's lifetime; in November 1893, it would become Tchaikovsky's own elegy at memorial concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In 1884, Tchaikovsky began to shed his unsociability and restlessness. That March, Tsar Alexander III conferred upon him the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class), which included a title of hereditary nobility and a personal audience with the Tsar. This was seen as a seal of official approval which advanced Tchaikovsky's social standing and might have been cemented in the composer's mind by the success of his Orchestral Suite No. 3 at its January 1885 premiere in Saint Petersburg.
In 1885, Alexander III requested a new production of "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in Saint Petersburg. By having the opera staged there and not at the Mariinsky Theatre, he served notice that Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. In addition, by virtue of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime annual pension of 3,000 rubles from the Tsar. This made him the premier court composer, in practice if not in actual title.
Despite Tchaikovsky's disdain for public life, he now participated in it as part of his increasing celebrity and out of a duty he felt to promote Russian music. He helped support his former pupil Sergei Taneyev, who was now director of Moscow Conservatory, by attending student examinations and negotiating the sometimes sensitive relations among various members of the staff. He served as director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society during the 1889–1890 season. In this post, he invited many international celebrities to conduct, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák and Jules Massenet.
During this period, Tchaikovsky also began promoting Russian music as a conductor, In January 1887, he substituted, on short notice, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow for performances of his opera "Cherevichki". Within a year, he was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia. These appearances helped him overcome life-long stage fright and boosted his self-assurance. In 1888, Tchaikovsky led the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Saint Petersburg, repeating the work a week later with the first performance of his tone poem "Hamlet". Although critics proved hostile, with César Cui calling the symphony "routine" and "meretricious", both works were received with extreme enthusiasm by audiences and Tchaikovsky, undeterred, continued to conduct the symphony in Russia and Europe. Conducting brought him to the United States in 1891, where he led the New York Music Society's orchestra in his "Festival Coronation March" at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall.
In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived at Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts, devoted exclusively to the music of Russian composers. One included the first complete performance of his revised First Symphony; another featured the final version of Third Symphony of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whose circle Tchaikovsky was already in touch.
Rimsky-Korsakov, with Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov and several other nationalistically minded composers and musicians, had formed a group known as the Belyayev circle, named after a merchant and amateur musician who became an influential music patron and publisher. Tchaikovsky spent much time in this circle, becoming far more at ease with them than he had been with the 'Five' and increasingly confident in showcasing his music alongside theirs. This relationship lasted until Tchaikovsky's death.
In 1892, Tchaikovsky was voted a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France, only the second Russian subject to be so honored (the first was sculptor Mark Antokolski). The following year, the University of Cambridge in England awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree.
On 16/28 October 1893, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the "Pathétique" in Saint Petersburg. Nine days later, Tchaikovsky died there, aged 53. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of fellow-composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, and Modest Mussorgsky; later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Mily Balakirev were also buried nearby.
While Tchaikovsky's death has traditionally been attributed to cholera from drinking unboiled water at a local restaurant, there has been much speculation that his death was suicide. In the "New Grove Dictionary of Music", Roland John Wiley wrote that "The polemics over [Tchaikovsky's] death have reached an impasse ... Rumors attached to the famous die hard ... As for illness, problems of evidence offer little hope of satisfactory resolution: the state of diagnosis; the confusion of witnesses; disregard of long-term effects of smoking and alcohol. We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out".
Tchaikovsky displayed a wide stylistic and emotional range, from light salon works to grand symphonies. Some of his works, such as the "Variations on a Rococo Theme", employ a "Classical" form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart (his favorite composer). Other compositions, such as his "Little Russian" symphony and his opera "Vakula the Smith", flirt with musical practices more akin to those of the 'Five', especially in their use of folk song. Other works, such as Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies, employ a personal musical idiom that facilitated intense emotional expression.
Tchaikovsky first visited Ukraine in 1864, staying in Trostianets where he wrote his first orchestral work, "The Storm" overture. Over the next 28 years, he visited over 15 places in Ukraine, where he stayed a few months at the time. Among his most favorite places was Kamianka, Cherkasy Oblast, where his sister Alexandra lived with her family. He wrote of Kamianka: "I found a feeling of peace in my soul, which I couldn't find in Moscow and St Petersburg". Tchaikovsky wrote more than 30 compositions while in Ukraine. He also visited Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko and attended his "Taras Bulba" opera performance in 1890 in the Kiev Opera House. Tchaikovsky was one of the founders of the Kiev Music Conservatory, which was later renamed after him. He also performed in concerts as a conductor in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkiv.
American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Tchaikovsky's "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody", a feature that has ensured his music's continued success with audiences. Tchaikovsky's complete range of melodic styles was as wide as that of his compositions. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs. According to "The New Grove", Tchaikovsky's melodic gift could also become his worst enemy in two ways.
The first challenge arose from his ethnic heritage. Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained: they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development. On a technical level, it made modulating to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music.
The second way melody worked against Tchaikovsky was a challenge that he shared with the majority of Romantic-age composers. They did not write in the regular, symmetrical melodic shapes that worked well with sonata form, such as those favored by Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, but were complete and independent in themselves. This completeness hindered their use as structural elements in combination with one another. This challenge was why the Romantics "were never natural symphonists". All a composer like Tchaikovsky could do with them was to essentially repeat them, even when he modified them to generate tension, maintain interest and satisfy listeners.
Harmony could be a potential trap for Tchaikovsky, according to Brown, since Russian creativity tended to focus on inertia and self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony worked against this to propel the music onward and, on a larger scale, shape it. Modulation, the shifting from one key to another, was a driving principle in both harmony and sonata form, the primary Western large-scale musical structure since the middle of the 18th century. Modulation maintained harmonic interest over an extended time-scale, provided a clear contrast between musical themes and showed how those themes were related to each other.
One point in Tchaikovsky's favor was "a flair for harmony" that "astonished" Rudolph Kündinger, Tchaikovsky's music tutor during his time at the School of Jurisprudence. Added to what he learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory studies, this talent allowed Tchaikovsky to employ a varied range of harmony in his music, from the Western harmonic and textural practices of his first two string quartets to the use of the whole tone scale in the center of the finale of the Second Symphony, a practice more typically used by The Five.
Rhythmically, Tchaikovsky sometimes experimented with unusual meters. More often, he used a firm, regular meter, a practice that served him well in dance music. At times, his rhythms became pronounced enough to become the main expressive agent of the music. They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements—a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements. This interaction generally does not take place in Russian music. (For more on this, please see Repetition below.)
Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice. The traditional argument that Tchaikovsky seemed unable to develop themes in this manner fails to consider this point; it also discounts the possibility that Tchaikovsky might have intended the development passages in his large-scale works to act as "enforced hiatuses" to build tension, rather than grow organically as smoothly progressive musical arguments.
According to Brown and musicologists Hans Keller and Daniel Zhitomirsky, Tchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure while composing the Fourth Symphony. He essentially sidestepped thematic interaction and kept sonata form only as an "outline", as Zhitomirsky phrases it. Within this outline, the focus centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys, and harmonies. This process, according to Brown and Keller, builds momentum and adds intense drama. While the result, Warrack charges, is still "an ingenious episodic treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them" in the Germanic sense, Brown counters that it took the listener of the period "through a succession of often highly charged sections which "added up" to a radically new kind of symphonic experience" (italics Brown), one that functioned not on the basis of summation, as Austro-German symphonies did, but on one of accumulation.
Partly due to the melodic and structural intricacies involved in this accumulation and partly due to the composer's nature, Tchaikovsky's music became intensely expressive. This intensity was entirely new to Russian music and prompted some Russians to place Tchaikovsky's name alongside that of Dostoyevsky. German musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar credits Tchaikovsky in his later symphonies with offering "full images of life, developed freely, sometimes even dramatically, around psychological contrasts ... This music has the mark of the truly lived and felt experience". Leon Botstein, in elaborating on this comment, suggests that listening to Tchaikovsky's music "became a psychological mirror connected to everyday experience, one that reflected on the dynamic nature of the listener's own emotional self". This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".
As mentioned above, repetition was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music. His use of sequences within melodies (repeating a tune at a higher or lower pitch in the same voice) could go on for extreme length. The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it. Tchaikovsky kept the musical conversation flowing by treating melody, tonality, rhythm and sound color as one integrated unit, rather than as separate elements.
By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging. By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place. Musicologist Martin Cooper calls this practice a subtle form of unifying a piece of music and adds that Tchaikovsky brought it to a high point of refinement. (For more on this practice, see the next section.)
Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects. Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his orchestration. Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary colors and sharply delineated contrasts of texture. However, beginning with the Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". This sonority, musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called doubling) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".
In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the "Variations on a Rococo Theme", Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. In the ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" and the opera "The Queen of Spades", Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present. On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinsky, who turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.
Of Tchaikovsky's Western contemporaries, Robert Schumann stands out as an influence in formal structure, harmonic practices and piano writing, according to Brown and musicologist Roland John Wiley. Boris Asafyev comments that Schumann left his mark on Tchaikovsky not just as a formal influence but also as an example of musical dramaturgy and self-expression. Leon Botstein claims the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also left their imprints on Tchaikovsky's orchestral style. The late-Romantic trend for writing orchestral suites, begun by Franz Lachner, Jules Massenet, and Joachim Raff after the rediscovery of Bach's works in that genre, may have influenced Tchaikovsky to try his own hand at them.
His teacher Anton Rubinstein's opera "The Demon" became a model for the final tableau of "Eugene Onegin". So did Léo Delibes' ballets "Coppélia" and "Sylvia" for "The Sleeping Beauty" and Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen" (a work Tchaikovsky admired tremendously) for "The Queen of Spades". Otherwise, it was to composers of the past that Tchaikovsky turned—Beethoven, whose music he respected; Mozart, whose music he loved; Glinka, whose opera "A Life for the Tsar" made an indelible impression on him as a child and whose scoring he studied assiduously; and Adolphe Adam, whose ballet "Giselle" was a favorite of his from his student days and whose score he consulted while working on "The Sleeping Beauty". Beethoven's string quartets may have influenced Tchaikovsky's attempts in that medium. Other composers whose work interested Tchaikovsky included Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Litolff.
Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music impacted his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece and on a cumulative level once the music had finished. What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Tchaikovsky's focus on pleasing his audience might be considered closer to that of Mendelssohn or Mozart. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal nation, the statement is not actually that surprising.
And yet, even when writing so-called 'programme' music, for example his Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, he cast it in sonata form. His use of stylized 18th-century melodies and patriotic themes was geared toward the values of Russian aristocracy. He was aided in this by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who commissioned "The Sleeping Beauty" from Tchaikovsky and the libretto for "The Queen of Spades" from Modest with their use of 18th century settings stipulated firmly. Tchaikovsky also used the polonaise frequently, the dance being a musical code for the Romanov dynasty and a symbol of Russian patriotism. Using it in the finale of a work could assure its success with Russian listeners.
Tchaikovsky's relationship with collaborators was mixed. Like Nikolai Rubinstein with the First Piano Concerto, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer rejected the Violin Concerto initially but changed his mind; he played it to great public success and taught it to his students, who included Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Wilhelm Fitzenhagen "intervened considerably in shaping what he considered 'his' piece", the "Variations on a Rococo Theme", according to music critic Michael Steinberg. Tchaikovsky was angered by Fitzenhagen's license but did nothing; the Rococo Variations were published with the cellist's amendments.
His collaboration on the three ballets went better and in Marius Petipa, who worked with him on the last two, he might have found an advocate. When "The Sleeping Beauty" was seen by its dancers as needlessly complicated, Petipa convinced them to put in the extra effort. Tchaikovsky compromised to make his music as practical as possible for the dancers and was accorded more creative freedom than ballet composers were usually accorded at the time. He responded with scores that minimized the rhythmic subtleties normally present in his work but were inventive and rich in melody, with more refined and imaginative orchestration than in the average ballet score.
Critical reception to Tchaikovsky's music was also varied but also improved over time. Even after 1880, some inside Russia held it suspect for not being nationalistic enough and thought Western European critics lauded it for exactly that reason. There might have been a grain of truth in the latter, according to musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein, as German critics especially wrote of the "indeterminacy of [Tchaikovsky's] artistic character ... being truly at home in the non-Russian". Of the foreign critics who did not care for his music, Eduard Hanslick lambasted the Violin Concerto as a musical composition "whose stink one can hear" and William Forster Abtrop wrote of the Fifth Symphony, "The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!"
The division between Russian and Western critics remained through much of the 20th century but for a different reason. According to Brown and Wiley, the prevailing view of Western critics was that the same qualities in Tchaikovsky's music that appealed to audiences—its strong emotions, directness and eloquence and colorful orchestration—added up to compositional shallowness. The music's use in popular and film music, Brown says, lowered its esteem in their eyes still further. There was also the fact, pointed out earlier, that Tchaikovsky's music demanded active engagement from the listener and, as Botstein phrases it, "spoke to the listener's imaginative interior life, regardless of nationality". Conservative critics, he adds, may have felt threatened by the "violence and 'hysteria' " they detected and felt such emotive displays "attacked the boundaries of conventional aesthetic appreciation—the cultured reception of art as an act of formalist discernment—and the polite engagement of art as an act of amusement".
There has also been the fact that the composer did not follow sonata form strictly, relying instead on juxtaposing blocks of tonalities and thematic groups. Maes states this point has been seen at times as a weakness rather than a sign of originality. Even with what Schonberg termed "a professional reevaluation" of Tchaikovsky's work, the practice of faulting Tchaikovsky for not following in the steps of the Viennese masters has not gone away entirely, while his intent of writing music that would please his audiences is also sometimes taken to task. In a 1992 article, "New York Times" critic Allan Kozinn writes, "It is Tchaikovsky's flexibility, after all, that has given us a sense of his variability... Tchaikovsky was capable of turning out music—entertaining and widely beloved though it is—that seems superficial, manipulative and trivial when regarded in the context of the whole literature. The First Piano Concerto is a case in point. It makes a joyful noise, it swims in pretty tunes and its dramatic rhetoric allows (or even requires) a soloist to make a grand, swashbuckling impression. But it is entirely hollow".
In the 21st century, however, critics are reacting more positively to Tchaikovsky's tunefulness, originality, and craftsmanship. "Tchaikovsky is being viewed again as a composer of the first rank, writing music of depth, innovation and influence," according to cultural historian and author Joseph Horowitz. Important in this reevaluation is a shift in attitude away from the disdain for overt emotionalism that marked half of the 20th century. "We have acquired a different view of Romantic 'excess,'" Horowitz says. "Tchaikovsky is today more admired than deplored for his emotional frankness; if his music seems harried and insecure, so are we all".
Horowitz maintains that, while the standing of Tchaikovsky's music has fluctuated among critics, for the public, "it never went out of style, and his most popular works have yielded iconic sound-bytes , such as the love theme from "Romeo and Juliet"". Along with those tunes, Botstein adds, "Tchaikovsky appealed to audiences outside of Russia with an immediacy and directness that were startling even for music, an art form often associated with emotion". Tchaikovsky's melodies, stated with eloquence and matched by his inventive use of harmony and orchestration, have always ensured audience appeal. His popularity is considered secure, with his following in many countries, including Great Britain and the United States, second only to that of Beethoven. His music has also been used frequently in popular music and film.
According to Wiley, Tchaikovsky was a pioneer in several ways. "Thanks in large part to Nadezhda von Meck", Wiley writes, "he became the first full-time professional Russian composer". This, Wiley adds, allowed him the time and freedom to consolidate the Western compositional practices he had learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Russian folk song and other native musical elements to fulfill his own expressive goals and forge an original, deeply personal style. He made an impact in not only absolute works such as the symphony but also program music and, as Wiley phrases it, "transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements ... into matters of Shakespearean elevation and psychological import". Wiley and Holden both note that Tchaikovsky did all this without a native school of composition upon which to fall back. They point out that only Glinka had preceded him in combining Russian and Western practices and his teachers in Saint Petersburg had been thoroughly Germanic in their musical outlook. He was, they write, for all intents and purposes alone in his artistic quest.
Maes and Taruskin write that Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. Maes adds that, like them, he wanted to produce music that reflected Russian national character but which did so to the highest European standards of quality. Tchaikovsky, according to Maes, came along at a time when the nation itself was deeply divided as to what that character truly was. Like his country, Maes writes, it took him time to discover how to express his Russianness in a way that was true to himself and what he had learned. Because of his professionalism, Maes says, he worked hard at this goal and succeeded. The composer's friend, music critic Hermann Laroche, wrote of "The Sleeping Beauty" that the score contained "an element deeper and more general than color, in the internal structure of the music, above all in the foundation of the element of melody. This basic element is undoubtedly Russian".
Tchaikovsky was inspired to reach beyond Russia with his music, according to Maes and Taruskin. His exposure to Western music, they write, encouraged him to think it belonged to not just Russia but also the world at large. Volkov adds that this mindset made him think seriously about Russia's place in European musical culture—the first Russian composer to do so. It steeled him to become the first Russian composer to acquaint foreign audiences personally with his own works, Warrack writes, as well as those of other Russian composers. In his biography of Tchaikovsky, Anthony Holden recalls the dearth of Russian classical music before Tchaikovsky's birth, then places the composer's achievements into historical perspective: "Twenty years after Tchaikovsky's death, in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" erupted onto the musical scene, signalling Russia's arrival into 20th-century music. Between these two very different worlds, Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge".
On 7 May 2010, Google celebrated his 170th birthday with a Google Doodle.
The following recording was made in Moscow in January 1890, by Julius Block on behalf of Thomas Edison.
According to musicologist Leonid Sabaneyev, Tchaikovsky was not comfortable with being recorded for posterity and tried to shy away from it. On an apparently separate visit from the one related above, Block asked the composer to play something on a piano or at least say something. Tchaikovsky refused. He told Block, "I am a bad pianist and my voice is raspy. Why should one eternalize it?" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24503 |
Phospholipid
Phospholipids (PL) are a class of lipids that are a major component of all cell membranes. They can form lipid bilayers because of their amphiphilic characteristic. The structure of the phospholipid molecule generally consists of two hydrophobic fatty acid "tails" and a hydrophilic "head" consisting of a phosphate group. The two components are usually joined together by a glycerol molecule. The phosphate groups can be modified with simple organic molecules such as choline, ethanolamine or serine.
The first phospholipid identified in 1847 as such in biological tissues was lecithin, or phosphatidylcholine, in the egg yolk of chickens by the French chemist and pharmacist Theodore Nicolas Gobley. Biological membranes in eukaryotes also contain another class of lipid, sterol, interspersed among the phospholipids and together they provide membrane fluidity and mechanical strength. Purified phospholipids are produced commercially and have found applications in nanotechnology and materials science.
An amphiphile (from the Greek αμφις, amphis: both and φιλíα, philia: love, friendship; also termed "amphipathic") is a term describing a chemical compound possessing both hydrophilic (water-loving, polar) and lipophilic (fat-loving, non-polar) properties; lipophilic properties can also be considered hydrophobic (water-avoiding). The phospholipid head usually contains a negatively charged phosphate group and glycerol; it is hydrophilic. The phospholipid tails usually consist of 2 long fatty acid chains; they are hydrophobic and avoid interactions with water. When placed in aqueous solutions, phospholipids are driven by hydrophobic interactions that result in the fatty acid tails aggregating to minimize interactions with water molecules. These specific properties allow phospholipids to play an important role in the phospholipid bilayer. In biological systems, the phospholipids often occur with other molecules (e.g., proteins, glycolipids, sterols) in a bilayer such as a cell membrane. Lipid bilayers occur when hydrophobic tails line up against one another, forming a membrane of hydrophilic heads on both sides facing the water.
Such movement can be described by the fluid mosaic model, that describes the membrane as a mosaic of lipid molecules that act as a solvent for all the substances and proteins within it, so proteins and lipid molecules are then free to diffuse laterally through the lipid matrix and migrate over the membrane. Sterols contribute to membrane fluidity by hindering the packing together of phospholipids. However, this model has now been superseded, as through the study of lipid polymorphism it is now known that the behaviour of lipids under physiological (and other) conditions is not simple.
"See Sphingolipid"
Phospholipids have been widely used to prepare liposomal, ethosomal and other nanoformulations of topical, oral and parenteral drugs for differing reasons like improved bio-availability, reduced toxicity and increased permeability across membranes. Liposomes are often composed of phosphatidylcholine-enriched phospholipids and may also contain mixed phospholipid chains with surfactant properties. The ethosomal formulation of ketoconazole using phospholipids is a promising option for transdermal delivery in fungal infections.
Computational simulations of phospholipids are often performed using molecular dynamics with force fields such as GROMOS, CHARMM, or AMBER.
Phospholipids are optically highly birefringent, i.e. their refractive index is different along their axis as opposed to perpendicular to it. Measurement of birefringence can be achieved using cross polarisers in a microscope to obtain an image of e.g. vesicle walls or using techniques such as dual polarisation interferometry to quantify lipid order or disruption in supported bilayers.
There are no simple methods available for analysis of phospholipids since the close range of polarity between different phospholipid species makes detection difficult. Oil chemists often use spectroscopy to determine total Phosphorus abundance and then calculate approximate mass of phospholipids based on molecular weight of expected fatty acid species. Modern lipid profiling employs more absolute methods of analysis, with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR spectroscopy), particularly 31P-NMR, while HPLC-ELSD provides relative values.
Phospholipid synthesis occurs in the cytosolic side of ER membrane that is studded with proteins that act in synthesis (GPAT and LPAAT acyl transferases, phosphatase and choline phosphotransferase) and allocation (flippase and floppase). Eventually a vesicle will bud off from the ER containing phospholipids destined for the cytoplasmic cellular membrane on its exterior leaflet and phospholipids destined for the exoplasmic cellular membrane on its inner leaflet.
Common sources of industrially produced phospholipids are soya, rapeseed, sunflower, chicken eggs, bovine milk, fish eggs etc. Each source has a unique profile of individual phospholipid species as well as fatty acids and consequently differing applications in food, nutrition, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and drug delivery.
Some types of phospholipid can be split to produce products that function as second messengers in signal transduction. Examples include phosphatidylinositol (4,5)-bisphosphate (PIP2), that can be split by the enzyme Phospholipase C into inositol triphosphate (IP3) and diacylglycerol (DAG), which both carry out the functions of the Gq type of G protein in response to various stimuli and intervene in various processes from long term depression in neurons to leukocyte signal pathways started by chemokine receptors.
Phospholipids also intervene in prostaglandin signal pathways as the raw material used by lipase enzymes to produce the prostaglandin precursors. In plants they serve as the raw material to produce Jasmonic acid, a plant hormone similar in structure to prostaglandins that mediates defensive responses against pathogens.
Phospholipids can act as emulsifiers, enabling oils to form a colloid with water. Phospholipids are one of the components of lecithin which is found in egg-yolks, as well as being extracted from soybeans, and is used as a food additive in many products, and can be purchased as a dietary supplement. Lysolecithins are typically used for water-oil emulsions like margarine, due to their higher HLB ratio. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24505 |
Pierre Trudeau
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau ( , ; October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000), mostly referred to as simply Pierre Trudeau, or by the initials PET, was a Canadian politician who was the 15th prime minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, between 1968 and 1984, with a brief period as Leader of the Opposition, from 1979 to 1980. His tenure of 15 years and 164 days makes him Canada's third longest-serving Prime Minister, behind William Lyon Mackenzie King and John A. Macdonald.
Trudeau rose to prominence as a lawyer, intellectual, and activist in Québec politics. He joined the Liberal Party and was elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1965, quickly being appointed as Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's Parliamentary Secretary. In 1967, he was appointed Minister of Justice. Trudeau's outgoing personality caused a media sensation, inspiring "Trudeaumania", and helped him to win the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1968, when he was appointed Prime Minister of Canada.
From the late 1960s until the early 1980s, Trudeau's personality dominated the political scene to an extent never before seen in Canadian political life. After his appointment as Prime Minister, he won the 1968, 1972 and 1974 elections, before narrowly losing in 1979. He won a fourth election victory shortly afterwards, in 1980, and eventually retired from politics shortly before the 1984 election.
Despite his personal motto, "Reason before passion", his personality and political career aroused polarizing reactions throughout Canada during his time in office. Admirers praised what they consider to be the force of Trudeau's intellect and his political acumen, maintaining national unity over the Quebec sovereignty movement, suppressing a Québec terrorist crisis, fostering a pan-Canadian identity, and in achieving sweeping institutional reform, including the implementation of official bilingualism, patriation of the Constitution, and the establishment of the "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms". Critics accused him of arrogance, of economic mismanagement, and of unduly centralizing Canadian decision-making to the detriment of the culture of Québec and the economy of the Prairies.
His eldest son, Justin Trudeau, became the 23rd and current Prime Minister, following the 2015 election and 2019 election, and is the first prime minister of Canada to be a descendant of a former prime minister.
The Trudeau family can be traced to Marcillac-Lanville in France in the 16th century and to a Robert Truteau (1544–1589). In 1659, the first Trudeau to arrive in Canada was Étienne Trudeau or Truteau (1641–1712), a carpenter and home builder from La Rochelle.
Pierre Trudeau was born at home at 5779 Durocher Avenue, Outremont, Montreal, Canada, on October 18, 1919, to Charles-Émile "Charley" Trudeau (1887–1935), a French-Canadian businessman and lawyer, and Grace Elliott, who was of mixed Scottish and French-Canadian descent. He had an older sister named Suzette and a younger brother named Charles Jr. Trudeau remained close to both siblings for his entire life. Trudeau attended the prestigious Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf (a private French Jesuit school), where he supported Québec nationalism. Trudeau's paternal grandparents were French-speaking Quebec farmers. His father, Charles-Émile Trudeau, had acquired a chain of gas stations, some "profitable mines, the Belmont amusement park in Montreal and the Montreal Royals, the city's minor-league baseball team" by the time Trudeau was fifteen. When his father died in Orlando, Florida, on April 10, 1935, Trudeau and each of his siblings inherited $5,000, a considerable sum at that time, which meant that he was financially secure and independent. His mother, Grace, "doted on Pierre" and he remained close to her throughout her long life. After her husband died, she left the management of her inheritance to others and spent a lot of her time with work for the Roman Catholic Church and other charities, travelling frequently to New York, Florida, Europe, and Maine, sometimes with her children. Already in his late teens, Trudeau was "directly involved in managing a large inheritance."
From the age of six until twelve, Trudeau attended the primary school, Académie Querbes, in Outremont, where he became immersed in the Catholic religion. The school which was for both English and French Catholics, was an exclusive school with very small classes and he excelled in mathematics and religion. From his earliest years, Trudeau was fluently bilingual which would later prove to be a "big asset for a politician in bilingual Canada." As a teenager, he attended the Jesuit French-language Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a prestigious secondary school known for educating elite francophone families in Québec.
In his seventh and final academic year, 1939–1940, Trudeau focused on winning a Rhodes Scholarship. In his application he wrote that he had prepared for public office by studying public speaking and publishing many articles in "Brébeuf". His letters of recommendations praised him highly. Father Boulin, who was the head of the college, said that during his seven years at the college (1933–1940), Trudeau had won a "hundred prizes and honourable mentions" and "performed with distinction in all fields". Trudeau graduated from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in 1940 at the age of twenty-one.
Trudeau did not win the Rhodes Scholarship. He consulted a number of people on his options including Henri Bourassa, the economist Edmond Montpetit, and Father Robert Bernier, a Franco-Manitoban. Following their advice, he chose a career in politics, and a degree in law at the Université de Montréal.
In his obituary, "The Economist" described Trudeau as "parochial as a young man", who "dismissed the second world war as a squabble between the big powers, although he later regretted "missing one of the major events of the century". In his 1993 "Memoir," Trudeau wrote that the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 and his father's death were the two "great bombshells" that marked his teenage years. In his first year at university, the prime topics of conversation were the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the London blitz. He wrote that in the early 1940s, when he was in his early twenties, he thought, "So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn't stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible..[I]f you were a French Canadian in Montreal [at that time], you did not automatically believe that this was a just war. In Montreal in the early 1940s, we still knew nothing about the Holocaust and we tended to think of this war as a settling of scores among the superpowers."
Young Trudeau was opposed to overseas conscription and in 1942, he campaigned for the anti-conscription candidate Jean Drapeau (later the Mayor of Montreal) in Outremont. Trudeau described a speech he heard in Montreal by Ernest Lapointe, who was then Prime Minister William Mackenzie King's top adviser on issues relating to Quebec and French-speaking Canada. Lapointe had been a Liberal MP during the 1917 conscription crisis, in which the Canadian government had deployed up to 1,200 soldiers to suppress the Quebec City anti-conscription Easter Riots in March and April 1918. In a final and bloody conflict, soldiers fired on the crowds. At least five men were killed by gunfire and there were over 150 casualties and $300,000 in damage. In 1939, it was Lapointe who helped draft the Liberal's policy against conscription for service overseas. Lapointe was aware that a new conscription crisis would destroy national unity that Mackenzie King had been trying to build since the end of World War 1. Trudeau never forgave Lapointe for "lying" and breaking his promise. His criticisms of King's war time policies, such as "suspension of habeas corpus", the "farce of bilingualism and French-Canadian advancement in the army. The forced "voluntary enrolment", was scathing.
As a university student Trudeau joined the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC). They trained at the local armoury in Montreal during the school term and undertook further training at Camp Farnham each summer. Although the "National Resources Mobilization Act" was enacted in 1940, preparing the way for conscription to serve overseas, there was no conscription until the Conscription Crisis of 1944 in response to the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
Trudeau continued his full-time studies in law at the Université de Montréal while in the COTC, during the war, from 1940 until his graduation in 1943.
Following his graduation in 1943, Trudeau articled for a year, and in the fall of 1944, began his master's in political economy at what is now called Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and was then known as the Graduate School of Public Administration. In his "Memoir", he admitted that it was at Harvard's "super-informed environment", that he realized the "historic importance" of the war and that he had "missed one of the major events of the century in which [he] was living. Harvard had become a major intellectual centre as facism in Europe led to the great intellectual migration to the United States. 978-0676975222
Trudeau's Harvard dissertation was on the topic of Marxism, communism and Christianity. At Harvard, a predominantly Protestant American university, Trudeau who was French Catholic, and who for the first time was living outside the province of Quebec, felt like an outsider. As his sense of isolation deepened, in 1947, he decided to continue his work on his Harvard dissertation in Paris, France. He studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. The Harvard dissertation remained unfinished when Trudeau entered a doctoral program to study under the socialist economist Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE). This cemented Trudeau's belief that Keynesian economics and social sciences were essential to the creation of the "good life" in a democratic society. He did not finish his LSE dissertation. Over a five-week period he attended many lectures and became a follower of personalism after being influenced most notably by Emmanuel Mounier. He also was influenced by Nikolai Berdyaev, particularly his book "Slavery and Freedom". Max and Monique Nemni argue that Berdyaev's book influenced Trudeau's rejection of nationalism and separatism.
In the summer of 1948, Trudeau embarked on world travels to find a sense of purpose. At the age of twenty-eight, he travelled to Poland where he visited Auschwitz, then Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Middle East, including Jordan and southern Iraq. Although he was very wealthy, Trudeau traveled with a back pack in "self-imposed hardship". He used his British passport instead of his Canadian passport in his travels through Pakistan, India, China, and Japan, often wearing local clothing to blend in. According to "The Economist", when Trudeau returned to Canada in 1949 after an absence of five years, his mind was "seemingly broadened" from his studying at Harvard, the Institut d'Études Politiques, and the LSE and his travels. He was "appalled at the narrow nationalism in his native French-speaking Quebec, and the authoritarianism of the province's government.
Beginning while Trudeau was travelling overseas, a number of events took place in Quebec that were precursors to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. These include the 1948 Refus global, the publication of Les insolences du Frère Untel, the 1949 Asbestos Strike, and the 1955 Richard Riot. Artists and intellectuals in Quebec signed the Refus global on August 9, 1948 in opposition to the repressive rule of Premier of Quebec Maurice Duplessis and the decadent "social establishment" in Quebec, including the Catholic Church. When he returned to Montreal in 1949, Trudeau quickly became a leading figure opposing Duplessis' rule. Trudeau actively supported the workers in the Asbestos Strike who opposed Duplessis in 1949. Trudeau was the co-founder and editor of "Cité Libre", a dissident journal that helped provide the intellectual basis for the Quiet Revolution. In 1956 he edited an important book on the subject, "La grève de l'amiante", which argued that the asbestos miners' strike of 1949 was a seminal event in Québec's history, marking the beginning of resistance to the conservative, Francophone clerical establishment and Anglophone business class that had long ruled the province.
Because of his labour union activities in Asbestos, Trudeau was blacklisted by Premier Duplessis and he was unable to teach law at the Université de Montréal. He surprised his closest friends in Quebec when he became a civil servant in Ottawa in 1949. He worked for the federal government until 1951 in the Privy Council Office of the Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent as an economic policy advisor. He wrote in his memoirs that he found this period very useful later on, when he entered politics, and that senior civil servant Norman Robertson tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay on.
His progressive values and his close ties with Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) intellectuals (including F. R. Scott, Eugene Forsey, Michael Kelway Oliver and Charles Taylor) led to his support of and membership in that federal democratic socialist party throughout the 1950s.
An associate professor of law at the Université de Montréal from 1961 to 1965, Trudeau's views evolved towards a liberal position in favour of individual rights counter to the state and made him an opponent of Québec nationalism. He admired the labour unions, which were tied to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and tried to infuse his Liberal party with some of their reformist zeal. By the late 1950s Trudeau began to reject social democratic and labour parties, arguing that they should put their narrow goals aside and join forces with Liberals to fight for democracy first. In economic theory he was influenced by professors Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith while he was at Harvard. Trudeau criticized the Liberal Party of Lester Pearson when it supported arming Bomarc missiles in Canada with nuclear warheads.
He was offered a position at Queen's University teaching political science by James Corry, who later became principal of Queen's, but turned it down because he preferred to teach in Québec. During the 1950s he was blacklisted by the United States and prevented from entering that country because of a visit to a conference in Moscow, and because he subscribed to a number of left-wing publications. Trudeau later appealed the ban and it was rescinded.
In 1965, Trudeau joined the Liberal party, along with his friends Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand. These "three wise men" ran successfully for the Liberals in the 1965 election. Trudeau himself was elected in the safe Liberal riding of Mount Royal, in western Montreal. He would hold this seat until his retirement from politics in 1984, winning each election with large majorities. His decision to join the Liberal Party of Canada rather than the CCF's successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP) was partly based on his belief that the federal NDP could not achieve power. He also doubted the feasibility of the centralizing policies of the party. He felt that the party leadership tended toward a ""deux nations"" approach he could not support.
Upon arrival in Ottawa, Trudeau was appointed as Prime Minister Lester Pearson's parliamentary secretary, and spent much of the next year travelling abroad, representing Canada at international meetings and bodies, including the United Nations. In 1967 he was appointed to Pearson's cabinet as Minister of Justice.
As Minister of Justice, Trudeau was responsible for introducing the landmark "Criminal Law Amendment Act", an omnibus bill whose provisions included, among other things, the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, the legalization of contraception, abortion and lotteries, new gun ownership restrictions as well as the authorization of breathalyzer tests on suspected drunk drivers. Trudeau famously defended the segment of the bill decriminalizing homosexual acts by telling reporters that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", adding that "what's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code". Trudeau paraphrased the term from Martin O'Malley's editorial piece in "The Globe and Mail" on December 12, 1967. Trudeau also liberalized divorce laws, and clashed with Québec Premier Daniel Johnson, Sr. during constitutional negotiations.
At the end of Canada's centennial year in 1967, Prime Minister Pearson announced his intention to step down, and Trudeau entered the race for the Liberal leadership. His energetic campaign attracted massive media attention and mobilized many young people, who saw Trudeau as a symbol of generational change. Going into the leadership convention, Trudeau was the front-runner and a clear favourite with the Canadian public. However, many Liberals still had reservations given that he joined the Liberal Party in 1965 and that his views, particularly those on divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, were seen as radical and opposed by a substantial segment of the party. During the convention, prominent Cabinet Minister Judy LaMarsh was caught on television profanely stating that Trudeau wasn't a Liberal.
Nevertheless, at the April 1968 Liberal leadership convention, Trudeau was elected as the leader on the fourth ballot, with the support of 51% of the delegates. He defeated several prominent and long-serving Liberals including Paul Martin Sr., Robert Winters and Paul Hellyer. As the new leader of the governing Liberals, Trudeau was sworn in as Prime Minister two weeks later on April 20.
Trudeau soon called an election, for June 25. His election campaign benefited from an unprecedented wave of personal popularity called "Trudeaumania", which saw Trudeau mobbed by throngs of youths. Trudeau's main national opponents were PC leader Robert Stanfield and NDP leader Tommy Douglas, both popular figures who had been Premiers, respectively, of Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan (albeit in Trudeau's native Québec, the main competition to the Liberals was from the Ralliement créditiste, led by Réal Caouette). As a candidate Trudeau espoused participatory democracy as a means of making Canada a "Just Society". He defended vigorously the newly implemented universal health care and regional development programmes, as well as the recent reforms found in the Omnibus bill.
On the eve of the election, during the annual Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade in Montreal, rioting Québec sovereignists threw rocks and bottles at the grandstand where Trudeau was seated, chanting "Trudeau au poteau!" (Trudeau – to the stake!). Rejecting the pleas of his aides that he take cover, Trudeau stayed in his seat, facing the rioters, without any sign of fear. The image of the defiant Prime Minister impressed the public, and he handily won the 1968 election the next day.
Trudeau's first government implemented many procedural reforms to make Parliament and the Liberal caucus meetings run more efficiently, significantly expanded the size and role of the Prime Minister's office, and substantially expanded social-welfare programs.
Trudeau's first major legislative push was implementing the majority of recommendations of Pearson's Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism via the "Official Languages Act", which made French and English the co-equal official languages of the federal government. More controversial than the declaration (which was backed by the NDP and, with some opposition in caucus, the PCs) was the implementation of the Act's principles: between 1966 and 1976, the francophone proportion of the civil service and military doubled, causing alarm in some sections of anglophone Canada that they were being disadvantaged.
Trudeau's Cabinet fulfilled Part IV of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's report by announcing a "Multiculturalism Policy" on October 8, 1971. This statement recognized that while Canada was a country of two official languages, it recognized a plurality of cultures – "a multicultural policy within a bilingual framework". This annoyed public opinion in Québec, which believed that it challenged Québec's claim of Canada as a country of two nations.
The 1999 National Film Board (NFB) documentary featuring young Canadians including the writer John Duffy, focused on how Trudeau's efforts to create a bilingual Canada affected them in the 1970s.
Trudeau's first serious test came during the October Crisis of 1970, when a Marxist group, the "Front de libération du Québec" (FLQ) kidnapped British Trade Consul James Cross at his residence on October 5. Five days later Québec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was also kidnapped. Trudeau, with the acquiescence of Premier of Quebec Robert Bourassa, responded by invoking the "War Measures Act" which gave the government sweeping powers of arrest and detention without trial. Trudeau presented a determined public stance during the crisis, answering the question of how far he would go to stop the violence by saying "Just watch me". Laporte was found dead on October 17 in the trunk of a car. The cause of his death is still debated. Five of the FLQ members were flown to Cuba in 1970 as part of a deal in exchange for James Cross' life, although they eventually returned to Canada years later, where they served time in prison.
Although this response is still controversial and was opposed at the time as excessive by parliamentarians like Tommy Douglas and David Lewis, it was met with only limited objections from the public.
After consultations with the provincial premiers, Trudeau agreed to attend a conference called by British Columbia Premier W. A. C. Bennett to attempt to finally patriate the Canadian constitution. Negotiations with the provinces by Minister of Justice John Turner created a draft agreement, known as the Victoria Charter, that entrenched a charter of rights, bilingualism, and a guarantee of a veto of constitutional amendments for Ontario and Québec, as well as regional vetoes for Western Canada and Atlantic Canada, within the new constitution. The agreement was acceptable to the nine predominantly-English speaking provinces, while Québec's Premier Robert Bourassa requested two weeks to consult with his cabinet. After a strong backlash of popular opinion against the agreement in Québec, Bourassa stated Québec would not accept it.
In foreign affairs, Trudeau kept Canada firmly in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but often pursued an independent path in international relations. He established Canadian diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, before the United States did, and went on an official visit to Beijing. He was known as a friend of Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba.
Trudeau was the first world leader to meet John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono on their "tour for world peace". Lennon said, after talking with Trudeau for 50 minutes, that Trudeau was "a beautiful person" and that "if all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace".
In the federal election of 1972, the Liberals won a minority government, with the New Democratic Party led by David Lewis holding the balance of power.
Requiring NDP support to continue, the government would move to the political left, including the creation of Petro-Canada.
In May 1974 the House of Commons passed a motion of no confidence in the Trudeau government, defeating its budget bill after Trudeau intentionally antagonized Stanfield and Lewis. The election of 1974 focused mainly on the current economic recession. Stanfield proposed the immediate introduction of wage and price controls to help end the increasing inflation Canada was currently facing. Trudeau mocked the proposal, saying to a newspaper reporter that it was the equivalent of a magician saying "Zap! You're frozen", and instead promoted a variety of small tax cuts to curb inflation. A campaign tour featuring Trudeau's wife and infant sons was popular, and NDP supporters scared of wage controls moved toward the Liberals.
The Liberals were re-elected with a majority government with 141 of the 264 seats, prompting Stanfield's retirement. The Liberals won no seats in Alberta, though, where Peter Lougheed was a vociferous opponent of Trudeau's 1974 budget.
While popular with the electorate, Trudeau's promised minor reforms had little effect on the growing rate of inflation, and he struggled with conflicting advice on the crisis. In September 1975 the popular Finance Minister John Turner resigned over a perceived lack of support in countervailing measures. In October 1975, in an embarrassing about-face, Trudeau and new Finance Minister Donald Macdonald introduced wage and price controls by passing the "Anti-Inflation Act". The breadth of the legislation, which touched on many powers traditionally considered the purview of the provinces, prompted a Supreme Court reference that only upheld the legislation as an emergency requiring Federal intervention under the "British North America Act". During the annual 1975 Christmas interview with CTV, Trudeau discussed the economy, citing market failures and stating that more state intervention would be necessary. However, the academic wording and hypothetical solutions posed during the complex discussion led much of the public to believe he had declared capitalism itself a failure, creating a lasting distrust among increasingly neoliberal business leaders.
Trudeau continued his attempts at increasing Canada's international profile, including joining the G7 group of major economic powers in 1976 at the behest of U.S. President Gerald Ford. On July 14, 1976, after long and emotional debate, Bill C-84 was passed by the House of Commons by a vote of 130 to 124, abolishing the death penalty completely and instituting a life sentence without parole for 25 years for first-degree murder.
Trudeau faced increasing challenges in Québec, starting with bitter relations with Bourassa and his Liberal government in Québec. After a rise in the polls after the rejection of the Victoria Charter, the Québec Liberals had taken a more confrontational approach with the Federal government on the constitution, French language laws, and the language of air traffic control in Québec. Trudeau responded with increasing anger at what he saw as nationalist provocations against the Federal government's bilingualism and constitutional initiatives, at times expressing his personal contempt for Bourassa.
Partially in an attempt to shore up his support, Bourassa called a surprise election in 1976 that resulted in René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois (PQ) winning a majority government. The PQ had chiefly campaigned on a "good government" platform, but promised a referendum on independence to be held within their first mandate. Trudeau and Lévesque had been personal rivals, with Trudeau's intellectualism contrasting with Lévesque's more working-class image. While Trudeau claimed to welcome the "clarity" provided by the PQ victory, the unexpected rise of the sovereignist movement became, in his view, his biggest challenge.
As the PQ began to take power, Trudeau faced the prolonged failure of his marriage, which was covered in lurid detail on a day-by-day basis by the English language press. Trudeau's reserve was seen as dignified by contemporaries and his poll numbers actually rose during the height of coverage, but aides felt the personal tensions left him uncharacteristically emotional and prone to outbursts.
In 1976, Trudeau, succumbing to pressure from the Chinese government, issued an order barring Taiwan from participating as China in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, although technically it was a matter for the IOC. His action strained relations with the United States – from President Ford, future President Carter and the press – and subjected Canada to international condemnation and shame.
As the 1970s wore on, growing public exhaustion towards Trudeau's personality and the country's constitutional debates caused his poll numbers to fall rapidly in the late 1970s. At the 1978 G7 summit, he discussed strategies for the upcoming election with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who advised him to announce several spending cuts to quell criticism of the large deficits his government was running.
After a series of defeats in by-elections in 1978, Trudeau waited as long as he could to call a statutory general election in 1979. He finally did so in 1979, only two months from the five-year limit provided under the "British North America Act".
Relations deteriorated on many points in the Nixon years (1969–74), including trade disputes, defence agreements, energy, fishing, the environment, cultural imperialism, and foreign policy. They changed for the better when Trudeau and President Jimmy Carter (1977–81) found a better rapport. The late 1970s saw a more sympathetic American attitude toward Canadian political and economic needs, the pardoning of draft evaders who had moved to Canada, and the passing of old sore points such as Watergate and the Vietnam War. Canada more than ever welcomed American investments during the "stagflation" (high inflation and high unemployment at the same time) that hurt both nations in the 1970s.
In the election of 1979, Trudeau and the Liberals faced declining poll numbers and the Joe Clark–led Progressive Conservatives focusing on "pocketbook" issues. Trudeau and his advisors, to contrast with the mild-mannered Clark, based their campaign on Trudeau's decisive personality and his grasp of the Constitution file, despite the general public's apparent wariness of both. The traditional Liberal rally at Maple Leaf Gardens saw Trudeau stressing the importance of major constitutional reform to general ennui, and his campaign "photo-ops" were typically surrounded by picket lines and protesters. Though polls portended disaster, Clark's struggles justifying his party's populist platform and a strong Trudeau performance in the election debate helped bring the Liberals to the point of contention.
Though winning the popular vote by four points, the Liberal vote was concentrated in Québec and faltered in industrial Ontario, allowing the PCs to win the seat-count handily and form a minority government. Trudeau soon announced his intention to resign as Liberal Party leader and favoured Donald Macdonald to be his successor.
However, before a leadership convention could be held, with Trudeau's blessing and Allan MacEachen's manoeuvring in the house, the Liberals supported an NDP subamendment to Clark's budget stating that the House had no confidence in the budget. In Canada, as in most other countries with a Westminster system, budget votes are indirectly considered to be votes of confidence in the government, and their failure automatically brings down the government. Liberal and NDP votes and Social Credit abstentions led to the subamendment passing 139–133, thereby toppling Clark's government and triggering a new election for a House less than a year old. The Liberal caucus, along with friends and advisers persuaded Trudeau to stay on as leader and fight the election, with Trudeau's main impetus being the upcoming referendum on Québec sovereignty.
Trudeau and the Liberals engaged in a new strategy for the February 1980 election: facetiously called the "low bridge", it involved dramatically underplaying Trudeau's role and avoiding media appearances, to the point of refusing a televised debate. On election day Ontario returned to the Liberal fold, and Trudeau and the Liberals defeated Clark and won a majority government.
As a result of the February 18, 1980 Canadian federal election, the 32nd Canadian Parliament was controlled by a Liberal Party majority, led by Prime Minister Trudeau and the 22nd Canadian Ministry.
The Liberal victory in 1980 highlighted a sharp geographical divide in the country: the party had won no seats west of Manitoba. Trudeau, in an attempt to represent Western interests, offered to form a coalition government with Ed Broadbent's NDP, which had won 22 seats in the west, but was rebuffed by Broadbent out of fear the party would have no influence in a majority government.
The first challenge Trudeau faced upon re-election was the May 20, 1980 Quebec referendum on Québec sovereignty, called by the Parti Québécois government under René Lévesque. Trudeau immediately initiated federal involvement in the referendum, reversing the Clark government's policy of leaving the issue to the Québec Liberals and Claude Ryan. He appointed Jean Chrétien as the nominal spokesman for the federal government, helping to push the "Non" cause to working-class voters who tuned out the intellectual Ryan and Trudeau. Unlike Ryan and the Liberals, he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the referendum question, and noted that the "association" required consent from the other provinces.
In the debates in the legislature during the campaign leading up to the referendum Lévesque said that Trudeau's middle name was Scottish, and that Trudeau's aristocratic upbringing proved that he was more Scottish than French. A week prior to the referendum, Trudeau delivered one of his most well-known speeches, in which he extolled the virtues of federalism and questioned the ambiguous language of the referendum question. He described the origin of the name "Canadian". Trudeau promised a new constitutional agreement should Québec decide to stay in Canada, in which English-speaking Canadians would have to listen to valid concerns made by the Quebecois. On May 20, sixty percent of Quebecers voted to remain in Canada. Following the announcement of the results, Trudeau said that he "had never been so proud to be a Quebecer and a Canadian".
In their first budget, delivered in October 1980 by Trudeau's long-time loyalist, Finance Minister Allan MacEachen, the National Energy Program was introduced. It became one of the Liberal's most contentious policies. The NEP was fiercely protested by the Western provinces. The western provinces blamed the devastating oil bust of the 1980s on the NEB which led to what many termed "Western alienation". Peter Lougheed, then Premier of Alberta entered into tough negotiations with Trudeau and they reached a revenue-sharing agreement on energy in 1982.
This first budget, was one of a series of unpopular budgets delivered in response to the severe global economic recession which affected much of the developed world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In his budget speech, MacEachen said that the global oil price shocks—in 1973 and again in 1979—had caused a "sharp renewal of inflationary forces and real income losses" in Canada and in the industrial world...They are not just Canadian problems ... they are world-wide problems." Leaders of developed countries raised their concerns at the Venice Summit, at meetings of Finance Ministers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Bank of Canada wrote that there was a "deeply troubling air of uncertainty and anxiety" about the economy.
Amongst the policies introduced by Trudeau's last term in office were an expansion in government support for Canada's poorest citizens.
In 1982 Trudeau succeeded in repatriating the Constitution. The British Parliament passed an act ceding to the Canadian federal government, full responsibility for amending Canada's national charter. Earlier in his tenure, he had met with opposition from the provincial governments, most notably with the Victoria Charter. Provincial premiers were united in their concerns regarding an amending formula, a court-enforced Charter of Rights, and a further devolution of powers to the provinces. In 1980, Chrétien was tasked with creating a constitutional settlement following the Québec referendum in which Quebecers voted to remain in Canada.
After chairing a series of increasingly acrimonious conferences with first ministers on the issue, Trudeau announced the intention of the federal government to proceed with a request to the British parliament to patriate the constitution, with additions to be approved by a referendum without input from provincial governments. Trudeau was backed by the NDP, Ontario Premier Bill Davis, and New Brunswick Premier Richard Hatfield and was opposed by the remaining premiers and PC leader Joe Clark. After numerous provincial governments challenged the legality of the decision using their reference power, conflicting decisions prompted a Supreme Court decision that stated unilateral patriation was legal, but was in contravention of a constitutional convention that the provinces be consulted and have general agreement to the changes.
After the court decision, which prompted some reservations in the British parliament of accepting a unilateral request, Trudeau agreed to meet with the premiers one more time before proceeding. At the meeting, Trudeau reached an agreement with nine of the premiers on patriating the constitution and implementing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with the caveat that provincial legislatures would have the ability to use a notwithstanding clause to protect some laws from judicial oversight. The notable exception was Lévesque, who, Trudeau believed, would never have signed an agreement. The objection of the Québec government to the new constitution became a source of continued acrimony between the federal and Québec governments, and would forever stain Trudeau's reputation amongst nationalists in the province.
The "Canada Act", which included the "Constitution Act, 1982" and the "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms", was proclaimed by Queen Elizabeth II, as Queen of Canada, on April 17, 1982.
By 1984, the Progressive Conservatives held a substantial lead in opinion polls under their new leader Brian Mulroney, and polls indicated that the Liberals faced all-but-certain defeat if Trudeau led them into the next election.
On February 29, 1984, a day after what he described as a walk through the snowy streets of Ottawa, Trudeau announced he would not lead the Liberals into the next election. He was frequently known to use the term "walk in the snow" as a trope; he claimed to have taken a similar walk in December 1979 before deciding to take the Liberals into the 1980 election.
Trudeau formally retired on June 30, ending his 15-year tenure as Prime Minister. He was succeeded by John Turner, a former Cabinet minister under both Trudeau and Lester Pearson. Before handing power to Turner, Trudeau took the unusual step of appointing Liberal Senators from Western provinces to his Cabinet. He advised Governor General Jeanne Sauvé to appoint over 200 Liberals to patronage positions. He and Turner then crafted a legal agreement calling for Turner to advise an additional 70 patronage appointments. The sheer volume of appointments, combined with questions about the appointees' qualifications, led to condemnation from across the political spectrum. However, an apparent rebound in the polls prompted Turner to call an election for September 1984, almost a year before it was due.
Turner's appointment deal with Trudeau came back to haunt the Liberals at the English-language debate, when Mulroney demanded that Turner apologize for not advising that the appointments be canceled—advice that Sauvé would have been required to follow by convention. Turner claimed that "I had no option" but to let the appointments stand, prompting Mulroney to tell him, "You had an option, sir–to say 'no'–and you chose to say 'yes' to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party."
In the 1984 election, Mulroney won the largest majority government (by total number of seats) in Canadian history. The Liberals, with Turner as leader, lost 95 seats–at the time, the worst defeat of a sitting government at the federal level. In the 1993 Canadian federal election, the Progressive Conservatives faced a larger defeat, when cut to two seats.
Trudeau joined the Montreal law firm Heenan Blaikie as counsel and settled in the historic Maison Cormier in Montreal following his retirement from politics. Though he rarely gave speeches or spoke to the press, his interventions into public debate had a significant impact when they occurred. Trudeau wrote and spoke out against both the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord proposals to amend the Canadian constitution, arguing that they would weaken federalism and the Charter of Rights if implemented. His opposition to both Accords was considered one of the major factors leading to the defeat of the two proposals.
He also continued to speak against the Parti Québécois and the sovereignty movement with less effect.
Trudeau also remained active in international affairs, visiting foreign leaders and participating in international associations such as the Club of Rome. He met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders in 1985; shortly afterwards Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan to discuss easing world tensions.
He published his memoirs in 1993. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies in several editions, and became one of the most successful Canadian books ever published.
In his old age, he was afflicted with Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer, and became less active, although he continued to work at his law practice until a few months before his death at the age of 80. He was devastated by the death of his youngest son, Michel Trudeau, who was killed in an avalanche on November 13, 1998.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau died on September 28, 2000, and was buried in the Trudeau family crypt, St-Rémi-de-Napierville Cemetery, Saint-Rémi, Québec. His body lay in state in the Hall of Honour in Parliament Hill's Centre Block to allow Canadians to pay their last respects. Several world politicians, including former US President Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro, attended the funeral. His son Justin delivered the eulogy during the state funeral which led to widespread speculation in the media that a career in politics was in his future. Eventually, Justin did enter politics, was elected to the House of Commons in late 2008, became the leader of the federal Liberal Party in April 2013, and led the Liberals to victory on October 19, 2015. Justin Trudeau was appointed Prime Minister on November 4, 2015, the first time a father and son had both held the position in Canada.
Trudeau was a Roman Catholic and attended church throughout his life. While mostly private about his beliefs, he made it clear that he was a believer, stating, in an interview with the "United Church Observer" in 1971: "I believe in life after death, I believe in God and I'm a Christian." Trudeau maintained, however, that he preferred to impose constraints on himself rather than have them imposed from the outside. In this sense, he believed he was more like a Protestant than a Catholic of the era in which he was schooled.
Michael W. Higgins, a former President of Catholic St. Thomas University, researched Trudeau's spirituality and finds that it incorporated elements of three Catholic traditions. The first of these was the Jesuits who provided his education up to the college level. Trudeau frequently displayed the logic and love of argument consistent with that tradition. A second great spiritual influence in Trudeau's life was Dominican. According to Michel Gourgues, professor at Dominican University College, Trudeau "considered himself a lay Dominican". He studied philosophy under Dominican Father Louis-Marie Régis and remained close to him throughout his life, regarding Régis as "spiritual director and friend". Another skein in Trudeau's spirituality was a contemplative aspect acquired from his association with the Benedictine tradition. According to Higgins, Trudeau was convinced of the centrality of meditation in a life fully lived. Trudeau meditated regularly after being initiated into Transcendental Meditation by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He took retreats at Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Québec and regularly attended Hours and the Eucharist at Montreal's Benedictine community.
Although never publicly theological in the way of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, nor evangelical, in the way of Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush, Trudeau's spirituality, according to Michael W. Higgins, "suffused, anchored, and directed his inner life. In no small part, it defined him."
Described as a "swinging young bachelor" when he became prime minister, in 1968; Trudeau dated Hollywood star Barbra Streisand in 1969 and 1970. While a serious romantic relationship, there was no express marriage proposal, contrary to one contemporary published report.
On March 4, 1971, while Prime Minister, Trudeau quietly wed 22-year-old Margaret Sinclair, who was 29 years younger, at St. Stephen's Roman Catholic parish church in North Vancouver.
Contrary to his publicized exploits, Trudeau was an intense intellectual with robust work habits and little time for family or fun. As a result, Margaret felt trapped and bored in the marriage, feelings that were exacerbated by her bipolar depression, with which she was later diagnosed.
The couple had three sons: the first two, 23rd and current Prime Minister Justin (born 1971), and Alexandre (born 1973), were both born on Christmas Day two years apart. Their third son, Michel (1975–1998), died in an avalanche while skiing in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. They separated in 1977, and were finally divorced in 1984.
When his divorce was finalized in 1984, Trudeau became the first Canadian Prime Minister to become a single parent as the result of divorce. In 1984, Trudeau was romantically involved with Margot Kidder (a Canadian actress famous for her role as Lois Lane in "Superman: The Movie" and its sequels) in the last months of his prime-ministership and after leaving office.
In 1991, Trudeau became a father again, with Deborah Margaret Ryland Coyne, to his only daughter, Sarah. Coyne later stood for the 2013 Liberal Party of Canada leadership election and came fifth in a poll won by Justin.
Trudeau began practising the Japanese martial art judo sometime in the mid-1950s when he was in his mid-thirties, and by the end of the decade he was ranked "ikkyū" (brown belt). Later, when he travelled to Japan as Prime Minister, he was promoted to "shodan" (first-degree black belt) by the Kodokan, and then promoted to "nidan" (second-degree black belt) by Masao Takahashi in Ottawa before leaving office. Trudeau began the night of his famous "walk in the snow" before announcing his retirement in 1984 by going to judo with his sons.
Trudeau remains well regarded by many Canadians. However, the passage of time has only slightly softened the strong antipathy he inspired among his opponents. Trudeau's strong personality, contempt for his opponents and distaste for compromise on many issues have made him, as historian Michael Bliss puts it, "one of the most admired and most disliked of all Canadian prime ministers". "He haunts us still", biographers Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson wrote in 1990. Trudeau's electoral successes were matched in the 20th century only by those of Mackenzie King.
Trudeau's most enduring legacy may lie in his contribution to Canadian nationalism, and of pride in Canada in and for itself rather than as a derivative of the British Commonwealth. His role in this effort, and his related battles with Québec on behalf of Canadian unity, cemented his political position when in office despite the controversies he faced—and remain the most remembered aspect of his tenure afterwards.
Some consider Trudeau's economic policies to have been a weak point. Inflation and unemployment marred much of his tenure as prime minister. When Trudeau took office in 1968 Canada had a debt of $18 billion (24% of GDP) which was largely left over from World War II, when he left office in 1984, that debt stood at $200 billion (46% of GDP), an increase of 83% in real terms. However, these trends were present in most western countries at the time, including the United States.
Many politicians still use the term "taking a walk in the snow", the line Trudeau used to describe how he arrived at the decision to leave office in 1984. Other popular Trudeauisms frequently used are "just watch me", the "Trudeau Salute", and "Fuddle Duddle".
Maclean's 1997 and 2011 scholarly surveys ranked him twice as the fifth best Canadian prime minister.
One of Trudeau's most enduring legacies is the 1982 patriation of the Canadian constitution—which replaced Canada's ties to Britain with its own constitution, the 1982 "1982 Constitution Act".
This included a domestic amending formula and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is seen as advancing civil rights and liberties and has become a cornerstone of Canadian values for most Canadians. It also represented the final step in Trudeau's liberal vision of a fully independent Canada based on fundamental human rights and the protection of individual freedoms as well as those of linguistic and cultural minorities. Court challenges based on the Charter of Rights have been used to advance the cause of women's equality, re-establish French school boards in provinces such as Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to mandate the adoption of same-sex marriage all across Canada. Section 35 of the "Constitution Act, 1982", has clarified issues of aboriginal and equality rights, including establishing the previously denied aboriginal rights of Métis. Section 15, dealing with equality rights, has been used to remedy societal discrimination against minority groups. The coupling of the direct and indirect influences of the charter has meant that it has grown to influence every aspect of Canadian life and the override (notwithstanding clause) of the charter has been infrequently used.
Canadian conservatives claim the constitution has resulted in too much judicial activism on the part of the courts in Canada. It is also heavily criticized by Québec nationalists, who resent that the 1982 amendments to the constitution were never ratified by any Québec government and the constitution does not recognize a constitutional veto for Québec.
Bilingualism is one of Trudeau's most lasting accomplishments, having been fully integrated into the Federal government's services, documents, and broadcasting (though not, however, in provincial governments, except for Ontario, New Brunswick, and Manitoba). While official bilingualism has settled some of the grievances Francophones had towards the federal government, many Francophones had hoped that Canadians would be able to function in the official language of their choice no matter where in the country they were.
However, Trudeau's ambitions in this arena have been overstated: Trudeau once said that he regretted the use of the term "bilingualism", because it appeared to demand that all Canadians speak two languages. In fact, Trudeau's vision was to see Canada as a bilingual confederation in which "all" cultures would have a place. In this way, his conception broadened beyond simply the relationship of Québec to Canada.
On October 8, 1971, Pierre Trudeau introduced the Multiculturalism Policy in the House of Commons. It was the first of its kind in the world, and was then emulated in several provinces, such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and other countries most notably Australia, which has had a similar history and immigration pattern. Beyond the specifics of the policy itself, this action signalled an openness to the world and coincided with a more open immigration policy that had been brought in by Trudeau's predecessor Lester B. Pearson.
In the last years of his tenure, he ensured both the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization had proper homes in the national capital region. The Trudeau government also implemented programs which mandated Canadian content in film, and broadcasting, and gave substantial subsidies to develop the Canadian media and cultural industries. Though the policies remain controversial, Canadian media industries have become stronger since Trudeau's arrival.
Trudeau's posthumous reputation in the Western Provinces is notably less favourable than in the rest of English-speaking Canada, and he is sometimes regarded as the "father of Western alienation". To many westerners, Trudeau's policies seemed to favour other parts of the country, especially Ontario and Québec, at their expense. Outstanding among such policies was the National Energy Program, which was seen as unfairly depriving western provinces of the full economic benefit from their oil and gas resources, in order to pay for nationwide social programs, and make regional transfer payments to poorer parts of the country. Sentiments of this kind were especially strong in oil-rich Alberta where unemployment rose from 4% to 10% following passage of the NEP. Estimates have placed Alberta's losses between $50 billion and $100 billion because of the NEP.
More particularly, two incidents involving Trudeau are remembered as having fostered Western alienation, and as emblematic of it. During a visit to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on July 17, 1969, Trudeau met with a group of farmers who were protesting the Canadian Wheat Board. The widely remembered perception is that Trudeau dismissed the protesters' concerns with "Why should "I" sell your wheat?" – however, he had asked the question rhetorically and then proceeded to answer it himself. Years later, on a train trip through Salmon Arm, British Columbia, he "gave the finger" to a group of protesters through the carriage window less widely remembered is that the protesters were shouting anti-French slogans at the train.
Trudeau's legacy in Québec is mixed. Many credit his actions during the October Crisis as crucial in terminating the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) as a force in Québec, and ensuring that the campaign for Québec separatism took a democratic and peaceful route. However, his imposition of the "War Measures Act"—which received majority support at the time—is remembered by some in Québec and elsewhere as an attack on democracy. Trudeau is also credited by many for the defeat of the 1980 Quebec referendum.
At the federal level, Trudeau faced almost no strong political opposition in Québec during his time as Prime Minister. For instance, his Liberal party captured 74 out of 75 Québec seats in the 1980 federal election. Provincially, though, Québécois twice elected the pro-sovereignty Parti Québécois. Moreover, there were not at that time any pro-sovereignty federal parties such as the Bloc Québécois. Since the signing of the "Constitution Act, 1982" in 1982 and until 2015, the Liberal Party of Canada had not succeeded in winning a majority of seats in Québec. He was disliked by the Quebecois nationalists.
In 1969, Trudeau along with his then Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien, proposed the 1969 White Paper (officially entitled Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian policy). Under the legislation of the White Paper, Indian Status would be eliminated. First Nations Peoples would be incorporated fully into provincial government responsibilities as equal Canadian citizens, and reserve status would be removed imposing the laws of private property in indigenous communities. Any special programs or considerations that had been allowed to First Nations people under previous legislation would be terminated, as the special considerations were seen by the Government to act as a means to further separate Indian peoples from Canadian citizens. This proposal was seen by many as racist and an attack on Canada's aboriginal population. The Paper proposed the general assimilation of First Nations into the Canadian body politic through the elimination of the "Indian Act" and Indian status, the parcelling of reserve land to private owners, and the elimination of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. The White Paper prompted the first major national mobilization of Indian and Aboriginal activists against the federal government's proposal, leading to Trudeau setting aside the legislation.
Trudeau was a strong advocate for a federalist model of government in Canada, developing and promoting his ideas in response and contrast to strengthening Québec nationalist movements, for instance the social and political atmosphere created during Maurice Duplessis' time in power.
Federalism in this context can be defined as "a particular way of sharing political power among different peoples within a state...Those who believe in federalism hold that different peoples do not need states of their own in order to enjoy self-determination. Peoples ... may agree to share a single state while retaining substantial degrees of self-government over matters essential to their identity as peoples".
As a social democrat, Trudeau sought to combine and harmonize his theories on social democracy with those of federalism so that both could find effective expression in Canada. He noted the ostensible conflict between socialism, with its usually strong centralist government model, and federalism, which expounded a division and cooperation of power by both federal and provincial levels of government. In particular, Trudeau stated the following about socialists:
Trudeau pointed out that in sociological terms, Canada is inherently a federalist society, forming unique regional identities and priorities, and therefore a federalist model of spending and jurisdictional powers is most appropriate. He argues, "in the age of the mass society, it is no small advantage to foster the creation of quasi-sovereign communities at the provincial level, where power is that much less remote from the people."
Trudeau's idealistic plans for a cooperative Canadian federalist state were resisted and hindered as a result of his narrowness on ideas of identity and socio-cultural pluralism: "While the idea of a 'nation' in the sociological sense is acknowledged by Trudeau, he considers the allegiance which it generates—emotive and particularistic—to be contrary to the idea of cohesion between humans, and as such creating fertile ground for the internal fragmentation of states and a permanent state of conflict".
This position garnered significant criticism for Trudeau, in particular from Québec and First Nations peoples on the basis that his theories denied their rights to nationhood. First Nations communities raised particular concerns with the proposed 1969 White Paper, developed under Trudeau by Jean Chrétien.
Trudeau chose the following jurists to be appointed as justices of the Supreme Court of Canada by the Governor General:
According to Canadian protocol, as a former Prime Minister, he was styled "The Right Honourable" for life.
The following honours were bestowed upon him by the Governor General, or by Queen Elizabeth II herself:
Other honours include:
Trudeau received several Honorary Degrees in recognition of his political career.
Trudeau was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada on June 24, 1985. His citation reads:
Lawyer, professor, author and defender of human rights this statesman served as Prime Minister of Canada for fifteen years. Lending substance to the phrase "the style is the man," he has imparted, both in his and on the world stage, his quintessentially personal philosophy of modern politics.
In 1990, Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall published a major biography "Trudeau and Our Times" in two volumes. Volume 1, "The magnificent obsession" reprinted in 1997, was the winner of the Governor General's Award. The most recent reprint was in 2006.
Through hours of archival footage and interviews with Trudeau himself, the documentary "Memoirs" details the story of a man who used intelligence and charisma to bring together a country that was very nearly torn apart.
Trudeau's life was also depicted in two CBC Television mini-series. The first one, "Trudeau" (with Colm Feore in the title role), depicts his years as Prime Minister. "Trudeau II: Maverick in the Making" with Stéphane Demers as the young Pierre, and Tobie Pelletier as him in later years) portrays his earlier life.
The 1999 feature-length documentary by the National Film Board (NFB) entitled "" explores the impact of Trudeau's vision of Canadian bilingualism through interviews with eight Canadians—including John Duffy—on how Trudeau's concept of nationalism and bilingualism affected them personally in the 1970s.
In the documentary mini-series "The Champions" directed by Donald Brittain, Trudeau was the co-subject along with René Lévesque.
In 2001, the CBC produced a full-length documentary entitled "Reflections". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24507 |
Pencil
A pencil is an implement for writing or drawing, constructed of a narrow, solid pigment core in a protective casing that prevents the core from being broken and/or marking the user's hand.
Pencils create marks by physical abrasion, leaving a trail of solid core material that adheres to a sheet of paper or other surface. They are distinct from pens, which dispense liquid or gel ink onto the marked surface.
Most pencil cores are made of graphite powder mixed with a clay binder. Graphite pencils (traditionally known as "lead pencils") produce grey or black marks that are easily erased, but otherwise resistant to moisture, most chemicals, ultraviolet radiation and natural aging. Other types of pencil cores, such as those of charcoal, are mainly used for drawing and sketching. Coloured pencils are sometimes used by teachers or editors to correct submitted texts, but are typically regarded as art supplies—especially those with waxy core binders that tend to smear when erasers are applied to them. Grease pencils have a softer, crayon-like waxy core that can leave marks on smooth surfaces such as glass or porcelain.
The most common pencil casing is thin wood, usually hexagonal in section but sometimes cylindrical or triangular, permanently bonded to the core. Casings may be of other materials, such as plastic or paper. To use the pencil, the casing must be carved or peeled off to expose the working end of the core as a sharp point. Mechanical pencils have more elaborate casings which are not bonded to the core; instead, they support separate, mobile pigment cores that can be extended or retracted through the casing's tip as needed. These casings can be reloaded with new cores (usually graphite) as the previous ones are exhausted.
"Pencil", from Old French "pincel", from Latin a "little tail" (see "penis"; "pincellus" is Latin from the post-classical period) originally referred to an artist's fine brush of camel hair, also used for writing before modern lead or chalk pencils.
Though the archetypal pencil was an artist's brush, the stylus, a thin metal stick used for scratching in papyrus or wax tablets, was used extensively by the Romans and for palm-leaf manuscripts.
As a technique for drawing, the closest predecessor to the pencil was silverpoint until in 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), a large deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. It remains the only large-scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called "plumbago" (Latin for "lead ore"). Because the pencil core is still referred to as "lead", or "a lead", many people have the misconception that the graphite in the pencil is lead, and the black core of pencils is still referred to as "lead", even though it never contained the element lead. The words for pencil in German ("bleistift"), Irish ("peann luaidhe"), Arabic (قلم رصاص "qalam raṣāṣ"), and some other languages literally mean "lead pen".
The value of graphite would soon be realised to be enormous, mainly because it could be used to line the moulds for cannonballs; the mines were taken over by the Crown and were guarded. When sufficient stores of graphite had been accumulated, the mines were flooded to prevent theft until more was required.
The usefulness of graphite for pencils was discovered as well, but graphite for pencils had to be smuggled. Because graphite is soft, it requires some form of encasement. Graphite sticks were initially wrapped in string or sheepskin for stability. England would enjoy a monopoly on the production of pencils until a method of reconstituting the graphite powder was found in 1662 in Italy. However, the distinctively square English pencils continued to be made with sticks cut from natural graphite into the 1860s. The town of Keswick, near the original findings of block graphite, still manufactures pencils, the factory also being the location of the Cumberland Pencil Museum. The meaning of "graphite writing implement" apparently evolved late in the 16th century.
Around 1560, an Italian couple named Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti made what are likely the first blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil. Their version was a flat, oval, more compact type of pencil. Their concept involved the hollowing out of a stick of juniper wood. Shortly thereafter, a superior technique was discovered: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the halves then glued together—essentially the same method in use to this day.
The first attempt to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662. It used a mixture of graphite, sulphur, and antimony.
English and German pencils were not available to the French during the Napoleonic Wars; France, under naval blockade imposed by Great Britain, was unable to import the pure graphite sticks from the British Grey Knotts mines – the only known source in the world. France was also unable to import the inferior German graphite pencil substitute. It took the efforts of an officer in Napoleon's army to change this. In 1795, Nicolas-Jacques Conté discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mixture into rods that were then fired in a kiln. By varying the ratio of graphite to clay, the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied. This method of manufacture, which had been earlier discovered by the Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth, the founder of the Koh-I-Noor in 1790, remains in use. In 1802, the production of graphite leads from graphite and clay was patented by the Koh-I-Noor company in Vienna.
In England, pencils continued to be made from whole sawn graphite. Henry Bessemer's first successful invention (1838) was a method of compressing graphite powder into solid graphite thus allowing the waste from sawing to be reused.
American colonists imported pencils from Europe until after the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin advertised pencils for sale in his "Pennsylvania Gazette" in 1729, and George Washington used a three-inch pencil when he surveyed the Ohio Country in 1762. It is said that William Munroe, a cabinetmaker in Concord, Massachusetts, made the first American wood pencils in 1812. This was not the only pencil-making occurring in Concord. According to Henry Petroski, transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau discovered how to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite using clay as the binder; this invention was prompted by his father's pencil factory in Concord, which employed graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar.
Munroe's method of making pencils was painstakingly slow, and in the neighbouring town of Acton, a pencil mill owner named Ebenezer Wood set out to automate the process at his own pencil mill located at Nashoba Brook. He used the first circular saw in pencil production. He constructed the first of the hexagon- and octagon-shaped wooden casings. Ebenezer did not patent his invention and shared his techniques with anyone. One of those was Eberhard Faber of New York, who became the leader in pencil production.
Joseph Dixon, an inventor and entrepreneur involved with the Tantiusques graphite mine in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, developed a means to mass-produce pencils. By 1870, The Joseph Dixon Crucible Company was the world's largest dealer and consumer of graphite and later became the contemporary Dixon Ticonderoga pencil and art supplies company.
By the end of the 19th century, over 240,000 pencils were used each day in the US. The favoured timber for pencils was Red Cedar as it was aromatic and did not splinter when sharpened. In the early 20th century supplies of Red Cedar were dwindling so that pencil manufacturers were forced to recycle the wood from cedar fences and barns to maintain supply.
One effect of this was that "during World War II rotary pencil sharpeners were outlawed in Britain because they wasted so much scarce lead and wood, and pencils had to be sharpened in the more conservative manner – with knives."
It was soon discovered that Incense cedar, when dyed and perfumed to resemble Red Cedar, was a suitable alternative and most pencils today are made from this timber which is grown in managed forests. Over 14 billion pencils are manufactured worldwide annually. Less popular alternatives to cedar include basswood and alder.
In Southeast Asia, the wood Jelutong may be used to create pencils (though the use of this rainforest species is controversial). Environmentalists prefer the use of Pulai – another wood native to the region and used in pencil manufacturing.
On 30 March 1858, Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil. In 1862, Lipman sold his patent to Joseph Reckendorfer for $100,000, who went on to sue pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell for infringement. In 1875, the Supreme Court of the US ruled against Reckendorfer declaring the patent invalid.
Historian Henry Petroski notes that while ever more efficient means of mass production of pencils has driven the replacement cost of a pencil down, before this people would continue to use even the stub of a pencil. For those who "did not feel comfortable using a stub, pencil extenders were sold. These devices function something like a "porte-crayon"...the pencil stub can be inserted into the end of a shaft...Extenders were especially common among engineers and draftsmen, whose favorite pencils were priced dearly. The use of an extender also has the advantage that the pencil does not appreciably change its heft as it wears down." Artists currently use extenders to maximize the use of their colored pencils.
A standard, #2, hexagonal pencil is long.
There are also pencils which use mechanical methods to push lead through a hole at the end. These can be divided into two groups: propelling pencils use an internal mechanism to push the lead out from an internal compartment, while clutch pencils merely hold the lead in place (the lead is extended by releasing it and allowing some external force, usually gravity, to pull it out of the body). The erasers (sometimes replaced by a sharpener on pencils with larger lead sizes) are also removable (and thus replaceable), and usually cover a place to store replacement leads. Mechanical pencils are popular for their longevity and the fact that they may never need sharpening. Lead types are based on grade and size; with standard sizes being , , , , , , , , and (ISO 9175-1)—the size is available, but is not considered a standard ISO size.
Pioneered by Taiwanese stationery manufacturer Bensia Pioneer Industrial Corporation in the early 1970s, the product is also known as Bensia Pencils, stackable pencils or non-sharpening pencils. It is a type of pencil where many short pencil tips are housed in a cartridge-style plastic holder. A blunt tip is removed by pulling it from the writing end of the body and re-inserting it into the open-ended bottom of the body, thereby pushing a new tip to the top.
Invented by Harold Grossman for Empire Pencil Company in 1967 and subsequently improved upon by Arthur D. Little for Empire from 1969 through the early 1970s; the plastic pencil was commercialised by Empire as the "EPCON" Pencil. These pencils were co-extruded, extruding a plasticised graphite mix within a wood-composite core.
Residual graphite from a pencil stick is not poisonous, and graphite is harmless if consumed.
Although lead has not been used for writing since antiquity, lead poisoning from pencils was not uncommon. Until the middle of the 20th century the paint used for the outer coating could contain high concentrations of lead, and this could be ingested when the pencil was sucked or chewed.
The lead of the pencil is a mix of finely ground graphite and clay powders. Before the two substances are mixed, they are separately cleaned of foreign matter and dried in a manner that creates large square cakes. Once the cakes have fully dried, the graphite and the clay squares are mixed together using water. The amount of clay content added to the graphite depends on the intended pencil hardness (lower proportions of clay makes the core softer), and the amount of time spent on grinding the mixture determines the quality of the lead. The mixture is then shaped into long spaghetti-like strings, straightened, dried, cut, and then tempered in a kiln. The resulting strings are dipped in oil or molten wax, which seeps into the tiny holes of the material and allows for the smooth writing ability of the pencil. A juniper or incense-cedar plank with several long parallel grooves is cut to fashion a "slat," and the graphite/clay strings are inserted into the grooves. Another grooved plank is glued on top, and the whole assembly is then cut into individual pencils, which are then varnished or painted. Many pencils feature an eraser on the top and so the process is usually still considered incomplete at this point. Each pencil has a shoulder cut on one end of the pencil to allow for a metal ferrule to be secured onto the wood. A rubber plug is then inserted into the ferrule for a functioning eraser on the end of the pencil.
Graphite pencils are made of a mixture of clay and graphite and their darkness varies from light grey to black: the more clay the harder the pencil. There is a wide range of grades available, mainly for artists who are interested in creating a full range of tones from light grey to black. Engineers prefer harder pencils which allow for a greater control in the shape of the lead.
Manufacturers distinguish their pencils by grading them, but there is no common standard. Two pencils of the same grade but different manufacturers will not necessarily make a mark of identical tone nor have the same hardness.
Most manufacturers, and almost all in Europe, designate their pencils with the letters "H" (commonly interpreted as "hardness") to "B" (commonly "blackness"), as well as "F" (usually taken to mean "fineness", although F pencils are no more fine or more easily sharpened than any other grade. Also known as "firm" in Japan). The standard writing pencil is graded "HB". This designation was in use at least as early as 1844. It used "B" for black and "H" for hard; a pencil's grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as "BB" and "BBB" for successively softer leads, and "HH" and "HHH" for successively harder ones. The Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth pencil manufacturers claim to have first used the HB designations, with "H" standing for Hardtmuth, "B" for the company's location of Budějovice, and "F" for Franz Hardtmuth, who was responsible for technological improvements in pencil manufacture.
As of 2009, a set of pencils ranging from a very soft, black-marking pencil to a very hard, light-marking pencil usually ranges from softest to hardest as follows:
Koh-i-noor offers twenty grades from 10H to 8B for its 1500 series. Mitsubishi Pencil offers twenty-two grades from 10H to 10B for its Hi-uni range. Derwent produces twenty grades from 9H to 9B for its graphic pencils. Staedtler produces 24 from 10H to 12B for its Mars Lumograph pencils.
Numbers as designation were first used by Conté and later by John Thoreau, father of Henry David Thoreau, in the 19th century.
Although Conté/Thoreau's equivalence table is widely accepted, not all manufacturers follow it; for example, Faber-Castell uses a different equivalence table in its "Grip 2001" pencils: 1 = 2B, 2 = B, 2½ = HB, 3 = H, 4 = 2H.
Graded pencils can be used for a rapid test that provides relative ratings for a series of coated panels but can't be used to compare the pencil hardness of different coatings. This test defines a "pencil hardness" of a coating as the grade of the hardest pencil that does not permanently mark the coating when pressed firmly against it at a 45 degree angle. For standardized measurements, there are Mohs hardness testing pencils on the market.
The majority of pencils made in the US are painted yellow. According to Henry Petroski, this tradition began in 1890 when the L. & C. Hardtmuth Company of Austria-Hungary introduced their Koh-I-Noor brand, named after the famous diamond. It was intended to be the world's best and most expensive pencil, and at a time when most pencils were either painted in dark colours or not at all, the Koh-I-Noor was yellow.
As well as simply being distinctive, the colour may have been inspired by the Austro-Hungarian flag; it was also suggestive of the Orient at a time when the best-quality graphite came from Siberia. Other companies then copied the yellow colour so that their pencils would be associated with this high-quality brand, and chose brand names with explicit Oriental references, such as Mikado (renamed Mirado) and Mongol.
Not all countries use yellow pencils. German and Brazilian pencils, for example, are often green, blue or black, based on the trademark colours of Faber-Castell, a major German stationery company which has plants in those countries. In southern European countries, pencils tend to be dark red or black with yellow lines, while in Australia, they are red with black bands at one end. In India, the most common pencil colour scheme was dark red with black lines, and pencils with a large number of colour schemes are produced.
Pencils are commonly round, hexagonal, or sometimes triangular in section. Carpenters' pencils are typically oval or rectangular, so they cannot easily roll away during work.
The following table lists the prominent manufacturers of wood-cased (including wood-free) pencils around the world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24508 |
Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie (, ; ; 15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906) was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. In 1903, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
Born in Paris on 15 May 1859, Pierre Curie was the son of Eugene Curie (28 August 1827 – 25 February 1910), a doctor of French Huguenot Protestant origin from Alsace, and Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie (15 January 1832 – 27 September 1897). He was educated by his father and in his early teens showed a strong aptitude for mathematics and geometry. When he was 16, he earned his math degree. By the age of 18, he earned a higher degree, but did not proceed immediately to a doctorate due to lack of money. Instead, he worked as a laboratory instructor. When Pierre Curie was preparing for his bachelor of science degree, he worked in the laboratory of Jean-Gustave Bourbouze in the Faculty of Science.
In 1880, Pierre and his older brother Jacques (1856–1941) demonstrated that an electric potential was generated when crystals were compressed, i.e. piezoelectricity. To aid this work they invented the piezoelectric quartz electrometer. The following year they demonstrated the reverse effect: that crystals could be made to deform when subject to an electric field. Almost all digital electronic circuits now rely on this in the form of crystal oscillators. In subsequent work on magnetism Pierre Curie defined the Curie scale. This work also involved delicate equipment - balances, electrometers, etc.
Pierre Curie was introduced to Maria Skłodowska by their friend, physicist Józef Wierusz-Kowalski. Curie took her into his laboratory as his student. His admiration for her grew when he realized that she would not inhibit his research. He began to regard Skłodowska as his muse. She refused his initial proposal, but finally agreed to marry him on 26 July 1895.
The Curies had a happy, affectionate marriage, and they were known for their devotion to each other.
Before his famous doctoral studies on magnetism, he designed and perfected an extremely sensitive torsion balance for measuring magnetic coefficients. Variations on this equipment were commonly used by future workers in that area. Pierre Curie studied ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, and diamagnetism for his doctoral thesis, and discovered the effect of temperature on paramagnetism which is now known as Curie's law. The material constant in Curie's law is known as the Curie constant. He also discovered that ferromagnetic substances exhibited a critical temperature transition, above which the substances lost their ferromagnetic behavior. This is now known as the Curie temperature. The Curie temperature is used to study plate tectonics, treat hypothermia, measure caffeine, and to understand extraterrestrial magnetic fields.
Pierre Curie formulated what is now known as the "Curie Dissymmetry Principle": a physical effect cannot have a dissymmetry absent from its efficient cause. For example, a random mixture of sand in zero gravity has no dissymmetry (it is isotropic). Introduce a gravitational field, and there is a dissymmetry because of the direction of the field. Then the sand grains can 'self-sort' with the density increasing with depth. But this new arrangement, with the directional arrangement of sand grains, actually reflects the dissymmetry of the gravitational field that causes the separation.
Curie worked with his wife in isolating polonium and radium. They were the first to use the term "radioactivity", and were pioneers in its study. Their work, including Marie Curie's celebrated doctoral work, made use of a sensitive piezoelectric electrometer constructed by Pierre and his brother Jacques Curie. Pierre Curie's 1898 publication with his wife Mme. Curie and also with M. G. Bémont for their discovery of radium and polonium was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society presented to the ESPCI ParisTech (officially the École supérieure de physique et de Chimie industrielles de la Ville de Paris) in 2015.
Curie and one of his students, Albert Laborde, made the first discovery of nuclear energy, by identifying the continuous emission of heat from radium particles. Curie also investigated the radiation emissions of radioactive substances, and through the use of magnetic fields was able to show that some of the emissions were positively charged, some were negative and some were neutral. These correspond to alpha, beta and gamma radiation.
The curie is a unit of radioactivity (3.7 × 1010 decays per second or 37 gigabecquerels) originally named in honor of Curie by the Radiology Congress in 1910, after his death. Subsequently, there has been some controversy over whether the naming was in honor of Pierre, Marie, or both.
In the late nineteenth century, Pierre Curie was investigating the mysteries of ordinary magnetism when he became aware of the spiritualist experiments of other European scientists, such as Charles Richet and Camille Flammarion. Pierre Curie initially thought the systematic investigation into the paranormal could help with some unanswered questions about magnetism. He wrote to his fiancée Marie: "I must admit that those spiritual phenomena intensely interest me. I think they are questions that deal with physics." Pierre Curie's notebooks from this period show he read many books on spiritualism. He did not attend séances such as those of Eusapia Palladino in Paris in 1905–06 as a mere spectator, and his goal certainly was not to communicate with spirits. He saw the séances as scientific experiments, tried to monitor different parameters, and took detailed notes of every observation. Despite studying spiritualism, Curie was an atheist.
Pierre and Marie Curie's daughter, Irène, and their son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, were also physicists involved in the study of radioactivity, and each received Nobel prizes for their work as well. The Curies' other daughter, Ève, wrote a noted biography of her mother. She was the only member of the Curie family to not become a physicist. Ève married Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., who received a Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Unicef in 1965. Pierre and Marie Curie's granddaughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, is a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Paris, and their grandson, Pierre Joliot, who was named after Pierre Curie, is a noted biochemist.
Pierre Curie died in a street accident in Paris on 19 April 1906. Crossing the busy Rue Dauphine in the rain at the Quai de Conti, he slipped and fell under a heavy horse-drawn cart. He died instantly when one of the wheels ran over his head, fracturing his skull. Statements made by his father and lab assistant imply that Curie's characteristic absent-minded preoccupation with his thoughts contributed to his death.
Both the Curies experienced radium burns, both accidentally and voluntarily, and were exposed to extensive doses of radiation while conducting their research. They experienced radiation sickness and Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia in 1934. Even now, all their papers from the 1890s, even her cookbooks, are too dangerous to touch. Their laboratory books are kept in special lead boxes and people who want to see them have to wear protective clothing. Had Pierre Curie not been killed as he was, it is likely that he would have eventually died of the effects of radiation, as did his wife, their daughter Irène, and her husband Frédéric Joliot.
In April 1995, Pierre and Marie Curie were moved from their original resting place, a family cemetery, and enshrined in the crypt of the Panthéon in Paris. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24509 |
Pushdown automaton
In the theory of computation, a branch of theoretical computer science, a pushdown automaton (PDA) is
a type of automaton that employs a stack.
Pushdown automata are used in theories about what can be computed by machines. They are more capable than finite-state machines but less capable than Turing machines.
Deterministic pushdown automata can recognize all deterministic context-free languages while nondeterministic ones can recognize all context-free languages, with the former often used in parser design.
The term "pushdown" refers to the fact that the stack can be regarded as being "pushed down" like a tray dispenser at a cafeteria, since the operations never work on elements other than the top element. A stack automaton, by contrast, does allow access to and operations on deeper elements. Stack automata can recognize a strictly larger set of languages than pushdown automata.
A nested stack automaton allows full access, and also allows stacked values to be entire sub-stacks rather than just single finite symbols.
A finite-state machine just looks at the input signal and the current state: it has no stack to work with. It chooses a new state, the result of following the transition. A pushdown automaton (PDA) differs from a finite state machine in two ways:
A pushdown automaton reads a given input string from left to right. In each step, it chooses a transition by indexing a table by input symbol, current state, and the symbol at the top of the stack. A pushdown automaton can also manipulate the stack, as part of performing a transition. The manipulation can be to push a particular symbol to the top of the stack, or to pop off the top of the stack. The automaton can alternatively ignore the stack, and leave it as it is.
Put together: Given an input symbol, current state, and stack symbol, the automaton can follow a transition to another state, and optionally manipulate (push or pop) the stack.
If, in every situation, at most one such transition action is possible, then the automaton is called a deterministic pushdown automaton (DPDA). In general, if several actions are possible, then the automaton is called a general, or nondeterministic, PDA. A given input string may drive a nondeterministic pushdown automaton to one of several configuration sequences; if one of them leads to an accepting configuration after reading the complete input string, the latter is said to belong to the "language accepted by the automaton".
We use standard formal language notation: formula_1 denotes the set of finite-length strings over alphabet formula_2 and formula_3 denotes the empty string.
A PDA is formally defined as a 7-tuple:
formula_4
where
An element formula_13 is a transition of formula_14. It has the intended meaning that formula_14, in state formula_16, on the input formula_17 and with formula_18 as topmost stack symbol, may read formula_19, change the state to formula_20, pop formula_21, replacing it by pushing formula_22. The formula_23 component of the transition relation is used to formalize that the PDA can either read a letter from the input, or proceed leaving the input untouched.
In many texts the transition relation is replaced by an (equivalent) formalization, where
Here formula_27 contains all possible actions in state formula_28 with formula_21 on the stack, while reading formula_19 on the input. One writes for example formula_31 precisely when formula_32 because formula_33. Note that "finite" in this definition is essential.
In order to formalize the semantics of the pushdown automaton a description of the current situation is introduced. Any 3-tuple formula_34 is called an instantaneous description (ID) of formula_14, which includes the current state, the part of the input tape that has not been read, and the contents of the stack (topmost symbol written first). The transition relation formula_8 defines the step-relation formula_37 of formula_14 on instantaneous descriptions. For instruction formula_13 there exists a step formula_40, for every formula_41 and every formula_42.
In general pushdown automata are nondeterministic meaning that in a given instantaneous description formula_43 there may be several possible steps. Any of these steps can be chosen in a computation.
With the above definition in each step always a single symbol (top of the stack) is popped, replacing it with as many symbols as necessary. As a consequence no step is defined when the stack is empty.
Computations of the pushdown automaton are sequences of steps. The computation starts in the initial state formula_44 with the initial stack symbol formula_45 on the stack, and a string formula_46 on the input tape, thus with initial description formula_47.
There are two modes of accepting. The pushdown automaton either accepts by final state, which means after reading its input the automaton reaches an accepting state (in formula_48), or it accepts by empty stack (formula_3), which means after reading its input the automaton empties its stack. The first acceptance mode uses the internal memory (state), the second the external memory (stack).
Formally one defines
Here formula_55 represents the reflexive and transitive closure of the step relation formula_56 meaning any number of consecutive steps (zero, one or more).
For each single pushdown automaton these two languages need to have no relation: they may be equal but usually this is not the case. A specification of the automaton should also include the intended mode of acceptance. Taken over all pushdown automata both acceptance conditions define the same family of languages.
Theorem. For each pushdown automaton formula_14 one may construct a pushdown automaton formula_58 such that formula_59, and vice versa, for each pushdown automaton formula_14 one may construct a pushdown automaton formula_58 such that formula_62
The following is the formal description of the PDA which recognizes the language formula_63 by final state:
formula_64, where
The transition relation formula_8 consists of the following six instructions:
In words, the first two instructions say that in state any time the symbol is read, one is pushed onto the stack. Pushing symbol on top of another is formalized as replacing top by (and similarly for pushing symbol on top of a ).
The third and fourth instructions say that, at any moment the automaton may move from state to state .
The fifth instruction says that in state , for each symbol read, one is popped.
Finally, the sixth instruction says that the machine may move from state to accepting state only when the stack consists of a single .
There seems to be no generally used representation for PDA. Here we have depicted the instruction formula_77 by an edge from state to state labelled by formula_78 (read ; replace by formula_79).
The following illustrates how the above PDA computes on different input strings. The subscript from the step symbol formula_80 is here omitted.
Every context-free grammar can be transformed into an equivalent nondeterministic pushdown automaton. The derivation process of the grammar is simulated in a leftmost way. Where the grammar rewrites a nonterminal, the PDA takes the topmost nonterminal from its stack and replaces it by the right-hand part of a grammatical rule ("expand"). Where the grammar generates a terminal symbol, the PDA reads a symbol from input when it is the topmost symbol on the stack ("match"). In a sense the stack of the PDA contains the unprocessed data of the grammar, corresponding to a pre-order traversal of a derivation tree.
Technically, given a context-free grammar, the PDA has a single state, 1, and its transition relation is constructed as follows.
The PDA accepts by empty stack. Its initial stack symbol is the grammar's start symbol.
For a context-free grammar in Greibach normal form, defining (1,γ) ∈ δ(1,"a","A") for each grammar rule "A" → "a"γ also yields an equivalent nondeterministic pushdown automaton.
The converse, finding a grammar for a given PDA, is not that easy. The trick is to code two states of the PDA into the nonterminals of the grammar.
Theorem. For each pushdown automaton formula_14 one may construct a context-free grammar formula_86 such that formula_87.
The language of strings accepted by a deterministic pushdown automaton is called a deterministic context-free language. Not all context-free languages are deterministic. As a consequence, the DPDA is a strictly weaker variant of the PDA
A finite automaton with access to two stacks is a more powerful device, equivalent in power to a Turing machine. A linear bounded automaton is a device which is more powerful than a pushdown automaton but less so than a Turing machine.
A GPDA is a PDA which writes an entire string of some known length to the stack or removes an entire string from the stack in one step.
A GPDA is formally defined as a 6-tuple:
where formula_89, and are defined the same way as a PDA.
is the transition function.
Computation rules for a GPDA are the same as a PDA except that the formula_92's and formula_93's are now strings instead of symbols.
GPDA's and PDA's are equivalent in that if a language is recognized by a PDA, it is also recognized by a GPDA and vice versa.
One can formulate an analytic proof for the equivalence of GPDA's and PDA's using the following simulation:
Let formula_94 be a transition of the GPDA
where formula_95.
Construct the following transitions for the PDA:
As a generalization of pushdown automata, Ginsburg, Greibach, and Harrison (1967) investigated stack automata, which may additionally step left or right in the input string (surrounded by special endmarker symbols to prevent slipping out), and step up or down in the stack in read-only mode.
A stack automaton is called "nonerasing" if it never pops from the stack. The class of languages accepted by nondeterministic, nonerasing stack automata is "NSPACE"("n"2), which is a superset of the context-sensitive languages. The class of languages accepted by deterministic, nonerasing stack automata is "DSPACE"("n"⋅log("n")).
An alternating pushdown automaton (APDA) is a pushdown automaton with a state set
States in formula_99 and formula_100 are called "existential" resp. "universal". In an existential state an APDA nondeterministically chooses the next state and accepts if "at least one" of the resulting computations accepts. In a universal state APDA moves to all next states and accepts if "all" the resulting computations accept.
The model was introduced by Chandra, Kozen and Stockmeyer. Ladner, Lipton and Stockmeyer proved that this model is equivalent to EXPTIME i.e. a language is accepted by some APDA if, and only if, it can be decided by an exponential-time algorithm.
Aizikowitz and Kaminski introduced "synchronized alternating pushdown automata" (SAPDA) that are equivalent to conjunctive grammars in the same way as nondeterministic PDA are equivalent to context-free grammars. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24510 |
Protein primary structure
Protein primary structure is the linear sequence of amino acids in a peptide or protein. By convention, the primary structure of a protein is reported starting from the amino-terminal (N) end to the carboxyl-terminal (C) end. Protein biosynthesis is most commonly performed by ribosomes in cells. Peptides can also be synthesized in the laboratory. Protein primary structures can be directly sequenced, or inferred from DNA sequences.
Amino acids are polymerised via peptide bonds to form a long backbone, with the different amino acid side chains protruding along it. In biological systems, proteins are produced during translation by a cell's ribosomes. Some organisms can also make short peptides by non-ribosomal peptide synthesis, which often use amino acids other than the standard 20, and may be cyclised, modified and cross-linked.
Peptides can be synthesised chemically via a range of laboratory methods. Chemical methods typically synthesise peptides in the opposite order (starting at the C-terminus) to biological protein synthesis (starting at the N-terminus).
Protein sequence is typically notated as a string of letters, listing the amino acids starting at the amino-terminal end through to the carboxyl-terminal end. Either a three letter code or single letter code can be used to represent the 20 naturally occurring amino acids, as well as mixtures or ambiguous amino acids (similar to nucleic acid notation).
Peptides can be directly sequenced, or inferred from DNA sequences. Large sequence databases now exist that collate known protein sequences.
In general, polypeptides are unbranched polymers, so their primary structure can often be specified by the sequence of amino acids along their backbone. However, proteins can become cross-linked, most commonly by disulfide bonds, and the primary structure also requires specifying the cross-linking atoms, e.g., specifying the cysteines involved in the protein's disulfide bonds. Other crosslinks include desmosine.
The chiral centers of a polypeptide chain can undergo racemization. Although it does not change the sequence, it does affect the chemical properties of the sequence. In particular, the L-amino acids normally found in proteins can spontaneously isomerize at the formula_1 atom to form D-amino acids, which cannot be cleaved by most proteases. Additionally, proline can form stable trans-isomers at the peptide bond.
Finally, the protein can undergo a variety of posttranslational modifications, which are briefly summarized here.
The N-terminal amino group of a polypeptide can be modified covalently, e.g.,
The C-terminal carboxylate group of a polypeptide can also be modified, e.g.,
Finally, the peptide side chains can also be modified covalently, e.g.,
Most of the polypeptide modifications listed above occur "post-translationally", i.e., after the protein has been synthesized on the ribosome, typically occurring in the endoplasmic reticulum, a subcellular organelle of the eukaryotic cell.
Many other chemical reactions (e.g., cyanylation) have been applied to proteins by chemists, although they are not found in biological systems.
In addition to those listed above, the most important modification of primary structure is peptide cleavage (by chemical hydrolysis or by proteases). Proteins are often synthesized in an inactive precursor form; typically, an N-terminal or C-terminal segment blocks the active site of the protein, inhibiting its function. The protein is activated by cleaving off the inhibitory peptide.
Some proteins even have the power to cleave themselves. Typically, the hydroxyl group of a serine (rarely, threonine) or the thiol group of a cysteine residue will attack the carbonyl carbon of the preceding peptide bond, forming a tetrahedrally bonded intermediate [classified as a hydroxyoxazolidine (Ser/Thr) or hydroxythiazolidine (Cys) intermediate]. This intermediate tends to revert to the amide form, expelling the attacking group, since the amide form is usually favored by free energy, (presumably due to the strong resonance stabilization of the peptide group). However, additional molecular interactions may render the amide form less stable; the amino group is expelled instead, resulting in an ester (Ser/Thr) or thioester (Cys) bond in place of the peptide bond. This chemical reaction is called an N-O acyl shift.
The ester/thioester bond can be resolved in several ways:
The proposal that proteins were linear chains of α-amino acids was made nearly simultaneously by two scientists at the same conference in 1902, the 74th meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, held in Karlsbad. Franz Hofmeister made the proposal in the morning, based on his observations of the biuret reaction in proteins. Hofmeister was followed a few hours later by Emil Fischer, who had amassed a wealth of chemical details supporting the peptide-bond model. For completeness, the proposal that proteins contained amide linkages was made as early as 1882 by the French chemist E. Grimaux.
Despite these data and later evidence that proteolytically digested proteins yielded only oligopeptides, the idea that proteins were linear, unbranched polymers of amino acids was not accepted immediately. Some well-respected scientists such as William Astbury doubted that covalent bonds were strong enough to hold such long molecules together; they feared that thermal agitations would shake such long molecules asunder. Hermann Staudinger faced similar prejudices in the 1920s when he argued that rubber was composed of macromolecules.
Thus, several alternative hypotheses arose. The colloidal protein hypothesis stated that proteins were colloidal assemblies of smaller molecules. This hypothesis was disproved in the 1920s by ultracentrifugation measurements by Theodor Svedberg that showed that proteins had a well-defined, reproducible molecular weight and by electrophoretic measurements by Arne Tiselius that indicated that proteins were single molecules. A second hypothesis, the cyclol hypothesis advanced by Dorothy Wrinch, proposed that the linear polypeptide underwent a chemical cyclol rearrangement C=O + HN formula_8 C(OH)-N that crosslinked its backbone amide groups, forming a two-dimensional "fabric". Other primary structures of proteins were proposed by various researchers, such as the diketopiperazine model of Emil Abderhalden and the pyrrol/piperidine model of Troensegaard in 1942. Although never given much credence, these alternative models were finally disproved when Frederick Sanger successfully sequenced insulin and by the crystallographic determination of myoglobin and hemoglobin by Max Perutz and John Kendrew.
Any linear-chain heteropolymer can be said to have a "primary structure" by analogy to the usage of the term for proteins, but this usage is rare compared to the extremely common usage in reference to proteins. In RNA, which also has extensive secondary structure, the linear chain of bases is generally just referred to as the "sequence" as it is in DNA (which usually forms a linear double helix with little secondary structure). Other biological polymers such as polysaccharides can also be considered to have a primary structure, although the usage is not standard.
The primary structure of a biological polymer to a large extent determines the three-dimensional shape (tertiary structure). Protein sequence can be used to predict local features, such as segments of secondary structure, or trans-membrane regions. However, the complexity of protein folding currently prohibits predicting the tertiary structure of a protein from its sequence alone. Knowing the structure of a similar homologous sequence (for example a member of the same protein family) allows highly accurate prediction of the tertiary structure by homology modeling. If the full-length protein sequence is available, it is possible to estimate its general biophysical properties, such as its isoelectric point.
Sequence families are often determined by sequence clustering, and structural genomics projects aim to produce a set of representative structures to cover the sequence space of possible non-redundant sequences. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24511 |
Peter principle
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was elucidated in the book "The Peter Principle" (William Morrow and Company, 1969) by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull.
Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. Hull wrote the text, based on Peter's research. The Peter principle has been the subject of much subsequent commentary and research.
The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at a job will earn promotion to a more senior position which requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, he or she will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again. If the person is competent in the new role, he or she will be promoted again, and will continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which he or she is incompetent. Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at that final level (termed "Final Placement" or "Peter's Plateau"). This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and assuming that there are enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted. The "Peter Principle" is therefore expressed as: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." This leads to Peter's Corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties." Hull calls the study of how hierarchies work "hierarchiology."
Laurence J. Peter's research led to the formulation of the Peter principle well before publishing his findings. He worked with Raymond Hull on a book that elucidated his observations about hierarchies. The principle is named for Peter because although Hull actually wrote the book, it is a summary of Peter's research. "The Peter Principle" was published by William Morrow and Company in 1969.
In chapters 1 and 2, Peter and Hull give various examples of the Peter principle in action. In each case, the higher position required skills which were not required at the level immediately below. For example, a competent school teacher may make a competent assistant principal, but then go on to be an incompetent principal. The teacher was competent at educating children, and as assistant principal he was good at dealing with parents and other teachers, but as principal he was poor at maintaining good relations with the school board and the superintendent.
In chapter 3, Peter and Hull discuss apparent exceptions to this principle and then debunk them. One of these illusory exceptions is when someone who is incompetent is still promoted anyway. They coin the phrase "percussive sublimation" for this phenomenon of being "kicked upstairs". But it is only a pseudo-promotion: a move from one unproductive position to another. This improves staff morale, as other employees believe that they too can be promoted again. Another pseudo-promotion is the ""lateral arabesque"", when a person is moved out of the way and given a longer job title.
While incompetence is merely a barrier to further promotion, "super-incompetence" is grounds for dismissal. So is super-competence. In both cases "they tend to disrupt the hierarchy." One example of a super-competent employee is a teacher of children with special needs who was so effective at educating them that after a year they exceeded all expectations at reading and arithmetic, but the teacher was still fired because he had neglected to devote enough time to bead-stringing and finger-painting.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the methods of achieving promotion: "Push" and "Pull." Push means the employee's own efforts, such as working hard and taking self-improvement courses. This is usually not very effective, because of the Seniority Factor: the next level up is often fully occupied, blocking the path to promotion. Pull is far more effective, and refers to accelerated promotion brought about by the efforts of an employee's mentors or patrons.
Chapter 6 explains why "good followers do not become good leaders." In chapter 7, Peter and Hull describe the effect of the Peter Principle in politics and government. Chapter 8, entitled "Hints and Foreshadowings", discusses the work of earlier writers on the subject of incompetence, such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Alexander Pope.
Chapter 9 explains that once employees have reached their level of incompetence, they always lack insight into their situation. Peter and Hull go on to explain why aptitude tests do not work and are actually counter-productive. Finally, they describe "Summit Competence": when someone reaches the highest level in their organisation and yet is still competent at that level. This is only because there were not enough ranks in the hierarchy, or because they did not have time to reach a level of incompetence. Such people often seek a level of incompetence in another hierarchy. For example, Socrates was an outstanding teacher but a terrible defence attorney. This is known as "Compulsive Incompetence."
Chapter 10 explains why trying to assist an incompetent employee by promoting another employee to act as his assistant does not work. ""Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.""
Chapters 11 and 12 describe the various medical and psychological manifestations of stress which may result when someone reaches his level of incompetence, as well as other symptoms such as certain characteristic habits of speech or behaviour.
Chapter 13 considers whether it is possible for an employee who has reached his level of incompetence to be happy and healthy once he gets there. The answer is no, if he realises his true situation, and yes if he does not.
In chapter 14 various ways of avoiding promotion to the final level are described. Attempting to refuse an offered promotion is ill-advised, and is only practicable if the employee is not married and has no one else to answer to. Generally it is better to avoid being considered for promotion in the first place, by pretending to be incompetent while one is actually still employed at a level of competence. This is "Creative Incompetence," and several examples of successful techniques are given. It works best if the chosen field of incompetence does not actually impair one's work.
The concluding chapter applies Peter's Principle to the entire human species at an evolutionary level, and asks whether humanity can survive in the long run, or will become extinct upon reaching its level of incompetence as technology advances.
Other commenters made observations similar to the Peter principle long before Peter's research. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1763 play "Minna von Barnhelm" features an army sergeant who shuns the opportunity to move up in the ranks, saying "I am a good sergeant; I might easily make a bad captain, and certainly an even worse general. One knows from experience." Similarly, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) wrote that "there is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal." Closely echoing Peter, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) wrote, "All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent."
A number of scholars have engaged in research interpreting the Peter principle and its effects. In 2000, Edward Lazear explored two possible explanations for the phenomenon. First is the idea that employees work harder to gain a promotion, and then slack off once it is achieved. The other is that it is a statistical process: workers who are promoted have passed a particular benchmark of productivity based on factors that cannot necessarily be replicated in their new role, leading to a Peter principle situation. Lazear concluded that the former explanation only occurs under particular compensation structures, whereas the latter always holds up.
Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo used an agent-based modelling approach to simulate the promotion of employees in a system where the Peter principle is assumed to be true. They found that the best way to improve efficiency in an enterprise is to promote people randomly, or to shortlist the best and the worst performer in a given group, from which the person to be promoted is then selected randomly. For this work, they won the 2010 edition of the parody Ig Nobel Prize in management science.
In 2018, professors Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue analyzed sales workers' performance and promotion practices at 214 American businesses to test the veracity of the Peter principle. They found that these companies tended to promote employees to management position based on their performance in their previous position, rather than based on managerial potential. Consistent with the Peter principle, the researchers found that high performing sales employees were likelier to be promoted, and that they were likelier to perform poorly as managers, leading to considerable costs to the businesses.
The Peter principle inspired Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip "Dilbert", to develop a similar concept, the Dilbert principle. The Dilbert principle holds that incompetent employees are promoted to management positions to get them out of the workflow. Adams explained the idea in his 1996 business book "The Dilbert Principle", and it has since been analyzed alongside the Peter principle. João Ricardo Faria wrote that the Dilbert principle is "a sub-optimal version of the Peter principle," and leads to even lower profitability than the Peter principle.
Companies and organizations shaped their policies to contend with the Peter principle. Lazear stated that some companies expect that productivity will "regress to the mean" following promotion in their hiring and promotion practices. Other companies have adopted "up or out" strategies, such as the Cravath System, in which employees who do not advance are periodically fired. The Cravath System was developed at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which made a practice of hiring chiefly recent law graduates, promoting internally and firing employees who do not perform at the required level. Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have suggested the additive increase/multiplicative decrease algorithm as a solution to the Peter principle less severe than firing employees who fail to advance. They propose a dynamic hierarchy in which employees are regularly either promoted or reassigned to a lower level, so that any worker who is promoted to their point of failure is soon moved to an area where they are productive. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24512 |
Platonic realism
Platonic realism is the philosophical position that universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds. It is named after the Greek philosopher Plato who applied realism to such universals, which he considered ideal forms. This stance is ambiguously also called Platonic idealism but should not be confused with idealism as presented by philosophers such as George Berkeley: as Platonic abstractions are not spatial, temporal, or mental, they are not compatible with the later idealism's emphasis on mental existence. Plato's Forms include numbers and geometrical figures, making them a theory of mathematical realism; they also include the Form of the Good, making them in addition a theory of ethical realism.
Plato expounded his own articulation of realism regarding the existence of universals in his dialogue "The Republic" and elsewhere, notably in the "Phaedo", the "Phaedrus", the "Meno" and the "Parmenides".
In Platonic realism, "universals" do not exist in the way that ordinary physical objects exist, even though Plato metaphorically referred to such objects in order to explain his concepts. More modern versions of the theory seek to avoid applying potentially misleading descriptions to universals. Instead, such versions maintain that it is meaningless (or a category mistake) to apply the categories of space and time to "universals".
Regardless of their description, Platonic realism holds that "universals" do exist in a broad, abstract sense, although not at any spatial or temporal distance from people's bodies. Thus, people cannot see or otherwise come into sensory contact with universals, but in order to conceive of universals, one must be able to conceive of these abstract forms.
Theories of universals, including Platonic realism, are challenged to satisfy certain constraints on theories of "universals".
Platonic realism satisfies one of those constraints, in that it is a theory of what general terms refer to. "Forms" are ideal in supplying meaning to referents for general terms. That is, to understand terms such as "applehood" and "redness", Platonic realism says that they refer to forms. Indeed, Platonism gets much of its plausibility because mentioning "redness", for example, could be assumed to be referring to something that is apart from space and time, but which has lots of specific instances.
Some contemporary linguistic philosophers construe "Platonism" to mean the proposition that universals exist independently of particulars (a universal is anything that can be predicated of a particular). Similarly, a form of modern Platonism is found in the philosophy of mathematics, especially regarding the foundations of mathematics. The Platonic interpretation of this philosophy includes the thesis that mathematics is discovered rather than created.
Plato's interpretation of universals is linked to his "Theory of Forms" in which he uses both the terms ("eidos": "form") and ("idea": "characteristic") to describe his theory. Forms are mind independent abstract objects or paradigms (παραδείγματα: "patterns in nature") of which particular objects and the properties and relations present in them are copies. Form is inherent in the particulars and these are said to "participate in" the form. Classically "idea" has been translated (or transliterated) as "idea," but secondary literature now typically employs the term "form" (or occasionally "kind," usually in discussion of Plato's "Sophist" and "Statesman") to avoid confusion with the English word connoting "thought".
Platonic form can be illustrated by contrasting a material triangle with an ideal triangle. The Platonic form is the ideal triangle — a figure with perfectly drawn lines whose angles add to 180 degrees. Any form of triangle that we experience will be an imperfect representation of the ideal triangle. Regardless of how precise your measuring and drawing tools you will never be able to recreate this perfect shape. Even drawn to the point where our senses cannot perceive a defect, in its essence the shape will still be imperfect; forever unable to match the ideal triangle.
Some versions of Platonic realism, like that of Proclus, regard Plato's forms as thoughts in the mind of God. Most consider forms not to be mental entities at all.
In Platonic realism, forms are related to "particulars" (instances of objects and properties) in that a particular is regarded as a copy of its form. For example, a particular apple is said to be a copy of the form of "applehood" and the apple's redness is an instance of the form of "Redness". "Participation" is another relationship between forms and particulars. Particulars are said to "participate" in the forms, and the forms are said to "inhere" in the particulars.
According to Plato, there are some forms that are not instantiated at all, but, he contends, that does not imply that the forms "could not" be instantiated. Forms are capable of being instantiated by many different particulars, which would result in the forms' having many copies, or inhering many particulars.
Two main criticisms with Platonic realism relate to inherence and the difficulty of creating concepts without sense perception. Despite these criticisms, realism has strong defenders. Its popularity through the centuries has been variable.
Critics claim that the terms "instantiation" and "copy" are not further defined and that "participation" and "inherence" are similarly mysterious and unenlightening.
They question what it means to say that the form of applehood "inheres" a particular apple or that the apple is a "copy" of the form of applehood. To the critic, it seems that the forms, not being spatial, cannot have a shape, so it cannot be that the apple "is the same shape as" the form. Likewise, the critic claims it is unclear what it means to say that an apple "participates" in "applehood".
Arguments refuting the inherence criticism, however, claim that a form of something spatial can lack a concrete (spatial) location and yet have "in abstracto" spatial qualities. An apple, then, can have the same shape as its form. Such arguments typically claim that the relationship between a particular and its form is very intelligible and easily grasped; that people unproblematically apply Platonic theory in everyday life; and that the inherence criticism is only created by the artificial demand to explain the normal understanding of inherence as if it were highly problematic. That is, the supporting argument claims that the criticism is with the mere illusion of a problem and thus could render suspect any philosophical concept.
A criticism of forms relates to the origin of concepts without the benefit of sense-perception. For example, to think of redness in general, according to Plato, is to think of the form of redness. Critics, however, question how one can have the concept of a form existing in a special realm of the universe, apart from space and time, since such a concept cannot come from sense-perception. Although one can see an apple and its redness, the critic argues, those things merely participate in, or are copies of, the forms. Thus, they claim, to conceive of a particular apple and its redness is not to conceive of "applehood" or "redness-in-general", so they question the source of the concept.
Plato's doctrine of recollection, however, addresses such criticism by saying that souls are "born" with the concepts of the forms, and just have to be "reminded" of those concepts from back before birth, when the souls were in close contact with the forms in the Platonic heaven. Plato is thus known as one of the very first rationalists, believing as he did that humans are born with a fund of "a priori" knowledge, to which they have access through a process of reason or intellection — a process that critics find to be rather mysterious.
A more modern response to this criticism of "concepts without sense-perception" is the claim that the universality of its qualities is an unavoidable given because one only experiences an object by means of general concepts. So, since the critic already grasps the relation between the abstract and the concrete, he is invited to stop thinking that it implies a contradiction. The response reconciles Platonism with empiricism by contending that an abstract (i.e., not concrete) object is "real" and knowable by its instantiation. Since the critic has, after all, naturally understood the abstract, the response suggests merely to abandon prejudice and accept it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24513 |
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was also a chancellor to Henry VIII, and Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote "Utopia", published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary island state.
More opposed the Protestant Reformation, directing polemics against the theology of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin and William Tyndale. More also opposed Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church, refusing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England and the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted of treason and executed. On his execution, he was reported to have said: "I die the King's good servant, and God's first".
Pope Pius XI canonised More in 1935 as a martyr. Pope John Paul II in 2000 declared him the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. The Soviet Union in the early twentieth century honoured him for the purportedly communist attitude toward property rights in "Utopia".
Born on Milk Street in London, on 7 February 1478, Thomas More was the son of Sir John More, a successful lawyer and later a judge, and his wife Agnes ("née" Graunger). He was the second of six children. More was educated at St Anthony's School, then considered one of London's best schools. From 1490 to 1492, More served John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, as a household page. Morton enthusiastically supported the "New Learning" (scholarship which was later known as "humanism" or "London humanism"), and thought highly of the young More. Believing that More had great potential, Morton nominated him for a place at the University of Oxford (either in St. Mary Hall or Canterbury College, both now gone).
More began his studies at Oxford in 1492, and received a classical education. Studying under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, he became proficient in both Latin and Greek. More left Oxford after only two years—at his father's insistence—to begin legal training in London at New Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery. In 1496, More became a student at Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court, where he remained until 1502, when he was called to the Bar.
According to his friend, theologian Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, More once seriously contemplated abandoning his legal career to become a monk. Between 1503 and 1504 More lived near the Carthusian monastery outside the walls of London and joined in the monks' spiritual exercises. Although he deeply admired their piety, More ultimately decided to remain a layman, standing for election to Parliament in 1504 and marrying the following year.
More continued ascetic practices for the rest of his life, such as wearing a hair shirt next to his skin and occasionally engaging in flagellation. A tradition of the Third Order of Saint Francis honours More as a member of that Order on their calendar of saints.
More married Jane Colt in 1505. Erasmus reported that More wanted to give his young wife a better education than she had previously received at home, and tutored her in music and literature. The couple had four children before Jane died in 1511: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John.
Going "against friends' advice and common custom," within thirty days More had married one of the many eligible women among his wide circle of friends. He chose Alice Middleton, a widow, to head his household and care for his small children. The speed of the marriage was so unusual that More had to get a dispensation from the banns of marriage, which, due to his good public reputation, he easily obtained.
More had no children from his second marriage, although he raised Alice's daughter from her previous marriage as his own. More also became the guardian of two young girls: Anne Cresacre would eventually marry his son, John More; and Margaret Giggs (later Clement) would be the only member of his family to witness his execution (she died on the 35th anniversary of that execution, and her daughter married More's nephew William Rastell). An affectionate father, More wrote letters to his children whenever he was away on legal or government business, and encouraged them to write to him often.
More insisted upon giving his daughters the same classical education as his son, an unusual attitude at the time. His eldest daughter, Margaret, attracted much admiration for her erudition, especially her fluency in Greek and Latin. More told his daughter of his pride in her academic accomplishments in September 1522, after he showed the bishop a letter she had written:
More's decision to educate his daughters set an example for other noble families. Even Erasmus became much more favourable once he witnessed their accomplishments.
A portrait of More and his family, Sir Thomas More and Family, was painted by Holbein, but it was lost in a fire in the 18th century. More's grandson commissioned a copy, of which two versions survive.
In 1504 More was elected to Parliament to represent Great Yarmouth, and in 1510 began representing London.
From 1510, More served as one of the two undersheriffs of the City of London, a position of considerable responsibility in which he earned a reputation as an honest and effective public servant. More became Master of Requests in 1514, the same year in which he was appointed as a Privy Counsellor. After undertaking a diplomatic mission to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, accompanying Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Archbishop of York, to Calais and Bruges, More was knighted and made under-treasurer of the Exchequer in 1521.
As secretary and personal adviser to King Henry VIII, More became increasingly influential: welcoming foreign diplomats, drafting official documents, and serving as a liaison between the King and Lord Chancellor Wolsey. More later served as High Steward for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
In 1523 More was elected as knight of the shire (MP) for Middlesex and, on Wolsey's recommendation, the House of Commons elected More its Speaker. In 1525 More became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with executive and judicial responsibilities over much of northern England.
After Wolsey fell, More succeeded to the office of Lord Chancellor in 1529. He dispatched cases with unprecedented rapidity.
More supported the Catholic Church and saw the Protestant Reformation as heresy, a threat to the unity of both church and society. More believed in the theology, argumentation, and ecclesiastical laws of the church, and "heard Luther's call to destroy the Catholic Church as a call to war."
His early actions against the Protestant Reformation included aiding Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books from being imported into England, spying on and investigating suspected Protestants, especially publishers, and arresting anyone holding in his possession, transporting, or distributing Bibles and other materials of the Protestant Reformation. More vigorously suppressed Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament.
The Tyndale Bible used controversial translations of certain words that More considered heretical and seditious; for example, it used "senior" and "elder" rather than "priest" for the Greek """", and used the term "congregation" instead of "church"; he also pointed out that some of the marginal glosses challenged Catholic doctrine. It was during this time that most of his literary polemics appeared.
Many accounts circulated during and after More's lifetime regarding persecution of the Protestant heretics during his time as Lord Chancellor. The popular sixteenth-century English Protestant historian John Foxe, who "placed Protestant sufferings against the background of... the Antichrist", was instrumental in publicising accusations of torture in his famous "Book of Martyrs", claiming that More had often personally used violence or torture while interrogating heretics. Later authors such as Brian Moynahan and Michael Farris cite Foxe when repeating these allegations. Peter Ackroyd also lists claims from Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" and other post-Reformation sources that More "tied heretics to a tree in his Chelsea garden and whipped them", that "he watched as 'newe men' were put upon the rack in the Tower and tortured until they confessed", and that "he was personally responsible for the burning of several of the 'brethren' in Smithfield." Richard Marius records a similar claim, which tells about James Bainham, and writes that "the story Foxe told of Bainham's whipping and racking at More's hands is universally doubted today". More himself denied these allegations:
More instead claims in his "Apology" (1533) that he only applied corporal punishment to two heretics: a child who was caned in front of his family for heresy regarding the Eucharist, and a "feeble-minded" man who was whipped for disrupting prayers. During More's chancellorship, six people were burned at the stake for heresy; they were Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, Thomas Dusgate, and James Bainham. Moynahan has shown that More was influential in the burning of Tyndale, as More's agents had long pursued him, even though this took place over a year after his own death. Burning at the stake had been a standard punishment for heresy, though only thirty burnings had taken place in the entire century before More's elevation to Chancellor, and burning continued to be used by both Catholics and Protestants during the religious upheaval of the following decades. Ackroyd notes that More zealously "approved of burning". Marius maintains that More did everything in his power to bring about the extermination of the Protestant heretics.
John Tewkesbury was a London leather seller found guilty by Bishop of London John Stokesley of harbouring English translated New Testaments; he was sentenced to burning for refusing to recant. More declared: he "burned as there was neuer wretche I wene better worthy." After Richard Bayfield was also executed for distributing Tyndale's Bibles, More commented that he was "well and worthely burned".
Modern commentators are divided over More's religious actions as Chancellor. Some biographers, including Ackroyd, have taken a relatively tolerant view of More's campaign against Protestantism by placing his actions within the turbulent religious climate of the time and the threat of deadly catastrophes such as the German Peasants' Revolt, which More blamed on Luther, as did many others, such as Erasmus. Others have been more critical, such as Richard Marius, an American scholar of the Reformation, believing that such persecutions were a betrayal of More's earlier humanist convictions, including More's zealous and well-documented advocacy of extermination for Protestants.
Some Protestants take a different view. In 1980, More was added to the Church of England's calendar of Saints and Heroes of the Christian Church, despite being a fierce opponent of the English Reformation that created the Church of England. He was added jointly with John Fisher, to be commemorated every 6 July (the date of More's execution) as "Thomas More, scholar, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Reformation Martyrs, 1535". Pope John Paul II honoured him by making him patron saint of statesmen and politicians in October 2000, stating: "It can be said that he demonstrated in a singular way the value of a moral conscience ... even if, in his actions against heretics, he reflected the limits of the culture of his time".
As the conflict over supremacy between the Papacy and the King reached its apogee, More continued to remain steadfast in supporting the supremacy of the Pope as Successor of Peter over that of the King of England. Parliament's reinstatement of the charge of praemunire in 1529 had made it a crime to support in public or office the claim of any authority outside the realm (such as the Papacy) to have a legal jurisdiction superior to the King's.
In 1530, More refused to sign a letter by the leading English churchmen and aristocrats asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and also quarrelled with Henry VIII over the heresy laws. In 1531, a royal decree required the clergy to take an oath acknowledging the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England. The bishops at the Convocation of Canterbury in 1532 agreed to sign the Oath but only under threat of praemunire and only after these words were added: "as far as Christ law allows". This was considered to be the final Submission of the Clergy. Cardinal John Fisher and some other clergy refused to sign. Henry purged most clergy who supported the papal stance from senior positions in the church. More continued to refuse to sign the Oath of Supremacy and did not agree to support the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine. However, he did not openly reject the King's actions and kept his opinions private.
On 16 May 1532, More resigned from his role as Chancellor but remained in Henry's favour despite his refusal. His decision to resign was caused by the decision of the convocation of the English Church, which was under intense royal threat, on the day before.
In 1533, More refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn as the Queen of England. Technically, this was not an act of treason, as More had written to Henry seemingly acknowledging Anne's queenship and expressing his desire for the King's happiness and the new Queen's health. Despite this, his refusal to attend was widely interpreted as a snub against Anne, and Henry took action against him.
Shortly thereafter, More was charged with accepting bribes, but the charges had to be dismissed for lack of any evidence. In early 1534, More was accused by Thomas Cromwell of having given advice and counsel to the "Holy Maid of Kent," Elizabeth Barton, a nun who had prophesied that the king had ruined his soul and would come to a quick end for having divorced Queen Catherine. This was a month after Barton had confessed, which was possibly done under royal pressure, and was said to be concealment of treason.
Though it was dangerous for anyone to have anything to do with Barton, More had indeed met with her, and was impressed by her fervour. But More was prudent and told her not to interfere with state matters. More was called before a committee of the Privy Council to answer these charges of treason, and after his respectful answers the matter seemed to have been dropped.
On 13 April 1534, More was asked to appear before a commission and swear his allegiance to the parliamentary Act of Succession. More accepted Parliament's right to declare Anne Boleyn the legitimate Queen of England, though he refused "the spiritual validity of the king's second marriage", and, holding fast to the teaching of papal supremacy, he steadfastly refused to take the oath of supremacy of the Crown in the relationship between the kingdom and the church in England. More furthermore publicly refused to uphold Henry's annulment from Catherine. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, refused the oath along with More. The oath reads:
In addition to refusing to support the King's annulment or supremacy, More refused to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession confirming Anne's role as queen and the rights of their children to succession. More's fate was sealed. While he had no argument with the basic concept of succession as stated in the Act, the preamble of the Oath repudiated the authority of the Pope.
His enemies had enough evidence to have the King arrest him on treason. Four days later, Henry had More imprisoned in the Tower of London. There More prepared a devotional "Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation". While More was imprisoned in the Tower, Thomas Cromwell made several visits, urging More to take the oath, which he continued to refuse.
The charges of high treason related to More's violating the statutes as to the King's supremacy (malicious silence) and conspiring with Bishop John Fisher in this respect (malicious conspiracy) and, according to some sources, for asserting that Parliament did not have the right to proclaim the King's Supremacy over the English Church. One group of scholars believes that the judges dismissed the first two charges (malicious acts) and tried More only on the final one but others strongly disagree.
Regardless of the specific charges, the indictment related to violation of the Treasons Act 1534 which declared it treason to speak against the King's Supremacy:
The trial was held on 1 July 1535, before a panel of judges that included the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley, as well as Anne Boleyn's father, brother, and uncle.
More, relying upon legal precedent and the maxim ""qui tacet consentire videtur"" ("one who keeps silent seems to consent"), understood that he could not be convicted as long as he did not explicitly deny that the King was Supreme Head of the Church, and he therefore refused to answer all questions regarding his opinions on the subject.
Thomas Cromwell, at the time the most powerful of the King's advisors, brought forth Solicitor General Richard Rich to testify that More had, in his presence, denied that the King was the legitimate head of the Church. This testimony was characterised by More as being extremely dubious. Witnesses Richard Southwell and Mr. Palmer both denied having heard the details of the reported conversation, and as More himself pointed out:
The jury took only fifteen minutes, however, to find More guilty.
After the jury's verdict was delivered and before his sentencing, More spoke freely of his belief that "no temporal man may be the head of the spirituality" (take over the role of the Pope). According to William Roper's account, More was pleading that the Statute of Supremacy was contrary to the Magna Carta, to Church laws and to the laws of England, attempting to void the entire indictment against him.
He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered (the usual punishment for traitors who were not the nobility), but the King commuted this to execution by decapitation.
The execution took place on 6 July 1535. When he came to mount the steps to the scaffold, its frame seeming so weak that it might collapse, More is widely quoted as saying (to one of the officials): "I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up and [for] my coming down, let me shift for my self"; while on the scaffold he declared that he died "the king's good servant, and God's first." After More had finished reciting the "Miserere" while kneeling, the executioner reportedly begged his pardon, then More rose up merrily, kissed him and gave him forgiveness.
Another comment he is believed to have made to the executioner is that his beard was completely innocent of any crime, and did not deserve the axe; he then positioned his beard so that it would not be harmed. More asked that his foster/adopted daughter Margaret Clement (née Giggs) be given his headless corpse to bury. She was the only member of his family to witness his execution. He was buried at the Tower of London, in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in an unmarked grave. His head was fixed upon a pike over London Bridge for a month, according to the normal custom for traitors.
More's daughter Margaret later rescued the severed head. It is believed to rest in the Roper Vault of St Dunstan's Church, Canterbury, perhaps with the remains of Margaret and her husband's family. Some have claimed that the head is buried within the tomb erected for More in Chelsea Old Church.
Among other surviving relics is his hair shirt, presented for safe keeping by Margaret Clement. This was long in the custody of the community of Augustinian canonesses who until 1983 lived at the convent at Abbotskerswell Priory, Devon. Some sources, including one from 2004, claimed that the hair shirt was then at the Martyr's church on the Weld family's estate in Chideock, Dorset. The most recent reports indicate that it is now preserved at Buckfast Abbey, near Buckfastleigh in Devon.
Between 1512 and 1519 More worked on a "History of King Richard III", which he never finished but which was published after his death. The "History" is a Renaissance biography, remarkable more for its literary skill and adherence to classical precepts than for its historical accuracy. Some consider it an attack on royal tyranny, rather than on Richard III himself or the House of York. More uses a more dramatic writing style than had been typical in medieval chronicles; Richard III is limned as an outstanding, archetypal tyrant—however, More was only seven years old when Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 so he had no first-hand, in-depth knowledge of him.
The "History of King Richard III" was written and published in both English and Latin, each written separately, and with information deleted from the Latin edition to suit a European readership. It greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play "Richard III". Contemporary historians attribute the unflattering portraits of Richard III in both works to both authors' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III in the Wars of the Roses. More's version barely mentions King Henry VII, the first Tudor king, perhaps because he had persecuted his father, Sir John More. Clements Markham suggests that the actual author of the work was Archbishop Morton and that More was simply copying or perhaps translating the work.
More's best known and most controversial work, "Utopia," is a frame narrative written in Latin. More completed and theologian Erasmus published the book in Leuven in 1516, but it was only translated into English and published in his native land in 1551 (16 years after his execution), and the 1684 translation became the most commonly cited. More (also a character in the book) and the narrator/traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus (whose name alludes both to the healer archangel Raphael, and 'speaker of nonsense', the surname's Greek meaning), discuss modern ills in Antwerp, as well as describe the political arrangements of the imaginary island country of Utopia (a Greek pun on 'ou-topos' [no place] and 'eu-topos' [good place]) among themselves as well as to Pieter Gillis and Hieronymus van Busleyden. Utopia's original edition included a symmetrical "Utopian alphabet" omitted by later editions, but which may have been an early attempt or precursor of shorthand.
Utopia contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly, reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle). In Utopia, there are no lawyers because of the laws' simplicity and because social gatherings are in public view (encouraging participants to behave well), communal ownership supplants private property, men and women are educated alike, and there is almost complete religious toleration (except for atheists, who are allowed but despised). More may have used monastic communalism as his model, although other concepts he presents such as legalising euthanasia remain far outside Church doctrine. Hythlodaeus asserts that a man who refuses to believe in a god or an afterlife could never be trusted, because he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself. Some take the novel's principal message to be the social need for order and discipline rather than liberty. Ironically, Hythlodaeus, who believes philosophers should not get involved in politics, addresses More's ultimate conflict between his humanistic beliefs and courtly duties as the King's servant, pointing out that one day those morals will come into conflict with the political reality.
"Utopia" gave rise to a literary genre, Utopian and dystopian fiction, which features ideal societies or perfect cities, or their opposite. Early works influenced by "Utopia" included "New Atlantis" by Francis Bacon, "Erewhon" by Samuel Butler, and "Candide" by Voltaire. Although Utopianism combined classical concepts of perfect societies (Plato and Aristotle) with Roman rhetorical finesse (cf. Cicero, Quintilian, epideictic oratory), the Renaissance genre continued into the Age of Enlightenment and survives in modern science fiction.
In 1520 the reformer Martin Luther published three works in quick succession: "An Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation" (Aug.), "Concerning the Babylonish Captivity of the Church" (Oct.), and "On the Liberty of a Christian Man" (Nov.). In these books, Luther set out his doctrine of salvation through grace alone, rejected certain Catholic practices, and attacked abuses and excesses within the Catholic Church. In 1521, Henry VIII formally responded to Luther's criticisms with the "Assertio," written with More's assistance. Pope Leo X rewarded the English king with the title ""Fidei defensor"" ("Defender of the Faith") for his work combating Luther's heresies.
Martin Luther then attacked Henry VIII in print, calling him a "pig, dolt, and liar". At the king's request, More composed a rebuttal: the "Responsio ad Lutherum" was published at the end of 1523. In the "Responsio," More defended papal supremacy, the sacraments, and other Church traditions. More, though considered "a much steadier personality", described Luther as an "ape", a "drunkard", and a "lousy little friar" amongst other epithets. Writing under the pseudonym of Gulielmus Rosseus, More tells Luther that:
His saying is followed with a kind of apology to his readers, while Luther possibly never apologized for his sayings. Stephen Greenblatt argues, "More speaks for his ruler and in his opponent's idiom; Luther speaks for himself, and his scatological imagery far exceeds in quantity, intensity, and inventiveness anything that More could muster. If for More scatology normally expresses a communal disapproval, for Luther, it expresses a deep personal rage."
Confronting Luther confirmed More's theological conservatism. He thereafter avoided any hint of criticism of Church authority. In 1528, More published another religious polemic, "A Dialogue Concerning Heresies", that asserted the Catholic Church was the one true church, established by Christ and the Apostles, and affirmed the validity of its authority, traditions and practices. In 1529, the circulation of Simon Fish's "Supplication for the Beggars" prompted More to respond with "The Supplication of Souls".
In 1531, a year after More's father died, William Tyndale published "An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue" in response to More's "Dialogue Concerning Heresies." More responded with a half million words: the "Confutation of Tyndale's Answer". The "Confutation" is an imaginary dialogue between More and Tyndale, with More addressing each of Tyndale's criticisms of Catholic rites and doctrines. More, who valued structure, tradition and order in society as safeguards against tyranny and error, vehemently believed that Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation in general were dangerous, not only to the Catholic faith but to the stability of society as a whole.
Most major humanists were prolific letter writers, and Thomas More was no exception. As in the case of his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam, however, only a small portion of his correspondence (about 280 letters) survived. These include everything from personal letters to official government correspondence (mostly in English), letters to fellow humanist scholars (in Latin), several epistolary tracts, verse epistles, prefatory letters (some fictional) to several of More's own works, letters to More's children and their tutors (in Latin), and the so-called "prison-letters" (in English) which he exchanged with his oldest daughter Margaret while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting execution. More also engaged in controversies, most notably with the French poet Germain de Brie, which culminated in the publication of de Brie's "Antimorus" (1519). Erasmus intervened, however, and ended the dispute.
More also wrote about more spiritual matters. They include: "A Treatise on the Passion" (a.k.a. Treatise on the Passion of Christ), "A Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body" (a.k.a. Holy Body Treaty), and "De Tristitia Christi" (a.k.a. The Agony of Christ). More handwrote the last in the Tower of London while awaiting his execution. This last manuscript, saved from the confiscation decreed by Henry VIII, passed by the will of his daughter Margaret to Spanish hands through Fray Pedro de Soto, confessor of Emperor Charles V. More's friend Luis Vives received it in Valencia, where it remains in the collection of Real Colegio Seminario del Corpus Christi museum.
Pope Leo XIII beatified Thomas More, John Fisher, and 52 other English Martyrs on 29 December 1886. Pope Pius XI canonised More and Fisher on 19 May 1935, and More's feast day was established as 9 July. Since 1970 the General Roman Calendar has celebrated More with St John Fisher on 22 June (the date of Fisher's execution). On 31 October 2000 Pope John Paul II declared More "the heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians". More is the patron of the German Catholic youth organisation Katholische Junge Gemeinde.
In 1980, despite their opposing the English Reformation, More and Fisher were added as martyrs of the reformation to the Church of England's calendar of "Saints and Heroes of the Christian Church", to be commemorated every 6 July (the date of More's execution) as "Thomas More, scholar, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Reformation Martyrs, 1535".
The steadfastness and courage with which More maintained his religious convictions, and his dignity during his imprisonment, trial, and execution, contributed much to More's posthumous reputation, particularly among Roman Catholics. His friend Erasmus defended More's character as "more pure than any snow" and described his genius as "such as England never had and never again will have." Upon learning of More's execution, Emperor Charles V said: "Had we been master of such a servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy councillor." G. K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic convert from the Church of England, predicted More "may come to be counted the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history." Hugh Trevor-Roper called More "the first great Englishman whom we feel that we know, the most saintly of humanists, the most human of saints, the universal man of our cool northern renaissance."
Jonathan Swift, an Anglican, wrote that More was "a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced". Some consider Samuel Johnson that quote's author, although neither his writings nor Boswell's contain such. The metaphysical poet John Donne, also honoured as a saint by Anglicans, was More's great-great-nephew. US Senator Eugene McCarthy had a portrait of More in his office.
Roman Catholic scholars maintain that More used irony in "Utopia," and that he remained an orthodox Christian.
Marxist theoreticians such as Karl Kautsky considered the book a critique of economic and social exploitation in pre-modern Europe and More is claimed to have influenced the development of socialist ideas.
Having been praised "as a Communist hero by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Kautsky" because of the Communist attitude to property in his "Utopia", under Soviet Communism the name of Thomas More was in ninth position from the top of Moscow's Stele of Freedom (also known as the Obelisk of Revolutionary Thinkers), as one of the most influential thinkers "who promoted the liberation of humankind from oppression, arbitrariness, and exploitation." This monument was erected in 1918 in Aleksandrovsky Garden near the Kremlin at Lenin's suggestion. It was dismantled on 2 July 2013, during Vladimir Putin's third term as President of post-Communist Russia.
"Utopia" also inspired socialists such as William Morris.
Many see More's communism or socialism as purely satirical. In 1888, while praising More's communism, Karl Kautsky pointed out that "perplexed" historians and economists often saw the name "Utopia" (which means "no place") as "a subtle hint by More that he himself regarded his communism as an impracticable dream".
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel Prize-winning, anti-Communist author of "The Gulag Archipelago", argued that Soviet communism needed enslavement and forced labour to survive, and that this had been " ...foreseen as far back as Thomas More, in his "Utopia"".
In 2008, More was portrayed on stage in Hong Kong as an allegorical symbol of the pan-democracy camp resisting the Chinese Communist Party in a translated and modified version of Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons".
William Roper's biography of More was one of the first biographies in Modern English.
"Sir Thomas More" is a play written circa 1592 in collaboration with Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare, and others. In it More is portrayed as a wise and honest statesman. The original manuscript has survived as a handwritten text that shows many revisions by its several authors, as well as the censorious influence of Edmund Tylney, Master of the Revels in the government of Queen Elizabeth I. The script has since been published and has had several productions.
The 20th-century agnostic playwright Robert Bolt portrayed Thomas More as the tragic hero of his 1960 play "A Man for All Seasons". The title is drawn from what Robert Whittington in 1520 wrote of More:
More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.
In 1966, the play "A Man for All Seasons" was adapted into a film with the same title. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann and adapted for the screen by the playwright. It stars Paul Scofield, a noted British actor, who said that the part of Sir Thomas More was "the most difficult part I played." The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Scofield won the Best Actor Oscar. In 1988 Charlton Heston starred in and directed a made-for-television film that restored the character of "the common man" that had been cut from the 1966 film.
In the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days, More is portrayed by actor William Squire.
Catholic science fiction writer R. A. Lafferty wrote his novel "Past Master" as a modern equivalent to More's "Utopia", which he saw as a satire. In this novel, Thomas More travels through time to the year 2535, where he is made king of the world "Astrobe", only to be beheaded after ruling for a mere nine days. One character compares More favourably to almost every other major historical figure: "He had one completely honest moment right at the end. I cannot think of anyone else who ever had one."
Karl Zuchardt's novel, "Stirb du Narr!" ("Die you fool!"), about More's struggle with King Henry, portrays More as an idealist bound to fail in the power struggle with a ruthless ruler and an unjust world.
The novelist Hilary Mantel portrays More as an unsympathetic persecutor of Protestants, and an ally of the Habsburg empire, in her 2009 novel "Wolf Hall", told from the perspective of a sympathetically portrayed Thomas Cromwell.
Literary critic James Wood in his book "The Broken Estate", a collection of essays, is critical of More and refers to him as "cruel in punishment, evasive in argument, lusty for power, and repressive in politics".
Aaron Zelman's non-fiction book "The State Versus the People" includes a comparison of "Utopia" with Plato's "Republic". Zelman is undecided as to whether More was being ironic in his book or was genuinely advocating a police state. Zelman comments, "More is the only Christian saint to be honoured with a statue at the Kremlin." By this Zelman implies that "Utopia" influenced Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks, despite their brutal repression of religion.
Other biographers, such as Peter Ackroyd, have offered a more sympathetic picture of More as both a sophisticated philosopher and man of letters, as well as a zealous Catholic who believed in the authority of the Holy See over Christendom.
The protagonist of Walker Percy's novels, "Love in the Ruins" and "The Thanatos Syndrome", is "Dr Thomas More", a reluctant Catholic and descendant of More.
More is the focus of the Al Stewart song "A Man For All Seasons" from the 1978 album "Time Passages", and of the Far song "Sir", featured on the limited editions and 2008 re-release of their 1994 album "Quick". In addition, the song "So Says I" by indie rock outfit The Shins alludes to the socialist interpretation of More's "Utopia".
Jeremy Northam depicts More in the television series "The Tudors "as a peaceful man, as well as a devout Roman Catholic and loving family patriarch. He also shows More loathing Protestantism, burning both Martin Luther's books and English Protestants who have been convicted of heresy. The portrayal has unhistorical aspects, such as that More neither personally caused nor attended Simon Fish's execution (since Fish actually died of bubonic plague in 1531 before he could stand trial), although More's "The Supplycatyon of Soulys", published in October 1529, addressed Fish's . Indeed, there is no evidence that More ever attended the execution of any heretic. The series also neglected to show More's avowed insistence that Richard Rich's testimony about More disputing the King's title as Supreme Head of the Church of England was perjured.
In 2002, More was placed at number 37 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
A plaque in the middle of the floor of London's Westminster Hall commemorates More's trial for treason and condemnation to execution in that original part of the Palace of Westminster. The building, which houses Parliament, would have been well known to More, who served several terms as a member and became Speaker of the House of Commons before his appointment as England's Lord Chancellor.
The Crown confiscated More's home and estate along the Thames in Chelsea after his execution. Crosby Hall, which was part of More's residence in Bishopsgate in The City of London, was eventually relocated and reconstructed stone by stone onto More's estate site in Chelsea by conservation architect Walter Godfrey in 1910. Crosby Hall remains the only surviving example of a medieval merchant house in London. It is privately owned and closed to the public.
Across a small park and Old Church Street from Crosby Hall is Chelsea Old Church, an Anglican church whose southern chapel More commissioned and in which he sang with the parish choir. Except for his chapel, the church was largely destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in 1958. The capitals on the medieval arch connecting the chapel to the main sanctuary display symbols associated with More and his office. On the southern wall of the sanctuary is the tomb and epitaph he erected for himself and his wives, detailing his ancestry and accomplishments in Latin, including his role as peacemaker between the various Christian European states as well as a curiously altered portion about his curbing heresy. When More served Mass, he would leave by the door just to the left of it. He is not, however, buried here, nor is it entirely certain which of his family may be. It is open to the public at specific times. Outside the church, facing the River Thames, is a statue by L. Cubitt Bevis erected in 1969, commemorating More as "saint", "scholar", and "statesman"; the back displays his coat-of-arms. Nearby, on Upper Cheyne Row, the Roman Catholic Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer & St. Thomas More honours the martyr.
A plaque and small garden commemorate the famed execution site on Tower Hill, London, just outside the Tower of London, as well as all those executed there, many as religious martyrs or as prisoners of conscience. More's corpse, minus his head, was unceremoniously buried in an unmarked mass grave beneath the Royal Chapel of St. Peter Ad Vincula, within the walls of the Tower of London, as was the custom for traitors executed at Tower Hill. The chapel is accessible to Tower visitors.
Thomas More is commemorated by a stone plaque near St Katharine Docks, just east of the Tower where he was executed. The street in which it is situated was formerly called Nightingale Lane, a corruption of "Knighten Guild", derived from the original owners of the land. It is now renamed Thomas More Street in his honour.
St Dunstan's Church, an Anglican parish church in Canterbury, possesses More's head, rescued by his daughter Margaret Roper, whose family lived in Canterbury down and across the street from their parish church. A stone immediately to the left of the altar marks the sealed Roper family vault beneath the Nicholas Chapel, itself to the right of the church's sanctuary or main altar. St Dunstan's Church has carefully investigated, preserved and sealed this burial vault. The last archaeological investigation revealed that the suspected head of More rests in a niche separate from the other bodies, possibly from later interference. Displays in the chapel record the archaeological findings in pictures and narratives. Roman Catholics donated stained glass to commemorate the events in More's life. A small plaque marks the former home of William and Margaret Roper; another house nearby and entitled Roper House is now a home for the deaf.
Note: The reference "CW" is to the relevant volume of the "Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More" (New Haven and London 1963–1997) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30479 |
Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego (, ; Spanish for "Land of Fire", formerly also Fireland in English) is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, with an area of , and a group of many islands, including Cape Horn and Diego Ramírez Islands. Tierra del Fuego is divided between Chile and Argentina, with the latter controlling the eastern half of the main island and the former the western half plus the islands south of Beagle Channel. The southernmost extent of the archipelago is at about latitude 55 S.
The earliest known human settlement in Tierra del Fuego dates to around 8,000 BCE. Europeans first explored the islands during Ferdinand Magellan's expedition of 1520; "Tierra del Fuego" and similar namings stem from sightings of the many bonfires that the natives built. Settlement by those of European descent and the great displacement of the native populations did not begin until the second half of the 19th century, at the height of the Patagonian sheep farming boom and of the local gold rush. Today, petroleum extraction dominates economic activity in the north of Tierra del Fuego, while tourism, manufacturing, and Antarctic logistics are important in the south.
The earliest human settlement occurred around 8,000 BCE. The Yaghan were some of the earliest known humans to settle in Tierra del Fuego. Archeological sites with characteristics of their culture have been found at locations such as Navarino Island.
The name "Tierra del Fuego" was given by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan while sailing for the Spanish Crown in 1520; he was the first European to visit these lands. He believed he was seeing the many fires ("fuego" in Spanish) of the Yaghan, which were visible from the sea, and that the "Indians" were waiting in the forests to ambush his armada.
In 1525 Francisco de Hoces was the first to speculate that Tierra del Fuego was one or more islands rather than part of what was then called Terra Australis. Francis Drake in 1578 and a Dutch East India Company expedition in 1616 learned more about the geography. The latter expedition named Cape Horn.
On his first voyage with in 1830, Robert FitzRoy picked up four native Fuegians, including "Jemmy Button" ("Orundellico") and brought them to England. The surviving three were taken to London to meet the King and Queen and were, for a time, celebrities. They returned to Tierra del Fuego in "Beagle" with FitzRoy and Charles Darwin, who made extensive notes about his visit to the islands.
During the second half of the 19th century, the archipelago began to come under Chilean and Argentine influence. Both countries sought to claim the whole archipelago based on "de jure" Spanish colonial titles. Salesian Catholic missions were established in Río Grande and Dawson Island.
Anglican missions were established by British colonists at Keppel Island in the Falklands in 1855 and in 1870 at Ushuaia on the main island, which continued to operate through the 19th century. Thomas Bridges (1842–1898) learned the language and compiled a 30,000-word Yaghan grammar and dictionary while he worked at Ushuaia. It was published in the 20th century and considered an important ethnological work.
An 1879 Chilean expedition led by Ramón Serrano Montaner reported large amounts of placer gold in the streams and river beds of Tierra del Fuego. This prompted massive immigration to the main island between 1883 and 1909. Numerous Argentines, Chileans and Croatians settled in the main island, leading to increased conflicts with native Selk'nam.
Julius Popper, a Romanian explorer, was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the region. Granted rights by the Argentine government to exploit any gold deposits he found in Tierra del Fuego, Popper has been identified as a central figure in the Selk'nam genocide.
Following contact with Europeans, the native Selk'nam and Yaghan populations were greatly reduced by unequal conflict and persecution by settlers, by infectious diseases to which the indigenous people had no immunity, and by mass transfer to the Salesian mission of Dawson Island. Despite the missionaries' efforts, many natives died. Today, only a few Selk'nam remain. Some of the few remaining Yaghan have settled in Villa Ukika in Navarino Island; others have scattered across Chile and Argentina.
Following the signing of the Boundary Treaty of 1881, Tierra del Fuego was divided between Argentina and Chile; previously, it had been claimed in its entirety by both countries.
The gold rushes of the late 19th century led to the founding of numerous small settlements by immigrants such as the Argentine settlements of Ushuaia and Río Grande and the Chilean settlements of Porvenir and Puerto Toro.
In 1945 a division of Chilean CORFO (Spanish acronym for Production Development Corporation) engaged in oil exploration made a breakthrough discovery of oil in northern Tierra del Fuego. Extraction began in 1949, and in 1950 the state created ENAP (National Petroleum Company) to deal with oil extraction and prospecting. Until 1960, most oil extracted in Chile came from Tierra del Fuego.
During the 1940s Chile and Argentina formulated their Antarctic claims. The governments realized the key role of Tierra del Fuego's geographical proximity in backing their claims as well as in supplying their Antarctic bases. In the 1950s, the Chilean military founded Puerto Williams to counter Ushuaia's monopoly as the only settlement in the Beagle Channel, a zone where Argentina disputed the 1881 borders.
In the 1960s and 1970s, sovereignty claims by Argentina over Picton, Lennox and Nueva Islands in Tierra del Fuego led the two countries in December 1978 to the brink of war. In response to the threat of an Argentine invasion, minefields were deployed and bunkers built on the Chilean side in some areas of Tierra del Fuego. The threat of war caused the Chilean Pinochet regime to give logistical support and information to the British during the Falklands War of 1982. Chilean radar supplied the British with information on Argentine jet movements in Tierra del Fuego, from where the Argentine Air Force launched raids on targets in the Falklands.
In 1986 the Argentine congress decided that the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego should be a new province; the law was not promulgated until 26 April 1990.
The archipelago consists of a main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, often called simply Tierra del Fuego or Isla Grande, with an area of , and a group of smaller islands. Of the main island the westernmost 29,484.7 km2 (11,384, 61.43%) belongs to Chile, and 18,507.3 km2 (7,146, 38.57%) belongs to Argentina. The archipelago is divided by an east–west channel, the Beagle Channel, immediately south of the main island. The largest islands south of the Beagle Channel are Hoste and Navarino.
The western part of the main island, and almost all the other islands, belong to Chile. They are part of the Magallanes y Antártica Chilena Region, the capital and chief town of which is Punta Arenas, situated on the mainland across the strait. The biggest Chilean towns are Porvenir, capital of the Chilean Province of Tierra del Fuego, located on the main island; and, on Navarino Island, Puerto Williams, which is the capital of the Antártica Chilena Province. Puerto Toro lies a few kilometers south of Puerto Williams and is arguably the southernmost village in the world. The mostly uninhabited islands north and west of the main island are part of Magallanes Province.
The eastern part of the main island, and a few small islands in the Beagle Channel, belong to Argentina. They are part of the Tierra del Fuego, Antarctic Territory and South Atlantic Islands Province, whose capital is Ushuaia, the biggest city of the archipelago. The other important city in the region is Río Grande on the Atlantic coast.
The Cordillera Darwin in the southwestern part of the main island contains many glaciers that reach the ocean. While Mount Darwin had previously been thought to be the tallest mountain in the archipelago, this distinction actually belongs to the unofficially named Monte Shipton at .
The topography can be divided into four regions: an outer archipelago region () to the south and west, a mountain region in the south (), a plains region () plus a sub-Andean zone in-between the last two zones ().
The geology of the archipelago is characterized by the effects of the Andean orogeny and the repeated Pleistocene glaciations. The geology of the island can be divided into large east–west-oriented units. The southwestern islands of the archipelago, including Cape Horn, are part of the South Patagonian Batholith, while Cordillera Darwin and the area around Beagle Channel form the principal cordillera hosting the highest mountains. The Magallanes fold and thrust belt extends north of Almirantazgo Fjord and Fagnano Lake, and north of this lies the Magallanes foreland; an old sedimentary basin that hosts hydrocarbon reserves. Orthogneiss dated at 525 million years is known to underlie some of the oil wells in northern Tierra del Fuego.
The Magallanes–Fagnano Fault, a sinistral strike slip fault crosses the southern part of the main island from west to east. It is an active fault, located inside and parallel to the Fuegian fold and thrust belt, and marks the boundary between a southern belt of Paleozoic meta sediments and a northern Mesozoic belt of sedimentary sequences. Fagnano Lake occupies a glacier-carved depression in a pull-apart basin that has developed along the Magallanes-Fagnano Fault zone.
Podzols and inceptisols occur beneath "Nothofagus betuloides" forests in Tierra del Fuego.
This region has a subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification Cfc) with short, cool summers and long, wet, moderately mild winters: the precipitation averages a year in the far west, but precipitation decreases rapidly to the eastern side. Temperatures are steady throughout the year: in Ushuaia they hardly surpass in summers and average in winters. Snowfall can occur in summer. The cold and wet summers help preserve the ancient glaciers. The southernmost islands possess a sub-antarctic climate typical of tundra that makes the growth of trees impossible. Some areas in the interior have a polar climate. Regions in the world with similar climates to southern Tierra del Fuego are: the Aleutian islands, Iceland, the Alaska Peninsula, the Faroe Islands, Macquarie Island, and the Heard and McDonald Islands.
Only 30% of the islands have forests, which are classified as Magellanic subpolar. The northeast is made up of steppe and cool semi-desert.
Six species of tree are found in Tierra del Fuego: canelo or winter's bark ("Drimys winteri"), "Maytenus magellanica", "Pilgerodendron uviferum", the southernmost conifer in the world, and three kinds of southern beech: "Nothofagus antarctica", "Nothofagus pumilio", and the evergreen "Nothofagus betuloides". Several kinds of fruit grow in open spaces in these forests, such as beach strawberry ("Fragaria chiloensis" var. "chiloensis" forma "chiloensis") and calafate ("Berberis buxifolia"), which have long been gathered by both Native Americans and residents of European descent. They are the only forests in the world to have developed in a climate with such cold summers. Tree cover extends very close to the southernmost tip of South America. Winds are so strong that trees in wind-exposed areas grow into twisted shapes, inspiring people to call them "flag-trees". Tree vegetation extends as far south as the Isla de los Estados, Navarino Island, and the northern part of Hoste Island. Dwarf nothofagus communities are found at altitudes above . Going farther south, Wollaston Islands and the southern part of Hoste Island are covered by subantarctic tundra.
Forests from Tierra del Fuego have expanded beyond local importance; they have been a source of trees that have been planted abroad in places with practically the same climate but which were originally devoid of trees, such as the Faroe Islands and nearby archipelagos. Most species were gathered from the coldest places in Tierra del Fuego, mainly sites with tundra borders. This effort resulted in positive changes, as the heavy winds and cool summers in the Faroe Islands did not allow the growth of trees from other regions in the world. The imported trees are used ornamentally, as curtains against wind, and for fighting erosion caused by storms and grazing in the Faroe Islands.
Among the most notable animals in the archipelago are austral parakeets, sea gulls, guanacos, foxes, kingfishers, condors, king penguins, owls, and firecrown hummingbirds.
North American beavers, introduced during the 1940s, have proliferated and caused considerable damage to the island's forests. The governments have established a wide-reaching program to trap and kill beavers in Tierra del Fuego.
Like the mainland of Chile and Argentina to the north, this archipelago boasts some of the finest trout fishing in the world. Sea-run brown trout often exceed , particularly in rivers such as the Rio Grande and the San Pablo and in the Lago Fagnano. Much of this water is privately owned, with catch and release and fly fishing only.
Waters adjacent to Tierra del Fuego are very rich in cetacean diversity. Sightings of southern right whales in Tierra del Fuego have increased in the 2000s, as well as humpbacks and some others such as blue whales, southern fins, southern seis, and southern minkes. Beagle Channel is a prominent area to watch rare, endemic dolphins, and the less-studied pygmy right whales.
Pinnipeds inhabiting the areas include South American sea lions ("Otaria flavescens"), South American fur seals ("Arctocephalus australis"), carnivorous leopard seals ("Hydrurga leptonyx") (seal-eating seal) and gigantic southern elephant seals ("Mirounga leonine").
Today, the main economic activities of the archipelago are fishing, natural gas and oil extraction, sheep farming, and ecotourism. Tourism is gaining in importance and becoming increasingly important as it attracts numerous upmarket visitors. Much of the tourism is based on "southernmost" claims: for example, both Ushuaia and Puerto Williams claim to be the "southernmost city in the world." On the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego, the government has promoted the establishment of several electronic companies via tributary exemptions, particularly in the city of Río Grande.
Energy production is a crucial economic activity. On the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego during the 2005 to 2010 period, petroleum and natural gas extraction contributed to 20% of the region's economic output. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30482 |
The Sims (video game)
The Sims is a strategic life simulation video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts in 2000. It is a simulation of the daily activities of one or more virtual people ("Sims") in a suburban household near a fictional city. Players control customizable Sims as they pursue career and relationship goals. Players can also use their Sims' income to renovate their living space, purchase home furnishings, or clothing for their household. Players can also choose to pursue a social and successful life.
The game's development was led by Will Wright and the game was a follow-up to Wright's earlier "SimCity" series; Wright was inspired to create the game by Christopher Alexander's 1977 book "A Pattern Language", and Scott McCloud's 1993 book "Understanding Comics" later played a role in the game's design. Seven expansion packs were released from 2000 to 2003, each of which added new items, characters, skins, and features.
Upon release, it garnered generally positive reviews and was described by Wright as being successful in attracting casual and female gamers. It also won several awards, and placed 31st on "Time"'s The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Several sequels were released - "The Sims 2" in 2004, "The Sims 3" in 2009, and "The Sims 4" in 2014.
The structure of the game is actually an agent-based artificial life program. The presentation of the game's artificial intelligence is advanced, and the Sims will respond to outside conditions independently, though often the player's intervention is necessary to keep the Sims on the right track. "The Sims" technically has unlimited replay value, in that there is no way to truly win the game, and the player can play over and over indefinitely. It has been described as more like a toy than a game.
Sims are influenced by the player to interact with objects and/or other Sims. Sims may receive guests at their home lot, invited or not, from other playable lots or from unhoused non-player character (NPC) Sims. If enabled in the game's options, Sims have a certain amount of free will, allowing them to autonomously interact with their world. However, the player can override most of these autonomous actions by cancelling them out in the action queue at the top of the screen. Unlike the simulated environments in games such as "SimCity", "SimEarth" or "SimLife", Sims are not fully autonomous. They are unable to take certain actions without specific commands, such as paying bills, finding a job, exercising, and conceiving children. Sims communicate in a fictional language called Simlish, which is mostly composed of blowing raspberries and saying nonsense.
The player can make decisions about time spent in skill development, such as exercise, reading, creativity, and logic by adding activities to Sims' daily agenda. Daily needs such as hygiene and eating can and must also be scheduled. Although Sims can autonomously perform these actions, they may not prioritize them effectively and can suffer consequences for neglecting their own needs. In addition, Sims must maintain balanced budgets and usually supplement an income by obtaining a job or selling their windows. Sims may earn promotions by fulfilling skills and maintaining friendships with others for each level, which lead to new job titles, increased wages, and different work hours. Alternately, Sims may create and sell various artwork and items at home.
While there is no eventual objective to the game, states of failure do exist in "The Sims". One is that Sims may die, either by starvation, drowning, fire, or electrocution (or from natural causes/age in certain versions). When a Sim dies, a tombstone or an urn will appear (in later expansion packs the Grim Reaper will appear first), and the ghost of the deceased Sim may haunt the building where it died. In addition, Sims can leave the game for good and never return, or two adult Sims with a bad relationship may brawl, eventually resulting in one of them moving out. Children will be sent away to military school if they fail their classes or if they have not fulfilled their needs (especially when hunger is very low), a social care worker will take them away from their household and they are no longer returnable.
When the "live mode" occurs in the game, the player may enter "Build mode" or "Buy mode" to pause time and renovate the house or lot. When the game begins, each family will start off with §20,000 Simoleons (regardless of its number of members). These funds can be used to purchase a small house or vacant lot on the Neighborhood screen. Once a lot is purchased, a house may be constructed or remodeled in Build mode, and/or purchase or move furniture in the Buy mode. All architectural and customizable features and furnishings in the Build and Buy modes follow a square tile system in which items must be placed on a tile. Walls and fences go on the edge of a tile and can follow the edge of the tile or cross it, but furniture items cannot be placed on either side of a crossed tile. The base game contains over 150 items including furniture and architectural elements.
In addition, the game includes an architecture system. The game was originally designed as an architecture simulation alone, with the Sims there only to evaluate the houses, but during development it was decided that the Sims were more interesting than originally anticipated and their once limited role in the game was developed further.
Players have a broad choice of objects that their respective Sims may purchase. Objects fall into one of eight broad categories: seating, surfaces, decorative, electronics, appliances, plumbing, lighting, and miscellaneous.
The original inspiration for "The Sims" was Christopher Alexander's 1977 book on architecture and urban design, "A Pattern Language". Game designer Will Wright was inspired by the book's focus on functionality in architecture, as Alexander based his design principles on structural usability rather than aesthetic values. Wright wanted to create a simulation game about enabling human behavior and interaction through design. Scott McCloud's 1993 book "Understanding Comics" became a big influence on the design of "The Sims" later on, as it advocates a certain type of "collaboration" between designer and consumer and outlines the value of abstraction for getting readers or players involved with a story.
Will Wright started working on "The Sims" after releasing "SimAnt" in 1991. However, the game's concept was very poorly received by a focus group, so Wright had difficulty getting the project off the ground. He managed to convince his company to let him work on the project (codenamed "Project X" at the time) in the background while developing "SimCity 2000" and "SimCopter". He was lent one programmer for the project, Jamie Doornbos, who went on to become the lead programmer for "The Sims". During the first few years of the project, Wright and Doornbos were primarily developing an open-ended system of character behavior. As the project continued, Wright found that the social aspect of the game turned out to be highly engaging, and the team started to focus more on the characters of the game, such as by letting Sims visit one another's houses and by implementing long-term relationships.
A demo of the game was presented at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo. During a displaying in front of the press, two female attendants at a wedding fell in love and kissed each other. After the event, the relationship mechanics were further modified so the character's sexual orientation was set depending on the player's actions.
"The Sims" uses a combination of 3D and 2D graphics techniques. The Sims themselves are rendered in 3D, whereas the house and all its objects are pre-rendered and displayed diametrically.
For the game's Japanese release, the game was renamed to SimPeople (シムピープル) to match the names of the other Sim games from Maxis.
The game music was composed by Jerry Martin, Marc Russo, Kirk R. Casey, and Dix Bruce. The game disc contains 37 tracks, of which 15 were published in 2007 as an official soundtrack album. Most of the tracks contain no vocals, but some of them feature Simlish lyrics.
"The Sims" is credited with opening up modding to a new demographic, making it easy enough to mod to allow for "casual modders". "The Sims" was designed in a way that it would be easy to add user-created content to the game, with Will Wright stating in an interview that he wanted to put the player in the design role. Maxis released modding tools for "The Sims" before the game itself, resulting in a suite of fan-created mods being available at launch.
"The Sims" has a total of seven expansion packs produced. Each expansion generally adds new items, characters, skins, and features.
"The Sims" has been repackaged in numerous editions. These are not expansions in themselves, but compilations of the base game plus pre-existing expansion packs and additional game content.
"The Sims" received positive reviews. Will Wright, the game's designer, said the game has been a success in many ways—attracting casual gamers and female gamers (the latter making up almost 60% of players).
Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PC version of the game for "Next Generation", rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Do not miss. Run do not walk. And set aside lots of time."
In 2012, the game was one of 14 video games selected by the Museum of Modern Art as the basis for an intended collection of 40 games.
The ports enjoyed a generally favorable reception, with Metacritic scores ranging from 83-85 as of .
"The Sims" has won numerous awards, including GameSpot's "Game of the Year Award" for 2000. During the 3rd Annual AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards (now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards), "The Sims" won "Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Game Design" and "Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering" (along with nominations for "Computer Family Title of the Year" and "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction"). "Game Informer" ranked it the 80th best game ever made in its 100th issue in 2001. In August 2016, "The Sims" placed 31st on "Time"'s The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. In 2019, it was ranked 17th on "The Guardian" newspaper's The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century list.
"The Sims" was released on February 4, 2000 and became a best-seller shortly after launch. In the United States, it was the best-selling computer game of 2000, with domestic sales of 1.77 million units and revenues of $72.9 million. It remained the country's #1 computer title in 2001, when it sold an additional 1.48 million units and earned another $60.4 million in revenue. In 2002, "The Sims" became the top-selling PC game in history at the time, displacing the game "Myst" by selling more than 6.3 million copies worldwide.
By February 2005, the game has shipped 16 million copies worldwide. By July 2006, the console versions of "The Sims" series had sold a combined 3.5 million units in the United States.
"Next Generation" ranked it as the 45th highest-selling game launched for the PlayStation 2, Xbox or GameCube between January 2000 and July 2006 in the United States.
By March 2015, "The Sims" had sold more than 11.24 million copies for PC, making it one of the best-selling PC games in history.
"The Sims" was followed by the sequels "The Sims 2" (2004), "The Sims 3" (2009), and "The Sims 4" (2014).
The console versions of "The Sims" were each followed by a sequel, "The Sims Bustin' Out", and a spin-off game, "". These versions incorporate some features of later PC expansion packs, and "Bustin' Out" adds a multiplayer mode supporting two simultaneous players. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30492 |
Turbomolecular pump
A turbomolecular pump is a type of vacuum pump, superficially similar to a turbopump, used to obtain and maintain high vacuum. These pumps work on the principle that gas molecules can be given momentum in a desired direction by repeated collision with a moving solid surface. In a turbomolecular pump, a rapidly spinning fan rotor 'hits' gas molecules from the inlet of the pump towards the exhaust in order to create or maintain a vacuum.
Most turbomolecular pumps employ multiple stages, each consisting of a quickly rotating rotor blade and stationary stator blade pair. The system works like a compressor that puts energy into the gas, rather than taking it out. Gas captured by the upper stages is pushed into the lower stages and successively compressed to the level of the fore-vacuum (backing pump) pressure.
As the gas molecules enter through the inlet, the rotor, which has a number of angled blades, hits the molecules. Thus the mechanical energy of the blades is transferred to the gas molecules. With this newly acquired momentum, the gas molecules enter into the gas transfer holes in the stator. This leads them to the next stage where they again collide with the rotor surface, and this process is continued, finally leading them outwards through the exhaust.
Because of the relative motion of rotor and stator, molecules preferentially hit the lower side of the blades. Because the blade surface looks down, most of the scattered molecules will leave it downwards. The surface is rough, so no reflection will occur. A blade needs to be thick and stable for high pressure operation and as thin as possible and slightly bent for maximum compression. For high compression ratios the throat between adjacent rotor blades (as shown in the image) is pointing as much as possible in the forward direction. For high flow rates the blades are at 45° and reach close to the axis.
Because the compression of each stage is ≈10, each stage closer to the outlet is considerably smaller than the preceding inlet stages. This has two consequences. The geometric progression tells us that infinite stages could ideally fit into a finite axial length. The finite length in this case is the full height of the housing as the bearings, the motor, and controller and some of the coolers can be installed inside on the axis. Radially, to grasp as much of the thin gas at the entrance, the inlet-side rotors would ideally have a larger radius, and correspondingly higher centrifugal force; ideal blades would get exponentially thinner towards their tips and carbon fibers should reinforce the aluminium blades. However, because the average speed of a blade affects pumping so much this is done by increasing the root diameter rather than the tip diameter where practical.
The performance of a turbomolecular pump is strongly related to the frequency of the rotor. As rpm increases, the rotor blades deflect more. To increase speed and reduce the deformation, stiffer materials and different blade designs have been suggested.
Turbomolecular pumps must operate at very high speeds, and the friction heat buildup imposes design limitations. Some turbomolecular pumps use magnetic bearings to reduce friction and oil contamination. Because the magnetic bearings and the temperature cycles allow for only a limited clearance between rotor and stator, the blades at the high pressure stages are somewhat degenerated into a single helical foil each. Laminar flow cannot be used for pumping, because laminar turbines stall when not used at the designed flow. The pump can be cooled down to improve the compression, but should not be so cold as to condense ice on the blades.
When a turbopump is stopped, the oil from the backing vacuum may backstream through the turbopump and contaminate the chamber. One way to prevent this is to introduce a laminar flow of nitrogen through the pump. The transition from vacuum to nitrogen and from a running to a still turbopump has to be synchronized precisely to avoid mechanical stress to the pump and overpressure at the exhaust. A thin membrane and a valve at the exhaust should be added to protect the turbopump from excessive back pressure (e.g. after a power failure or leaks in the backing vacuum).
The rotor is stabilized in all of its six degrees of freedom. One degree is governed by the electric motor. Minimally, this degree must be stabilized electronically (or by a diamagnetic material, which is too unstable to be used in a precision pump bearing). Another way (ignoring losses in magnetic cores at high frequencies) is to construct this bearing as an axis with a sphere at each end. These spheres are inside hollow static spheres. On the surface of each sphere is a checkerboard pattern of inwards and outwards going magnetic field lines. As the checkerboard pattern of the static spheres is rotated, the rotor rotates. In this construction no axis is made stable on the cost of making another axis unstable, but all axes are neutral and the electronic regulation is less stressed and will be more dynamically stable. Hall effect sensors can be used to sense the rotational position and the other degrees of freedom can be measured capacitively.
At atmospheric pressure, the mean free path of air is about 70 nm. A turbomolecular pump can work only if those molecules hit by the moving blades reach the stationary blades before colliding with other molecules on their way. To achieve that, the gap between moving blades and stationary blades must be close to or less than the mean free path. From a practical construction standpoint, a feasible gap between the blade sets is on the order of 1 mm, so a turbopump will stall (no net pumping) if exhausted directly to the atmosphere. Since the mean free path is inversely proportional to pressure, a turbopump will pump when the exhaust pressure is less than about where the mean free path is about 0.7 mm.
Most turbopumps have a Holweck pump (or molecular drag pump) as their last stage to increase the maximum backing pressure (exhaust pressure) to about 1–10 mbar. Theoretically, a centrifugal pump, a side channel pump, or a regenerative pump could be used to back to atmospheric pressure directly, but currently there is no commercially available turbopump that exhausts directly to atmosphere. In most cases, the exhaust is connected to a mechanical backing pump (usually called roughing pump) that produces a pressure low enough for the turbomolecular pump to work efficiently. Typically, this backing pressure is below 0.1 mbar and commonly about 0.01 mbar. The backing pressure is rarely below 10−3 mbar (mean free path ≈ 70 mm) because the flow resistance of the vacuum pipe between the turbopump and the roughing pump becomes significant.
The turbomolecular pump can be a very versatile pump. It can generate many degrees of vacuum from intermediate vacuum (≈10−2 Pa) up to ultra-high vacuum levels (≈10−8 Pa).
Multiple turbomolecular pumps in a lab or manufacturing-plant can be connected by tubes to a small backing pump. Automatic valves and diffusion pump like injection into a large buffer-tube in front of the backing pump prevents any overpressure from one pump to stall another pump.
Laws of fluid dynamics do not provide good approximations for the behavior of individual, highly separated, non-interacting gas molecules, like those found in high vacuum environments. The maximum compression varies linearly with circumferential rotor speed. In order to obtain extremely low pressures down to 1 micropascal, rotation rates of 20,000 to 90,000 revolutions per minute are often necessary. Unfortunately, the compression ratio varies exponentially with the square root of the molecular weight of the gas. Thus, heavy molecules are pumped much more efficiently than light molecules. Most gases are heavy enough to be well pumped but it is difficult to pump hydrogen and helium efficiently.
An additional drawback stems from the high rotor speed of this type of pump: very high grade bearings are required, which increase the cost.
Because turbomolecular pumps only work in molecular flow conditions, a pure turbomolecular pump will require a very large backing pump to work effectively. Thus, many modern pumps have a molecular drag stage such as a Holweck or Gaede mechanism near the exhaust to reduce the size of backing pump required.
Much of recent turbo pump development has been focused on improvement of the effectiveness of the drag stages. As gas is removed from a pumped space, the lighter gases hydrogen and helium become a larger proportion of the remaining gas load. In recent years it has been demonstrated that the precise design of the surface geometry of the drag stages can have a marked effect on pumping of these light gases, improving compression ratios by up to two orders of magnitude for given pumping volume. As a result, it is possible to use much smaller backing pumps than would be required by pure turbomolecular pumps and/or design more compact turbomolecular pumps.
The turbomolecular pump was invented in 1958 by W. Becker, based on the older molecular drag pumps developed by Wolfgang Gaede in 1913, Fernand Holweck in 1923 and Manne Siegbahn in 1944. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30494 |
Tour de France
The Tour de France () is an annual men's multiple stage bicycle race primarily held in France, while also occasionally passing through nearby countries. Like the other Grand Tours (the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España), it consists of 21 day-long stages over the course of 23 days. It has been described as "the world’s most prestigious and most difficult bicycle race."
The race was first organized in 1903 to increase sales for the newspaper "L'Auto" and is currently run by the Amaury Sport Organisation. The race has been held annually since its first edition in 1903 except when it was stopped for the two World Wars. As the Tour gained prominence and popularity, the race was lengthened and its reach began to extend around the globe. Participation expanded from a primarily French field, as riders from all over the world began to participate in the race each year. The Tour is a UCI World Tour event, which means that the teams that compete in the race are mostly UCI WorldTeams, with the exception of the teams that the organizers invite. It has become "the world's biggest annual sporting event." A women's Tour de France was held under different names between 1984 and 2009. Since 2014, the La Course by Le Tour de France is held for women in a one- or two-day format during the men's race.
Traditionally, the race is held primarily in the month of July. While the route changes each year, the format of the race stays the same with the appearance of time trials, the passage through the mountain chains of the Pyrenees and the Alps, and the finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The modern editions of the Tour de France consist of 21 day-long segments (stages) over a 23-day period and cover around . The race alternates between clockwise and counterclockwise circuits of France.
There are usually between 20 and 22 teams, with eight riders in each. All of the stages are timed to the finish; the riders' times are compounded with their previous stage times. The rider with the lowest cumulative finishing times is the leader of the race and wears the yellow jersey. While the general classification garners the most attention, there are other contests held within the Tour: the points classification for the sprinters, the mountains classification for the climbers, young rider classification for riders under the age of 26, and the team classification, based on the first three finishers from each team on each stage. Achieving a stage win also provides prestige, often accomplished by a team's sprint specialist or a rider taking part in a breakaway.
The Tour de France was created in 1903. The roots of the Tour de France trace back to the emergence of two rival sports newspapers in the country. On one hand was "Le Vélo", the first and the largest daily sports newspaper in France which sold 80,000 copies a day. On the other was "L'Auto", which had been set-up by journalists and business-people including Comte Jules-Albert de Dion, Adolphe Clément, and Édouard Michelin in 1899. The rival paper emerged following disagreements over the Dreyfus Affair, a cause célèbre (in which de Dion was implicated) that divided France at the end of the 19th century over the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer convicted—though later exonerated—of selling military secrets to the Germans. The new newspaper appointed Henri Desgrange as the editor. He was a prominent cyclist and owner with Victor Goddet of the velodrome at the Parc des Princes. De Dion knew him through his cycling reputation, through the books and cycling articles that he had written, and through press articles he had written for the Clément tyre company.
"L'Auto" was not the success its backers wanted. Stagnating sales lower than the rival it was intended to surpass led to a crisis meeting on 20 November 1902 on the middle floor of "L'Auto"'s office at 10 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, Paris. The last to speak was the most junior there, the chief cycling journalist, a 26-year-old named Géo Lefèvre. Desgrange had poached him from Giffard's paper. Lefèvre suggested a six-day race of the sort popular on the track but all around France. Long-distance cycle races were a popular means to sell more newspapers, but nothing of the length that Lefèvre suggested had been attempted. If it succeeded, it would help "L'Auto" match its rival and perhaps put it out of business. It could, as Desgrange said, "nail Giffard's beak shut."
Desgrange and Lefèvre discussed it after lunch. Desgrange was doubtful but the paper's financial director, Victor Goddet, was enthusiastic. He handed Desgrange the keys to the company safe and said: "Take whatever you need." "L'Auto" announced the race on 19 January 1903.
The first Tour de France was staged in 1903. The plan was a five-stage race from 31 May to 5 July, starting in Paris and stopping in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and Nantes before returning to Paris. Toulouse was added later to break the long haul across southern France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Stages would go through the night and finish next afternoon, with rest days before riders set off again. But this proved too daunting and the costs too great for most and only 15 competitors had entered. Desgrange had never been wholly convinced and he came close to dropping the idea. Instead, he cut the length to 19 days, changed the dates to 1 to 19 July, and offered a daily allowance to those who averaged at least on all the stages, equivalent to what a rider would have expected to earn each day had he worked in a factory. He also cut the entry fee from 20 to 10 francs and set the first prize at 12,000 francs and the prize for each day's winner at 3,000 francs. The winner would thereby win six times what most workers earned in a year. That attracted between 60 and 80 entrants – the higher number may have included serious inquiries and some who dropped out – among them not just professionals but amateurs, some unemployed, and some simply adventurous.
Desgrange seems not to have forgotten the Dreyfus Affair that launched his race and raised the passions of his backers. He announced his new race on 1 July 1903 by citing the writer Émile Zola, whose open letter "J'Accuse…!" led to Dreyfus's acquittal, establishing the florid style he used henceforth.
The first Tour de France started almost outside the Café Reveil-Matin at the junction of the Melun and Corbeil roads in the village of Montgeron. It was waved away by the starter, Georges Abran, at 3:16 p.m. on 1 July 1903. "L'Auto" hadn't featured the race on its front page that morning.
Among the competitors were the eventual winner, Maurice Garin, his well-built rival Hippolyte Aucouturier, the German favourite Josef Fischer, and a collection of adventurers including one competing as "Samson".
Many riders dropped out of the race after completing the initial stages as the physical effort the tour required was just too much. Only a mere 24 entrants remained at the end of the fourth stage. The race finished on the edge of Paris at Ville d'Avray, outside the Restaurant du Père Auto, before a ceremonial ride into Paris and several laps of the Parc des Princes. Garin dominated the race, winning the first and last two stages, at . The last rider, Millocheau, finished 64h 47m 22s behind him.
"L'Auto"'s mission was accomplished as throughout the race circulation of the publication doubled, making the race something much larger than Desgrange had ever hoped for.
Such was the passion that the first Tour created in spectators and riders that Desgrange said the 1904 Tour de France would be the last. Cheating was rife and riders were beaten up by rival fans as they neared the top of the col de la République, sometimes called the col du Grand Bois, outside St-Étienne. The leading riders, including the winner Maurice Garin, were disqualified, though it took the Union Vélocipèdique de France until 30 November to make the decision. McGann says the UVF waited so long "...well aware of the passions aroused by the race." Desgrange's opinion of the fighting and cheating showed in the headline of his reaction in "L'Auto": THE END. Desgrange's despair did not last. By the following spring he was planning another Tour, longer at 11 stages rather than 6 – and this time all in daylight to make any cheating more obvious. Stages in 1905 began between 3 am and 7:30 am. The race captured the imagination. "L'Auto's" circulation rose from 25,000 to 65,000; by 1908 it was a quarter of a million. The Tour returned after its suspension during World War One and continued to grow, with circulation of "L'Auto" reaching 500,000 by 1923. The record claimed by Desgrange was 854,000 during the 1933 Tour. "Le Vélo", meanwhile, went out of business in 1904.
Desgrange and his Tour invented bicycle stage racing. Desgrange experimented with different ways of judging the winner. Initially he used total accumulated time (as used in the modern Tour de France) but from 1906 to 1912 by points for placings each day. Desgrange saw problems in judging both by time and by points. By time, a rider coping with a mechanical problem—which the rules insisted he repair alone—could lose so much time that it cost him the race. Equally, riders could finish so separated that time gained or lost on one or two days could decide the whole race. Judging the race by points removed over-influential time differences but discouraged competitors from riding hard. It made no difference whether they finished fast or slow or separated by seconds or hours, so they were inclined to ride together at a relaxed pace until close to the line, only then disputing the final placings that would give them points.
The format changed over time. The Tour originally ran around the perimeter of France. Cycling was an endurance sport and the organisers realised the sales they would achieve by creating supermen of the competitors. Night riding was dropped after the second Tour in 1904, when there had been persistent cheating when judges could not see riders. That reduced the daily and overall distance but the emphasis remained on endurance. Desgrange said his ideal race would be so hard that only one rider would make it to Paris. The first mountain stages (in the Pyrenees) appeared in 1910. Early tours had long multi-day stages, with the format settling on 15 stages from 1910 until 1924. After this, stages were gradually shortened, such that by 1936 there were as many as three stages in a single day. Desgrange initially preferred to see the Tour as a race of individuals. The first Tours were open to whoever wanted to compete. Most riders were in teams that looked after them. The private entrants were called "touriste-routiers" – tourists of the road – from 1923 and were allowed to take part provided they make no demands on the organisers. Some of the Tour's most colourful characters have been touriste-routiers. One finished each day's race and then performed acrobatic tricks in the street to raise the price of a hotel. Until 1925 Desgrange forbade team members from pacing each other. The 1927 and 1928 Tours, however, consisted mainly of team time-trials, an unsuccessful experiment which sought to avoid a proliferation of sprint finishes on flat stages. Desgrange was a traditionalist with equipment. Until 1930 he demanded that riders mend their bicycles without help and that they use the same bicycle from start to end. Exchanging a damaged bicycle for another was allowed only in 1923. Desgrange stood against the use of multiple gears and for many years insisted riders use wooden rims, fearing the heat of braking while coming down mountains would melt the glue that held the tires on metal rims (they were finally allowed in 1937).
By the end of the 1920s, Desgrange believed he could not beat what he believed were the underhand tactics of bike factories. When the Alcyon team contrived to get Maurice De Waele to win even though he was sick, he said "My race has been won by a corpse". In 1930 Desgrange again attempted to take control of the Tour from teams, insisting competitors enter in national teams rather than trade teams and that competitors ride plain yellow bicycles that he would provide, without a maker's name. There was no place for individuals in the post-1930s teams and so Desgrange created regional teams, generally from France, to take in riders who would not otherwise have qualified. The original touriste-routiers mostly disappeared but some were absorbed into regional teams. In 1936 Desgrange had a prostate operation. At the time, two operations were needed; the Tour de France was due to fall between them. Desgrange persuaded his surgeon to let him follow the race. The second day proved too much and, in a fever at Charleville, he retired to his château at Beauvallon. Desgrange died at home on the Mediterranean coast on 16 August 1940. The race was taken over by his deputy, Jacques Goddet. The Tour was again disrupted by War after 1939, and did not return until 1947.
In 1944, "L'Auto" was closed – its doors nailed shut – and its belongings, including the Tour, sequestrated by the state for publishing articles too close to the Germans. Rights to the Tour were therefore owned by the government. Jacques Goddet was allowed to publish another daily sports paper, "L'Équipe", but there was a rival candidate to run the Tour: a consortium of "Sports" and "Miroir Sprint". Each organised a candidate race. "L'Équipe" and "Le Parisien Libéré" had La Course du Tour de France and "Sports" and "Miroir Sprint" had La Ronde de France. Both were five stages, the longest the government would allow because of shortages. "L'Équipe"'s race was better organised and appealed more to the public because it featured national teams that had been successful before the war, when French cycling was at a high. "L'Équipe" was given the right to organise the 1947 Tour de France. However, "L'Équipe"'s finances were never sound and Goddet accepted an advance by Émilion Amaury, who had supported his bid to run the post-war Tour. Amaury was a newspaper magnate whose condition was that his sports editor, Félix Lévitan should join Goddet for the Tour. The two worked together, Goddet running the sporting side and Lévitan the financial.
On the Tour's return, the format of the race settled on between 20–25 stages. Most stages would last one day but the scheduling of 'split' stages continued well in to the 1980s. 1953 saw the introduction of the Green Jersey 'Points' competition. National teams contested the Tour until 1961. The teams were of different sizes. Some nations had more than one team and some were mixed in with others to make up the number. National teams caught the public imagination but had a snag: that riders might normally have been in rival trade teams the rest of the season. The loyalty of riders was sometimes questionable, within and between teams. Sponsors were always unhappy about releasing their riders into anonymity for the biggest race of the year, as riders in national teams wore the colours of their country and a small cloth panel on their chest that named the team for which they normally rode. The situation became critical at the start of the 1960s. Sales of bicycles had fallen and bicycle factories were closing. There was a risk, the trade said, that the industry would die if factories were not allowed the publicity of the Tour de France. The Tour returned to trade teams in 1962. In the same year, Émilion Amaury, owner of "le Parisien Libéré", became financially involved in the Tour. He made Félix Lévitan co-organizer of the Tour, and it was decided that Levitan would focus on the financial issues, and Jacques Goddet on the sporting issues. The Tour de France was meant for professional cyclists, but in 1961 the organisation started the Tour de l'Avenir the amateur version.
Doping had become a problem culminating in the death of Tom Simpson in 1967, after which riders went on strike, though the organisers suspected sponsors provoked them. The Union Cycliste Internationale introduced limits to daily and overall distances, imposed rest days and tests were introduced for riders. It was then impossible to follow the frontiers, and the Tour increasingly zig-zagged across the country, sometimes with unconnected days' races linked by train, while still maintaining some sort of loop. The Tour returned to national teams for 1967 and 1968 as "an experiment". The Tour returned to trade teams in 1969 with a suggestion that national teams could come back every few years, but this has not happened since.
In the early 1970s the race was dominated by Eddy Merckx, who won the General Classification five times, the Mountains Classification twice, the Points Classification three times and a record 34 stages. Merckx's dominating style earned him the nickname "The Cannibal". In 1969 he already had a commanding lead when he launched a solo attack which none of the other elite riders could answer, resulting in a winning margin of nearly eighteen minutes. In 1973 he did not win because he did not enter the Tour and his reign as champ only came to an end when he finished 2nd to Bernard Thevenet in 1975.
During this era race director Felix Lévitan began to recruit additional sponsors, sometimes accepting prizes in kind if he could not get cash. In 1975 the polka-dot jersey was introduced for the winner of the Mountains Classification. This same year Levitan also introduced the finish of the Tour at the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Since then this stage has been largely ceremonial and is generally only contested as a prestigious sprinters' stage. (See 'Notable Stages' below for examples of non-ceremonial finishes to this stage) Occasionally a rider will be given the honor of leading the rest of the peloton onto the circuit finish in their final Tour as was the case for Jens Voigt and Sylvain Chavanel among others.
The late 1970s into the early 1980s the Tour was dominated by Frenchman Bernard Hinault who would become the third rider to win five times. Hinault was defeated by Joop Zoetemelk in 1980 when he withdrew, and by his own teammate Greg LeMond in 1986 but he was in contention during both of these Tours. Only once in his Tour de France career was he soundly defeated and this was by Laurent Fignon in 1984. The 1987 edition, was more uncertain than past editions as previous winners Hinault and Zoetemelk had retired, LeMond was absent and Fignon was suffering from a lingering injury. As such the race was highly competitive and the lead changed hands eight times before Stephen Roche won. When Roche won the World Championship later in the season he became only the second rider (after Merckx) to win cycling's Triple Crown which meant winning the Giro, the Tour and the World road race championship in the same year.
Levitan helped drive an internationalization of the Tour de France, and cycling in general. Roche was the first winner from Ireland, but in the years leading up to his victory cyclists from numerous other countries began joining the ranks of the peloton. In 1982 Sean Kelly of Ireland (points) and Phil Anderson of Australia (young rider) became the first winners of any Tour classifications from outside cycling's Continental Europe heartlands, while Lévitan was influential in facilitating the participation in the 1983 Tour by amateur riders from the Eastern Bloc and Colombia. In 1984, for the first time, the Société du Tour de France organized the Tour de France Féminin, a version for women. It was run in the same weeks as the men's version, and won by Marianne Martin. Greg LeMond of the US became the first non-European winner in the 1986 race.
While the global awareness and popularity of the Tour grew during this time, its finances became stretched. Goddet and Lévitan continued to clash over the running of the race. Lévitan launched the Tour of America, as a precursor to his plans to take the Tour de France to the US. The Tour of America lost a lot of money, and it appeared to have been cross-financed by the Tour de France. In the years before 1987, Lévitan's position had always been protected by Émilien Amaury, the then owner of ASO, but recently, Émilien Amaury had retired and his son Philippe Amaury was now responsible. When Lévitan arrived at his office on 17 March 1987, he found that his doors were locked and he was fired. The organisation of the 1987 Tour de France was taken over by Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet. He was not successful in acquiring more funds, and was fired within one year.
Months before the start of the 1988 Tour, director Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet was replaced by Xavier Louy. In 1988 the Tour was organised by Jean-Pierre Courcol, the director of "L'Équipe", then in 1989 by Jean-Pierre Carenso and then by Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in 1989 had been race director. The former television presenter Christian Prudhomme—he commentated on the Tour among other events—replaced Leblanc in 2007, having been assistant director for three years. In 1993 ownership of "L'Équipe" moved to the Amaury Group, which formed Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) to oversee its sports operations, although the Tour itself is operated by its subsidiary the Société du Tour de France.
From 1988 onward was arguably the beginning of what can be referred to as the dope-era, as a new drug which drug tests were not able to detect began being used known as erythropoietin (EPO). Pedro Delgado won the 1988 Tour de France by a considerable margin and in 1989 and 1990 Lemond returned from injury and won back to back Tours with the 1989 edition still standing as the closest two-way battle in TDF history with Lemond claiming an 8-second victory on the final time trial to best Laurent Fignon. The early 1990s was dominated by Spaniard Miguel Indurain who became such an exceptional time-trialist that it didn't even matter many top level riders were experimenting with EPO. He won the time trials by such dominating margins that virtually nobody could compete with him and as a result he became the first rider to win five Tours in a row. The influx of more international riders continued through this period as in 1996 and 1997 the race was won for the first time by a rider from Denmark in Bjarne Riis, and Germany in Jan Ullrich. During the 1998 Tour de France a doping scandal known as the Festina Affair shook the sport to its core when it became apparent that there was systematic doping going on in the sport. Numerous riders and a handful of teams were either thrown out of the race, or left of their own free will and in the end Marco Pantani survived to win his lone Tour in a reduced main field. The 1999 Tour de France was billed as the ‘Tour of Renewal’ as the sport tried to clean up its image following the doping fiasco of the previous year. Initially it seemed to be a Cinderella type story when cancer survivor Lance Armstrong stole the show on Sestriere and kept on riding to the first of his astonishing seven consecutive Tour de France victories, however 1999 was just the beginning of the doping problem getting much, much worse. Following Armstrong's retirement in 2005 the 2006 edition saw his former teammate Floyd Landis finally get the chance he worked so hard for with a stunning and improbable solo breakaway on Stage 17 in which he set himself up to win the Tour in the final time trial, which he then did. Not long after the Tour was over however, Landis was accused of doping and had his Tour win revoked. Over the next few years a new star in Alberto Contador came onto the scene, Carlos Sastre won a very competitive Tour in 2008 and in 2011 Cadel Evans would become the first Australian to win the Tour after coming up just short several times in the previous few editions.
The 2012 Tour de France would be won by the first British rider to ever win the Tour in Bradley Wiggins while finishing on the podium just behind him was Chris Froome, who along with Contador, would become the next big stars to attempt to contest the giants of Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain and Armstrong. Overshadowing the entire sport at this time however, was the Lance Armstrong Doping Case, which finally revealed much of the truth about doping in cycling. As a result, the UCI decided that each of Armstrong's seven wins would be revoked. This decision cleared the names of many people, including lesser known riders, reporters, team medical staff and even the wife of a rider who had their reputations tarnished or had been forced from the sport by challenging the Armstrong machine. Much of this only became possible after Floyd Landis came forward to USADA. Also around this time an investigation by the French government into doping in cycling revealed that way back during the 1998 Tour, close to 90% of the riders who were tested, retroactively tested positive for EPO. The end result of these doping scandals being that in the case of Landis in 2006, and Contador in 2010 new winners were declared in Oscar Pereiro and Andy Schleck respectively, however in the case of the seven Tours revoked from Armstrong there was no alternate winner named, as much of Armstrong's competition was just as guilty as he was and the sport has been trying to set the right example for the future generation of riders. The generation from the mid 2010s and beyond seems to be competing on a level playing field without having to make the decision so many riders of the previous generation had to make; which was to give in and start doping, or give up on their dreams.
In the local towns and cities that the Tour visits for stage starts and finishes it is quite the spectacle that usually shuts these towns down for the day resulting in a very festive atmosphere and these events usually require months of planning and preparation. ASO employs around 70 people full-time, in an office facing but not connected to "L'Équipe" in the Issy-les-Moulineaux area of outer western Paris. That number expands to about 220 during the race itself, not including 500 contractors employed to move barriers, erect stages, signpost the route and other work. ASO now also operate several other major bike races throughout the year.
The 2020 Tour was postponed to commence on 29 August, following the French government's extension of a ban on mass gatherings after the COVID-19 outbreak in the country. This was the first time since the end of World War II that the Tour De France was not held in the month of July.
The oldest and main competition in the Tour de France is known as the "general classification", for which the yellow jersey is awarded: the winner of this is said to have won the race. A few riders from each team aim to win overall but there are three further competitions to draw riders of all specialties: points, mountains, and a classification for young riders with general classification aspirations. The leader of each of the aforementioned classifications wears a distinctive jersey, with riders leading multiple classifications wearing the jersey of the most prestigious that he leads. In addition to these four classifications, there are several minor and discontinued classifications that are competed for during the race.
The oldest and most sought after classification in the Tour de France is the general classification. All of the stages are timed to the finish. The riders' times are compounded with their previous stage times; so the rider with the lowest aggregate time is the leader of the race. The leader is determined after each stage's conclusion: he gains the privilege to wear the yellow jersey, presented on a podium in the stage's finishing town, for the next stage. If a rider is leading more than one classification that awards a jersey, he wears the yellow one, since the general classification is the most important one in the race. Between 1905 and 1912 inclusive, in response to concerns about rider cheating in the 1904 race, the general classification was awarded according to a point-based system based on their placings in each stage, and the rider with the lowest total of points after the Tour's conclusion was the winner.
The leader in the first Tour de France was awarded a green armband. The yellow jersey (The color yellow was chosen as the magazine that created the Tour, "L'Auto", printed its newspapers on yellow paper), was added to the race in the 1919 edition and it has since become a symbol of the Tour de France. The first rider to wear the yellow jersey was Eugène Christophe. Riders usually try to make the extra effort to keep the jersey for as long as possible in order to get more publicity for the team and its sponsors. Eddy Merckx has worn the yellow jersey for 96 stages, which is more than any other rider in the history of the Tour de France. Four riders have won the general classification five times in their career: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain.
The mountains classification is the second oldest jersey awarding classification in the Tour de France. The mountains classification was added to the Tour de France in the 1933 edition and was first won by Vicente Trueba. Prizes for the classification were first awarded in 1934. During stages of the race containing climbs, points are awarded to the first riders to reach the top of each categorized climb, with points available for up to the first 10 riders, depending on the classification of the climb. Climbs are classified according to the steepness and length of that particular hill, with more points available for harder climbs. The classification was preceded by the "meilleur grimpeur" () which was awarded by the organising newspaper "l'Auto" to a cyclist who completed each race.
The classification awarded no jersey to the leader until the 1975 Tour de France, when the organizers decided to award a distinctive white jersey with red dots to the leader. The climbers' jersey is worn by the rider who, at the start of each stage, has the largest number of climbing points. If a rider leads two or more of classifications, the climbers' jersey is worn by the rider in second, or third, place in that contest. At the end of the Tour, the rider holding the most climbing points wins the classification. Some riders may race with the aim of winning this particular competition, while others who gain points early on may shift their focus to the classification during the race. The Tour has five categories for ranking the mountains the race covers. The scale ranges from category 4, the easiest, to hors catégorie, the hardest. During his career Richard Virenque won the mountains classification a record seven times.
The point distribution for the mountains in the 2019 event was:
The points classification is the third oldest of the currently awarded jersey classifications. It was introduced in the 1953 Tour de France and was first won by Fritz Schär. The classification was added to draw the participation of the sprinters as well as celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Tour. Points are given to the first 15 riders to finish a stage, with an additional set of points given to the first 15 riders to cross a pre-determined 'sprint' point during the route of each stage. The point classification leader green jersey is worn by the rider who at the start of each stage, has the greatest number of points.
In the first years, the cyclist received penalty points for not finishing with a high place, so the cyclist with the fewest points was awarded the green jersey. From 1959 on, the system was changed so the cyclists were awarded points for high place finishes (with first place getting the most points, and lower placings getting successively fewer points), so the cyclist with the most points was awarded the green jersey. The number of points awarded varies depending on the type of stage, with flat stages awarding the most points at the finish and time trials and high mountain stages awarding the fewest points at the finish. This increases the likelihood of a sprinter winning the points classification, though other riders can be competitive for the classification if they have a sufficient number of high-place finishes.
The winner of the classification is the rider with the most points at the end of the Tour. In case of a tie, the leader is determined by the number of stage wins, then the number of intermediate sprint victories, and finally, the rider's standing in the general classification. The classification has been won a record seven times by Peter Sagan.
The first year the points classification was used it was sponsored by La Belle Jardinière, a lawn mower producer, and the jersey was made green. In 1968 the jersey was changed to red to please the sponsor. However, the color was changed back the following year. For almost 25 years the classification was sponsored by Pari Mutuel Urbain, a state betting company. However they announced in November 2014 that they would not be continuing their sponsorship, and in March 2015 it was revealed that the green jersey would now be sponsored by Czech car manufacturer Škoda.
As of 2015, the points awarded are:
The leader of the classification is determined the same way as the general classification, with the riders' times being added up after each stage and the eligible rider with lowest aggregate time is dubbed the leader. The Young rider classification is restricted to the riders that are under the age of 26. Originally the classification was restricted to neo-professionals – riders that are in their first three years of professional racing – until 1983. In 1983, the organizers made it so that only first time riders were eligible for the classification. In 1987, the organizers changed the rules of the classification to what they are today.
This classification was added to the Tour de France in the 1975 edition, with Francesco Moser being the first to win the classification after placing seventh overall. The Tour de France awards a white jersey to the leader of the classification, although this was not done between 1989 and 2000. Five riders have won both the young rider classification and the general classification in the same year: Laurent Fignon (1983), Jan Ullrich (1997), Alberto Contador (2007), Andy Schleck (2010), and Egan Bernal (2019). Two riders have won the young rider classification three times in their respective careers: Jan Ullrich and Andy Schleck.
As of 2015 Jersey sponsor is Optician company Krys, replacing Škoda who moved to the Green Jersey.
The "prix de la combativité" goes to the rider who most animates the day, usually by trying to break clear of the field. The most combative rider wears a number printed white-on-red instead of black-on-white next day. An award goes to the most aggressive rider throughout the Tour. Already in 1908 a sort of combativity award was offered, when "Sports Populaires" and "L'Education Physique" created "Le Prix du Courage", 100 francs and a silver gilt medal for "the rider having finished the course, even if unplaced, who is particularly distinguished for the energy he has used." The modern competition started in 1958. In 1959, a Super Combativity award for the most combative cyclist of the Tour was awarded. It was initially not awarded every year, but since 1981 it has been given annually. Eddy Merckx has the most wins (4) for the overall award.
The team classification is assessed by adding the time of each team's best three riders each day. The competition does not have its own jersey but since 2006 the leading team has worn numbers printed black-on-yellow. Until 1990, the leading team would wear yellow caps. As of 2012, the riders of the leading team wear yellow helmets. During the era of national teams, France and Belgium won 10 times each. From 1973 up to 1988, there was also a team classification based on points (stage classification); members of the leading team would wear green caps.
There has been an intermediate sprints classification, which from 1984 awarded a red jersey for points awarded to the first three to pass intermediate points during the stage. These sprints also scored points towards the points classification and bonuses towards the general classification. The intermediate sprints classification with its red jersey was abolished in 1989, but the intermediate sprints have remained, offering points for the points classification and, until 2007, time bonuses for the general classification.
From 1968 there was a combination classification, scored on a points system based on standings in the general, points and mountains classifications. The design was originally white, then a patchwork with areas resembling each individual jersey design. This was also abolished in 1989.
The rider who has taken most time is called the "lanterne rouge" ("red lantern, as in the red light at the back of a vehicle so it can be seen in the dark") and in past years sometimes carried a small red light beneath his saddle. Such was sympathy that he could command higher fees in the races that previously followed the Tour. In 1939 and 1948 the organisers excluded the last rider every day, to encourage more competitive racing.
Prize money has always been awarded. From 20,000 francs the first year,
prize money has increased each year, although from 1976 to 1987 the first prize was an apartment offered by a race sponsor. The first prize in 1988 was a car, a studio-apartment, a work of art, and 500,000 francs in cash. Prizes only in cash returned in 1990.
Prizes and bonuses are awarded for daily placings and final placings at the end of the race. In 2009, the winner received 450,000 €, while each of the 21 stage winners won 8,000 € (10,000 € for the team time-trial stage). The winners of the points classification and mountains classification each win 25,000 €, the young rider competition and the combativity prize 20,000 €; the winner of the team classification (calculated by adding the cumulative times of the best three riders in each team) receives 50 000 €.
The Souvenir Henri Desgrange, in memory of the founder of the Tour, is awarded to the first rider over the Col du Galibier where his monument stands, or to the first rider over the highest col in the Tour. A similar award, the Souvenir Jacques Goddet, is made at the summit of the Col du Tourmalet, at the memorial to Jacques Goddet, Desgrange's successor.
The modern tour typically has 21 stages, one per day.
The Tour directors categorise mass-start stages into 'flat', 'hilly', or 'mountain'. This affects the points awarded in the sprint classification, whether the 3 kilometer rule is operational, and the permitted disqualification time in which riders must finish (which is the winners' time plus a pre-determined percentage of that time). Time bonuses of 10, 6, and 4 seconds are awarded to the first three finishers, though this was not done from 2008 to 2014. Bonuses were previously also awarded to winners of intermediate sprints.
The first time trial in the Tour was between La Roche-sur-Yon and Nantes (80 km) in 1934. The first stage in modern Tours is often a short trial, a "prologue", to decide who wears yellow on the opening day. The first prologue was in 1967. The 1988 event, at La Baule, was called "la préface". There are usually two or three time trials. The final time trial has sometimes been the final stage, more recently often the penultimate stage.
Since 1975 the race has finished with laps of the Champs-Élysées. As the peloton arrives in downtown Paris the French Air Force does a three-jet flyover with the three colors of the French flag in smoke behind them. This stage rarely challenges the leader because it is flat and the leader usually has too much time in hand to be denied. In modern times, there tends to be a gentlemen's agreement: while the points classification is still contended if possible, the overall classification is not fought over; because of this, it is not uncommon for the "de facto" winner of the overall classification to ride into Paris holding a glass of champagne. The only time the Maillot Jaune was attacked in a manner that lasted all the way through the end of this stage was during the 1979 Tour de France. In 1987, Pedro Delgado vowed to attack during the stage to challenge the 40-second lead held by Stephen Roche. He was unsuccessful and he and Roche finished in the peloton. In 2005, controversy arose when Alexander Vinokourov attacked and won the stage, in the process taking fifth place overall from Levi Leipheimer. This attack was not a threat to the overall lead, but was a long-shot at the Podium standings, as Vinokourov was about five minutes behind 3rd place.
In 1989 the last stage was a time trial. Greg LeMond overtook Laurent Fignon to win by eight seconds, the closest margin in the Tour's history.
The climb of Alpe d'Huez has become one of the more noted mountain stages. During the 2004 Tour de France it was the scene of a mountain time trial on the 16th stage. Riders complained of abusive spectators who threatened their progress up the climb. On this stage it is not uncommon for a low end estimate of the spectators in attendance to number 300,000. During a famous head to head battle between Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor on Puy de Dome it was estimated that at least a half a million people were on hand. Mont Ventoux is often claimed to be the hardest in the Tour because of the harsh conditions. Another notable mountain stage frequently featured climbs the Col du Tourmalet, the most visited mountain in the history of the Tour. Col du Galibier is the most visited mountain in the Alps. The 2011 Tour de France stage to Galibier marked the 100th anniversary of the mountain in the Tour and also boasted the highest finish altitude ever: . Some mountain stages have become memorable because of the weather. An example is a stage in 1996 Tour de France from Val-d'Isère to Sestriere. A snowstorm at the start area led to a shortening of the stage from to just . During the 2019 Tour de France multiple landslides and hail storms forced two critical mountain stages to be considerably shortened. Authorities made every effort to plow the road and make the course safe, but the volume of hail, mud and debris proved too much.
To host a stage start or finish brings prestige and business to a town. The prologue and first stage (Grand Départ) are particularly prestigious. The race may start with a prologue (too short to go between towns) in which case the start of the next day's racing, which would be considered stage 1, would usually be in the same town. In 2007 director Christian Prudhomme said that "in general, for a period of five years we have the Tour start outside France three times and within France twice."
With the switch to the use of national teams in 1930, the costs of accommodating riders fell to the organizers instead of the sponsors and Henri Desgrange raised the money by allowing advertisers to precede the race. The procession of often colourfully decorated trucks and cars became known as the publicity caravan. It formalised an existing situation, companies having started to follow the race. The first to sign to precede the Tour was the chocolate company, Menier, one of those who had followed the race. Its head of publicity, Paul Thévenin, had first put the idea to Desgrange. It paid 50,000 francs. Preceding the race was more attractive to advertisers because spectators gathered by the road long before the race or could be attracted from their houses. Advertisers following the race found that many who had watched the race had already gone home. Menier handed out tons of chocolate in that first year of preceding the race, as well as 500,000 policemen's hats printed with the company's name. The success led to the caravan's existence being formalised the following year.
The caravan was at its height between 1930 and the mid-1960s, before television and especially television advertising was established in France. Advertisers competed to attract public attention. Motorcycle acrobats performed for the Cinzano apéritif company and a toothpaste maker, and an accordionist, Yvette Horner, became one of the most popular sights as she performed on the roof of a Citroën Traction Avant. The modern Tour restricts the excesses to which advertisers are allowed to go but at first anything was allowed. The writer Pierre Bost lamented: "This caravan of 60 gaudy trucks singing across the countryside the virtues of an apéritif, a make of underpants or a dustbin is a shameful spectacle. It bellows, it plays ugly music, it's sad, it's ugly, it smells of vulgarity and money."
Advertisers pay the Société du Tour de France approximately €150,000 to place three vehicles in the caravan. Some have more. On top of that come the more considerable costs of the commercial samples that are thrown to the crowd and the cost of accommodating the drivers and the staff—frequently students—who throw them. The number of items has been estimated at 11 million, each person in the procession giving out 3,000 to 5,000 items a day. A bank, GAN, gave out 170,000 caps, 80,000 badges, 60,000 plastic bags, and 535,000 copies of its race newspaper in 1994. Together, they weighed . The vehicles also have to be decorated on the morning of each stage and, because they must return to ordinary highway standards, disassembled after each stage. Numbers vary but there are normally around 250 vehicles each year. Their order on the road is established by contract, the leading vehicles belonging to the largest sponsors.
The procession sets off two hours before the start and then regroups to precede the riders by an hour and a half. It spreads and takes 40 minutes to pass at between and . Vehicles travel in groups of five. Their position is logged by GPS and from an aircraft and organised on the road by the caravan director—Jean-Pierre Lachaud—an assistant, three motorcyclists, two radio technicians, and a breakdown and medical crew. Six motorcyclists from the Garde Républicaine, the élite of the gendarmerie, ride with them.
The first three Tours from 1903–1905 stayed within France. The 1906 race went into Alsace-Lorraine, territory annexed by the German Empire in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. Passage was secured through a meeting at Metz between Desgrange's collaborator, Alphonse Steinès, and the German governor.
No teams from Italy, Germany, or Spain rode in 1939 because of tensions preceding the Second World War (after German assistance to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War it was widely expected Spain would join Germany in a European war, though this did not come to pass). Henri Desgrange planned a Tour for 1940, after war had started but before France had been invaded. The route, approved by military authorities, included a route along the Maginot Line. Teams would have been drawn from military units in France, including the British, who would have been organised by a journalist, Bill Mills. Then the Germans invaded and the race was not held again until 1947 (see Tour de France during the Second World War). The first German team after the war was in 1960, although individual Germans had ridden in mixed teams. The Tour has since started in Germany four times: in Cologne in 1965, in Frankfurt in 1980, in West Berlin on the city's 750th anniversary in 1987, and in Düsseldorf in 2017. Plans to enter East Germany in 1987 were abandoned.
Prior to 2013, the Tour de France had visited every region of Metropolitan France except Corsica. Jean-Marie Leblanc, when he was organiser, said the island had never asked for a stage start there. It would be difficult to find accommodation for 4,000 people, he said. The spokesman of the Corsican nationalist party Party of the Corsican Nation, François Alfonsi, said: "The organisers must be afraid of terrorist attacks. If they are really thinking of a possible terrorist action, they are wrong. Our movement, which is nationalist and in favour of self-government, would be delighted if the Tour came to Corsica." The opening three stages of the 2013 Tour de France were held on Corsica as part of the celebrations for the 100th edition of the race.
Most stages are in mainland France, although since the mid-1950s it has become common to visit nearby countries: Andorra, Belgium, Germany (and the former West Germany), Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Spain,
Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have all hosted stages or part of a stage. Since 1975 the finish has been on the Champs-Élysées in Paris; from 1903 to 1967 the race finished at the Parc des Princes stadium in western Paris and from 1968 to 1974 at the Piste Municipale south of the capital. Feliz Levitan, race organizer in the 1980s, was keen to host stages in the United States, but these proposals have never been developed.
The following editions of the Tour started, or are planned to start, outside France:
The Tour was first followed only by journalists from "L'Auto", the organisers. The race was founded to increase sales of a floundering newspaper and its editor, Desgrange, saw no reason to allow rival publications to profit.
The first time papers other than "L'Auto" were allowed was 1921, when 15 press cars were allowed for regional and foreign reporters.
The Tour was shown first on cinema newsreels a day or more after the event. The first live radio broadcast was in 1929, when Jean Antoine and Alex Virot of the newspaper "L'Intransigeant" broadcast for Radio Cité. They used telephone lines. In 1932 they broadcast the sound of riders crossing the col d'Aubisque in the Pyrenees on 12 July, using a recording machine and transmitting the sound later.
The first television pictures were shown a day after a stage. The national TV channel used two 16mm cameras, a Jeep, and a motorbike. Film was flown or taken by train to Paris, where it was edited and then shown the following day.
The first live broadcast, and the second of any sport in France, was the finish at the Parc des Princes in Paris on 25 July 1948. Rik Van Steenbergen of Belgium led in the bunch after a stage of from Nancy. The first live coverage from the side of the road was from the Aubisque on 8 July 1958. Proposals to cover the whole race were abandoned in 1962 after objections from regional newspapers whose editors feared the competition. The dispute was settled, but not in time for the race, and the first complete coverage was the following year in 1963. In 1958 the first mountain climbs were broadcast live on television for the first time, and in 1959 helicopters were first used for the television coverage.
The leading television commentator in France was a former rider, Robert Chapatte. At first he was the only commentator. He was joined in following seasons by an analyst for the mountain stages and by a commentator following the competitors by motorcycle.
Broadcasting in France was largely a state monopoly until 1982, when the socialist president François Mitterrand allowed private broadcasters and privatised the leading television channel. Competition between channels raised the broadcasting fees paid to the organisers from 1.5 per cent of the race budget in 1960 to more than a third by the end of the century. Broadcasting time also increased as channels competed to secure the rights. The two largest channels to stay in public ownership, Antenne 2 and FR3, combined to offer more coverage than its private rival, TF1. The two stations, renamed France 2 and France 3, still hold the domestic rights and provide pictures for broadcasters around the world.
The stations use a staff of 300 with four helicopters, two aircraft, two motorcycles, 35 other vehicles including trucks, and 20 podium cameras.
French aviation company Hélicoptères de France (HdF) has provided aerial filming services for the Tour since 1999. HdF operates Eurocopter AS355 Écureuil 2 and AS350 Écureuil helicopters for this purpose, and the pilots undergo training along the course for six months before the race.
Domestic television covers the most important stages of the Tour, such as those in the mountains, from mid-morning until early evening. Coverage typically starts with a survey of the day's route, interviews along the road, discussions of the difficulties and tactics ahead, and a 30-minute archive feature. The biggest stages are shown live from start to end, followed by interviews with riders and others and features such an edited version of the stage seen from beside a team manager following and advising riders from his car. Radio covers the race in updates throughout the day, particularly on the national news channel, France Info, and some stations provide continuous commentary on long wave. The 1979 Tour was the first to be broadcast in the United States.
The combination of unprecedented rigorous doping controls and almost no positive tests helped restore fans' confidence in the 2009 Tour de France. This led directly to an increase in global popularity of the event. The most watched stage of 2009 was stage 20, from Montélimar to Mont Ventoux in Provence, with a global total audience of 44 million, making it the 12th most watched sporting event in the world in 2009.
The Tour is an important cultural event for fans in Europe. Millions line the route, some having camped for a week to get the best view. Crowds flanking the course are reminiscent of the community festivals that are part of another form of cycle racing in a different country – the Isle of Man TT.
The Tour de France appealed from the start not just for the distance and its demands but because it played to a wish for national unity, a call to what Maurice Barrès called the France "of earth and deaths" or what Georges Vigarello called "the image of a France united by its earth."
The image had been started by the 1877 travel/school book "Le Tour de la France par deux enfants". It told of two boys, André and Julien, who "in a thick September fog left the town of Phalsbourg in Lorraine to see France at a time when few people had gone far beyond their nearest town."
The book sold six million copies by the time of the first Tour de France, the biggest selling book of 19th-century France (other than the Bible). It stimulated a national interest in France, making it "visible and alive", as its preface said. There had already been a car race called the Tour de France but it was the publicity behind the cycling race, and Desgrange's drive to educate and improve the population, that inspired the French to know more of their country.
The academic historians Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard say most people in France had little idea of the shape of their country until "L'Auto" began publishing maps of the race.
The Tour has inspired several popular songs in France, notably "P'tit gars du Tour" (1932), "Les Tours de France" (1936) and "Faire le Tour de France" (1950). German electronic group Kraftwerk composed "Tour de France" in 1983 – described as a minimalistic "melding of man and machine" – and produced an album, "Tour de France Soundtracks" in 2003, the centenary of the Tour.
The Tour and its first Italian winner, Ottavio Bottecchia, are mentioned at the end of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises".
In films, the Tour was background for "Five Red Tulips" (1949) by Jean Stelli, in which five riders are murdered. A burlesque in 1967, "Les Cracks" by Alex Joffé, with Bourvil et Monique Tarbès, also featured it. Footage of the 1970 Tour de France is shown in Jorgen Leth's experimental short "Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee". Patrick Le Gall made "Chacun son Tour" (1996). The comedy, "Le Vélo de Ghislain Lambert" (2001), featured the Tour of 1974.
In 2005, three films chronicled a team. The German "Höllentour", translated as "Hell on Wheels", recorded 2003 from the perspective of Team Telekom. The film was directed by Pepe Danquart, who won an Academy Award for live-action short film in 1993 for "Black Rider" ("Schwarzfahrer"). The Danish film "Overcoming" by Tómas Gislason recorded the 2004 Tour from the perspective of Team CSC.
"Wired to Win" chronicles Française des Jeux riders Baden Cooke and Jimmy Caspar in 2003. By following their quest for the points classification, won by Cooke, the film looks at the working of the brain. The film, made for IMAX theaters, appeared in December 2005. It was directed by Bayley Silleck, who was nominated for an Academy Award for documentary short subject in 1996 for "Cosmic Voyage".
A fan, Scott Coady, followed the 2000 Tour with a handheld video camera to make "The Tour Baby!", which raised $160,000 to benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and made a 2005 sequel, "Tour Baby Deux!".
"Vive Le Tour" by Louis Malle is an 18-minute short of 1962. The 1965 Tour was filmed by Claude Lelouch in "Pour un Maillot Jaune". This 30-minute documentary has no narration and relies on sights and sounds of the Tour.
In fiction, the 2003 animated feature "Les Triplettes de Belleville" ("The Triplets of Belleville") ties into the Tour de France.
After the Tour de France there are criteriums in the Netherlands and Belgium. These races are public spectacles where thousands of people can see their heroes from the Tour de France race. The budget of a criterium is over 100,000 Euro, with most of the money going to the riders. Jersey winners or big-name riders earn between 20 and 60 thousand euros per race in start money.
Allegations of doping have plagued the Tour almost since 1903. Early riders consumed alcohol and used ether, to dull the pain. Over the years they began to increase performance and the Union Cycliste Internationale and governments enacted policies to combat the practice.
In 1924, Henri Pélissier and his brother Charles told the journalist Albert Londres they used strychnine, cocaine, chloroform, aspirin, "horse ointment" and other drugs. The story was published in "Le Petit Parisien" under the title "Les Forçats de la Route" ('The Convicts of the Road')
On 13 July 1967, British cyclist Tom Simpson died climbing Mont Ventoux after taking amphetamine.
In 1998, the "Tour of Shame", Willy Voet, soigneur for the Festina team, was arrested with erythropoietin (EPO), growth hormones, testosterone and amphetamine. Police raided team hotels and found products in the possession of the cycling team TVM. Riders went on strike. After mediation by director Jean-Marie Leblanc, police limited their tactics and riders continued. Some riders had dropped out and only 96 finished the race. It became clear in a trial that management and health officials of the Festina team had organised the doping.
Further measures were introduced by race organisers and the UCI, including more frequent testing and tests for blood doping (transfusions and EPO use). This would lead the UCI to becoming a particularly interested party in an International Olympic Committee initiative, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), created in 1999. In 2002, the wife of Raimondas Rumšas, third in the 2002 Tour de France, was arrested after EPO and anabolic steroids were found in her car. Rumšas, who had not failed a test, was not penalised. In 2004, Philippe Gaumont said doping was endemic to his Cofidis team. Fellow Cofidis rider David Millar confessed to EPO after his home was raided. In the same year, Jesus Manzano, a rider with the Kelme team, alleged he had been forced by his team to use banned substances.
From 1999 to 2006, seven successive tours were declared as having been won by Lance Armstrong. In August 2005, one month after Armstrong's seventh apparent victory, "L'Équipe" published documents it said showed Armstrong had used EPO in the 1999 race. At the same Tour, Armstrong's urine showed traces of a glucocorticosteroid hormone, although below the positive threshold. He said he had used skin cream containing triamcinolone to treat saddle sores. Armstrong said he had received permission from the UCI to use this cream. Further allegations ultimately culminated in the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) disqualifying him from all his victories since 1 August 1998, including his seven consecutive Tour de France victories, and a lifetime ban from competing in professional sports. The ASO declined to name any other rider as winner in Armstrong's stead in those years.
The 2006 Tour had been plagued by the Operación Puerto doping case before it began. Favourites such as Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso were banned by their teams a day before the start. Seventeen riders were implicated. American rider Floyd Landis, who finished the Tour as holder of the overall lead, had tested positive for testosterone after he won stage 17, but this was not confirmed until some two weeks after the race finished. On 30 June 2008 Landis lost his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Óscar Pereiro was named as winner.
On 24 May 2007, Erik Zabel admitted using EPO during the first week of the 1996 Tour, when he won the points classification. Following his plea that other cyclists admit to drugs, former winner Bjarne Riis admitted in Copenhagen on 25 May 2007 that he used EPO regularly from 1993 to 1998, including when he won the 1996 Tour. His admission meant the top three in 1996 were all linked to doping, two admitting cheating. On 24 July 2007 Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for a blood transfusion (blood doping) after winning a time trial, prompting his Astana team to pull out and police to raid the team's hotel. The next day Cristian Moreni tested positive for testosterone. His Cofidis team pulled out.
The same day, leader Michael Rasmussen was removed for "violating internal team rules" by missing random tests on 9 May and 28 June. Rasmussen claimed to have been in Mexico. The Italian journalist Davide Cassani told Danish television he had seen Rasmussen in Italy. The alleged lying prompted Rasmussen's firing by Rabobank.
On 11 July 2008 Manuel Beltrán tested positive for EPO after the first stage. On 17 July 2008, Riccardo Riccò tested positive for continuous erythropoiesis receptor activator, a variant of EPO, after the fourth stage. In October 2008, it was revealed that Riccò's teammate and Stage 10 winner Leonardo Piepoli, as well as Stefan Schumacher – who won both time trials – and Bernhard Kohl – third on general classification and King of the Mountains – had tested positive.
After winning the 2010 Tour de France, it was announced that Alberto Contador had tested positive for low levels of clenbuterol on 21 July rest day. On 26 January 2011, the Spanish Cycling Federation proposed a 1-year ban but reversed its ruling on 15 February and cleared Contador to race. Despite a pending appeal by the UCI, Contador finished 5th overall in the 2011 Tour de France, but in February 2012, Contador was suspended and stripped of his 2010 victory.
During the 2012 Tour, the 3rd placed rider from 2011, Fränk Schleck tested positive for the banned diuretic Xipamide and was immediately disqualified from the Tour.
In October 2012, the United States Anti-Doping Agency released a report on doping by the U.S. Postal Service cycling team, implicating, amongst others, Armstrong. The report contained affidavits from riders including Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton, George Hincapie, Floyd Landis, Levi Leipheimer, and others describing widespread use of Erythropoietin (EPO), blood transfusion, testosterone, and other banned practices in several Tours. In October 2012 the UCI acted upon this report, formally stripping Armstrong of all titles since 1 August 1998, including all seven Tour victories, and announced that his Tour wins would not be reallocated to other riders.
Cyclists who have died during the Tour de France:
Another seven fatal accidents have occurred:
One rider has been King of the Mountains, won the combination classification, combativity award, the points competition, and the Tour in the same year—Eddy Merckx in 1969, which was also the first year he participated. The following year he came close to repeating the feat, but was five points behind the winner in the points classification. The only other rider to come close to this achievement is Bernard Hinault in 1979, who won the overall and points competitions and placed second in the mountains classification.
Twice the Tour was won by a racer who never wore the yellow jersey until the race was over. In 1947, Jean Robic overturned a three-minute deficit on the final stage into Paris. In 1968, Jan Janssen of the Netherlands secured his win in the individual time trial on the last day.
The Tour has been won three times by racers who led the general classification on the first stage and holding the lead all the way to Paris. Maurice Garin did it during the Tour's very first edition, 1903; he repeated the feat the next year, but the results were nullified by the officials as a response to widespread cheating. Ottavio Bottecchia completed a GC start-to-finish sweep in 1924. And in 1928, Nicolas Frantz held the GC for the entire race, and at the end, the podium consisted solely of members of his racing team. While no one has equalled this feat since 1928, four times a racer has taken over the GC lead on the second stage and carried that lead all the way to Paris. It is worth noting that Jacques Anquetil predicted he would wear the yellow jersey as leader of the general classification from start to finish in 1961, which he did. That year, the first day had two stages, the first part from Rouen to Versailles and the second part from Versailles to Versailles. No yellow jersey was awarded after the first part, and at the end of the day Anquetil was in yellow.
The most appearances have been by Sylvain Chavanel, who rode his 18th and final Tour in 2018. Prior to Chavenel's final Tour, he shared the record with George Hincapie with 17. In light of Hincapie's suspension for use of performance-enhancing drugs, before which he held the mark for most consecutive finishes with sixteen, having completed all but his very first, Joop Zoetemelk and Chavanel share the record for the most finishes at 16, with Zoetemelk having completed all 16 of the Tours that he started. Of these 16 Tours Zoetemelk came in the top five 11 times, a record, finished second 6 times, a record, and won the 1980 Tour de France.
In the early years of the Tour, cyclists rode individually, and were sometimes forbidden to ride together. This led to large gaps between the winner and the number two. Since the cyclists now tend to stay together in a peloton, the margins of the winner have become smaller, as the difference usually originates from time trials, breakaways or on mountain top finishes, or from being left behind the peloton. The smallest margins between the winner and the second placed cyclists at the end of the Tour is 8 seconds between winner Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon in 1989. The largest margin, by comparison, remains that of the first Tour in 1903: 2h 49m 45s between Maurice Garin and Lucien Pothier.
The most podium places by a single rider is eight by Raymond Poulidor, followed by Bernard Hinault and Joop Zoetemelk with seven. Poulidor never finished in 1st place and neither Hinault nor Zoetemelk ever finished in 3rd place.
Three riders have won 8 stages in a single year: Charles Pélissier (1930), Eddy Merckx (1970, 1974), and Freddy Maertens (1976). Mark Cavendish has the most mass finish stage wins with 30 as of stage 14 in 2016, ahead of André Darrigade and André Leducq with 22, François Faber with 19, and Eddy Merckx with 18. The youngest Tour de France stage winner is Fabio Battesini, who was 19 when he won one stage in the 1931 Tour de France.
The fastest massed-start stage was in 1999 from Laval to Blois (), won by Mario Cipollini at . The fastest time-trial is Rohan Dennis' stage 1 of the 2015 Tour de France in Utrecht, won at an average of . The fastest stage win was by the 2013 Orica GreenEDGE team in a team time-trial. It completed the in Nice (stage 5) at .
The longest successful post-war breakaway by a single rider was by Albert Bourlon in the 1947 Tour de France. In the Carcassone-Luchon stage, he stayed away for . It was one of seven breakaways longer than , the last being Thierry Marie's escape in 1991. Bourlon finished 16 m 30s ahead. This is one of the biggest time gaps but not the greatest. That record belongs to José-Luis Viejo, who beat the peloton by just over 23:00 and the second place rider by 22 m 50s in the Montgenèvre-Manosque stage in 1976. He was the fourth and most recent rider to win a stage by more than 20 minutes.
Four riders have won five times: Jacques Anquetil (FRA), Eddy Merckx (BEL), Bernard Hinault (FRA), and Miguel Indurain (ESP). Indurain achieved the mark with a record five consecutive wins. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30498 |
Thiamine
Thiamine, also known as thiamin or vitamin B1, is a vitamin found in food, and manufactured as a dietary supplement and medication. Food sources of thiamine include whole grains, legumes, and some meats and fish. Grain processing removes much of the thiamine content, so in many countries cereals and flours are enriched with thiamine. Supplements and medications are available to treat and prevent thiamine deficiency and disorders that result from it, including beriberi and Wernicke encephalopathy. Other uses include the treatment of maple syrup urine disease and Leigh syndrome. They are typically taken by mouth, but may also be given by intravenous or intramuscular injection.
Thiamine supplements are generally well tolerated. Allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, may occur when repeated doses are given by injection. Thiamine is in the B complex family. It is an essential micronutrient, which cannot be made in the body. Thiamine is required for metabolism including that of glucose, amino acids, and lipids.
Thiamine was discovered in 1897, was the first vitamin to be isolated in 1926, and was first made in 1936. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system. Thiamine is available as a generic medication, and as an over-the-counter drug. The wholesale cost in the developing world (as of 2016) is about US$2.17 per one gram vial. In the United States a month's supply of a multivitamin containing thiamine is less than US$25.
Thiamine is used to treat thiamine deficiency which when severe can prove fatal. In less severe cases, non-specific signs include malaise, weight loss, irritability and confusion. Well-known disorders caused by thiamine deficiency include beriberi, Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, optic neuropathy, Leigh's disease, African Seasonal Ataxia, and central pontine myelinolysis.
In Western countries, thiamine deficiency is seen mainly in chronic alcoholism. Thiamine deficiency is often present in alcohol misuse disorder. Also at risk are older adults, persons with HIV/AIDS or diabetes, and persons who have had bariatric surgery. Varying degrees of thiamine deficiency have been associated with the long-term use of high doses of diuretics, particularly furosemide in the treatment of heart failure.
Women who are pregnant or lactating require more thiamine. For pregnant and lactating women, the consequences of thiamine deficiency are the same as those of the general population but the risk is greater due to their temporarily increased need for this nutrient. In pregnancy, this is likely due to thiamine being preferentially sent to the fetus and placenta, especially during the third trimester. For lactating women, thiamine is delivered in breast milk even if it results in thiamine deficiency in the mother. Pregnant women with hyperemesis gravidarum are also at an increased risk for thiamine deficiency due to losses when vomiting.
Thiamine is an important aspect for not only mitochondrial membrane development, but also synaptosomal membrane function. It has also been suggested that thiamine deficiency plays a role in the poor development of the infant brain that can lead to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Thiamine is a treatment for some types of maple syrup urine disease and Leigh disease.
Thiamine is generally well tolerated and non-toxic when ingested. Some adverse side effects have been reported when thiamine is given parenterally including allergic reactions, nausea, lethargy, and impaired coordination.
Thiamine is a colorless organosulfur compound with a chemical formula C12H17N4OS. Its structure consists of an aminopyrimidine and a thiazolium ring linked by a methylene bridge. The thiazole is substituted with methyl and hydroxyethyl side chains. Thiamine is soluble in water, methanol, and glycerol and practically insoluble in less polar organic solvents. It is stable at acidic pH, but is unstable in alkaline solutions. Thiamine, which is a persistent carbene, is used by enzymes to catalyze benzoin condensations in vivo. Thiamine is unstable to heat, but stable during frozen storage. It is unstable when exposed to ultraviolet light and gamma irradiation. Thiamine reacts strongly in Maillard-type reactions.
Complex thiamine biosynthesis occurs in bacteria, some protozoans, plants, and fungi. The thiazole and pyrimidine moieties are biosynthesized separately and then combined to form thiamine monophosphate (ThMP) by the action of thiamine-phosphate synthase (EC2.5.1.3). The biosynthetic pathways may differ among organisms. In "E. coli" and other enterobacteriaceae, ThMP may be phosphorylated to the cofactor thiamine diphospate (ThDP) by a thiamine-phosphate kinase (ThMP + ATP → ThDP + ADP, EC 2.7.4.16). In most bacteria and in eukaryotes, ThMP is hydrolyzed to thiamine, which may then be pyrophosphorylated to ThDP by thiamine diphosphokinase (thiamine + ATP → ThDP + AMP, EC 2.7.6.2).
The biosynthetic pathways are regulated by riboswitches. If there is sufficient thiamine present in the cell then the thiamine binds to the mRNAs for the enzymes that are required in the pathway and prevents their translation. If there is no thiamine present then there is no inhibition, and the enzymes required for the biosynthesis are produced. The specific riboswitch, the TPP riboswitch (or ThDP), is the only riboswitch identified in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms.
Thiamine is found in a wide variety of processed and whole foods. Whole grains, legumes, pork, fruits, and yeast are rich sources.
The salt thiamine mononitrate, rather than thiamine hydrochloride, is used for food fortification, as the mononitrate is more stable, and does not absorb water from natural humidity (is non-hygroscopic), whereas thiamine hydrochloride is hygroscopic. When thiamine mononitrate dissolves in water, it releases nitrate (about 19% of its weight) and is thereafter absorbed as the thiamine cation.
In the U.S. the Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for thiamine were updated in 1998, by the Institute of Medicine now known as the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR. AI and UL defined the same as in United States. For women (including those pregnant or lactating), men and children the PRI is 0.1 mg thiamine per megajoule (MJ) of energy consumed. As the conversion is 1 MJ = 239 kcal, an adult consuming 2390 kilocalories should be consuming 1.0 mg thiamine. This is slightly lower than the U.S. RDA. The EFSA reviewed the same safety question and also reached the conclusion that there was not sufficient evidence to set a UL for thiamine.
To aid with adequate micronutrient intake, pregnant women are often advised to take a daily prenatal multivitamin. While micronutrient compositions vary among different vitamins, a typical prenatal vitamin contains around 1.5 mg of thiamine.
For U.S. food and dietary supplement labeling purposes the amount in a serving is expressed as a percentage of Daily Value (%DV). For thiamine labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value was 1.5 mg, but as of May 27, 2016 it was revised to 1.2 mg to bring it into agreement with the RDA. Compliance with the updated labeling regulations was required by 1 January 2020, for manufacturers with $10 million or more in annual food sales, and by 1 January 2021 for manufacturers with less than $10 million in annual food sales. During the first six months following the 1 January 2020 compliance date, the FDA plans to work cooperatively with manufacturers to meet the new Nutrition Facts label requirements and will not focus on enforcement actions regarding these requirements during that time. A table of the old and new adult Daily Values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.
Thiamine in foods can be degraded in a variety of ways. Sulfites, which are added to foods usually as a preservative, will attack thiamine at the methylene bridge in the structure, cleaving the pyrimidine ring from the thiazole ring. The rate of this reaction is increased under acidic conditions. Thiamine is degraded by thermolabile thiaminases (present in raw fish and shellfish). Some thiaminases are produced by bacteria. Bacterial thiaminases are cell surface enzymes that must dissociate from the membrane before being activated; the dissociation can occur in ruminants under acidotic conditions. Rumen bacteria also reduce sulfate to sulfite, therefore high dietary intakes of sulfate can have thiamine-antagonistic activities.
Plant thiamine antagonists are heat-stable and occur as both the ortho- and para-hydroxyphenols. Some examples of these antagonists are caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, and tannic acid. These compounds interact with the thiamine to oxidize the thiazole ring, thus rendering it unable to be absorbed. Two flavonoids, quercetin and rutin, have also been implicated as thiamine antagonists.
Refining grain removes its bran and germ, and thus subtracts its naturally occurring vitamins and minerals. In the United States, B-vitamin deficiencies became common in the first half of the 20th century due to white flour consumption. The American Medical Association successfully lobbied for restoring these vitamins by enrichment of grain, which began in the US in 1939. The UK followed in 1940 and Denmark in 1953. As of 2016, about 85 countries had passed legislation mandating fortification of wheat flour with at least some nutrients, and 28% of industrially milled flour was fortified, often with thiamine and other B vitamins.
Thiamine is released by the action of phosphatase and pyrophosphatase in the upper small intestine. At low concentrations, the process is carrier-mediated. At higher concentrations, absorption also occurs via passive diffusion. Active transport is greatest in the jejunum and ileum, but it can be inhibited by alcohol consumption or by folate deficiency. Decline in thiamine absorption occurs at intakes above 5 mg/day. On the serosal side of the intestine, discharge of the vitamin by those cells is dependent on Na+-dependent ATPase.
The majority of thiamine in serum is bound to proteins, mainly albumin. Approximately 90% of total thiamine in blood is in erythrocytes. A specific binding protein called thiamine-binding protein (TBP) has been identified in rat serum and is believed to be a hormone-regulated carrier protein important for tissue distribution of thiamine.
Uptake of thiamine by cells of the blood and other tissues occurs via active transport and passive diffusion. About 80% of intracellular thiamine is phosphorylated and most is bound to proteins. Two members of the SLC gene family of transporter proteins, "SLC19A2" and "SLC19A3," are capable of the thiamine transport. In some tissues, thiamine uptake and secretion appears to be mediated by a soluble thiamine transporter that is dependent on Na+ and a transcellular proton gradient.
Human storage of thiamine is about 25 to 30 mg, with the greatest concentrations in skeletal muscle, heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. ThMP and free (unphosphorylated) thiamine is present in plasma, milk, cerebrospinal fluid, and, it is presumed, all extracellular fluid. Unlike the highly phosphorylated forms of thiamine, ThMP and free thiamine are capable of crossing cell membranes. Calcium and magnesium have been shown to affect the distribution of thiamine in the body and magnesium deficiency has been shown to aggravate thiamine deficiency. Thiamine contents in human tissues are less than those of other species.
Thiamine and its acid metabolites (2-methyl-4-amino-5-pyrimidine carboxylic acid, 4-methyl-thiazole-5-acetic acid, and thiamine acetic acid) are excreted principally in the urine.
Its phosphate derivatives are involved in many cellular processes. The best-characterized form is thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP), a coenzyme in the catabolism of sugars and amino acids. In yeast, TPP is also required in the first step of alcoholic fermentation. All organisms use thiamine, but it is made only in bacteria, fungi, and plants. Animals must obtain it from their diet, and thus, for humans, it is an essential nutrient. Insufficient intake in birds produces a characteristic polyneuritis.
Thiamine is usually considered as the transport form of the vitamin. There are five known natural thiamine phosphate derivatives: thiamine monophosphate (ThMP), thiamine diphosphate (ThDP), also sometimes called thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP), thiamine triphosphate (ThTP), the recently discovered adenosine thiamine triphosphate (AThTP), and adenosine thiamine diphosphate (AThDP). While the coenzyme role of thiamine diphosphate is well-known and extensively characterized, the non-coenzyme action of thiamine and derivatives may be realized through binding to a number of recently identified proteins which do not use the catalytic action of thiamine diphosphate
No physiological role is known for thiamine monophosphate (ThMP); however, the diphosphate is physiologically relevant. The synthesis of thiamine diphosphate (ThDP), also known as "thiamine pyrophosphate" (TPP) or "cocarboxylase", is catalyzed by an enzyme called thiamine diphosphokinase according to the reaction thiamine + ATP → ThDP + AMP (EC 2.7.6.2). ThDP is a coenzyme for several enzymes that catalyze the transfer of two-carbon units and in particular the dehydrogenation (decarboxylation and subsequent conjugation with coenzyme A) of 2-oxoacids (alpha-keto acids). Examples include:
The enzymes transketolase, pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH), and 2-oxoglutarate dehydrogenase (OGDH) are all important in carbohydrate metabolism. The cytosolic enzyme transketolase is a key player in the pentose phosphate pathway, a major route for the biosynthesis of the pentose sugars deoxyribose and ribose. The mitochondrial PDH and OGDH are part of biochemical pathways that result in the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is a major form of energy for the cell. PDH links glycolysis to the citric acid cycle, while the reaction catalyzed by OGDH is a rate-limiting step in the citric acid cycle. In the nervous system, PDH is also involved in the production of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, and for myelin synthesis.
Thiamine triphosphate (ThTP) was long considered a specific neuroactive form of thiamine, playing a role in chloride channels in the neurons of mammals and other animals, although this is not completely understood. However, recently it was shown that ThTP exists in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals suggesting a much more general cellular role. In particular in "E. coli", it seems to play a role in response to amino acid starvation.
Adenosine thiamine triphosphate (AThTP) or thiaminylated adenosine triphosphate has recently been discovered in "Escherichia coli", where it accumulates as a result of carbon starvation. In "E. coli", AThTP may account for up to 20% of total thiamine. It also exists in lesser amounts in yeast, roots of higher plants and animal tissue.
Adenosine thiamine diphosphate (AThDP) or thiaminylated adenosine diphosphate exists in small amounts in vertebrate liver, but its role remains unknown.
Thiamine was the first of the water-soluble vitamins to be described, leading to the discovery of more essential nutrients and to the notion of vitamin.
In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro (1849–1920), a surgeon general in the Japanese navy, rejected the previous germ theory for beriberi and hypothesized that the disease was due to insufficiencies in the diet instead. Switching diets on a navy ship, he discovered that replacing a diet of white rice only with one also containing barley, meat, milk, bread, and vegetables, nearly eliminated beriberi on a nine-month sea voyage. However, Takaki had added many foods to the successful diet and he incorrectly attributed the benefit to increased nitrogen intake, as vitamins were unknown substances at the time. The Navy was not convinced of the need for so expensive a program of dietary improvement, and many men continued to die of beriberi, even during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. Not until 1905, after the anti-beriberi factor had been discovered in rice bran (removed by polishing into white rice) and in barley bran, was Takaki's experiment rewarded by making him a baron in the Japanese peerage system, after which he was affectionately called "Barley Baron".
The specific connection to grain was made in 1897 by Christiaan Eijkman (1858–1930), a military doctor in the Dutch Indies, who discovered that fowl fed on a diet of cooked, polished rice developed paralysis, which could be reversed by discontinuing rice polishing. He attributed beriberi to the high levels of starch in rice being toxic. He believed that the toxicity was countered in a compound present in the rice polishings. An associate, Gerrit Grijns (1865–1944), correctly interpreted the connection between excessive consumption of polished rice and beriberi in 1901: He concluded that rice contains an essential nutrient in the outer layers of the grain that is removed by polishing. Eijkman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1929, because his observations led to the discovery of vitamins.
In 1910 a Japanese scientist Umetaro Suzuki first isolated the compound which he described as "aberic acid". In translation from the Japanese paper in which it was claimed to be a new finding this claim was omitted. In 1911 a Polish biochemist Casimir Funk isolated the substance from rice bran (the modern thiamine) that he called a "vitamine" (on account of its containing an amino group). However, Funk did not completely characterize its chemical structure. Dutch chemists, Barend Coenraad Petrus Jansen (1884–1962) and his closest collaborator Willem Frederik Donath (1889–1957), went on to isolate and crystallize the active agent in 1926, whose structure was determined by Robert Runnels Williams (1886–1965), a US chemist, in 1934. Thiamine was named by the Williams team as "thio" or "sulfur-containing vitamin", with the term "vitamin" coming indirectly, by way of Funk, from the amine group of thiamine itself (by this time in 1936, vitamins were known to not always be amines, for example, vitamin C). Thiamine was synthesized in 1936 by the Williams group.
Thiamine was first named "aneurin" (for anti-neuritic vitamin). Sir Rudolph Peters, in Oxford, introduced thiamine-deprived pigeons as a model for understanding how thiamine deficiency can lead to the pathological-physiological symptoms of beriberi. Indeed, feeding the pigeons upon polished rice leads to an easily recognizable behavior of head retraction, a condition called opisthotonos. If not treated, the animals died after a few days. Administration of thiamine at the stage of opisthotonos led to a complete cure within 30 minutes. As no morphological modifications were observed in the brain of the pigeons before and after treatment with thiamine, Peters introduced the concept of a biochemical lesion.
When Lohman and Schuster (1937) showed that the diphosphorylated thiamine derivative (thiamine diphosphate, ThDP) was a cofactor required for the oxydative decarboxylation of pyruvate, a reaction now known to be catalyzed by pyruvate dehydrogenase, the mechanism of action of thiamine in the cellular metabolism seemed to be elucidated. At present, this view seems to be oversimplified: pyruvate dehydrogenase is only one of several enzymes requiring thiamine diphosphate as a cofactor; moreover, other thiamine phosphate derivatives have been discovered since then, and they may also contribute to the symptoms observed during thiamine deficiency. Lastly, the mechanism by which the thiamine moiety of ThDP exerts its coenzyme function by proton substitution on position 2 of the thiazole ring was elucidated by Ronald Breslow in 1958. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30500 |
Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which was one of the causes of the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See. Along with Thomas Cromwell, he supported the principle of royal supremacy, in which the king was considered sovereign over the Church within his realm.
During Cranmer's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the reformed Church of England. Under Henry's rule, Cranmer did not make many radical changes in the Church, due to power struggles between religious conservatives and reformers. He published the first officially authorised vernacular service, the "Exhortation and Litany".
When Edward came to the throne, Cranmer was able to promote major reforms. He wrote and compiled the first two editions of the "Book of Common Prayer", a complete liturgy for the English Church. With the assistance of several Continental reformers to whom he gave refuge, he changed doctrine or discipline in areas such as the Eucharist, clerical celibacy, the role of images in places of worship, and the veneration of saints. Cranmer promulgated the new doctrines through the Prayer Book, the "Homilies" and other publications.
After the accession of the Roman Catholic Mary I, Cranmer was put on trial for treason and heresy. Imprisoned for over two years and under pressure from Church authorities, he made several recantations and apparently reconciled himself with the Roman Catholic Church. While this would have normally absolved him, Mary wanted him executed, and, on the day of his execution, he withdrew his recantations, to die a heretic to Roman Catholics and a martyr for the principles of the English Reformation. Cranmer's death was immortalised in "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" and his legacy lives on within the Church of England through the "Book of Common Prayer" and the "Thirty-Nine Articles", an Anglican statement of faith derived from his work.
Cranmer was born in 1489 at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, England. He was a younger son of Thomas Cranmer by his wife Agnes Hatfield. Thomas Cranmer was of modest wealth but was from a well-established armigerous gentry family which took its name from the manor of Cranmer in Lincolnshire. A ledger stone to one of his relatives in the Church of St John of Beverley, Whatton, near Aslockton is inscribed as follows: "Hic jacet Thomas Cranmer, Armiger, qui obiit vicesimo septimo die mensis Maii, anno d(omi)ni. MD centesimo primo, cui(us) a(n)i(ma)e p(ro)p(i)cietur Deus Amen" ("here lies Thomas Cranmer, Esquire, who died on the 27th day of May in the year of our lord 1601, on whose soul may God look upon with mercy"). The arms of the Cranmer and Aslockton families are displayed. The figure is that of a man in flowing hair and gown, and a purse at his right side. Their oldest son, John Cranmer, inherited the family estate, whereas Thomas and his younger brother Edmund were placed on the path to a clerical career.
Today historians know nothing definite about Cranmer's early schooling. He probably attended a grammar school in his village. At the age of fourteen, two years after the death of his father, he was sent to the newly created Jesus College, Cambridge. It took him eight years to reach his Bachelor of Arts degree following a curriculum of logic, classical literature and philosophy. During this time, he began to collect medieval scholastic books, which he preserved faithfully throughout his life. For his master's degree he studied the humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus. He finished the course in three years. Shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College.
Sometime after Cranmer took his MA, he married a woman named Joan. Although he was not yet a priest, he was forced to forfeit his fellowship, resulting in the loss of his residence at Jesus College. To support himself and his wife, he took a job as a reader at Buckingham Hall (later reformed as Magdalene College). When Joan died during her first childbirth, Jesus College showed its regard for Cranmer by reinstating his fellowship. He began studying theology and by 1520 he had been ordained, the university already having named him as one of their preachers. He received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1526.
Not much is known about Cranmer's thoughts and experiences during his three decades at Cambridge. Traditionally, he has been portrayed as a humanist whose enthusiasm for biblical scholarship prepared him for the adoption of Lutheran ideas, which were spreading during the 1520s. A study of his marginalia reveals an early antipathy to Martin Luther and an admiration for Erasmus. When Cardinal Wolsey, the king's Lord Chancellor, selected several Cambridge scholars, including Edward Lee, Stephen Gardiner and Richard Sampson, to be diplomats throughout Europe, Cranmer was chosen to take a minor role in the English embassy in Spain. Two recently discovered letters written by Cranmer describe an early encounter with the king, Henry VIII of England: upon Cranmer's return from Spain, in June 1527, the king personally interviewed Cranmer for half an hour. Cranmer described the king as "the kindest of princes".
Henry VIII's first marriage had its origins in 1502 when his elder brother, Arthur, died. Their father, Henry VII, then betrothed Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, to the future king. The betrothal immediately raised questions related to the biblical prohibition (in Leviticus 18 and 20) against marriage to a brother's wife. The couple married in 1509 and after a series of miscarriages, a daughter, Mary, was born in 1516. By the 1520s, Henry still did not have a son to name as heir and he took this as a sure sign of God's anger and made overtures to the Vatican about an annulment. He gave Cardinal Wolsey the task of prosecuting his case; Wolsey began by consulting university experts. From 1527, in addition to his duties as a Cambridge don, Cranmer assisted with the annulment proceedings.
In mid-1529, Cranmer stayed with relatives in Waltham Holy Cross to avoid an outbreak of the plague in Cambridge. Two of his Cambridge associates, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe, joined him. The three discussed the annulment issue and Cranmer suggested putting aside the legal case in Rome in favour of a general canvassing of opinions from university theologians throughout Europe. Henry showed much interest in the idea when Gardiner and Foxe presented him this plan. It is not known whether the king or his new Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, explicitly approved the plan. Eventually it was implemented and Cranmer was requested to join the royal team in Rome to gather opinions from the universities. Edward Foxe coordinated the research effort and the team produced the "Collectanea Satis Copiosa" ("The Sufficiently Abundant Collections") and "The Determinations", historical and theological support for the argument that the king exercised supreme jurisdiction within his realm.
Cranmer's first contact with a Continental reformer was with Simon Grynaeus, a humanist based in Basel, Switzerland, and a follower of the Swiss reformers, Huldrych Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius. In mid-1531, Grynaeus took an extended visit to England to offer himself as an intermediary between the king and the Continental reformers. He struck up a friendship with Cranmer and after his return to Basel, he wrote about Cranmer to the German reformer Martin Bucer in Strasbourg. Grynaeus' early contacts initiated Cranmer's eventual relationship with the Strasbourg and Swiss reformers.
In January 1532, Cranmer was appointed the resident ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As the emperor travelled throughout his realm, Cranmer had to follow him to his residence in Regensburg. He passed through the Lutheran city of Nuremberg and saw for the first time the effects of the Reformation. When the Imperial Diet was moved to Nuremberg, he met the leading architect of the Nuremberg reforms, Andreas Osiander. They became good friends, and during that July Cranmer took the surprising action of marrying Margarete, the niece of Osiander's wife. He did not take her as his mistress, as was the prevailing custom with priests for whom celibacy was too rigorous. Scholars note that Cranmer had moved, however moderately at this stage, into identifying with certain Lutheran principles. This progress in his personal life was not matched in his political life as he was unable to persuade Charles, Catherine's nephew, to support the annulment of his aunt's marriage.
While Cranmer was following Charles through Italy, he received a royal letter dated 1 October 1532 informing him that he had been appointed the new Archbishop of Canterbury, following the death of archbishop William Warham. Cranmer was ordered to return to England. The appointment had been secured by the family of Anne Boleyn, who was being courted by Henry. When Cranmer's promotion became known in London, it caused great surprise as Cranmer had previously held only minor positions in the Church. Cranmer left Mantua on 19 November and arrived in England at the beginning of January. Henry personally financed the papal bulls necessary for Cranmer's promotion to Canterbury. The bulls were easily acquired because the papal nuncio was under orders from Rome to please the English in an effort to prevent a final breach. The bulls arrived around 26 March 1533 and Cranmer was consecrated as a bishop on 30 March in St Stephen's Chapel, by John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln; John Vesey, Bishop of Exeter; and Henry Standish, Bishop of St Asaph. Even while they were waiting for the bulls, Cranmer continued to work on the annulment proceedings, which required greater urgency after Anne announced her pregnancy. Henry and Anne were secretly married on 24 or 25 January 1533 in the presence of a handful of witnesses. Cranmer did not learn of the marriage until a fortnight (14 days) later.
For the next few months, Cranmer and the king worked on establishing legal procedures on how the monarch's marriage would be judged by his most senior clergy. Several drafts of the procedures have been preserved in letters written between the two. Once procedures were agreed upon, Cranmer opened court sessions on 10 May, inviting Henry and Catherine of Aragon to appear. Gardiner represented the king; Catherine did not appear or send a proxy. On 23 May Cranmer pronounced the judgement that Henry's marriage with Catherine was against the law of God. He even issued a threat of excommunication if Henry did not stay away from Catherine. Henry was now free to marry and, on 28 May, Cranmer validated Henry and Anne's marriage. On 1 June, Cranmer personally crowned and anointed Anne queen and delivered to her the sceptre and rod. Pope Clement VII was furious at this defiance, but he could not take decisive action as he was pressured by other monarchs to avoid an irreparable breach with England. On 9 July he provisionally excommunicated Henry and his advisers (which included Cranmer) unless he repudiated Anne by the end of September. Henry kept Anne as his wife and, on 7 September, Anne gave birth to Elizabeth. Cranmer baptised her immediately afterwards and acted as one of her godparents.
It is difficult to assess how Cranmer's theological views had evolved since his Cambridge days. There is evidence that he continued to support humanism; he renewed Erasmus' pension that had previously been granted by Archbishop Warham. In June 1533, he was confronted with the difficult task of not only disciplining a reformer, but also seeing him burnt at the stake. John Frith was condemned to death for his views on the eucharist: he denied the real presence. Cranmer personally tried to persuade him to change his views without success. Although he rejected Frith's radicalism, by 1534 he clearly signalled that he had broken with Rome and that he had set a new theological course. He supported the cause of reform by gradually replacing the old guard in his ecclesiastical province with men who followed the new thinking such as Hugh Latimer. He intervened in religious disputes, supporting reformers to the disappointment of religious conservatives who desired to maintain the link with Rome.
Cranmer was not immediately accepted by the bishops within his province. When he attempted a canonical visitation, he had to avoid locations where a resident conservative bishop might make an embarrassing personal challenge to his authority. In 1535, Cranmer had difficult encounters with several bishops, John Stokesley, John Longland, and Stephen Gardiner among others. They objected to Cranmer's power and title and argued that the Act of Supremacy did not define his role. This prompted Thomas Cromwell, the king's chief minister, to activate and to take the office of the vicegerent, the deputy supreme head of ecclesiastical affairs. He created another set of institutions that gave a clear structure to the royal supremacy. Hence, the archbishop was eclipsed by Vicegerent Cromwell in regards to the king's spiritual jurisdiction. There is no evidence that Cranmer resented his position as junior partner. Although he was an exceptional scholar, he lacked the political ability to outface even clerical opponents. Those tasks were left to Cromwell.
On 29 January 1536, when Anne miscarried a son, the king began to reflect again on the biblical prohibitions that had haunted him during his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. Shortly after the miscarriage, the king started to take an interest in Jane Seymour. By 24 April, he had commissioned Cromwell to prepare the case for a divorce. Unaware of these plans, Cranmer had continued to write letters to Cromwell on minor matters up to 22 April. Anne was sent to the Tower of London on 2 May, and Cranmer was urgently summoned by Cromwell. On the very next day, Cranmer wrote a letter to the king expressing his doubts about the queen's guilt, highlighting his own esteem for Anne. After it was delivered, Cranmer was resigned to the fact that the end of Anne's marriage was inevitable. On 16 May, he saw Anne in the Tower and heard her confession and the following day, he pronounced the marriage null and void. Two days later, Anne was executed; Cranmer was one of the few who publicly mourned her death.
The vicegerency brought the pace of reforms under the control of the king. A balance was instituted between the conservatives and the reformers and this was seen in the "Ten Articles", the first attempt at defining the beliefs of the Henrician Church. The articles had a two-part structure. The first five articles showed the influence of the reformers by recognising only three of the former seven sacraments: baptism, eucharist, and penance. The last five articles concerned the roles of images, saints, rites and ceremonies, and purgatory, and they reflected the views of the traditionalists. Two early drafts of the document have been preserved and show different teams of theologians at work. The competition between the conservatives and reformers is revealed in rival editorial corrections made by Cranmer and Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of Durham. The end product had something that pleased and annoyed both sides of the debate. By 11 July, Cranmer, Cromwell, and the Convocation, the general assembly of the clergy, had subscribed to the "Ten Articles".
In late 1536, the north of England was convulsed in a series of uprisings collectively known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious opposition to Henry's policies. Cromwell and Cranmer were the primary targets of the protesters' fury. Cromwell and the king worked furiously to quell the rebellion, while Cranmer kept a low profile. After it was clear that Henry's regime was safe, the government took the initiative to remedy the evident inadequacy of the "Ten Articles". The outcome after months of debate was "The Institution of a Christian Man" informally known from the first issue as the Bishops' Book. The book was initially proposed in February 1537 in the first vicegerential synod, ordered by Cromwell, for the whole Church. Cromwell opened the proceedings, but as the synod progressed, Cranmer and Foxe took on the chairmanship and the co-ordination. Foxe did most of the final editing and the book was published in late September.
Even after publication, the book's status remained vague because the king had not given his full support to it. In a draft letter, Henry noted that he had not read the book, but supported its printing. His attention was most likely occupied by the pregnancy of Jane Seymour and the birth of the male heir, Edward, that Henry had sought for so long. Jane died shortly after giving birth and her funeral was held on 12 November. That month Henry started to work on the Bishops' Book; his amendments were sent to Cranmer, Sampson, and others for comment. Cranmer's responses to the king were far more confrontational than his colleagues' and he wrote at much greater length. They reveal unambiguous statements supporting reformed theology such as justification by faith or "sola fide" (faith alone) and predestination. His words did not convince the king. A new statement of faith was delayed until 1543 with the publication of the King's Book.
In 1538, the king and Cromwell arranged with Lutheran princes to have detailed discussions on forming a political and religious alliance. Henry had been seeking a new embassy from the Schmalkaldic League since mid-1537. The Lutherans were delighted by this and they sent a joint delegation from various German cities, including a colleague of Martin Luther, Friedrich Myconius. The delegates arrived in England on 27 May 1538. After initial meetings with the king, Cromwell, and Cranmer, discussions on theological differences were transferred to Lambeth Palace under Cranmer's chairmanship. Progress on an agreement was slow partly due to Cromwell being too busy to help expedite the proceedings and partly due to the negotiating team on the English side, which was evenly balanced between conservatives and reformers. The talks dragged on with the Germans becoming weary despite the Archbishop's strenuous efforts. The negotiations were fatally neutralised by an appointee of the king. Cranmer's colleague, Edward Foxe, who sat on Henry's Privy Council, had died earlier in the year. The king chose as his replacement Cranmer's conservative rival, Cuthbert Tunstall, who was told to stay near Henry to give advice. On 5 August, when the German delegates sent a letter to the king regarding three items that particularly worried them (compulsory clerical celibacy, the withholding of the chalice from the laity, and the maintenance of private masses for the dead), Tunstall was able to intervene for the king and to influence the decision. The result was a thorough dismissal by the king of many of the Germans' chief concerns. Although Cranmer begged the Germans to continue with the negotiations using the argument "to consider the many thousands of souls in England" at stake, they left on 1 October having made no substantial achievements.
Continental reformer Philipp Melanchthon was aware that he was very much admired by Henry. In early 1539, Melanchthon wrote several letters to Henry criticising his views on religion, in particular his support of clerical celibacy. By late April another delegation from the Lutheran princes arrived to build on Melanchthon's exhortations. Cromwell wrote a letter to the king in support of the new Lutheran mission. The king had begun to change his stance and concentrated on wooing conservative opinion in England rather than reaching out to the Lutherans. On 28 April 1539, Parliament met for the first time in three years. Cranmer was present, but Cromwell was unable to attend due to ill health. On 5 May the House of Lords created a committee with the customary religious balance between conservatives and reformers to examine and determine doctrine. The committee was given little time to do the detailed work needed for a thorough revision. On 16 May, the Duke of Norfolk noted that the committee had not agreed on anything, and proposed that the Lords examine six doctrinal questions—which eventually formed the basis of the "Six Articles". They affirmed the conservative interpretation of doctrines such as the real presence, clerical celibacy, and the necessity of auricular confession, the private confession of sins to a priest. As the Act of the Six Articles neared passage in Parliament, Cranmer moved his wife and children out of England to safety. Up until this time, the family was kept quietly hidden, most likely in Ford Palace in Kent. The Act passed Parliament at the end of June and it forced Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton to resign their dioceses given their outspoken opposition to the measure.
The setback for the reformers was short-lived. By September, Henry was displeased with the results of the Act and its promulgators; the ever-loyal Cranmer and Cromwell were back in favour. The king asked his archbishop to write a new preface for the Great Bible, an English translation of the Bible that was first published in April 1539 under the direction of Cromwell. The preface was in the form of a sermon addressed to readers. As for Cromwell, he was delighted that his plan of a royal marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves, the sister of a German prince was accepted by the king. In Cromwell's view, the marriage could potentially bring back contacts with the Schmalkaldic League. Henry was dismayed with Anne when they first met on 1 January 1540 but married her reluctantly on 6 January in a ceremony officiated by Cranmer. The marriage ended in disaster as Henry decided that he would request a royal divorce. This resulted in Henry being placed in an embarrassing position and Cromwell suffered the consequences. His old enemies, including the Duke of Norfolk, took advantage of the weakened Cromwell and he was arrested on 10 June. He immediately lost the support of all his friends, including Cranmer. As Cranmer had done for Anne Boleyn, he wrote a letter to the king defending the past work of Cromwell. Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves was quickly annulled on 9 July by the vice-gerential synod, now led by Cranmer and Gardiner.
Following the annulment, Cromwell was executed on 28 July. Cranmer now found himself in a politically prominent position, with no one else to shoulder the burden. Throughout the rest of Henry's reign, he clung to Henry's authority. The king had total trust in him and in return, Cranmer could not conceal anything from the king. At the end of June 1541, Henry with his new wife, Catherine Howard, left for his first visit to the north of England. Cranmer was left in London as a member of a council taking care of matters for the king in his absence. His colleagues were Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. This was Cranmer's first major piece of responsibility outside the Church. In October, while the king and queen were away, a reformer named John Lascelles revealed to Cranmer that Catherine engaged in extramarital affairs. Cranmer gave the information to Audley and Seymour and they decided to wait until Henry's return. Afraid of angering the king, Audley and Seymour suggested that Cranmer inform Henry. Cranmer slipped a message to Henry during mass on All Saints Day. An investigation revealed the truth of the marital indiscretions and Catherine was executed in February 1542.
In 1543, several conservative clergymen in Kent banded together to attack and denounce two reformers, Richard Turner and John Bland, before the Privy Council. They prepared articles to present to the council, but at the last moment, additional denunciations were added by Stephen Gardiner's nephew, Germain Gardiner. These new articles attacked Cranmer and listed his misdeeds back to 1541. This document and the actions that followed were the basis of the so-called Prebendaries' Plot. The articles were delivered to the Council in London and were probably read on 22 April 1543. The king most likely saw the articles against Cranmer that night. The archbishop appeared unaware that an attack on his person was made. His commissioners in Lambeth dealt specifically with Turner's case where he was acquitted, much to the fury of the conservatives.
While the plot against Cranmer was proceeding, the reformers were being attacked on other fronts. On 20 April, the Convocation reconvened to consider the revision of the Bishops' Book. Cranmer presided over the sub-committees, but the conservatives were able to overturn many reforming ideas, including justification by faith. On 5 May, the new revision called "A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man" or the King's Book was released. Doctrinally, it was far more conservative than the Bishops' Book. On 10 May, the reformers received another blow. Parliament passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, which abolished "erroneous books" and restricted the reading of the Bible in English to those of noble status. From May to August, reformers were examined, forced to recant, or imprisoned.
For five months, Henry took no action on the accusations against his archbishop. The conspiracy was finally revealed to Cranmer by the king himself. According to Cranmer's secretary, Ralph Morice, sometime in September 1543 the king showed Cranmer a paper summarising the accusations against him. An investigation was to be mounted and Cranmer was appointed chief investigator. Surprise raids were carried out, evidence gathered, and ringleaders identified. Typically, Cranmer put the clergymen involved in the conspiracy through immediate humiliation, but he eventually forgave them and continued to use their services. To show his trust in Cranmer, Henry gave Cranmer his personal ring. When the Privy Council arrested Cranmer at the end of November, the nobles were stymied by the symbol of the king's trust in him. Cranmer's victory ended with two second-rank leaders imprisoned and Germain Gardiner executed.
With the atmosphere in Cranmer's favour, he pursued quiet efforts to reform the Church, particularly the liturgy. On 27 May 1544 the first officially authorised vernacular service was published, the processional service of intercession known as the "Exhortation and Litany". It survives today with minor modifications in the "Book of Common Prayer". The traditional litany uses invocations to saints, but Cranmer thoroughly reformed this aspect by providing no opportunity in the text for such veneration. Additional reformers were elected to the House of Commons and new legislation was introduced to curb the effects of the Act of the Six Articles and the Act for the Advancement of True Religion.
In 1546, the conservatives in a coalition including Gardiner, the Duke of Norfolk, the Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, and the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, made one last attempt to challenge the reformers. Several reformers with links to Cranmer were targeted. Some such as Lascelles were burnt at the stake. Powerful reform-minded nobles Edward Seymour and John Dudley returned to England from overseas and they were able to turn the tide against the conservatives. Two incidents tipped the balance. Gardiner was disgraced before the king when he refused to agree to exchange episcopal estates, and the son of the Duke of Norfolk was charged with treason and executed. There is no evidence that Cranmer played any part in these political games, and there were no further plots as the king's health ebbed in his final months. Cranmer performed his final duties for the king on 28 January 1547 when he gave a reformed statement of faith while gripping Henry's hand instead of giving him his last rites. Cranmer mourned Henry's death and it was later said that he demonstrated his grief by growing a beard. The beard was also a sign of his break with the past. Continental reformers grew beards to mark their rejection of the old Church and this significance of clerical beards was well understood in England. On 31 January, he was among the executors of the king's final will that nominated Edward Seymour as Lord Protector and welcomed the boy king, Edward VI.
Under the regency of Seymour, the reformers were now part of the establishment. A royal visitation of the provinces took place in August 1547 and each parish that was visited was instructed to obtain a copy of the "Homilies". This book consisted of twelve homilies of which four were written by Cranmer. His reassertion of the doctrine of justification by faith elicited a strong reaction from Gardiner. In the "Homily of Good Works annexed to Faith", Cranmer attacked monasticism and the importance of various personal actions involved in liturgical recitations and ceremonies. Hence, he narrowed the range of good works that would be considered necessary and reinforced the primacy of faith. In each parish visited, injunctions were put in place that resolved to, "...eliminate any image which had any suspicion of devotion attached to it."
Cranmer's eucharistic views, which had already moved away from official Catholic doctrine, received another push from Continental reformers. Cranmer had been in contact with Martin Bucer since the time when initial contacts were made with the Schmalkaldic League. Cranmer and Bucer's relationship became ever closer due to Charles V's victory over the League at Mühlberg, which left England as the sole major nation that gave sanctuary to persecuted reformers. Cranmer wrote a letter to Bucer (now lost) with questions on eucharistic theology. In Bucer's reply dated 28 November 1547, he denied the corporeal real presence and condemned transubstantiation and the adoration of the elements. The letter was delivered to Cranmer by two Italian reformed theologians, Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochino who were invited to take refuge in England. Martyr also brought with him an epistle written allegedly by John Chrysostom (now regarded as a forgery), "Ad Caesarium Monachum", which appeared to provide patristic support against the corporeal real presence. These documents were to influence Cranmer's thoughts on the eucharist.
In March 1549, the city of Strasbourg forced Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius to leave. Cranmer immediately invited the men to come to England and promised that they would be placed in English universities. When they arrived on 25 April, Cranmer was especially delighted to meet Bucer face to face after eighteen years of correspondence. He needed these scholarly men to train a new generation of preachers as well as assist in the reform of liturgy and doctrine. Others who accepted his invitations include the Polish reformer, Jan Łaski, but Cranmer was unable to convince Osiander and Melanchthon to come to England.
As the use of English in worship services spread, the need for a complete uniform liturgy for the Church became evident. Initial meetings to start what would eventually become the 1549 "Book of Common Prayer" were held in the former abbey of Chertsey and in Windsor Castle in September 1548. The list of participants can only be partially reconstructed, but it is known that the members were balanced between conservatives and reformers. These meetings were followed by a debate on the Eucharist in the House of Lords which took place between 14 and 19 December. Cranmer publicly revealed in this debate that he had abandoned the doctrine of the corporeal real presence and believed that the Eucharistic presence was only spiritual. Parliament backed the publication of the Prayer Book after Christmas by passing the Act of Uniformity 1549; it then legalized clerical marriage.
It is difficult to ascertain how much of the Prayer Book is Cranmer's personal composition. Generations of liturgical scholars have been able to track down the sources that he used, including the Sarum Rite, writings from Hermann von Wied, and several Lutheran sources including Osiander and Justus Jonas. More problematic is determining how Cranmer worked on the book and with whom he worked. Despite the lack of knowledge of who might have helped him, he is given the credit for the editorship and the overall structure of the book.
The use of the new Prayer Book was made compulsory on 9 June 1549. This triggered a series of protests in Devon and Cornwall where the English language was not yet in common usage, now known as the Prayer Book Rebellion. By early July, the uprising had spread to other parts in the east of England. The rebels made a number of demands including the restoration of the Six Articles, the use of Latin for the mass with only the consecrated bread given to the laity, the restoration of prayers for souls in purgatory, and the rebuilding of abbeys. Cranmer wrote a strong response to these demands to the King in which he denounced the wickedness of the rebellion. On 21 July, Cranmer commandeered St Paul's Cathedral where he vigorously defended the official Church line. A draft of his sermon, the only extant written sample of his preaching from his entire career, shows that he collaborated with Peter Martyr on dealing with the rebellion.
The Prayer Book Rebellion and other events had a negative effect on the Seymour regency. The Privy Council became divided when a set of dissident Councillors banded together behind John Dudley in order to oust Seymour. Cranmer and two other Councillors, William Paget, and Thomas Smith initially rallied behind Seymour. After a flurry of letters passed between the two sides, a bloodless "coup d'état" resulted in the end of Seymour's Protectorship on 13 October 1549. Despite the support of religiously conservative politicians behind Dudley's coup, the reformers managed to maintain control of the new government and the English Reformation continued to consolidate gains. Seymour was initially imprisoned in the Tower, but he was shortly released on 6 February 1550 and returned to the council. The archbishop was able to transfer his former chaplain, Nicholas Ridley from the minor see of Rochester to the diocese of London, while John Ponet took Ridley's former position. Incumbent conservatives were uprooted and replaced with reformers.
The first result of co-operation and consultation between Cranmer and Bucer was the Ordinal, the liturgy for the ordination of priests. This was missing in the first Prayer Book and was not published until 1550. Cranmer adopted Bucer's draft and created three services for commissioning a deacon, a priest, and a bishop. In the same year, Cranmer produced the "Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ", a semi-official explanation of the eucharistic theology within the Prayer Book. It was the first full-length book to bear Cranmer's name on the title-page. The preface summarises his quarrel with Rome in a well-known passage where he compared "beads, pardons, pilgrimages, and such other like popery" with weeds, but the roots of the weeds were transubstantiation, the corporeal real presence, and the sacrificial nature of the mass.
Although Bucer assisted in the development of the English Reformation, he was still quite concerned about the speed of its progress. Both Bucer and Fagius had noticed that the 1549 Prayer Book was not a remarkable step forward, although Cranmer assured Bucer that it was only a first step and that its initial form was only temporary. By late 1550, Bucer was becoming disillusioned. Cranmer made sure that he did not feel alienated and kept in close touch with him. This attention paid off during the vestments controversy. This incident was initiated by John Hooper, a follower of Heinrich Bullinger who had recently returned from Zürich. Hooper was unhappy with Cranmer's Prayer Book and Ordinal and he particularly objected to the use of ceremonies and vestments. When the Privy Council selected him to be the Bishop of Gloucester on 15 May 1550, he laid down conditions that he would not wear the required vestments. He found an ally among the Continental reformers in Jan Łaski who had become a leader of the Stranger church in London, a designated place of worship for Continental Protestant refugees. His church's forms and practices had taken reforms much further than Cranmer would have liked. Bucer and Peter Martyr, while they sympathised with Hooper's position, supported Cranmer's arguments of timing and authority. Cranmer and Ridley stood their ground. This led to Hooper's imprisonment and he eventually gave in. He was consecrated on 8 March 1551 according to the Ordinal and he preached before the king in his episcopal garments. Cranmer's vision of reform through careful steps under the authority of the government was maintained.
Cranmer's role in politics was diminishing when on 16 October 1551 Seymour was arrested on charges of treason. In December Seymour was put on trial and although acquitted of treason, he was judged guilty of felony and put to death on 22 January 1552. This was the beginning of the breach between Cranmer and Dudley. It was aggravated during the year by the gradual appropriation of ecclesiastical property by the regency. Even throughout this political turmoil, Cranmer worked simultaneously on three major projects in his reform programme: the revision of canon law, the revision of the Prayer Book, and the formation of a statement of doctrine.
The original Roman canon law that defined governance within the Church clearly needed revision following Henry's break with Rome. Several revision attempts were made throughout Henry's reign, but these initial projects were shelved as the speed of reform outpaced the time required to work on a revision. As the reformation stabilised, Cranmer formed a committee in December 1551 to restart the work. He recruited Peter Martyr to the committee and he also asked Łaski and Hooper to participate, demonstrating his usual ability to forgive past actions. Cranmer and Martyr realised that a successful enactment of a reformed ecclesiastical law-code in England would have international significance. Cranmer planned to draw together all the reformed churches of Europe under England's leadership to counter the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation. In March 1552, Cranmer invited the foremost Continental reformers, Bullinger, John Calvin, and Melanchthon to come to England and to participate in an ecumenical council. The response was disappointing: Melanchthon did not respond, Bullinger stated that neither of them could leave Germany as it was riven by war between the Emperor and the Lutheran princes, and while Calvin showed some enthusiasm, he said he was unable to come. Cranmer acknowledged Calvin and replied stating, "Meanwhile we will reform the English Church to the utmost of our ability and give our labour that both its doctrines and laws will be improved after the model of holy scripture." One partial manuscript of the project survived that was annotated with corrections and comments by Cranmer and Martyr. When the final version was presented to Parliament, the breach between Cranmer and Dudley was complete and the regent effectively killed the canon law bill in the House of Lords.
As in the first Prayer Book, the origins and participants in the work of its revision are obscure, but it was clear that Cranmer led the project and steered its development. It had begun as early as the end of 1549 when the Convocation of Canterbury met to discuss the matter. Late in 1550, the opinions of Martyr and Bucer were sought on how the liturgy might be improved and they significantly influenced the revision. The spiritual presence view was clarified by the use of entirely different words when the communicants are offered the bread and the wine. New rubrics noted that any kind of bread could be used and any bread or wine that remained could be used by the curate, thus disassociating the elements from any physical presence. The new book removed any possibility of prayers for the dead, as such prayers implied support for the doctrine of purgatory. The Act of Uniformity 1552, which authorised the book's use, specified that it be exclusively used from 1 November. The final version was officially published at nearly the last minute, due to Dudley's intervention. While travelling in the north of the country, he met the Scots reformer, John Knox, then based in Newcastle. Impressed by his preaching, Dudley selected him to be a royal chaplain and brought him south to participate in the reform projects. In a sermon before the king, Knox attacked the practice of kneeling during communion. On 27 September 1552, the Privy Council stopped the printing of the new Prayer Book and told Cranmer to revise it. He responded with a long letter using the argument that it was for Parliament with the royal assent to decide any changes in the liturgy. On 22 October, the council decided to keep the liturgy as it is and add the so-called "Black Rubric", which explained that no adoration was intended when kneeling at communion.
The origins of the statement that eventually became the "Forty-Two Articles" are equally obscure. As early as December 1549, the archbishop was demanding from his bishops subscription to certain doctrinal articles. In 1551 Cranmer presented a version of a statement to the bishops, but its status remained ambiguous. Cranmer did not devote much effort into developing the articles, most likely due to work on the canon law revision. He became more interested once the hope for an ecumenical council began to fade. By September 1552, draft versions of the articles were being worked on by Cranmer and John Cheke, his scholarly friend who was commissioned to translate them into Latin. When the "Forty-Two Articles" were finally published in May 1553, the title-page declared that the articles were agreed upon by the Convocation and were published by the authority of the king. This was not in fact the case and the mistake was likely caused by miscommunications between the archbishop and the Privy Council. Cranmer complained about this to the council, but the authorities responded by noting that the articles were developed during the time of the Convocation—hence evading a direct answer. The council gave Cranmer the unfortunate task of requiring subscription to the articles from the bishops, many of whom opposed them and pointed out the anomaly of the title-page. It was while Cranmer was carrying out this duty that events unfolded that would render the subscriptions futile.
Edward VI became seriously ill from tuberculosis and the councillors were told that he did not have long to live. In May 1553, the council sent several letters to Continental reformers assuring them that Edward's health was improving. Among the letters was one addressed to Melanchthon inviting him to come to England to take up the Regius Chair in Cambridge which was vacant since the death of Martin Bucer in February 1551. Both Henry VIII and Cranmer had previously failed to convince Melanchthon to come; this time the council made a serious effort by sending him an advance to cover his travel expenses. Cranmer sent a personal letter urging him to take the offer. Despite his plea, Melanchthon never made the voyage to England. While this effort to shore up the reformation was taking place, the council was working to convince several judges to put on the throne Lady Jane Grey, Edward's cousin and a Protestant, instead of Mary, Henry and Catherine of Aragon's daughter and a Catholic. On 17 June 1553 the king made his will noting Jane would succeed him, contravening the Third Succession Act. Cranmer tried to speak to Edward alone, but he was refused and his audience with Edward occurred in the presence of the councillors. Edward told him that he supported what he wrote in his will. Cranmer's decision to support Jane must have occurred before 19 June when royal orders were sent to convene the Convocation for the recognition of the new succession.
By mid-July, there were serious provincial revolts in Mary's favour and support for Jane in the council fell. As Mary was proclaimed queen, Dudley, Ridley, Cheke, and Jane's father, the Duke of Suffolk were imprisoned. No action was taken against the archbishop. On 8 August he led Edward's funeral according to the rites of the Prayer Book. During these months, he advised others, including Peter Martyr, to flee England, but he himself chose to stay. Reformed bishops were removed from office and conservative clergy, such as Edmund Bonner, had their old positions restored. Cranmer did not go down without a fight. When rumours spread that he authorised the use of the mass in Canterbury Cathedral, he declared them to be false and said, "[A]ll the doctrine and religion, by our said sovereign lord king Edward VI is more pure and according to God's word, than any that hath been used in England these thousand years." Not surprisingly, the government regarded Cranmer's declaration as tantamount to sedition. He was ordered to stand before the council in the Star Chamber on 14 September and on that day he said his final goodbye to Martyr. Cranmer was sent straight to the Tower to join Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley.
On 13 November 1553 Cranmer and four others were brought to trial for treason, found guilty, and condemned to death. Numerous witnesses testified that Cranmer had encouraged heresy and had written heretical works. Throughout February 1554 Jane Grey and other rebels were executed. It was now time to deal with the religious leaders of the reformation, and so on 8 March 1554 the Privy Council ordered Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer to be transferred to Bocardo prison in Oxford to await a second trial for heresy. During this time Cranmer was able to smuggle out a letter to Martyr who had fled to Strasbourg, the last surviving document written in his own hand. He stated that the desperate situation of the church was proof that it will eventually be delivered and wrote, "I pray that God may grant that we may endure to the end!" Cranmer remained isolated in Bocardo prison for seventeen months before the trial started on 12 September 1555. Although it took place in England, the trial was under papal jurisdiction and the final verdict would come from Rome. Under interrogation, Cranmer admitted to every fact that was placed before him, but he denied any treachery, disobedience, or heresy. The trial of Latimer and Ridley started shortly after Cranmer's but their verdicts came almost immediately and they were burnt at the stake on 16 October. Cranmer was taken to a tower to watch the proceedings. On 4 December, Rome decided Cranmer's fate by depriving him of the archbishopric and giving permission to the secular authorities to carry out their sentence.
In his final days Cranmer's circumstances changed, which led to several recantations. On 11 December, Cranmer was taken out of Bocardo and placed in the house of the Dean of Christ Church. This new environment was very different from that of his two years in prison. He was in an academic community and treated as a guest. Approached by a Dominican friar, Juan de Villagarcía, he debated the issues of papal supremacy and purgatory. In his first four recantations, produced between the end of January and mid-February, Cranmer submitted himself to the authority of the king and queen and recognised the pope as head of the church. On 14 February 1556, he was degraded from holy orders and returned to Bocardo. He had conceded very little and Edmund Bonner was not satisfied with these admissions. On 24 February a writ was issued to the mayor of Oxford and the date of Cranmer's execution was set for 7 March. Two days after the writ was issued, a fifth statement, the first which could be called a true recantation, was issued. Cranmer repudiated all Lutheran and Zwinglian theology, fully accepted Catholic theology including papal supremacy and transubstantiation, and stated that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church. He announced his joy of returning to the Catholic faith, asked for and received sacramental absolution, and participated in the mass. Cranmer's burning was postponed, and under normal practice of canon law he should have been absolved. Mary decided that no further postponement was possible. His last recantation was issued on 18 March. It was a sign of a broken man, a sweeping confession of sin. Despite the stipulation in canon law that recanting heretics be reprieved, Mary was determined to make an example of Cranmer, arguing that "his iniquity and obstinacy was so great against God and your Grace that your clemency and mercy could have no place with him", and pressed ahead with his execution.
Cranmer was told that he would be able to make a final recantation but this time in public during a service at the University Church. He wrote and submitted the speech in advance and it was published after his death. At the pulpit on the day of his execution, he opened with a prayer and an exhortation to obey the king and queen, but he ended his sermon totally unexpectedly, deviating from the prepared script. He renounced the recantations that he had written or signed with his own hand since his degradation and he stated that, in consequence, his hand would be punished by being burnt first. He then said, "And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine." He was pulled from the pulpit and taken to where Latimer and Ridley had been burnt six months before. As the flames drew around him, he fulfilled his promise by placing his right hand into the heart of the fire while saying "that unworthy hand". His dying words were, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit ...; I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God."
The Marian government produced a pamphlet with all six recantations plus the text of the speech Cranmer was to have made in the University Church. His subsequent withdrawal of his recantations was not mentioned, though what actually happened soon became common knowledge, undermining the effectiveness of Marian propaganda. Similarly, the Protestant party had difficulty in making use of the event, given Cranmer's recantations. The exiles' propaganda concentrated on publishing various specimens of his writings. Eventually John Foxe put Cranmer's story to effective use in 1559, and it features prominently in his "Acts and Monuments" when it was first printed in 1563.
Cranmer's family had been exiled to the Continent in 1539. It is not known exactly when they returned to England, but it was soon after the accession of Edward VI in 1547 that Cranmer publicly acknowledged their existence. Not much is known about the early years of the children. His daughter, Margaret, was likely born in the 1530s and his son, Thomas, came later, probably during the reign of Edward. Around the time of Mary's accession, Cranmer's wife, Margarete, escaped to Germany, while his son was entrusted to his brother, Edmund Cranmer, who took him to the Continent. Margarete Cranmer eventually married Cranmer's favourite publisher, Edward Whitchurch. The couple returned to England after Mary's reign and settled in Surrey. Whitchurch also negotiated for the marriage of Margaret to Thomas Norton. Whitchurch died in 1562 and Margarete married for the third time to Bartholomew Scott. She died in the 1570s. Both of Cranmer's children died without issue and his line became extinct.
When Elizabeth I came to power she restored the Church of England's independence from Rome under the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. The church that she re-established represented, in effect, a snapshot of the Edwardian Church from September 1552. Thus the Elizabethan Prayer Book was basically Cranmer's 1552 edition but without the "Black Rubric". In the Convocation of 1563 the "Forty-Two Articles" which were never adopted by the Church were altered in the area of eucharistic doctrine to form the "Thirty-Nine Articles". Most of the exiles returned to England and resumed their careers in the Church. To some like Edmund Grindal, an Archbishop of Canterbury during Elizabeth's reign, Cranmer provided a shining example whose work should be upheld and extended.
Cranmer's greatest concerns were the maintenance of the royal supremacy and the diffusion of reformed theology and practice. Scholars note that he is best remembered for his contribution to the realms of language and of cultural identity. His prose helped to guide the development of the English language, and the "Book of Common Prayer" is a major contribution to English literature that influenced many lives in the Anglophone world. It guided Anglican worship for four hundred years.
Disparaging Catholic biographers sometimes depict Cranmer as an unprincipled opportunist, a Nicodemite, and a tool of royal tyranny. For their part, hagiographic Protestant biographers sometimes appear to overlook the times that Cranmer betrayed his own principles. Both sides can agree in seeing Cranmer as a committed scholar whose life showed the strengths and weaknesses of a very human and often under-appreciated reformer. The Anglican Communion commemorates him as a Reformation Martyr on 21 March, the anniversary of his death.
On film and television Thomas Cranmer has been portrayed by, | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30502 |
Theology
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the supernatural, but also deals with religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and, in particular, to reveal themselves to humankind. While theology has turned into a secular field, religious adherents still consider theology to be a discipline that helps them live and understand concepts such as life and love and that helps them lead lives of obedience to the deities they follow or worship.
"Theology" is derived from the Greek "theologia" (θεολογία), which derived from "theos" (Θεός), meaning "god", and "-logia" (-λογία), meaning "utterances, sayings, or oracles" (a word related to "logos" [λόγος], meaning "word, discourse, account, or reasoning") which had passed into Latin as "theologia" and into French as "théologie". The English equivalent "theology" (Theologie, Teologye) had evolved by 1362. The sense the word has in English depends in large part on the sense the Latin and Greek equivalents had acquired in patristic and medieval Christian usage, although the English term has now spread beyond Christian contexts.
Augustine of Hippo define the Latin equivalent, "theologia", as "reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity"; Richard Hooker defined "theology" in English as "the science of things divine". The term can, however, be used for a variety of disciplines or fields of study.
Theology considers whether the divine exists in some form, such as in physical, supernatural, mental, or social realities, and what evidence for and about it may be found via personal spiritual experiences or historical records of such experiences as documented by others. The study of these assumptions is not part of theology proper but is found in the philosophy of religion, and increasingly through the psychology of religion and neurotheology. Theology then aims to structure and understand these experiences and concepts, and to use them to derive normative prescriptions for how to live our lives.
Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument (experiential, philosophical, ethnographic, historical, and others) to help understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote any myriad of religious topics. As in philosophy of ethics and case law, arguments often assume the existence of previously resolved questions, and develop by making analogies from them to draw new inferences in new situations.
The study of theology may help a theologian more deeply understand their own religious tradition, another religious tradition, or it may enable them to explore the nature of divinity without reference to any specific tradition. Theology may be used to propagate, reform, or justify a religious tradition or it may be used to compare, challenge (e.g. biblical criticism), or oppose (e.g. irreligion) a religious tradition or world-view. Theology might also help a theologian address some present situation or need through a religious tradition, or to explore possible ways of interpreting the world.
Greek "theologia" (θεολογία) was used with the meaning "discourse on God" around 380 BC by Plato in "The Republic", Book ii, Ch. 18. Aristotle divided theoretical philosophy into "mathematike", "physike" and "theologike", with the last corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.
Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such discourse: mythical (concerning the myths of the Greek gods), rational (philosophical analysis of the gods and of cosmology) and civil (concerning the rites and duties of public religious observance).
Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold usage, though Augustine also used the term more simply to mean 'reasoning or discussion concerning the deity'
In patristic Greek Christian sources, "theologia" could refer narrowly to devout and inspired knowledge of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.
The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used "theologia" to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality (as opposed to "physica", which deals with corporeal, moving realities). Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.
In scholastic Latin sources, the term came to denote the rational study of the doctrines of the Christian religion, or (more precisely) the academic discipline which investigated the coherence and implications of the language and claims of the Bible and of the theological tradition (the latter often as represented in Peter Lombard's "Sentences", a book of extracts from the Church Fathers).
In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the distinction between "poetic theology" ("theologia poetica") and "revealed" or Biblical theology serves as steppingstone for a revival of philosophy as independent of theological authority.
It is in this last sense, theology as an academic discipline involving rational study of Christian teaching, that the term passed into English in the fourteenth century, although it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God – a discourse now sometimes called theology proper.
From the 17th century onwards, it also became possible to use the term theology to refer to study of religious ideas and teachings that are not specifically Christian (e.g., in the term natural theology which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts independent of specifically Christian revelation,) or that are specific to another religion (see below).
"Theology" can also now be used in a derived sense to mean "a system of theoretical principles; an (impractical or rigid) ideology".
The term "theology" has been deemed by some as only appropriate to the study of religions that worship a supposed deity (a "theos"), i.e. more widely than monotheism; and presuppose a belief in the ability to speak and reason about this deity (in "logia"). They suggest the term is less appropriate in religious contexts that are organized differently (religions without a single deity, or that deny that such subjects can be studied logically). ("Hierology" has been proposed as an alternative, more generic term.)
As defined by Thomas Aquinas, theology is constituted by a triple aspect: what is taught by God, teaches of God and leads to God (). This indicates the three distinct areas of God as theophanic revelation, the systematic study of the nature of divine and, more generally, of religious belief, and the spiritual path. Christian theology as the study of Christian belief and practice concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and the New Testament as well as on Christian tradition. Christian theologians use biblical exegesis, rational analysis and argument. Theology might be undertaken to help the theologian better understand Christian tenets, to make comparisons between Christianity and other traditions, to defend Christianity against objections and criticism, to facilitate reforms in the Christian church, to assist in the propagation of Christianity, to draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to address some present situation or need, or for a variety of other reasons.
Islamic theological discussion that parallels Christian theological discussion is called "Kalam"; the Islamic analogue of Christian theological discussion would more properly be the investigation and elaboration of "Sharia" or "Fiqh".
In Jewish theology, the historical absence of political authority has meant that most theological reflection has happened within the context of the Jewish community and synagogue, including through rabbinical discussion of Jewish law and Midrash (rabbinic biblical commentaries). Jewish theology is linked to ethics and therefore has implications for how one behaves.
Some academic inquiries within Buddhism, dedicated to the investigation of a Buddhist understanding of the world, prefer the designation Buddhist philosophy to the term "Buddhist theology", since Buddhism lacks the same conception of a "theos". Jose Ignacio Cabezon, who argues that the use of "theology" "is" appropriate, can only do so, he says, because "I take theology not to be restricted to discourse on God ... I take 'theology' not to be restricted to its etymological meaning. In that latter sense, Buddhism is of course "a"theological, rejecting as it does the notion of God."
Within Hindu philosophy, there is a tradition of philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe, of God (termed "Brahman", Paramatma and Bhagavan in some schools of Hindu thought) and of the Atman (soul). The Sanskrit word for the various schools of Hindu philosophy is Darshana (meaning "view" or "viewpoint"). Vaishnava theology has been a subject of study for many devotees, philosophers and scholars in India for centuries. A large part of its study lies in classifying and organizing the manifestations of thousands of gods and their aspects. In recent decades the study of Hinduism has also been taken up by a number of academic institutions in Europe, such as the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Bhaktivedanta College. "See also: Krishnology"
In Japan, the term "theology" (神学, "shingaku") has been ascribed to Shinto since the Edo period with the publication of Mano Tokitsuna's "Kokon shingaku ruihen" (古今神学類編; lit. "categorized compilation of ancient theology"). In modern times, other terms are used to denote studies in Shinto--as well as Buddhist--belief, such as "kyōgaku" (教学; "education [and] studies") and "shūgaku" (宗学; "religion studies").
English academic Graham Harvey has commented that Pagans "rarely indulge in theology". Nevertheless, theology has been applied in some sectors across contemporary Pagan communities, including Wicca, Heathenry, Druidry and Kemetism. As these religions have given precedence to orthopraxy, theological views often vary among adherents.
The term is used by Christine Kraemer in her book "Seeking The Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies" and by Michael York in "Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion".
The history of the study of theology in institutions of higher education is as old as the history of such institutions themselves. For instance, Taxila was an early centre of Vedic learning, possible from the 6th century BC or earlier; the Platonic Academy founded in Athens in the 4th century BC seems to have included theological themes in its subject matter; the Chinese Taixue delivered Confucian teaching from the 2nd century BC; the School of Nisibis was a centre of Christian learning from the 4th century AD; Nalanda in India was a site of Buddhist higher learning from at least the 5th or 6th century AD; and the Moroccan University of Al-Karaouine was a centre of Islamic learning from the 10th century, as was Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
The earliest universities were developed under the aegis of the Latin Church by papal bull as "studia generalia" and perhaps from cathedral schools. It is possible, however, that the development of cathedral schools into universities was quite rare, with the University of Paris being an exception. Later they were also founded by Kings (University of Naples Federico II, Charles University in Prague, Jagiellonian University in Kraków) or municipal administrations (University of Cologne, University of Erfurt). In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools were deemed to have become primarily sites of higher education. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries. Christian theological learning was therefore a component in these institutions, as was the study of Church or Canon law: universities played an important role in training people for ecclesiastical offices, in helping the church pursue the clarification and defence of its teaching, and in supporting the legal rights of the church over against secular rulers. At such universities, theological study was initially closely tied to the life of faith and of the church: it fed, and was fed by, practices of preaching, prayer and celebration of the Mass.
During the High Middle Ages, theology was therefore the ultimate subject at universities, being named "The Queen of the Sciences" and serving as the capstone to the Trivium and Quadrivium that young men were expected to study. This meant that the other subjects (including Philosophy) existed primarily to help with theological thought.
Christian theology's preeminent place in the university began to be challenged during the European Enlightenment, especially in Germany. Other subjects gained in independence and prestige, and questions were raised about the place of a discipline that seemed to involve commitment to the authority of particular religious traditions in institutions that were increasingly understood to be devoted to independent reason.
Since the early nineteenth century, various different approaches have emerged in the West to theology as an academic discipline. Much of the debate concerning theology's place in the university or within a general higher education curriculum centres on whether theology's methods are appropriately theoretical and (broadly speaking) scientific or, on the other hand, whether theology requires a pre-commitment of faith by its practitioners, and whether such a commitment conflicts with academic freedom.
In some contexts, theology has been held to belong in institutions of higher education primarily as a form of professional training for Christian ministry. This was the basis on which Friedrich Schleiermacher, a liberal theologian, argued for the inclusion of theology in the new University of Berlin in 1810.
For instance, in Germany, theological faculties at state universities are typically tied to particular denominations, Protestant or Roman Catholic, and those faculties will offer denominationally-bound "(konfessionsgebunden)" degrees, and have denominationally bound public posts amongst their faculty; as well as contributing 'to the development and growth of Christian knowledge' they 'provide the academic training for the future clergy and teachers of religious instruction at German schools.'
In the United States, several prominent colleges and universities were started in order to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Georgetown, Boston University, Yale, Duke University, and Princeton all had the theological training of clergy as a primary purpose at their foundation.
Seminaries and bible colleges have continued this alliance between the academic study of theology and training for Christian ministry. There are, for instance, numerous prominent examples in the United States, including Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Criswell College in Dallas, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, Andersonville Theological Seminary in Camilla, Georgia, Dallas Theological Seminary, North Texas Collegiate Institute in Farmers Branch, Texas and the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri.
In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training. This applies, for instance, to many university departments in the United Kingdom, including the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30503 |
Bay City Rollers
The Bay City Rollers are a Scottish pop rock band known for their worldwide teen idol popularity in the 1970s. They have been called the "tartan teen sensations from Edinburgh", and "the first of many acts heralded as the 'biggest group since the Beatles'".
The group's line-up had many changes over the years, but the classic line-up during its heyday included guitarists Eric Faulkner and Stuart Wood, singer Les McKeown, bassist Alan Longmuir, and drummer Derek Longmuir. The line-up in 2018 includes guitarist Stuart Wood (Woody), singer Ian Thomson, bassist Marcus Cordock and drummer Jamie McGrory.
In 1964, a trio called the Ambassadors was formed in Edinburgh, Scotland, by 16-year-old Alan Longmuir on acoustic guitar, his younger brother Derek Longmuir on drums, and their older cousin Neil Porteous on acoustic guitar. The group never performed publicly under this name, just a family wedding where they covered "Wake Up Little Susie". They changed their name to the Saxons, and Derek invited his schoolfriend, Gordon "Nobby" Clark, to be the lead singer. Porteous moved from acoustic to electric guitar, and Alan Longmuir followed suit by changing to electric bass. The Saxons played occasional dance hall concerts while the band members completed their schooling or worked during the day (Alan apprenticed as a plumber). Porteous left the band in July 1965, with new guitarist Dave Pettigrew filling the spot after answering an advertisement placed by the band in an Edinburgh newspaper. Pettigrew was more advanced musically than the others, and pushed the band to improve. Their repertoire included American R&B/pop songs such as "Please Mr. Postman" and "Heat Wave". They played at least one gig at the Gonk Club as the Deadbeats, but they discovered a conflict: another band was playing locally as Rock Bottom and the Deadbeats.
While taking a technical class at Napier College, Alan met fellow plumbing student Gregory Ellison, who joined the Saxons on electric guitar, with Pettigrew shifting to keyboards. Gregory's older brother Mike joined as a second lead singer, allowing more complex harmonies, especially useful for the Motown songs they liked to perform. The band convinced Tam Paton, a former big band leader and influential local band and club manager, to audition them at the Longmuirs' house. Paton booked them for a Thursday night at his club, the Palais, then assigned them to open for the Hipple People at Top Storey. Further gigs followed.
More successful now, the Saxons moved out of the Longmuirs' back room to practise in Hermiston at a church. They played a couple of contemporary Kinks numbers but favoured American songs, including a new one: "C.C. Rider" by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Desiring a better name for the band, they settled on "Rollers", but needed a more powerful American-sounding term in front of that. Derek Longmuir threw a dart at a map of the United States, landing first on Arkansas. This did not meet anyone's approval, so a second dart was thrown. It landed near Bay City, Michigan. The band agreed on the name, the Bay City Rollers. Short-term members from this period included bassist David Paton (from 1969 to 1970) and keyboardist Billy Lyall (1969–71), who went on to be founding members of another Edinburgh band, Pilot.
After signing with Bell Records, the band's first hit was "Keep On Dancing" (UK No. 9, 1971), a cover of a 1965 hit by the Gentrys. Upon this release's success, they made appearances on BBC One's "Top of the Pops".
Several non-charting singles were released over the following two years. This period saw the addition of long term member guitarist Eric Faulkner. In mid-1973, they narrowly missed the UK Singles Chart with their fourth single, "Saturday Night". By the end of 1973, Clark had become disillusioned with the band's musical direction and decided to leave just when his recording of "Remember (Sha-La-La-La)" zoomed up the charts to No. 6. He was replaced as lead singer by Les McKeown. A couple of months later, in early 1974, what became known as the classic line-up was completed; guitarist John Devine was replaced by Stuart "Woody" Wood.
In late 1973, McKeown recorded lead vocals on "Remember (Sha-La-La-La)", and a lead-in to a series of UK chart hits. 16-year-old Stuart Wood completed the "classic five" line up in February 1974, a week after the band had debuted the "Remember" single on "Top of the Pops." (John Devine had mimed the piano part). By early 1975, the band was well on the way to achieving global success. The "classic five" line up consisted of: Alan Longmuir, Derek Longmuir, Stuart "Woody" Wood, Eric Faulkner and Les McKeown.
Beginning with "Remember" (UK No. 6), the Rollers' popularity exploded, and they released a string of hits on the UK chart. Following in succession were "Shang-a-Lang" (UK No. 2), "Summerlove Sensation" (UK No. 3), and "All of Me Loves All of You" (UK No. 4).
By early 1975, they were one of the biggest-selling acts in the UK. The successful '75 UK tour, which prompted newspaper headlines about the rise of "Rollermania" (a take-off on Beatlemania a decade before). The Rollers were the subject of a 20-week UK television series, "Shang-a-Lang".
A cover of the Four Seasons' "Bye, Bye, Baby" stayed at No. 1 in the UK for six weeks in March and April 1975, selling nearly a million copies and becoming the biggest seller of the year. The subsequent single, "Give a Little Love" topped the charts in July 1975, achieving their second No. 1 hit. Two full-length LPs were produced during this period: "Once Upon a Star" (1975) and "Wouldn't You Like It?" (1975). Faulkner and Wood undertook the majority of the songwriting duties.
By this time, Bay City Roller fans had a completely distinctive style of dress, featuring calf-length tartan trousers and tartan scarves.
English singer-songwriter Nick Lowe wrote a "Jaundiced" (in Lowe's words) paean to the band titled "Bay City Rollers We Love You". The track was "carefully sculpted" to be poor enough to get Lowe out of a recording contract with United Artists. The strategy backfired. UA issued the record as by the Tartan Horde, which was the name given to Rollers fans in England, and it became a substantial hit in Japan. Lowe was obliged to record a follow-up song called "Rollers Show", which did not meet with the same commercial success. This follow-up song was included on the US release of Lowe's first album, "Pure Pop for Now People".
As the group's popularity swelled to superstardom in the UK, a concerted effort was made by Arista Records (the record company that evolved from Bell) to launch the Rollers in North America. New Arista head, Clive Davis, was instrumental in grooming and overseeing the project. His work paid off, as in late 1975, the Rollers reached No. 1 on the US "Billboard" Hot 100 with "Saturday Night". Ironically, "Saturday Night" had missed the UK chart completely two years earlier. The Rollers gave the track their American debut, via a satellite-link performance on "Saturday Night Live, with Howard Cosell". In Canada, it fared equally well, hitting No. 1 on the "RPM" national singles chart on 10 January 1976. The "Bay City Rollers" (1975) album (North American release only) hit No. 1 in the same chart on 7 February.
A second North American hit came with "Money Honey", written by Faulkner, which hit No. 9 in the US. In Canada, it fared better, following its predecessor to the top, giving them their second No. 1 in the "RPM" national singles chart on 13 March 1976.
The North America/Japan release album "Rock n' Roll Love Letter" (1976) jumped from No. 25, to the top position, in a single week in Canada. This deposed their own "Bay City Rollers" (1975) album at No. 1 on the national chart, on 27 March 1976, However, it only managed to achieve the No. 31 spot on the US "Billboard" chart.
They were also extremely popular in Australia. One example of their popularity, was put into the book about "Countdown" – the Australian TV music show which ran from 1974 - 1987. Their 1976 appearance on Countdown coincided with a total eclipse of the sun. Director Ted Emery recalled:
By early 1976, the strain of success (and the discomfort of being a man in his late 20s in a teen band) had taken its toll on bassist Alan Longmuir, who decided to leave the group. He was replaced for seven months by 17-year-old Ian Mitchell from Northern Ireland – the first band member born outside Edinburgh, Scotland. With Mitchell, the group released an album titled "Dedication" (1976), and hit the charts with a cover version of the Dusty Springfield song, "I Only Want to Be with You. " The song reached US No. 12, as well as "Yesterday's Hero" (featuring live material from a 1976 personal appearance in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square), and "Dedication".
As the Rollers' popularity waned, the shuffling of personnel continued; Mitchell quit the band. He was replaced by guitarist Pat McGlynn. Further struggles involved the direction of their sound, as the members wished to pursue more sophisticated styles. They settled on David Bowie's producer, Harry Maslin, and in August 1977 released "It's a Game" as a four-piece group, comprising McKeown, Wood, Faulkner and Derek Longmuir. The "It's a Game" tour was recorded in 1977 at Japan's Budokan Hall, and was later released in 2001 as "Rollerworld: Live at the Budokan 1977".
On the tour, they covered an unsuccessful 1973 single by String Driven Thing, "It's a Game" to give them their final UK Top 20 hit (#16 in May 1977). Oddly enough, this single provided them with their highest-charting German hit, reaching No. 4 in the same year. The follow-up "You Made Me Believe in Magic" could only make No. 34 in July in the UK and No. 10 in the US, but this would be their final major success there, too.
At the end of 1978, the band had split with McKeown, then fired manager Tam Paton shortly after, and decided to continue in a more new wave, rock-oriented sound. Their name was now the Rollers. South African-born Duncan Faure joined the band as new lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter. With Faure, the line-up produced three albums: "Elevator" (1979), "Voxx" (1980) and "Ricochet" (1981). Following the expiry of the band's Arista contract, neither of the releases sold as well as expected, and they stopped touring by late 1981.
Thirty-five years after its release, "The Federalist" described "Ricochet" as a pop rock masterpiece, demonstrating a maturity in the band's musical style. "The A.V. Club" agreed, comparing "Ricochet" to the pop/new wave style of the Cars, and recommending the album be "rescued from obscurity".
During the 1980s and 1990s, there were a few short tours. Seven past members played Japan in 1982, and again in 1983. A reunion album, "Breakout", was released in Japan and Australia in 1985, and added drummer George Spencer. "Breakout" was written primarily by McKeown and McGlynn with minor contributions from Faulkner, Wood, and Mitchell.
In the late 1980s, a version of the band called the New Rollers was formed featuring Faulkner on lead vocals, Kass (Karen Prosser) on vocals, Jason Medvec on guitar, Andy Boakes on bass, Mark Roberts on drums. The band toured extensively throughout the US and Canada as well as tours of the UK and Australia. This group also released an independent four-song EP titled "Party Harty".
In 1990, Stuart Wood and Alan Longmuir joined with Faulkner to tour under the Bay City Rollers name, and issued several CDs of re-recordings of the old Roller tunes.
The classic line-up (minus Derek Longmuir) performed a one-off New Year's Eve millennium concert, the last official Bay City Rollers concert (1999–2000) in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. Interest was rekindled in the UK by various television documentaries about the group; and a new television-advertised compilation of greatest hits, "Very Best of the Bay City Rollers", entered the UK Albums Chart, on release in 2004 at No. 11.
On 22 September 2015 the Bay City Rollers, including McKeown, Stuart “Woody” Wood and Alan Longmuir announced that they were reforming and would play a show at the Glasgow Barrowlands on 20 December.
On 27 February 2018, Stuart “Woody” Wood announced that the new Bay City Rollers would be performing in Tokyo, Japan in June of the same year. The band comprises Woody on guitar, Ian Thomson on lead vocals and guitar, Marcus Cordock on bass, and Jamie McGrory on drums.
Bassist Alan Longmuir died on 2 July 2018 after falling ill while on holiday with his wife in Mexico. His autobiography "I Ran With The Gang: My Life In and Out of The Bay City Rollers" was published posthumously in November 2018. The book was written with Martin Knight.
According to the BBC, the Bay City Rollers sold 120 million records.
In March 2007, six former members of the group (Faure plus the "classic line-up") announced a lawsuit against Arista Records in hopes of claiming what they described as "tens of millions of dollars" of unpaid royalties. Nobby Clark threatened to sue the other band members if their lawsuit were successful, stating that he was the creative force behind the band's success, despite the fact that he left the group in 1973, before the bulk of their fame and fortune began.
In September 2010, Gordon "Nobby" Clark, Ian Mitchell and Pat McGlynn filed a complaint in the courts, in the United States, against the six members (Faure plus the "classic line-up"), over being excluded from the case against Arista records. Clark, Mitchell and McGlynn were seeking to have their rights determined, and were also seeking financial damages against the other Bay City Rollers, for alleged breach of contract. In 2013 a judge in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the three due to the statute of frauds, which establishes that certain agreements must be in writing under certain conditions, with the appellate judge ruling, "A claim for unjust enrichment must be based on the value of plaintiffs' contribution to the joint effort of the band at the time it made the relevant records, not on the income stream resulting from a revival over thirty years later,"
In March 2011, a New York judge determined that the Bay City Rollers could move forward with their four-year-old lawsuit against Arista Records. Arista denied responsibility for the majority of the royalties, citing a New York statute of limitations. The statute limits plaintiffs from recovering damages post six years in contract disputes; therefore would negate the Rollers' claims for royalties incurred prior to 2001. However, since Arista had continued to promise the Bay City Rollers their royalties, in writing, the judge ruled that the statute was not applicable.
After almost a decade, the legal battle came to an end with an out-of-court settlement in 2016. Arista Records' parent company - Sony Music, is believed to have paid $3.5 million, with each band member receiving £70,000. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30508 |
Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from "threefold") holds that God is one God, but three coeternal consubstantial persons or "hypostases"—the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit—as "one God in three Divine persons". The three persons are distinct, yet are one "substance, essence or nature" (homoousios). In this context, a "nature" is "what" one is, whereas a "person" is "who" one is. The subset of Christianity that accepts this doctrine is collectively known as Trinitarianism, while the subset that does not is referred to as nontrinitarian. Trinitarianism contrasts with positions such as Binitarianism (one deity in two persons) and Monarchianism (no plurality of persons within God), of which Modalistic Monarchianism (one deity revealed in three modes) and Unitarianism (one deity in one person) are subsets.
While the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, the New Testament possesses a "triadic" understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas. The doctrine of the Trinity was first formulated among the fathers of the Church as early Christians attempted to rationalize the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptural documents and prior traditions.
While the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, the New Testament possesses a "triadic" understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas, including Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 12:4-5, Ephesians 4:4-6, 1 Peter 1:2 and Revelation 1:4-5. Reflection by early Christians on passages such as the Great Commission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" and Paul the Apostle's blessing: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all", while at the same time the Jewish Shema Yisrael: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone" has led theologians across history in attempting to articulate the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Eventually, the diverse references to God, Jesus, and the Spirit found in the New Testament were brought together to form the doctrine of the Trinity—one God subsisting in three persons and one substance. The doctrine of the Trinity was used to oppose alternative views of how the three are related and to defend the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods.
The Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7, is a disputed text which states: "There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one." However, this passage is not considered to be part of the genuine text, and most scholars agree that the phrase was a gloss.
In the letters of Paul, the public, corporate devotional patterns towards Jesus in the early Christian community are reflective of Paul's perspective on the divine status of Jesus in what scholars have termed a "binitarian" pattern of devotion. For Paul, Jesus receives prayer (1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 12:8-9; 1 Thess. 3:11), the presence of Jesus is confessionally invoked by believers (1 Cor. 16:22; Romans 10:9-13; Phil. 2:10-11), people are baptized in Jesus’ name (1 Cor. 6:11; Rom. 6:3), Jesus is the reference in Christian fellowship for a religious ritual meal (the Lord’s Supper; 1 Cor. 11:17-34 – in pagan cults, the reference for ritual meals is always to a deity), and Jesus is the source of continuing prophetic oracles to believers (1 Thess. 4:15-17).
The Gospels depict Jesus as human through most of their narrative, but "[o]ne eventually discovers that he is a divine being manifest in flesh, and the point of the texts is in part to make his higher nature known in a kind of intellectual epiphany." In the Gospels, Jesus receives προσκύνησις in the aftermath of the resurrection, a Greek term that either expresses the contemporary social gesture of bowing to a superior, either on one's knees or in full prostration (in Matthew 18:26 a slave performs προσκύνησις to his master so that he would not be sold after being unable to pay his debts). The term can also refer to the religious act of devotion towards a deity. While Jesus receives προσκύνησις a number of times in the Synoptic Gospels, only a few can be said to refer to divine worship. This includes Matthew 28:16-20, an account of the resurrected Jesus receiving worship from his disciples after proclaiming he has been given authority over the cosmos and his ever-continuing presence with the disciples (forming an inclusio with the beginning of the Gospel, where Jesus is given the name Emmanuel/"God with us", a name that alludes to the God of Israel's continuing presence with his followers throughout the Old Testament (Gen. 28:15; Deut 20:1) and used in reference to Jesus in the resurrection account). Whereas some have argued that Matthew 28:19 was an interpolation on account of its absence from the first few centuries of early Christian quotations, scholars largely accept the passage as authentic due to its supporting manuscript evidence and that it does appear to be either quoted in the Didache (7:1-3) or at least reflected in the Didache as part of a common tradition from which both Matthew and the Didache emerged. Jesus receiving divine worship in the post-resurrection accounts is further mirrored in Luke 24:52. Acts depicts the early Christian movement as a public cult centered around Jesus in several passages. In Acts, it is common for individual Christians to "call" upon the name of Jesus (9:14, 21; 22:16), an idea precedented in the Old Testament descriptions of calling on the name of YHWH as a form of prayer. The story of Stephen depicts Stephen invoking and crying out to Jesus in the final moments of his life to receive his spirit (7:59-60). Acts further describes a common ritual practice inducting new members into the early Jesus sect by baptizing them in Jesus' name (2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5). According to Dale Allison, Acts depicts the appearances of Jesus to Paul as a divine theophany, styled on and identified with the God responsible for the theophany of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.
The Gospel of John has been seen as especially aimed at emphasizing Jesus' divinity, presenting Jesus as the Logos, pre-existent and divine, from its first words: "" (John 1:1). The Gospel of John ends with Thomas's declaration that he believed Jesus was God, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). There is no significant tendency among modern scholars to deny that John 1:1 and John 20:28 identify Jesus with God. John also portrays Jesus as the agent of creation of the universe.
Some have suggested that John presents a hierarchy when he quotes Jesus as saying, "The Father is greater than I", a statement which was appealed to by nontrinitarian groups such as Arianism. However, Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas argued this statement was to be understood as Jesus speaking about his human nature.
Prior Jewish theology held that the Spirit is merely the divine presence of God himself, whereas orthodox Christian theology holds that the Holy Spirit is a distinct person of God himself. This development begins early in the New Testament, as the Spirit of God receives much more emphasis and description comparably than it had in earlier Jewish writing. Whereas there are 75 references to the Spirit within the Old Testament and 35 identified in the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, despite its significantly shorter length, mentions the Spirit 275 times. In addition to its larger emphasis and importance placed on the Spirit in the New Testament, the Spirit is also described in much more personalized and individualized terms than earlier. Larry Hurtado writes;
Moreover, the New Testament references often portray actions that seem to give the Spirit an intensely personal quality, probably more so than in Old Testament or ancient Jewish texts. So, for example, the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness (Mk 1:12; compare “led” in Mt. 4:1/Lk 4:1), and Paul refers to the Spirit interceding for believers (Rom 8:26–27) and witnessing to believers about their filial status with God (Rom 8:14–16). To cite other examples of this, in Acts the Spirit alerts Peter to the arrival of visitors from Cornelius (10:19), directs the church in Antioch to send forth Barnabas and Saul (13:2–4), guides the Jerusalem council to a decision about Gentile converts (15:28), at one point forbids Paul to missionize in Asia (16:6), and at another point warns Paul (via prophetic oracles) of trouble ahead in Jerusalem (21:11).
In the New Testament, the Spirit is not a recipient of devotion or worship as can be found in the Nicene Creed, though there are aspects of the New Testament which describe the Spirit as the subject of religious ritual in Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:13.
As the Arian controversy was dissipating, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus Christ to the equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and Son. On one hand, the Pneumatomachi sect declared that the Holy Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son. On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Holy Spirit was equal to the Father and Son in nature or substance.
Although the main text used in defense of the deity of the Holy Spirit was Matthew 28:19, Cappadocian Fathers such as Basil the Great argued from other verses such as "But Peter said, 'Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.'" (Acts 5:3-4).
Another passage the Cappadocian Fathers quoted from was "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host" (Psalm 33:6). According to their understanding, because "breath" and "spirit" in Hebrew are both "רוּחַ" ("ruach"), Psalm 33:6 is revealing the roles of the Son and Holy Spirit as co-creators. And since, according to them, because only the holy God can create holy beings such as the angels, the Son and Holy Spirit must be God.
Yet another argument from the Cappadocian Fathers to prove that the Holy Spirit is of the same nature as the Father and Son comes from "For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God" (1 Cor. 2:11). They reasoned that this passage proves that the Holy Spirit has the same relationship to God as the spirit within us has to us.
The Cappadocian Fathers also quoted, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Cor. 3:16) and reasoned that it would be blasphemous for an inferior being to take up residence in a temple of God, thus proving that the Holy Spirit is equal with the Father and the Son.
They also combined "the servant does not know what his master is doing" (John 15:15) with 1 Corinthians 2:11 in an attempt to show that the Holy Spirit is not the slave of God, and therefore his equal.
The Pneumatomachi contradicted the Cappadocian Fathers by quoting, "Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" (Hebrews 1:14) in effect arguing that the Holy Spirit is no different from other created angelic spirits. The Church Fathers disagreed, saying that the Holy Spirit is greater than the angels, since the Holy Spirit is the one who grants the foreknowledge for prophecy (1 Cor. 12:8-10) so that the angels could announce events to come.
In addition, the Old Testament has also been interpreted as foreshadowing the Trinity, by referring to God's word (Psalm 33:16), his spirit (Isaiah 61:1), and Wisdom (Proverbs 9:1), as well as narratives such as the appearance of the three men to Abraham. However, it is generally agreed among Trinitarian Christian scholars that it would go beyond the intention and spirit of the Old Testament to correlate these notions directly with later Trinitarian doctrine.
Some Church Fathers believed that a knowledge of the mystery was granted to the prophets and saints of the Old Testament, and that they identified the divine messenger of Genesis 16:7, Genesis 21:17, Genesis 31:11, Exodus 3:2 and Wisdom of the sapiential books with the Son, and "the spirit of the Lord" with the Holy Spirit. Other Church Fathers, such as Gregory Nazianzen, argued in his "Orations" that the revelation was gradual, claiming that the Father was proclaimed in the Old Testament openly, but the Son only obscurely, because "it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son".
Genesis 18–19 has been interpreted by Christians as a Trinitarian text. The narrative has the Lord appearing to Abraham, who was visited by three men (Gen 18:1-2). Then in , "the two angels" visited Lot at Sodom. The interplay between Abraham on the one hand and the Lord/three men/the two angels on the other was an intriguing text for those who believed in a single God in three persons. Justin Martyr, and John Calvin similarly, interpreted it such that Abraham was visited by God, who was accompanied by two angels. Justin supposed that the God who visited Abraham was distinguishable from the God who remains in the heavens, but was nevertheless identified as the (monotheistic) God. Justin appropriated the God who visited Abraham to Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.
Augustine, in contrast, held that the three visitors to Abraham were the three persons of the Trinity. He saw no indication that the visitors were unequal, as would be the case in Justin's reading. Then in Genesis 19, two of the visitors were addressed by Lot in the singular: "Lot said to them, 'Not so, my lord'" (Gen. 19:18) Augustine saw that Lot could address them as one because they had a single substance, despite the plurality of persons.
Some Christians interpret the theophanies or appearances of the Angel of the Lord as revelations of a person distinct from God, who is nonetheless called God. This interpretation is found in Christianity as early as Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis, and reflects ideas that were already present in Philo. The Old Testament theophanies were thus seen as Christophanies, each a "preincarnate appearance of the Messiah".
While the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, it was first formulated as early Christians attempted to understand the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptural documents and prior traditions. The New Testament possesses a "triadic" understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas. The Ante-Nicene Fathers asserted Christ's deity and spoke of "Father, Son and Holy Spirit", even though their language is not that of the traditional doctrine as formalized in the fourth century.
Trinitarians view these as elements of the codified doctrine. An early Trinitarian formula appears towards the end of the first century, where Clement of Rome rhetorically asks in his epistle as to why corruption exists among some in the Christian community; "Do we not have one God, and one Christ, and one gracious Spirit that has been poured out upon us, and one calling in Christ?" (1 Clement 46:6). Around the turn of the first century, the Didache directs Christians to "baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Ignatius of Antioch provides early support for the Trinity around 110, exhorting obedience to "Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit".
The pseudonymous Ascension of Isaiah, written sometime between the end of the first century and the beginning of the third century, possesses a "proto-trinitarian" view, such as in its narrative of how the inhabitants of the sixth heaven sing praises to "the primal Father and his Beloved Christ, and the Holy Spirit". Justin Martyr (AD 100–c. 165) also writes, "in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit".
The first of the early church fathers to be recorded using the word "Trinity" was Theophilus of Antioch writing in the late 2nd century. He defines the Trinity as God, His Word ("Logos") and His Wisdom ("Sophia") in the context of a discussion of the first three days of creation, following the early Christian practice of identifying the Holy Spirit as the Wisdom of God. The first defense of the doctrine of the Trinity was in the early 3rd century by the early church father Tertullian. He explicitly defined the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and defended his theology against "Praxeas", though he noted that the majority of the believers in his day found issue with his doctrine.
St. Justin and Clement of Alexandria used the Trinity in their doxologies and St. Basil likewise, in the evening lighting of lamps. Origen of Alexandria (AD 185-c. 253) has often been interpreted as Subordinationist, but some modern researchers have argued that Origen might have actually been anti-Subordinationist.
Although there is much debate as to whether the beliefs of the Apostles were merely articulated and explained in the Trinitarian Creeds, or were corrupted and replaced with new beliefs, all scholars recognize that the Creeds themselves were created in reaction to disagreements over the nature of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These controversies took some centuries to be resolved.
Of these controversies, the most significant developments were articulated in the first four centuries by the Church Fathers in reaction to Adoptionism, Sabellianism, and Arianism. Adoptionism was the belief that Jesus was an ordinary man, born of Joseph and Mary, who became the Christ and Son of God at his baptism. In 269, the Synods of Antioch condemned Paul of Samosata for his Adoptionist theology, and also condemned the term "homoousios" (ὁμοούσιος, "of the same being") in the modalist sense in which he used it.
Among the Non-Trinitarian beliefs, the Sabellianism taught that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are essentially one and the same, the difference being simply verbal, describing different aspects or roles of a single being. For this view Sabellius was excommunicated for heresy in Rome c. 220.
In the fourth century, Arianism, as traditionally understood, taught that the Father existed prior to the Son who was not, by nature, God but rather a changeable creature who was granted the dignity of becoming "Son of God". In 325, the First Council of Nicaea adopted the Nicene Creed which described Christ as "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father", and the "Holy Ghost" as the one by which was incarnate... of the Virgin Mary". ("the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us"). About the Father and the Son, the creed used the term "homoousios" (of one substance) to define the relationship between the Father and the Son. After more than fifty years of debate, "homoousios" was recognised as the hallmark of orthodoxy, and was further developed into the formula of "three persons, one being".
The Confession of the First Council of Nicaea, the Nicene Creed, said little about the Holy Spirit. At the First Council of Nicea (325) all attention was focused on the relationship between the Father and the Son, without making any similar statement about the Holy Spirit:
Later, at the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Nicene Creed would be expanded, known as Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, by saying that the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son (συμπροσκυνούμενον καὶ συνδοξαζόμενον), suggesting that he was also consubstantial with them:
The doctrine of the divinity and personality of the Holy Spirit was developed by Athanasius in the last decades of his life. He defended and refined the Nicene formula. By the end of the 4th century, under the leadership of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus (the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine had reached substantially its current form.
In the late 6th century, some Latin-speaking churches added the words "and from the Son" ("Filioque") to the description of the procession of the Holy Spirit, words that were not included in the text by either the Council of Nicaea or that of Constantinople. This was incorporated into the liturgical practice of Rome in 1014."Filioque" eventually became one of the main causes for the East-West Schism in 1054, and the failures of the repeated union attempts.
Gregory of Nazianzus would say of the Trinity, "No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light."
Devotion to the Trinity centered in the French monasteries at Tours and Aniane where Saint Benedict dedicated the abbey church to the Trinity in 872. Feast Days were not instituted until 1091 at Cluny and 1162 at Canterbury and papal resistance continued until 1331.
Baptism is generally conferred with the Trinitarian formula, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit". Trinitarians identify this name with the Christian faith into which baptism is an initiation, as seen for example in the statement of Basil the Great (330–379): "We are bound to be baptized in the terms we have received, and to profess faith in the terms in which we have been baptized." The First Council of Constantinople (381) also says, "This is the Faith of our baptism that teaches us to believe in the Name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. According to this Faith there is one Godhead, Power, and Being of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." may be taken to indicate that baptism was associated with this formula from the earliest decades of the Church's existence. Other Trinitarian formulas found in the New Testament include in 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, Ephesians 4:4–6, 1 Peter 1:2 and Revelation 1:4–5.
Oneness Pentecostals demur from the Trinitarian view of baptism and emphasize baptism ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’ the original apostolic formula. For this reason, they often focus on the baptisms in Acts. Those who place great emphasis on the baptisms in Acts often likewise question the authenticity of in its present form. Most scholars of New Testament textual criticism accept the authenticity of the passage, since there are no variant manuscripts regarding the formula, and the extant form of the passage is attested in the Didache and other patristic works of the 1st and 2nd centuries: Ignatius, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian, and Gregory Thaumaturgus.
Commenting on , Gerhard Kittel states:
This threefold relation [of Father, Son and Spirit] soon found fixed expression in the triadic formulae in and in . The form is first found in the baptismal formula in ; Did., 7. 1 and 3...[I]t is self-evident that Father, Son and Spirit are here linked in an indissoluble threefold relationship.
In Trinitarian doctrine, God exists as three persons or hypostases, but is one being, having a single divine nature. The members of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal, one in essence, nature, power, action, and will. As stated in the Athanasian Creed, the Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Holy Spirit is uncreated, and all three are eternal without beginning. "The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" are not names for different parts of God, but one name for God because three persons exist in God as one entity. They cannot be separate from one another. Each person is understood as having the identical essence or nature, not merely similar natures.
According to the Eleventh Council of Toledo (675) "For, when we say: He who is the Father is not the Son, we refer to the distinction of persons; but when we say: the Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, and the Holy Spirit that which the Father is and the Son is, this clearly refers to the nature or substance"
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) adds: "In God there is only a Trinity since each of the three persons is that reality — that is to say substance, essence or divine nature. This reality neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds; the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the holy Spirit proceeds. Thus there is a distinction of persons but a unity of nature. Although therefore the Father is one person, the Son another person and the holy Spirit another person, they are not different realities, but rather that which is the Father is the Son and the holy Spirit, altogether the same; thus according to the orthodox and catholic faith they are believed to be consubstantial."
Clarification of the relationships among the three Trinitarian "Hypostases" ("Persons" but of course not in the sense of a "human self") much advances because of the pertaining Magisterial statement promulgated by the Council of Florence (1431-1449), though its formulation much precedes the Council: "These three Persons are one God and not three gods, for the three are one substance, one essence, one nature, one opposition of relationship ["relationis oppositio"]." Robert Magliola explains that most theologians have taken "relationis oppositio" in the "Thomist" sense, namely, the "opposition of relationship" [in English we would say "oppositional relationship"] is one of contrariety rather than contradiction. The only "functions" that are applied "uniquely" to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively in Scripture are the following: "Paternity" to the Father, "Filiation" (Sonship) to the Son, and "Passive Spiration" or that which is "breathed out," to the Holy Spirit. Magliola goes on to explain:
Because such is the case (among other reasons), Karl Rahner rejects the "psychological" theories of Trinity which define the Father as Knower, for example, and the Son as the Known (i.e., Truth). Scripture in one place or another identifies Knowing with each of the three Persons all told. Which is to say, according to the "relationis oppositio", Knowing (in our example) does not define the Persons [qua individual Persons] at all, but the Unity of God instead. (Scripture's attribution of Knowing to any one Person at any one time is said to be just "appropriated" to the Person: it does not really belong to that unique Person).
Magliola, continuing the Rahnerian stance, goes on to explain that the Divine Persons necessarily relate to each other in terms of "pure negative reference," that is, the three "Is Not" relations represented in the "Scutum Fidei" diagram (to the upper right in this article) are in each case a pure or absolute "Is Not". This is the case because the "relationis oppositio" clause disallows the Persons to "share," qua Persons, the unique role that defines each of them. Lest he be misunderstood, Magliola, in a subsequent publication, makes sure to specify that each of the three Persons, while unique as a Person, is nonetheless—because of the Divine "consubstantiality" and "simplicity"—the "one" Reality that is God.
"Perichoresis" (from Greek, "going around", "envelopment") is a term used by some scholars to describe the relationship among the members of the Trinity. The Latin equivalent for this term is "circumincessio". This concept refers for its basis to , where Jesus is instructing the disciples concerning the meaning of his departure. His going to the Father, he says, is for their sake; so that he might come to them when the "other comforter" is given to them. Then, he says, his disciples will dwell in him, as he dwells in the Father, and the Father dwells in him, and the Father will dwell in them. This is so, according to the theory of "perichoresis", because the persons of the Trinity "reciprocally contain one another, so that one permanently envelopes and is permanently enveloped by, the other whom he yet envelopes". (Hilary of Poitiers, "Concerning the Trinity" 3:1).
"Perichoresis" effectively excludes the idea that God has parts, but rather is a simple being. It also harmonizes well with the doctrine that the Christian's union with the Son in his humanity brings him into union with one who contains in himself, in the Apostle Paul's words, "all the fullness of deity" and not a part. ("See also: Divinization (Christian)"). "Perichoresis" provides an intuitive figure of what this might mean. The Son, the eternal Word, is from all eternity the dwelling place of God; he is the "Father's house", just as the Son dwells in the Father and the Spirit; so that, when the Spirit is "given", then it happens as Jesus said, "I will not leave you as orphans; for I will come to you."
The term "immanent Trinity" focuses on who God is; the term “economic Trinity” focuses on what God does. According to the "Catechism of the Catholic Church", The Fathers of the Church distinguish between theology ("theologia") and economy ("oikonomia"). "Theology" refers to the mystery of God's inmost life within the Blessed Trinity and "economy" to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the "oikonomia" the "theologia" is revealed to us; but conversely, the "theologia" illuminates the whole "oikonomia". God's works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we know a person, the better we understand his actions.
The whole divine economy is the common work of the three divine persons. For as the Trinity has only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same operation: "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle." However, each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, "one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are". It is above all the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons.
The ancient Nicene theologians argued that everything the Trinity does is done by Father, Son, and Spirit working in unity with one will. The three persons of the Trinity always work inseparably, for their work is always the work of the one God. The Son's will cannot be different from the Father's because it is the Father's. They have but one will as they have but one being. Otherwise they would not be one God. On this point St. Basil said:
According to Thomas Aquinas the Son prayed to the Father, became a minor to the angels, became incarnate, obeyed the Father as to his human nature, as to his divine nature the Son remained God: "Thus, then, the fact that the Father glorifies, raises up, and exalts the Son does not show that the Son is less than the Father, except in His human nature. For, in the divine nature by which He is equal to the Father, the power of the Father and the Son is the same and their operation is the same."
Athanasius of Alexandria explained that the Son is eternally one in being with the Father, temporally and voluntarily subordinate in his incarnate ministry. Such human traits, he argued, were not to be read back into the eternal Trinity. Likewise, the Cappadocian Fathers also insisted there was no economic inequality present within the Trinity. As Basil wrote: "We perceive the operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be one and the same, in no respect showing differences or variation; from this identity of operation we necessarily infer the unity of nature."
The traditional theory of "appropriation" consists in attributing certain names, qualities, or operations to one of the Persons of the Trinity, not, however, to the exclusion of the others, but in preference to the others. This theory was established by the Latin Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, especially by Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine, and Leo the Great. In the Middle Ages, the theory was systematically taught by the Schoolmen such as Bonaventure.
Augustine "coupled the doctrine of the Trinity with anthropology. Proceeding from the idea that humans are created by God according to the divine image, he attempted to explain the mystery of the Trinity by uncovering traces of the Trinity in the human personality". The first key of his exegesis is an interpersonal analogy of mutual love. In "De trinitate" (399–419) he wrote,
Reaffirming the theopaschite formula "unus de trinitate passus est carne" (meaning "One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh"), Thomas Aquinas wrote that Jesus suffered and died as to his human nature, as to his divine nature he could not suffer or die. "But the commandment to suffer clearly pertains to the Son only in His human nature. (...) "And the way in which Christ was raised up is like the way He suffered and died, that is, in the flesh. For it says in 1 Peter (4:1): "Christ having suffered in the flesh" (...) then, the fact that the Father glorifies, raises up, and exalts the Son does not show that the Son is less than the Father, except in His human nature. For, in the divine nature by which He is equal to the Father."
In the 1900s the recovery of a substantially different formula of theopaschism took place: at least "unus de Trinitate passus est" (meaning "...not only in the flesh"). Deeply affected by the atomic bombs event, as early as 1946 the Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori published "Theology of the Pain of God", a theology of the Cross pushed up to the immanent Trinity. This concept was later taken by both Reformed and Catholic theology: in 1971 by Jürgen Moltmann's "The Crucified God"; in the 1972 "Preface to the Second Edition" of his 1970 German book "Theologie der Drei Tage" (English translation: "Mysterium Paschale") by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who took a cue from Revelation 13:8 (Vulgate: "agni qui occisus est ab origine mundi", NIV: "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world") to explore the "God is love" idea as an "eternal super-kenosis". In the words of von Balthasar: "At this point, where the subject undergoing the 'hour' is the Son speaking with the Father, the controversial 'Theopaschist formula' has its proper place: 'One of the Trinity has suffered.' The formula can already be found in Gregory Nazianzen: 'We needed a...crucified God'."
The underlying question is if the three Persons of the Trinity can live a self-love ("amor sui"), as well as if for them, with the conciliar dogmatic formulation in terms that today we would call ontotheological, it is possible that the aseity ("causa sui") is valid. If the Father is not the Son or the Spirit since the generator/begetter is not the generated/begotten nor the generation/generative process and vice versa, and since the lover is neither the beloved nor the love dynamic between them and vice versa, Christianity has provided as a response a concept of divine ontology and love different from common sense (omnipotence, omnibenevolence, impassibility, etc.): a sacrificial, martyring, crucifying, precisely kenotic concept.
Benjamin B. Warfield saw a principle of subordination in the "modes of operation" of the Trinity, but was also hesitant to ascribe the same to the "modes of subsistence" in relation of one to another. While noting that it is natural to see a subordination in function as reflecting a similar subordination in substance, he suggests that this might be the result of "...an agreement by Persons of the Trinity – a "Covenant" as it is technically called – by virtue of which a distinct function in the work of redemption is assumed by each".
According to Eusebius, Constantine suggested the term "homoousios" at the Council of Nicaea, though most scholars have doubted that Constantine had such knowledge and have thought that most likely Hosius had suggested the term to him. Constantine later changed his view about the Arians, who opposed the Nicene formula, and supported the bishops who rejected the formula, as did several of his successors, the first emperor to be baptized in the Nicene faith being Theodosius the Great, emperor from 379 to 395.
Nontrinitarianism (or antitrinitarianism) refers to Christian belief systems that reject the doctrine of the Trinity as found in the Nicene Creed as not having a scriptural origin. Nontrinitarian views differ widely on the nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Various nontrinitarian views, such as Adoptionism, Monarchianism, and Arianism existed prior to the formal definition of the Trinity doctrine in AD 325, 360, and 431, at the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, respectively. Following the adoption of trinitarianism at Constantinople in 381, Arianism was driven from the Empire, retaining a foothold amongst the Germanic tribes. When the Franks converted to Catholicism in 496, however, it gradually faded out. Nontrinitarianism was later renewed in the Gnosticism of the Cathars in the 11th through 13th centuries, in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, and in some groups arising during the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century. See also binitarianism.
Arianism was condemned as heretical by the First Council of Nicaea and, lastly, with Sabellianism by the Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 381 CE). Adoptionism was declared as heretical by the Ecumenical Council of Frankfurt, convened by the Emperor Charlemagne in 794 for the Latin West Church.
Modern nontrinitarian groups or denominations include Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dawn Bible Students, Iglesia ni Cristo, Jehovah's Witnesses, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, the Seventh Day Church of God, Unitarian Universalist Christians, United Church of God, and The Shepherd's Chapel.
Islam considers Jesus to be a prophet, but not divine, and God to be absolutely indivisible (a concept known as "tawhid"). Several verses of the Quran state that the doctrine of the Trinity is blasphemous.
Interpretation of these verses by modern scholars has been varied. Verse 5:73 has been interpreted as a potential criticism of Syriac literature that references Jesus as "the third of three" and thus an attack on the view that Christ was divine. Some scholars suggest that verse 5:73 is a reference to the Collyridians, a small heretical group of Christians composed of women that venerated Mary above usual standards by other sects of Christianity. However, this sect may not have existed at all, let alone during the period when Islam emerged, and did not worship Mary as a goddess. Another interpretation is that this passage should be studied from a rhetorical perspective; so as not to be an error, but an intentional misrepresentation of the doctrine of the Trinity in order to demonstrate its absurdity from an Islamic perspective. Recent Islamic studies asserts that "the quranic accusations that christians claim Mary as God can be understood as a rhetorical statement." For example, David Thomas states that verse 5:116 need not be seen as describing actually professed beliefs, but rather, giving examples of "shirk" (claiming divinity for beings other than God) and a "warning against excessive devotion to Jesus and extravagant veneration of Mary, a reminder linked to the central theme of the Qur'an that there is only one God and He alone is to be worshipped." When read in this light, it can be understood as an admonition, "Against the divinization of Jesus that is given elsewhere in the Qur'an and a warning against the virtual divinization of Mary in the declaration of the fifth-century church councils that she is 'God-bearer'." Similarly, Gabriel Reynolds, Sidney Griffith and Mun'im Sirry argue that this quranic verse is to be understood as an intentional caricature and rhetorical statement to warn from the dangers of deifiying Jesus or Mary. Additionally in the sources, there is evidence of an early christian heretic sect that deified Mary (see Collyridianism).
Judaism traditionally maintains a tradition of monotheism to the exclusion of the possibility of a Trinity. In Judaism, God is understood to be the absolute one, indivisible, and incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. The idea of God as a duality or trinity is heretical — it is even considered by some to be polytheistic.
The Trinity is most commonly seen in Christian art with the Spirit represented by a dove, as specified in the Gospel accounts of the Baptism of Christ; he is nearly always shown with wings outspread. However depictions using three human figures appear occasionally in most periods of art.
The Father and the Son are usually differentiated by age, and later by dress, but this too is not always the case. The usual depiction of the Father as an older man with a white beard may derive from the biblical Ancient of Days, which is often cited in defense of this sometimes controversial representation. However, in Eastern Orthodoxy the Ancient of Days is usually understood to be God the Son, not God the Father (see below) — early Byzantine images show Christ as the Ancient of Days, but this iconography became rare. When the Father is depicted in art, he is sometimes shown with a halo shaped like an equilateral triangle, instead of a circle. The Son is often shown at the Father's right hand (Acts 7:56). He may be represented by a symbol — typically the Lamb ("agnus dei") or a cross — or on a crucifix, so that the Father is the only human figure shown at full size. In early medieval art, the Father may be represented by a hand appearing from a cloud in a blessing gesture, for example in scenes of the Baptism of Christ. Later, in the West, the Throne of Mercy (or "Throne of Grace") became a common depiction. In this style, the Father (sometimes seated on a throne) is shown supporting either a crucifix or, later, a slumped crucified Son, similar to the Pietà (this type is distinguished in German as the "Not Gottes"), in his outstretched arms, while the Dove hovers above or in between them. This subject continued to be popular until the 18th century at least.
By the end of the 15th century, larger representations, other than the Throne of Mercy, became effectively standardised, showing an older figure in plain robes for the Father, Christ with his torso partly bare to display the wounds of his Passion, and the dove above or around them. In earlier representations both Father, especially, and Son often wear elaborate robes and crowns. Sometimes the Father alone wears a crown, or even a papal tiara.
In the later part of the Christian Era, in Renaissance European iconography, the Eye of Providence began to be used as an explicit image of the Christian Trinity and associated with the concept of Divine Providence. Seventeenth-century depictions of the Eye of Providence sometimes show it surrounded by clouds or sunbursts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30511 |
The Ridgeway
The Ridgeway is a ridgeway or ancient trackway described as Britain's oldest road. The section clearly identified as an ancient trackway extends from Wiltshire along the chalk ridge of the Berkshire Downs to the River Thames at the Goring Gap, part of the Icknield Way which ran, not always on the ridge, from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia. The route was adapted and extended as a National Trail, created in 1972. The Ridgeway National Trail follows the ancient Ridgeway from Overton Hill, near Avebury, to Streatley, then follows footpaths and parts of the ancient Icknield Way through the Chiltern Hills to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. The National Trail is long.
For at least 5,000 years travellers have used the Ridgeway. The Ridgeway provided a reliable trading route to the Dorset coast and to the Wash in Norfolk. The high dry ground made travel easy and provided a measure of protection by giving traders a commanding view, warning against potential attacks. The Bronze Age saw the development of Uffington White Horse and the stone circle at Avebury. During the Iron Age, inhabitants took advantage of the high ground by building hillforts along the Ridgeway to help defend the trading route. Following the collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe, invading Saxon and Viking armies used it. In medieval times and later, the Ridgeway found use by drovers, moving their livestock from the West Country and Wales to markets in the Home Counties and London. Before the Enclosure Acts of 1750, the Ridgeway existed as an informal series of tracks across the chalk downs, chosen by travellers based on path conditions. Once enclosures started, the current path developed through the building of earth banks and the planting of hedges.
The idea for a long-distance path along the line of the Wessex Downs and Chilterns goes back to the Hobhouse Committee of 1947. The present route was designated by the Government in 1972, and opened as a National Trail in 1973.
One of fifteen long-distance National Trails in England and Wales, the Ridgeway travels for northeast from Overton Hill within the Avebury World Heritage Site to Ivinghoe Beacon near Tring. At Marlborough it meets the Wessex Ridgeway, a footpath opened in 1994 which follows the southwest section of the ancient track into Dorset, as far as Lyme Regis. At Ivinghoe Beacon the Ridgeway meets the Icknield Way Path which continues northeast towards Suffolk. The Ridgeway meets the more recent (1997) Thames Path National Trail at the Goring Gap, where the trails use opposite banks of the River Thames between Goring-on-Thames and Mongewell; the Thames Path follows the western bank and the Ridgeway the eastern.
The total height climbed along the path is . The official guide to the trail divides The Ridgeway into six sections. It is possible to join or leave the trail at other locations with public transport links including Avebury, Swindon, Wantage, Wallingford, Princes Risborough and Tring.
The Ridgeway is one of four long-distance footpaths that combine to run from Lyme Regis to Hunstanton, collectively referred to as the Greater Ridgeway or Greater Icknield Way.
The Ridgeway passes near many Neolithic, Iron Age and Bronze Age sites including Avebury Stone Circle; Barbury Castle, Liddington Castle, Uffington Castle, Segsbury Castle, Pulpit Hill and Ivinghoe Beacon Hill, all Iron Age and Bronze Age hill forts; Wayland's Smithy, a Neolithic chieftain burial tomb; the Uffington White Horse, an ancient chalk horse carved into the hillside near Uffington Castle; and Grim's Ditch, a section of earthwork near Mongewell created by Iron Age peoples as a possible demarcation line. Other points of interest include the Blowing Stone and Victory Drive, the private drive of Chequers (the British Prime Minister's country retreat).
The Ridgeway's surface varies from chalk-rutted farm paths and green lanes (which have a propensity for becoming extremely muddy and pot-holed after rain) to small sections of metalled roads. Designated as a bridleway (shared with horses and bicycles) for much of its length, the Ridgeway also includes parts designated as byway which permits the use of motorised vehicles. Local restrictions along many byway sections limit the use of motorised vehicles to the summer months. Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, many public rights of way in England and Wales that authorities had not explicitly classified as Bridleway or Byway defaulted to the classification "Restricted Byway" which precludes the use of motor vehicles at all times, except authorised vehicles and where required for access. As a result, much of the Ridgeway remains prohibited to motor vehicle use by the general public year-round. However, the Ridgeway is the only means of access for many farms, especially in the more remote parts of the Downs.
Despite the Ridgeway's artificial creation, the TV programme "Seven Natural Wonders" featured it in 2005 as one of the wonders of the South.
Places that are near to (or on) The Ridgeway National Trail include (from west to east): | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30512 |
The Bangles
The Bangles are an American pop rock band that formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1981. The band recorded several singles that reached the U.S. Top 10 during the 1980s, including "Manic Monday" (1986); "Walk Like an Egyptian" (1986); "Hazy Shade of Winter" (1987); "In Your Room" (1989); and "Eternal Flame" (1989).
The band's classic line-up consisted of founding members Susanna Hoffs (lead vocals and rhythm guitar), Debbi Peterson (drums and vocals) and Vicki Peterson (lead guitar and vocals), together with Michael Steele (bass and vocals). As of June 2018, the band consisted of Hoffs, Debbi and Vicki Peterson and founding bassist Annette Zilinskas.
Susanna Hoffs and sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson had each been in bands before coming together in Los Angeles in December 1980. The impetus was two classified advertisements in the weekly paper "The Recycler". One had been placed by Hoffs, and the only person to respond was Annette Zilinskas, and the other was by Lynn Elkind, the Petersons' housemate and a departing member of their then band Those Girls. When Hoffs called in response to Elkind's ad, Vicki Peterson answered the phone, and in their conversation they discovered a great deal of common interests; when Hoffs spoke to Elkind after Peterson gave her the message, they did not have the same common interests and it was with the Petersons that Hoffs formed a new band. The Those Girls bass guitarist, Vicki Peterson's lifelong best friend Amanda Hills, had also left the band (now a history professor, Amanda Hills Podany has performed as a guest with the Bangles on a few rare occasions) and this left an opening for Zilinskas. The resulting (and also current as of 2019) lineup first performed as The Colours in 1981.
Shortly afterward the group renamed themselves The Bangs. The band was part of the Los Angeles Paisley Underground scene, which featured groups that played a mixture of 1960s-influenced rock.
In 1981, Hoffs and the Petersons recorded and released a single ("Getting Out of Hand" b/w "Call on Me") on DownKiddie Records (their own label). The Bangs were signed to Faulty Products, a label formed by Miles Copeland.
The early Bangles line-up of Susanna Hoffs (vocals/guitars), Vicki Peterson (guitars/vocals), Debbi Peterson (vocals/drums) and Annette Zilinskas (vocals/bass) recorded an EP in 1982, and released the single "The Real World". At the last minute they discovered another band had registered the Bangs name and would not let them use it without payment so they dropped "The" and added the letters "les" to the end to become Bangles. Their first EP was retitled "Bangles" and released. In 1983, Faulty Products issued a 12-inch "remix" single of "The Real World" to radio and media, but another setback came as the label folded. I.R.S. Records picked up distribution and re-issued the EP. After Zilinskas left the band to focus on her own project, Blood on the Saddle, she was replaced by Michael Steele, formerly of the all-female band The Runaways, Toni & The Movers, Slow Children and Elton Duck.
The Bangles' full-length debut album on Columbia Records, "All Over the Place" (1984), captured their power pop roots, featuring the singles "Hero Takes a Fall" and the Kimberley Rew-penned Beatlesque "Going Down to Liverpool" (originally recorded by Rew's band Katrina and the Waves). The record received good reviews, and the video for "Liverpool" featured Leonard Nimoy, which helped to generate further publicity. This came about through a friendship between the Hoffs and Nimoy families. They received a much wider audience serving as the opening act for Cyndi Lauper on her Fun Tour.
All this went some way to attracting the attention of Prince, who gave them "Manic Monday" originally written for his group Apollonia 6. "Manic Monday" went on to become a number-two hit in the US, the UK and Germany, outsold at the time only by another Prince composition, his own "Kiss". The band's second album "Different Light" (January 1986) was more polished than its predecessor and, with the help of the worldwide number-one hit "Walk Like an Egyptian" (written by Liam Sternberg), saw the band firmly in the mainstream. The song was sent to them in mid-session and the group was divided about whether it would be a failure or a success. When the song was released the group was amazed to discover that it brought them a new audience of female fans, most of them very young. Commented Michael Steele to a "Nine-O-One Network Magazine" writer: "When I go out now it is usually girls who recognize me." Three additional hit singles released from the "Different Light" album were: "Following" (top 40 in Ireland), "Walking Down Your Street" (#11 on the US Billboard Hot 100), and the wistful "If She Knew What She Wants", written and first recorded by Jules Shear (which reached 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1986 and was in the German Top 20 for 13 weeks).
The band had another hit with a remake of Simon & Garfunkel's "A Hazy Shade of Winter" (1987) from the soundtrack of the film "Less Than Zero". The song reached no. 2 in February 1988.
The album "Everything" (1988) was produced by Davitt Sigerson, as the band had a negative reaction to working with David Kahne on "Different Light". It was another multi-platinum hit and included the top five hit "In Your Room", as well as their biggest selling single "Eternal Flame". Co-writer Billy Steinberg came up with the title after Hoffs told him about the band's recent trip to Memphis, Tennessee where they visited Graceland, Elvis Presley's estate in Memphis. An eternal flame is maintained at Presley's grave, but it had gone out on the day of their visit, and its clear plastic enclosure was flooded. They asked what was in the box and were told, "That's the eternal flame." The single became their biggest worldwide hit and the biggest single by an all-female band in history. Hoffs was naked when she recorded the song, convinced by Sigerson that Olivia Newton-John got her amazing performances by recording everything naked.
There was friction among band members after music industry media began singling out Hoffs as the lead singer of the group. In fact, singing duties on the band's albums were evenly divided among the band's members, each of whom wrote or co-wrote songs. The band broke up in 1989. Hoffs began a solo career, and Vicki Peterson toured as a member of the Continental Drifters and as a fill-in member of The Go-Go's.
The band started drifting back together in 1998, and officially re-formed to record a song for the soundtrack of "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me", at the behest of the film's director Jay Roach (who had married Hoffs in 1993). The song chosen for the album was "Get The Girl" and was released in 1999. The reunion continued with a tour in 2000. Later the same year, the group was also inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame. From 2001–2002, they were in the studio recording the album "Doll Revolution" at Icon Recording Studios, Hollywood, California. The album, featuring such songs as "Stealing Rosemary", "Ride the Ride", "Nickel Romeo", and the single "Something That You Said", was released in early 2003. The title track, which was written by Elvis Costello, was originally recorded for his 2002 album "When I Was Cruel". "Doll Revolution" was a solid comeback success in Germany after the Bangles had performed in Germany's biggest television show "Wetten dass", but failed to make any impact in other markets such as the UK, the U.S. and Australia. In July 2004, Paul McCartney presented the Bangles with "honorary rock'n'roll diplomas" from his Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
In 2005, the Bangles announced the departure of Michael Steele who left due to artistic disputes over touring and recording. Steele was replaced by touring bassist Abby Travis for live appearances. On December 31, 2005, the group performed "Hazy Shade of Winter" in front of Times Square and later "Eternal Flame" as part of "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve 2006". Travis was fired in 2008.
In the spring of 2009, the Bangles returned to the studio to begin work on a new album entitled "Sweetheart of the Sun" which was released on September 27, 2011. The band went on tour in late 2011 in support of it, with dates on the East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast. Openers for the various dates included rock band Antigone Rising and power pop band A Fragile Tomorrow.
In December 2013, the Bangles played two nights with three other reunited Paisley Underground bands—The Dream Syndicate, The Three O'Clock, and Rain Parade—at The Fillmore in San Francisco and The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles (benefit concert). Their set list focused on their early material, with remarks from the band at the beginning of the Fillmore show that they were going to be playing songs that they hadn't played in 30 years. In January 2014, they performed at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood, California, in celebration of The Whisky's 50th anniversary.
Original bassist Annette Zilinskas rejoined the band in 2018.
Three new recordings by the Bangles were released in November 2018 as part of a compilation album called "3 × 4", which also included The Dream Syndicate, The Three O'Clock, and Rain Parade, with each of the four bands covering songs by the other bands. Following the initial Record Store Day first-release as a double album on "psychedelic swirl" purple vinyl, Yep Roc Records released the album on LP, CD, and digital in February 2019.
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The Pogues
The Pogues were an English Celtic punk band fronted by Shane MacGowan and others, founded in Kings Cross, London in 1982, as "Pogue Mahone" – the anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic "póg mo thóin", meaning "kiss my arse". The band reached international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s, recording several hit albums and singles. MacGowan left the band in 1991 due to drinking problems, but the band continued – first with Joe Strummer and then with Spider Stacy on vocals – before breaking up in 1996. The Pogues re-formed in late 2001, and played regularly across the UK and Ireland and on the US East Coast, until dissolving again in 2014. The group did not record any new material during this second incarnation.
Their politically-tinged music was informed by MacGowan and Stacy's punk backgrounds,
yet used traditional Irish instruments such as the tin whistle, banjo, cittern, mandolin and accordion.
The future members of the Pogues first met when MacGowan (vocals), Peter "Spider" Stacy (tin whistle), and Jem Finer (banjo) were together in an occasional band called The Millwall Chainsaws in the late 1970s after MacGowan and Stacy met in the toilets at a Ramones gig at The Roundhouse in London in 1977. MacGowan was already with The Nips, though when they broke up in 1980 he concentrated more on Stacy's Millwall Chainsaws, who changed their name to The New Republicans.
In 1982, James Fearnley (accordion), who had been a guitarist with The Nips, joined MacGowan, Stacy, and Finer, forming the band, then known as Pogue Mahone. The new group played their first gig at The Pindar of Wakefield on 4 October 1982.
They then appeared at Gossips in Dean Street Soho on Thursday 3 November 1983 with Trash Trash Trash and The Stingrays.
They later added Cait O'Riordan (bass) and Andrew Ranken (drums). The band played London pubs and clubs, and released a single, "Dark Streets of London", on their own, self-named label, gaining a small reputation – especially for their live performances. They came to the attention of the media and Stiff Records when they opened for The Clash on their 1984 tour. Shortening their name to "The Pogues" (partly due to BBC censorship following complaints from Gaelic speakers in Scotland) they released their first album "Red Roses for Me" on Stiff Records that October.
The band gained more attention when the UK Channel 4's influential music show "The Tube" made a video of their version of "Waxie's Dargle" for the show. The performance, featuring Spider Stacy repeatedly smashing himself over the head with a beer tray, became a favourite with the viewers, but Stiff Records refused to release it as a single, feeling it was too late for it to help "Red Roses for Me". Nevertheless, it remained a favourite request for the show for many years.
With the aid of producer Elvis Costello, they recorded the follow-up, "Rum Sodomy & the Lash", in 1985 during which time guitarist Philip Chevron joined. The album title is a famous comment falsely attributed to Winston Churchill who was supposedly describing the "true" traditions of the British Royal Navy. The album cover featured "The Raft of the Medusa", with the faces of the characters in Théodore Géricault's painting replaced with those of the band members. The album shows the band moving away from covers to original material. Shane MacGowan came into his own as a songwriter with this disc, offering up poetic story-telling, such as "The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn" and "The Old Main Drag", as well as definitive interpretations of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town" and Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" (this had previously been covered by Shane's fellow punk contemporaries Skids in 1981).
The band failed to take advantage of the momentum created by the strong artistic and commercial success of their second album. They first refused to record another album (offering up the four-track EP "Poguetry in Motion" instead); O'Riordan married Costello and left the band, to be replaced by bassist Darryl Hunt, formerly of Plummet Airlines and Pride of the Cross; and they added a multi-instrumentalist in Terry Woods, formerly of Steeleye Span. Looming over the band at this period (as throughout their entire career) was the increasingly erratic behaviour of their vocalist and principal songwriter, Shane MacGowan. Their record label, Stiff Records, went bankrupt soon after the 1987 release of the single "The Irish Rover" (with The Dubliners). Members of the band, including O'Riordan, acted in Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell", and five songs by the band were included on the film's soundtrack album.
The band remained stable enough to record "If I Should Fall from Grace with God" with its Christmas hit duet with Kirsty MacColl "Fairytale of New York". "Fairytale of New York" was released as a single in 1987 and reached No. 1 in the Irish charts and No. 2 in the British charts over Christmas (the time of peak sales). The song has become a festive classic in the UK and Ireland over the years, and was voted the best Christmas song of all time three years running in 2004, 2005, and 2006 in polls by music channel VH1 UK, despite not achieving Christmas Number One when it was released. It was also voted as the 27th greatest song never to reach UK#1 in another VH1 poll, and also voted as the 84th greatest song of all time by BBC Radio 2 listeners in the "Sold on Song" top 100 poll. In 2007 the record was briefly censored by the BBC because of the word "faggot" being deemed potentially offensive to homosexual people. Following protests from listeners, including the mother of Kirsty MacColl, the censorship was lifted.
The band was at the peak of its commercial success, with both albums making the top 5 in the UK (numbers 3 and 5 respectively), but MacGowan was increasingly unreliable. He failed to turn up for the opening dates of their 1988 tour of America, and prevented the band from promoting their 1990 album "Hell's Ditch", so in 1991 the band sacked him. Vocal duties were for a time handled by Joe Strummer. Spider Stacy took over permanently after Strummer left in the winter of 1991. After Strummer's departure, the remaining seven Pogues recorded in 1993 "Waiting for Herb", which contained the band's third and final top twenty single, "Tuesday Morning", which became their best-selling single internationally. Terry Woods and James Fearnley then left the band and were replaced by David Coulter and James McNally respectively. Within months of their departures, ill health forced Phil Chevron to leave the band; he was replaced by his former guitar technician, Jamie Clarke. This line-up recorded the band's seventh and final studio album, "Pogue Mahone". The album was a commercial failure, and, following Jem Finer's decision to leave the band in 1996, the remaining members decided it was time to call it quits. According to Shane MacGowan, among the reasons of the break-up was disagreement concerning the political orientation of his songs, the band not wanting to sing too obvious pro-Republican songs – though some of their previous songs were already politically engaged: for instance, "Streams of Whiskey" is about the poet and IRA member Brendan Behan. Soon after the break-up Shane MacGowan recorded a song titled "Paddy Public Enemy Number One" as a tribute to the Republican leader Dominic McGlinchey, a former leader of the INLA killed a few years before.
After the Pogues's break-up, the three remaining long-term members (Spider Stacy, Andrew Ranken and Darryl Hunt) played together briefly as The Vendettas. They played mainly new Stacy-penned tracks, though Darryl Hunt also contributed songs, and the band's live set included a few Pogues songs. First Ranken then Hunt left the band, the latter going on to become singer/songwriter in an indie band called Bish, whose self-titled debut album was released in 2001. Ranken has gone on to play with a number of other bands, including hKippers, The Municipal Waterboard and, most recently, The Mysterious Wheels. In addition to The Vendettas, who Stacy freely admits lost all attraction when the Pogues reformed, Spider continued to write and record music with various bands, including the James Walbourne, Filthy Thieving Bastards, Dropkick Murphys and Astral Social Club.
Shane MacGowan founded Shane MacGowan and The Popes in 1992. They released two studio albums and broke up in 2002. His autobiography "A Drink With Shane MacGowan", co-written with his journalist girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke, was released in 2001. Jem Finer went into experimental music, playing a big part in a project known as "Longplayer", a piece of music designed to play continuously for 1,000 years without repeating itself. In 2005, Finer released the album "Bum Steer" with DB Bob (as DM Bob and Country Jem). James Fearnley moved to the United States shortly before leaving the Pogues. He was a member of The Low And Sweet Orchestra and later the Cranky George Trio. Philip Chevron reformed his former band The Radiators, which briefly included former Pogue Cait O'Riordan. Terry Woods formed The Bucks with Ron Kavana, releasing the album "Dancin' To The Ceili Band" in 1994. Later, he formed The Woods Band, releasing the album "Music From The Four Corners of Hell" in 2002.
The band, including MacGowan, re-formed for a Christmas tour in 2001 and performed nine shows in the UK and Ireland in December 2004. In 2002 "Q" magazine named the Pogues as one of the "50 Bands To See Before You Die". In July 2005, the band – again including MacGowan – played at the annual Guilfest festival in Guildford before flying out to Japan where they played three dates. Japan is the last place they all played together before MacGowan was originally sacked in 1991, and they have a strong following there. They played a date in Spain in early September. The reunited Pogues played dates in the UK with support from the Dropkick Murphys in late 2005, and re-released their 1987 Christmas classic "Fairytale of New York" on 19 December, which went straight in at No. 3 in the UK Singles charts on Christmas Day 2005, showing the song's enduring popularity. On 22 December 2005 the BBC broadcast a live performance (recorded the previous week) on the Jonathan Ross Christmas show with Katie Melua filling in for the late Kirsty MacColl, the first time the band had played the song live on television. The following week they performed live on the popular music show "".
Shane MacGowan wrote a blog for "The Guardian" in 2006, detailing his thoughts on the current tour.
The band was awarded the lifetime achievement award at the annual Meteor Ireland Music Awards in February 2006. In March 2006, the band played their first US dates with Shane in over 15 years. The band played a series of sold-out concerts in Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, Boston, and New York. Later they played a series of highly acclaimed and sold-out gigs during mid-October 2006 in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, and toured Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London, Dublin, and Nottingham in mid-December 2006. They began a second US tour in March 2007, once again to coincide (and conclude) with a Roseland Ballroom New York City show on Saint Patrick's Day. 2007 has proved to be the most prolific year of touring since the reunion. A tour of the west coast of America and eleven dates in the UK in December complement the headlining festival appearances made in the summer across Europe (Sweden, Belgium and Spain). They continue to be in huge demand, often selling out very large venues, despite criticism of selling out, and claims that arenas and festivals do not suit the band's sound.
Guitarist Phil Chevron has stated there were no plans to record new music or release a new album. Chevron said that one way to keep enjoying what they were doing was to avoid making a new album, although he did say that there still is a possibility in the future for new music, but certainly not in the near future. Terry Woods has commented that MacGowan has been writing, and most of it sounds good. In 2008 the band released a box set "Just Look Them Straight in the Eye and Say...POGUE MAHONE!!", which included rare studio out-takes and previously unreleased material.
The band received mixed reviews of their performances though they continued to pull the crowds. Reviewing a March 2008 concert, The "Washington Post" described MacGowan as "puffy and paunchy," but said the singer "still has a banshee wail to beat Howard Dean's, and the singer's abrasive growl is all a band this marvelous needs to give its amphetamine-spiked take on Irish folk a focal point". The reviewer continued: "The set started off shaky, MacGowan singing of `goin' where streams of whiskey are flowin,' and looking like he'd arrived there already. He grew more lucid and powerful as the evening gathered steam, through two hours and 26 songs, mostly from the Pogues' first three (and best) albums". In December 2010 the Pogues (with support from Crowns) played what was billed as a farewell UK Christmas tour.
In March 2011, the Pogues played a six-city/ten-show sold out US tour titled "A Parting Glass with The Pogues" visiting Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York City (in that order), with only the last three cities getting more than one show. Stacy said "I think we are basically pretty certain this is the last tour of this type we'll be doing in the States. There might be the odd sort of one-off here and there. We're not saying this is absolutely, definitely the end".
In August 2012, the Pogues embarked on a 30th Anniversary Summer 2012 8-city European Tour scheduled from 4 August 2012 at the Stockton Weekender Festival in Stockton-on-Tees, UK to 11 & 12 September 2012 at L'Olympia, Paris, two shows filmed and recorded for a live album and DVD released on 19 November 2012.
In March 2013, the Pogues released "30:30: The Essential Collection", a 2-disc set featuring 30 songs along with eleven videos. In October 2013, the Pogues released a box set titled "Pogues 30" containing remastered versions of all of their studio albums plus a previously unreleased live album featuring Joe Strummer at the London Forum in December 1991.
Guitarist Philip Chevron died on 8 October 2013 in Dublin, Ireland from oesophageal cancer, aged 56.
In December 2013, the Pogues went on a four-date UK Christmas tour, followed by a few shows during spring and summer 2014. The Pogues' last performance on British soil occurred on 5 July 2014 at the British Summer Time festival in London's Hyde Park. The Pogues' last performance to date occurred on 9 August 2014 during the "Fête du bruit dans Landerneau" festival in Landerneau, Britanny, France.
About his future with the Pogues, in a 24 December 2015 interview with Vice Magazine, when the interviewer asked whether the band were still active, Shane MacGowan said: "We're not, no", saying that, since their 2001 reunion happened, "I went back with [The] Pogues and we grew to hate each other all over again", adding, "I don't hate the band at all – they're friends. I like them a lot. We were friends for years before we joined the band. We just got a bit sick of each other. We're friends as long as we don't tour together. I've done a hell of a lot of touring. I've had enough of it". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30514 |
The Big Country
The Big Country is a 1958 American Technicolor epic Western film directed by William Wyler and starring Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston and Burl Ives filmed in Technirama. The supporting cast features Charles Bickford and Chuck Connors. The picture was based on the serialized magazine novel "Ambush at Blanco Canyon" by Donald Hamilton and was co-produced by Wyler and Peck. The opening title sequence was created by Saul Bass. The film is one of very few in which Heston plays a major supporting role instead of the lead.
Ives won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his performance, as well as the Golden Globe Award. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award for the musical score, composed by Jerome Moross.
Former sailor James McKay (Gregory Peck) travels to the American West to join his fiancée Patricia (Carroll Baker) at the enormous ranch owned by her father, Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford), referred to by all as "The Major". After a meeting with Patricia's friend, schoolteacher Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), McKay and Patricia are accosted by a group of drunks led by Buck Hannassey (Chuck Connors), the son of the Major's ardent and implacable enemy Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives). In spite of the harassment and mockery, McKay surprises Patricia by standing his ground and allowing the group to leave without further incident.
The next morning, McKay declines an invitation from the Major's foreman Steve Leech (Charlton Heston) to ride an indomitable bronco stallion named "Old Thunder". McKay then brings a pair of dueling pistols to the Major as a gift. When the Major learns of Buck's pestering of his daughter and future son-in-law, he gathers his men and goes to raid the Hannassey ranch despite McKay's attempts to defuse the situation. The Major's group finds neither Rufus nor Buck, so they settle for terrorizing the Hannassey women and children, as well as capturing and punishing the members of Buck's posse. Meanwhile, McKay privately tames and rides Old Thunder after many unsuccessful attempts, and swears his only witness, the ranch hand Ramon (Alfonso Bedoya), to secrecy.
A gala is held on the Terrill ranch in honor of Patricia's upcoming wedding. At the height of the festivities, an armed Rufus crashes the party and accuses the Major of hypocrisy. The next day, McKay secretly goes to Maragon's ranch, known as the "Big Muddy". The Big Muddy's territory is the location of the town's only nearby river, and as such it is a vital source of water for both the Terrill and Hannassey cattle during times of drought. McKay persuades Maragon to sell the ranch to him in the hopes of both securing a gift for Patricia and ending the conflict by continuing Maragon's policy of unrestricted access to the river. McKay is found and returned to town by a search party led by Leech. Leech brands McKay a liar when McKay explains he was never in danger, but McKay again refuses to be goaded into a fight, which disappoints Patricia enough to make the pair reconsider their engagement. The next morning, Maragon tells Patricia of McKay's purchase of the Big Muddy for her, which initially convinces her to attempt to make amends with McKay. However, when she learns of McKay's plan to allow the Hannasseys equal access to the water, she leaves.
Wanting to lure the Major into an ambush in the canyon leading to his homestead, Rufus takes Maragon hostage. Although McKay personally promises Rufus equal access to the water, he finds himself in a clash with Buck, which is ultimately settled with a duel. Buck fires before the signal, but misses, his bullet grazing McKay's forehead and leaving him open to be shot by McKay. Buck's subsequent display of cowardice convinces McKay to spare Buck. The frustrated Buck snatches another gun from a nearby civilian, forcing Rufus to kill his son. Rufus goes to the canyon for a final confrontation with the Major and challenges him to a one-on-one showdown. Armed with rifles, the two old men advance and kill one another. McKay, along with Julie and Ramon, ride off to start a new life together.
Director William Wyler was known for shooting an exorbitant number of takes on his films, usually without explaining to the actors what to do differently except "[make it] better", and this one was no exception. Many of the actors, including Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker, were so traumatized by his directing style that they refused to speak about the experience for years. Simmons later said they constantly received rewrites for the script, making acting extremely difficult. Gregory Peck and Wyler, who were good friends, fought constantly on the set and had a falling out for three years, although they later reconciled. Wyler and Charles Bickford also clashed, as they had done thirty years previously on the production of his 1929 film "Hell's Heroes". Burl Ives, however, claimed to have enjoyed making the film.
Before principal photography was complete, Wyler left for Rome to start work on "Ben-Hur", delegating creation of the final scenes involving McKay and Julie to his assistant Robert Swink, whose resulting scenes pleased Wyler so much that he wrote Swink a letter stating: "I can't begin to tell you how pleased I am with the new ending... The shots you made are complete perfection."
Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" wrote in a negative review that "for all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude. Peace is a pious precept but fightin' is more excitin'. That's what it proves." "Variety" called the film "one of the best photography jobs of the year", with a "serviceable, adult" storyline "which should find favor with audiences of all tastes." "Harrison's Reports" declared it "a first-rate super-western, beautifully photographed in the Technirama anamorphic process and Technicolor. It is a long picture, perhaps too long for what the story has to offer, but there is never a dull moment from start to finish and it holds one's interest tightly throughout." Richard L. Coe of "The Washington Post" called it "super stuff. Franz Planer's photography of Texas is downright awe-inspiring, the characters are solid, the story line firm, the playing first-rate, the music more than dashing in this nearly three-hour tale which should delight everybody."
John McCarten of "The New Yorker" wrote, "Of those involved in this massive enterprise, Mr. Bickford and Mr. Ives are the most commendable as they whoop and snort about the sagebrush. But even they are hardly credible types, and as for the rest of the cast, they can be set down as a rather wooden lot." Philip K. Scheuer of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "too self consciously 'epical' to be called great, but at its best, which is frequently, it's better than good." "The Monthly Film Bulletin" wrote that the picture's attempts to convey a message were for the most part "superficial and pedestrian," and found that "the pivotal character of McKay, played on a monotonously self-righteous note by Gregory Peck, never comes alive. It is mainly due to the power of the climactic canyon battle, and Burl Ives' interesting playing as Rufus, that this remains a not unsympathetic film, decorated pleasantly by Jean Simmons and with spirit by Carroll Baker."
The film was a big hit, being the second most popular movie in Britain in 1959. On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has an approval rating of 100% based on 11 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10.
Ives won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award for the musical score by Jerome Moross.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower liked the movie so much he screened it on four successive evenings in the White House during his second administration.
Playmobil designed an entire cowboy line based on the architecture of the film.
In a poll of 500 films held by "Empire" magazine, it was voted 187th Greatest Movie of all time.
The Academy Film Archive preserved "The Big Country" in 2006.
A comic book adaptation of the novel and tie-in to the movie was first released in 1957.
The Blanco Canyon scenes were filmed in California's Red Rock Canyon State Park. The ranch and field scenes with greenery were filmed in the central California Sierra foothills near the town of Farmington. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30515 |
The Stranglers
The Stranglers are an English rock band who emerged via the punk rock scene. Scoring some 23 UK top 40 singles and 17 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning four decades, the Stranglers are one of the longest-surviving and most "continuously successful" bands to have originated in the UK punk scene.
Formed as the Guildford Stranglers in Guildford, Surrey in early 1974, they originally built a following within the mid-1970s pub rock scene. While their aggressive, no-compromise attitude had them identified by the media with the emerging UK punk rock scene that followed, their idiosyncratic approach rarely followed any single musical genre, and the group went on to explore a variety of musical styles, from new wave, art rock and gothic rock through the sophisti-pop of some of their 1980s output.
They had major mainstream success with their 1982 single "Golden Brown". Their other hits include "No More Heroes", "Peaches", "Always the Sun" and "Skin Deep" and the 2003 Top 40 hit "Big Thing Coming", which was seen as a return to form.
The Stranglers' early sound was driven by Jean-Jacques Burnel's melodic bass, but also gave prominence to Dave Greenfield's keyboards.
Their early music was also characterised by the growling vocals and sometimes misanthropic lyrics of both Burnel and Hugh Cornwell. Over time, their output gradually grew more refined and sophisticated. Summing up their contribution to popular music, critic Dave Thompson later wrote: "From bad-mannered yobs to purveyors of supreme pop delicacies, the group was responsible for music that may have been ugly and might have been crude – but it was never, ever boring."
Founding keyboard player Dave Greenfield died on May 3, 2020. On June 10, the remaining bandmembers announced that they were working on mixing an album the Stranglers had recorded shortly prior to Greenfield's death, and would mount a final tour in the autumn of 2020 in Greenfield's honour.
Before forming the band, "Jet Black" (real name Brian Duffy) was already in his mid-30s—significantly older than the other members of the band he would eventually assemble. A successful businessman, Black at one point owned a fleet of ice cream vans, and later ran "The Jackpot", a Guildford off-licence that would serve as the base for the early Stranglers. Black had also been a semi-professional drummer in the late 1950s and early 1960s; after attaining a degree of financial stability due to his business successes, by 1974 he decided to return to drumming, and to assemble a band. The Stranglers came to be an influential band in the British punk and new wave scene of the mid-70s.
The group that eventually formed between 1974–75 was originally named the Guildford Stranglers, but they soon dropped the geographical prefix and the name, "The Stranglers", was registered as a business on 11 September 1974 by Black. The other original personnel were bass player/vocalist Jean-Jacques Burnel, guitarist/vocalist Hugh Cornwell and keyboardist/guitarist Hans Wärmling, who was replaced by keyboardist Dave Greenfield within a year. None of the band came from Guildford (apart from Burnel who was from Godalming) : Black is from Ilford, Burnel from Notting Hill, Cornwell from Kentish Town and Greenfield from Brighton, while Wärmling came from Gothenburg and returned there after leaving the band.
Cornwell was a blues musician before forming the band and had briefly been a bandmate of Richard Thompson, Burnel had been a classical guitarist who had performed with symphony orchestras, Black's musical background was as a jazz drummer, and Dave Greenfield had played at military bases in Germany. Their early influences included pre-punk psychedelic rock bands such as the Doors and the Music Machine.
From 1976 the Stranglers became associated with the burgeoning punk rock movement, due in part to their opening for the first British tours of American punks the Ramones and Patti Smith. Notwithstanding this association, some of the movement's champions in the British musical press viewed the band with suspicion on account of their age and musical virtuosity and the intellectual bent of some of their lyrics. However, Burnel was quoted saying, "I thought of myself as part of punk at the time because we were inhabiting the same flora and fauna ... I would like to think the Stranglers were more punk plus and then some."
The band's early albums, "Rattus Norvegicus", "No More Heroes" and "Black and White", all released within a period of 13 months, were highly successful with the record-buying public and singles such as "Peaches", "Something Better Change" and "No More Heroes" became instant punk classics. Meanwhile, the band received a mixed reception from some critics because of their apparent sexist and racist innuendo. However, critic Dave Thompson argued that such criticism was oblivious to the satire and irony in the band's music, writing: "the Stranglers themselves revelled in an almost Monty Python-esque grasp of absurdity (and, in particular, the absurdities of modern 'men's talk')."
These albums went on to build a strong fan-following, but the group's confrontational attitude towards the press was increasingly problematic and triggered a severe backlash when Burnel, a martial arts enthusiast, punched music journalist Jon Savage during a promotional event.
In February 1978 the Stranglers began a mini-tour, playing three secret pub gigs as a thank-you to those venues and their landlords for their support during the band's rise to success. The first was at The Duke of Lancaster in New Barnet on Valentine's Day, with further performances at The Red Cow, Hammersmith, and The Nashville Rooms, West Kensington, in early September.
During their appearance at the University of Surrey on the BBC TV programme "Rock Goes to College" on the 19th of October 1978, the group walked off stage because an agreement to make tickets available to non-university students had not been honoured.
In the later half of the 1970s, The Stranglers toured Japan twice, joining the alternative music scene of Tokyo, which was evolving from the punk sound of Kyoto-based band 村八分 (Ostracism), whose music influence spread to Tokyo in 1971. The Stranglers were the only foreign band to take part in a landmark scene focussed around S-KEN Studio in Roppongi, and The Loft venues in Shinjuku and Shimokitazawa from 1977 to 1979. The scene included bands such as Friction, and they became friends with the band, Red Lizard, who they invited back to London, where the band became known as Lizard. In 1979, while still in Japan, Burnel also became close friends with Keith, co-founder and drummer for ARB. At the end of 1983, ARB's bassist was imprisoned, leaving the band with a problem for their forthcoming tour. Burnel took time out from The Stranglers to fly out to Japan at short notice and join ARB to cover the tour, including appearing at the 'All Japan Rock Festival' at Hibaya park, becoming the first non-Japanese to ever appear at the festival. Burnel toured with ARB for 5 weeks and played on two studio tracks, "Yellow Blood" and "Fight it Out", both of which appeared on the RCA Victor ARB album "Yellow Blood".
In 1979, one of the Stranglers' two managers advised them to break up as he felt that the band had lost direction, but this idea was dismissed and they parted company with their management team. Meanwhile, Burnel released an experimental solo album "Euroman Cometh" backed by a small UK tour and Cornwell recorded the album "Nosferatu" in collaboration with Robert Williams. Later that year the Stranglers released "The Raven", which heralded a transition towards a more melodic and complex sound which appealed more to the album than the singles market. The songs on "The Raven" are multi-layered and musically complicated, and deal with such subjects as a Viking's lonely voyage, heroin addiction, genetic engineering, contemporary political events in Iran and Australia and extraterrestrial visitors, "The Meninblack". "The Raven" saw a definite transition in the band's sound. The Hohner Cembalet – so prominent on the previous three albums – was dropped and Oberheim synthesizers were deployed on most tracks. A Korg Vocoder was used on the track "The Meninblack" whilst acoustic piano was used on "Don't Bring Harry". "The Raven" was not released in the US; instead a compilation album "The Stranglers IV" was released in 1980, containing a selection of tracks from "The Raven" and a mix of earlier and later non-album tracks. "The Raven" sold well, reaching No.4 in the UK Albums Chart - it spawned one top 20 single, "Duchess", with "Nuclear Device" reaching No.36 and the EP "Don't Bring Harry" reaching No.41. This was followed by a non-album single, "Bear Cage", backed with "Shah Shah a Go Go" from "The Raven". A 12-inch single, the band's first, containing extended mixes of both tracks was also released, but "Bear Cage" also only managed No.36 in the charts.
Following the success of The Stranglers' previous four albums they were given complete freedom for their next, "The Gospel According to the Meninblack", a concept album exploring religion and the supposed connection between religious phenomena and extraterrestrial visitors. It was preceded by a single "Who Wants the World", which didn't appear on the album, and only just made the top 40. The album also included "Waltzinblack" which became adopted as a theme by TV chef Keith Floyd. "The Gospel According to The Meninblack" was very different from their earlier work and alienated many fans. It peaked on the UK albums chart at No.8, their lowest placing to date, and in 1981 was widely considered an artistic and commercial failure. The track "Two Sunspots" had been recorded during the "Black And White" sessions in 1978, but was shelved until 1980 when it was rediscovered and placed on "The Gospel According to the Meninblack". The "Meninblack" track from "The Raven" is the "Two Sunspots" soundtrack slowed down.
After a slow start, the Stranglers recovered their commercial and critical status with "La Folie" (1981) which was another concept album, this time exploring the subject of love. At first "La Folie" charted lower than any other Stranglers studio album, and the first single taken from it, "Let Me Introduce You to the Family", only charted at No.42. However, the next single was "Golden Brown". The song is an evocative waltz-time ballad, with an extra beat in the fourth bar. Cornwell said the lyrics were "about heroin and also about a girl. She was of Mediterranean origin and her skin was golden brown." It became their biggest hit, charting at No.2 in the UK Singles Chart. It was also named as "record of the week" on BBC Radio 2, despite the station not previously playing music associated with the punk genre. It remains a radio staple to this day. Following this success, "La Folie" recharted at No.11 in the UK albums chart. "Tramp" was originally thought to be the ideal follow-up single to "Golden Brown"; however "La Folie" was chosen after Burnel convinced his bandmates of its potential. Sung in French, it received negligible airplay and charted at No.47. Shortly afterwards the Stranglers left EMI. As part of their severance deal, The Stranglers were forced to release a greatest hits collection, "The Collection 1977–1982". The track listing for "The Collection 1977–1982" included the new single "Strange Little Girl", which had originally been recorded on a demo in '74 and rejected by EMI. It became a hit, charting at No.7 in July 1982.
Following the Stranglers' return to commercial success, many record companies lined up to sign them. Virgin Records was the most likely choice but Epic Records made a last minute offer and secured the Stranglers' services. The Stranglers once again had complete artistic freedom and in 1983 released their first album for Epic, "Feline", which included the UK No. 9 hit "European Female". The album was another change in musical direction, this time influenced by European music. It was the first Stranglers album to feature acoustic guitars, and it was on this album that Jet Black began to use electronic drum kits. Hugh Cornwell stated, "On "La Folie" there were three tracks – 'Golden Brown' ... 'La Folie' and 'How to Find True Love and Happiness in the Present Day' – that sort of pointed us away from what we had been doing. It was strange doing those tracks, because we'd never really attempted that quite minimalistic recording technique. And when we started writing for "Feline", things were coming out the same way." The album gained much critical success but fell well short of "La Folie" in terms of sales and failed to produce another hit after "European Female". Nonetheless "Feline" broke the Stranglers in Europe and reached No.4 in the UK chart in January 1983 (their last studio album to break the UK Top 10).
1984 saw the release of "Aural Sculpture" which consolidated the band's success in Europe and established them in Oceania. It included the UK No.15 hit "Skin Deep" (which also reached No. 11 in Australia and No. 19 in New Zealand, and Top 30 in the Netherlands). This was their first album to feature the three-piece horn-section which was retained in all their subsequent albums and live performances until Hugh Cornwell's departure in 1990. "Aural Sculpture" was only a moderate success in the UK album charts, peaking at No.14 in November 1984.
Their 1986 album, "Dreamtime", dealt with environmental concerns among other issues. Its signature track, and another radio staple for many years to come, was "Always the Sun" (a No.15 hit in France and No.16 hit in Ireland, No.21 in Australia, No.30 in the UK, and No.42 in the Netherlands). The only Stranglers album to chart in the US, "Dreamtime" was again only a moderate hit in the UK, reaching No. 16 in November 1986.
The Stranglers' final album with Cornwell, "10", was released in 1990. This was recorded with the intention of building on their "cult" status in America. Following the success of their cover of The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night", a UK No. 7 hit in 1988, The Stranglers released another '60s cover, "96 Tears" as their first single from "10"; it reached No. 17 in the UK. Despite this success, the follow-up single "Sweet Smell of Success" only reached No.65. "Man of the Earth", which the band had high hopes for, was due to be the third single from the album, however Epic Records decided against it. In August 1990, Hugh Cornwell abruptly left Stranglers to pursue a solo career, following the band's failure to attain a tour in the US. In his autobiography, Cornwell stated that he felt that The Stranglers were a spent force creatively, and cited various examples of his increasingly acrimonious relationship with his fellow band-members, particularly Burnel.
Following the departure of Cornwell, CBS-Sony dropped Stranglers from their roster. The remaining members recruited John Ellis, who had had a long-standing association with the band. He had opened for them in the 1970s as a member of The Vibrators, filled in for Cornwell during his time in prison for drug possession in 1980, worked with Burnel and Greenfield in their side-project Purple Helmets, and been added to the Stranglers' line-up as a touring guitarist a short time before Cornwell's departure. Burnel and Ellis briefly took over vocal duties (for one television appearance on "The Word") before enlisting Paul Roberts, who sang on most songs live, even those originally sung by Burnel.
This line-up recorded four albums: "Stranglers in the Night" (1992), "About Time" (1995), "Written in Red" (1997) and "Coup de Grace" (1998).
In 2000, Ellis left the band and a new guitarist, Baz Warne, was recruited.
The Stranglers achieved something of a critical and popular renaissance in 2004 with the acclaimed "Norfolk Coast" album and a subsequent sell-out tour, together with their first Top-40 hit (No. 31 UK) in fourteen years, "Big Thing Coming". The album also included "Tuckers Grave" about a Somerset cider house named after the victim of a suicide in a nearby farm which members of the band now occupied. In 2005, "Coast to Coast: Live on Tour" was released, the live album contained songs recorded during their tour the previous year. On their sellout UK tour they were supported by Goldblade.
In May 2006, Roberts left the band, and The Stranglers were now back to a four-piece line-up: Burnel, Black, Greenfield and Warne, with the lead vocals shared between Warne and Burnel. In concert, Burnel returned to singing the songs he originally recorded as lead vocalist, and Warne sang the numbers originally led by Hugh Cornwell.
"Suite XVI", the follow-up album to "Norfolk Coast", was released in September 2006 (the title is a pun on "Sweet 16" and also a reference to the fact that it was the band's sixteenth studio album) and continued the band's resurgence. Although partly a return to the band's heavier punk roots, the album featured a typically idiosyncratic mixture of musical styles which included a country and western style Johnny Cash pastiche/homage "I Hate You".
In 2007 it was reported that drummer Black was suffering from atrial fibrillation, an ailment which subsequently forced him to miss a number of shows, particularly where extended travel was required. On such occasions Ian Barnard, Black's drum technician, deputised.
On 4 November 2007, the band (with Black) played a sell-out gig at the Roundhouse in Camden, North London, marking the thirtieth anniversary of their headline run at the same venue in 1977. The set list was the same as the 1977 concert, with the addition of a couple of more recent songs as a final encore. The event is recorded on the DVD "Rattus at the Roundhouse".
The Stranglers continued their resurgence in 2010 starting with an extensive UK tour, including a sold-out return to the Hammersmith Apollo in March, their first visit there since 1987. They were supported on the 16-date UK tour by Max Raptor.
A new double CD compilation album, "Decades Apart", containing a selection of tracks from the full career of the band, including at least one from each of their sixteen studio albums and two new tracks, "Retro Rockets" and "I Don't See the World Like You Do" was released in February. The download version of "Decades Apart" included an unreleased recording from 1978, "Wasting Time", inspired by the band's 'Rock Goes To College' experience earlier that year; this track, originally titled "Social Secs" was never released, and the music ended up being reversed and released as "Yellowcake UF6", the B-side to "Nuclear Device" in 1979.
Across the summer the band played a number of festivals, including Weyfest and Glastonbury and T in the Park in the UK and Oxegen 2010 in Ireland, and concerts in Japan, Greece, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria. The band also released a new live album and DVD, recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo in May 2010. In March 2011, the band completed another UK tour. Burnel's long term friend, Wilko Johnson, was invited to bring The Wilko Johnson band on the tour. In April, the band began touring Europe, with many gigs and major festivals lined up for the entire year.
On 23 September 2012, the band returned to Looe, Cornwall, fronted by Warne and Burnel. The band had originally spent time in Looe writing "Suite XVI".
"Giants" was released in 2012, including the first instrumental on an album since "Waltzinblack" on "The Gospel According to The Meninblack". The "deluxe" version consisted of a second disc containing tracks from the 'Weekend in Black' acoustic session in November 2011.
2013 saw the band play a full UK tour, with Black playing the second half at most gigs (Jim Macaulay taking the first half). Several festivals were booked for 2013, including a session at the BBC Proms on 12 August. For the North American tour Black was not present, with Macaulay playing the entire show.
In 2014, the band celebrated their fortieth birthday with a Ruby Tour, throughout the UK and Europe. In 2015, the March On tour had 18 dates around the United Kingdom. Where stage space allowed, a second drum kit was set up and Jet Black appeared for a set of four songs. A proposed gig in Moscow was announced and then cancelled due to visa difficulties, but a mini-tour of the UK took place in July. The band then played gigs throughout Europe, ending in November. In April 2016, they returned to New Zealand and Australia.
Black has not performed on stage with the band since partial-set appearances in March 2015, although he remains an official member of the band. Jim Macaulay appeared in a promotional photograph alongside Burnel, Greenfield and Warne for the first time in 2016, while Black was not depicted.
In August 2017 they performed at an outdoor concert in Hull as it is UK City of Culture. In July 2018 they played at the LUNAR festival in Tanworth-in-Arden.
During an interview with Janice Long, on BBC Radio Wales, on 10 July 2018, Burnel revealed that Black continues to be in fairly poor health and had suffered a minor stroke earlier in 2018.
Greenfield died on 3 May 2020, at the age of 71. He had contracted COVID-19 while in hospital for a heart ailment.
Current members
Current touring musicians
Former members
Former touring musicians
(In the late 1980s, the Stranglers regularly featured a 3-piece brass section in their live line-up.)
"No More Heroes" was featured in the first episode of the BBC series "Ashes to Ashes" and in the third episode of the second season of the American TV show "Queer as Folk". The title was used for the Japanese video game "No More Heroes", created by Goichi Suda. A cover version by Violent Femmes was used for the film "Mystery Men".
The song "Let me Down Easy" was used as the opening credits theme for Hardcore Henry.
"Peaches" appeared in the title sequence of "Sexy Beast" by director Jonathan Glazer, and was used as the closing theme for many of Keith Floyd's cooking programmes, with the instrument track 'Waltzinblack' providing the title music.
"Golden Brown" featured in Guy Ritchie's film "Snatch" (2000), was used extensively in the Australian film "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand", and featured in the Black Mirror episode, Metalhead leading to Jacob Stolworthy of The Independent to claim, " 'Golden Brown' can stop being used in popular culture its usage has officially peaked".
Tori Amos covered "Strange Little Girl" on her 2001 "Strange Little Girls" album. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30518 |
Tom Waits
Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected greater influence from blues, rock, vaudeville, and experimental genres.
Waits was born and raised in a middle-class family in Pomona, California. Inspired by the work of Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, he began singing on the San Diego folk music circuit as a teenager. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records. His first albums were the jazz-oriented "Closing Time" (1973) and "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974), which reflected his lyrical interest in nightlife, poverty, and criminality. He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe, and Japan, and attracted greater critical recognition and commercial success with "Small Change" (1976), "Blue Valentine" (1978), and "Heartattack and Vine" (1980). He produced the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's film "One from the Heart" (1981), and subsequently made cameo appearances in several Coppola films.
In 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City. With Brennan's encouragement and frequent collaboration, he pursued a more experimental and eclectic musical aesthetic influenced by the work of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. This was reflected in a series of albums released by Island Records, including "Swordfishtrombones" (1983), "Rain Dogs" (1985), and "Franks Wild Years" (1987). He continued appearing in films, notably starring in Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" (1986), and also made theatrical appearances. With theatre director Robert Wilson, he produced the musicals "The Black Rider" and "Alice", first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, his albums "Bone Machine" (1992), "The Black Rider" (1993), and "Mule Variations" (1999) earned him increasing critical acclaim and multiple Grammy Awards. In the late 1990s, he switched to the record label ANTI-, which released "Blood Money" (2002), "Alice" (2002), "Real Gone" (2004), and "Bad as Me" (2011).
Despite a lack of mainstream commercial success, Waits has influenced many musicians and gained an international cult following. In 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2015, he was ranked at No. 55 on "Rolling Stone" "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time". Several biographies have also been written about him.
Thomas Alan Waits was born on December 7, 1949, in Pomona, California. He has one older sister and one younger sister. His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texas native of Scots-Irish descent, while his mother, Alma Fern (née Johnson), hailed from Oregon and had Norwegian ancestry. Alma was a conventional housewife and regular church-goer. Jesse taught Spanish at a local school and was an alcoholic; Waits later related that his father was "a tough one, always an outsider". The family lived at 318 North Pickering Avenue in Whittier, California. He described having a "very middle-class" upbringing and "a pretty normal childhood". He attended Jordan Elementary School, where he was bullied. There, he learned to play the bugle and guitar, while his father taught him to play the ukulele. During the summers, he visited maternal relatives in Gridley and Marysville. He later recalled that it was an uncle's raspy, gravelly voice that inspired the manner in which he later sang.
In 1959, his parents separated and his father moved away from the family home, which was a traumatic experience for 10-year-old Waits. Alma took her children and relocated to Chula Vista, a middle-class suburb of San Diego. Jesse visited the family there, taking his children on trips to Tijuana. In nearby Southeast San Diego, Waits attended O'Farrell Community School, where he fronted a school band, the Systems, later describing the group as "white kids trying to get that Motown sound". He developed a love of R&B and soul singers like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, as well as country music and Roy Orbison. Bob Dylan later became a strong influence, with Waits placing transcriptions of Dylan's lyrics on his bedroom walls. He was an avid watcher of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" and "The Twilight Zone". By the time he was studying at Hilltop High School, he later related, he was "kind of an amateur juvenile delinquent", interested in "malicious mischief" and breaking the law. He later described himself as a "rebel against the rebels", for he eschewed the hippie subculture which was growing in popularity and was instead inspired by the 1950s Beat generation, having a love of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. In 1968, at age 18, he dropped out of high school.
Waits worked at Napoleone's pizza restaurant in National City, California, and both there and at a local diner developed an interest in the lives of the patrons, writing down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard. He said he worked in the forestry service as a fireman for three years and served with the Coast Guard. He enrolled at Chula Vista's Southwestern Community College to study photography, for a time considering a career in the field. He continued pursuing his musical interests, taking piano lessons. He began frequenting folk music venues around San Diego, becoming drawn into the city's folk music scene.
In 1969, he gained employment as an occasional doorman for the Heritage coffeehouse, which held regular performances from folk musicians. He also began to sing at the Heritage; his set initially consisted largely of covers of Dylan and Red Sovine's "Big Joe and Phantom 309". In time, he performed his own material as well, often parodies of country songs or bittersweet ballads influenced by his relationships with girlfriends; these included early songs "Ol' 55" and "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You". As his reputation spread, he played at other San Diego venues, supporting acts like Tim Buckley, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and his friend Jack Tempchin. Aware that San Diego offered little opportunity for career progression, Waits began traveling into Los Angeles to play at the Troubadour.
At the Troubadour, Waits came to the attention of Herb Cohen, who signed him to a publishing contract and a recording contract. Quitting his job at Napoleone's to concentrate on his songwriting career, in early 1972 Waits moved to an apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a poor neighborhood known for its Hispanic and bohemian communities.
He continued performing at the Troubadour and there met David Geffen, who gave Waits a recording contract with his Asylum Records. Jerry Yester was chosen to produce his first album, with the recording sessions taking place in Hollywood's Sunset Sound studios. The resulting album, "Closing Time", was released in March 1973, although it attracted little attention and did not sell well. Biographer Barney Hoskyns noted that "Closing Time" was "broadly in step with the singer-songwriter school of the early 1970s"; Waits had wanted to create a piano-led jazz album although Yester had pushed its sound in a more folk-oriented direction. An Eagles cover of its opening track, "Ol' 55", on their album "On the Border", brought Waits further money and recognition, although he regarded their version as "a little antiseptic".
To promote his debut, Waits and a three-piece band embarked on a U.S. tour, largely on the East Coast, where he was the supporting act for more established artists. As part of this, he supported Tom Rush at Washington D.C.'s The Cellar Door, Danny O'Keefe at Massachusetts's Club Passim, Charlie Rich at New York City's Max's Kansas City, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in East Lansing, Michigan, and John P. Hammond in San Francisco.
Waits returned to Los Angeles in June, feeling demoralised about his career. That month, he was the cover star of free music magazine, "Music World". He began composing songs for his second album, and attended the Venice Poetry Workshop to try out this new material in front of an audience. Although Waits was eager to record this new material, Cohen instead convinced him to take over as a support act for Frank Zappa's the Mothers of Invention after previous support act Kathy Dalton pulled out due to the hostility from Zappa's fans. Waits joined Zappa's tour in Ontario, but like Dalton found the audiences hostile; while on stage he was jeered at and pelted with fruit. Although he liked the Mothers of Invention's band members, he found Zappa himself intimidating.
Waits moved from Silver Lake to Echo Park, spending much of his time in downtown Los Angeles. In early 1974, he continued to perform around the West Coast, getting as far as Denver. For Waits' second album, Geffen wanted a more jazz-oriented producer, selecting Bones Howe for the job. Recording sessions for "The Heart of Saturday Night" took place at Wally Heider Studio Number 3, Cahuenga Boulevard in April and May, with Waits conceptualising the album as a sequence of songs about U.S. nightlife. The album was far more widely reviewed than "Closing Time" had been, reflecting Waits' growing notability on the American music scene. Waits himself was later dismissive of the album, describing it as "very ill-formed, but I was trying".
After recording "The Heart of Saturday Night", Waits reluctantly agreed to tour with Zappa again, but once more faced strong audience hostility. The kudos of having supported Zappa's tour nevertheless bolstered his image in the music industry and helped his career.
In October 1974, he first performed as the headline act before touring the East Coast; in New York City he met and befriended the singer Bette Midler, with whom he had a sporadic affair. Back in Los Angeles, Cohen suggested Waits produce a live album. To this end, he performed two live shows at the Record Plant Studio in front of an audience. Again produced by Howe, the recording was released as "Nighthawks at the Diner" in October 1975.
He followed this with a week's residency at the Reno Sweeney in New York City, and in December appeared on the PBS concert show "Soundstage". From March to May 1976, he toured the U.S., telling interviewers that the experience was tough and that he was drinking too much alcohol. In May, he embarked on his first tour of Europe, performing in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen. On his return to Los Angeles, he joined his friend Chuck E. Weiss by moving into the Tropicana motel in West Hollywood, a place that already had an established reputation in rock music circles. Visitors noted that his two-room apartment there was heavily cluttered. He was living in what biographer Hoskyns later called a "pastiche of poverty"; Waits told the "LA Times" that "You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty".
In July 1976, he recorded the album "Small Change", again produced by Howe. In later years, he described it as a seminal episode in his development as a songwriter, describing it as the point when he became "completely confident in the craft". On release, the album was critically well received and was his first release to break into the Billboard Top 100 Album List, peaking at number 89. Later, biographer Patrick Humphries called "Small Change" Waits' "masterpiece". He received growing press attention, being profiled in "Newsweek", "Time", "Vogue", and "The New Yorker"; he had begun to accrue a cult following. He went on tour to promote the new album, backed by the Nocturnal Emissions. In reference to his song "Pasties and a G-String", a female stripper came onstage during his performances. He began 1977 by touring Japan for the first time.
Back in Los Angeles, he encountered various problems. One female fan, recently escaped from a mental health institution in Illinois, began stalking him and lurking outside his Tropicana apartment. In May 1977, Waits and close friend Chuck E. Weiss were arrested for fighting with police officers in a coffee shop. They were charged with two counts of disturbing the peace but were acquitted after the defence produced eight witnesses who refuted the police officers' account of the incident. In response, Waits sued the Los Angeles Police Department and five years later was awarded $7,500 in damages.
In July and August 1977, he recorded his fourth studio album, "Foreign Affairs"; Bob Alcivar had been employed as its arranger. The album included "I Never Talk to Strangers", a duet with Midler, with whom he was still in an intermittent relationship. She appeared with him at the Troubadour to sing the song; the next day he repaid the favor by performing at a gay rights benefit at the Hollywood Bowl that Midler was involved with. "Foreign Affairs" was not as well received by critics as its predecessor, and unlike "Small Change" failed to make the Billboard Top 100 album chart. That year, he began a relationship with the singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones; her own work and style was influenced by him. In October 1977, he returned to touring with the Nocturnal Emissions; it was on this tour that he first began using props onstage, in this case a street lamp. Again, he found the tour exhausting. In March 1978, he embarked on his second tour of Japan.
During these years, Waits sought to broaden his career beyond music by involving himself in other projects. Waits became friends with the actor and director Sylvester Stallone and made his first cinematic appearance as a cameo part in Stallone's "Paradise Alley" (1978); Waits appeared as a drunk piano player. With Paul Hampton, Waits also began writing a movie musical, although this project never came to fruition. Another of the projects he began at this time was a book about entertainers of the past whom he admired.
In July 1978, Waits began the recording sessions for his album "Blue Valentine". Part way through the sessions, he replaced his musicians in order to create a less jazz-oriented sound; for the album, he switched from a piano to an electric guitar as his main instrument. For the album cover, Waits used a picture of him and Jones in his car, a 1964 Ford Thunderbird, taken by Elliot Gilbert. From the album, Waits' first single was released, a cover of "Somewhere", but it failed to chart. For his "Blue Valentine" tour, Waits assembled a new band; he also had a gas station built for use as a set during his performances. His support act on the tour was Leon Redbone. In April, he embarked on a European tour, there making television appearances and press interviews; in Austria he was the subject of a short documentary. From there, he flew to Australia for his first tour of that country before returning to Los Angeles in May.
Waits was dissatisfied with Elektra-Asylum, whom he felt had lost interest in him as an artist in favor of their more commercially successful acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, and Queen. Jones' musical career was taking off; after an appearance on "Saturday Night Live", her single "Chuck E.'s In Love" reached number 4 in the singles chart, straining her relationship with Waits. Their relationship was further damaged by Jones' heroin addiction. Waits joined Jones for the first leg of her European tour, but then ended his relationship with her. Her grief at the breakup was channelled into the 1981 album "Pirates". In September, Waits moved to Crenshaw Boulevard to be closer to his father, before deciding to relocate to New York City. He initially lived in the Chelsea Hotel before renting an apartment on West 26th Street. On arriving in the city, he told a reporter that he "just needed a new urban landscape. I've always wanted to live here. It's a good working atmosphere for me". In the city, he contemplated writing a Broadway musical to be based on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town".
The film director Francis Ford Coppola then asked Waits to return to Los Angeles to write a soundtrack for his forthcoming film, "One from the Heart", which was to be set in Las Vegas. Waits was excited, but conflicted, by the prospect; Coppola wanted him to create music akin to his early work, a genre that he was trying to leave behind, and thus he characterised the project as an artistic "step backwards" for him. He nevertheless returned to Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack in a room set aside for the purpose in Coppola's Hollywood studios. This style of working was new to Waits; he later recalled that he was "so insecure when I started... I was sweating buckets". Waits was nominated for the 1982 Academy Award for Original Music Score.
Waits still contractually owed Elektra-Asylum a further album, so took a break from Coppola's project to write an album that he initially called "White Spades". He recorded the album in June; it was released in September as "Heartattack and Vine". The album was more guitar-based and had—according to Humphries—"a harder, R&B edge"—than any of its predecessors. It again broke into the Top 100 Album Chart, peaking at number 96. Reviews were generally good. Hoskyns called it "one of Waits' pinnacle achievements" as an album. One of its tracks, "Jersey Girl", was subsequently covered by Bruce Springsteen. Waits was grateful, both for the revenue that the cover brought him and because he felt appreciated by a songwriter whom he admired.
An assistant story editor on "One from the Heart" was Kathleen Brennan, a young Irish-American woman; Waits later described encountering her as "love at first sight". They were engaged to be married within a week. In August, they married at a 24-hour wedding chapel on the Manchester Boulevard in Watts before honeymooning in Tralee, a town in County Kerry, Ireland, where Brennan had family. Returning to Los Angeles, the couple moved into a Union Avenue apartment. Hoskyns noted that with Brennan, "Waits had found the stabilizing, nurturing companion he'd always wanted", and that she brought him "a sense of emotional security he had never known" before. At the same time, many of his old friends felt cut off after his marriage. Kathleen shunned the media and refused all interview requests.
Recording of Waits' "One from the Heart" soundtrack began in October 1980 and continued until September 1981. A number of the tracks were recorded as duets with Crystal Gayle; Waits had initially planned to duet with Midler, although she proved unavailable. The film was released in 1982, to largely poor reviews. Waits makes a small cameo in it, playing a trumpet in a crowd scene. Waits' soundtrack album, also titled "One from the Heart", was released by Columbia Records in 1982. Waits had misgivings about the album, thinking it over-produced. Humphries thought that working with Coppola was an important move in Waits' career: it "led directly to Waits moving from cult (i.e. largely unknown) artiste to center-stage."
Newly married and with his Elektra-Asylum contract completed, Waits decided that it was time to artistically reinvent himself. He wanted to move away from using Howe as his producer, although the two parted on good terms. With Brennan's help, he began the process of firing Cohen as his manager, with he and Brennan taking on managerial responsibilities themselves. He came to believe that Cohen had been swindling him out of much of his earnings, later relating that "I thought I was a millionaire and it turned out I had, like, twenty bucks." Waits credited Brennan with introducing him to much new music, most notably the work of Captain Beefheart, a key influence on the direction in which he wanted to take his music. He later noted that "once you've heard Beefheart it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." He also came under the influence of Harry Partch, a composer who created his own instruments out of everyday materials. Waits began to use images rather than moods or characters as the basis for his songs.
Waits wrote the songs which would be included on the album "Swordfishtrombones" during a two-week trip to Ireland. He recorded it at Sunset Sound studios and produced the album himself; Brennan often attended the sessions and gave him advice. "Swordfishtrombones" abandoned the jazz sound characteristic of his earlier work; it was his first album not to feature a saxophone. When the album was finished, he took it to Asylum, but they declined to release it. Waits wanted to leave the label; in his view, "They liked dropping my name in terms of me being a 'prestige' artist, but when it came down to it they didn't invest a whole lot in me in terms of faith".
Chris Blackwell of Island Records learned of Waits' dissatisfaction and approached him, offering to release "Swordfishtrombones"; Island had a reputation for signing more experimental acts, such as King Crimson, Roxy Music, and Sparks. Waits did not tour to promote the album, partly because Brennan was pregnant. Although not enthusiastic regarding the new trend for music videos, he appeared in one for the song "In the Neighbourhood", co-directed by Haskell Wexler and Michael A. Russ. Russ also designed the "Swordfishtrombones" album cover, featuring an image of Waits with Lee Kolima, a circus strongman, and Angelo Rossito, a dwarf. According to David Smay, "Swordfishtrombones" was "the record where Tom Waits radically reinvented himself and reshaped the musical landscape." The album was critically well received; the "New Musical Express" named it album of the year.
In 1983, Waits appeared in three more Coppola films: in "Rumble Fish" he played Benny, a philosopher running a billboard store, in "The Outsiders" he was Buck Merrill, a one-line role, and in "The Cotton Club" he again made a cameo appearance, this time as the eponymous club's maître'd. He later stated that "Coppola is actually the only film director in Hollywood that has a conscience... most or them are egomaniacs and money-grabbing bastards". In September, Brennan gave birth to their daughter, Kellesimone. Waits was determined to keep his family life separate from his public image and to spend as much time possible with his daughter. With Brennan and their child, Waits moved to New York City to be closer to Brennan's parents and Island's U.S. office. They settled into a loft apartment in Little Spain, near to Union Square. Waits found New York City life frustrating, although it allowed him to meet many new musicians and artists. He befriended John Lurie of The Lounge Lizards, and the duo began sharing a music studio in the Westbeth artist-community building in Greenwich Village. He began networking in the city's arts scene, and at a party Jean-Michel Basquiat held for Lurie he met the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
Waits recorded his eighth studio album, "Rain Dogs", at the RCA Studios in mid 1985. Waits called the album "kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria". Keith Richards played on several tracks; he later acknowledged Waits' encouragement of his first solo album, "Talk is Cheap". The filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed a music video of the "Rain Dogs" track "Downtown Train". The song was subsequently covered by Patty Smyth in 1987, and later by Rod Stewart, where it reached the top five in 1990. In 1985, "Rolling Stone" magazine named Waits its "Songwriter of the Year", and in 2003 it would rank "Rain Dogs" among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
In September 1985, his son Casey was born. Waits assembled a band and went on tour, kicking it off in Scotland in October before proceeding around Europe and then the US. He changed the setlist for each performance; most of the songs chosen were from his two Island albums.
Returning to the U.S., he travelled to New Orleans to appear in Jarmusch's film, "Down by Law". Jarmusch wrote "Down by Law" with Waits and Lurie in mind; they played two of the three main roles, with Roberto Benigni as the third. The film opened and closed with Waits songs taken from "Rain Dogs". Jarmusch noted that "Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic. An interest in unambitious people, marginal people." The pair developed a friendship; Waits called Jarmusch "Dr Sullen", while Jarmusch called Waits "The Prince of Melancholy".
Waits had devised the idea of a musical play, "Franks Wild Years", which would be loosely based on the eponymous song from "Swordfishtrombones". In late 1985, he reached an agreement that the play would be performed by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago's Briar Street Theatre for a three-month stretch from June 1986. During the show, Waits starred as the central character, Frank. Reviews were generally positive. He had initially considered a run in New York City, but decided against it. The songs from the show were recorded at Universal Recording Studios for his ninth studio album, "Franks Wild Years", and released by Island a year later, in 1987. After its release, Waits toured North America and Europe, his last full tour for two decades. Two of these performances were recorded and used as the basis for a concert film directed by Chris Blum, "Big Time".
Waits had also continued interacting and working with other artists he admired. He was a great fan of The Pogues and went on a Chicago pub crawl with them in 1986. The following year, he appeared as a master of ceremonies on several dates of Elvis Costello's "Wheel of Fortune" tour. In September 1987, he joined singers like Springsteen, Costello, and k. d. lang by appearing in a "Black and White Night" at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel to celebrate the life of singer-songwriter Roy Orbison, of whom Waits was a fan. 1988 saw Waits contribute a cover of the song "Heigh Ho" in Hal Willner's Disney-themed album, "".
In fall 1986, Waits took a small part in "Candy Mountain", a film by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, as millionaire golf enthusiast Al Silk. He then starred in Hector Babenco's "Ironweed", as Rudy the Kraut, a more substantial role. Hoskyns noted that Babenco's film put Waits "on the mainstream Hollywood map as a character actor". In fall 1987, Waits and his family left New York and returned to Los Angeles, setting on Union Avenue. In summer 1988, he appeared as a hitman in Robert Dornhelm's film "Cold Feet", filmed in Gallatin National Forest, and that year he also provided his voice for Jarmusch's film "Mystery Train".
Although Waits had provided a voice-over for a 1981 television advert for Butcher's Blend dog food, he hated when musicians allowed companies to use their songs in advertising; he said that "artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs". In November 1988, he brought a lawsuit against Frito-Lay for using an actor imitating his voice to advertise their Salsa Rio Doritos; it came to court in April 1990, and Waits won the case in 1992. He received a $2.6 million settlement, a sum larger that his earnings from all of his previous albums combined. This earned him and Brennan a reputation as tireless adversaries.
In 1989, Waits began planning a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a theatre director he had known throughout the 1980s. Their project was a "cowboy opera" titled "The Black Rider". It was to be based around a German folk tale, that of the Freischütz. In 2004, Waits related that "Wilson is my teacher. There's nobody that's affected me that much as an artist". Waits was scheduled to write the music for the play, and at the suggestion of Allen Ginsberg, Waits and Wilson approached the Beat poet William S. Burroughs to write the play. To do this, they flew to Kansas to meet with Burroughs, who agreed to join their project. Waits travelled to Hamburg in May 1989 to work on the project, and was later joined there by Burroughs. "The Black Rider" debuted in Hamburg's Thalia in March 1990. On completing its run at the Thalia, the play went on an international tour, with a second run of performances occurring in the mid-2000s.
In June 1989, Waits travelled to London to appear in Ann Guedes' film "Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale". He proceeded to Ireland, where he was joined by Brennan and spent time with her family. In December 1989 he began a stint as Curly, a mobster's son, at the Los Angeles Theater Center production of Thomas Babe's play "Demon Wine". Over the next four years, he made seven film appearances. He nevertheless repeatedly told press that he did not see himself as an actor, but only as someone who did some acting. He made a brief appearance as a plainclothes cop in "The Two Jakes" (1990) and then a disabled war veteran in Terry Gilliam's "The Fisher King" (1991). He had a cameo in Steve Rash' "Queens Logic" (1991) and then played a pilot-for-hire in Héctor Babenco's "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (1991). He appeared as Renfield in Coppola's 1992 film "Bram Stoker's Dracula". Waits also starred as Earl Piggot, an alcoholic limousine driver, in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts". Hoskyns stated that this "may be the best performance Waits ever gave as an actor."
In the early 1990s, Waits and his family moved to the outskirts of Sonoma, but after a bypass road was built nearby they moved again, relocating to a secluded house near Valley Ford. In 1992, Waits gave up drinking alcohol and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Between 1991 and 1993, much of Waits' early work was assembled and released as the multi-volume "Tom Waits: The Early Years". Waits was angered at this, describing many of his early demos as "baby pictures" that he would not want released. In April 1992, Waits released the soundtrack album to Jarmusch's "Night on Earth". Largely instrumental, it had been recorded at the Prairie Sun studio in Cotati. In the early 1990s he took part in several charitable causes; in 1990 he contributed a song to the HIV/AIDS benefit album "Red Hot + Blue" and later appeared at a Wiltern Theater fundraising show for the victims of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
In August 1992, Wait released his tenth studio album, "Bone Machine". The album was recorded in an old storage room at Prairie Sun. Waits described wanting to explore "more machinery sounds" with the album. Eight of the album tracks were co-written by Brennan, reflecting the growing impact over his work. The album cover was co-designed by Waits and Jesse Dylan. Jarmusch filmed a video for the album song "I Don't Wanna Grow Up". Critic Steve Huey calls it "perhaps Tom Waits's most cohesive album... a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative—and often harrowing—effect... Waits' most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible." The album won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album; in response to the news, Waits told Jarmusch: "alternative to "what"?!"
Waits next appeared in Jarmusch's film "Coffee and Cigarettes", where he was filmed having a conversation with the rock singer Iggy Pop. Waits decided that he wanted to record an album of the songs written for "The Black Rider" play, doing so at Los Angeles' Sunset Sound Factory. The album, "The Black Rider", was released in the fall of 1993. Waits and Wilson decided to collaborate again, this time on an operatic treatment about the novelist Lewis Carroll's relationship Alice Liddell, who had provided the inspiration for "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass". Again scheduled to premier at the Thalia, they began working on the project in Hamburg in early 1992. Waits characterized the songs he wrote for the play as "adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults". In his lyrics, Waits drew on his increasing interest in freak shows and the physically deformed. He thought the play itself was about "repression, mental illness and obsessive, compulsive disorders". "Alice" premiered at the Thalia in December 1992.
In early 1993, Brennan was pregnant with Waits' third child, Sullivan. He decided to reduce his workload so as to spend more time with his children; this isolation spawned rumours that he was seriously ill or had separated from his wife. For three years, he turned down all offers to perform gigs or appear in movies. However, he made several cameos and guest appearances on albums by musicians he admired. The English musician Gavin Bryars visited him in California and Waits added vocals for a re-release of Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", which was then nominated for the 1993 Mercury Music Award.
In February 1996 he held a benefit performance to raise funds for the legal defence of his friend Don Hyde, who had been charged with distributing LSD. He also contributed two songs to the soundtrack album of the film "Dead Man Walking", released that year, while he then contributed another song the 1997 film "The End of Violence". In 1998, Island released "Beautiful Maladies", a compilation of 23 Waits tracks from his five albums with the company; he had been allowed to select the tracks himself. That year, Waits also produced and funded Weiss' album, "Extremely Cool", as a favor to his old friend.
After his contract with Island expired, Waits decided not to try to renew it, particularly as Blackwell had resigned from the company. He signed to a smaller record label, Anti-, recently launched as an offshoot of the punk-label Epitaph Records. He described the company as "a friendly place". The president of Anti-, Andy Kaulkin, said the label was "blown away that Tom would even consider us. We are huge fans." Waits himself praised the label: "Epitaph is a label run by and for artists and musicians, where it feels much more like a partnership than a plantation... We shook on the deal over a coffee in a truck stop. I know it's going to be an adventure."
In March 1999, Anti- released his album "Mule Variations". Waits had been recording the tracks at Prairie Sun since June 1998. The tracks often dealt with themes involving rural life in the United States and were influenced by the early blues recordings made by Alan Lomax; Waits coined the term "surrural" ("surreal" and "rural") to describe the album's contents. On its release, "Mule Variations" reached number 30 on the U.S. Billboard 200, representing the highest showing of a Waits album. The album was critically well received, being named "Album of the Year" by "Mojo" magazine, and was given a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On the Grammy's categorization of the album as folk music, Waits noted: "That's not a bad thing to be called if you've got to be in some kind of category."
Also in March 1999, Waits gave his first live show in three years at Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas as part of the South by Southwest festival. He subsequently appeared in an episode of VH1's "Storytellers" television show, where he performed several tracks. In the later part of the year he embarked on the "Mule Variations" tour, primarily in the U.S. but also featuring dates in Berlin. In October, he performed at Neil Young's annual Bridge School benefit gig. That year, he also appeared in the Kinka Usher film "Mystery Men", a comic book spoof, where he played Dr A. Heller, an eccentric inventor living in an abandoned amusement park. In 2000, Waits produced "Wicked Grin", the 2001 album of his friend John Hammond; the album contained several covers of Waits songs.
Also in 2000, Waits began writing songs for Wilson's production of the Georg Buchner play "Woyzeck", scheduled to start at the Betty Nansen Theater in Copenhagen in November. He initially worked on the songs at home before traveling to Copenhagen for rehearsals in October. Waits stated that he liked the play because it was "a proletariat story... about a poor soldier who is manipulated by the government". He decided to then record the songs he had written for both "Alice" and "Woyzeck", placing them on separate albums. For these recordings, he brought in a range of jazz and avant-garde musicians from San Francisco. The two albums, titled "Alice" and "Blood Money", were released simultaneously in May 2002. "Alice" entered the U.S. album chart at number 32 and "Blood Money" at number 33, his highest charting positions at that time. Waits described "Alice" as being "more metaphysical or something, maybe more water, more feminine", while "Blood Money" was "more earthbound, more carnival, more the slaving meat-wheel that we're all on". Of the two, "Alice" was better received by critics.
In May 2001, Waits accepted a Founders Award at the 18th annual American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Pop Music Awards in a ceremony at Los Angeles' Beverly Hilton Hotel. That same month, he joined singers Randy Newman and Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart in launching a $40 million lawsuit against mp3.com for copyright infringement. In September 2002 he appeared at a hearing on accounting practices within the music industry in California. There, he expressed satisfaction with Anti but declared that more broadly, "the record companies are like cartels. It's a nightmare to be trapped in one." In September 2003, Waits performed at the Healing the Divide fundraiser in New York City, and contributed a track to that year's release of the album, "Tribute to the Ramones". This latter track earned him a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Vocal Rock Performance".
In 2004, Waits' fifteenth studio album, "Real Gone", was released. Waits had recorded it in an abandoned schoolhouse in Locke. Hoskyns called the album Waits' "roughest, most unkempt music to date". It incorporated Waits beatboxing, a technique he had picked up from his growing interest in hip hop. Humphries characterised it as "the most overtly political album of Waits' career". It featured three highly political songs expressing Waits' anger at the Presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. He stated that "I'm not a politician. I keep my mouth shut because I don't want to put my foot in it. But at a certain point, saying absolutely nothing is a political statement of its own." "Real Gone" received largely good reviews. It made the Billboard Top 30 as well as the Top 10 in several European album charts, also earning him a nomination for Best International Male Solo Artist at the 2005 Brit Awards. In October 2004, he launched a tour in Vancouver before heading to Europe, where his shows were sell-outs: his only London gig saw 78,000 applications for around 3,700 available tickets.
After several years of making no film appearances, he played a gun-toting Seventh-day Adventist in Tony Scott's 2005 film "Domino". That year, he also appeared in Benigni's film "The Tiger and the Snow", for which Waits had travelled to Italy. He followed this with a performance as an angel posing as a tramp in the 2007 film "". In the summer of 2006, Waits embarked of a short tour of southern and Midwest states, titled "Orphans". His son Casey played with him in the band accompanying him on the tour. In November 2006 he issued "", a 54-song three-disc box set of rarities, unreleased tracks, and new compositions. Waits described its contents as "songs that fell behind the stove while making dinner". "Orphans" made the top ten in several European charts. That year, he also made another guest appearance on the Sparklehorse album "Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain".
In January 2008, Waits performed at a benefit for Bet Tzedek Legal Services—The House of Justice, a nonprofit poverty law center, in Los Angeles. In 2008 Waits embarked on his Glitter and Doom Tour, starting in the U.S. and then moving to Europe. Both of his sons played with him on the tour. At the June concert in El Paso, Texas he was awarded the key to the city.
Waits continued acting, appearing as Mr Nick in Terry Gilliam's 2009 film "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus".
Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito Lay in 2000 when Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" (from "Franks Wild Years") for a commercial broadcast in Spain. Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song. Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Waits' moral rights in addition to the infringement of copyright. The production company, Tandem Campany Guasch, was ordered to pay compensation to Waits through his Spanish publisher. Waits later joked that they got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme". In 2005, Waits sued Adam Opel AG, claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer. In 2007, the suit was settled, and Waits gave the sum to charity.
In 2010, Waits was reported to be working on a new stage musical with director and long-time collaborator Robert Wilson and playwright Martin McDonagh.
In early 2011, Tom Waits completed a set of 23 poems entitled "Seeds on Hard Ground", which were inspired by Michael O'Brien's portraits of the homeless in his upcoming book, "Hard Ground", which will include the poems alongside the portraits. In anticipation of the book release, Waits and ANTI- printed limited edition chapbooks of the poems to raise money for Redwood Empire Food Bank, a homeless referral and family support service in Sonoma County, California. As of January 26, 2011, four editions, each limited to a thousand copies costing $24.99US each, sold out, raising $90,000 for the food bank.
In March 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Neil Young. In accepting the award, he stated: "They say I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with... like it's a bad thing."
On February 24, 2011, it was announced via Waits' official website that he had begun work on his next studio album. Waits said through his website that on August 23 he would "set the record straight" in regards to rumors of a new release. On August 23, the title of the new album was revealed to be "Bad as Me", and a new single, also titled "Bad as Me," started being offered via Amazon.com and other sites. The album was released on October 24.
In 2012, Waits had a supporting role in a film written and directed by Martin McDonagh called "Seven Psychopaths", where he played a retired serial killer.
In 2013, the song "Shenandoah," recorded with Keith Richards, was included on the compilation album "Son of Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys." The album was released February 19 on ANTI-. On May 5, 2013, Waits joined the Rolling Stones on stage at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, California to duet with Mick Jagger on the song "Little Red Rooster". The same year, the songs "Hold On" and "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" were sung by the character Beth Greene (Emily Kinney) in "The Walking Dead" episodes "I Ain't a Judas" and "Infected." On October 27, 2013, Tom Waits performed at the 27th annual Bridge School Benefit concert in Mountain View California. "Rolling Stone" called it a "triumph".
Over the years, Waits made six regular appearances on the "Late Show with David Letterman", and on May 14, 2015 he sang "Take One Last Look" on the 5th to last broadcast. He was accompanied by Larry Taylor on upright bass and Gabriel Donohue on piano accordion, with the horn section of the CBS Orchestra. In the fall of 2015, Waits's work was featured in several songs adapted for stage performance in Chicago Shakespeare theater's production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest".
In 2016, Waits embarked upon litigation against French artist Bartabas who had used several of Waits' songs as a backdrop to a theatrical performance that in many ways paid homage to Waits' work. Claims and counterclaims were made, with Bartabas claiming to have sought and been granted permission to use the material (and to have paid $400,000 for the privilege) but with Waits seemingly of the view that his identity had been stolen. The case in the French courts was lost and the circus performance was allowed to continue, although the threat of further litigation meant that it was not performed outside France and the resulting DVD release does not contain Waits' material.
In 2018, Waits had a feature role in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", a western anthology film by the Coen Brothers, which was released on Netflix. His character, The Prospector in the "All Gold Canyon" story, digs for gold in a valley in the old west.
Hoskyns described the "core sound" of Waits' early work as being that of a "Beat verse/jazz-trio".
There were jazz elements in Waits' early work. During his "Blue Valentine" tour, Waits began experimenting more with sounds derived from the blues, with Humphries arguing that Waits had "always been indebted" to the blues. In later life, he preferred to be thought of as a blues singer, although accepted the label of a folk singer.
Waits has made use of blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental.
Waits described his voice as being "the sand in the sandwich". In 2008, he modelled some of his early vocal mannerisms after Richard Buckley. Waits was usually reticent to discuss the specifics of his song-writing with journalists. His work was influenced by his voracious reading and by conversations that he overheard in diners. A major influence was the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, although other writers who inspired him included Charles Bukowski, Nelson Algren, John Rechy, and Hubert Selby Jr. He was also inspired by the comedian Lenny Bruce. Musically, he was influenced by Randy Newman, and Dr. John. He regarded James Brown as one of his musical heroes, and was also a great fan of the Rolling Stones. He has praised Dylan, noting that "for a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and saw are to a carpenter", as well as the country musician Merle Haggard, relating: "Want to learn how to write songs? Listen to Merle Haggard."
As of 1982, Waits' musical style shifted; Hoskyns noted that this new style "was fashioned out of diverse and disparate ingredients". This new style was influenced by Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch. Noting that he had a "gravelly timbre" to his voice, Humphries characterized Waits' voice as one that "sounds like it was hauled through Hades in a dredger". His voice was described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding as though "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car". "Rolling Stone" also noted his "rusted plow-blade voice". One of Waits' own favorite descriptions of his vocal style was that of "Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in Hell". Humphries cited him, alongside Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Randy Newman, as a number of U.S. singers who followed Dylan in breaking away from conventional styles of popular music and singing with their "distinctive" voices.
Humphries described "Waitsworld" as a place of "the ricocheted romantics bent out of shape by a broad who should have known better; the twisted psychotics; the loners; the losers". By "Blue Valentine", violent death had become a recurrent lyrical theme in his work; the song "Sweet Little Bullet" from that album for instance was written about a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide by jumping from a high window along the Hollywood Bowl. In his later work, orphanhood also became a recurring theme. Many of his songs make reference to fictional locations that Waits has invented, such as the eponymous term in his song "Burma Shave". Hoskyns also noted that many Waits songs, such as "Burma Shave" and "Georgia Lee", reflect an "abiding concern for runaways and kids in danger". Andy Gill expressed the view that throughout Waits' oeuvre, "the theme of lowlife redemption, of escape, is ever-present".
Waits tended to wear all-black. Humphries noted that "on stage, Waits is a consummate performer, a raconteur of the recherché, and a genuine wit." Waits has stated that a performance should be "a spectacle and entertaining". It was on his 1977 tour for "Foreign Affairs" that he started employing props as part of his routine; one recurring prop was a megaphone through which he would shout at the audience.
Waits and his wife and frequent collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, live in Sonoma County, California. They married in 1980 and have three children: Kellesimone (born 1983), Casey (born 1985) and Sullivan (born 1993). During the 1970s, he had a brief relationship with the comedian Elayne Boosler, an intermittent relationship with Bette Midler, as well as a relationship with Rickie Lee Jones. After he married and had children, he became increasingly reclusive. Safeguarding the privacy of his family life became very important to him. During interviews, he deflected questions about his personal life, and refused to sanction any biography of him. When Hoskyns was researching for a biography, Waits and his wife asked people not to talk to him. Hoskyns believed that it was Brennan who was responsible for the "wall of inaccessibility" surrounding Waits.
Waits was determined to keep a distance between his public persona and his personal life. According to Hoskyns, Waits hid behind his persona, noting that "Tom Waits is as much of a character created for his fans as it is a real man". In Hoskyns' view, Waits' self-image was in part "a self-protective device, a screen to deflect attention". Among music journalists, there was much suggestion that Waits was a poseur.
Hoskyns regarded Waits' "persona of the skid-row boho/hobo, a young man out of time and place" as an "ongoing experiment in performance art". He added that Waits had adopted a "self-appointed role as the bard of the streets". Mick Brown, a music journalist from "Sounds" who interviewed Waits in the mid-1970s, noted that "he had immersed himself in this character to the point where it "wasn't" an act and had become an identity". Louie Lista, a friend of Waits' during the 1970s, stated that the singer's general attitude was that of "I'm an outsider, but I'll "revel" in being an outsider". In a similar manner to contemporaries like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits was known for cutting contact with figures he worked with in his past.
Another friend from the period, Troubadour-manager Robert Marchese, related that Waits cultivated "the whole mystique of this really funky dude and all that Charles Bukowski crap" to give "his impression of how funky poor folk really are", whereas in reality Waits was "basically a middle-class, San Diego mom-and-pop-schoolteacher kid". Humphries thought that there was a "conservative element" to Waits' persona, stating that behind his public image, "Waits has always been more of a white-picket-fence kind of guy than you might imagine."
Jarmusch described Waits as "a very contradictory character", stating that he is "potentially violent if he thinks someone is "screwing" with him, but he's gentle and kind too". Herbert Hardesty, who worked with Waits on "Blue Valentine", called him "a very pleasant human being, a very nice person". Humphries referred to him as "an essentially reticent man... reflective and surprisingly shy". He had a sense of humour and enjoyed jokes. Hoskyns described Waits as "unequivocally—some would say almost gruffly—heterosexual".
Hoskyns suggested that Waits had an "on-off affair with alcohol, never quite able to shake it off".
During the 1970s, he was known as a heavy drinker and a smoker but avoided any drugs harder than cocaine. He told one interviewer, "I discovered alcohol at an early age, and that guided me a lot." He made reference to alcohol consumption while on stage, for instance using the line, "I don't have a drink problem, 'cept when I can't get a drink." Humphries suggested that Waits' use of alcohol as opposed to illicit drugs marked him out as being different from many of his contemporaries on the 1970s U.S. music scene.
During interviews, Waits would avoid questions about his personal life, go off on a tangent, and throw in trivia. Humphries noted that Waits often supplied interviewers with "droll one-liners", something he termed "Waitsisms", observing that the singer was "dripping with wit and vinegar". Waits was known for getting irate with journalists,
Waits disliked touring; but Hoskyns added that he had "a strong work ethic". He had a hatred of the Internet. When asked about his religious beliefs, he noted: "With the God stuff I don't know. I don't know what's out there any more than anyone else".
During his career, Waits has had little chart success, nor major commercial success. Instead, he attracted a cult fan following. Hoskyns referred to him as being "as important an American artist as anyone the twentieth century has produced", while Humphries described him as "one of America's finest post-Dylan singer-songwriters". Humphries noted that at the time of his emergence to public fame, Waits represented "a unique voice on the late Seventies pop radar". He thought that Waits was, along with the painter Edward Hopper, "one of the two great depicters of American isolation". Hoskyns noted that by the end of the twentieth century, "Waits was an iconic alternative figure, not just to the fans who'd grown up with him but to subsequent generations of music geeks", coming to be "universally acknowledged as an elder statesman of 'alternative' rock".
The journalist Karen Schoemer of "Newsweek" stated that "to the postboomer generation, he's more Dylan than Dylan. [His] melting-pot approach to Americana, his brilliant narratives and his hardiness against commercial trends have made him the ultimate icon for the alternative-minded." He was included among the 2010 list of "Rolling Stone"s 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.
A number of events have been held to gather together fans of Waits' work, such as "Waiting for Waits" in Mallorca and the "Straydogs Party" in Denmark. Various cabaret shows have been held devoted to Waits' songs, including Robert Berdahl's "Warm Beer, Cold Women" and Stewart D'Arrietta's "Belly of a Drunken Piano". When the actor Robert Carlyle formed a theatre, he named it the Rain Dog Theatre after Waits' album. Among the celebrities who have described themselves as Waits fans are Johnny Depp, John Oliver, Jerry Hall, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman. In Britain, prominent figures who have described themselves as Waits fans include the historian Simon Schama, the writer Raymond Briggs, the presenter Graham Norton, and the actor Colin Firth. Musicians who noted their admiration for Waits' work included Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Nanci Griffith, Joe Strummer from the punk rock band The Clash, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Frank Black of Pixies, and James Hetfield from the heavy metal band Metallica. Bob Dylan, who was a major influence on the young Waits, stated that Waits was one of his "secret heroes".
Many different musicians have covered his songs. In 1995, Holly Cole released an album of Waits' covers, "Temptations", while in 2008 Scarlett Johansson did the same with her debut album, "Anywhere I Lay My Head". Bruce Springsteen had a commercial success with his cover of Waits' "Jersey Girl", as did Rod Stewart with his covers of Waits tracks "Downtown Train" and "Tom Traubert's Blues". Johnny Cash covered "Down There by the Train" on his 1994 album, "American Recordings", calling Waits "a very special writer, my kind of writer". Willie Nelson included a cover of a Waits track on his album, "It Always Will Be". The Ramones covered "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" on their final album, "Adios Amigos", while Bob Seger covered "Blind Love","New Coat of Paint", and "Downtown Train", and Norah Jones included a song Waits wrote for her, "Long Way Home", on her album "Feels Like Home".
His tracks have also been selected for use in film. The director Julian Schnabel for instance chose two Waits tracks for inclusion in his award-winning 2008 film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". The 1995 film, "Smoke", used "Innocent When You Dream" as the soundtrack to the closing sequence, Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, which appeared at the end of the film during and after the closing credits.
Further Waits tribute albums include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30519 |
The Year of Living Dangerously (film)
The Year of Living Dangerously is a 1982 Australian romantic drama film directed by Peter Weir and co-written by Weir and David Williamson. It was adapted from Christopher Koch's 1978 novel "The Year of Living Dangerously". The story is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno. It follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup by the 30 September Movement in 1965.
The film stars Mel Gibson as Australian journalist Guy Hamilton, and Sigourney Weaver as British Embassy officer Jill Bryant. It also stars Linda Hunt as the male dwarf Billy Kwan, Hamilton's local photographer contact, a role for which Hunt won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film was shot in both Australia and the Philippines and includes Australian actors Bill Kerr as Colonel Henderson and Noel Ferrier as Wally O'Sullivan.
It was banned from being shown in Indonesia until 2000, after the forced resignation of coup-leader and political successor Suharto in 1998. The title "The Year of Living Dangerously" is a quote which refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno; "vivere pericolosamente", meaning "living dangerously". Sukarno used the line for the title of his Indonesian Independence Day speech of 1964.
Guy Hamilton, a neophyte foreign correspondent for an Australian TV network, arrives in Jakarta on assignment. He meets the close-knit members of the foreign correspondent community, including journalists from the UK, the US, and New Zealand, diplomatic personnel—and Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf of high intelligence and moral seriousness. Hamilton is initially unsuccessful because his predecessor, tired of life in Indonesia, had departed without introducing Hamilton to his contacts. He receives limited sympathy from the journalist community, which competes for scraps of information from Sukarno's regime, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and the conservative Muslim Indonesian military. However, Billy takes a liking to Guy and arranges interviews for him with key political figures.
Billy introduces Guy to Jill Bryant, a beautiful young assistant at the British embassy. Billy and Jill are close friends, yet Billy subtly manipulates her encounters with Guy. After resisting Guy because she's returning to the UK, Jill falls in love with him. Discovering that the Communist Chinese are arming the PKI, Jill passes this information to Guy to save his life, but he wants to cover the Communist rebellion that will occur when the arms shipment reaches Jakarta. Shocked, Billy and Jill end their friendships with Guy, and he is left with the American journalist, Pete Curtis, and his own assistant and driver Kumar, who is secretly a member of the PKI. Kumar, however, remains loyal to Guy, and tries to open his eyes to all that is going on.
Billy, outraged by Sukarno's failure to meet the needs of most Indonesians, decides to hang a sign saying "Sukarno feed your people" from the Hotel Indonesia expressing his outrage, but is thrown from the window by security men, and dies in Guy's arms. His death is also witnessed by Jill. Still in search of "the big story", Guy visits the Presidential palace after the army generals have taken over and unleashed executions, after they learned of the Communist shipment. Struck down by an Army officer, Guy suffers a detached retina. Resting alone in Billy's bungalow, Guy recalls a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, "all is clouded by desire", which Billy told him. Kumar visits him and tells him about the failed coup attempt. Risking permanent damage to his eye, a heavily bandaged Guy implores Kumar to drive him to the airport, where he boards the last plane out of Jakarta and is reunited with Jill.
A number of filmmakers were interested in buying the rights to Christopher Koch's novel including Phillip Noyce. It was Peter Weir who was successful. Koch wrote an early draft but Weir was unhappy with it. Alan Sharp wrote three more drafts, then David Williamson was brought on to do several more drafts. Koch later came back on to work on some of the voice over, although he never spoke with Peter Weir. Koch later claimed that the final script was "55% Williamson/Weir, and 45% Koch".
The film was originally backed by the South Australian Film Corporation and the Australian Film Commission, with international distribution arranged by MGM/UA Entertainment Company. However, the SAFC then dropped out and Weir's agent suggested MGM provide the entire $6 million budget themselves, which is what happened. It was by far the most ambitious Australian film undertaken at the time and was one of the first co-productions between Australia and a Hollywood studio.
Dancer David Atkins was originally cast as Billy Kwan. However, during rehearsals Weir began to feel that the relationship between his character and Mel Gibson's was not working so he decided to recast. Several actors auditioned, including Bob Balaban and Wallace Shawn, when Weir saw a photo of Linda Hunt. He asked for her to audition and decided to cast her. Weir said on casting Hunt, "I never would have started out looking for a woman, But from the moment I saw her test, I knew she was appropriate."
To accomplish the role during production, Hunt shortened "her hair and dye[d] it black[,] wore padding around her waist, shaved her eyebrows, and carried something in her shirt pocket." In her 1986 interview with "Bomb" magazine, Hunt remarked that Billy Kwan "is supra-personal [with] layers of sexual ambiguity[.]"
Although originally set to be filmed in Jakarta, permission to film in Indonesia was denied, so the bulk of the film was shot in the Philippines, in Manila’s Quiapo district and the Banaue Rice Terraces. Death threats against Weir and Gibson from Muslims who believed the film would be anti-Islam forced the production to move to Australia. The crew moved to Sydney in early April 1982 during its fifth week of the six-week Philippine shoot with only a few small scenes remaining. Filming in Australia was for another six weeks.
Gibson downplayed the death threats, saying, "It wasn't really that bad. We got a lot of death threats to be sure, but I just assumed that when there are so many, it must mean nothing is really going to happen. I mean, if they meant to kill us, why send a note?"
Gibson described his character Guy, saying, "He's not a silver-tongued devil. He's kind of immature and he has some rough edges and I guess you could say the same for me."
"L'Enfant", a track from Vangelis' 1979 album "Opera sauvage", was featured in the film.
"The Year of Living Dangerously" opened in Australia on 16 December 1982 at Sydney’s Pitt Centre.
The film was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival attended by Weir, Gibson and Weaver to promote it, where it was well received by audiences and critics. Gibson attended the festival during a break from filming "The Bounty" in London.
The film was released for sale or rental in Australia on VHS in 1984 and on LaserDisc in 1985 with a runtime of 117-minute cut.
Warner Bros. released "The Year of Living Dangerously" in the United States on DVD in June 2000 with a theatrical trailer as the sole extra feature. In 2002 it was issued on DVD in Australia.
The film opened in Australia on 17 December 1982. Filmed on a budget of $6 million, "The Year of Living Dangerously" grossed $2,898,000 at the box office in Australia.
The film opened in the United States via limited release on 21 January 1983 before receiving a wide release on 18 February 1983. In its limited release opening weekend in the US, the film earned $35,000 from one theater. When released nationwide, the film ranked thirteenth in the box office grossing $1,716,040 on 690 theaters during the Presidents' Day weekend. In its sixth weekend since its limited opening (however, second nationwide release weekend), The Year of Living Dangerously made $1.2 million in 679 theaters (a total of $3,469,305 over that period), rising to eleventh. It then made $932,370 on its seventh weekend (third nationwide) a 25.7% drop, and $802,753 on its eighth weekend across 290 screens both finishing thirteenth.
On its tenth and final weekend on 25 March it made $3.4 million, a +436% increase for a total box office gross of $10.3 million.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 88% rating based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 7.82/10. The site's consensus states: "Both a smart, suspenseful tale of intrigue and a sweeping romance, "The Year of Living Dangerously" features excellent performances from Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver as a pair of journalists covering political unrest in Indonesia." Metacritic reports a 65 out of 100 rating based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Film critic Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film four out of four stars and praised Hunt's performance: "Billy Kwan is played, astonishingly, by a woman—Linda Hunt, a New York stage actress who enters the role so fully that it never occurs to us that she is not a man. This is what great acting is, a magical transformation of one person into another". In his review for "The New York Times", Vincent Canby praised Gibson's performance: "If this film doesn't make an international star of Mr. Gibson ("Gallipoli", "The Road Warrior"), then nothing will. He possesses both the necessary talent and the screen presence".
However, Richard Corliss of "Time" wrote, "But in his attempt to blend his preoccupations with the plot of C. J. Koch's 1978 novel, Weir has perhaps packed too much imagery and information into his movie ... The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels". In his review for the "Washington Post", Gary Arnold described the film as "a grievously flawed yet compelling tale of political intrigue, certainly a triumph of atmosphere if not of coherent dramatization". "Newsweek" magazine called the film "an annoying failure because it fritters away so many rich opportunities".
For their work in the film, Weir was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival and Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30524 |
Thoinot Arbeau
Thoinot Arbeau is the anagrammatic pen name of French cleric Jehan Tabourot (March 17, 1520 – July 23, 1595). Tabourot is most famous for his "Orchésographie", a study of late sixteenth-century French Renaissance social dance. He was born in Dijon and died in Langres.
"Orchésographie", first published in Langres, 1589, provides information on social ballroom behaviour and on the interaction of musicians and dancers. It is available online in facsimile and in plain text. There is an English translation by Mary Stewart Evans, edited by Julia Sutton, in print with Dover Publications. It contains numerous woodcuts of dancers and musicians and includes many dance tabulations in which extensive instructions for the steps are lined up next to the musical notes, a significant innovation in dance notation at that time.
He also published on astronomy: "Compot et Manuel Kalendrier, par lequel toutes personnes peuvent facilement apprendre et sçavoir le cours du Soleil et de la Lune et semblablement les festes fixes et mobiles que l’on doit célébrer en l’Eglise, suyvant la correction ordonné par notre Saint Pére Grégoire XIII" [...Calendar, by which all people can easily learn and know the course of the Sun and of the Moon and similarly, the festivals with fixed and moveable dates which one celebrates in Church, according to the correction ordained by our Father Saint Gregory XIII], Langres: Jehan des Preyz, 1582, (cited in "Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon", I (Dijon: Académie de Dijon, 1924), 107).
Thoinot Arbeau was translated into English as "Orchesography" by Cyril W. Beaumont in 1925, and in a modern edition in 1967.
"Branle de l'Official" provided the tune for the 20th century English Christmas carol "Ding Dong Merrily on High". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30525 |
Temple in Jerusalem
The Temple in Jerusalem was any of a series of structures which were located on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, the current site of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. These successive temples stood at this location and functioned as a site of ancient Israelite and later Jewish worship. It is also called the Holy Temple (, Modern: , Tiberian: , Ashkenazi: ; ; : "Betä Mäqdäs").
The Hebrew name given in the Hebrew Bible for the building complex is either "Beit YHWH" "House of YHWH", "Beit HaElohim" "House of God", or simply "Beiti" "my house", "Beitekhah" "your house" etc.
In rabbinical literature the temple is "Beit HaMikdash", "The Sanctified House", and only the Temple in Jerusalem is referred to by this name.
The Hebrew Bible says that the First Temple was built by King Solomon. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, as the sole place of Israelite sacrifice (), the Temple replaced the Tabernacle constructed in the Sinai Desert under the auspices of Moses, as well as local sanctuaries, and altars in the hills. This temple was sacked a few decades later by Shoshenq I, Pharaoh of Egypt.
Although efforts were made at partial reconstruction, it was only in 835 BCE when Jehoash, King of Judah, in the second year of his reign invested considerable sums in reconstruction, only to have it stripped again for Sennacherib, King of Assyria c. 700 BCE. The First Temple was totally destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, when they sacked the city.
According to the Book of Ezra, construction of the Second Temple was called for by Cyrus the Great and began in 538 BCE, after the fall of the Babylonian Empire the year before. According to some 19th-century calculations, work started later, in April 536 BCE (), and was completed in 515 BCE - February 21 - 21 years after the start of the construction. This date is obtained by coordinating (the third day of Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the Great) with historical sources. The accuracy of these dates is contested by modern researchers, who consider the biblical text to be of later date and based on a combination of historical records and religious considerations, leading to contradictions between different books of the Bible and making the dates unreliable. The new temple was dedicated by the Jewish governor Zerubbabel. However, with a full reading of the Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah, there were four edicts to build the Second Temple, which were issued by three kings: Cyrus in 536 BCE (Ezra ch. 1), Darius I of Persia in 519 BCE (ch. 6), and Artaxerxes I of Persia in 457 BCE (ch. 7), and finally by Artaxerxes again in 444 BCE (Nehemiah ch. 2). Also, despite the fact that the new temple was not as extravagant or imposing as its predecessor, it still dominated the Jerusalem skyline and remained an important structure throughout the time of Persian suzerainty.
The temple narrowly avoided being destroyed again in 332 BCE when the Jews refused to acknowledge the deification of Alexander the Great of Macedonia. Alexander was allegedly "turned from his anger" at the last minute by astute diplomacy and flattery. Further, after the death of Alexander on 13 June 323 BCE, and the dismembering of his empire, the Ptolemies came to rule over Judea and the Temple. Under the Ptolemies, the Jews were given many civil liberties and lived content under their rule. However, when the Ptolemaic army was defeated at Panium by Antiochus III of the Seleucids in 200 BCE, this policy changed. Antiochus wanted to Hellenise the Jews, attempting to introduce the Greek pantheon into the temple. Moreover, a rebellion ensued and was brutally crushed, but no further action by Antiochus was taken, and when Antiochus died in 187 BCE at Luristan, his son Seleucus IV Philopator succeeded him. However, his policies never took effect in Judea, since he was assassinated the year after his ascension. Antiochus IV Epiphanes succeeded his older brother to the Seleucid throne and immediately adopted his father's previous policy of universal Hellenisation. The Jews rebelled again and Antiochus, in a rage, retaliated in force. Considering the previous episodes of discontent, the Jews became incensed when the religious observances of Sabbath and circumcision were officially outlawed. When Antiochus erected a statue of Zeus in their temple and Hellenic priests began sacrificing pigs (the usual sacrifice offered to the Greek gods in the Hellenic religion), their anger began to spiral. When a Greek official ordered a Jewish priest to perform a Hellenic sacrifice, the priest (Mattathias) killed him. In 167 BCE, the Jews rose up en masse behind Mattathias and his five sons to fight and win their freedom from Seleucid authority. Mattathias' son Judah Maccabee, now called "The Hammer", re-dedicated the temple in 165 BCE and the Jews celebrate this event to this day as the central theme of the non-biblical festival of Hanukkah. The temple was rededicated under Judah Maccabee in 164 BCE.
During the Roman era, Pompey entered (and thereby desecrated) the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE, but left the Temple intact. In 54 BCE, Crassus looted the Temple treasury, only for him to die the year after at the Battle of Carrhae against Parthia. According to folklore he was executed by having molten gold poured down his throat. When news of this reached the Jews, they revolted again, only to be put down in 43 BCE.
Around 20 BCE, the building was renovated and expanded by Herod the Great, and became known as Herod's Temple. It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE during the Siege of Jerusalem. During the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in 132–135 CE, Simon bar Kokhba and Rabbi Akiva wanted to rebuild the Temple, but bar Kokhba's revolt failed and the Jews were banned from Jerusalem (except for Tisha B'Av) by the Roman Empire. The emperor Julian allowed to have the Temple rebuilt but the Galilee earthquake of 363 ended all attempts ever since.
After the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century, Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan ordered the construction of an Islamic shrine, the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount. The shrine has stood on the mount since 691 CE; the al-Aqsa Mosque, from roughly the same period, also stands in what used to be the Temple courtyard.
The Temple Mount, along with the entire Old City of Jerusalem, was captured from Jordan by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War, allowing Jews once again to visit the holy site. Jordan had occupied East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount immediately following Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. Israel officially unified East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, with the rest of Jerusalem in 1980 under the Jerusalem Law, though United Nations Security Council Resolution 478 declared the Jerusalem Law to be in violation of international law. The Muslim Waqf, based in Jordan, has administrative control of the Temple Mount.
There are three main theories as to where the Temple stood: where the Dome of the Rock is now located, to the north of the Dome of the Rock (Professor Asher Kaufman), or to the east of the Dome of the Rock (Professor Joseph Patrich of the Hebrew University).
The exact location of the Temple is a contentious issue, as elements of questioning the exact placement of the Temple is often associated with Temple denial. Since the Holy of Holies lay at the center of the complex as a whole, the Temple's location is obviously connected with the location of the Holy of Holies. The location of the Temple was even a question less than 150 years after the Second Temple's destruction, as detailed in the Talmud. Chapter 54 of the Tractate Berakhot states that the Holy of Holies was directly aligned with the Golden Gate, which would have placed the Temple slightly to the north of the Dome of the Rock, as Kaufman postulated. However, chapter 54 of the Tractate Yoma and chapter 26 of the Tractate Sanhedrin asserts that the Holy of Holies stood directly on the Foundation Stone, which agrees with the consensus theory that the Dome of the Rock stands on the Temple's location.
The Temple of Solomon or First Temple consisted of three main elements:
In the case of the last and most elaborate structure, the Herodian Temple, the structure consisted of the wider Temple precinct, the restricted Temple courts, and the Temple building itself:
According to the Talmud, the Women's Court was to the east and the main area of the Temple to the west. The main area contained the butchering area for the sacrifices and the Outer Altar on which portions of most offerings were burned. An edifice contained the "ulam" (antechamber), the "hekhal" (the "sanctuary"), and the Holy of Holies. The sanctuary and the Holy of Holies were separated by a wall in the First Temple and by two curtains in the Second Temple. The sanctuary contained the seven branched candlestick, the table of showbread and the Incense Altar.
The main courtyard had thirteen gates. On the south side, beginning with the southwest corner, there were four gates:
On the north side, beginning with the northwest corner, there were four gates:
On the east side was "Shaar Nikanor", between the Women's Courtyard and the main Temple Courtyard, which had two minor doorways, one on its right and one on its left. On the western wall, which was relatively unimportant, there were two gates that did not have any name.
The Mishnah lists concentric circles of holiness surrounding the Temple: Holy of Holies; Sanctuary; Vestibule; Court of the Priests; Court of the Israelites; Court of the Women; Temple Mount; the walled city of Jerusalem; all the walled cities of the Land of Israel; and the borders of the Land of Israel.
The Temple was the place where offerings described in the course of the Hebrew Bible were carried out, including daily morning and afternoon offerings and special offerings on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Levites recited Psalms at appropriate moments during the offerings, including the Psalm of the Day, special psalms for the new month, and other occasions, the Hallel during major Jewish holidays, and psalms for special sacrifices such as the "Psalm for the Thanksgiving Offering" (Psalm 100).
As part of the daily offering, a prayer service was performed in the Temple which was used as the basis of the traditional Jewish (morning) service recited to this day, including well-known prayers such as the Shema, and the Priestly Blessing. The Mishna describes it as follows:
Seder Kodashim, the fifth order, or division, of the Mishnah (compiled between 200–220 CE), provides detailed descriptions and discussions of the religious laws connected with Temple service including the sacrifices, the Temple and its furnishings, as well as the priests who carried out the duties and ceremonies of its service. Tractates of the order deal with the sacrifices of animals, birds, and meal offerings, the laws of bringing a sacrifice, such as the sin offering and the guilt offering, and the laws of misappropriation of sacred property. In addition, the order contains a description of the Second Temple (tractate Middot), and a description and rules about the daily sacrifice service in the Temple (tractate Tamid).
In the Babylonian Talmud, all the tractates have Gemara – rabbinical commentary and analysis – for all their chapters; some chapters of Tamid, and none on Middot and Kinnim. The Jerusalem Talmud has no Gemara on any of the tractates of Kodashim.
The Talmud (Yoma 9b) describes traditional theological reasons for the destruction: "Why was the first Temple destroyed? Because the three cardinal sins were rampant in society: idol worship, licentiousness, and murder… And why then was the second Temple – wherein the society was involved in Torah, commandments and acts of kindness – destroyed? Because gratuitous hatred was rampant in society."
Part of the traditional Jewish morning service, the part surrounding the Shema prayer, is essentially unchanged from the daily worship service performed in the Temple. In addition, the Amidah prayer traditionally replaces the Temple's daily "tamid" and special-occasion "Mussaf" (additional) offerings (there are separate versions for the different types of sacrifices). They are recited during the times their corresponding offerings were performed in the Temple.
The Temple is mentioned extensively in Orthodox services. Conservative Judaism retains mentions of the Temple and its restoration, but removes references to the sacrifices. References to sacrifices on holidays are made in the past tense, and petitions for their restoration are removed. Mentions in Orthodox Jewish services include:
The destruction of the Temple is mourned on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av. Three other minor fasts (Tenth of Tevet, 17th of Tammuz, and Third of Tishrei), also mourn events leading to or following the destruction of the Temple. There are also mourning practices which are observed at all times, for example, the requirement to leave part of the house unplastered.
In his novel The Old New Land, depicting the future Jewish State as he envisioned it, Theodor Herzl - founder of political Zionism - included a depiction of a rebuilt Jerusalem Temple. However, in Herzl's view, the Temple did not need to be built on the precise site where the old Temple stood and which is now taken up by the Muslim Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock - very sensitive holy sites. By locating the Temple at an unspecified different Jerusalem location, the Jewish state envisioned by Herzl avoids the extreme tension over this issue experienced in the actual Israel. Also, worship at the Temple envisioned by Herzl does not involve animal sacrifice, which was the main form of worship at the ancient Jerusalem Temple. Rather, the Temple depicted in Herzl's book is essentially just an especially big and ornate synagogue, holding the same kind of services as any other synagogue.
Jesus predicts the destruction of the Second Temple () and allegorically compares his body to a Temple that will be torn down and raised up again in three days. This idea, of the Temple as the body of Christ, became a rich and multi-layered theme in medieval Christian thought (where Temple/body can be the heavenly body of Christ, the ecclesial body of the Church, and the Eucharistic body on the altar).
The Temple Mount bears significance in Islam as it acted as a sanctuary for the Hebrew prophets and the Israelites. Islamic tradition says that a temple was first built on the Temple Mount by Jacob and later rebuilt by Solomon, the son of David. Traditionally referred to as the "Farthest Mosque" ("al-masjid al-aqṣa' " literally "utmost site of bowing (in worship)" though the term now refers specifically to the mosque in the southern wall of the compound which today is known simply as "al-haram ash-sharīf" "the noble sanctuary"), the site is seen as the destination of Muhammad's nightly travel ("Isrā' "), one of the most significant events recounted in the Quran and the place of his ascent heavenwards thereafter ("Mi'raj").
According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, Jerusalem (i.e., the Temple Mount) has the significance as a holy site/sanctuary ("haram") for Muslims primarily in three ways, the first two being connected to the Temple. First, Muhammad (and his companions) prayed facing the Temple in Jerusalem (referred to as ""Bayt Al-Maqdis"", in the Hadiths) similar to the Jews before changing it to the Kaaba in Mecca sixteen months after arriving in Medina following the verses revealed (Sura 2:144, 149-150). Secondly, during the Meccan part of his life, he reported to have been to Jerusalem by night and prayed in the Temple, as the first part of his otherworldly journey (Isra and Mi'raj).
Imam Abdul Hadi Palazzi, leader of Italian Muslim Assembly, quotes the Quran to support Judaism's special connection to the Temple Mount. According to Palazzi, "The most authoritative Islamic sources affirm the Temples". He adds that Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims because of its prior holiness to Jews and its standing as home to the biblical prophets and kings David and Solomon, all of whom he says are sacred figures in Islam. He claims that the Quran "expressly recognizes that Jerusalem plays the same role for Jews that Mecca has for Muslims".
In his 2007 book, "The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City", Dore Gold calls assertions that the Temple in Jerusalem never existed or was not located on the Mount "Temple Denial". David Hazony has described the phenomenon as "a campaign of intellectual erasure [by Palestinian leaders, writers, and scholars] ... aimed at undermining the Jewish claim to any part of the land" and compared the phenomenon to Holocaust denial.
Archaeological excavations have found remnants of both the First Temple and Second Temple. Among the artifacts of the First Temple are dozens of ritual immersion or baptismal pools in this area surrounding the Temple Mount, as well as a large square platform identified by architectural archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer as likely being built by King Hezekiah c. 700 BCE as a gathering area in front of the Temple.
Possible Second Temple artifacts include the Trumpeting Place inscription and the Temple Warning inscription, which are surviving pieces of the Herodian expansion of the Temple Mount.
Ever since the Second Temple's destruction, a prayer for the construction of a Third Temple has been a formal and mandatory part of the thrice-daily Jewish prayer services. However, the question of whether and when to construct the Third Temple is disputed both within the Jewish community and without; groups within Judaism argue both for and against construction of a new Temple, while the expansion of Abrahamic religion since the 1st century CE has made the issue contentious within Christian and Islamic thought as well. Furthermore, the complicated political status of Jerusalem makes reconstruction difficult, while Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock have been constructed at the traditional physical location of the Temple.
In 363 CE, the Roman emperor Julian had ordered Alypius of Antioch to rebuild the Temple as part of his campaign to strengthen non-Christian religions. The attempt failed, perhaps due to sabotage, an accidental fire, or an earthquake in Galilee.
The Book of Ezekiel prophesies what would be the Third Temple, noting it as an eternal house of prayer and describing it in detail.
A journalistic depiction of the controversies around the Jerusalem Temple was presented in the 2010 documentary "Lost Temple" by Serge Grankin. The film contains interviews with religious and academic authorities involved in the issue. German journalist Dirk-Martin Heinzelmann, featured in the film, presents the point of view of Prof. Joseph Patrich (the Hebrew University), stemming from the underground cistern mapping made by Charles William Wilson (1836-1905). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30526 |
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is an American spy-fiction television series produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television and first broadcast on NBC. The series follows secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who work for a secret international counterespionage and law-enforcement agency called U.N.C.L.E. The series premiered on September 22, 1964, completing its run on January 15, 1968. The program led the spy-fiction craze on television, and by 1966 there were nearly a dozen imitators. Several episodes were successfully released to theaters as B movies or double features. There was also a spin-off series, "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.", novel and comic book series, and merchandising.
With few recurring characters, the series attracted many high-profile guest stars. Props from the series are exhibited at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and at the museums of the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies. The series won the Golden Globe Award for Best TV Show in 1966.
Originally, co-creator Sam Rolfe wanted to leave the meaning of U.N.C.L.E. ambiguous so it could refer to either "Uncle Sam" or the United Nations. Concerns by the MGM legal department about using "U.N." for commercial purposes resulted in the producers' clarification that U.N.C.L.E. was an acronym for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Each episode had an "acknowledgement" to the U.N.C.L.E. in the end titles.
The series consists of 105 episodes originally broadcast between 1964 and 1968, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
and Arena productions. The first season was produced in black and white, the remainder in color.
The first episode was broadcast on September 22, 1964, as part of the Tuesday night NBC lineup, but moved to Monday nights, a half hour earlier, the following January.
Ian Fleming contributed to the concepts after being approached by the show's co-creator, Norman Felton. The book "The James Bond Films" says Fleming proposed two characters, Napoleon Solo and April Dancer (later appearing on the spin-off series "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E."). The original name was "Ian Fleming's Solo." Robert Towne, Sherman Yellen, and Harlan Ellison later wrote scripts for the series. Author Michael Avallone, who wrote the first original novelisation based upon the series (see below), is sometimes incorrectly cited as the show's creator.
Originally, Solo was the focus of the series, but Russian agent Illya Kuryakin drew so much enthusiasm from fans, the agents became a team.
The series centered on a two-man troubleshooting team working for multi-national secret intelligence agency U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement): American Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), and Russian Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum). Leo G. Carroll played Alexander Waverly, the British chief of the organization. Barbara Moore joined the cast as Lisa Rogers in the fourth season.
The series, though fictional, achieved such cultural prominence that props, costumes and documents, and a video clip are in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library's exhibit on spies and counterspies. Similar U.N.C.L.E. exhibits are in the museums of the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies.
U.N.C.L.E.'s primary adversary was THRUSH (WASP in the pilot movie). The original series never divulged who or what THRUSH represented, nor was it ever used as an acronym. In the U.N.C.L.E. novels written by David McDaniel it is the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, described as having been founded by Col. Sebastian Moran after the death of Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Final Problem". But in a second season episode, guest star Jessie Royce Landis plays a character who claims that she founded THRUSH.
THRUSH's aim was to conquer the world. THRUSH was considered so dangerous an organization that even governments who were ideologically opposed to each other – such as the United States and the Soviet Union – had cooperated in forming and operating the U.N.C.L.E. organization. Similarly, when Solo and Kuryakin held opposing political views, the friction between them in the story was held to a minimum. Although executive producer Norman Felton and Ian Fleming conceived Napoleon Solo, it was the producer Sam Rolfe who created the global U.N.C.L.E. hierarchy, and he included the Soviet agent, Illya Kuryakin. Unlike the CIA or MI6, U.N.C.L.E. was a global organization of agents from many countries and cultures.
The creators decided an innocent character would be featured in each episode, giving the audience someone with whom to identify. Despite many changes over four seasons, "innocents" remained a constant – from a suburban housewife in the pilot, "The Vulcan Affair" (film version: "To Trap a Spy"), to those kidnapped in the final episode, "The Seven Wonders of the World Affair."
Filmed in color from late November to early December 1963, with locations at a Lever Brothers soap factory in California, the television pilot made as a 70-minute film was originally titled "Ian Fleming's Solo" and later shortened to "Solo". However, in February 1964 a law firm representing "James Bond" movie producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli demanded an end to the use of Fleming's name in connection with the series and an end to use of the name and character "Solo", "Napoleon Solo" and "Mr. Solo". At that time filming was underway for the "Bond" movie "Goldfinger", in which Martin Benson was playing a supporting character named "Mr. Solo", being an American Mafia boss murdered by the main villain. The claim was the name "Solo" had been sold to them by Fleming, and Fleming could not again use it. Within five days Fleming had signed an affidavit that nothing in the Solo pilot infringed any of his Bond characters, but the threat of legal action resulted in a settlement in which the name Napoleon Solo could be kept but the title of the show had to change.
The role of the head of U.N.C.L.E. in the pilot was Mr. Allison, played by Will Kuluva, rather than Mr. Waverly, played by Leo G. Carroll, and David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin only had a brief role. Revisions to some scenes were shot for television, including those needed to feature Leo G. Carroll. The pilot episode was reedited to 50 minutes to fit a one-hour time slot, converted to black and white, and shown on television as "The Vulcan Affair".
NBC in New York was not happy with the pilot. An executive wanted to drop the Russian character, Illya Kuryakin, from the cast, but he could not remember his name, saying "K– K–". Felton replied "Kuluva?" and the executive replied "That's it." Felton did not argue as he wanted to replace Kuluva anyway. When later asked who the replacement was, Felton replied, "Leo G. Carroll". The executive said that he was too old to replace David McCallum as Solo's sidekick. Felton explained he had replaced Kuluva, and that it was too late to get rid of McCallum, the contracts already having been signed. It has been rumored for years that the executive in question was Grant Tinker, then the husband of Mary Tyler Moore and later chairman of NBC.
Additional color sequences with Luciana Paluzzi were shot in April 1964, and then added to the pilot for MGM to release it outside the United States as a B movie titled "To Trap a Spy". This premiered in Hong Kong in November 1964. The extra scenes were reedited to tone down their sexuality, and then used in the regular series in the episode "The Four-Steps Affair".
Beyond extra scenes for the feature film, and revised scene shots and edits made for the television episode, there are other differences among the three versions of the story. Before the show went into full production there was concern from MGM that the name of THRUSH for the pilot's international criminal organization sounded too much like SMERSH, the international spy-killing organization in Fleming's Bond series. The studio suggested Raven, Shark, Squid, Vulture, Tarantula, Snipe, Sphinx, Dooom, and Maggot (the last used in early scripts). Although no legal action took place, the name was dubbed as "WASP" in the feature version "To Trap a Spy". The original pilot kept THRUSH (presumably since it was not intended to be released to the public in that version). Felton and Rolfe pushed for the reinstatement of "THRUSH". It turned out that WASP could not be used, since Gerry Anderson's British television series "Stingray" was based on an organization called W.A.S.P. (World Aquanaut Security Patrol). By May 1964, THRUSH was retained for the television episode edit of the pilot. Despite this, WASP was used by the feature film in Japan in late 1964, and it was left in the American release in 1966.
Another change among the three versions of the pilot story was the cover name for the character of Elaine May Donaldson. In the original pilot it was Elaine Van Nessen; in the television version and the feature version it was Elaine Van Every. Illya Kuryakin's badge number is 17 in the pilot, rather than 2 during the series, and Solo's hair, after new footage was added, changed back and forth from a slicked back style to the less severe style he wore throughout the series.
With the popularity of the show and the spy craze, "To Trap a Spy" and the second U.N.C.L.E. feature "The Spy with My Face" were released in the United States as an MGM double feature in early 1966.
The show's first season was in black and white. Rolfe created a kind of "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" world, where mundane everyday life would intersect with the looking-glass fantasy of international espionage which lay just beyond. The U.N.C.L.E. universe was one where the weekly "innocent" would get caught up in a series of fantastic adventures, in a battle of good and evil.
U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York City was most-frequently entered by a secret entrance in Del Floria's Tailor Shop. Another entrance was through The Masque Club. Mr. Waverly had his own secret entrance, hinted at in the episode "The Mad, Mad Tea Party Affair." The episodes were largely filmed on the MGM back lot. The same building with an imposing exterior staircase was used for episodes set throughout the Mediterranean area and Latin America, and the same dirt road lined with eucalyptus trees on the back lot in Culver City stood in for virtually every continent of the globe. The episodes followed a naming convention where each title was in the form of "The ***** Affair", such as "The Vulcan Affair", "The Mad, Mad, Tea Party Affair", and "The Waverly Ring Affair", etc. The only exception was "Alexander the Greater Affair". The first season episode "The Green Opal Affair" establishes that U.N.C.L.E. uses the term "affair" to refer to its different missions.
Rolfe endeavored to make the implausible elements in the series seem not only feasible but entertaining. In the series, frogmen emerge from wells in Iowa, shootouts occur between U.N.C.L.E. and THRUSH agents in a crowded Manhattan movie theater, and top-secret organizations are hidden behind innocuous brownstone facades. The series began to dabble in science-fiction plots, beginning with "The Double Affair" in which a THRUSH agent, made to look like Solo through plastic surgery, infiltrates a secret U.N.C.L.E. facility where an immensely powerful weapon called "Project Earthsave" is stored; according to the dialogue, the weapon was developed to protect against a potential alien threat to Earth. "The Spy with My Face" was the theatrical film version of this episode.
In its first season "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." competed against "The Red Skelton Show" on CBS and Walter Brennan's short-lived "The Tycoon" on ABC. During this time producer Norman Felton told Alan Caillou and several of the series writers to make the show more tongue in cheek.
Switching to color, "U.N.C.L.E." continued to enjoy huge popularity. When Rolfe left the show at the conclusion of the first season, David Victor became the new showrunner. Over the next three seasons, five different showrunners would supervise the "U.N.C.L.E." franchise, and each one took the show in a direction that differed considerably from that of the first season. In an attempt to emulate the success of ABC's mid-season hit "Batman", which had proved hugely popular with its debut in early 1966, "U.N.C.L.E." moved swiftly towards self-parody and slapstick. In contrast to other seasons, the fourth and final season had a recurring female character, Lisa Rogers, played by Barbara Moore in ten episodes.
During the third season the producers made a conscious decision to increase the level of humor. This new direction resulted in a severe ratings drop, and nearly resulted in the show's cancellation. It was renewed for a fourth season and an attempt was made to go back to serious storytelling, but the ratings never recovered and "U.N.C.L.E." was cancelled midway through the season.
The series was popular enough to generate a spin-off series, "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." (1966–67) The "girl" was first introduced during "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." episode "The Moonglow Affair" (February 25, 1966) and was then played by Mary Ann Mobley. The spin-off series ran for one season, starring Stefanie Powers as agent "April Dancer", a character name credited to Ian Fleming, and Noel Harrison as agent Mark Slate (who had been played substantially differently by actor Norman Fell in the pilot). There was some crossover between the two shows, and Leo G. Carroll played Mr. Waverly in both programs, becoming the second actor in American television to star as the same character in two separate series.
A reunion telefilm, "Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E." subtitled "The Fifteen Years Later Affair," was broadcast on CBS in America on April 5, 1983, with Vaughn and McCallum reprising their roles, and Patrick Macnee replacing Leo G. Carroll, who had died in 1972, as the head of U.N.C.L.E. A framed picture of Carroll appeared on his desk. The movie included a tribute to Ian Fleming via a cameo appearance by an unidentified secret agent with the initials "JB". The part was played by George Lazenby who was shown driving James Bond's trademark vehicle, an Aston Martin DB5. One character, identifying him, says that it is "just like "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"", which was Lazenby's only Bond film.
The movie, written by Michael Sloan and directed by Ray Austin, briefly filled in the missing years. THRUSH had been put out of business, and the escape of its leader from prison begins the story. Solo and Kuryakin, who had retired, are recalled by U.N.C.L.E. to recapture the escapee and defeat THRUSH once and for all. Rather than reuniting the agents and recapturing their chemistry, however, the agents are separated and paired with younger agents. Like most similar reunion films, this production was considered a trial balloon for a possible new series which never materialized.
Although some personnel from the original series were involved (like composer Gerald Fried and director of photography Fred Koenekamp), the movie was not produced by MGM but by Michael Sloan Productions in association with Viacom Productions.
The theme music, written by Jerry Goldsmith, changed slightly each season. Goldsmith provided only three original scores and was succeeded by Morton Stevens, who composed four scores for the series. After Stevens, Walter Scharf did six scores, and Lalo Schifrin did two. Gerald Fried was composer from season two through the beginning of season four. The final composers were Robert Drasnin (who also scored episodes of "", as did Schifrin, Scharf, and Fried), Nelson Riddle (whose score for the two-part episode "The Concrete Overcoat Affair" was so loathed by Norman Felton that he never hired the composer again, although the music did get tracked into other third-season episodes), and Richard Shores.
The music reflected the show's changing seasons. Goldsmith, Stevens, and Scharf composed dramatic scores in the first season using brass, unusual time signatures and martial rhythms. Gerald Fried and Robert Drasnin opted for a lighter approach in the second, employing harpsichords and bongos. By the third season, the music, like the show, had become more camp, exemplified by an R&B organ and saxophone version of the theme. The fourth season's attempt at seriousness was duly echoed by Richard Shores' somber scores.
Apart from Solo, Kuryakin and Waverly, very few recurring characters appeared on the show with any regularity. As a result, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." featured many high-profile guest performers during its three-and-a-half-year run.
William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy appeared together in a 1964 episode, "The Project Strigas Affair", a full two years before "" premiered. Shatner played a heroic civilian recruited for an U.N.C.L.E. mission, and Nimoy played the villain's henchman. The villain was portrayed by Werner Klemperer. James Doohan appeared in multiple episodes, each time as a different character.
Barbara Feldon played an U.N.C.L.E. translator eager for field work in "The Never-Never Affair", one year before becoming one of the stars of "Get Smart." Robert Culp played the villain in 1964's "The Shark Affair". Leigh Chapman appeared in a recurring role as Napoleon Solo's secretary, Sarah, for several episodes in 1965.
Woodrow Parfrey appeared five times as a guest performer, although he never received an opening-title credit. Usually cast as a scientist, he played the primary villain in one episode, "The Cherry Blossom Affair". Another five-time guest star was Jill Ireland, who at the time was married to David McCallum. Ricardo Montalbán appeared in two episodes as the primary villain. "The Five Daughters Affair" featured a cameo appearance by Joan Crawford. Janet Leigh and Jack Palance appeared in "The Concrete Overcoat Affair" and Sonny and Cher made an appearance in the third season episode "The Hot Number Affair". Other notable guest stars included: Richard Anderson, Eve Arden, Whitney Blake, Joan Blondell, Lloyd Bochner, Judy Carne, Roger C. Carmel, Ted Cassidy, Joan Collins, Walter Coy, Yvonne Craig, Broderick Crawford, Kim Darby, Albert Dekker, Ivan Dixon, Chad Everett, Anne Francis, Grayson Hall, Pat Harrington Jr., James Hong, Allen Jenkins, Patsy Kelly, Richard Kiel, Marta Kristen, Elsa Lanchester, Martin Landau, Angela Lansbury, Julie London, Jack Lord, Lynn Loring, Jan Murray, Leslie Nielsen, William Marshall, Eve McVeagh, Carroll O'Connor, David Opatoshu, Leslie Parrish, Eleanor Parker, Slim Pickens, Vincent Price, Dorothy Provine, Cesar Romero, Charles Ruggles, Kurt Russell, Telly Savalas, Nancy Sinatra, Guthrie Thomas, Terry-Thomas, Rip Torn, Fritz Weaver, and Elen Willard (in her last acting appearance).
The characters in the series had a range of useful spy equipment, including handheld satellite communicators. A catchphrase often heard was "Open Channel D" when agents used their pocket radios; these were originally disguised as cigarette packs, later as cigarette cases, and still later as fountain pens. One of the original pen communicator props is now in the museum of the CIA. Replicas have been made over the years for other displays, and this is the second-most-identifiable prop from the series (closely following the U.N.C.L.E. Special pistol).
A few of the third-and fourth-season episodes featured an "U.N.C.L.E. car", which was a modified "Piranha Coupe", a plastic-bodied concept car based on the Chevrolet Corvair chassis built in limited numbers by the custom car designer Gene Winfield. The U.N.C.L.E. car had been lost after the end of the TV series, but it was found in Colorado during the early 1980s, and it was restored to original condition by Oscar-winning special effects artist Robert Short of California.
One prop, designed by the toy designer Reuben Klamer often referred to as "The Gun", drew so much attention that it actually spurred considerable fan mail, and was often so addressed. Internally designated the "U.N.C.L.E. Special", it was a modular semiautomatic weapon. The basic pistol could be converted into a longer-range carbine by attaching a long barrel, an extendable shoulder stock, a telescopic sight, and an extended magazine. In this "carbine mode", the pistol could fire on full automatic. This capability brought authorities to the set to investigate reports that the studio was illegally manufacturing machine guns. They threatened to confiscate the prop guns and it took a tour of the prop room to convince them that these were actually "dummy" pistols incapable of firing live ammunition. The actual pistol used as the prop was the Mauser Model 1934 Pocket Pistol, but it was unreliable, it jammed constantly, and it was dwarfed by the carbine accessories. It was soon replaced by the larger and more-reliable Walther P38.
The long magazine was actually a standard magazine with a dummy extension, but it inspired several small-arms manufacturers to begin making long magazines for various pistols. While many of these continue to be available 40 years later, long magazines were not available for the P38 for some years.
THRUSH had a range of weaponry of its own, much of them only in the development stage before being destroyed by the heroes. A notable item was the infrared sniperscope, enabling villains to aim gunfire in total darkness. The prop was built from a U.S. Army-surplus M1 carbine, with a vertical foregrip and barrel compensator, and using army-surplus infrared scopes. The infrared special effect was achieved using a searchlight to illuminate the target. The viewfinder image was a negative version of the film. When the scopes were switched on a pulsing chirp sound effect was used. The fully equipped carbines were seen only once, in "The Iowa Scuba Affair". After that, a mockup of the scope was used to make handling easier.
German small arms were well represented in the series. Not only were P38s frequently seen (both as the U.N.C.L.E. Special and in standard configuration), but also the Luger P-08 pistol. In the pilot episode "The Vulcan Affair", Illya Kuryakin is carrying a standard U.S. Army .45 caliber pistol. The "Broomhandle" Mauser carbines and MP 40 machine pistols were favored by opponents. U.N.C.L.E. also used the MP 40. Beginning in the third season, both U.N.C.L.E and THRUSH agents used rifles that were either the Spanish CETME or the Heckler & Koch G3 (based on the CETME).
Emmy Awards
Golden Globe Awards
Grammy Awards
Logie Awards
"The Man From U.N.C.L.E." rated so highly in America and the UK that MGM and the producers decided to film extra footage (often more adult to evoke Bond films) for two of the first season episodes and release them to theaters after they had aired on TV. The episodes with the extra footage that made it to theaters were the original pilot, "The Vulcan Affair", retitled "To Trap a Spy" and "The Double Affair" retitled as "The Spy with My Face". Both had added sex and violence, new sub-plots and guest stars not in the original TV episodes. They were released in early 1966 as an "U.N.C.L.E." double-feature program first run in neighborhood theaters, bypassing the customary downtown movie palaces which were still thriving in the mid-1960s and where new movies usually played for weeks or months before coming to outlying screens.
A selling point to seeing these films theatrically was that they were being shown in color, at a time when most people had only black and white TVs (and indeed the two first-season episodes that were expanded to feature length, while filmed in color, had only been broadcast in black and white). The words "in color" featured prominently on the trailers, TV spots, and posters for the film releases. The episodes used to make U.N.C.L.E. films were not included in the packages of television episodes screened outside the United States.
Subsequent two-part episodes, beginning with the second season premiere, "Alexander The Greater Affair", retitled "One Spy Too Many" for its theatrical release, were developed into one complete feature film with only occasional extra sexy and violent footage added to them, sometimes as just inserts. In the case of "One Spy Too Many," a subplot featuring Yvonne Craig as an U.N.C.L.E. operative carrying on a flirtatious relationship with Solo was also added to the film; Craig does not appear in the television episodes.
The later films were not released in America, only overseas, but the first few did well in American theaters and remain one of the rare examples of a television show released in paid theatrical engagements. With the exception of the two-part episode "The Five Daughters Affair", shown as part of Granada Plus's run of the series, the episodes which became movies have never aired on British television.
The films in the series:
A film adaptation of the television series was produced by Warner Bros. and Turner Entertainment, and was released in 2015. Directed by Guy Ritchie, the film stars Armie Hammer, Henry Cavill, and Hugh Grant as Kuryakin, Solo, and Waverly, respectively. Filming began in September 2013, and the movie was released on August 14, 2015. The film received generally positive reviews.
Although album recordings of the series had been made by Hugo Montenegro and many orchestras covered versions of the title theme, it wasn't until 2002 that the first of three double-disc albums of original music from the series were released through "Film Score Monthly" (FSM).
FSM also released a disc of music specifically written for the feature film versions of series episodes. "One Of Our Spies Is Missing" and "The Karate Killers" are strongly represented, due to the original TV episodes – "The Bridge Of Lions Affair" and "The Five Daughters Affair" respectively – having been tracked with music written for other episodes.
Several comic books based on the series were published. In the US, there was a Gold Key Comics series which ran for twenty-two issues. Entertainment Publishing released an eleven-issue series of one- and two-part stories from January 1987 to September 1988 that updated U.N.C.L.E. to the 1980s, while largely ignoring the reunion TV-movie. A two-part comics story, "The Birds of Prey Affair", was put out by Millennium Publications in 1993, which showcased the return of a smaller, more-streamlined version of THRUSH, controlled by Dr. Egret, who had melded with the Ultimate Computer. The script was written by Mark Ellis and Terry Collins, with artwork by Nick Choles, and transplanted the characters into the 1990s.
Two "Man from U.N.C.L.E." strips were originated for the British market in the 1960s (some Gold Key material was also reprinted), the most notable for "Lady Penelope" comic, which launched in January 1966. This was replaced by a "Girl from U.N.C.L.E." strip in January 1967. "Man from U.N.C.L.E." also featured in the short-lived title "Solo" (published between February and September 1967) and some text stories appeared in "TV Tornado".
In 2015–2016, DC Comics launched "Batman '66 Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E.", a crossover with its "Batman '66" series.
Licensed merchandise included a "Man from U.N.C.L.E." digest-sized story magazine, board games, Gilbert action figures, Aurora plastic model kits, lunch boxes, and toy guns.
An example of this, the Louis Marx "Target Gun Set", a dart-gun shooting-game released in the form of a quasi-playset, is built around the setting of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York City. Art on the cardboard stand displays both the U.N.C.L.E. and THRUSH logos, and a half-dozen soft plastic figures per "side" were provided, including Solo, Kuryakin and Waverly. The game measures ; the figures, at , represent one of the few attempts Marx made at supplementing its 6-inch figure line. The U.N.C.L.E. figures are cast in blue, except for a single (unnamed) figure in tan; THRUSH agents are cast in gray. Marx was released an arcade game licensed under "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
Corgi Toys produced a die-cast model of the "Thrushbuster", an Oldsmobile Super 88, with figures of 'Napoleon Solo' and 'Illya Kuryakin' which popped in and out of the car windows firing guns by pressing down on a model periscope protruding through the roof.
Two dozen novels were based upon "Man from U.N.C.L.E." and published between 1965 and 1968. Unhampered by television censors, the novels were generally grittier and more violent than the televised episodes. The series sold in the millions, and was the largest TV-novel tie-in franchise until surpassed by "Dark Shadows" and "Star Trek".
Volumes 10–15 and 17 of the series were only published in the United States.
"The Rainbow Affair" is notable for unnamed cameos by The Saint, Miss Marple, John Steed, Emma Peel, Willie Garvin, Tommy Hambledon, Neddie Seagoon, Father Brown, a retired Sherlock Holmes (aged nearly 100), and Dr. Fu Manchu.
Whitman Books published three hardcover novels aimed at young readers: "The Affair of the Gunrunners' Gold" and "The Affair of the Gentle Saboteur" by Brandon Keith, and "The Calcutta Affair" by George S. Elrick. The first two broke the "...Affair" naming convention used by the franchise on most other TV episodes and book releases.
A children's storybook was written by Walter B. Gibson entitled "The Coin of El Diablo Affair".
The digest-sized "Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine" featured original novellas continuing the adventures of Solo and Kuryakin. Published under the house name "Robert Hart Davis", they were written by such authors as John Jakes, Dennis Lynds, and Bill Pronzini. 24 issues, which also offered original crime and spy-fiction short stories and novelettes, and occasional SF and fantasy reprints under the title "Department of Lost Stories", ran monthly from February 1966 to January 1968. An additional novella entitled "The Vanishing City Affair" was advertised on page 140 of the January 1968 issue for the proposed (but never published) February 1968 issue. It is as yet unconfirmed, however, if this novella was shelved for possible future release elsewhere or if it was ever written at all.
Three science-fiction novels appear to be rewrites of "orphaned" U.N.C.L.E. novel outlines or manuscripts: "Genius Unlimited" by John Rackham (a pseudonym of Phillifent), "The Arsenal Out of Time" by McDaniel, and "Agent Of T.E.R.R.A. #1: The Flying Saucer Gambit" by Jack Jardine (writing as Larry Maddock).
There have been four TV Annuals published in UK between 1967 and 1970 by World Distributors which features written stories and reprint of a Gold Key story which were never published in the UK.
In November 2007, after coming to an agreement with Warner Home Video, Time-Life released a 41 DVD set (region 1) for direct order, with sales through stores scheduled for fall 2008. An earlier release by Anchor Bay, allegedly set for 2006, was apparently scuttled because of a dispute over the rights to the series with Warner Home Video.
On October 21, 2008, the Time-Life set was released to retail outlets in Region 1 (North America) in a special all-seasons box set contained within a small briefcase. The complete-series set consists of 41 DVDs, including two discs of special features included exclusively with the box set. Included in the set was the "Solo" pilot episode, as well as one of the films, "One Spy Too Many". Paramount Pictures and CBS Home Entertainment released "Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E." to DVD in Region 1 on March 3, 2009.
On August 23, 2011, Warner Archive Collection released "The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 8-Movie Collection" on DVD via their "manufacture on demand" service. On November 4, 2014, Warner Home Video released the complete series set on DVD in Region 1 in a new repackaged version. On August 4, 2015, Warner Home Video released an individual release of season 1 on DVD in Region 1. Season 2 was released on February 2, 2016.
In Region 2, Warner Bros. released the complete series set on DVD in the UK. They also released a separate movie collection on September 8, 2003. The DVD contains five of the eight movies, missing the following: "To Trap a Spy" (1964), "The Spy in the Green Hat" (1966) and "One of Our Spies is Missing" (1966).
On March 26, 2012, Fabulous Films released "Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E." on Region 2 DVD.
In 1967, MGM released a theatrical "Tom & Jerry" short produced and directed by Chuck Jones titled "The Mouse from H.U.N.G.E.R." paid homage to the show, with Jerry as a secret agent tasked with the mission of retrieving a sizeable stash of cheese from the villainous Tom Thrush (portrayed by Tom).
References to the show in popular culture began during its original broadcast when it was parodied in an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," fittingly titled "The Man from My Uncle". References in other television shows have continued over the years, including a 2010 episode of "Mad Men" called "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword". It has also been referenced in other television shows including "Get Smart," "Angry Beavers," and "Laugh-In."
The TV show "My Favorite Martian" (1963–1966) also used CRUSH as the name of the evil spy organization, spoofing THRUSH in two episodes. In the season two episode "006 3/4", Tim finds a distress note from Agent 006 of Top Secret, who is being tracked by CRUSH. Top Secret asks Tim to assist Agent 004, to save 006. In the season three episode "Butterball" Uncle Martin must rescue Tim who is kidnapped by Butterball.
A 1966 episode of "The Avengers" was titled "The Girl from AUNTIE".
In a 1966 episode of the sitcom "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" titled "Say UNCLE", the young twins are fans of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and become convinced that their father Jim is a secret agent. In one scene, they watch Jim emerge from a tailor shop similar to Del Floria's. Another man entering the shop asks Jim for a match, and Jim gives him his matchbook. The boys are astonished, because the other man is David McCallum, identified in the ending credits as Illya Kuryakin; they believe their father has just passed a secret message to the "real-life" Illya Kuryakin. The scene ends with the "U.N.C.L.E" scene transition: the action freezes and goes out of focus.
It was also referenced in Glad commercials in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which starred the "Man from GLAD", a trenchcoat-wearing agent who flew around in his combination boat/helicopter demonstrating Glad products to suburban housewives and saving the day.
In 1970, a "secret agent" theme was used by Australian confectionery manufacturer Allen's to market their Anticol cough lozenges, with TV commercials running under the title "The Man From A.N.T.I.C.O.L.", featuring agent "Napoleon Brandy" combatting illnesses being spread by the agents of S.L.A.S.H.
In a late 1986 episode of "The A-Team," Robert Vaughn – who had been added to the show's cast as mysterious retired agent for the show's final season, as part of an effort to revive flagging ratings – was reunited with guest star David McCallum, in an episode entitled "The 'Say U.N.C.L.E.' Affair". This story paid homage to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," complete with chapter titles, the word "affair" in the title, the phrase "Open Channel D", similar scene transitions, and much mention of Vaughn's and McCallum's respective characters having once worked closely together as agents. But in this story, McCallum's agent had turned villainous, selling out to the enemy and now capturing Vaughn to try to find out the whereabouts of a Soviet jet fighter.
Beginning in 2003, McCallum starred in the CBS television series "NCIS" as Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, M.D., a medical examiner. During the episode "The Meat Puzzle" (season 2, episode 13), as an inside joke, NCIS agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) is asked, "What did Ducky look like when he was younger?" Gibbs responds, "Illya Kuryakin". The photo supposedly of a younger Ducky is actually a promotional photo from McCallum's "Man from U.N.C.L.E." days.
On the fifth episode of the fourth season of "Mad Men" (2010), "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", as Sally Draper is watching an episode of the show at a sleepover, she is caught by her friend's mother absent-mindedly masturbating (apparently to David McCallum's Illya) while staring at the television. The episode shown is approximately correct for the year and month (March 1965) the "Mad Men" episode is set in.
"" was a British television comedy series written and performed by Ben Elton. The title of the series was a play on words of both the American spy series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Auntie", an informal name for the BBC.
A scene from "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." is shown in the HBO movie "Temple Grandin," the biographical movie about the high-functioning autistic woman who overcame many of her symptoms to acquire a Ph.D. in Animal Sciences, and in an early scene from the film, Claire Danes, who played Grandin in the film, repeated a line from the episode "The Gazebo in the Maze Affair": "Would you like for me to open the gate?"
The TV show was mentioned in the 2019 film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". There's a scene where Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is told by casting agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) that due to Dalton playing the heavy in weekly television, he'll get typecasted to play the heavy in other media.
A colorful whip pan shot, similar to the TV show scene transitions, appears in before the ticket-to-Okinawa and ticket-to-Japan scenes. Chapter Four is also titled "The MAN From Okinawa".
Gold Key Comics released comic book series based on The Man from U.N.C.L.E in 1965 - 1969 and it ran for 22 issues.
The 1965–1969 comic book series T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) (Tower Comics), a strange combination of secret agents and superheroes, was inspired by the success of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E".
The Marvel Universe spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Marvel Universe terror society HYDRA (both created in 1965) were inspired by the "Man From U.N.C.L.E." television program.
"The Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E." was a "Man From U.N.C.L.E." parody in Archie Comics published in 1966–1967. The comic portrayed Archie and the gang as a group of high-tech spies, as part of world-defense organization P.O.P. (an acronym for Protect our Planet). Their chief enemy was a counter-group known as C.R.U.S.H. (a spoof on THRUSH but whose acronym was never explained). Although Reggie, Veronica and Moose were initially cast as C.R.U.S.H. agents, they later became members of P.O.P. All the characters also had undefined acronyms for names (A.R.C.H.I.E., B.E.T.T.Y., etc.). R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. stood for "Really Impressive Vast Enterprise for Routing Dangerous Adversaries, Louts, Etc."
Ted Mark's "The Man from O.R.G.Y." ("Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth") series of erotic fiction paperback originals (Lancer Books) was a take-off of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E". The series ran from 1965 to 1981 and inspired a 1970 film. Another 34-title "The Man from O.R.G.Y." series was published by Paperback Library from 1967 to 1973. Another similar title was "The Man from S.T.U.D.", by F. W. Paul (Paul W. Fairman), which published 11 titles between 1968 and 1971. Rod Gray's "Lady from L.U.S.T." (League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists) erotic fiction novels were a take-off of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E"; 25 books in the series were published between 1968 and 1975. Other similar pastiche paperback series included "The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T.", "The Miss from S.I.S.", "The Man from S.A.D.I.S.T.O.", "The Man from P.A.N.S.Y.", and "The Girl from H.A.R.D."
"Lyra and Bon Bon and the Mares From S.M.I.L.E." is an upcoming title in the "" chapter books published by Little, Brown, and Company, to be released in March 2016.
Musical examples include the song "Man Called Uncle" from Elvis Costello's 1980 album "Get Happy!!" and an Argentinian funk duo who took the name Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas honoring the fictitious spy. Alma Cogan paid a similar tribute to the Russian agent in her single "Love Ya Illya", released in 1966 under the pseudonym "Angela and the Fans". In the 1980s, The Cleaners from Venus penned "Ilya Kuryakin Looked at Me"; the song was later covered by The Jennifers. The English 2 Tone band The Specials made an instrumental song called "Napoleon Solo". It was also the name of a Danish 2 Tone band. Space–surf band Man or Astro-man? covered the theme song for their 1994 EP "Astro Launch". Man or Astro-man are instrumental, not surf however. The British trip-hop group U.N.K.L.E. derive their name from the show.
The protagonist in the spy-fi video games "" (2000) and "" (2002) works for an organization known as U.N.I.T.Y. The villains in both games work for an organization known as H.A.R.M. In the first game the main character (Cate Archer) overhears two H.A.R.M. guards talking about how they thought Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a good show.
The video game "Team Fortress 2" (2007) has an achievement referencing the show, named "The Man From P.U.N.C.T.U.R.E."
The fourth episode of the Paperback Warrior podcast focuses on "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." novels and their impact on the spy-fiction genre. The show's co-host, Tom Simon, discusses both Michael Avalone's "The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (a.k.a. The Thousand Coffin Affair)" novel as well as Harry Whittington's "The Doomsday Affair". Additionally, the co-host points to many successful authors contributing to the series' novels and novellas and suggests a three-book series entitled "The Man from W.A.R." by Michael Kurland was directly influenced by "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." series. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30527 |
Taiwanese cuisine
Taiwanese cuisine (, or ) has several variations. In addition to the following representative dishes from the majority Hoklo, there are also indigenous Taiwanese peoples, Hakka, Waishengren, and local derivatives of Japanese cuisine, as well as other types of Chinese cuisine from outside Taiwan or Fujian.
Taiwanese cuisine itself is often associated with influences from mid to southern provinces of mainland China, most notably from the south of Fujian (Hokkien) which often leads to it being classified or grouped with 'Southern Fujianese cuisine'. However, influences from all of mainland China can easily be found after the Kuomintang retreat to the island which brought along many mainland Chinese cuisines. A notable Japanese influence also exists due to the period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. Traditional Chinese food can be found in Taiwan, alongside Fujian and Hakka-style as well as native Taiwanese dishes, including dishes from Guangdong, Jiangxi, Chaoshan, Shanghai, Hunan, Sichuan and Beijing.
Taiwanese culinary history is murky and is intricately tied to patterns of migration and colonization. Both locally and internationally Taiwanese cuisine, particularly its history, is a politically contentious topic. Pork, seafood, chicken, rice, and soy are common ingredients. Beef is far less common, and some Taiwanese (particularly the elderly generation) still refrain from eating it. A traditional reluctance towards slaughtering precious cattle needed for agriculture, and an emotional attachment and feeling of gratitude and thanks to the animals traditionally used for very hard labor. However, due to influences from the influx of out of province Chinese in the early 1900s, the Taiwanese version of beef noodle soup is now one of the most popular dishes in Taiwan. American food aid in the decades following WWII which primarily consisted of wheat, beef, and spam like processed meats forever changed the Taiwanese diet with wheat based noodles, breads, and dumplings taking a more central role in the cuisine.
During the Japanese Colonial period Taiwanese cuisine was divided with high-end restaurants, known as wine houses, serving Chinese influenced cuisine such as Peking duck, shark fin with bird’s nest soup and braised turtle to the colonial elite while those without wealth or connections primarily ate rice, porridge, pickled vegetables, and sweet potato leaves. Cooking oil was considered a luxury and was only used for special occasions.
Taiwan's cuisine has also been influenced by its geographic location. Living on a crowded island, the Taiwanese had to look aside from the farmlands for sources of protein. As a result, seafood figures prominently in their cuisine. This seafood encompasses many different things, from large fish such as tuna and grouper, to sardines and even smaller fish such as anchovies. Crustaceans, squid and cuttlefish are also eaten.
Because of the island's sub-tropical location, Taiwan has an abundant supply of various fruit, such as papayas, starfruit, melons, and citrus fruit. A wide variety of tropical fruits, imported and native, are also enjoyed in Taiwan. Other agricultural products in general are rice, corn, tea, pork, poultry, beef, fish and other fruits and vegetables. Fresh ingredients in Taiwan are readily available from markets.
In many of their dishes, the Taiwanese have shown their creativity in their selection of spices. Taiwanese cuisine relies on an abundant array of seasonings for flavor: soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, fermented black beans, pickled radish, pickled mustard greens, peanuts, chili peppers, cilantro (sometimes called Chinese parsley), and a local variety of basil ().
An important part of Taiwanese cuisine are "xiaochi", substantial snacks along the lines of Spanish tapas or Levantine meze.
The Taiwanese "xiaochi" has gained much reputation internationally. Many travelers go to Taiwan just for xiǎochī. The most common place to enjoy xiǎochī in Taiwan is in a night market. Each night market also has its own famous xiǎochī.
Moreover, the Taiwanese xiǎochī has been improving to a higher level. Nowadays, Taiwanese xiǎochī not only served in night markets but some luxury and high-end restaurants. These restaurants use higher quality ingredients and creative presentations, reinventing dishes whilst keeping the robust flavors. The prices usually jump by twice the price or even higher in the restaurants. The Taiwanese government supports the Taiwanese xiǎochī and has held national xiǎochī events in Taiwan regularly.
Vegetarian restaurants are commonplace with a wide variety of dishes, mainly due to the influence of Buddhism and other syncretistic religions like I-Kuan Tao. These vegetarian restaurants vary in style from all-you-can-eat to pay-by-the-weight and of course the regular order-from-a-menu.
There is a type of outdoor barbecue called . To barbecue in this manner, one first builds a hollow pyramid up with dirt clods. Next, charcoal or wood is burnt inside until the temperature inside the pyramid is very high (the dirt clods should be glowing red). The ingredients to be cooked, such as taro, yam, or chicken, are placed in cans, and the cans are placed inside the pyramid. Finally, the pyramid is toppled over the food until cooked.
Many non-dessert dishes are usually considered snacks, not entrees; that is, they have a similar status to Cantonese dim sum or Spanish tapas. Such dishes are usually only slightly salted, with lots of vegetables along with the main meat or seafood item.
Taiwan's best-known snacks are present in the night markets, where street vendors sell a variety of different foods, from finger foods, drinks, sweets, to sit-down dishes. In these markets, one can also find fried and steamed meat-filled buns, oyster-filled omelets, refreshing fruit ices, and much more. Aside from snacks, appetizers, entrees, and desserts, night markets also have vendors selling clothes, accessories, and offer all kinds of entertainment and products.
In 2014 The Guardian called Taiwan’s night markets the "best street food markets in the world.”
Taiwan's food and food culture is very much diversified and largely influenced by the exodus of Han people. However, one part of the Taiwanese food culture that remains integral is that of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples. Though the indigenous population only make up less than 2% of Taiwan's overall population, it is notable that their foods eaten and ways of preparation are distinguishable from the more typical Chinese-influenced cuisine.
The aborigines’ diet very much depends on nature. With profuse vegetation and wild animals, the aborigines were natural hunter-gatherers. Essentially, much of what Aborigines ate depended on their environment – that is, whether they lived in coastal or mountainous areas. Tribes like Amis, Atayal, Saisiyat and Bunun hunt what they can, and gather what they cultivate. On the other hand, tribes like the Yamis and the Thao have fish as a predominant source of food. Most foods consisted of millet, taro, sweet potato, wild greens and game like boar and rat. This is in contrast to the main foods eaten by the Han, which consisted of rice and chicken.
Game meats for those living in the mountainous areas include deer, and flying squirrel intestines, a delicacy as regarded by the Bunun people. Another is ‘stinky’ meat – that is, ‘maggoty game’ that has begun to rot, which is then barbecued, fried, seasoned with garlic and ginger then served with spicy sauce.
The Amis, apart from meat, had much greens to eat, largely due to the belief that anything a cow ate, was also edible by humans. The Bununs, who are primarily hunters of wild animals, would dine on stone-grilled pork, boar, deer, and hog roast. The Yami tribe, located off Taitung coast, fed on many types of fish, including the prized ‘flying fish’ (or Alibangbang). A speciality includes rice, mixed with river fish and wild vegetables, served in large bamboo trunks.
Apart from being a staple-food, millet was always produced as wine. Not just for drinking, millet wine played an important role in being used as offerings during festivals, births and weddings. Millet wines are all made in the homes of the Aborigines. Sticky rice is put into a wooden steamer after being soaked in water. Once cooled, the rice is put into a pot of water, then pulled out and combined with rice yeast. After four or five days of being placed in a large jar, the rice is placed in a sieve or rice bag, whilst the alcoholic liquid drips out and is stored away.
Also important to the Indigenous Taiwanese people's cuisine are the sweet potato and taro, favored for their perennial nature and low maintenance. The cultivation of root vegetables rather than typical seedling plants was notably prominent, with archaeological evidence suggesting as early as fourth millennium BC, from the Dapenkeng site, in Guanyin Mountain, New Taipei City.
Given the versatility of both vegetables, they were usually boiled or steamed, and eaten by itself or as ingredients in soups and strews. Without the need for advanced agricultural technology, taro and sweet potatoes were a prime preference for farming. Canadian missionary George MacKay said of 19th century Taiwan: ‘the bulb of the sweet potato is planted in March. In about six weeks the vines are cut into pieces eight inches long, which are planted in drills, and from these vine-cuttings the bulbs grow and are ripe about the end of June. A second crop is planted in a similar way in July and is ripe in November.’ (Ibid). The influence of sweet potatoes and taro has been vast. They are still widely present in modern-day Taiwan, be it on the streets, night markets, or in successful food chains like ‘Meet Fresh’ (or 鮮芋仙).
Due to the absence of contemporary culinary utensils such as the refrigerator, gas stovetops and ovens, the Indigenous resorted to other means to prepare their food. Upon bringing back hunted game meat, the Aborigines would preserve the meat with either millet wine or salt. Another cooking technique involved the heating up of stones by fire, which are then placed inside a vessel with other certain meats and seafood, which are cooked from the heat of the stones. Foods were mostly prepared by steaming, boiling or roasting, in order to infuse flavors together, yet preserve the original flavors. This again is contrasted with the Han, who adopted skills like stir-frying and stewing. Meat was also put on a bamboo spit and cooked over the fire.
A cookbook published in 2000 by the CIP and National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism, listed some foods of the main Taiwanese Aboriginal tribes, showing the Aborigines’ adherence and passion for natural foods.
Though Taiwan is home to many cuisines, there are still restaurants which keep the spirit of Aborigine cuisine alive. Whilst chefs in such restaurants may need to tweak traditional recipes to suit contemporary tastebuds, emphasis of natural foods is still extant. The annual Indigenous Peoples Healthy Cuisine and Innovative Beverage Competition, partly sponsored by the Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Tourism Bureau provides prize money to contestants who creatively use traditional indigenous ingredients in healthy ways. Other similar competitions are held by local governments (such as Kaohsiung City). In Tainan, indigenous people may sell their food at the Cha Ha Mu Aboriginal Park. Such trends are all to promote the wonderful taste of Aboriginal Taiwanese cuisine.
Fusion cuisine is very popular in Taiwan. Many Taiwanese dishes are a result of cultural fusion, such as the Taiwanese version of pastel de nata which are a legacy of Portuguese colonialism.
Italian cuisine has been popular in Taiwan for a long time but until the late 1990s and early 2000s there were few authentic Italian restaurants in Taiwan and even fewer Italian chefs. Due to the Financial crisis of 2007–08 a large number of Italians emigrated from Italy to healthier economies, this led to a rapid increase in both the number of Italian restaurants and the number of Italian expats in Taiwan. While most restaurants follow the traditional Italian course style meal the proportions are influenced by Italian-American cuisine. Taiwanese diners are seen as increasingly passionate and discerning about Italian cuisine. Michael de Prenda was one of the innovators of Italian cuisine in Taiwan starting multiple restaurants, a market, and a farm.
Along with the fleeing KMT came White Russian refugees who had sought shelter from the Russian Revolution in China. George Elsner founded the first Russian restaurant, The Café Astoria, in Taiwan in 1949. The Café Astoria was a center of Russian expat life in Taiwan during its early years with Chiang Ching-kuo and his Russian wife Faina Vakhreva often bringing their children with them to eat there. Elsner died stateless in Taiwan.
Nordic haute cuisine is popular in Taiwan’s major cities with restaurants offering both authentic nordic cuisine and nordic cuisine adapted to local ingredients and tastes.
The increase in immigration from Hong Kong following the pro-democracy protests there has brought an increased focus on Hong Kong cuisine and on fusion between Hong Kong and Taiwan cuisines. Taiwan is a safe haven for Hong Kongers and many have opened shops and restaurants serving food they were unable to find in Taiwan or which they did not feel was up to Hong Kong standards.
Taiwanese cuisine has a global presence. Taiwanese chefs have been extremely successful abroad cooking both Taiwanese and international cuisine. Well known chefs include André Chiang.
Taiwanese immigrant restaurateurs were largely responsible for the shift of American Chinese food from a Cantonese focused cuisine to a diverse cuisine which featured dishes from many regions in China. The immigration of Taiwanese chefs to the United States began in the 1950s. At the time cooks in Taiwan were trained in traditional Chinese regional cooking as this fit the chosen identity of the KMT. Taiwanese restaurateurs changed the food landscape of many American cities, including New York City, and pioneered such innovations as picture menus and food delivery. Many of the immigrants to the United States during this period had been born in mainland China and fled to Taiwan with the retreating KMT, particularly former residents of the Dachen Islands who had been evacuated in 1955.
Traditionally Taiwanese food has been hard to differentiate from Chinese and Japanese food abroad as many Taiwanese cooked simplified or westernized versions of traditional Taiwanese, Japanese, or Chinese dishes rather than authentic fair. In 2018 there was rapid growth in the number of authentic Taiwanese restaurants in New York City and across the country which coincided in an increase in interest in regional Chinese food as well as greater interest in Taiwan itself.
Taiwanese American cuisine is emerging as a full cuisine in its own right. Myers + Chang in Boston was one of the fist restaurants to explicitly describe their food as such. In 2018 James Beard Award-winning chef Stephanie Izard opened a Taiwanese snack/dessert shop in Chicago.
Historically culinary education was informal with apprentices learning at the knee of a master for many years before being able to practice the craft on their own. The first college level course in cooking was implemented in 1986 at Danshui Technical College. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30528 |
Thai cuisine
Thai cuisine (, , ) is the national cuisine of Thailand.
Thai cooking places emphasis on lightly prepared dishes with strong aromatic components and a spicy edge. Thai chef McDang characterises Thai food as demonstrating "intricacy; attention to detail; texture; color; taste; and the use of ingredients with medicinal benefits, as well as good flavor", as well as care being given to the food's appearance, smell and context. Australian chef David Thompson, an expert on Thai food, observes that unlike many other cuisines, Thai cooking is "about the juggling of disparate elements to create a harmonious finish. Like a complex musical chord it's got to have a smooth surface but it doesn't matter what's happening underneath. Simplicity isn't the dictum here, at all."
Traditional Thai cuisine loosely falls into four categories: "tom" (boiled dishes), "yam" (spicy salads), "tam" (pounded foods), and "gaeng" (curries). Deep-fries, stir-fries, and steamed dishes derive from Chinese cooking.
In 2017, seven Thai dishes appeared on a list of the "World's 50 Best Foods"— an online poll of 35,000 people worldwide by "CNN Travel". Thailand had more dishes on the list than any other country. They were: tom yam goong (4th), pad Thai (5th), som tam (6th), massaman curry (10th), green curry (19th), Thai fried rice (24th) and mu nam tok (36th).
Thai cuisine and the culinary traditions and cuisines of Thailand's neighbors have mutually influenced one another over the course of many centuries.
According to the Thai monk Venerable Buddhadasa Bhikku's writing, ‘India's Benevolence to Thailand’, Thai cuisine was influenced by Indian cuisine. He wrote that Thai people learned how to use spices in their food in various ways from Indians. Thais also obtained the methods of making herbal medicines from the Indians. Some plants like Sarabhi of Guttiferae family, Kanika or harsinghar, phikun or Mimusops elengi and bunnak or the rose chestnut etc. were brought from India.
Many dishes that are now popular in Thailand were originally Chinese dishes. They were introduced to Thailand by the Hokkien people starting in the 15th century, and by the Teochew people who started settling in larger numbers from the late–18th century onward, mainly in the towns and cities, and now form the majority of Thai Chinese. Such dishes include "chok" (), rice porridge; "salapao" (steamed buns); "kuaitiao rat na" (fried rice-noodles); and "khao kha mu" (stewed pork with rice). The Chinese also introduced the use of the wok for cooking, the technique of deep-frying and stir frying dishes, several types of noodles, "taochiao" (fermented bean paste), soy sauces, and tofu. The cuisines of India and Persia, brought first by traders, and later settlers from these regions, with their use of dried spices, gave rise to Thai adaptations and dishes such as "kaeng kari" (yellow curry) and "kaeng matsaman" (massaman curry).
Western influences, starting in 1511 when the first diplomatic mission from the Portuguese arrived at the court of Ayutthaya, have created dishes such as "foi thong", the Thai adaptation of the Portuguese fios de ovos, and "sangkhaya", where coconut milk replaces cow's milk in making a custard. These dishes were said to have been brought to Thailand in the 17th century by Maria Guyomar de Pinha, a woman of mixed Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali ancestry who was born in Ayutthaya, and became the wife of Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek adviser to King Narai. The most notable influence from the West must be the introduction of the chili pepper from the Americas in the 16th or 17th century. It, and rice, are now two of the most important ingredients in Thai cuisine. During the Columbian Exchange, Portuguese and Spanish ships brought new foodstuffs from the Americas including tomatoes, corn, papaya, pea eggplants, pineapple, pumpkins, culantro, cashews, and peanuts.
Regional variations tend to correlate to neighboring states (often sharing the same cultural background and ethnicity on both sides of the border) as well as climate and geography. Northern Thai cuisine shares dishes with Shan State in Burma, northern Laos, and also with Yunnan Province in China, whereas the cuisine of Isan (northeastern Thailand) is similar to that of southern Laos, and is also influenced by Khmer cuisine from Cambodia to its south, and by Vietnamese cuisine to its east. Southern Thailand, with many dishes that contain liberal amounts of coconut milk and fresh turmeric, has that in common with Indian, Malaysian, and Indonesian cuisine.
Thai cuisine is more accurately described as five regional cuisines, corresponding to the five main regions of Thailand:
In addition to these regional cuisines, there is also Thai royal cuisine which can trace its history back to the cosmopolitan palace cuisine of the Ayutthaya kingdom (1351–1767 CE). Its refinement, cooking techniques, presentation, and use of ingredients were of great influence to the cuisine of the central Thai plains.
Thai food was traditionally eaten with the hand while seated on mats or carpets on the floor or coffee table in upper middle class family, customs still found in the more traditional households. Today, however, most Thais eat with a fork and spoon. Tables and chairs were introduced as part of a broader Westernization drive during the reign of King Mongkut, Rama IV. The fork and spoon were introduced by King Chulalongkorn after his return from a tour of Europe in 1897 CE.
Important to Thai dining is the practice of "khluk", mixing the flavors and textures of different dishes with the rice from one's plate. The food is pushed by the fork, held in the left hand, into the spoon held in the right hand, which is then brought to the mouth. A traditional ceramic spoon is sometimes used for soup, and knives are not generally used at the table. It is common practice for both the Thais and the hill tribe peoples who live in Lanna and Isan to use sticky rice as an edible implement by shaping it into small, and sometimes flattened, balls by hand (and only the right hand by custom) which are then dipped into side dishes and eaten.
Chopsticks were foreign utensils to most ethnic groups in Thailand with the exception of the Thai Chinese, and a few other cultures such as the Akha people, who are recent arrivals from Yunnan Province, China. Traditionally, the majority of ethnic Thai people ate with their hands like the people of India. Chopsticks are mainly used in Thailand for eating Chinese-style noodle soups, or at Chinese, Japanese, or Korean restaurants. Stir fried noodle dishes such as "pad Thai", and curry-noodle dishes such as "khanom chin nam ngiao", are also eaten with a fork and spoon in the Thai fashion.
Thai meals typically consist of rice ("khao" in Thai) with many complementary dishes shared by all. The dishes are all served at the same time, including the soups, and it is also customary to provide more dishes than there are guests at a table. A Thai family meal would normally consist of rice with several dishes which should form a harmonious contrast of flavors and textures as well as preparation methods. Traditionally, a meal would have at least five elements: a dip or relish for raw or cooked vegetables ("khrueang chim") is the most crucial component of any Thai meal. "Khrueang chim", considered a building block of Thai food by Chef McDang, may come in the form of a spicy chili sauce or relish called "nam phrik" (made of raw or cooked chilies and other ingredients, which are then mashed together), or a type of dip enriched with coconut milk called "lon". The other elements would include a clear soup (perhaps a spicy "tom yam" or a mellow "tom chuet"), a curry or stew (essentially any dish identified with the "kaeng" prefix), a deep-fried dish and a stir fried dish of meat, fish, seafood, or vegetables.
In most Thai restaurants, diners will have access to a selection of Thai sauces ("nam chim") and condiments, either brought to the table by wait staff or present at the table in small containers. These may include: "phrik nam pla/nam pla phrik" (fish sauce, lime juice, chopped chilies and garlic), dried chili flakes, sweet chili sauce, sliced chili peppers in rice vinegar, Sriracha sauce, and even sugar. With certain dishes, such as "khao kha mu" (pork trotter stewed in soy sauce and served with rice), whole Thai peppers and raw garlic are served in addition to the sour chili sauce. Cucumber is sometimes eaten to cool the mouth with particularly spicy dishes. They often feature as a garnish, especially with one-dish meals. The plain rice, sticky rice or the "khanom chin" (Thai rice noodles) served alongside a spicy Thai curry or stir fry, tends to counteract the spiciness.
When time is limited or when eating alone, single dishes, such as fried rice or noodle soups, are quick and filling. An alternative is to have one or smaller helpings of curry, stir fries and other dishes served together on one plate with a portion of rice. This style of serving food is called "khao rat kaeng" (lit., "rice covered with curry"), or for short "khao kaeng" (lit., "rice curry"). Eateries and shops that specialize in pre-made food are the usual place to go to for having a meal this way. These venues have a large display showing the different dishes one can choose. When placing their order at these places, Thais will state if they want their food served as separate dishes, or together on one plate with rice ("rat khao"). Very often, regular restaurants will also feature a selection of freshly made "rice curry" dishes on their menu for single customers.
Thailand has about the same land area as Spain and a length of approximately 1,650 kilometers or 1,025 miles (Italy, in comparison, is about 1,250 kilometers or 775 miles long), with the foothills of the Himalayas in the north, a high plateau in the northeast, a verdant river basin in the center, and tropical rainforests and islands in the south. With over 40 distinct ethnic groups each with its own culture and even more languages, it comes as no surprise that Thai cuisine, as a whole, features many different ingredients ("suan phasom"; ), and ways of preparing food.
Thai food is known for its enthusiastic use of fresh (rather than dried) herbs and spices. Common flavors in Thai food come from garlic, galangal, coriander/cilantro, lemon grass, shallots, pepper, kaffir lime leaves, shrimp paste, fish sauce, and chilies. Palm sugar, made from the sap of certain "Borassus" palms, is used to sweeten dishes while lime and tamarind contribute sour notes. Meats used in Thai cuisine are usually pork and chicken, and also duck, beef, and water buffalo. Goat and mutton are rarely eaten except by Muslim Thais. Game, such as wild boar, deer and wild birds, are now less common due to loss of habitat, the introduction of modern methods of intensive animal farming in the 1960s, and the rise of agribusinesses, such as Thai Charoen Pokphand Foods, in the 1980s. Traditionally, fish, crustaceans, and shellfish play an important role in the diet of Thai people. In 2006 the per capita consumption of fish was 33.6 kg. Anna Leonowens (of "The King and I" fame) observed in her book "The English Governess at the Siamese Court" (1870):
"The stream is rich in fish of excellent quality and flavour, such as is found in most of the great rivers of Asia; and is especially noted for its "platoo", a kind of sardine, so abundant and cheap that it forms a common seasoning to the labourer's bowl of rice."
Freshwater varieties come from the many rivers, lakes, ponds, and paddy fields inland, and seafood from the tropical seas of the southern half of the country. Some species, such as the giant river prawn, need brackish water as juveniles but live out their lives in freshwater once mature. Aquaculture of species such as Nile tilapia, catfish, tiger prawns, and blood cockles, now generates a large portion of the seafood sold in, and exported from Thailand.
Like most other Asian cuisines, rice is the staple grain of Thai cuisine. According to Thai food expert McDang, rice is the first and most important part of any meal, and the words for rice and food are the same: "khao". As in many other rice eating cultures, to say "eat rice" (in Thai ""kin khao""; pronounced as "keen cow") means to eat food.
Rice is such an integral part of the diet that a common Thai greeting is ""kin khao reu yang?"" which literally translates as "Have you eaten rice yet?".
Thai farmers historically have cultivated tens of thousands of rice varieties. The traditional recipe for a rice dish could include as many as 30 varieties of rice. That number has been drastically reduced due to genetic modifications.
Non-glutinous rice ("Oryza sativa") is called "khao chao" (lit., "royal rice"). One type, which is indigenous to Thailand, is the highly prized, sweet-smelling jasmine rice (""). This naturally aromatic long-grained rice grows in abundance in the patchwork of paddy fields that blanket Thailand's central plains. Once the rice is steamed or cooked, it is called "khao suai" (lit., "beautiful rice"). Non-glutinous rice is used for making fried rice dishes, and for congee, of which there are three main varieties: "khao tom" (a thin rice soup, most often with minced pork or fish), "khao tom kui" (a thick, unflavored rice porridge that is served with side dishes), or "chok" (a thick rice porridge that is flavored with broth and minced meat).
Other varieties of rice eaten in Thailand include: sticky rice ("khao niao"), a unique variety of rice which contains an unusual balance of the starches present in all rice, causing it to cook up to a sticky texture. Sticky rice, not jasmine rice, is a staple food in the local cuisines of northern Thailand and of Isan (northeastern Thailand), both regions of Thailand directly adjacent to Laos with which they share many cultural traits. Thai Red Cargo rice, an unpolished long grain rice with an outer deep reddish-brown color and a white center, has a nutty taste and slightly chewy compared to the soft and gummy texture of jasmine rice. Only the husks of the red rice grains are removed which allows it to retain all its nutrients and vitamins, but unlike brown rice, its red color comes from antioxidants in the bran. Black sticky rice is a type of sticky rice with a deep purple-red color that may appear black. Another unpolished grain, black sticky rice has a rich nutty flavor that is most often used in desserts.
Noodles are usually made from either rice flour, wheat flour or mung bean flour. "Khanom chin" is fresh rice vermicelli made from fermented rice, and eaten with spicy curries such as green chicken curry ("khanom chin kaeng khiao wan kai") or with salads such as "som tam". Other rice noodles, adapted from Chinese cuisine to suit Thai taste, are called "kuaitiao" in Thailand and come in three varieties: "sen yai" are wide flat noodles, "sen lek" are thin flat rice noodles, and "sen mi" (also known as rice vermicelli in the West) are round and thin. "Bami" is made from egg and wheat flour and usually sold fresh. They are similar to the Teochew "mee pok". "Wun sen", called cellophane noodles in English, are extremely thin noodles made from mung bean flour which are sold dried. Thai noodle dishes, whether stir fried like "phat Thai" or in the form of a noodle soup, usually come as an individual serving and are not meant to be shared and eaten communally.
Rice flour ("paeng khao chao") and tapioca flour ("paeng man sampalang") are often used in desserts or as thickening agents.
An ingredient found in many Thai dishes and used in every region of the country is "nam pla", a clear fish sauce that is very aromatic. Fish sauce is a staple ingredient in Thai cuisine and imparts a unique character to Thai food. Fish sauce is prepared with fermented fish that is made into a fragrant condiment and provides a salty flavor. There are many varieties of fish sauce and many variations in the way it is prepared. Some fish may be fermented with shrimp or spices. Another type of sauce made from fermented fish is "pla ra". It is more pungent than "nam pla", and, in contrast to "nam pla", which is a clear liquid, "pla ra" is opaque and often contains pieces of fish. To add this sauce to a "som tam" (spicy papaya salad) is a matter of choice. "Kapi", Thai shrimp paste, is a combination of fermented ground shrimp and salt. It is used in the famous chili paste called "nam phrik kapi", in rice dishes such as "khao khluk kapi" and it is indispensable for making Thai curry pastes. "Tai pla" is a pungent sauce used in the southern Thai cuisine, that is made from the fermented innards of the short mackerel ("pla thu"). It is one of the main condiments of "kaeng tai pla" curry and is also used to make "nam phrik tai pla". Far removed from the nearest sea, from northern Thailand comes "nam pu", a thick, black paste made by boiling mashed rice-paddy crabs for hours. It is used as an ingredient for certain northern Thai salads, curries, and chili pastes. It too has a strong and pungent flavor.
"Nam phrik" are Thai chili pastes, similar to the Indonesian and Malaysian sambals. Each region has its own special versions. The words ""nam phrik"" are used by Thais to describe many pastes containing chilies used for dipping, although the more watery versions tend to be called "nam chim". Thai curry pastes are normally called "phrik kaeng" or "khrueang kaeng" (lit. curry ingredients), but some people also use the word "nam phrik" to designate a curry paste. Red curry paste, for instance, could be called "phrik kaeng phet" or "khrueang kaeng phet" in Thai, but also "nam phrik kaeng phet". Both "nam phrik" and "phrik kaeng" are prepared by crushing together chilies with various ingredients such as garlic and shrimp paste using a mortar and pestle. Some "nam phrik" are served as a dip with vegetables such as cucumbers, cabbage and yard-long beans, either raw or blanched. One such paste is "nam phrik num", a paste of pounded fresh green chilies, shallots, garlic and coriander leaves. The sweet roasted chili paste called "nam phrik phao" is often used as an ingredient in "tom yam" or when frying meat or seafood, and it is also popular as a spicy "jam" on bread, or served as a dip with prawn crackers. The dry "nam phrik kung", made with pounded dried shrimp ("kung haeng"), is often eaten plain with rice and a few slices of cucumber. French diplomat Simon de la Loubère observed that chili pastes were vital for the way Thai people eat. He provides us with a recipe for "nam phrik" with "pla ra" and onions in "Du Royaume de Siam", an account of his mission to Thailand published in 1691.
The soy sauces which are used in Thai cuisine are of Chinese origin, and the Thai names for them are (wholly or partially) loanwords from the Teochew dialect: "si-io dam" (black soy sauce), "si-io khao" (light soy sauce), "si-io wan" (sweet soy sauce), and "taochiao" (fermented whole soy beans). "Namman hoi" (oyster sauce) is also of Chinese origin. It is used extensively in vegetable and meat stir fries.
Satay is also common in Thailand, grilled or skewered meat served with a spicy peanut dipping sauce made from roasted or fried peanuts.
Thai dishes use a wide variety of herbs, spices and leaves rarely found in the West. The characteristic flavor of kaffir lime leaves ("bai makrut") appears in many Thai soups (e.g., the hot and sour "tom yam") or curry from the southern and central areas of Thailand. The Thai lime ("manao") is smaller, darker and sweeter than the kaffir lime, which has a rough looking skin with a stronger lime flavor. Kaffir lime leaves or rind is frequently combined with galangal ("kha") and lemongrass ("takhrai"), either kept whole in simmered dishes or blended together with liberal amounts of chilies and other aromatics to make curry paste. Fresh Thai basil, distinctively redolent of cloves, and with stems which are often tinged with a purple color, are used to add fragrance in certain dishes such as green curry. Other commonly used herbs in Thai cuisine include "phak chi", (coriander or cilantro leaves), "rak phak chi" (cilantro/coriander roots), spearmint ("saranae"), holy basil ("kraphao"), ginger ("khing"), turmeric ("khamin"), fingerroot ("krachai"), culantro ("phak chi farang"), pandanus leaves ("bai toei"), and Thai lemon basil ("maenglak"). Spices and spice mixtures used in Thai cuisine include "phong phalo" (five-spice powder), "phong kari" (curry powder), and fresh and dried peppercorns ("phrik thai"). Northern Thai "larb" uses a very elaborate spice mix, called "phrik lap", which includes ingredients such as cumin, cloves, long pepper, star anise, prickly ash seeds and cinnamon.
Besides kaffir lime leaves, several other tree leaves are used in Thai cuisine such as "cha-om", the young feathery leaves of the "Acacia pennata" tree. These leaves can be cooked in omelettes, soups and curries or eaten raw in northern Thai salads. Banana leaves are often used as packaging for ready-made food or as steamer cups such as in "ho mok pla", a spicy steamed pâté or soufflé made with fish and coconut milk. Banana flowers are also used in Thai salads or as a vegetable ingredient for certain curries. The leaves and flowers of the neem tree ("sadao") are also eaten blanched. "Phak lueat" (leaves from the "Ficus virens") are cooked in curries, and "bai makok" (from the "Spondias mombin") can be eaten raw with a chili paste.
Five main chilies are generally used as ingredients in Thai food. One chili is very small (about ) and is known as the hottest chili: "phrik khi nu suan" ("garden mouse-dropping chili"). The slightly larger chili "phrik khi nu" ("mouse-dropping chili") is the next hottest. The green or red "phrik chi fa" ("sky pointing chili") is slightly less spicy than the smaller chilies. The very large " phrik yuak", which is pale green in color, is the least spicy and used more as a vegetable. Lastly, the dried chilies: "phrik haeng" are spicier than the two largest chilies and dried to a dark red color.
Other typical ingredients are the several types of eggplant ("makhuea") used in Thai cuisine, such as the pea-sized "makhuea phuang" and the egg-sized "makhuea suai", often also eaten raw. Although broccoli is often used in Asian restaurants in the west in "phat phak ruam" (stir fried mixed vegetables) and "rat na" (rice noodles served in gravy), it was never used in any traditional Thai food in Thailand and was rarely seen in Thailand. Usually in Thailand, khana is used, for which broccoli is a substitute. Other vegetables which are often eaten in Thailand are "thua fak yao" (yardlong beans), "thua ngok" (bean sprouts), "no mai" (bamboo shoots), tomatoes, cucumbers, "phak tam lueng" ("Coccinia grandis"), "phak kha na" (Chinese kale), "phak kwangtung" (choy sum), sweet potatoes (both the tuber and leaves), a few types of squash, "phak krathin" ("Leucaena leucocephala"), "sato" ("Parkia speciosa"), "tua phū" (winged beans) and "khaophot" (corn).
Among the green, leafy vegetables and herbs that are usually eaten raw in a meal or as a side dish in Thailand, the most important are: "phak bung" (morning glory), "horapha" (Thai basil), "bai bua bok" (Asian pennywort), "phak kachet" (water mimosa), "phak kat khao" (Chinese cabbage), "phak phai" (praew leaves), "phak kayang" (rice paddy herb), "phak chi farang" (culantro), "phak tiu" ("Cratoxylum formosum"), "phak "phaai"" (yellow burr head) and "kalamplī" (cabbage). Some of these leaves are highly perishable and must be used within a couple of days.
Several types of mushroom ("het") also feature in Thai cuisine such as straw mushrooms ("het fang"), shiitake ("het hom"), and white jelly fungus ("het hu nu khao").
Flowers are also commonly used ingredients in many Thai dishes, either as a vegetable, such as "dok khae" ("Sesbania grandiflora") and "huapli" (the flower bud of the banana), or as a food coloring, such as with the blue-colored "dok anchan" (the flowers of the "Clitoria ternatea", which can also be eaten raw or fried).
Fresh fruit forms a large part of the Thai diet, and are customarily served after a meal as dessert. The Scottish author John Crawfurd, sent on an embassy to Bangkok in 1822, writes in his account of the journey:
"The fruits of Siam, or at least of the neighbourhood of Bangkok, are excellent and various, surpassing, according to the experience of our party (...) those of all other parts of India." The Siamese themselves consume great quantities of fruit, and the whole neighbourhood of Bangkok is one forest of fruit trees.
Fruit is not only eaten on its own, but often served with spicy dips made from sugar, salt, and chilies. Fruits feature in spicy salads such as "som tam" (green papaya salad) and "yam som-o" (pomelo salad), in soups with tamarind juice such as "tom khlong" and "kaeng som", and in Thai curries such as "kaeng kanun" (jackfruit curry), "kaeng pet phet yang" (grilled duck curry with pineapple or grapes), and "kaeng pla sapparot" (fish and pineapple curry). Fruits are also used in certain Thai chili pastes, such as in "nam phrik long rue" made with "madan" (a close relative of the mangosteen), and "nam phrik luk nam liap", salted black Chinese olive chilli paste.
Although many of the exotic fruits of Thailand may have been sometimes unavailable in Western countries, Asian markets now import such fruits as rambutan and lychees. In Thailand one can find papaya, jackfruit, mango, mangosteen, langsat, longan, pomelo, pineapple, rose apples, durian, Burmese grapes and other native fruits. Chantaburi in Thailand each year holds the "World Durian Festival" in early May. This single province is responsible for half of the durian production of Thailand and a quarter of the world production. The "Langsat Festival" is held each year in Uttaradit on weekends in September. The "langsat" ("Lansium parasiticum"), for which Uttaradit is famous, is a fruit that is similar in taste to the longan.
From the coconut comes coconut milk, used both in curries and desserts, and coconut oil. The juice of a green coconut can be served as a drink and the young flesh is eaten in either sweet or savory dishes. The grated flesh of a mature coconut is used raw or toasted in sweets, salads and snacks such as "miang kham". Thais not only consume products derived from the nut (actually a drupe), but they also make use of the growth bud of the palm tree as a vegetable. From the stalk of the flowers comes a sap that can be used to make coconut vinegar, alcoholic beverages, and sugar. Coconut milk and other coconut-derived ingredients feature heavily in the cuisines of central and southern Thailand. In contrast to these regions, coconut palms do not grow as well in northern and northeastern Thailand, where in wintertime the temperatures are lower and where there is a dry season that can last five to six months. In northern Thai cuisine, only a few dishes, most notably the noodle soup "khao soi", use coconut milk. In the southern parts of northeastern Thailand, where the region borders Cambodia, one can again find dishes containing coconut. It is also here that the people eat non-glutinous rice, just as in central and southern Thailand, and not glutinous rice as they do in northern Thailand and in the rest of northeastern Thailand.
Apples, pears, peaches, grapes, and strawberries, which do not traditionally grow in Thailand and in the past had to be imported, have become increasingly popular in the last few decades since they were introduced to Thai farmers by the Thai Royal Projects, starting in 1969, and the Doi Tung Project since 1988. These temperate fruit grow especially well in the cooler, northern Thai highlands, where they were initially introduced as a replacement for the cultivation of opium, together with other crops such as cabbages, tea, and arabica coffee.
According to the Thai government's "The Eleventh National Economic and Social Development Plan (2012–2016)", Thailand is number one in the world in the application of chemicals in agriculture. The report stated that, "The use of chemicals in the agricultural and industrial sectors is growing while control mechanisms are ineffective making Thailand rank first in the world in the use of registered chemicals in agriculture."
The Thai Pesticide Alert Network (ThaiPAN), a food safety advocacy group, annually tests Thai farm produce for contamination. In their June 2019 report, the group found that of 286 samples, 41% of produce was found to contain unsafe levels of chemicals. The group surveyed both wet markets and retail stores across the nation. Contaminants were found in 44% of samples from retail stores, and 39% of samples from wet markets. Vegetables with the highest levels of contamination were Chinese mustard greens, kale, hot basil, parsley, chilis, and cauliflower. Fruits with the highest contamination were tangerines, rose apples, guavas, and grapes. Contamination levels decreased from 2018, when 46% of samples were found to be contaminated, and 2016, when more than 50% of tested produce was found to be unsafe.
In prior years, "Q-Mark" goods showed a higher prevalence of contamination, 61.5%, than they did during ThaiPAN's March 2016 survey, 57%. Q-Mark is Thailand's National Bureau of Agricultural Commodity and Food Standards (ACFS) mark of quality.
In a survey of hydroponically-grown vegetables, ThaiPAN, in late-2017, tested 30 hydroponic vegetables purchased at Thai fresh markets and supermarkets. Of 30 vegetables tested, 19 contained noxious chemical levels above maximum limits. Three samples were contaminated, but at levels below the legal maximum. Eight samples were free of harmful chemicals.
On 22 October 2019, the 26-member National Hazardous Substances Committee (NHSC) changed paraquat, glyphosate, and chlorpyrifos from Type 3 toxic substances to Type 4, effectively prohibiting their production, import, export, or possession. Their use will be prohibited as of 1 December 2019. On 27 November 2019, the NHSC amended that timetable, moving the date for the ban of paraquat and chlorpyrifos to 1 June 2020. They lifted the ban on glyphosate with restrictions on usage: glyphosate will be used only on six major crops: corn, cassava, sugarcane, rubber, oil palms, and fruit. It is not permitted in watershed areas and other sensitive environment zones, and farmers must submit proof of use including the type of crops and the size of their farms when purchasing glyphosate. Industry Minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit, who chairs the NHSC, said the committee reached its decision after reviewing information provided by the Department of Agriculture and the Ministry of Public Health. NCHS member Jirapon Limpananon, chair of the Pharmacy Council of Thailand, announced her resignation from the NCHS Wednesday night following the meeting.
Whereas many Thai dishes are now familiar in the West, the vast majority are not. In many of the dishes below, different kinds of protein, or combinations of protein, are interchangeable as the main ingredient. Beef ("nuea"), chicken ("kai"), pork ("mu"), duck ("pet"), tofu ("taohu"), fish ("pla"), prawns or shrimp ("kung"), crab ("pu"), shellfish ("hoi"), or egg ("khai") can, for example, all be used as main ingredients for "kaeng phet" (red curry). Thus "kaeng phet kai" is red curry with chicken and "kaeng phet mu" is red curry made with pork.
Khao chao (; lit. "morning rice/food"), breakfast dishes, for Thais are limited. Very often, a Thai breakfast can consist of the same dishes with rice which are also eaten for lunch or dinner. Single dishes such as fried rice, noodle soups, and steamed rice with something simple such as an omelette, fried/grilled pork or chicken, or a stir fry with vegetables, are commonly sold for breakfast from street stalls as a quick take-out.
The following dishes are viewed as being specific breakfast dishes but they can also be found at any other moment of the day:
Known as ahan chan diao (; lit., "single dish food"), it is not only the name for true single plate dishes, but also for dishes that are served ""rat khao"" (lit., "poured on rice"): one or more dishes are served together with rice on one plate. Some of these eateries offer a large selection of (pre-cooked) dishes, others are specialized in only a one, or a few dishes with rice.
Ahan Phak Klang (; lit. "central region food") is most often eaten with the non-glutinous jasmine rice. The cuisine has also incorporated many Thai Chinese dishes.
Ahan Isan (; lit. "Isan food") generally features dishes similar to those found in Laos, as Isan people historically have close ties with Lao culture and speak a language that is generally mutually intelligible with the Lao language. The staple food of Isan is glutinous rice and most of the Isaan food is spicy and cooked with local ingredients found on the farms all through northeastern Thailand. Isaan people primarily get their income from farming. Rice, sugar cane, pineapple, potato, and rubber are all farmed in this region.
Ahan Lan Na (; lit. 'Lan Na food') shares certain dishes with neighboring Shan State, in Burma, and with Laos. As in northeastern Thailand, glutinous rice, not jasmine rice, is eaten as the staple food.
Ahan Phak Tai (; lit. "southern region food") shares certain dishes with the cuisine of northern Malaysia. Southern Thais, just like the people of central Thailand to the north, and the people of Malaysia to the south, eat non-glutinous rice as their staple food.
(; ) lit. 'sweet things'). Although most Thai meals finish with fresh fruit, sometimes sweet snacks, often eaten between meals, will also be served as a dessert.
Ice cream was introduced to Thailand during the reign of King Rama V when the first ice cream machine was imported to Thailand. Ice cream in the second half of the 19th century was made of coconut water blended with ice. At first, ice could not be produced in Thailand. That led to importing ice from Singapore. Ice cream was then an upper-class treat, but over time ice cream became more widely available and the product was improved by replacing coconut water with coconut milk.
There were two types of ice cream in Thailand. First, ice cream in the palace was made of coconut juice with roasted tamarind on top. Second, ice cream for the public was coconut ice cream with the scent of the Nommaeo flower with a slight sweet taste. The ice cream "tube" was born during the reign of Rama VII. Its ingredients were contained inside a zinc tube which was shaken until it solidified, then skewered stick to serve as a handle. It was sold by mobile vendors using dry ice and salt to keep the ice cream cold. Eventually, ice cream was manufactured and sold in small cups.
According to the "Bangkok Post", "aitim tat" (; "cut ice cream"), was very popular 30 years ago (1986). It came in rectangular bars of various flavors, sliced into pieces by the vendor, who then inserted two wooden sticks into the pieces to use as holders. "Aitim tat" was made from milk, coconut milk, flour, sugar, and artificial flavour. The price was one or two baht, depending on the size.
The Pop Company in the 1970s set up the first ice-cream manufacturing plant in Thailand. The company used a duck logo, resulting it the nickname "aitim tra pet" (; "duck brand ice cream"). It was sold in front of Chaloemchai Theater. Its most popular offering was called "banana split", with three flavors of ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
Khrueang duem (; lit. "beverages")
Other alcoholic beverages from Thailand include Mekhong whisky and Sang Som. Several brands of beer are brewed in Thailand, the two biggest brands are Singha and Chang.
Edible insects, whole or in chili paste and as ingredients in fortified products, are common in Thailand. Some claim that Thailand is the world leader in edible insects. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that there are about 20,000 cricket farms alone in 53 of Thailand's 76 provinces.
A wide range of insects are eaten in Thailand, especially in Isan and in the north. Many markets in Thailand sell deep-fried grasshoppers, crickets ("ching rit"), bee larvae, silkworm ("non mai"), ant eggs ("khai mot") and termites. The culinary creativity even extends to naming: one tasty larva, which is also known under the name "bamboo worm" ("non mai phai", "Omphisa fuscidentalis"), is colloquially called "express train" ("rot duan") due to its appearance.
Most insects reportedly taste fairly bland when deep-fried. In contrast to the bland taste of most of these insects, the "maeng da" or "maelong da na" ("Lethocerus indicus") has been described as having a very penetrating taste, similar to that of a very ripe gorgonzola cheese. This giant water bug is famously used in a chili dip called "nam phrik maeng da". Ant eggs and silkworms are eaten boiled in a soup in Isan, or used in egg dishes in northern Thailand.
The quality and choice of street food in Thailand is world-renowned. Bangkok is often mentioned as one of the best street food cities in the world, and even called the street food capital of the world. The website VirtualTourist says:"Few places in the world, if any, are as synonymous with street food as Thailand. For the variety of locations and abundance of options, we selected Bangkok, Thailand, as our number one spot for street food. Bangkok is notable for both its variety of offerings and the city's abundance of street hawkers."
There is scarcely a Thai dish that is not sold by a street vendor or at a market somewhere in Thailand. Some specialize in only one or two dishes, others offer a complete menu that rival that of restaurants. Some sell only pre-cooked foods, others make food to order. The foods that are made to order, tend to be dishes that can be quickly prepared: quick stir fries with rice, such as "phat kaphrao" (spicy basil-fried minced pork, chicken, or seafood) or "phat khana" (stir fried gailan), and quick curries such as "pladuk phat phet" (catfish fried with red curry paste).
Noodles are a popular street food item as they are mainly eaten as a single dish. Chinese-style noodle soups, fried noodles, and fermented Thai rice noodles ("khanom chin"), served with a choice of different Thai curries, are popular. Nearly everywhere in Thailand you will see "som tam" (green papaya salad) and sticky rice sold at stalls and roadside shops. This is popularly eaten together with grilled chicken; but if the shop does not sell any themselves, someone else nearby will. In most cities and towns there will be stalls selling sweet "roti", a thin, flat fried dough envelop, with fillings such as banana, egg, and chocolate. The "roti" is similar to the Malay "roti canai" and Singaporean "roti prata", and the stalls are often operated by Thai Muslims. Sweets snacks, collectively called "khanom", such as "tako" (coconut cream jelly), "khanom man" (coconut cassava cake), and "khanom wun" (flavored jellies), can be seen displayed on large trays in glass covered push-carts. Other sweets, such as "khanom bueang" and "khanom khrok" (somewhat similar to Dutch "poffertjes"), are made to order.
In the evenings, mobile street stalls, often only a scooter with a side car, drive by and temporarily set up shop outside bars in Thailand, selling "kap klaem" ("drinking food"). Popular "kap klaem" dishes sold by mobile vendors are grilled items such as sun-dried squid, meats on skewers, or grilled sour sausages, and deep-fried snacks such as fried insects or fried sausages. Peeled and sliced fruits are also sold from street carts, laid out on a bed of crushed ice to preserve their freshness. "Salapao", steamed buns filled with meat or sweet beans and the Thai version of the Chinese steamed "baozi", are also commonly sold by mobile vendors.
Food markets in Thailand, large open air halls with permanent stalls, tend to operate as a collection of street stalls, each vendor with their own set of tables and providing (limited) service, although some resemble the regular food courts at shopping malls and large supermarkets, with service counters and the communal use of tables. Food courts and food markets offer many of the same foods as street stalls, both pre-cooked as well as made to order. Night food markets, in the form of a collection of street stalls and mobile vendors, spring up in parking lots, along busy streets, and at temple fairs and local festivals in the evenings, when the temperatures are more agreeable and people have finished work.
The dishes sold at wet markets in Thailand tend to be offered pre-cooked. Many people go there, and also to street vendors, to buy food for at work, or to take back home. It is a common sight to see Thais carrying whole communal meals consisting of several dishes, cooked rice, sweets, and fruit, all neatly packaged in plastic bags and foam food containers, to be shared with colleagues at work or at home with friends and family. Due to the fact that many dishes are similar to those that people would cook at home, it is a good place to find regional, and seasonal, foods.
Although the Vegetarian Festival is celebrated each year by a portion of Thailand's population, and many restaurants in Thailand will offer vegetarian food during this festival period, pure vegetarian food is usually difficult to find in normal restaurants and eateries in Thailand. All traditionally made Thai curries, for instance, contain shrimp paste, and fish sauce is used as salt in many Thai dishes. At shops and restaurants that specifically cater to vegetarians, substitutes for these ingredients are used. Meat dishes are also commonly part of the alms offered to Buddhist monks in Thailand as vegetarianism is not considered obligatory in Theravada Buddhism; but having an animal killed specifically to feed Buddhist monks is prohibited.
In most towns and cities, traditional Buddhist vegetarian fare, without any meat or seafood products of any kind and also excluding certain strong tasting vegetables and spices, is sold at specialized vegetarian restaurants which can be recognized by a yellow sign with in Thai script the word "che" () or "ahan che" () written on it in red. These restaurants serve what can be regarded as vegan food. Many Indian restaurants of the sizable Thai-Indian community will also have vegetarian dishes on offer, due to the fact that vegetarianism is held as an ideal by many followers of the Hindu faith. Indian vegetarian cuisine can incorporate dairy products and honey. Due to the increased demand for vegetarian food from foreign tourists, many hotels, guesthouses and restaurants that cater to them, will now also have vegetarian versions of Thai dishes on their menu. Pescatarians would have very few problems with Thai cuisine due to the abundance of Thai dishes which only contain fish and seafood as their source of animal protein.
Originally, this referred to the food that was cooked or prepared by people living in the palace. Thai royal cuisine has become very well known from the Rattanakosin Era onwards.
Typically, Thai royal cuisine has basic characteristics that are close to the basic food prepared by general people. However, Thai royal cuisine focuses on the freshness of seasonal products. Other than that, it is crucial that the way in which Thai royal food is cooked, should be complex and delicate.
La Loubère, an envoy from France during the reign of King Narai the Great, recorded that the food at the court was generally similar to villager food. Ways that make Thai Royal cuisine different food was the beautiful presentation. For example, they served fish and chicken with the bones removed, and the vegetables were served in bite-sized portions. In addition, if beef is used, it should be tenderloin only.
There are many types of Thai royal cuisine such as "ranchuan" curry, "nam phrik long rue", "matsaman" curry, rice in jasmine-flavored iced water or "khao chae", spicy salad, fruit, and carved vegetable.
Thai Chef McDang, himself descended from the royal family, asserts that the difference between royal Thai cuisine and regular Thai cuisine is fiction. He maintains that the only difference between the food of the palace and that of the common people is the former's elaborate presentation and better ingredients.
Thai cuisine only became well-known worldwide from the 1960s on, when Thailand became a destination for international tourism and US troops arrived in large numbers during the Vietnam War. The number of Thai restaurants went up from four in 1970s London to between two and three hundred in less than 25 years. The earliest attested Thai restaurant in the United States, "Chada Thai", opened its doors in 1959 in Denver, Colorado. It was run by the former newspaper publisher Lai-iad (Lily) Chittivej. The oldest Thai restaurant in London, "The Bangkok Restaurant", was opened in 1967 by Mr and Mrs Bunnag, a former Thai diplomat and his wife, in South Kensington.
The global popularity of Thai cuisine is seen as an important factor in promoting tourism, and also increased exports of Thailand's agricultural sector. It is a result of deliberate "gastrodiplomacy". In June 2009, the Tourism Authority of Thailand organised a conference to discuss these matters at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre in Bangkok. TAT Governor Seree Wangpaichitr said, "This conference was long overdue. The promotion of Thai cuisine is one of our major niche-market targets. Our figures show that visitors spent 38.8 billion baht on eating and drinking last year, up 16% over 1997."
The Thaksin administration (2001–2006) launched the "Kitchen of the World" campaign early in its tenure to promote Thai cuisine internationally, with a yearly budget of 500 million baht. It provided loans and training for restaurateurs seeking to establish Thai restaurants overseas; established the "Thai Select" certification program which encouraged the use of ingredients imported from Thailand; and promoted integration between Thai investors, Thai Airways, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand with Thai restaurants overseas.
The "Global Thai" program, launched in 2002, was a government-led culinary diplomacy initiative. It aimed to boost the number of Thai restaurants worldwide to 8,000 by 2003 from about 5,500 previously. By 2011, that number had swelled to more than 10,000 Thai restaurants worldwide.
The program was explained in "Thailand: Kitchen of the World", an e-book published to promote the program. The point of the e-book: "In the view of the Export Promotion Department, Thai restaurants have a good business potential that can be developed to maintain a high level of international recognition. To achieve that goal, the department is carrying out a public relations campaign to build up a good image of the country through Thai restaurants worldwide."
The Department of Export Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Commerce offers potential restaurateurs plans for three different "master restaurant" types—from fast food to elegant—which investors can choose as a prefabricated restaurant plan. Concomitantly, the Export-Import Bank of Thailand offered loans to Thai nationals aiming to open restaurants abroad, and the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Bank of Thailand set up an infrastructure for loans of up to US$3 million for overseas food industry initiatives, including Thai restaurants.
One survey conducted in 2003 by the Kellogg School of Management and Sasin Institute showed that Thai cuisine ranked fourth when people were asked to name an ethnic cuisine, after Italian, French, and Chinese cuisine. When asked "what is your favourite cuisine?", Thailand's cuisine came in at sixth place, behind the three aforementioned cuisines, and Indian and Japanese cuisine.
In the list of the "World's 50 most delicious foods", compiled by CNN in 2011, "som tam" stands at place 46, "nam tok mu" at 19, "tom yam kung" at 8, and massaman curry stands on first place as most delicious food in the world. In a reader's poll held a few months later by CNN, "mu nam tok" came in at 36, Thai fried rice at 24, green curry at 19, "massaman" curry at 10, and Thai "som tam", "pad Thai", and "tom yam kung" at six, five, and four.
In 2012, the British "Restaurant Magazine" included Nahm Bangkok of chef David Thompson in its yearly list of The World's 50 Best Restaurants.
Thai chefs of the Thailand Culinary Academy took second place in the Gourmet Team Challenge (Practical) of the FHC China International Culinary Arts Competition 14 in Shanghai, China on 14–16 November 2012. They won the IKA Culinary Olympic 2012 competition held in Erfurt, Germany between 5–10 October 2012, where they received four gold and one silver medal.
In 2011, the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Northwestern United States, was presented to Andy Ricker of restaurant "Pok Pok" in Portland, Oregon, and for Best Chef in the Southwestern United States to Saipin Chutima of restaurant "Lotus of Siam" in Winchester, Nevada.
Three restaurants that specialize in Thai cuisine, but are owned by non-Thai chefs, have received Michelin stars:
Culinary tours of Thailand have gained popularity in recent years. Alongside other forms of tourism in Thailand, food tours have carved a niche for themselves. Many companies offer culinary and cooking tours of Thailand and many tourists visiting Thailand attend cooking courses offered by hotels, guesthouses and cooking schools.
The Thai government believes that a sub-standard Thai restaurant meal served abroad "...sabotages the country's reputation." To ensure the quality of Thai food abroad, the government has over the years initiated a series of programs designed to create universal standards for Thai food.
In 2003 the Ministry of Finance sent officials to the US to award certificates to deserving restaurants. On their return the project was abandoned.
Soon thereafter, the Ministry of Labor created "Krua Thai Su Krua Lok" ('Thai kitchen goes global'). Its centerpiece was a 10-day Thai cooking course for those who wanted to prepare Thai food overseas. The effort was short-lived.
After some officials had a bad Thai meal abroad, in 2013 the Yingluck administration had the idea of standardising Thai food everywhere. The National Food Institute came up with a program called "Rod Thai Tae" ('authentic Thai taste'). A parallel effort was called the "Thai Delicious" project.
Thailand's National Innovation Agency (NIA), a public organization under the Thai Ministry of Science and Technology, spearheaded a 30 million baht (US$1 million), effort by the government to:
The agency has posted 11 "authentic" recipes for tom yum gung (nam sai), tom yum gung (nam khon), pad Thai, Massaman curry, kaeng kiew wan (green curry), kaeng lueng (southern Thai sour curry), Golek chicken sauce, khao soi, sai oui (northern Thai sausage), nam prik noom (green pepper chili paste), and nam prik aong (northern Thai chili paste). These recipes were featured at a gala dinner promoting "Authentic Thai Food for the World", held at the Plaza Athénée Hotel Bangkok on 24 August 2016 at which Thailand's Minister of Industry was the honored guest. By 2020, Thai Delicious plans to post over 300 Thai food recipes.
To determine authenticity, Thai researchers developed the "e-delicious machine", described as "...an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic." The machine evaluates food by measuring its conductivity at different voltages. Readings from 10 sensors are combined to produce a chemical signature. Because the machine cannot judge taste, the food is compared with a standard derived from a database of popular preferences for each dish. For tom yam, the spicy soup flavored with Kaffir lime leaves and coriander, researchers posted notices at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, requesting 120 tasters. The tasters—students, university staff, and area workers—were paid a few baht for their opinions. They were served 10 differently prepared soups and rated each one. The winning soup was declared the standard, and its chemical characteristics were programmed into the machine. When testing food, the machine returns a numerical score from one to 100. A score lower than 80 is deemed "not up to standard". The machine cost about US$100,000 to develop. Restaurants that follow officially sanctioned recipes can affix a "Thai Delicious" logo to their menus. As each machine sells for 200,000 baht, this project was shelved also.
The Thai Delicious project has been criticized, the main rationale being that "Standardisation is the enemy of Thai food." Some observers think, however, that the quality of Thai food, at least in the US, is declining with its increased popularity, a state of affairs that Thai Delicious aims to fix.
In August 2018, Thailand's Ministry of Commerce kicked off a project called "Thai Select". It issues certificates in three grades to domestic Thai restaurants: gold (five stars); red (four stars); and orange (three stars). The goal is to enable tourists to Thailand to choose a worthy restaurant.
Culture Minister Vira Rojpojchanarat announced in 2018 that between 2020 and 2024, his ministry will investigate ways to preserve authentic Thai cuisine from the increasing influence of foreign dishes. "Unique in its preparation with recipes handed down for generations, Thai culinary art needs better protection against foreign influences which are now changing the look and taste of certain local dishes," he warned. The plan will conform to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The 2003 convention intends to protect the "uses, representations, expressions, knowledge and techniques that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals, recognised as an integral part of their cultural heritage".
On average, Thai people consume 4,300 mg of sodium per day, twice the WHO's recommended maximum. Thai street food is one of the top three contributors to high salt intake. The Public Health Ministry has embarked on a program to reduce the population's salt consumption by 30 percent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30529 |
Toxicology
Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating exposures to toxins and toxicants. The relationship between dose and its effects on the exposed organism is of high significance in toxicology. Factors that influence chemical toxicity include the dosage, duration of exposure (whether it is acute or chronic), route of exposure, species, age, sex, and environment. Toxicologists are experts on poisons and poisoning. There is a movement for evidence-based toxicology as part of the larger movement towards evidence-based practices.
Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the court of the Roman emperor Nero, made the first attempt to classify plants according to their toxic and therapeutic effect. Ibn Wahshiyya wrote the "Book on Poisons" in the 9th or 10th century. This was followed up in 1360 by Khagendra Mani Darpana.
Mathieu Orfila is considered the modern father of toxicology, having given the subject its first formal treatment in 1813 in his "Traité des poisons", also called "Toxicologie générale".
In 1850, Jean Stas became the first person to successfully isolate plant poisons from human tissue. This allowed him to identify the use of nicotine as a poison in the Bocarmé murder case, providing the evidence needed to convict the Belgian Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé of killing his brother-in-law.
Theophrastus Phillipus Auroleus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) (also referred to as Paracelsus, from his belief that his studies were above or beyond the work of Celsus – a Roman physician from the first century) is also considered "the father" of toxicology. He is credited with the classic toxicology maxim, ""Alle Dinge sind Gift und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist."" which translates as, "All things are poisonous and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not poisonous." This is often condensed to: "The dose makes the poison" or in Latin "Sola dosis facit venenum".
The goal of toxicity assessment is to identify adverse effects of a substance. Adverse effects depend on two main factors: i) routes of exposure (oral, inhalation, or dermal) and ii) dose (duration and concentration of exposure). To explore dose, substances are tested in both acute and chronic models. Generally, different sets of experiments are conducted to determine whether a substance causes cancer and to examine other forms of toxicity.
Factors that influence chemical toxicity:
The discipline of evidence-based toxicology strives to transparently, consistently, and objectively assess available scientific evidence in order to answer questions in toxicology, the study of the adverse effects of chemical, physical, or biological agents on living organisms and the environment, including the prevention and amelioration of such effects. Evidence-based toxicology has the potential to address concerns in the toxicological community about the limitations of current approaches to assessing the state of the science. These include concerns related to transparency in decision making, synthesis of different types of evidence, and the assessment of bias and credibility. Evidence-based toxicology has its roots in the larger movement towards evidence-based practices.
Toxicity experiments may be conducted "in vivo" (using the whole animal) or "in vitro" (testing on isolated cells or tissues), or "in silico" (in a computer simulation).
The classic experimental tool of toxicology is testing on non-human animals. Example of model organisms are "Galleria mellonella," which can replace small mammals, and Zebrafish, which allow for the study of toxicology in a lower order vertebrate in vivo. As of 2014, such animal testing provides information that is not available by other means about how substances function in a living organism. The use of non-human animals for toxicology testing is opposed by some organisations for reasons of animal welfare, and it has been restricted or banned under some circumstances in certain regions, such as the testing of cosmetics in the European Union.
While testing in animal models remains as a method of estimating human effects, there are both ethical and technical concerns with animal testing.
Since the late 1950s, the field of toxicology has sought to reduce or eliminate animal testing under the rubric of "Three Rs" - reduce the number of experiments with animals to the minimum necessary; refine experiments to cause less suffering, and replace "in vivo" experiments with other types, or use more simple forms of life when possible.
Computer modeling is an example of alternative testing methods; using computer models of chemicals and proteins, structure-activity relationships can be determined, and chemical structures that are likely to bind to, and interfere with, proteins with essential functions, can be identified. This work requires expert knowledge in molecular modeling and statistics together with expert judgment in chemistry, biology and toxicology.
In 2007 the American NGO National Academy of Sciences published a report called "Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy" which opened with a statement: "Change often involves a pivotal event that builds on previous history and opens the door to a new era. Pivotal events in science include the discovery of penicillin, the elucidation of the DNA double helix, and the development of computers. ...Toxicity testing is approaching such a scientific pivot point. It is poised to take advantage of the revolutions in biology and biotechnology. Advances in toxicogenomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, epigenetics, and computational toxicology could transform toxicity testing from a system based on whole-animal testing to one founded primarily on in vitro methods that evaluate changes in biologic processes using cells, cell lines, or cellular components, preferably of human origin." As of 2014 that vision was still unrealized.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency studied 1,065 chemical and drug substances in their ToxCast program (part of the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard) using "in silica" modelling and a human pluripotent stem cell-based assay to predict "in vivo" developmental intoxicants based on changes in cellular metabolism following chemical exposure. Major findings from the analysis of this ToxCast_STM dataset published in 2020 include: (1) 19% of 1065 chemicals yielded a prediction of developmental toxicity, (2) assay performance reached 79%–82% accuracy with high specificity (> 84%) but modest sensitivity (< 67%) when compared with "in vivo" animal models of human prenatal developmental toxicity, (3) sensitivity improved as more stringent weights of evidence requirements were applied to the animal studies, and (4) statistical analysis of the most potent chemical hits on specific biochemical targets in ToxCast revealed positive and negative associations with the STM response, providing insights into the mechanistic underpinnings of the targeted endpoint and its biological domain.
In some cases shifts away from animal studies has been mandated by law or regulation; the European Union (EU) prohibited use of animal testing for cosmetics in 2013.
Most chemicals display a classic dose response curve – at a low dose (below a threshold), no effect is observed. Some show a phenomenon known as sufficient challenge – a small exposure produces animals that "grow more rapidly, have better general appearance and coat quality, have fewer tumors, and live longer than the control animals".
A few chemicals have no well-defined safe level of exposure. These are treated with special care. Some chemicals are subject to
bioaccumulation as they are stored in rather than being excreted from the body; these also receive special consideration.
Several measures are commonly used to describe toxic dosages according to the degree of effect on an organism or a population, and some are specifically defined by various laws or organizational usage. These include:
Medical toxicology is the discipline that requires physician status (MD or DO degree plus specialty education and experience).
Clinical toxicology is the discipline that can be practiced not only by physicians but also other health professionals with a master's degree in clinical toxicology: physician extenders (physician assistants, nurse practitioners), nurses, pharmacists, and allied health professionals.
Forensic toxicology is the discipline that makes use of toxicology and other disciplines such as analytical chemistry, pharmacology and clinical chemistry to aid medical or legal investigation of death, poisoning, and drug use. The primary concern for forensic toxicology is not the legal outcome of the toxicological investigation or the technology utilized, but rather the obtainment and interpretation of results.
Computational toxicology is a discipline that develops mathematical and computer-based models to better understand and predict adverse health effects caused by chemicals, such as environmental pollutants and pharmaceuticals. Within the "Toxicology in the 21st Century" project, the best predictive models were identified to be Deep Neural Networks, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines, which can reach the performance of in vitro experiments.
A toxicologist is a scientist or medical personnel who specializes in the study of symptoms, mechanisms, treatments and detection of venoms and toxins; especially the poisoning of people.
To work as a toxicologist one should obtain a degree in toxicology or a related degree like biology, chemistry, pharmacology or biochemistry. Bachelor's degree programs in toxicology cover the chemical makeup of toxins and their effects on biochemistry, physiology and ecology. After introductory life science courses are complete, students typically enroll in labs and apply toxicology principles to research and other studies. Advanced students delve into specific sectors, like the pharmaceutical industry or law enforcement, which apply methods of toxicology in their work. The Society of Toxicology (SOT) recommends that undergraduates in postsecondary schools that don't offer a bachelor's degree in toxicology consider attaining a degree in biology or chemistry. Additionally, the SOT advises aspiring toxicologists to take statistics and mathematics courses, as well as gain laboratory experience through lab courses, student research projects and internships.
Toxicologists perform many different duties including research in the academic, nonprofit and industrial fields, product safety evaluation, consulting, public service and legal regulation. In order to research and assess the effects of chemicals, toxicologists perform carefully designed studies and experiments. These experiments help identify the specific amount of a chemical that may cause harm and potential risks of being near or using products that contain certain chemicals. Research projects may range from assessing the effects of toxic pollutants on the environment to evaluating how the human immune system responds to chemical compounds within pharmaceutical drugs. While the basic duties of toxicologists are to determine the effects of chemicals on organisms and their surroundings, specific job duties may vary based on industry and employment. For example, forensic toxicologists may look for toxic substances in a crime scene, whereas aquatic toxicologists may analyze the toxicity level of water bodies.
The salary for jobs in toxicology is dependent on several factors, including level of schooling, specialization, experience. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes that jobs for biological scientists, which generally include toxicologists, were expected to increase by 21% between 2008 and 2018. The BLS notes that this increase could be due to research and development growth in biotechnology, as well as budget increases for basic and medical research in biological science.
The word "toxicology" () is a neoclassical compound from New Latin, first attested circa 1799, from the combining forms "toxico-" + "-logy", which in turn come from the Ancient Greek words τοξικός "toxikos", "poisonous", and λόγος "logos", "subject matter"). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30531 |
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ( ; October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), often referred to as Teddy Roosevelt or his initials T. R., was an American statesman, politician, conservationist, naturalist, and writer who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He served as the 25th vice president from March to September 1901 and as the 33rd governor of New York from 1899 to 1900. Roosevelt emerged as a leader of the Republican Party and became a driving force for the anti-trust policy while supporting Progressive Era policies in the early 20th century. His face is depicted on Mount Rushmore alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
Roosevelt was a sickly child with debilitating asthma, but he overcame his health problems by embracing a strenuous lifestyle, as well as growing out of his asthma naturally in his young adult years. He integrated his exuberant personality, a vast range of interests and world-famous achievements into a "cowboy" persona defined by robust masculinity. He was home-schooled and began a lifelong naturalist avocation before attending Harvard College. His book "The Naval War of 1812" (1882) established his reputation as a learned historian and as a popular writer. Upon entering politics, he became the leader of the reform faction of Republicans in New York's state legislature. His wife and his mother both died in rapid succession, and he escaped to a cattle ranch in the Dakotas. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley, but he resigned from that post to lead the Rough Riders during the Spanish–American War, returning a war hero. He was elected governor of New York in 1898. After Vice President Garret Hobart died in 1899, the New York state party leadership convinced McKinley to accept Roosevelt as his running mate in the 1900 election. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously, and the McKinley–Roosevelt ticket won a landslide victory based on a platform of peace, prosperity, and conservation.
Roosevelt took office as vice president in March 1901 and assumed the presidency at age 42 after McKinley was assassinated the following September. He remains the youngest person to become President of the United States. Roosevelt was a leader of the progressive movement, and he championed his "Square Deal" domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness, breaking of trusts, regulation of railroads, and pure food and drugs. He made conservation a top priority and established many new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the nation's natural resources. In foreign policy, he focused on Central America where he began construction of the Panama Canal. He expanded the Navy and sent the Great White Fleet on a world tour to project the United States' naval power around the globe. His successful efforts to broker the end of the Russo-Japanese War won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. He avoided controversial tariff and money issues. Roosevelt was elected to a full term in 1904 and continued to promote progressive policies, many of which were passed in Congress. He groomed his close friend William Howard Taft to successfully succeed him in the 1908 presidential election.
Roosevelt grew frustrated with Taft's brand of conservatism and belatedly tried to win the 1912 Republican nomination for president. He failed, walked out, and founded the so-called "Bull Moose" Party which called for wide-ranging progressive reforms. He ran in the 1912 election and the split allowed the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson to win the election. Following the defeat, Roosevelt led a two-year expedition to the Amazon basin where he nearly died of tropical disease. During World War I, he criticized Wilson for keeping the country out of the war with Germany, and his offer to lead volunteers to France was rejected. He considered running for president again in 1920, but his health continued to deteriorate and he died in 1919. He is generally ranked in polls of historians and political scientists as one of the five best presidents.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born on October 27, 1858, at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan, New York City. He was the second of four children born to socialite Martha Stewart "Mittie" Bulloch and businessman and philanthropist Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (brother of Robert Roosevelt and James A. Roosevelt, all sons of Cornelius Roosevelt). He had an older sister (Anna, nicknamed "Bamie"), a younger brother (Elliott) and a younger sister (Corinne). Elliott was later the father of First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Theodore's distant cousin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His paternal grandfather was of Dutch descent; his other ancestry included primarily Scottish and Scots-Irish, English and smaller amounts of German, Welsh and French. Theodore Sr. was the fifth son of businessman Cornelius Van Schaack "C.V.S." Roosevelt and Margaret Barnhill. Theodore's fourth cousin, James Roosevelt I, who was also a businessman, was the father of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mittie was the younger daughter of Major James Stephens Bulloch and Martha P. "Patsy" Stewart. Through the Van Schaacks, Roosevelt was a descendant of the Schuyler family.
Roosevelt's youth was largely shaped by his poor health and debilitating asthma. He repeatedly experienced sudden nighttime asthma attacks that caused the experience of being smothered to death, which terrified both Theodore and his parents. Doctors had no cure. Nevertheless, he was energetic and mischievously inquisitive. His lifelong interest in zoology began at age seven when he saw a dead seal at a local market; after obtaining the seal's head, Roosevelt and two cousins formed what they called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History". Having learned the rudiments of taxidermy, he filled his makeshift museum with animals that he killed or caught; he then studied the animals and prepared them for exhibition. At age nine, he recorded his observation of insects in a paper entitled "The Natural History of Insects".
Roosevelt's father significantly influenced him. His father was a prominent leader in New York's cultural affairs; he helped to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and had been especially active in mobilizing support for the Union during the Civil War, even though his in-laws included Confederate leaders. Roosevelt said, "My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness." Family trips abroad, including tours of Europe in 1869 and 1870, and Egypt in 1872, shaped his cosmopolitan perspective. Hiking with his family in the Alps in 1869, Roosevelt found that he could keep pace with his father. He had discovered the significant benefits of physical exertion to minimize his asthma and bolster his spirits. Roosevelt began a heavy regime of exercise. After being manhandled by two older boys on a camping trip, he found a boxing coach to teach him to fight and strengthen his body.
A 6-year-old Roosevelt witnessed the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln from his grandfather's mansion in Union Square, New York City where he was photographed in the window along with his brother Elliott, as confirmed by wife Edith who was also present.
Roosevelt was mostly homeschooled by tutors and his parents. Biographer H. W. Brands argued that "The most obvious drawback to his home schooling was uneven coverage of the various areas of human knowledge". He was solid in geography and bright in history, biology, French, and German; however, he struggled in mathematics and the classical languages. When he entered Harvard College on September 27, 1876, his father advised: "Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies." His father's sudden death on February 9, 1878, devastated Roosevelt, but he eventually recovered and doubled his activities.
He did well in science, philosophy, and rhetoric courses but continued to struggle in Latin and Greek. He studied biology intently and was already an accomplished naturalist and a published ornithologist. He read prodigiously with an almost photographic memory. While at Harvard, Roosevelt participated in rowing and boxing; he was once runner-up in a Harvard boxing tournament. Roosevelt was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi literary society (later the Fly Club), the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and the prestigious Porcellian Club; he was also an editor of "The Harvard Advocate". In 1880, Roosevelt graduated Phi Beta Kappa (22nd of 177) from Harvard with an A.B. "magna cum laude". Biographer Henry Pringle states:
After his father's death, Roosevelt had inherited $125,000 (equivalent to $ million in ), enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life. Roosevelt gave up his earlier plan of studying natural science and instead decided to attend Columbia Law School, moving back into his family's home in New York City. Roosevelt was an able law student, but he often found law to be irrational. He spent much of his time writing a book on the War of 1812.
Determined to enter politics, Roosevelt began attending meetings at Morton Hall, the 59th Street headquarters of New York's 21st District Republican Association. Though Roosevelt's father had been a prominent member of the Republican Party, the younger Roosevelt made an unorthodox career choice for someone of his class, as most of Roosevelt's peers refrained from becoming too closely involved in politics. Roosevelt found allies in the local Republican Party, and he defeated an incumbent Republican state assemblyman closely tied to the political machine of Senator Roscoe Conkling. After his election victory, Roosevelt decided to drop out of law school, later saying, "I intended to be one of the governing class."
While at Harvard, Roosevelt began a systematic study of the role played by the young United States Navy in the War of 1812. Assisted by two uncles, he scrutinized original source materials and official U.S. Navy records, ultimately publishing "The Naval War of 1812" in 1882. The book contained drawings of individual and combined ship maneuvers, charts depicting the differences in iron throw weights of cannon shot between rival forces, and analyses of the differences and similarities between British and American leadership down to the ship-to-ship level. Upon release, "The Naval War of 1812" was praised for its scholarship and style, and it remains a standard study of the war.
With the publication of "The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783" in 1890, Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was immediately hailed as the world's outstanding naval theorist by the leaders of Europe. Roosevelt paid very close attention to Mahan's emphasis that only a nation with the world's most powerful fleet could dominate the world's oceans, exert its diplomacy to the fullest, and defend its own borders. He incorporated Mahan's ideas into his views on naval strategy for the remainder of his career.
On his 22nd birthday in 1880, Roosevelt married socialite Alice Hathaway Lee. Their daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt, was born on February 12, 1884. Two days after giving birth, Roosevelt's wife died due to an undiagnosed case of kidney failure (called Bright's disease at the time), which had been masked by the pregnancy. In his diary, Roosevelt wrote a large 'X' on the page and then, "The light has gone out of my life." His mother, Mittie, had died of typhoid fever eleven hours earlier at 3:00 a.m., in the same house. Distraught, Roosevelt left baby Alice in the care of his sister Bamie in New York City while he grieved. He assumed custody of his daughter when she was three.
After the death of his wife and mother, Roosevelt focused on his work, specifically by re-energizing a legislative investigation into corruption of the New York City government, which arose from a concurrent bill proposing that power be centralized in the mayor's office. For the rest of his life, he rarely spoke about his wife Alice and did not write about her in his autobiography. While working with Joseph Bucklin Bishop on a biography that included a collection of his letters, Roosevelt did not mention his marriage to Alice nor his second marriage to Edith Kermit Carow.
Roosevelt was a member of the New York State Assembly (New York Co., 21st D.) in 1882, 1883 and 1884. He immediately began making his mark, specifically in corporate corruption issues. He blocked a corrupt effort by financier Jay Gould to lower his taxes. Roosevelt exposed suspected collusion in the matter by Judge Theodore Westbrook, and argued for and received approval for an investigation to proceed, aiming for the impeachment of the judge. The investigation committee rejected impeachment, but Roosevelt had exposed the potential corruption in Albany, and thus assumed a high and positive political profile in multiple New York publications.
Roosevelt's anti-corruption efforts helped him win re-election in 1882 by a margin greater than two-to-one, an achievement made even more impressive by the fact that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Grover Cleveland won Roosevelt's district. With Conkling's Stalwart faction of the Republican Party in disarray following the assassination of President James Garfield, Roosevelt won election as the Republican party leader in the state assembly. He allied with Governor Cleveland to win passage of a civil service reform bill. Roosevelt won re-election a second time, and sought the office of Speaker of the New York State Assembly, but was defeated by Titus Sheard in a 41 to 29 vote of the GOP caucus. In his final term, Roosevelt served as Chairman of the Committee on Affairs of Cities; he wrote more bills than any other legislator.
With numerous presidential hopefuls to choose from, Roosevelt supported Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont, a colorless reformer. The state GOP preferred the incumbent president, New York City's Chester Arthur, who was known for passing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Arthur, at the time, was suffering from Bright's disease, unknown to the public, and out of duty he did not contest his own nomination. Roosevelt fought hard and succeeded in influencing the Manhattan delegates at the state convention in Utica. He then took control of the state convention, bargaining through the night and outmaneuvering the supporters of Arthur and James G. Blaine; he gained a national reputation as a key person in New York State.
Roosevelt attended the 1884 GOP National Convention in Chicago and gave a speech convincing delegates to nominate African American John R. Lynch, an Edmunds supporter, to be temporary chair. Roosevelt fought alongside the Mugwump reformers; however, Blaine, having gained support from Arthur's and Edmunds's delegates, won the nomination by 541 votes on the fourth ballot. In a crucial moment of his budding political career, Roosevelt resisted the demand of the Mugwumps that he bolt from Blaine. He bragged about his one small success: "We achieved a victory in getting up a combination to beat the Blaine nominee for temporary chairman... To do this needed a mixture of skill, boldness and energy... to get the different factions to come in... to defeat the common foe." He was also impressed by an invitation to speak before an audience of ten thousand, the largest crowd he had addressed up to that date. Having gotten a taste of national politics, Roosevelt felt less aspiration for advocacy on the state level; he then retired to his new "Chimney Butte Ranch" on the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt refused to join other Mugwumps in supporting Grover Cleveland, the governor of New York and the Democratic nominee in the general election. He debated the pros and cons of staying loyal with his political friend, Henry Cabot Lodge. After Blaine won the nomination, Roosevelt had carelessly said that he would give "hearty support to any decent Democrat". He distanced himself from the promise, saying that it had not been meant "for publication". When a reporter asked if he would support Blaine, Roosevelt replied, "That question I decline to answer. It is a subject I do not care to talk about." In the end, he realized that he had to support Blaine to maintain his role in the GOP, and he did so in a press release on July 19. Having lost the support of many reformers, Roosevelt decided to retire from politics and move to North Dakota.
Roosevelt first visited the Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt bison. Exhilarated by the cowboy life, and with the cattle business booming in the territory, Roosevelt invested $14,000 in hopes of becoming a prosperous cattle rancher. For the next several years, he shuttled between his home in New York and his ranch in Dakota.
Following the 1884 presidential election, Roosevelt built a ranch named Elkhorn, which was north of the boomtown of Medora, North Dakota. Roosevelt learned to ride western style, rope, and hunt on the banks of the Little Missouri. Though he earned the respect of the authentic cowboys, they were not overly impressed. However, he identified with the herdsman of history, a man he said possesses, "few of the emasculated, milk-and-water moralities admired by the pseudo-philanthropists; but he does possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation". He reoriented, and began writing about frontier life for national magazines; he also published three books – "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman", "Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail", and "The Wilderness Hunter".
Roosevelt brought his desire to address the common interests of citizens to the West. He successfully led efforts to organize ranchers to address problems of overgrazing and other shared concerns; his work resulted in the formation of the Little Missouri Stockmen's Association. He felt compelled to promote conservation and was able to form the Boone and Crockett Club, whose primary goal was the conservation of large game animals and their habitats. After the uniquely severe US winter of 1886–87 wiped out his herd of cattle and those of his competitors, and with it over half of his $80,000 investment, Roosevelt returned to the East. Though his finances suffered from the experience, Roosevelt's time in the West made it impossible to peg him as an ineffectual intellectual, a characterization that could have hampered his political career.
On December 2, 1886, Roosevelt married his childhood and family friend, Edith Kermit Carow. Roosevelt was deeply troubled that his second marriage had taken place so soon after the death of his first wife, and he faced resistance from his sisters. Nonetheless, the couple married at St George's, Hanover Square in London, England. The couple had five children: Theodore "Ted" III in 1887, Kermit in 1889, Ethel in 1891, Archibald in 1894, and Quentin in 1897. The couple also raised Roosevelt's daughter from his first marriage, Alice, who often clashed with her stepmother.
Upon Roosevelt's return to New York in 1886, Republican leaders quickly approached him about running for mayor of New York City in the city's mayoral election. Roosevelt accepted the nomination despite having little hope of winning the race against United Labor Party candidate Henry George and Democratic candidate Abram Hewitt. Roosevelt campaigned hard for the position, but Hewitt won with 41% (90,552 votes), taking the votes of many Republicans who feared George's radical policies. George was held to 31% (68,110 votes), and Roosevelt took third place with 27% (60,435 votes). Fearing that his political career might never recover, Roosevelt turned his attention to writing "The Winning of the West", a historical work tracking the westward movement of Americans; the book was a great success for Roosevelt, earning favorable reviews and selling numerous copies.
After Benjamin Harrison unexpectedly defeated Blaine for the presidential nomination at the 1888 Republican National Convention, Roosevelt gave stump speeches in the Midwest in support of Harrison. On the insistence of Henry Cabot Lodge, President Harrison appointed Roosevelt to the United States Civil Service Commission, where he served until 1895. While many of his predecessors had approached the office as a sinecure, Roosevelt vigorously fought the spoilsmen and demanded enforcement of civil service laws. The "New York Sun" then described Roosevelt as "irrepressible, belligerent, and enthusiastic". Roosevelt frequently clashed with Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who handed out numerous patronage positions to Harrison supporters, and Roosevelt's attempt to force out several postal workers damaged Harrison politically. Despite Roosevelt's support for Harrison's reelection bid in the presidential election of 1892, the eventual winner, Grover Cleveland, reappointed him to the same post. Roosevelt's close friend and biographer, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, described his assault on the spoils system:
In 1894, a group of reform Republicans approached Roosevelt about running for Mayor of New York again; he declined, mostly due to his wife's resistance to being removed from the Washington social set. Soon after he declined, he realized that he had missed an opportunity to reinvigorate a dormant political career. He retreated to the Dakotas for a time; his wife Edith regretted her role in the decision and vowed that there would be no repeat of it.
William Lafayette Strong, a reform-minded Republican, won the 1894 mayoral election and offered Roosevelt a position on the board of the New York City Police Commissioners. Roosevelt became president of the board of commissioners and radically reformed the police force. Roosevelt implemented regular inspections of firearms and annual physical exams, appointed recruits based on their physical and mental qualifications rather than political affiliation, established Meritorious Service Medals, and closed corrupt police hostelries. During his tenure, a Municipal Lodging House was established by the Board of Charities, and Roosevelt required officers to register with the Board; he also had telephones installed in station houses.
In 1894, Roosevelt met Jacob Riis, the muckraking "Evening Sun" newspaper journalist who was opening the eyes of New Yorkers to the terrible conditions of the city's millions of poor immigrants with such books as "How the Other Half Lives." Riis described how his book affected Roosevelt:
Roosevelt made a habit of walking officers' beats late at night and early in the morning to make sure that they were on duty. He made a concerted effort to uniformly enforce New York's Sunday closing law; in this, he ran up against boss Tom Platt as well as Tammany Hall—he was notified that the Police Commission was being legislated out of existence. His crackdowns led to protests and demonstrations. Invited to one large demonstration, not only did he surprisingly accept, he delighted in the insults, caricatures and lampoons directed at him, and earned some surprising good will. Roosevelt chose to defer rather than split with his party. As Governor of New York State, he would later sign an act replacing the Police Commission with a single Police Commissioner.
In the 1896 presidential election, Roosevelt backed Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed for the Republican nomination, but William McKinley won the nomination and defeated William Jennings Bryan in the general election. Roosevelt opposed Bryan's free silver platform, viewing many of Bryan's followers as dangerous fanatics, and Roosevelt gave campaign speeches for McKinley. Urged by Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, President McKinley appointed Roosevelt as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long was more concerned about formalities than functions, was in poor health, and left many major decisions to Roosevelt. Influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan, Roosevelt called for a build-up in the country's naval strength, particularly the construction of battleships. Roosevelt also began pressing his national security views regarding the Pacific and the Caribbean on McKinley, and was particularly adamant that Spain be ejected from Cuba. He explained his priorities to one of the Navy's planners in late 1897:
On February 15, 1898, , an armored cruiser, exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, killing hundreds of crew members. While Roosevelt and many other Americans blamed Spain for the explosion, McKinley sought a diplomatic solution. Without approval from Long or McKinley, Roosevelt sent out orders to several naval vessels, directing them to prepare for war. George Dewey, who had received an appointment to lead the Asiatic Squadron with the backing of Roosevelt, later credited his victory at the Battle of Manila Bay to Roosevelt's orders. After finally giving up hope of a peaceful solution, McKinley asked Congress to declare war upon Spain, beginning the Spanish–American War.
With the beginning of the Spanish–American War in late April 1898, Roosevelt resigned from his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Along with Army Colonel Leonard Wood, he formed the First US Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. His wife and many of his friends begged Roosevelt to remain in his post in Washington, but Roosevelt was determined to see battle. When the newspapers reported the formation of the new regiment, Roosevelt and Wood were flooded with applications from all over the country. Referred to by the press as the "Rough Riders", the regiment was one of many temporary units active only for the duration of the war.
The regiment trained for several weeks in San Antonio, Texas, and in his autobiography, Roosevelt wrote that his prior experience with the New York National Guard had been invaluable, in that it enabled him to immediately begin teaching his men basic soldiering skills. The Rough Riders used some standard issue gear and some of their own design, purchased with gift money. Diversity characterized the regiment, which included Ivy Leaguers, professional and amateur athletes, upscale gentlemen, cowboys, frontiersmen, Native Americans, hunters, miners, prospectors, former soldiers, tradesmen, and sheriffs. The Rough Riders were part of the cavalry division commanded by former Confederate general Joseph Wheeler, which itself was one of three divisions in the V Corps under Lieutenant General William Rufus Shafter. Roosevelt and his men landed in Daiquirí, Cuba, on June 23, 1898, and marched to Siboney. Wheeler sent parts of the 1st and 10th Regular Cavalry on the lower road northwest and sent the "Rough Riders" on the parallel road running along a ridge up from the beach. To throw off his infantry rival, Wheeler left one regiment of his Cavalry Division, the 9th, at Siboney so that he could claim that his move north was only a limited reconnaissance if things went wrong. Roosevelt was promoted to colonel and took command of the regiment when Wood was put in command of the brigade. The Rough Riders had a short, minor skirmish known as the Battle of Las Guasimas; they fought their way through Spanish resistance and, together with the Regulars, forced the Spaniards to abandon their positions.
Under his leadership, the Rough Riders became famous for the charge up Kettle Hill on July 1, 1898, while supporting the regulars. Roosevelt had the only horse, and rode back and forth between rifle pits at the forefront of the advance up Kettle Hill, an advance that he urged despite the absence of any orders from superiors. He was forced to walk up the last part of Kettle Hill, because his horse had been entangled in barbed wire. The victories came at a cost of 200 killed and 1,000 wounded.
Roosevelt commented on his role in the battles: "On the day of the big fight I had to ask my men to do a deed that European military writers consider utterly impossible of performance, that is, to attack over open ground an unshaken infantry armed with the best modern repeating rifles behind a formidable system of entrenchments. The only way to get them to do it in the way it had to be done was to lead them myself."
In August, Roosevelt and other officers demanded that the soldiers be returned home. Roosevelt always recalled the Battle of Kettle Hill (part of the San Juan Heights) as "the great day of my life" and "my crowded hour". In 2001, Roosevelt was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions; he had been nominated during the war, but Army officials, annoyed at his grabbing the headlines, blocked it. After returning to civilian life, Roosevelt preferred to be known as "Colonel Roosevelt" or "The Colonel", though "Teddy" remained much more popular with the public, even though Roosevelt openly despised that moniker. Men working closely with Roosevelt customarily called him "Colonel" or "Theodore". Henceforth, political cartoons of Roosevelt usually depicted him in his Rough Rider garb.
After leaving Cuba in August 1898, the Rough Riders were transported to a camp at Montauk Point, Long Island, where Roosevelt and his men were briefly quarantined due to the War Department's fear of spreading yellow fever. Shortly after Roosevelt's return to the United States, Republican Congressman Lemuel E. Quigg, a lieutenant of party boss Tom Platt, asked Roosevelt to run in the 1898 gubernatorial election. Platt disliked Roosevelt personally, feared that Roosevelt would oppose Platt's interests in office, and was reluctant to propel Roosevelt to the forefront of national politics. However, Platt also needed a strong candidate due to the unpopularity of the incumbent Republican governor, Frank S. Black, and Roosevelt agreed to become the nominee and to try not to "make war" with the Republican establishment once in office. Roosevelt defeated Black in the Republican caucus by a vote of 753 to 218, and faced Democrat Augustus Van Wyck, a well-respected judge, in the general election. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously on his war record, winning the election by a margin of just one percent.
As governor, Roosevelt learned much about ongoing economic issues and political techniques that later proved valuable in his presidency. He was exposed to the problems of trusts, monopolies, labor relations, and conservation. Chessman argues that Roosevelt's program "rested firmly upon the concept of the square deal by a neutral state". The rules for the Square Deal were "honesty in public affairs, an equitable sharing of privilege and responsibility, and subordination of party and local concerns to the interests of the state at large".
By holding twice-daily press conferences—which was an innovation—Roosevelt remained connected with his middle-class political base. Roosevelt successfully pushed the Ford Franchise-Tax bill, which taxed public franchises granted by the state and controlled by corporations, declaring that "a corporation which derives its powers from the State, should pay to the State a just percentage of its earnings as a return for the privileges it enjoys". He rejected "boss" Thomas C. Platt's worries that this approached Bryanite Socialism, explaining that without it, New York voters might get angry and adopt public ownership of streetcar lines and other franchises.
The New York state government affected many interests, and the power to make appointments to policy-making positions was a key role for the governor. Platt insisted that he be consulted on major appointments; Roosevelt appeared to comply, but then made his own decisions. Historians marvel that Roosevelt managed to appoint so many first-rate men with Platt's approval. He even enlisted Platt's help in securing reform, such as in the spring of 1899, when Platt pressured state senators to vote for a civil service bill that the secretary of the Civil Service Reform Association called "superior to any civil service statute heretofore secured in America".
Chessman argues that as governor, Roosevelt developed the principles that shaped his presidency, especially insistence upon the public responsibility of large corporations, publicity as a first remedy for trusts, regulation of railroad rates, mediation of the conflict of capital and labor, conservation of natural resources and protection of the less fortunate members of society. Roosevelt sought to position himself against the excesses of large corporations on the one hand and radical movements on the other.
As the chief executive of the most populous state in the union, Roosevelt was widely considered a potential future presidential candidate, and supporters such as William Allen White encouraged him to run for president. Roosevelt had no interest in challenging McKinley for the Republican nomination in 1900, and was denied his preferred post of Secretary of War. As his term progressed, Roosevelt pondered a 1904 presidential run, but was uncertain about whether he should seek re-election as governor in 1900.
In November 1899, Vice President Garret Hobart died of heart failure, leaving an open spot on the 1900 Republican national ticket. Though Henry Cabot Lodge and others urged him to run for vice president in 1900, Roosevelt was reluctant to take the powerless position and issued a public statement saying that he would not accept the nomination. Additionally, Roosevelt was informed by President McKinley and campaign manager Mark Hanna that he was not being considered for the role of vice president due to his actions prior to the Spanish–American War. Eager to be rid of Roosevelt, Platt nonetheless began a newspaper campaign in favor of Roosevelt's nomination for the vice presidency. Roosevelt attended the 1900 Republican National Convention as a state delegate and struck a bargain with Platt: Roosevelt would accept the nomination for vice president if the convention offered it to him, but would otherwise serve another term as governor. Platt asked Pennsylvania party boss Matthew Quay to lead the campaign for Roosevelt's nomination, and Quay outmaneuvered Hanna at the convention to put Roosevelt on the ticket. Roosevelt won the nomination unanimously.
Roosevelt's vice-presidential campaigning proved highly energetic and an equal match for Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan's famous barnstorming style of campaigning. In a whirlwind campaign that displayed his energy to the public, Roosevelt made 480 stops in 23 states. He denounced the radicalism of Bryan, contrasting it with the heroism of the soldiers and sailors who fought and won the war against Spain. Bryan had strongly supported the war itself, but he denounced the annexation of the Philippines as imperialism, which would spoil America's innocence. Roosevelt countered that it was best for the Filipinos to have stability and the Americans to have a proud place in the world. With the nation basking in peace and prosperity, the voters gave McKinley an even larger victory than that which he had achieved in 1896.
After the campaign, Roosevelt took office as vice president in March 1901. The office of vice president was a powerless sinecure and did not suit Roosevelt's aggressive temperament. Roosevelt's six months as vice president were uneventful, and Roosevelt presided over the Senate for a mere four days before it adjourned. On September 2, 1901, Roosevelt first publicized an aphorism that thrilled his supporters at the Minnesota State Fair: "Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far."
On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York when he was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Roosevelt was vacationing in Vermont, and traveled to Buffalo to visit McKinley in the hospital. It appeared that McKinley would recover, so Roosevelt resumed his vacation in the Adirondacks. When McKinley's condition worsened, Roosevelt again traveled to Buffalo. McKinley died on September 14, and Roosevelt was informed while he was in North Creek; he continued on to Buffalo and was sworn in as the nation's 26th president at the Ansley Wilcox House.
Roosevelt's accession to the presidency left the vice presidency vacant. As there was no constitutional provision for filling an intra-term vacancy in that office (prior to ratification of the 25th Amendment in 1967), Roosevelt served his first term without a vice president. McKinley's supporters were nervous about the new president, and Hanna was particularly bitter that the man he had opposed so vigorously at the convention had succeeded McKinley. Roosevelt assured party leaders that he intended to adhere to McKinley's policies, and he retained McKinley's Cabinet. Nonetheless, Roosevelt sought to position himself as the party's undisputed leader, seeking to bolster the role of the president and position himself for the 1904 election.
Shortly after taking office, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. To his dismay, this sparked a bitter, and at times vicious, reaction across the heavily segregated South. Roosevelt reacted with astonishment and protest, saying that he looked forward to many future dinners with Washington. Upon further reflection, Roosevelt wanted to ensure that this had no effect on political support in the South, and further dinner invitations to Washington were avoided; their next meeting was scheduled as typical business at 10:00 a.m. instead.
For his aggressive use of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, compared to his predecessors, Roosevelt became mythologized as the "trust-buster"; but in reality he was more of a trust regulator. Roosevelt viewed big business as a necessary part of the American economy, and sought only to prosecute the "bad trusts" that restrained trade and charged unfair prices. He brought 44 antitrust suits, breaking up the Northern Securities Company, the largest railroad monopoly; and regulating Standard Oil, the largest oil and refinery company. Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley combined prosecuted only 18 antitrust violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Bolstered by his party's winning large (but slightly smaller) majorities in the 1902 elections, Roosevelt proposed the creation of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor, which would include the Bureau of Corporations. While Congress was receptive to Department of Commerce and Labor, it was more skeptical of the antitrust powers that Roosevelt sought to endow within the Bureau of Corporations. Roosevelt successfully appealed to the public to pressure Congress, and Congress overwhelmingly voted to pass Roosevelt's version of the bill.
In a moment of frustration, House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon commented on Roosevelt's desire for executive branch control in domestic policy-making: "That fellow at the other end of the avenue wants everything from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil." Biographer Brands states, "Even his friends occasionally wondered whether there wasn't any custom or practice too minor for him to try to regulate, update or otherwise improve." In fact, Roosevelt's willingness to exercise his power included attempted rule changes in the game of football; at the Naval Academy, he sought to force retention of martial arts classes and to revise disciplinary rules. He even ordered changes made in the minting of a coin whose design he disliked, and ordered the Government Printing Office to adopt simplified spellings for a core list of 300 words, according to reformers on the Simplified Spelling Board. He was forced to rescind the latter after substantial ridicule from the press and a resolution of protest from the House of Representatives.
In May 1902, anthracite coal miners went on strike, threatening a national energy shortage. After threatening the coal operators with intervention by federal troops, Roosevelt won their agreement to an arbitration of the dispute by a commission, which succeeded in stopping the strike. The accord with J.P. Morgan resulted in the miners getting more pay for fewer hours, but with no union recognition. Roosevelt said, "My action on labor should always be considered in connection with my action as regards capital, and both are reducible to my favorite formula—a square deal for every man." Roosevelt was the first president to help settle a labor dispute.
During Roosevelt's second year in office it was discovered there was corruption in the Indian Service, the Land Office, and the Post Office Department. Roosevelt investigated and prosecuted corrupt Indian agents who had cheated the Creeks and various tribes out of land parcels. Land fraud and speculation were found involving Oregon federal timberlands. In November 1902, Roosevelt and Secretary Ethan A. Hitchcock forced Binger Hermann, the General Land Office Commissioner, to resign from office. On November 6, 1903 Francis J. Heney was appointed special prosecutor and obtained 146 indictments involving an Oregon Land Office bribery ring. U.S. Senator John H. Mitchell was indicted for bribery to expedite illegal land patents, found guilty in July 1905, and sentenced to six months in prison. More corruption was found in the Postal Department, that brought on the indictments of 44 government employees on charges of bribery and fraud. Historians generally agree that Roosevelt moved "quickly and decisively" to prosecute misconduct in his administration.
Merchants complained that some railroad rates were too high. In the 1906 Hepburn Act, Roosevelt sought to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to regulate rates, but the Senate, led by conservative Nelson Aldrich fought back. Roosevelt worked with the Democratic Senator Benjamin Tillman to pass the bill. Roosevelt and Aldrich ultimately reached a compromise that gave the ICC the power to replace existing rates with "just-and-reasonable" maximum rates, but allowed railroads to appeal to the federal courts on what was "reasonable." In addition to rate-setting, the Hepburn Act also granted the ICC regulatory power over pipeline fees, storage contracts, and several other aspects of railroad operations.
Roosevelt responded to public anger over the abuses in the food packing industry by pushing Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Though conservatives initially opposed the bill, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", published in 1906, helped galvanize support for reform. The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 banned misleading labels and preservatives that contained harmful chemicals. The Pure Food and Drug Act banned food and drugs that were impure or falsely labeled from being made, sold, and shipped. Roosevelt also served as honorary president of the American School Hygiene Association from 1907 to 1908, and in 1909 he convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.
Of all Roosevelt's achievements, he was proudest of his work in conservation of natural resources and extending federal protection to land and wildlife. Roosevelt worked closely with Interior Secretary James Rudolph Garfield and Chief of the United States Forest Service Gifford Pinchot to enact a series of conservation programs that often met with resistance from Western members of Congress, such as Charles William Fulton. Nonetheless, Roosevelt established the United States Forest Service, signed into law the creation of five National Parks, and signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed 18 new U.S. National Monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, four game preserves, and 150 National Forests. The area of the United States that he placed under public protection totals approximately .
Roosevelt extensively used executive orders on a number of occasions to protect forest and wildlife lands during his tenure as president. By the end of his second term in office, Roosevelt used executive orders to establish of reserved forestry land. Roosevelt was unapologetic about his extensive use of executive orders to protect the environment, despite the perception in Congress that he was encroaching on too many lands. Eventually, Senator Charles Fulton (R-OR) attached an amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill that effectively prevented the president from reserving any further land. Before signing that bill into law, Roosevelt used executive orders to establish an additional 21 forest reserves, waiting until the last minute to sign the bill into law. In total, Roosevelt used executive orders to establish 121 forest reserves in 31 states. Prior to Roosevelt, only one president had issued over 200 executive orders, Grover Cleveland (253). The first 25 presidents issued a total of 1,262 executive orders; Roosevelt issued 1,081.
Although Commodore Perry had opened the door to the isolated nation of Japan during the mid-1800s, it was not until the U.S. acquisition of Hawaii on January 17, 1893, followed by the U.S. victory in the Spanish American War of 1898, giving the U.S. mandate over the Philippines, that the U.S. found itself becoming closely engaged with Japan. These events were part of the U.S. goal of transitioning into a naval world power, but she needed to find a way to avoid a military confrontation in the Pacific with Japan. One of Theodore Roosevelt's high priorities during his presidency and even afterwards, was the maintenance of friendly relations with Japan.
In the 1890s, Roosevelt had been an ardent imperialist, and he vigorously defended the permanent acquisition of the Philippines in the 1900 election campaign. After the Philippine–American War ended in 1902, he largely lost his imperialist interest in the Philippines and Asian expansion, but he wished instead to have a strong U.S. presence in that region of the world, not like the European colonial powers, but as a symbol of democratic values.
In 1904, the Japanese government requested the diplomat Kaneko Kentarō (who had been a fellow Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt) to ask Roosevelt to assist in mediating a treaty between Japan and Russia to end the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt agreed to do so (see The 1905 Illustrated London News illustration of Roosevelt with the Russian and Japanese representatives). The parties met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and resolved the final conflict over the division of Sakhalin– Russia took the northern half, and Japan the south; Japan also dropped its demand for an indemnity. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts in bringing about the Treaty of Portsmouth. George E. Mowry concludes that Roosevelt handled the arbitration well, doing an "excellent job of balancing Russian and Japanese power in the Orient, where the supremacy of either constituted a threat to growing America".
The early 1900s were at times challenging in terms of U.S. Japan engagement: The Oct. 23rd, 1907 Puck magazine cover shows President Theodore Roosevelt defending the nation of Japan from attack - Roosevelt is wearing a military uniform with the Japanese Imperial seal on his hat. He holds a rifle and confronts two rolled-up U.S. newspapers labeled the ‘"Sun"‘ and ‘"World"‘ who are also holding rifles and confronting Roosevelt - "In the magazine caption", Roosevelt stated that the war talk predicting a future conflict between the U.S. and Japan was based entirely on these incendiary newspapers, which sought to increase their sales, and for that reason, these newspapers had attacked Roosevelt's representative Minister William Howard Taft, who Roosevelt had again sent to Tokyo to promote improved communications between their two nations. Much of the confrontation was sparked by racism shown against Japanese Americans living in California.
The 1915 photo to the right presents a diplomatic banquet held in New York City. honoring the visit of the Japanese statesmen and financier, Baron Eiichi Shibusawa. Both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft respectfully attended this goodwill event where important issues linked to U.S. Japan relations and the recent outbreak of WWI were discussed. Also attending this 1915 event was Count Chinda Sutemi Japanese Ambassador to the U.S.
In 1917, out of empathy for those suffering in Europe from World War One, Prince Iyesato Tokugawa and Baron Eiichi Shibusawa published a condolence booklet honoring Japan's Allies. Japan had supported its democratic allies and aided their sick and wounded during the war. The condolence booklet described Japan's fundraising organization, headed by the prince and baron, that donated to Allied nations to help with their health costs. On November 30, 1919, the "New York Times" published a lengthy article by Roosevelt titled "What the Japanese Have Stood For In World War," in which he emphasized the great appreciation America should have for the Japanese people and for Japan's significant role in winning WWI.
As president, he primarily focused the nation's overseas ambitions on the Caribbean, especially locations that had a bearing on the defense of his pet project, the Panama Canal. Roosevelt also increased the size of the navy, and by the end of his second term the United States had more battleships than any other country besides Britain.
Following the Spanish–American War, Roosevelt believed that the United States had emerged as a world power, and he sought ways to assert America's newly-eminent position abroad.
Roosevelt also played a major role in mediating the First Moroccan Crisis by calling the Algeciras Conference, which averted war between France and Germany.
Roosevelt's presidency saw the strengthening of ties with Great Britain. The Great Rapprochement had begun with British support of the United States during the Spanish–American War, and it continued as Britain withdrew its fleet from the Caribbean in favor of focusing on the rising German naval threat. In 1901, Britain and the United States signed the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty, abrogating the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty, which had prevented the United States from constructing a canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. The long-standing Alaska boundary dispute was settled on terms favorable to the United States, as Great Britain was unwilling to alienate the United States over what it considered to be a secondary issue. As Roosevelt later put it, the resolution of the Alaskan boundary dispute "settled the last serious trouble between the British Empire and ourselves."
The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 resolved unpleasant racial tensions with Japan. Tokyo was angered over the segregation of Japanese children in San Francisco schools. The tensions were ended, but Japan also agreed not to allow unskilled workers to emigrate to the U.S.
In December 1902, the Germans, British, and Italians blockaded the ports of Venezuela in order to force the repayment of delinquent loans. Roosevelt was particularly concerned with the motives of German Emperor Wilhelm II. He succeeded in getting the three nations to agree to arbitration by tribunal at The Hague, and successfully defused the crisis. The latitude granted to the Europeans by the arbiters was in part responsible for the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, which the President issued in 1904: "Chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power."
The pursuit of an isthmus canal in Central America during this period focused on two possible routes—Nicaragua and Panama, which was then a rebellious district within Colombia. Roosevelt convinced Congress to approve the Panamanian alternative, and a treaty was approved, only to be rejected by the Colombian government. When the Panamanians learned of this, a rebellion followed, was supported by Roosevelt, and succeeded. A treaty with the new Panama government for construction of the canal was then reached in 1903. Roosevelt received criticism for paying the bankrupt Panama Canal Company and the New Panama Canal Company $40,000,000 (equivalent to $ billion in ) for the rights and equipment to build the canal. Critics charged that an American investor syndicate allegedly divided the large payment among themselves. There was also controversy over whether a French company engineer influenced Roosevelt in choosing the Panama route for the canal over the Nicaragua route. Roosevelt denied charges of corruption concerning the canal in a January 8, 1906 message to Congress. In January 1909, Roosevelt, in an unprecedented move, brought criminal libel charges against the New York "World" and the Indianapolis "News" known as the "Roosevelt-Panama Libel Cases". Both cases were dismissed by U.S. District Courts, and on January 3, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court, upon federal appeal, upheld the lower courts' rulings. Historians are sharply critical of Roosevelt's criminal prosecutions of the "World" and the "News", but are divided on whether actual corruption in acquiring and building the Panama Canal took place.
In 1906, following a disputed election, an insurrection ensued in Cuba; Roosevelt sent Taft, the Secretary of War, to monitor the situation; he was convinced that he had the authority to unilaterally authorize Taft to deploy Marines if necessary, without congressional approval.
Examining the work of numerous scholars, Ricard (2014) reports that:
The most striking evolution in the twenty-first century historiography of Theodore Roosevelt is the switch from a partial arraignment of the imperialist to a quasi-unanimous celebration of the master diplomatist... [Hagiographies of Roosevelt] have underlined cogently Roosevelt's exceptional statesmanship in the construction of the nascent twentieth-century "special relationship". ...The twenty-sixth president's reputation as a brilliant diplomatist and realpolitician has undeniably reached new heights in the twenty-first century...yet, his Philippine policy still prompts criticism.
Building on McKinley's effective use of the press, Roosevelt made the White House the center of news every day, providing interviews and photo opportunities. After noticing the reporters huddled outside the White House in the rain one day, he gave them their own room inside, effectively inventing the presidential press briefing. The grateful press, with unprecedented access to the White House, rewarded Roosevelt with ample coverage.
Roosevelt normally enjoyed very close relationships with the press, which he used to keep in daily contact with his middle-class base. While out of office, he made a living as a writer and magazine editor. He loved talking with intellectuals, authors, and writers. He drew the line, however, at expose-oriented scandal-mongering journalists who, during his term, set magazine subscriptions soaring by their attacks on corrupt politicians, mayors, and corporations. Roosevelt himself was not usually a target, but his speech in 1906 coined the term "muckraker" for unscrupulous journalists making wild charges. "The liar", he said, "is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves."
The press did briefly target Roosevelt in one instance. After 1904, he was periodically criticized for the manner in which he facilitated the construction of the Panama Canal. According to biographer Brands, Roosevelt, near the end of his term, demanded that the Justice Department bring charges of criminal libel against Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World". The publication had accused him of "deliberate misstatements of fact" in defense of family members who were criticized as a result of the Panama affair. Though an indictment was obtained, the case was ultimately dismissed in federal court—it was not a federal offense, but one enforceable in the state courts. The Justice Department had predicted that result, and had also advised Roosevelt accordingly.
The control and management of the Republican Party lay in the hands of Ohio Senator and Republican Party chairman Mark Hanna until McKinley's death. Roosevelt and Hanna frequently cooperated during Roosevelt's first term, but Hanna left open the possibility of a challenge to Roosevelt for the 1904 Republican nomination. Roosevelt and Ohio's other Senator, Joseph B. Foraker, forced Hanna's hand by calling for Ohio's state Republican convention to endorse Roosevelt for the 1904 nomination. Unwilling to break with the president, Hanna was forced to publicly endorse Roosevelt. Hanna and Pennsylvania Senator Matthew Quay both died in early 1904, and with the waning of Thomas Platt's power, Roosevelt faced little effective opposition for the 1904 nomination. In deference to Hanna's conservative loyalists, Roosevelt at first offered the party chairmanship to Cornelius Bliss, but he declined. Roosevelt turned to his own man, George B. Cortelyou of New York, the first Secretary of Commerce and Labor. To buttress his hold on the party's nomination, Roosevelt made it clear that anyone opposing Cortelyou would be considered to be opposing the President. The President secured his own nomination, but his preferred vice-presidential running mate, Robert R. Hitt, was not nominated. Senator Charles Warren Fairbanks of Indiana, a favorite of conservatives, gained the nomination.
While Roosevelt followed the tradition of incumbents in not actively campaigning on the stump, he sought to control the campaign's message through specific instructions to Cortelyou. He also attempted to manage the press's release of White House statements by forming the Ananias Club. Any journalist who repeated a statement made by the president without approval was penalized by restriction of further access.
The Democratic Party's nominee in 1904 was Alton Brooks Parker. Democratic newspapers charged that Republicans were extorting large campaign contributions from corporations, putting ultimate responsibility on Roosevelt, himself. Roosevelt denied corruption while at the same time he ordered Cortelyou to return $100,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) of a campaign contribution from Standard Oil. Parker said that Roosevelt was accepting corporate donations to keep damaging information from the Bureau of Corporations from going public. Roosevelt strongly denied Parker's charge and responded that he would "go into the Presidency unhampered by any pledge, promise, or understanding of any kind, sort, or description...". Allegations from Parker and the Democrats, however, had little impact on the election, as Roosevelt promised to give every American a "square deal". Roosevelt won 56% of the popular vote, and Parker received 38%; Roosevelt also won the Electoral College vote, 336 to 140. Before his inauguration ceremony, Roosevelt declared that he would not serve another term. Democrats afterwards would continue to charge Roosevelt and the Republicans of being influenced by corporate donations during Roosevelt's second term.
As his second term progressed, Roosevelt moved to the left of his Republican Party base and called for a series of reforms, most of which Congress failed to pass. In his last year in office, he was assisted by his friend Archibald Butt (who later perished in the sinking of RMS Titanic). Roosevelt's influence waned as he approached the end of his second term, as his promise to forego a third term made him a lame duck and his concentration of power provoked a backlash from many Congressmen. He sought a national incorporation law (at a time when all corporations had state charters), called for a federal income tax (despite the Supreme Court's ruling in "Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co."), and an inheritance tax. In the area of labor legislation, Roosevelt called for limits on the use of court injunctions against labor unions during strikes; injunctions were a powerful weapon that mostly helped business. He wanted an employee liability law for industrial injuries (pre-empting state laws) and an eight-hour work day for federal employees. In other areas he also sought a postal savings system (to provide competition for local banks), and he asked for campaign reform laws.
The election of 1904 continued to be a source of contention between Republicans and Democrats. A Congressional investigation in 1905 revealed that corporate executives donated tens of thousands of dollars in 1904 to the Republican National Committee. In 1908, a month before the general presidential election, Governor Charles N. Haskell of Oklahoma, former Democratic Treasurer, said that Senators beholden to Standard Oil lobbied Roosevelt, in the summer of 1904, to authorize the leasing of Indian oil lands by Standard Oil subsidiaries. He said Roosevelt overruled his Secretary of Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock and granted a pipeline franchise to run through the Osage lands to the Prairie Oil and Gas Company. The New York "Sun" made a similar accusation and said that Standard Oil, a refinery who financially benefited from the pipeline, had contributed $150,000 to the Republicans in 1904 (equivalent to $ million in ) after Roosevelt's alleged reversal allowing the pipeline franchise. Roosevelt branded Haskell's allegation as "a lie, pure and simple" and obtained a denial from Treasury Secretary Shaw that Roosevelt had neither coerced Shaw nor overruled him.
Roosevelt enjoyed being president and was still relatively youthful, but felt that a limited number of terms provided a check against dictatorship. Roosevelt ultimately decided to stick to his 1904 pledge not to run for a third term. He personally favored Secretary of State Elihu Root as his successor, but Root's ill health made him an unsuitable candidate. New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes loomed as potentially strong candidate and shared Roosevelt's progressivism, but Roosevelt disliked him and considered him to be too independent. Instead, Roosevelt settled on his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who had ably served under Presidents Harrison, McKinley, and Roosevelt in various positions. Roosevelt and Taft had been friends since 1890, and Taft had consistently supported President Roosevelt's policies. Roosevelt was determined to install the successor of his choice, and wrote the following to Taft: "Dear Will: Do you want any action about those federal officials? I will break their necks with the utmost cheerfulness if you say the word!" Just weeks later he branded as "false and malicious"; the charge was that he was using the offices at his disposal to favor Taft. At the 1908 Republican convention, many chanted for "four years more" of a Roosevelt presidency, but Taft won the nomination after Henry Cabot Lodge made it clear that Roosevelt was not interested in a third term.
In the 1908 election, Taft easily defeated the Democratic nominee, three-time candidate William Jennings Bryan. Taft promoted a progressivism that stressed the rule of law; he preferred that judges rather than administrators or politicians make the basic decisions about fairness. Taft usually proved to be a less adroit politician than Roosevelt and lacked the energy and personal magnetism, along with the publicity devices, the dedicated supporters, and the broad base of public support that made Roosevelt so formidable. When Roosevelt realized that lowering the tariff would risk creating severe tensions inside the Republican Party by pitting producers (manufacturers and farmers) against merchants and consumers, he stopped talking about the issue. Taft ignored the risks and tackled the tariff boldly, encouraging reformers to fight for lower rates, and then cutting deals with conservative leaders that kept overall rates high. The resulting Payne-Aldrich tariff of 1909, signed into law early in President Taft's tenure, was too high for most reformers, and Taft's handling of the tariff alienated all sides. While the crisis was building inside the Party, Roosevelt was touring Africa and Europe, to allow Taft to be his own man.
In March 1909, shortly after the end of his presidency, Roosevelt left New York for the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition, a safari in east and central Africa. Roosevelt's party landed in Mombasa, East Africa (now Kenya) and traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) before following the Nile to Khartoum in modern Sudan. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and by his own writings, Roosevelt's party hunted for specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The group, led by the hunter-tracker RJ Cunninghame, included scientists from the Smithsonian, and was joined from time to time by Frederick Selous, the famous big game hunter and explorer. Participants on the expedition included Kermit Roosevelt, Edgar Alexander Mearns, Edmund Heller, and John Alden Loring.
Roosevelt and his companions killed or trapped approximately 11,400 animals, from insects and moles to hippopotamuses and elephants. The 1,000 large animals included 512 big game animals, including six rare white rhinos. Tons of salted animals and their skins were shipped to Washington; it took years to mount them all, and the Smithsonian shared many duplicate specimens with other museums. Regarding the large number of animals taken, Roosevelt said, "I can be condemned only if the existence of the National Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and all similar zoological institutions are to be condemned". He wrote a detailed account of the safari in the book "African Game Trails", recounting the excitement of the chase, the people he met, and the flora and fauna he collected in the name of science.
After his safari, Roosevelt traveled north to embark on a tour of Europe. Stopping first in Egypt, he commented favorably on British rule of the region, giving his opinion that Egypt was not yet ready for independence. He refused a meeting with the Pope due to a dispute over a group of Methodists active in Rome, but met with Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of Great Britain, and other European leaders. In Oslo, Norway, Roosevelt delivered a speech calling for limitations on naval armaments, a strengthening of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the creation of a "League of Peace" among the world powers. He also delivered the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, in which he denounced those who sought parallels between the evolution of animal life and the development of society. Though Roosevelt attempted to avoid domestic politics during his time abroad, he met with Gifford Pinchot, who related his own disappointment with the Taft Administration. Pinchot had been forced to resign as head of the forest service after clashing with Taft's Interior Secretary, Richard Ballinger, who had prioritized development over conservation. Roosevelt returned to the United States in June 1910.
Roosevelt had attempted to refashion Taft into a second version of himself, but as soon as Taft began to display his individuality, the former president expressed his disenchantment. He was offended on election night when Taft indicated that his success had been possible not just through the efforts of Roosevelt, but also his brother Charley. Roosevelt was further alienated when Taft, intent on becoming his own man, did not consult him about cabinet appointments. Roosevelt and other progressives were ideologically dissatisfied over Taft's conservation policies and his handling of the tariff when he concentrated more power in the hands of conservative party leaders in Congress. Regarding radicalism and liberalism, Roosevelt wrote a British friend in 1911:
Roosevelt urged progressives to take control of the Republican Party at the state and local level and to avoid splitting the party in a way that would hand the presidency to the Democrats in 1912. Additionally, Roosevelt expressed optimism about the Taft Administration after meeting with the president in the White House in June 1910.
In August 1910, Roosevelt gained national attention with a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, which was the most radical of his career and marked his public break with Taft and the conservative Republicans. Advocating a program of "New Nationalism", Roosevelt emphasized the priority of labor over capital interests, a need to more effectively control corporate creation and combination, and proposed a ban on corporate political contributions. Returning to New York, Roosevelt began a battle to take control of the state Republican party from William Barnes Jr., Tom Platt's successor as the state party boss, whom he would later confront in the Barnes vs. Roosevelt Libel Trial. Taft had pledged his support to Roosevelt in this endeavor, and Roosevelt was outraged when Taft's support failed to materialize at the 1910 state convention. Roosevelt nonetheless campaigned for the Republicans in the 1910 elections, in which the Democrats gained control of the House for the first time since the 1890s. Among the newly elected Democrats was New York state senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who argued that he represented his distant cousin's policies better than his Republican opponent.
The Republican progressives interpreted the 1910 defeats as compelling argument for the complete reorganization of the party in 1911. Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin joined with Pinchot, William White, and California Governor Hiram Johnson to create the National Progressive Republican League; their objectives were to defeat the power of political bossism at the state level and to replace Taft at the national level. Despite skepticism of La Follette's new league, Roosevelt expressed general support for progressive principles. Between January and April 1911, Roosevelt wrote a series of articles for "The Outlook," defending what he called "the great movement of our day, the progressive nationalist movement against special privilege, and in favor of an honest and efficient political and industrial democracy". With Roosevelt apparently uninterested in running in 1912, La Follette declared his own candidacy in June 1911. Roosevelt continually criticized Taft after the 1910 elections, and the break between the two men became final after the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against US Steel in September 1911; Roosevelt was humiliated by this suit because he had personally approved of an acquisition that the Justice Department was now challenging. However, Roosevelt was still unwilling to run against Taft in 1912; he instead hoped to run in 1916 against whichever Democrat beat Taft in 1912.
Taft was a major advocate of arbitration as a major reform of the Progressive Era. In 1911 Taft and his Secretary of State Philander C. Knox negotiated major treaties with Great Britain and with France providing that differences be arbitrated. Disputes had to be submitted to the Hague Court or other tribunal. These were signed in August 1911 but had to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. Neither Taft nor Knox consulted with members of the Senate during the negotiating process. By then many Republicans were opposed to Taft, and the president felt that lobbying too hard for the treaties might cause their defeat. He made some speeches supporting the treaties in October, but the Senate added amendments Taft could not accept, killing the agreements.
The arbitration issue opens a window on a bitter philosophical dispute among American progressives. Some, led by Taft looked to legal arbitration as the best alternative to warfare. Taft was a constitutional lawyer who later became Chief Justice; he had a deep understanding of the legal issues. Taft's political base was the conservative business community which largely supported peace movements before 1914. However, his mistake in this case was a failure to mobilize that base. The businessmen believed that economic rivalries were cause of war, and that extensive trade led to an interdependent world that would make war a very expensive and useless anachronism.
However, an opposing faction of progressives, led by Roosevelt, ridiculed arbitration as foolhardy idealism, and insisted on the realism of warfare as the only solution to serious international disputes. Roosevelt worked with his close friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to impose those amendments that ruined the goals of the treaties. Lodge thought the treaties impinged too much on senatorial prerogatives. Roosevelt, however, was acting to sabotage Taft's campaign promises. At a deeper level, Roosevelt's truly believed that arbitration was a naïve solution and the great issues had to be decided by warfare. The Rooseveltian approach incorporated a near-mystical faith of the ennobling nature of war. It endorsed jingoistic nationalism as opposed to the businessmen's calculation of profit and national interest.
In November 1911, a group of Ohio Republicans endorsed Roosevelt for the party's nomination for president; the endorsers included James R. Garfield and Dan Hanna. This endorsement was made by leaders of President Taft's home state. Roosevelt conspicuously declined to make a statement—requested by Garfield—that he would flatly refuse a nomination. Soon thereafter, Roosevelt said, "I am really sorry for Taft... I am sure he means well, but he means well feebly, and he does not know how! He is utterly unfit for leadership and this is a time when we need leadership." In January 1912, Roosevelt declared "if the people make a draft on me I shall not decline to serve". Later that year, Roosevelt spoke before the Constitutional Convention in Ohio, openly identifying as a progressive and endorsing progressive reforms—even endorsing popular review of state judicial decisions. In reaction to Roosevelt's proposals for popular overrule of court decisions, Taft said, "Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics".
Roosevelt began to envision himself as the savior of the Republican Party from defeat in the upcoming presidential election. In February 1912, Roosevelt announced in Boston, "I will accept the nomination for president if it is tendered to me. I hope that so far as possible the people may be given the chance through direct primaries to express who shall be the nominee. Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge thought that division of the party would lead to its defeat in the next election, while Taft believed that he would be defeated either in the Republican primary or in the general election.
The 1912 primaries represented the first extensive use of the presidential primary, a reform achievement of the progressive movement. The Republican primaries in the South, where party regulars dominated, went for Taft, as did results in New York, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Roosevelt won in Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania; Roosevelt also won Taft's home state of Ohio. These primary elections, while demonstrating Roosevelt's continuing popularity with the electorate, were not pivotal. The final credentials of the state delegates at the national convention were determined by the national committee, which was controlled by the party leaders, headed by the incumbent president.
Prior to the 1912 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Roosevelt expressed doubt about his prospects for victory, noting that Taft had more delegates and control of the credentials committee. His only hope was to convince party leaders that the nomination of Taft would hand the election to the Democrats, but party leaders were determined not to cede their leadership to Roosevelt. The credentials committee awarded almost all contested delegates to Taft, and Taft won the nomination on the first ballot. Black delegates from the South played a key role: they voted heavily for Taft and put him over the top. La Follette also helped Taft's candidacy; he hoped that a deadlocked convention would result in his own nomination, and refused to release his delegates to support Roosevelt.
Once his defeat at the Republican convention appeared probable, Roosevelt announced that he would "accept the progressive nomination on a progressive platform and I shall fight to the end, win or lose". At the same time, Roosevelt prophetically said, "My feeling is that the Democrats will probably win if they nominate a progressive". Bolting from the Republican Party, Roosevelt and key allies such as Pinchot and Albert Beveridge created the Progressive Party, structuring it as a permanent organization that would field complete tickets at the presidential and state level. It was popularly known as the "Bull Moose Party", after Roosevelt told reporters, "I'm as fit as a bull moose". At the 1912 Progressive National Convention, Roosevelt cried out, "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." California Governor Hiram Johnson was nominated as Roosevelt's running mate. Roosevelt's platform echoed his 1907–1908 proposals, calling for vigorous government intervention to protect the people from the selfish interests:
Though many Progressive party supporters in the North were supporters of civil rights for blacks, Roosevelt did not give strong support to civil rights and ran a "lily-white" campaign in the South. Rival all-white and all-black delegations from four southern states arrived at the Progressive national convention, and Roosevelt decided to seat the all-white delegations. Nevertheless, he won little support outside mountain Republican strongholds. Out of nearly 1100 counties in the South, Roosevelt won two counties in Alabama, one in Arkansas, seven in North Carolina, three in Georgia, 17 in Tennessee, two in Texas, one in Virginia, and none in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, or South Carolina.
On October 14, 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt was shot by a saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank. The bullet lodged in his chest after penetrating his steel eyeglass case and passing through a thick (50 pages) single-folded copy of the speech titled "", which he was carrying in his jacket. Schrank was immediately disarmed (by Czech immigrant Frank Bukovsky), captured, and might have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed. Roosevelt assured the crowd he was all right, then ordered police to take charge of Schrank and to make sure no violence was done to him. As an experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung, and he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 90 minutes before completing his speech and accepting medical attention. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." Afterwards, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura. Doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to attempt to remove it, and Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.
After the Democrats nominated Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, Roosevelt did not expect to win the general election, as Wilson had compiled a record attractive to many progressive Democrats who might have otherwise considered voting for Roosevelt. Roosevelt still campaigned vigorously, and the election developed into a two-person contest between Wilson and Roosevelt despite Taft's presence in the race. Roosevelt respected Wilson, but the two differed on various issues; Wilson opposed any federal intervention regarding women's suffrage or child labor (he viewed these as state issues), and attacked Roosevelt's tolerance of large businesses.
Roosevelt won 4.1 million votes (27%), compared to Taft's 3.5 million (23%). Wilson gained 6.3 million votes (42% of the total) and a massive landslide in the Electoral College, with 435 electoral votes; Roosevelt won 88 electoral votes, while Taft won 8. Pennsylvania was the only eastern state won by Roosevelt; in the Midwest, he carried Michigan, Minnesota, and South Dakota; in the West, California, and Washington. Wilson's victory represented the first Democratic presidential election victory since Cleveland's 1892 campaign, and it was the party's best performance in the Electoral College since 1852. Roosevelt, meanwhile, garnered a higher share of the popular vote than any other third-party presidential candidate in history.
A friend of Roosevelt's, Father John Augustine Zahm, persuaded Roosevelt to participate in an expedition to South America. To finance the expedition, Roosevelt received support from the American Museum of Natural History in return for promising to bring back many new animal specimens. Roosevelt's popular book, "Through the Brazilian Wilderness" describes his expedition into the Brazilian jungle in 1913 as a member of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, co-named after its leader, Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon.
Once in South America, a new, far more ambitious goal was added: to find the headwaters of the Rio da Duvida, and trace it north to the Madeira and thence to the Amazon River. It was later renamed Roosevelt River in honor of the former president. Roosevelt's crew consisted of his son Kermit, naturalist Colonel Rondon, George K. Cherrie, sent by the American Museum of Natural History, Brazilian Lieutenant João Lira, team physician Dr. José Antonio Cajazeira, and 16 skilled paddlers and porters. The initial expedition started somewhat tenuously on December 9, 1913, at the height of the rainy season. The trip down the River of Doubt started on February 27, 1914.
During the trip down the river, Roosevelt suffered a minor leg wound after he jumped into the river to try to prevent two canoes from smashing against the rocks. The flesh wound he received, however, soon gave him tropical fever that resembled the malaria he had contracted while in Cuba fifteen years before. Because the bullet lodged in his chest from the assassination attempt in 1912 was never removed, his health worsened from the infection. This weakened Roosevelt so greatly that six weeks into the adventure, he had to be attended to day and night by the expedition's physician and his son Kermit. By then, he could not walk because of the infection in his injured leg and an infirmity in the other, which was due to a traffic accident a decade earlier. Roosevelt was riddled with chest pains, fighting a fever that soared to and at times made him delirious, at one point constantly reciting the first two lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree". Regarding his condition as a threat to the survival of the others, Roosevelt insisted he be left behind to allow the poorly provisioned expedition to proceed as rapidly as it could, preparing to commit suicide with an overdose of morphine. Only an appeal by his son persuaded him to continue.
Despite Roosevelt's continued decline and loss of over , Colonel Rondon reduced the pace of the expedition to allow for his commission's mapmaking and other geographical tasks, which required regular stops to fix the expedition's position by sun-based survey. Upon Roosevelt's return to New York, friends and family were startled by his physical appearance and fatigue. Roosevelt wrote, perhaps prophetically, to a friend that the trip had cut his life short by ten years. For the rest of his few remaining years, he would be plagued by flare-ups of malaria and leg inflammations so severe as to require surgery. Before Roosevelt had even completed his sea voyage home, critics raised doubts over his claims of exploring and navigating a completely uncharted river over long. When he had recovered sufficiently, he addressed a standing-room-only convention organized in Washington, D.C., by the National Geographic Society and satisfactorily defended his claims.
Roosevelt returned to the United States in May 1914. Though he was outraged by the Wilson Administration's conclusion of a treaty that expressed "sincere regret" for the way in which the United States had acquired the Panama Canal Zone, he was impressed by many of the reforms passed under Wilson. Roosevelt made several campaign appearances for the Progressives, but the 1914 elections were a disaster for the fledgling third party. Roosevelt began to envision another campaign for president, this time with himself at the head of the Republican Party, but conservative party leaders remained opposed to Roosevelt. In hopes of engineering a joint nomination, the Progressives scheduled the 1916 Progressive National Convention at the same time as the 1916 Republican National Convention. When the Republicans nominated Charles Evans Hughes, Roosevelt declined the Progressive nomination and urged his Progressive followers to support the Republican candidate. Though Roosevelt had long disliked Hughes, he disliked Wilson even more, and he campaigned energetically for the Republican nominee. However, Wilson won the 1916 election by a narrow margin. The Progressives disappeared as a party following the 1916 election, and Roosevelt and many of his followers permanently re-joined the Republican Party.
Roosevelt was an early supporter of the modern view that there needs to be a global order. In his Nobel prize address of 1910, he said, "it would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others." It would have executive power such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 lacked. He called for American participation.
When World War I broke out, Roosevelt proposed "a World League for the Peace of Righteousness," in September 1914, which would preserve sovereignty but limit armaments and require arbitration. He added that it should be "solemnly covenanted that if any nations refused to abide by the decisions of such a court, then others draw the sword in behalf of peace and justice." In 1915 he outlined this plan more specifically, urging that nations guarantee their entire military force, if necessary, against any nation that refused to carry out arbitration decrees or violated rights of other nations. He insisted upon the participation of the United States as one of the "joint guarantors." Roosevelt referred to this plan in a 1918 speech as "the most feasible for...a league of nations." By this time Wilson was strongly hostile to Roosevelt and Lodge, and developed his own plans for a rather different League of Nations. It became reality along Wilson's lines at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Roosevelt denounced Wilson's approach but died before it was adopted at Paris. However, Lodge was willing to accept it with serious reservations. In the end, on March 19, 1920, Wilson had Democratic Senators vote against the League with the Lodge Reservations and the United States never joined the League of Nations.
When the First World War began in 1914, Roosevelt strongly supported the Allies and demanded a harsher policy against Germany, especially regarding submarine warfare. Roosevelt angrily denounced the foreign policy of President Wilson, calling it a failure regarding the atrocities in Belgium and the violations of American rights. In 1916, while campaigning for Hughes, Roosevelt repeatedly denounced Irish-Americans and German-Americans whom he described as unpatriotic, saying they put the interests of Ireland and Germany ahead of America's by supporting neutrality. He insisted that one had to be 100% American, not a "hyphenated American" who juggled multiple loyalties. In March 1917, Congress gave Roosevelt the authority to raise a maximum of four divisions similar to the Rough Riders, and Major Frederick Russell Burnham was put in charge of both the general organization and recruitment. However, President Wilson announced to the press that he would not send Roosevelt and his volunteers to France, but instead would send an American Expeditionary Force under the command of General John J. Pershing. Roosevelt never forgave Wilson, and quickly published "The Foes of Our Own Household," an indictment of the sitting president. Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, a pilot with the American forces in France, was shot down behind German lines on July 14, 1918, at the age of 20. It is said that Quentin's death distressed Roosevelt so much that he never recovered from his loss.
Roosevelt's attacks on Wilson helped the Republicans win control of Congress in the off-year elections of 1918. He declined a request from New York Republicans to run for another gubernatorial term, but attacked Wilson's Fourteen Points, calling instead for the unconditional surrender of Germany. He was cautiously optimistic about the proposed League of Nations, but had reservations about its impact on United States sovereignty.
Roosevelt was the leading contender for the 1920 Republican nomination, but insisted that, "If they take me, they'll have to take me without a single modification of the things that I have always stood for! He wrote William Allen White, "I wish to do everything in my power to make the Republican Party the Party of sane, constructive radicalism, just as it was under Lincoln." Accordingly, he told the 1918 state convention of the Maine Republican Party that he stood for old-age pensions, insurance for sickness and unemployment, construction of public housing for low-income families, the reduction of working hours, aid to farmers, and more regulation of large corporations.
Roosevelt's physical condition was rapidly deteriorating due to the long-term effects of jungle diseases. He was hospitalized for seven weeks in late 1918, and never fully recovered.
On the night of January 5, 1919, Roosevelt suffered breathing problems. After receiving treatment from his physician, Dr. George W. Faller, he felt better and went to bed. Roosevelt's last words were "Please put out that light, James" to his family servant James E. Amos. Between 4:00 and 4:15 the next morning, Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill after a blood clot had detached from a vein and traveled to his lungs. He was 60 years old. Upon receiving word of his death, his son Archibald telegraphed his siblings: "The old lion is dead." Woodrow Wilson's vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, said that "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight." Following a private farewell service in the North Room at Sagamore Hill, a simple funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, Charles Evans Hughes, Warren G. Harding, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Howard Taft were among the mourners. The snow-covered procession route to Youngs Memorial Cemetery was lined with spectators and a squad of mounted policemen who had ridden from New York City. Roosevelt was buried on a hillside overlooking Oyster Bay.
Roosevelt was a prolific author, writing with passion on subjects ranging from foreign policy to the importance of the national park system. Roosevelt was also an avid reader of poetry. Poet Robert Frost said that Roosevelt "was our kind. He quoted poetry to me. He knew poetry."
As an editor of "Outlook" magazine, Roosevelt had weekly access to a large, educated national audience. In all, Roosevelt wrote about 18 books (each in several editions), including his autobiography, "The Rough Riders", "History of the Naval War of 1812", and others on subjects such as ranching, explorations, and wildlife. His most ambitious book was the four volume narrative "The Winning of the West", focused on the American frontier in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Roosevelt said that the American character—indeed a new "American race" (ethnic group) had emerged from the heroic wilderness hunters and Indian fighters, acting on the frontier with little government help. Roosevelt also published an account of his 1909–10 African expedition entitled "African Game Trails".
In 1907, Roosevelt became embroiled in a widely publicized literary debate known as the nature fakers controversy. A few years earlier, naturalist John Burroughs had published an article entitled "Real and Sham Natural History" in the "Atlantic Monthly", attacking popular writers of the day such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William J. Long for their fantastical representations of wildlife. Roosevelt agreed with Burroughs's criticisms, and published several essays of his own denouncing the booming genre of "naturalistic" animal stories as "yellow journalism of the woods". It was the President himself who popularized the negative term "nature faker" to describe writers who depicted their animal characters with excessive anthropomorphism.
Roosevelt intensely disliked being called "Teddy", despite the widespread public association with said moniker, and was quick to point out this fact to those who referred to him as such, though it would become widely used by newspapers during his political career.
Roosevelt had a lifelong interest in pursuing what he called, in an 1899 speech, "The Strenuous Life". To this end, he exercised regularly and took up boxing, tennis, hiking, rowing, polo, and horseback riding. As governor of New York, he boxed with sparring partners several times each week, a practice he regularly continued as president until being hit so hard in the face he became blind in his left eye (a fact not made public until many years later). Thereafter, he practiced judo for two 2-month periods in 1902 and 1904, not attaining any rank; he also continued his habit of skinny-dipping in the Potomac River during the winter.
Roosevelt was an enthusiastic singlestick player and, according to "Harper's Weekly", showed up at a White House reception with his arm bandaged after a bout with General Leonard Wood in 1905. Roosevelt was an avid reader, reading tens of thousands of books, at a rate of several per day in multiple languages. Along with Thomas Jefferson, Roosevelt was the most well-read of all American presidents.
Historians have often emphasized Roosevelt's warrior persona. He took aggressive positions regarding war with Spain in 1898, Colombia in 1903, and especially with Germany, from 1915–17. As a demonstration of American naval might, he sent the "Great White Fleet" around the world in 1907–1909. The implicit threat of the "big stick" of military power provided leverage to "speak softly" and quietly resolve conflict in numerous cases. He boasted in his autobiography:
Richard D. White Jr states, "Roosevelt's warrior spirit framed his views of national politics, [and] international relations."
Historian Howard K. Beale has argued:
Roosevelt attended church regularly and was a lifelong adherent of the Reformed Church in America, an American affiliate of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1907, concerning the motto "In God We Trust" on money, he wrote, "It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements." He was also a member of the Freemasons and Sons of the American Revolution.
Roosevelt talked a great deal about religion. Biographer Edmund Morris states:
Roosevelt publicly encouraged church attendance, and was a conscientious churchgoer himself. When gas rationing was introduced during the First World War, he walked the three miles from his home at Sagamore Hill to the local church and back, even after a serious operation had made it difficult for him to travel by foot. It was said that Roosevelt "allowed no engagement to keep him from going to church," and he remained a fervent advocate of the Bible throughout his adult life. According to Christian F. Reisner, writing in 1922 shortly after Roosevelt's death, "Religion was as natural to Mr. Roosevelt as breathing," and when the travel library for Roosevelt's famous Smithsonian-sponsored African expedition was being assembled, the Bible was, according to his sister, "the first book selected." In an address delivered in his home at Oyster Bay to the Long Island Bible Society in 1901, Roosevelt declared that:
When he assumed the presidency, Roosevelt reassured many conservatives, stating, "the mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance." The following year, Roosevelt asserted the president's independence from business interests by opposing the merger which created the Northern Securities Company, and many were surprised that any president, much less an unelected one, would challenge powerful banker J.P. Morgan. In his last two years as president, Roosevelt became increasingly distrustful of big business, despite its close ties to the Republican Party. Roosevelt sought to replace the 19th-century laissez-faire economic environment with a new economic model which included a larger regulatory role for the federal government. He believed that 19th-century entrepreneurs had risked their fortunes on innovations and new businesses, and that these capitalists had been rightly rewarded. By contrast, he believed that 20th-century capitalists risked little but nonetheless reaped huge and, given the lack of risk, unjust, economic rewards. Without a redistribution of wealth away from the upper class, Roosevelt feared that the country would turn to radicals or fall to revolution. His Square Deal domestic program had three main goals: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. The Square Deal evolved into his program of "New Nationalism", which emphasized the priority of labor over capital interests and a need to more effectively control corporate creation and combination, and proposed a ban on corporate political contributions.
Historians credit Roosevelt for changing the nation's political system by permanently placing the presidency at center stage and making character as important as the issues. His accomplishments include trust busting and conservationism. He is a hero to liberals and progressives for his proposals in 1907–1912 that presaged the modern welfare state of the New Deal Era, including direct federal taxation, labor reforms, and more direct democracy, while conservationists admire Roosevelt for putting the environment and selflessness towards future generations on the national agenda, and conservatives and nationalists respect his commitment to law and order, civic duty and military values, as well as his personality of individual self-responsibility and hardiness. Dalton says, "Today he is heralded as the architect of the modern presidency, as a world leader who boldly reshaped the office to meet the needs of the new century and redefined America's place in the world."
However, liberals and socialists have criticized him for his interventionist and imperialist approach to nations he considered "uncivilized". Conservatives and libertarians reject his vision of the welfare state and emphasis on the superiority of government over private action. Historians typically rank Roosevelt among the top five presidents in American history.
Dalton says Roosevelt is remembered as, "one of the most picturesque personalities who has ever enlivened the landscape". His friend, historian Henry Adams, proclaimed:
Roosevelt's biographers have stressed his personality. Henry F. Pringle, who won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for his "Theodore Roosevelt" (1931) stated:
Cooper compared him with Woodrow Wilson, and argued that both of them played the roles of warrior and priest. Dalton stressed Roosevelt's strenuous life. Sarah Watts examined the desires of the "Rough Rider in the White House". Brands calls Roosevelt "the last romantic", arguing that his romantic concept of life emerged from his belief that "physical bravery was the highest virtue and war the ultimate test of bravery".
Roosevelt as the exemplar of American masculinity has become a major theme. As president, he repeatedly warned men that they were becoming too office-bound, too complacent, too comfortable with physical ease and moral laxity, and were failing in their duties to propagate the race and exhibit masculine vigor. French historian Serge Ricard says, "the ebullient apostle of the Strenuous Life offers ideal material for a detailed psycho-historical analysis of aggressive manhood in the changing socio-cultural environment of his era; McKinley, Taft, or Wilson would perhaps inadequately serve that purpose". He promoted competitive sports and the Boy Scouts of America, founded in 1910, as the way forward. Brands shows that heroic displays of bravery were essential to Roosevelt's image and mission:
Roosevelt was included with Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln at the Mount Rushmore Memorial, designed in 1927 with the approval of Republican President Calvin Coolidge.
For his gallantry at San Juan Hill, Roosevelt's commanders recommended him for the Medal of Honor. However, the initial recommendation lacked any eyewitnesses, and the effort was eventually tainted by Roosevelt's own lobbying of the War Department. In the late 1990s, Roosevelt's supporters again recommended the award, which was denied by the Secretary of the Army on basis that the decorations board determined "Roosevelt's bravery in battle did not rise to the level that would justify the Medal of Honor and, indeed, it did not rise to the level of men who fought in that engagement." Nevertheless, politicians apparently convinced the secretary to reconsider the award a third time and reverse himself, leading to the charge that it was a "politically motivated award." On January 16, 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor posthumously for his charge on San Juan Hill, Cuba, during the Spanish–American War. He is the only president to have received the Medal of Honor.
The United States Navy named two ships for Roosevelt: the , a submarine that was in commission from 1961 to 1982, and the , an aircraft carrier that has been on active duty in the Atlantic Fleet since 1986.
On November 18, 1956, the United States Postal Service released a 6¢ Liberty Issue postage stamp honoring Roosevelt. A 32¢ stamp was issued on February 3, 1998, as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series. In 2008, Columbia Law School awarded Roosevelt a Juris Doctor degree, posthumously making him a member of the class of 1882.
Roosevelt's "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick" ideology is still quoted by politicians and columnists in different countries—not only in English, but also in translations to various other languages. Another lasting, popular legacy of Roosevelt is the stuffed toy bears—teddy bears—named after him following an incident on a hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902. Roosevelt has been portrayed in films and television series such as "Brighty of the Grand Canyon", "The Wind and the Lion", "Rough Riders", "My Friend Flicka"," and Law of the Plainsman." Robin Williams portrayed Roosevelt in the form of a wax mannequin that comes to life in "Night at the Museum" and its sequels "" and "". In 2017, it was announced that Leonardo DiCaprio will portray Roosevelt in a biopic to be directed by Martin Scorsese.
Moreover, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the state of North Dakota is named after him. The America the Beautiful Quarters series features Roosevelt riding a horse on the national park's quarter.
Asteroid 188693 Roosevelt, discovered by astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey in 2005, was named after him. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center on November 8, 2019 (). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30535 |
Tiberius
Tiberius ( ; Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti filius Augustus; 16 November 42 BC – 16 March 37 AD) was the second Roman emperor, reigning from AD 14 to 37. He succeeded his stepfather, Augustus.
Born to Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla to a family of the noted patrician gens Claudia, he was given the name Tiberius Claudius Nero. His mother divorced Nero and married Octavian—later to ascend to Emperor as Augustus—who officially became his stepfather. Tiberius would later marry Augustus' daughter (from his marriage to Scribonia), Julia the Elder, and even later be adopted by Augustus. Through the adoption, he officially became a Julian, assuming the name Tiberius Julius Caesar. The emperors after Tiberius would continue this blended dynasty of both families for the following thirty years; historians have named it the Julio-Claudian dynasty. His relationship to the other emperors of this dynasty was as follows: he was the stepson of Augustus, grand-uncle of Caligula, paternal uncle of Claudius, and great-grand uncle of Nero. Tiberius' 22-and-a-half-year reign would be the longest after that of Augustus until that of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who surpassed his reign by a few months.
Tiberius was one of the greatest Roman generals; his conquest of Pannonia, Dalmatia, Raetia, and (temporarily) parts of Germania laid the foundations for the northern frontier. Even so, he came to be remembered as a dark, reclusive and sombre ruler who never really desired to be emperor; Pliny the Elder called him "the gloomiest of men". After the death of his son Drusus Julius Caesar in AD 23, Tiberius became more reclusive and aloof. In 26 AD he removed himself from Rome and left administration largely in the hands of his unscrupulous Praetorian prefects Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Quintus Naevius Sutorius Macro. When Tiberius died, he was succeeded by his grand-nephew and adopted grandson, Caligula.
Tiberius was born in Rome on 16 November 42 BC to Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia. In 39 BC his mother divorced his biological father and, though again pregnant by Tiberius Nero, married Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. In 38 BC his brother, Nero Claudius Drusus, was born.
Little is recorded of Tiberius' early life. In 32 BC Tiberius, at the age of nine, delivered the eulogy for his biological father at the rostra. In 29 BC, he rode in the triumphal chariot along with his adoptive father Octavian in celebration of the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium.
In 23 BC Emperor Augustus became gravely ill, and his possible death threatened to plunge the Roman world into chaos again. Historians generally agree that it is during this time that the question of Augustus' heir became most acute, and while Augustus had seemed to indicate that Agrippa and Marcellus would carry on his position in the event of his death, the ambiguity of succession became Augustus' chief problem.
In response, a series of potential heirs seem to have been selected, among them Tiberius and his brother Drusus. In 24 BC, at the age of seventeen, Tiberius entered politics under Augustus' direction, receiving the position of quaestor, and was granted the right to stand for election as praetor and consul five years in advance of the age required by law. Similar provisions were made for Drusus.
Shortly thereafter Tiberius began appearing in court as an advocate, and it was presumably at this time that his interest in Greek rhetoric began. In 20 BC, Tiberius was sent east under Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. The Parthian Empire had captured the standards of the legions under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus (53 BC) (at the Battle of Carrhae), Decidius Saxa (40 BC), and Mark Antony (36 BC).
After a year of negotiation, Tiberius led a sizable force into Armenia, presumably with the goal of establishing it as a Roman client state and ending the threat it posed on the Roman-Parthian border. Augustus was able to reach a compromise whereby the standards were returned, and Armenia remained a neutral territory between the two powers.
Tiberius married Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Augustus' close friend and greatest general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. He was appointed to the position of praetor, and was sent with his legions to assist his brother Drusus in campaigns in the west. While Drusus focused his forces in Gallia Narbonensis and along the German frontier, Tiberius combated the tribes in the Alps and within Transalpine Gaul, conquering Raetia. In 15 BC he discovered the sources of the Danube, and soon afterward the bend of the middle course. Returning to Rome in 13 BC, Tiberius was appointed as consul, and around this same time his son, Drusus Julius Caesar, was born.
Agrippa's death in 12 BC elevated Tiberius and Drusus with respect to the succession. At Augustus' request in 11 BC, Tiberius divorced Vipsania and married Julia the Elder, Augustus' daughter and Agrippa's widow. Tiberius was very reluctant to do this, as Julia had made advances to him when she was married and Tiberius was happily married. His new marriage with Julia was happy at first, but turned sour.
Reportedly, Tiberius once ran into Vipsania again, and proceeded to follow her home crying and begging forgiveness; soon afterwards, Tiberius met with Augustus, and steps were taken to ensure that Tiberius and Vipsania would never meet again. Tiberius continued to be elevated by Augustus, and after Agrippa's death and his brother Drusus' death in 9 BC, seemed the clear candidate for succession. As such, in 12 BC he received military commissions in Pannonia and Germania, both areas highly volatile and of key importance to Augustan policy.
In 6 BC, Tiberius launched a pincer movement against the Marcomanni. Setting out northwest from Carnuntum on the Danube with four legions, Tiberius passed through Quadi territory in order to invade Marcomanni territory from the east. Meanwhile, general Gaius Sentius Saturninus would depart east from Moguntiacum on the Rhine with two or three legions, pass through newly annexed Hermunduri territory, and attack the Marcomanni from the west. The campaign was a resounding success, but Tiberius could not subjugate the Marcomanni because he was soon summoned to the Rhine frontier to protect Rome's new conquests in Germania.
He returned to Rome and was consul for a second time in 7 BC, and in 6 BC was granted tribunician power "(tribunicia potestas)" and control in the East, all of which mirrored positions that Agrippa had previously held. However, despite these successes and despite his advancement, Tiberius was not happy.
In 6 BC, on the verge of accepting command in the East and becoming the second-most powerful man in Rome, Tiberius suddenly announced his withdrawal from politics and retired to Rhodes. The precise motives for Tiberius's withdrawal are unclear. Historians have speculated a connection with the fact that Augustus had adopted Julia's sons by Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius, and seemed to be moving them along the same political path that both Tiberius and Drusus had trodden.
Tiberius' move thus seemed to be an interim solution: he would hold power only until his stepsons would come of age, and then be swept aside. The promiscuous, and very public, behavior of his unhappily married wife, Julia, may have also played a part. Indeed, Tacitus calls it Tiberius' "intima causa", his innermost reason for departing for Rhodes, and seems to ascribe the entire move to a hatred of Julia and a longing for Vipsania. Tiberius had found himself married to a woman he loathed, who publicly humiliated him with nighttime escapades in the Roman Forum, and forbidden to see the woman he had loved.
Whatever Tiberius' motives, the withdrawal was almost disastrous for Augustus' succession plans. Gaius and Lucius were still in their early teens, and Augustus, now 57 years old, had no immediate successor. There was no longer a guarantee of a peaceful transfer of power after Augustus' death, nor a guarantee that his family, and therefore his family's allies, would continue to hold power should the position of "Princeps" survive.
Somewhat apocryphal stories tell of Augustus pleading with Tiberius to stay, even going so far as to stage a serious illness. Tiberius' response was to anchor off the shore of Ostia until word came that Augustus had survived, then sailing straightway for Rhodes. Tiberius reportedly regretted his departure and requested to return to Rome several times, but each time Augustus refused his requests.
With Tiberius' departure, succession rested solely on Augustus' two young grandsons, Lucius and Gaius Caesar. The situation became more precarious in AD 2 with the death of Lucius. Augustus, with perhaps some pressure from Livia, allowed Tiberius to return to Rome as a private citizen and nothing more. In AD 4, Gaius was killed in Armenia, and Augustus had no other choice but to turn to Tiberius.
The death of Gaius in AD 4 initiated a flurry of activity in the household of Augustus. Tiberius was adopted as full son and heir, and in turn he was required to adopt his nephew Germanicus, the son of his brother Drusus and Augustus' niece Antonia Minor. Along with his adoption, Tiberius received tribunician power as well as a share of Augustus' "maius imperium", something that even Marcus Agrippa may never have had.
In AD 7, Agrippa Postumus, a younger brother of Gaius and Lucius, was disowned by Augustus and banished to the island of Pianosa, to live in solitary confinement. Thus, when in AD 13, the powers held by Tiberius were made equal, rather than second, to Augustus' own powers, he was for all intents and purposes a "co-Princeps" with Augustus, and, in the event of the latter's passing, would simply continue to rule without an interregnum or possible upheaval.
However, according to Suetonius, after a two-year stint in Germania, which lasted from 10–12 AD, "Tiberius returned and celebrated the triumph which he had postponed, accompanied also by his generals, for whom he had obtained the triumphal regalia. And before turning to enter the Capitol, he dismounted from his chariot and fell at the knees of his father, who was presiding over the ceremonies.” "Since the consuls caused a law to be passed soon after this that he should govern the provinces jointly with Augustus and hold the census with him, he set out for Illyricum on the conclusion of the lustral ceremonies."
Thus, according to Suetonius, these ceremonies and the declaration of his "co-Princeps" took place in the year 12 AD, after Tiberius' return from Germania. "But he was at once recalled, and finding Augustus in his last illness but still alive, he spent an entire day with him in private." Augustus died in AD 14, a month before his 76th birthday. He was buried with all due ceremony and, as had been arranged beforehand, deified, his will read, and Tiberius, now a middle-aged man at 55, was confirmed as his sole surviving heir.
The Senate convened on 18 September, to validate Tiberius's position as Princeps and, as it had done with Augustus before, extend the powers of the position to him. These proceedings are fully accounted by Tacitus. Tiberius already had the administrative and political powers of the Princeps, all he lacked were the titles—Augustus, Pater Patriae, and the Civic Crown (a crown made from laurel and oak, in honor of Augustus having saved the lives of Roman citizens).
Tiberius, however, attempted to play the same role as Augustus: that of the reluctant public servant who wants nothing more than to serve the state. This ended up throwing the entire affair into confusion, and rather than humble, he came across as derisive; rather than seeming to want to serve the state, he seemed obstructive. He cited his age as a reason why he could not act as Princeps, stated he did not wish the position, and then proceeded to ask for only a section of the state. Tiberius finally relented and accepted the powers voted to him, though according to Tacitus and Suetonius he refused to bear the titles Pater Patriae, Imperator, and Augustus, and declined the most solid emblem of the Princeps, the Civic Crown and laurels.
This meeting seems to have set the tone for Tiberius's entire rule. He seems to have wished for the Senate and the state to simply act without him and his direct orders were rather vague, inspiring debate more on what he actually meant than on passing his legislation. In his first few years, Tiberius seemed to have wanted the Senate to act on its own, rather than as a servant to his will as it had been under Augustus. According to Tacitus, Tiberius derided the Senate as "men fit to be slaves".
Problems arose quickly for the new Princeps. The Roman legions posted in Pannonia and in Germania had not been paid the bonuses promised them by Augustus, and after a short period of time mutinied when it was clear that a response from Tiberius was not forthcoming. Germanicus and Tiberius's son, Drusus Julius Caesar, were dispatched with a small force to quell the uprising and bring the legions back in line.
Rather than simply quell the mutiny, however, Germanicus rallied the mutineers and led them on a short campaign across the Rhine into Germanic territory, stating that whatever treasure they could grab would count as their bonus. Germanicus's forces crossed the Rhine and quickly occupied all of the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe. Additionally, Tacitus records the capture of the Teutoburg forest and the reclaiming of Roman standards lost years before by Publius Quinctilius Varus, when three Roman legions and their auxiliary cohorts had been ambushed by Germanic tribes.
Germanicus had managed to deal a significant blow to Rome's enemies, quell an uprising of troops, and returned lost standards to Rome, actions that increased the fame and legend of the already very popular Germanicus with the Roman people.
After being recalled from Germania, Germanicus celebrated a triumph in Rome in AD 17, the first full triumph that the city had seen since Augustus' own in 29 BC. As a result, in AD 18 Germanicus was granted control over the eastern part of the empire, just as both Agrippa and Tiberius had received before, and was clearly the successor to Tiberius. Germanicus survived a little over a year before dying, accusing Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the governor of Syria, of poisoning him.
The Pisones had been longtime supporters of the Claudians, and had allied themselves with the young Octavian after his marriage to Livia, the mother of Tiberius. Germanicus's death and accusations indicted the new Princeps. Piso was placed on trial and, according to Tacitus, threatened to implicate Tiberius. Whether the governor actually could connect the Princeps to the death of Germanicus is unknown; rather than continuing to stand trial when it became evident that the Senate was against him, Piso committed suicide.
Tiberius seems to have tired of politics at this point. In AD 22, he shared his tribunician authority with his son Drusus, and began making yearly excursions to Campania that reportedly became longer and longer every year. In AD 23, Drusus mysteriously died, and Tiberius seems to have made no effort to elevate a replacement. Finally, in AD 26, Tiberius retired from Rome to an Imperial villa-complex he had inherited from Augustus, on the island of Capri. It was just off the coast of Campania, which was a traditional holiday retreat for Rome's upper classes, particularly those who valued cultured leisure (otium) and a Hellenised lifestyle.
Lucius Aelius Sejanus had served the imperial family for almost twenty years when he became Praetorian Prefect in AD 15. As Tiberius became more embittered with the position of Princeps, he began to depend more and more upon the limited secretariat left to him by Augustus, and specifically upon Sejanus and the Praetorians. In AD 17 or 18, Tiberius had trimmed the ranks of the Praetorian Guard responsible for the defense of the city, and had moved it from encampments outside of the city walls into the city itself, giving Sejanus access to somewhere between 6000 and 9000 troops.
The death of Drusus elevated Sejanus, at least in Tiberius's eyes, who thereafter refers to him as his 'Socius Laborum' (Partner of my labours). Tiberius had statues of Sejanus erected throughout the city, and Sejanus became more and more visible as Tiberius began to withdraw from Rome altogether. Finally, with Tiberius's withdrawal in AD 26, Sejanus was left in charge of the entire state mechanism and the city of Rome.
Sejanus's position was not quite that of successor; he had requested marriage in AD 25 to Tiberius's niece, Livilla, though under pressure quickly withdrew the request. While Sejanus's Praetorians controlled the imperial post, and therefore the information that Tiberius received from Rome and the information Rome received from Tiberius, the presence of Livia seems to have checked his overt power for a time. Her death in AD 29 changed all that.
Sejanus began a series of purge trials of Senators and wealthy equestrians in the city of Rome, removing those capable of opposing his power as well as extending the imperial (and his own) treasury. Germanicus's widow Agrippina the Elder and two of her sons, Nero Julius Caesar and Drusus Caesar were arrested and exiled in AD 30 and later all died in suspicious circumstances. In Sejanus's purge of Agrippina the Elder and her family, Caligula, Agrippina the Younger, Julia Drusilla, and Julia Livilla were the only survivors.
In 31, Sejanus held the consulship with Tiberius "in absentia," and began his play for power in earnest. Precisely what happened is difficult to determine, but Sejanus seems to have covertly attempted to court those families who were tied to the Julians, and attempted to ingratiate himself with the Julian family line with an eye toward placing himself, as an adopted Julian, in the position of Princeps, or as a possible regent. Livilla was later implicated in this plot, and was revealed to have been Sejanus's lover for a number of years.
The plot seems to have involved the two of them overthrowing Tiberius, with the support of the Julians, and either assuming the Principate themselves, or serving as regent to the young Tiberius Gemellus or possibly even Caligula. Those who stood in his way were tried for treason and swiftly dealt with.
In AD 31 Sejanus was summoned to a meeting of the Senate, where a letter from Tiberius was read condemning Sejanus and ordering his immediate execution. Sejanus was tried, and he and several of his colleagues were executed within the week. As commander of the Praetorian Guard, he was replaced by Naevius Sutorius Macro.
Tacitus claims that more treason trials followed and that whereas Tiberius had been hesitant to act at the outset of his reign, now, towards the end of his life, he seemed to do so without compunction. Hardest hit were those families with political ties to the Julians. Even the imperial magistracy was hit, as any and all who had associated with Sejanus or could in some way be tied to his schemes were summarily tried and executed, their properties seized by the state. As Tacitus vividly describes,
However, Tacitus' portrayal of a tyrannical, vengeful emperor has been challenged by some historians: Edward Togo Salmon notes in "A history of the Roman world from 30 BC to AD 138":
While Tiberius was in Capri, rumours abounded as to what exactly he was doing there. Suetonius records the rumours of lurid tales of sexual perversity, including graphic depictions of child molestation, and cruelty, and most of all his paranoia. While heavily sensationalized, Suetonius' stories at least paint a picture of how Tiberius was perceived by the Roman senatorial class, and what his impact on the Principate was during his 23 years of rule.
The affair of Sejanus and the final years of treason trials permanently damaged Tiberius' image and reputation. After Sejanus's fall, Tiberius' withdrawal from Rome was complete; the empire continued to run under the inertia of the bureaucracy established by Augustus, rather than through the leadership of the Princeps. Suetonius records that he became paranoid, and spent a great deal of time brooding over the death of his son. Meanwhile, during this period a short invasion by Parthia, incursions by tribes from Dacia and from across the Rhine by several Germanic tribes occurred.
Little was done to either secure his succession or indicate how it was to take place; the Julians and their supporters had fallen to the wrath of Sejanus, and his own sons and immediate family were dead. Two of the candidates were either Caligula, the sole surviving son of Germanicus, or Tiberius' own grandson, Tiberius Gemellus. However, only a half-hearted attempt at the end of Tiberius' life was made to make Caligula a quaestor, and thus give him some credibility as a possible successor, while Gemellus himself was still only a teenager and thus completely unsuitable for some years to come.
Tiberius died in Misenum on 16 March AD 37, a few months shy of his 78th birthday. Tacitus relates that the emperor appeared to have stopped breathing, and that Caligula, who was at Tiberius' villa, was being congratulated on his succession to the empire, when news arrived that the emperor had revived and was recovering his faculties. Those who had moments before recognized Caligula as Augustus fled in fear of the emperor's wrath, while Macro took advantage of the chaos to have Tiberius smothered with his own bedclothes. Suetonius reports several rumours, including that the emperor had been poisoned by Caligula, starved, and smothered with a pillow; that recovering, and finding himself deserted by his attendants, he attempted to rise from his couch, but fell dead. According to Cassius Dio, Caligula, fearing that the emperor would recover, refused Tiberius' requests for food, insisting that he needed warmth, not food; then assisted by Macro, he smothered the emperor in his bedclothes.
After his death, the Senate refused to vote Tiberius the divine honors that had been paid to Augustus, and mobs filled the streets yelling "To the Tiber with Tiberius!"; the bodies of criminals were typically thrown into the river, instead of being buried or burnt. However, the emperor was cremated, and his ashes were quietly laid in the Mausoleum of Augustus, later to be scattered in AD 410 during the Sack of Rome.
In his will, Tiberius had left his powers jointly to Caligula and Tiberius Gemellus. Caligula's first act on becoming Princeps was to void Tiberius' will.
Tiberius' heir Caligula not only spent Tiberius' fortune of 2,700,000,000 sesterces but would also begin the chain of events which would bring about the downfall of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in AD 68.
Had he died before AD 23, he might have been hailed as an exemplary ruler. Despite the overwhelmingly negative characterization left by Roman historians, Tiberius left the imperial treasury with nearly 3 billion sesterces upon his death. Rather than embark on costly campaigns of conquest, he chose to strengthen the existing empire by building additional bases, using diplomacy as well as military threats, and generally refraining from getting drawn into petty squabbles between competing frontier tyrants.
The result was a stronger, more consolidated empire. Of the authors whose texts have survived, only four describe the reign of Tiberius in considerable detail: Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio and Marcus Velleius Paterculus. Fragmentary evidence also remains from Pliny the Elder, Strabo and Seneca the Elder. Tiberius himself wrote an autobiography which Suetonius describes as "brief and sketchy", but this book has been lost.
The most detailed account of this period is handed down to us by Tacitus, whose "Annals" dedicate the first six books entirely to the reign of Tiberius. Tacitus was a Roman senator, born during the reign of Nero in AD 56, and consul suffect in AD 97. His text is largely based on the "Acta Senatus" (the minutes of the session of the Senate) and the "Acta Diurna" (a collection of the acts of the government and news of the court and capital), as well as speeches by Tiberius himself, and the histories of contemporaries such as Marcus Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and Pliny the Elder (all of which are lost).
Tacitus' narrative emphasizes both political and psychological motivation. His characterisation of Tiberius throughout the first six books is mostly negative, and gradually worsens as his rule declines, identifying a clear breaking point with the death of his son Drusus in AD 23.
Tacitus describes Julio-Claudian rule as generally unjust and "criminal"; he attributes the apparent virtues of Tiberius during his early reign to hypocrisy.
Another major recurring theme concerns the balance of power between the Senate and the Emperors, corruption, and the growing tyranny among the governing classes of Rome. A substantial amount of his account on Tiberius is therefore devoted to the treason trials and persecutions following the revival of the "maiestas" law under Augustus. Ultimately, Tacitus' opinion on Tiberius is best illustrated by his conclusion of the sixth book:
Suetonius was an equestrian who held administrative posts during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. "The Twelve Caesars" details a biographical history of the principate from the birth of Julius Caesar to the death of Domitian in AD 96. Like Tacitus, he drew upon the imperial archives, as well as histories by Aufidius Bassus, Marcus Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and Augustus' own letters.
His account is more sensationalist and anecdotal than that of his contemporary. The most famous sections of his biography delve into the numerous alleged debaucheries Tiberius remitted himself to while at Capri. Nevertheless, Suetonius also reserves praise for Tiberius' actions during his early reign, emphasizing his modesty.
One of the few surviving sources contemporary with the rule of Tiberius comes from Velleius Paterculus, who served under Tiberius for eight years (from AD 4) in Germany and Pannonia as praefect of cavalry and "legatus". Paterculus' "Compendium of Roman History" spans a period from the fall of Troy to the death of Livia in AD 29. His text on Tiberius lavishes praise on both the emperor and Sejanus. How much of this is due to genuine admiration or prudence remains an open question, but it has been conjectured that he was put to death in AD 31 as a friend of Sejanus.
The Gospels mention that during Tiberius' reign, Jesus of Nazareth preached and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea province. In the Bible, Tiberius is mentioned by name in "Luke 3:1", which states that John the Baptist entered on his public ministry in the fifteenth year of his reign. The city of Tiberias (named after Tiberius) referenced in "John 6:23" is located on the Sea of Galilee, which was also known as the Sea of Tiberias and is referenced in "John 6:1". Many other references to "Caesar" (or "the emperor" in some other translations), without further specification, would seem to refer to Tiberius. Similarly, the "tribute penny" referred to in Matthew and Mark is popularly thought to be a silver denarius coin of Tiberius.
During Tiberius' reign Jews had become more prominent in Rome and Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus began proselytizing Roman citizens, increasing long-simmering resentments. Tiberius in 19 AD ordered Jews who were of military age to join the Roman Army. Tiberius banished the rest of the Jews from Rome and threatened to enslave them for life if they did not leave the city.
There is considerable debate among historians as to when Christianity was differentiated from Judaism. Most scholars believe that Roman distinction between Jews and Christians took place around AD 70. Tiberius most likely viewed Christians as a Jewish sect rather than a separate, distinct faith.
Possible traces remain of personal renovations done by Tiberius in the Gardens of Maecenas, where he lived upon returning from exile in 2 AD. These persist inside the villa's likely triclinium-nymphaeum, the so-called Auditorium of Maecenas. In an otherwise Late Republican-era building, by nature of its brickwork and flooring, the Dionysian-themed landscape and nature frescos lining the walls are reminiscent of the illusionistic early Imperial paintings in his mother's own subterranean dining room.
The palace of Tiberius at Rome was located on the Palatine Hill, the ruins of which can still be seen today. No major public works were undertaken in the city during his reign, except a temple dedicated to Augustus and the restoration of the theater of Pompey, both of which were not finished until the reign of Caligula. In addition, remnants of Tiberius' villa at Sperlonga, which includes a grotto where the important Sperlonga sculptures were found in fragments, and the "Villa Jovis" on top of Capri have been preserved. The estate at Capri is said by Tacitus to have included a total of twelve villas across the island, of which "Villa Jovis" was the largest.
Tiberius refused to be worshipped as a living god, and allowed only one temple to be built in his honor, at Smyrna. The town Tiberias, in modern Israel on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, was named in Tiberius's honour by Herod Antipas.
The theft of the Gold Tiberius, an unintentionally unique commemorative coin commissioned by Tiberius which is stated to have achieved legendary status in the centuries hence, from a mysterious triad of occultists drives the plot of the framing story in Arthur Machen's 1895 novel "The Three Impostors".
Tiberius has been represented in fiction, in literature, film and television, and in video games, often as a peripheral character in the central storyline. One such modern representation is in the novel "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves, and the consequent BBC television series adaptation, where he is portrayed by George Baker. George R. R. Martin, the author of The Song of Ice and Fire series, has stated that central character Stannis Baratheon is partially inspired by Tiberius Caesar, and particularly the portrayal by Baker.
In the 1968 ITV historical drama "The Caesars", Tiberius (by André Morell) is the central character for much of the series and is portrayed in a much more balanced way than in "I, Claudius".
He also appears as a minor character in the 2006 film "The Inquiry", in which he is played by Max von Sydow. In addition, Tiberius has prominent roles in "Ben-Hur" (played by George Relph in his last starring role), and in "A.D." (played by James Mason).
Played by Ernest Thesiger, he featured in "The Robe" (1953). He was featured in the 1979 film "Caligula", portrayed by Peter O'Toole. He was an important character in Taylor Caldwell's 1958 novel, "Dear and Glorious Physician", a biography of St Luke the Evangelist, author of the third canonical Gospel.
He was played by Kenneth Cranham in "A.D. The Bible Continues".
Tiberius was married twice, with only his first union producing a child who would survive to adulthood: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30536 |
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as "TCP/IP". TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP, which is part of the Transport Layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP.
TCP is connection-oriented, and a connection between client and server is established before data can be sent. The server must be listening (passive open) for connection requests from clients before a connection is established. Three-way handshake (active open), retransmission, and error-detection adds to reliability but lengthens latency. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that prioritizes time over reliability. TCP employs network congestion avoidance. However, there are vulnerabilities to TCP including denial of service, connection hijacking, TCP veto, and reset attack. For network security, monitoring, and debugging, TCP traffic can be intercepted and logged with a packet sniffer.
Though TCP is a complex protocol, its basic operation has not changed significantly since its first specification. TCP is still dominantly used for the web, i.e. for the HTTP protocol, and later HTTP/2, while not used by latest standard HTTP/3.
In May 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. The authors had been working with to incorporate concepts from the French CYCLADES project into the new network. The specification of the resulting protocol, ("Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program"), was written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974. It contains the first attested use of the term "Internet", as a shorthand for "internetworking".
A central control component of this model was the "Transmission Control Program" that incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. The monolithic Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture consisting of the "Transmission Control Protocol" and the "Internet Protocol". This resulted in a networking model that became known informally as "TCP/IP", although formally it was variously referred to as the Department of Defense (DOD) model, and ARPANET model, and eventually also as the "Internet Protocol Suite".
In 2004, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn received the Turing Award for their foundational work on TCP/IP.
The Transmission Control Protocol provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol. It provides host-to-host connectivity at the transport layer of the Internet model. An application does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a link to another host, such as the required IP fragmentation to accommodate the maximum transmission unit of the transmission medium. At the transport layer, TCP handles all handshaking and transmission details and presents an abstraction of the network connection to the application typically through a network socket interface.
At the lower levels of the protocol stack, due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or unpredictable network behaviour, IP packets may be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests re-transmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. If the data still remains undelivered, the source is notified of this failure. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details.
TCP is used extensively by many internet applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW), email, File Transfer Protocol, Secure Shell, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming media.
TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery and can incur relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order messages or re-transmissions of lost messages. Therefore, it is not particularly suitable for real-time applications such as voice over IP. For such applications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) operating over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are usually recommended instead.
TCP is a reliable stream delivery service which guarantees that all bytes received will be identical and in the same order as those sent. Since packet transfer by many networks is not reliable, TCP achieves this using a technique known as "positive acknowledgement with re-transmission". This requires the receiver to respond with an acknowledgement message as it receives the data. The sender keeps a record of each packet it sends and maintains a timer from when the packet was sent. The sender re-transmits a packet if the timer expires before receiving the acknowledgement. The timer is needed in case a packet gets lost or corrupted.
While IP handles actual delivery of the data, TCP keeps track of "segments" - the individual units of data transmission that a message is divided into for efficient routing through the network. For example, when an HTML file is sent from a web server, the TCP software layer of that server divides the file into segments and forwards them individually to the internet layer in the network stack. The internet layer software encapsulates each TCP segment into an IP packet by adding a header that includes (among other data) the destination IP address. When the client program on the destination computer receives them, the TCP software in the transport layer re-assembles the segments and ensures they are correctly ordered and error-free as it streams the file contents to the receiving application.
Transmission Control Protocol accepts data from a data stream, divides it into chunks, and adds a TCP header creating a TCP segment. The TCP segment is then encapsulated into an Internet Protocol (IP) datagram, and exchanged with peers.
The term "TCP packet" appears in both informal and formal usage, whereas in more precise terminology "segment" refers to the TCP protocol data unit (PDU), "datagram" to the IP PDU, and "frame" to the data link layer PDU:
Processes transmit data by calling on the TCP and passing buffers of data as arguments. The TCP packages the data from these buffers into segments and calls on the internet module [e.g. IP] to transmit each segment to the destination TCP.
A TCP segment consists of a segment "header" and a "data" section. The segment header contains 10 mandatory fields, and an optional extension field ("Options", pink background in table). The data section follows the header and is the payload data carried for the application. The length of the data section is not specified in the segment header; It can be calculated by subtracting the combined length of the segment header and IP header from the total IP datagram length specified in the IP header.
TCP protocol operations may be divided into three phases. Connections must be properly established in a multi-step handshake process ("connection establishment") before entering the "data transfer" phase. After data transmission is completed, the "connection termination" closes established virtual circuits and releases all allocated resources.
A TCP connection is managed by an operating system through a resource that represents the local end-point for communications, the "Internet socket". During the lifetime of a TCP connection, the local end-point undergoes a series of state changes:
To establish a connection, TCP uses a three-way handshake.
Before a client attempts to connect with a server, the server must first bind to and listen at a port to open it up for connections: this is called a passive open.
Once the passive open is established, a client may initiate an active open.
To establish a connection, the three-way (or 3-step) handshake occurs:
At this point, both the client and server have received an acknowledgment of the connection.
The steps 1, 2 establish the connection parameter (sequence number) for one direction and it is acknowledged.
The steps 2, 3 establish the connection parameter (sequence number) for the other direction and it is acknowledged.
With these, a full-duplex communication is established.
The connection termination phase uses a four-way handshake, with each side of the connection terminating independently. When an endpoint wishes to stop its half of the connection, it transmits a FIN packet, which the other end acknowledges with an ACK. Therefore, a typical tear-down requires a pair of FIN and ACK segments from each TCP endpoint. After the side that sent the first FIN has responded with the final ACK, it waits for a timeout before finally closing the connection, during which time the local port is unavailable for new connections; this prevents confusion due to delayed packets being delivered during subsequent connections.
A connection can be "half-open", in which case one side has terminated its end, but the other has not. The side that has terminated can no longer send any data into the connection, but the other side can. The terminating side should continue reading the data until the other side terminates as well.
It is also possible to terminate the connection by a 3-way handshake, when host A sends a FIN and host B replies with a FIN & ACK (merely combines 2 steps into one) and host A replies with an ACK.
Some operating systems, such as Linux and H-UX, implement a half-duplex close sequence in the TCP stack. If the host actively closes a connection, while still having unread incoming data available, the host sends the signal RST (losing any received data) instead of FIN. This assures a TCP application that the remote process has read all the transmitted data by waiting for the signal FIN, before it actively closes the connection. The remote process cannot distinguish between an RST signal for "connection aborting" and "data loss". Both cause the remote stack to lose all data received.
Some application protocols using the TCP open/close handshaking for the application protocol open/close handshaking may find the RST problem on active close. As an example:
For a program flow like above, a TCP/IP stack like that described above does not guarantee that all the data arrives to the other application if unread data has arrived at this end.
Most implementations allocate an entry in a table that maps a session to a running operating system process. Because TCP packets do not include a session identifier, both endpoints identify the session using the client's address and port. Whenever a packet is received, the TCP implementation must perform a lookup on this table to find the destination process. Each entry in the table is known as a Transmission Control Block or TCB. It contains information about the endpoints (IP and port), status of the connection, running data about the packets that are being exchanged and buffers for sending and receiving data.
The number of sessions in the server side is limited only by memory and can grow as new connections arrive, but the client must allocate a random port before sending the first SYN to the server. This port remains allocated during the whole conversation, and effectively limits the number of outgoing connections from each of the client's IP addresses. If an application fails to properly close unrequired connections, a client can run out of resources and become unable to establish new TCP connections, even from other applications.
Both endpoints must also allocate space for unacknowledged packets and received (but unread) data.
The Transmission Control Protocol differs in several key features from the User Datagram Protocol:
TCP uses a "sequence number" to identify each byte of data. The sequence number identifies the order of the bytes sent from each computer so that the data can be reconstructed in order, regardless of any packet reordering, or packet loss that may occur during transmission. The sequence number of the first byte is chosen by the transmitter for the first packet, which is flagged SYN. This number can be arbitrary, and should, in fact, be unpredictable to defend against TCP sequence prediction attacks.
Acknowledgements (ACKs) are sent with a sequence number by the receiver of data to tell the sender that data has been received to the specified byte. ACKs do not imply that the data has been delivered to the application. They merely signify that it is now the receiver's responsibility to deliver the data.
Reliability is achieved by the sender detecting lost data and retransmitting it. TCP uses two primary techniques to identify loss. Retransmission timeout (abbreviated as RTO) and duplicate cumulative acknowledgements (DupAcks).
If a single segment (say segment 100) in a stream is lost, then the receiver cannot acknowledge packets above no. 100 because it uses cumulative ACKs. Hence the receiver acknowledges packet 99 again on the receipt of another data packet. This duplicate acknowledgement is used as a signal for packet loss. That is, if the sender receives three duplicate acknowledgements, it retransmits the last unacknowledged packet. A threshold of three is used because the network may reorder segments causing duplicate acknowledgements. This threshold has been demonstrated to avoid spurious retransmissions due to reordering. Sometimes selective acknowledgements (SACKs) are used to provide explicit feedback about the segments that have been received. This greatly improves TCP's ability to retransmit the right segments.
When a sender transmits a segment, it initializes a timer with a conservative estimate of the arrival time of the acknowledgement. The segment is retransmitted if the timer expires prematurely, with a new timeout threshold of twice the previous value, resulting in exponential backoff behavior. Typically, the initial timer value is formula_1, where formula_2 is the clock granularity. This guards against excessive transmission traffic due to faulty or malicious actors, such as man-in-the-middle denial of service attackers.
Sequence numbers allow receivers to discard duplicate packets and properly sequence reordered packets. Acknowledgments allow senders to determine when to retransmit lost packets.
To assure correctness a checksum field is included; see checksum computation section for details on checksumming. The TCP checksum is a weak check by modern standards. Data Link Layers with high bit error rates may require additional link error correction/detection capabilities. The weak checksum is partially compensated for by the common use of a CRC or better integrity check at layer 2, below both TCP and IP, such as is used in PPP or the Ethernet frame. However, this does not mean that the 16-bit TCP checksum is redundant: remarkably, introduction of errors in packets between CRC-protected hops is common, but the end-to-end 16-bit TCP checksum catches most of these simple errors. This is the end-to-end principle at work.
TCP uses an end-to-end flow control protocol to avoid having the sender send data too fast for the TCP receiver to receive and process it reliably. Having a mechanism for flow control is essential in an environment where machines of diverse network speeds communicate. For example, if a PC sends data to a smartphone that is slowly processing received data, the smartphone must regulate the data flow so as not to be overwhelmed.
TCP uses a sliding window flow control protocol. In each TCP segment, the receiver specifies in the "receive window" field the amount of additionally received data (in bytes) that it is willing to buffer for the connection. The sending host can send only up to that amount of data before it must wait for an acknowledgement and window update from the receiving host.
When a receiver advertises a window size of 0, the sender stops sending data and starts the "persist timer". The persist timer is used to protect TCP from a deadlock situation that could arise if a subsequent window size update from the receiver is lost, and the sender cannot send more data until receiving a new window size update from the receiver. When the persist timer expires, the TCP sender attempts recovery by sending a small packet so that the receiver responds by sending another acknowledgement containing the new window size.
If a receiver is processing incoming data in small increments, it may repeatedly advertise a small receive window. This is referred to as the silly window syndrome, since it is inefficient to send only a few bytes of data in a TCP segment, given the relatively large overhead of the TCP header.
The final main aspect of TCP is congestion control. TCP uses a number of mechanisms to achieve high performance and avoid congestion collapse, where network performance can fall by several orders of magnitude. These mechanisms control the rate of data entering the network, keeping the data flow below a rate that would trigger collapse. They also yield an approximately max-min fair allocation between flows.
Acknowledgments for data sent, or lack of acknowledgments, are used by senders to infer network conditions between the TCP sender and receiver. Coupled with timers, TCP senders and receivers can alter the behavior of the flow of data. This is more generally referred to as congestion control and/or network congestion avoidance.
Modern implementations of TCP contain four intertwined algorithms: slow-start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit, and fast recovery (RFC 5681).
In addition, senders employ a "retransmission timeout" (RTO) that is based on the estimated round-trip time (or RTT) between the sender and receiver, as well as the variance in this round trip time. The behavior of this timer is specified in RFC 6298. There are subtleties in the estimation of RTT. For example, senders must be careful when calculating RTT samples for retransmitted packets; typically they use Karn's Algorithm or TCP timestamps (see RFC 1323). These individual RTT samples are then averaged over time to create a Smoothed Round Trip Time (SRTT) using Jacobson's algorithm. This SRTT value is what is finally used as the round-trip time estimate.
Enhancing TCP to reliably handle loss, minimize errors, manage congestion and go fast in very high-speed environments are ongoing areas of research and standards development. As a result, there are a number of TCP congestion avoidance algorithm variations.
The maximum segment size (MSS) is the largest amount of data, specified in bytes, that TCP is willing to receive in a single segment. For best performance, the MSS should be set small enough to avoid IP fragmentation, which can lead to packet loss and excessive retransmissions. To try to accomplish this, typically the MSS is announced by each side using the MSS option when the TCP connection is established, in which case it is derived from the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the data link layer of the networks to which the sender and receiver are directly attached. Furthermore, TCP senders can use path MTU discovery to infer the minimum MTU along the network path between the sender and receiver, and use this to dynamically adjust the MSS to avoid IP fragmentation within the network.
MSS announcement is also often called "MSS negotiation". Strictly speaking, the MSS is not "negotiated" between the originator and the receiver, because that would imply that both originator and receiver will negotiate and agree upon a single, unified MSS that applies to all communication in both directions of the connection. In fact, two completely independent values of MSS are permitted for the two directions of data flow in a TCP connection. This situation may arise, for example, if one of the devices participating in a connection has an extremely limited amount of memory reserved (perhaps even smaller than the overall discovered Path MTU) for processing incoming TCP segments.
Relying purely on the cumulative acknowledgment scheme employed by the original TCP protocol can lead to inefficiencies when packets are lost. For example, suppose bytes with sequence number 1,000 to 10,999 are sent in 10 different TCP segments of equal size, and the second segment (sequence numbers 2,000 to 2,999) is lost during transmission. In a pure cumulative acknowledgment protocol, the receiver can only send a cumulative ACK value of 2,000 (the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the received data) and cannot say that it received bytes 3,000 to 10,999 successfully. Thus the sender may then have to resend all data starting with sequence number 2,000.
To alleviate this issue TCP employs the "selective acknowledgment (SACK)" option, defined in 1996 in RFC 2018, which allows the receiver to acknowledge discontinuous blocks of packets which were received correctly, in addition to the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the last contiguous byte received successively, as in the basic TCP acknowledgment. The acknowledgement can specify a number of "SACK blocks", where each SACK block is conveyed by the "Left Edge of Block" (the first sequence number of the block) and the "Right Edge of Block" (the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the block), with a "Block" being a contiguous range that the receiver correctly received. In the example above, the receiver would send an ACK segment with a cumulative ACK value of 2,000 and a SACK option header with sequence numbers 3,000 and 11,000. The sender would accordingly retransmit only the second segment with sequence numbers 2,000 to 2,999.
A TCP sender can interpret an out-of-order segment delivery as a lost segment. If it does so, the TCP sender will retransmit the segment previous to the out-of-order packet and slow its data delivery rate for that connection. The duplicate-SACK option, an extension to the SACK option that was defined in May 2000 in RFC 2883, solves this problem. The TCP receiver sends a D-ACK to indicate that no segments were lost, and the TCP sender can then reinstate the higher transmission-rate.
The SACK option is not mandatory, and comes into operation only if both parties support it. This is negotiated when a connection is established. SACK uses a TCP header option (see TCP segment structure for details). The use of SACK has become widespread—all popular TCP stacks support it. Selective acknowledgment is also used in Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP).
For more efficient use of high-bandwidth networks, a larger TCP window size may be used. The TCP window size field controls the flow of data and its value is limited to between 2 and 65,535 bytes.
Since the size field cannot be expanded, a scaling factor is used. The TCP window scale option, as defined in RFC 1323, is an option used to increase the maximum window size from 65,535 bytes to 1 gigabyte. Scaling up to larger window sizes is a part of what is necessary for TCP tuning.
The window scale option is used only during the TCP 3-way handshake. The window scale value represents the number of bits to left-shift the 16-bit window size field. The window scale value can be set from 0 (no shift) to 14 for each direction independently. Both sides must send the option in their SYN segments to enable window scaling in either direction.
Some routers and packet firewalls rewrite the window scaling factor during a transmission. This causes sending and receiving sides to assume different TCP window sizes. The result is non-stable traffic that may be very slow. The problem is visible on some sites behind a defective router.
TCP timestamps, defined in RFC 1323 in 1992, can help TCP determine in which order packets were sent.
TCP timestamps are not normally aligned to the system clock and start at some random value. Many operating systems will increment the timestamp for every elapsed millisecond; however the RFC only states that the ticks should be proportional.
There are two timestamp fields:
TCP timestamps are used in an algorithm known as "Protection Against Wrapped Sequence" numbers, or "PAWS" (see RFC 1323 for details). PAWS is used when the receive window crosses the sequence number wraparound boundary. In the case where a packet was potentially retransmitted it answers the question: "Is this sequence number in the first 4 GB or the second?" And the timestamp is used to break the tie.
Also, the Eifel detection algorithm (RFC 3522) uses TCP timestamps to determine if retransmissions are occurring because packets are lost or simply out of order.
Recent Statistics show that the level of Timestamp adoption has stagnated, at ~40%, owing to Windows server dropping support since Windows Server 2008.
TCP timestamps are enabled by default In Linux kernel., and disabled by default in Windows Server 2008, 2012 and 2016.
It is possible to interrupt or abort the queued stream instead of waiting for the stream to finish. This is done by specifying the data as "urgent". This tells the receiving program to process it immediately, along with the rest of the urgent data. When finished, TCP informs the application and resumes back to the stream queue. An example is when TCP is used for a remote login session, the user can send a keyboard sequence that interrupts or aborts the program at the other end. These signals are most often needed when a program on the remote machine fails to operate correctly. The signals must be sent without waiting for the program to finish its current transfer.
TCP out-of-band data was not designed for the modern Internet. The "urgent" pointer only alters the processing on the remote host and doesn't expedite any processing on the network itself. When it gets to the remote host there are two slightly different interpretations of the protocol, which means only single bytes of OOB data are reliable. This is assuming it is reliable at all as it is one of the least commonly used protocol elements and tends to be poorly implemented.
Normally, TCP waits for 200 ms for a full packet of data to send (Nagle's Algorithm tries to group small messages into a single packet). This wait creates small, but potentially serious delays if repeated constantly during a file transfer. For example, a typical send block would be 4 KB, a typical MSS is 1460, so 2 packets go out on a 10 Mbit/s ethernet taking ~1.2 ms each followed by a third carrying the remaining 1176 after a 197 ms pause because TCP is waiting for a full buffer.
In the case of telnet, each user keystroke is echoed back by the server before the user can see it on the screen. This delay would become very annoying.
Setting the socket option codice_5 overrides the default 200 ms send delay. Application programs use this socket option to force output to be sent after writing a character or line of characters.
The RFC defines the codice_6 push bit as "a message to the receiving TCP stack to send this data immediately up to the receiving application". There is no way to indicate or control it in user space using Berkeley sockets and it is controlled by protocol stack only.
TCP may be attacked in a variety of ways. The results of a thorough security assessment of TCP, along with possible mitigations for the identified issues, were published in 2009, and is currently being pursued within the IETF.
By using a spoofed IP address and repeatedly sending purposely assembled SYN packets, followed by many ACK packets, attackers can cause the server to consume large amounts of resources keeping track of the bogus connections. This is known as a SYN flood attack. Proposed solutions to this problem include SYN cookies and cryptographic puzzles, though SYN cookies come with their own set of vulnerabilities. Sockstress is a similar attack, that might be mitigated with system resource management. An advanced DoS attack involving the exploitation of the TCP Persist Timer was analyzed in Phrack #66. PUSH and ACK floods are other variants.
An attacker who is able to eavesdrop a TCP session and redirect packets can hijack a TCP connection. To do so, the attacker learns the sequence number from the ongoing communication and forges a false segment that looks like the next segment in the stream. Such a simple hijack can result in one packet being erroneously accepted at one end. When the receiving host acknowledges the extra segment to the other side of the connection, synchronization is lost. Hijacking might be combined with Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) or routing attacks that allow taking control of the packet flow, so as to get permanent control of the hijacked TCP connection.
Impersonating a different IP address was not difficult prior to RFC 1948, when the initial "sequence number" was easily guessable. That allowed an attacker to blindly send a sequence of packets that the receiver would believe to come from a different IP address, without the need to deploy ARP or routing attacks: it is enough to ensure that the legitimate host of the impersonated IP address is down, or bring it to that condition using denial-of-service attacks. This is why the initial sequence number is now chosen at random.
An attacker who can eavesdrop and predict the size of the next packet to be sent can cause the receiver to accept a malicious payload without disrupting the existing connection. The attacker injects a malicious packet with the sequence number and a payload size of the next expected packet. When the legitimate packet is ultimately received, it is found to have the same sequence number and length as a packet already received and is silently dropped as a normal duplicate packet—the legitimate packet is "vetoed" by the malicious packet. Unlike in connection hijacking, the connection is never desynchronized and communication continues as normal after the malicious payload is accepted. TCP veto gives the attacker less control over the communication, but makes the attack particularly resistant to detection. The large increase in network traffic from the ACK storm is avoided. The only evidence to the receiver that something is amiss is a single duplicate packet, a normal occurrence in an IP network. The sender of the vetoed packet never sees any evidence of an attack.
Another vulnerability is TCP reset attack.
TCP and UDP use port numbers to identify sending and receiving application end-points on a host, often called Internet sockets. Each side of a TCP connection has an associated 16-bit unsigned port number (0-65535) reserved by the sending or receiving application. Arriving TCP packets are identified as belonging to a specific TCP connection by its sockets, that is, the combination of source host address, source port, destination host address, and destination port. This means that a server computer can provide several clients with several services simultaneously, as long as a client takes care of initiating any simultaneous connections to one destination port from different source ports.
Port numbers are categorized into three basic categories: well-known, registered, and dynamic/private. The well-known ports are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and are typically used by system-level or root processes. Well-known applications running as servers and passively listening for connections typically use these ports. Some examples include: FTP (20 and 21), SSH (22), TELNET (23), SMTP (25), HTTP over SSL/TLS (443), and HTTP (80). Note, as of the latest standard, HTTP/3, QUIC is used as a transport instead of TCP. Registered ports are typically used by end user applications as ephemeral source ports when contacting servers, but they can also identify named services that have been registered by a third party. Dynamic/private ports can also be used by end user applications, but are less commonly so. Dynamic/private ports do not contain any meaning outside of any particular TCP connection.
Network Address Translation (NAT), typically uses dynamic port numbers, on the ("Internet-facing") public side, to disambiguate the flow of traffic that is passing between a public network and a private subnetwork, thereby allowing many IP addresses (and their ports) on the subnet to be serviced by a single public-facing address.
TCP is a complex protocol. However, while significant enhancements have been made and proposed over the years, its most basic operation has not changed significantly since its first specification RFC 675 in 1974, and the v4 specification RFC 793, published in September 1981. RFC 1122, Host Requirements for Internet Hosts, clarified a number of TCP protocol implementation requirements. A list of the 8 required specifications and over 20 strongly encouraged enhancements is available in RFC 7414. Among this list is RFC 2581, TCP Congestion Control, one of the most important TCP-related RFCs in recent years, describes updated algorithms that avoid undue congestion. In 2001, RFC 3168 was written to describe Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), a congestion avoidance signaling mechanism.
The original TCP congestion avoidance algorithm was known as "TCP Tahoe", but many alternative algorithms have since been proposed (including TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, FAST TCP, TCP New Reno, and TCP Hybla).
TCP Interactive (iTCP) is a research effort into TCP extensions that allows applications to subscribe to TCP events and register handler components that can launch applications for various purposes, including application-assisted congestion control.
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an ongoing effort within the IETF that aims at allowing a TCP connection to use multiple paths to maximize resource usage and increase redundancy. The redundancy offered by Multipath TCP in the context of wireless networks enables the simultaneous utilization of different networks, which brings higher throughput and better handover capabilities. Multipath TCP also brings performance benefits in datacenter environments. The reference implementation of Multipath TCP is being developed in the Linux kernel. Multipath TCP is used to support the Siri voice recognition application on iPhones, iPads and Macs
TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT) is an extension proposed in December 2009 to secure servers against denial-of-service attacks. Unlike SYN cookies, TCPCT does not conflict with other TCP extensions such as window scaling. TCPCT was designed due to necessities of DNSSEC, where servers have to handle large numbers of short-lived TCP connections.
tcpcrypt is an extension proposed in July 2010 to provide transport-level encryption directly in TCP itself. It is designed to work transparently and not require any configuration. Unlike TLS (SSL), tcpcrypt itself does not provide authentication, but provides simple primitives down to the application to do that. , the first tcpcrypt IETF draft has been published and implementations exist for several major platforms.
TCP Fast Open is an extension to speed up the opening of successive TCP connections between two endpoints. It works by skipping the three-way handshake using a cryptographic "cookie". It is similar to an earlier proposal called T/TCP, which was not widely adopted due to security issues. TCP Fast Open was published as RFC 7413 in 2014.
Proposed in May 2013, Proportional Rate Reduction (PRR) is a TCP extension developed by Google engineers. PRR ensures that the TCP window size after recovery is as close to the Slow-start threshold as possible. The algorithm is designed to improve the speed of recovery and is the default congestion control algorithm in Linux 3.2+ kernels.
TCP was originally designed for wired networks. Packet loss is considered to be the result of network congestion and the congestion window size is reduced dramatically as a precaution. However, wireless links are known to experience sporadic and usually temporary losses due to fading, shadowing, hand off, interference, and other radio effects, that are not strictly congestion. After the (erroneous) back-off of the congestion window size, due to wireless packet loss, there may be a congestion avoidance phase with a conservative decrease in window size. This causes the radio link to be underutilized. Extensive research on combating these harmful effects has been conducted. Suggested solutions can be categorized as end-to-end solutions, which require modifications at the client or server, link layer solutions, such as Radio Link Protocol (RLP) in cellular networks, or proxy-based solutions which require some changes in the network without modifying end nodes.
A number of alternative congestion control algorithms, such as Vegas, Westwood, Veno, and Santa Cruz, have been proposed to help solve the wireless problem.
One way to overcome the processing power requirements of TCP is to build hardware implementations of it, widely known as TCP offload engines (TOE). The main problem of TOEs is that they are hard to integrate into computing systems, requiring extensive changes in the operating system of the computer or device. One company to develop such a device was Alacritech.
A packet sniffer, which intercepts TCP traffic on a network link, can be useful in debugging networks, network stacks, and applications that use TCP by showing the user what packets are passing through a link. Some networking stacks support the SO_DEBUG socket option, which can be enabled on the socket using setsockopt. That option dumps all the packets, TCP states, and events on that socket, which is helpful in debugging. Netstat is another utility that can be used for debugging.
For many applications TCP is not appropriate. One problem (at least with normal implementations) is that the application cannot access the packets coming after a lost packet until the retransmitted copy of the lost packet is received. This causes problems for real-time applications such as streaming media, real-time multiplayer games and voice over IP (VoIP) where it is generally more useful to get most of the data in a timely fashion than it is to get all of the data in order.
For historical and performance reasons, most storage area networks (SANs) use Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) over Fibre Channel connections.
Also, for embedded systems, network booting, and servers that serve simple requests from huge numbers of clients (e.g. DNS servers) the complexity of TCP can be a problem. Finally, some tricks such as transmitting data between two hosts that are both behind NAT (using STUN or similar systems) are far simpler without a relatively complex protocol like TCP in the way.
Generally, where TCP is unsuitable, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is used. This provides the application multiplexing and checksums that TCP does, but does not handle streams or retransmission, giving the application developer the ability to code them in a way suitable for the situation, or to replace them with other methods like forward error correction or interpolation.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is another protocol that provides reliable stream oriented services similar to TCP. It is newer and considerably more complex than TCP, and has not yet seen widespread deployment. However, it is especially designed to be used in situations where reliability and near-real-time considerations are important.
Venturi Transport Protocol (VTP) is a patented proprietary protocol that is designed to replace TCP transparently to overcome perceived inefficiencies related to wireless data transport.
TCP also has issues in high-bandwidth environments. The TCP congestion avoidance algorithm works very well for ad-hoc environments where the data sender is not known in advance. If the environment is predictable, a timing based protocol such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) can avoid TCP's retransmits overhead.
UDP-based Data Transfer Protocol (UDT) has better efficiency and fairness than TCP in networks that have high bandwidth-delay product.
Multipurpose Transaction Protocol (MTP/IP) is patented proprietary software that is designed to adaptively achieve high throughput and transaction performance in a wide variety of network conditions, particularly those where TCP is perceived to be inefficient.
When TCP runs over IPv4, the method used to compute the checksum is defined in RFC 793:
"The checksum field is the 16 bit one's complement of the one's complement sum of all 16-bit words in the header and text. If a segment contains an odd number of header and text octets to be checksummed, the last octet is padded on the right with zeros to form a 16-bit word for checksum purposes. The pad is not transmitted as part of the segment. While computing the checksum, the checksum field itself is replaced with zeros."
In other words, after appropriate padding, all 16-bit words are added using one's complement arithmetic. The sum is then bitwise complemented and inserted as the checksum field. A pseudo-header that mimics the IPv4 packet header used in the checksum computation is shown in the table below.
The source and destination addresses are those of the IPv4 header. The protocol value is 6 for TCP (cf. List of IP protocol numbers). The TCP length field is the length of the TCP header and data (measured in octets).
When TCP runs over IPv6, the method used to compute the checksum is changed, as per RFC 2460:
A pseudo-header that mimics the IPv6 header for computation of the checksum is shown below.
Many TCP/IP software stack implementations provide options to use hardware assistance to automatically compute the checksum in the network adapter prior to transmission onto the network or upon reception from the network for validation. This may relieve the OS from using precious CPU cycles calculating the checksum. Hence, overall network performance is increased.
This feature may cause packet analyzers that are unaware or uncertain about the use of checksum offload to report invalid checksums in outbound packets that have not yet reached the network adapter. This will only occur for packets that are intercepted before being transmitted by the network adapter; all packets transmitted by the network adaptor on the wire will have valid checksums. This issue can also occur when monitoring packets being transmitted between virtual machines on the same host, where a virtual device driver may omit the checksum calculation (as an optimization), knowing that the checksum will be calculated later by the VM host kernel or its physical hardware. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30538 |
2001 Tour de France
The 2001 Tour de France was a multiple-stage bicycle race held from 7 to 29 July, and the 88th edition of the Tour de France. It has no overall winner—although American cyclist Lance Armstrong originally won the event, the United States Anti-Doping Agency announced in August 2012 that they had disqualified Armstrong from all his results since 1998, including his seven Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005. The verdict was subsequently confirmed by the Union Cycliste Internationale.
The race included a team time trial, two individual time trials and five consecutive mountain-top finishing stages, the second of which was the Chamrousse special-category climb time trial. Thus, all the high-mountain stages were grouped consecutively, following the climbing time trial, with one rest day in between. France was ridden 'clockwise', so the Alps were visited before the Pyrenees. The Tour started in France but also visited Belgium in its first week. The ceremonial final stage finished at the Champs-Élysées in Paris, as is tradition. Erik Zabel won his record sixth consecutive points classification victory.
The organisers felt that the 2000 Tour de France had not included enough French teams and consequently changed the selection procedure. was selected because it included the winner of the previous edition, Lance Armstrong. was selected because it included the winner of the 2000 UCI Road World Cup, Erik Zabel). was selected because it won the team classification in the 2000 Giro d'Italia. was selected because it won the team classifications in both the 2000 Tour de France and 2000 Vuelta a España. A further twelve teams qualified based on the UCI ranking in the highest UCI division at the end of 2000, after compensating for transfers. Although initially it was announced that four wildcards would be given, the tour organisation decided to add five teams: In total, 21 teams participated, each with 9 cyclists, giving a total of 189 cyclists.
The teams entering the race were:
Qualified teams
Invited teams
The highest point of elevation in the race was at the summit of the Col du Tourmalet mountain pass on stage 14.
After Armstrong abandoned his fight against the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), he was stripped of his record seven Tour de France titles. The Union Cycliste Internationale endorsed the USADA sanctions and decided not to award victories to any other rider or upgrade other placings in any of the affected events. The 2001 Tour therefore has no official winner.
There were several classifications in the 2001 Tour de France. The most important was the general classification, calculated by adding each cyclist's finishing times in each stage. The cyclist with the least accumulated time was the race leader, identified by the yellow jersey; the winner of this classification is considered the winner of the Tour.
Additionally, there was a points classification, which awarded a green jersey. In this classification, cyclists got points for finishing among the best in a stage finish, or in intermediate sprints. The cyclist with the most points lead the classification and was identified with a green jersey.
There was also a mountains classification. The organisation had categorised some climbs as either "hors catégorie", first, second, third, or fourth-category; points for this classification were won by the first cyclists to reach the top of these climbs, with more points available for the higher-categorised climbs. The cyclist with the most points lead the classification and wore a white jersey with red polka dots.
The fourth individual classification was the young rider classification, which was marked by the white jersey. This was decided in the same way as the general classification, but only riders under 26 years of age were eligible.
For the team classification, the times of the best three cyclists per team on each stage were added; the leading team was the team with the lowest total time.
In addition, there was a combativity award given after each mass-start stage to the cyclist considered most combative, who wore a red number bib the next stage. The decision was made by a jury composed of journalists who gave points. The cyclist with the most points from votes in all stages led the combativity classification. Laurent Jalabert won this classification, and was given overall the super-combativity award.
There were also two special awards each with a prize of F 20,000, the Souvenir Henri Desgrange, given in honour of Tour founder and first race director Henri Desgrange to the first rider to pass the summit of the Col de la Madeleine on stage 10, and the Souvenir Jacques Goddet, given for the first time in honour of the second director Jacques Goddet to the first rider to pass the summit of the Col du Tourmalet on stage 14. Laurent Roux won the Henri Desgrange and Sven Montgomery won the Jacques Goddet. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30540 |
Alhambra
The Alhambra (, ; , , ) is a palace and fortress complex located in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. It was originally constructed as a small fortress in AD 889 on the remains of Roman fortifications, and then largely ignored until its ruins were renovated and rebuilt in the mid-13th century by the Nasrid emir Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar of the Emirate of Granada, who built its current palace and walls with many beautiful, intricate details. It was converted into a royal palace in 1333 by Yusuf I, Sultan of Granada. After the conclusion of the Christian Reconquista in 1492, the site became the Royal Court of Ferdinand and Isabella (where Christopher Columbus received royal endorsement for his expedition), and the palaces were partially altered in the Renaissance style. In 1526 Charles I & V commissioned a new Renaissance palace better befitting the Holy Roman Emperor in the revolutionary Mannerist style influenced by humanist philosophy in direct juxtaposition with the Nasrid Andalusian architecture, but it was ultimately never completed due to Morisco rebellions in Granada.
Alhambra's last flowering of Islamic palaces was built for the final Muslim emirs in Spain during the decline of the Nasrid dynasty, who were increasingly subject to the Christian Kings of Castile. After being allowed to fall into disrepair for centuries, the buildings occupied by squatters, Alhambra was rediscovered following the defeat of Napoleon, who had conducted retaliatory destruction of the site. The rediscoverers were first British intellectuals and then other north European Romantic travelers. It is now one of Spain's major tourist attractions, exhibiting the country's most significant and well-known Islamic architecture, together with 16th-century and later Christian building and garden interventions. The Alhambra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Moorish poets described it as "a pearl set in emeralds", an allusion to the colour of its buildings and the woods around them. The palace complex was designed with the mountainous site in mind and many forms of technology were considered. The park (Alameda de la Alhambra), which is overgrown with wildflowers and grass in the spring, was planted by the Moors with roses, oranges, and myrtles; its most characteristic feature, however, is the dense wood of English elms brought by the Duke of Wellington in 1812. The park has a multitude of nightingales and is usually filled with the sound of running water from several fountains and cascades. These are supplied through a conduit long, which is connected with the Darro at the monastery of Jesus del Valle above Granada.
Despite long neglect, willful vandalism, and some ill-judged restoration, the Alhambra endures as an atypical example of Muslim art in its final European stages, relatively uninfluenced by the direct Byzantine influences found in the Mezquita of Córdoba. Most of the palace buildings are quadrangular in plan, with all the rooms opening on to a central court, and the whole reached its present size simply by the gradual addition of new quadrangles, designed on the same principle, though varying in dimensions, and connected with each other by smaller rooms and passages. Alhambra was extended by the different Muslim rulers who lived in the complex. However, each new section that was added followed the consistent theme of "paradise on earth". Column arcades, fountains with running water, and reflecting pools were used to add to the aesthetic and functional complexity. In every case, the exterior was left plain and austere. Sun and wind were freely admitted. Blue, red, and a golden yellow, all somewhat faded through lapse of time and exposure, are the colors chiefly employed. The name Alhambra means the red one or the red castle, which refers to the sun-dried bricks that the outer wall is made of.
The decoration consists for the upper part of the walls, as a rule, of Arabic inscriptions—mostly poems by Ibn Zamrak and others praising the palace—that are manipulated into geometrical patterns with vegetal background set onto an arabesque setting ("Ataurique"). Much of this ornament is carved stucco (plaster) rather than stone. Tile mosaics ("alicatado"), with complicated mathematical patterns ("tracería", most precisely "lacería"), are largely used as panelling for the lower part. Metal was also not present very mainly. Similar designs are displayed on wooden ceilings (Alfarje). Muqarnas are the main elements for vaulting with stucco, and some of the most accomplished dome examples of this kind are in the Court of the Lions halls. The palace complex is designed in the Nasrid style, the last blooming of Islamic Art in the Iberian Peninsula, that had a great influence on the Maghreb to the present day, and on contemporary Mudejar Art, which is characteristic of western elements reinterpreted into Islamic forms and widely popular during the Reconquista in Spain.
"Alhambra" derives from the Arabic " (f.)", meaning "the red one", the complete form of which was "" "the red fortress (qalat)". The "Al-" in "Alhambra" means "the" in Arabic, but this is ignored in general usage in both English and Spanish, where the name is normally given the definite article.
Around the year 889, forces loyal to Umar ibn Hafsun in revolt against Abdullah ibn Muhammad al-Umawi and the Emirate of Córdoba besieged a small Islamic fortress in Granada held by Sawār Ben Hamdūn. The first reference to "" came in lines of poetry attached to an arrow shot over the ramparts, recorded by Ibn Hayyan:
"Deserted and roofless are the houses of our enemies;
Let them within the red castle (Kalat al hamra) hold their mischievous councils;
Completed towards the end of Muslim rule of Spain by Yusuf I (1333–1353) and Muhammed V, Sultan of Granada (1353–1391), the Alhambra is a reflection of the culture of the last centuries of the Muslim rule of Al Andalus, reduced to the Nasrid Emirate of Granada. It is a place where artists and intellectuals had taken refuge as the Reconquista by Spanish Christians won victories over Al Andalus. The Alhambra integrates natural site qualities with constructed structures and gardens, and is a testament to Moorish culture in Spain and the skills of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian artisans, craftsmen, and builders of their era.
The literal translation of Alhambra, "the red (female)," reflects the color of the red clay of the surroundings of which the fort is made. The buildings of the Alhambra were originally whitewashed; however, the buildings as seen today are reddish. Another possible origin of the name is the tribal designation of the Nasrid Dynasty, known as the Banu al-Ahmar "Arabic: Sons of the Red (male)", a sub-tribe of the Arab Qahtanite Banu Khazraj tribe. One of the early Nasrid ancestors was nicknamed "Yusuf Al Ahmar" (Yusuf the Red) and hence the (Nasrid) fraction of the Banu Khazraj took up the name of Banu al-Ahmar.
The first reference to the Qal‘at al-Ḥamra was during the battles between the Arabs and the Muladies (people of mixed Arab and European descent) during the rule of the ‘Abdullah ibn Muhammad (r. 888–912). In one particularly fierce and bloody skirmish, the Muladies soundly defeated the Arabs, who were then forced to take shelter in a primitive red castle located in the province of Elvira, presently located in Granada. According to surviving documents from the era, the red castle was quite small, and its walls were not capable of deterring an army intent on conquering. The castle was then largely ignored until the eleventh century, when its ruins were renovated and rebuilt by Samuel ibn Naghrela, vizier to the emir Badis ben Habus of the Zirid Dynasty of Al Andalus, in an attempt to preserve the small Jewish settlement also located on the natural plateau, Sabikah Hill.
Ibn Nasr, the founder of the Nasrid Dynasty, was forced to flee to Jaén to avoid persecution by King Ferdinand III of Castile and the Reconquista supporters working to end Spain's Moorish rule. After retreating to Granada, Ibn-Nasr took up residence at the Palace of Badis ben Habus in the Alhambra. A few months later, he embarked on the construction of a new Alhambra fit for the residence of a sultan. According to an Arabic manuscript since published as the "Anónimo de Granada y Copenhague",
The design included plans for six palaces, five of which were grouped in the northeast quadrant forming a royal quarter, two circuit towers, and numerous bathhouses. During the reign of the Nasrid Dynasty, the Alhambra was transformed into a palatine city, complete with an irrigation system composed of acequias for the gardens of the Generalife located outside the fortress. Previously, the old Alhambra structure had been dependent upon rainwater collected from a cistern and from what could be brought up from the Albaicín. The creation of the Sultan's Canal solidified the identity of the Alhambra as a palace-city rather than a defensive and ascetic structure. The hydraulic system includes two long water channels and several sophisticated elevation devices to bring water onto the plateau.
The last Nasrid sultan, Muhammad XII of Granada, surrendered the Emirate of Granada in 1492 without the Alhambra itself being attacked when the forces of the Reyes Católicos, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, took the surrounding territory with a force of overwhelming numbers. Muhammad XII moved the remains of his ancestors from the complex, as was verified by in 1925, when he found seventy empty tombs. The remains are now likely to be located in Mondújar in the principality of Lecrín.
The decoration within the palaces comes from the last great period of Andalusian art in Granada. With little of the Byzantine influence of contemporary Abassid architecture, artists endlessly reproduced the same forms and trends, creating a new style that developed over the course of the Nasrid Dynasty. The Nasrids used freely all the stylistic elements that had been created and developed during eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Peninsula, including the Caliphate horseshoe arch, the Almohad sebka (a grid of rhombuses), the Almoravid palm, and unique combinations of them, as well as innovations such as stilted arches and muqarnas (stalactite ceiling decorations). Structurally, the design is simple and does not evince significant innovation. While artistically pleasing it was until the reconquest structurally ad hoc and reliant on the skills of subject artisans and workers.
Columns and muqarnas appear in several chambers, and the interiors of numerous palaces are decorated with arabesques and calligraphy. The arabesques of the interior are ascribed to, among other sultans, Yusuf I, Mohammed V, and Ismail I, Sultan of Granada.
After the Christian conquest of the city in 1492, the conquerors began to alter the Alhambra. The open work was filled up with whitewash, the painting and gilding effaced, and the furniture soiled, torn, or removed. Charles I (1516–1556) rebuilt portions in the Renaissance style of the period and destroyed the greater part of the winter palace to make room for a Renaissance-style structure which was never completed. Philip V (1700–1746) Italianised the rooms and completed his palace in the middle of what had been the Moorish building; he had partitions constructed which blocked up whole apartments.
Over subsequent centuries the Moorish art was further damaged, and in 1812 some of the towers were destroyed by the French under Count Sebastiani. In 1821, an earthquake caused further damage. Restoration work was undertaken in 1828 by the architect José Contreras, endowed in 1830 by Ferdinand VII. After the death of Contreras in 1847, it was continued by his son Rafael (died 1890) and his grandson. Especially notable was the intervention of in the 1930s: the young architect "opened arcades that had been walled up, re-excavated filled-in pools, replaced missing tiles, completed inscriptions that lacked portions of their stuccoed lettering, and installed a ceiling in the still unfinished palace of Charles V".
According to the site's current architect, Pedro Salmeron Escobar, the Alhambra evolved organically over a period of several centuries from the ancient hilltop fortress defined by a narrow promontory carved by the river Darro and overlooking the "Vega" or Plain of Granada as it descends from the Sierra Nevada. The red earth from which the fortress is constructed is a granular aggregate held together by a medium of red clay which gives the resulting layered brick- and stone- reinforced construction ("tapial calicastrado") its characteristic hue and is at the root of the name of 'the Red Hill'.
This crude earthiness is counterpointed by the startling fine alabaster white stucco work of the famous interiors. Meltwater from the 'Snowy Mountains' is drawn across an arched vault at the eastern tip of the "Torre del Agua" ('Water Tower') and channeled through the citadel via a complex system of conduits ("acequia") and water tanks ("los albercones") which create the celebrated interplay of light, sound and surface.
Alhambra is about in length by at its greatest width. It extends from west-northwest to east-southeast and covers an area of about or 35 acres. The Alhambra's most westerly feature is the Alcazaba (citadel), a strongly fortified position built to protect the original post-Roman districts of "Iliberri", now 'Centro', and "Gárnata al-yahūd" ('Granada of the Jews', now "Realejo", and the Moorish suburb of "El Albayzín".
Due to touristic demand, modern access runs contrary to the original sequence which began from a principal access via the "Puerta de la Justicia" (Gate of Justice) onto a large souq or public market square facing the Alcazaba, now subdivided and obscured by later Christian-era development. From the "Puerta del Vino" (Wine Gate) ran the "Calle Real" (Royal Street) dividing the Alhambra along its axial spine into a southern residential quarter, with mosques, hamams (bathhouses) and diverse functional establishments, and a greater northern portion, occupied by several palaces of the nobility with extensive landscaped gardens commanding views over the Albayzin. All of this was subservient to the great Tower of the Ambassadors in the "Palacio Comares", which acted as the royal audience chamber and throne room with its three arched windows dominating the city. The private, internalised universe of the "Palacio de Los Leones" (Palace of the Lions) adjoins the public spaces at right angles (see Plan illustration) but was originally connected only by the function of the Royal Baths, the Eye of Aixa's Room serving as the exquisitely decorated focus of meditation and authority overlooking the refined garden of "Lindaraja/Daraxa" toward the city.
The rest of the plateau comprises a number of earlier and later Moorish palaces, enclosed by a fortified wall, with thirteen defensive towers, some such as the "Torres de la Infanta" and "Cattiva" containing elaborate vertical palaces in miniature. The river Darro passes through a ravine on the north and divides the plateau from the Albaicín district of Granada. Similarly, the Assabica Valley, containing the Alhambra Park, lies on the west and south, and, beyond this valley, the almost parallel ridge of Monte Mauror separates it from the Antequeruela district. Another ravine separates it from the Generalife, the summer pleasure gardens of the emir. Escobar notes that the later planting of deciduous elms obscures the overall perception of the layout, so a better reading of the original landscape is given in winter when the trees are bare.
The Alhambra resembles many medieval Christian strongholds in its threefold arrangement as a castle, a palace and a residential annex for subordinates. The alcazaba or citadel, its oldest part, is built on the isolated and precipitous foreland which terminates the plateau on the northwest. All that remains are its massive outer walls, towers and ramparts. On its watchtower, the 25 m (85 ft) high "Torre de la Vela", the flag of Ferdinand and Isabella was first raised as a symbol of the Spanish conquest of Granada on 2 January 1492. A turret containing a large bell was added in the 18th century and restored after being damaged by lightning in 1881. Beyond the Alcazaba is the palace of the Moorish rulers, The Nasrid Palaces or Alhambra proper, and beyond this is the Alhambra Alta (Upper Alhambra), originally occupied by officials and courtiers.
Access from the city to the Alhambra Park is afforded by the "Puerta de las Granadas" (Gate of Pomegranates), a triumphal arch dating from the 15th century. A steep ascent leads past the Pillar of Charles V, a fountain erected in 1554, to the main entrance of the Alhambra. This is the "Puerta de la Justicia" (Gate of Justice), a massive horseshoe archway surmounted by a square tower and used by the Moors as an informal court of justice. The hand of Fatima, with fingers outstretched as a talisman against the evil eye, is carved above this gate on the exterior; a key, the symbol of authority, occupies the corresponding place on the interior. A narrow passage leads inward to the "Plaza de los Aljibes" (Place of the Cisterns), a broad open space which divides the Alcazaba from the Moorish palace. To the left of the passage rises the "Torre del Vino" (Wine Tower), built in 1345 and used in the 16th century as a cellar. On the right is the palace of Charles V, a smaller Renaissance building, to construct which part of the Alhambra, including the original main entrance, was torn down.
The Royal Complex (Plaza de Nazaríes) consists of three main parts: Mexuar, Serallo, and the Harem. The Mexuar is modest in decor and houses the functional areas for conducting business and administration. Strapwork is used to decorate the surfaces in Mexuar. The ceilings, floors, and trim are made of dark wood and are in sharp contrast to white, plaster walls. Serallo, built during the reign of Yusuf I in the 14th century, contains the Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles). Brightly colored interiors featured "dado" panels, "yesería", "azulejo", cedar, and "artesonado". Artesonado are highly decorative ceilings and other woodwork. Lastly, the Harem is also elaborately decorated and contains the living quarters for the wives and mistresses of the Arab monarchs. This area contains a bathroom with running water (cold and hot), baths, and pressurized water for showering. The bathrooms were open to the elements in order to allow in light and air.
The Court of the Myrtles was built under Muhammad V of Granada, and with 11 "qasā'id" by Ibn Zamrak, 8 of which remain. The present entrance to the "Palacio Árabe" (Arab palace), or "Casa Real", is by a small door from which a corridor connects to the "Patio de los Arrayanes" (Court of the Myrtles), also called the "Patio de la Alberca" (Court of the Blessing or Court of the Pond), from the Arabic "birka", "pool". The birka helped to cool the palace and acted as a symbol of power. Because water was usually in short supply, the technology required to keep these pools full was expensive and difficult. This court is 42 m (140 ft) long by 22 m (74 ft) broad, and in the centre there is a large pond set in the marble pavement, full of goldfish, and with myrtles growing along its sides. There are galleries on the north and south sides; the southern gallery is 7 m (23 ft) high and supported by a marble colonnade. Underneath it, to the right, was the principal entrance, and over it are three windows with arches and miniature pillars. From this court, the walls of the "Torre de Comares" are seen rising over the roof to the north and reflected in the pond.
The "Salón de los Embajadores" (Hall of the Ambassadors) is the largest room in the Alhambra and occupies all the "Torre de Comares". It is a square room, the sides being 12 m (37 ft) in length, while the centre of the dome is 23 m (75 ft) high. This was the grand reception room, and the throne of the sultan was placed opposite the entrance. The grand hall projects from the walls of the palace, providing views in three directions. In this sense, it was a "mirador" from which the palace's inhabitants could gaze outward to the surrounding landscape. The tiles are nearly 4 ft (1.2 m) high all round, and the colours vary at intervals. Over them is a series of oval medallions with inscriptions, interwoven with flowers and leaves. There are nine windows, three on each facade, and the ceiling is decorated with white, blue and gold inlays in the shape of circles, crowns and stars. The walls are covered with varied stucco works, surrounding many ancient escutcheons.
The Court of the Lions ("Patio de los Leones") is an oblong courtyard, 116 ft (35 m) in length by 66 ft (20 m) in width, surrounded by a low gallery supported on 124 white marble columns. A pavilion projects into the court at each extremity, with filigree walls and a light domed roof. The square is paved with coloured tiles and the colonnade with white marble, while the walls are covered 5 ft (1.5 m) up from the ground with blue and yellow tiles, with a border above and below of enamelled blue and gold. The columns supporting the roof and gallery are irregularly placed. They are adorned by varieties of foliage, etc.; about each arch there is a large square of stucco arabesques; and over the pillars is another stucco square of filigree work.
In the centre of the court is the Fountain of the Lions, an alabaster basin supported by the figures of twelve lions in white marble, not designed with sculptural accuracy but as symbols of strength, power, and sovereignty. Each hour one lion would produce water from its mouth. At the edge of the great fountain there is a poem written by Ibn Zamrak. This praises the beauty of the fountain and the power of the lions, but it also describes their ingenious hydraulic systems and how they actually worked, which baffled all those who saw them.
The "Sala de los Abencerrajes" (Hall of the Abencerrages) derives its name from a legend according to which the father of Boabdil, the last sultan of Granada, having invited the chiefs of that line to a banquet, massacred them here. This room is a perfect square, with a lofty dome and trellised windows at its base. The roof is decorated in blue, brown, red and gold, and the columns supporting it spring out into the arch form in a remarkably beautiful manner. Opposite to this hall is the "Sala de las dos Hermanas" (Hall of the two Sisters), so-called from two white marble slabs laid as part of the pavement. These slabs measure 500 by 220 cm (15 by 7½ ft). There is a fountain in the middle of this hall, and the roof – a dome honeycombed with tiny cells, all different, and said to number 5000 – is an example of the "stalactite vaulting" of the Moors.
Of the outlying buildings connected to the Alhambra, the foremost in interest is the Palacio de Generalife or Gineralife (the Muslim "Jennat al Arif", "Garden of Arif," or "Garden of the Architect"). This villa dates from the beginning of the 14th century but has been restored several times. The "Villa de los Martires" (Martyrs' Villa), on the summit of Monte Mauror, commemorates by its name the Christian slaves who were forced to build the Alhambra and confined here in subterranean cells. The "Torres Bermejas" (Vermilion Towers), also on Monte Mauror, are a well-preserved Moorish fortification, with underground cisterns, stables, and accommodation for a garrison of 200 men. Several Roman tombs were discovered in 1829 and 1857 at the base of Monte Mauror.
Among the other features of the Alhambra are the "Sala de la Justicia" (Hall of Justice), the "Patio del Mexuar" (Court of the Council Chamber), the "Patio de Daraxa" (Court of the Vestibule), and the "Peinador de la Reina" (Queen's Robing Room), in which there is similar architecture and decoration. The palace and the Upper Alhambra also contain baths, rows of bedrooms and summer-rooms, a whispering gallery and labyrinth, and vaulted sepulchres.
The original furniture of the palace is represented by one of the famous Alhambra vases, very large Hispano-Moresque ware vases made in the Sultanate to stand in niches around the palace. These famous examples of Hispano-Moresque ware date from the 14th and 15th centuries. The one remaining in the palace, from about 1400, is 1.3 m (4 ft 3 in) high; the background is white and the decoration is blue, white and gold.
The Alhambra features various styles of the Arabic epigraphy that developed under the Nasrid dynasty, and particularly under Yusuf I and Muhammad V. José Miguel Puerta Vílchez compares the walls of the Alhambra to the pages of a manuscript, drawing similarities between the zilīj-covered dados and the geometric manuscript illuminations, and the epigraphical forms in the palace to calligraphic motifs in contemporary Arabic manuscripts.
The texts of the Alhambra include "devout, regal, votive, and Quranic phrases and sentences," formed into arabesques, carved into wood and marble, and glazed onto tiles. Poets of the Narsid court, including Ibn al-Khatīb and Ibn Zamrak, composed poems for the palace. Most of the poetry is inscribed in Nasrid cursive script, while foliate and floral Kufic inscriptions—often formed into arches, columns, enjambments, and "architectural calligrams"—are generally used as decorative elements. Kufic calligrams, particularly of the words "blessing" ( "baraka") and "felicity" ( "yumn"), are used as decorative motifs in arabesque throughout the palace.
Parts of the following works are set in the Alhambra:
The plot of the "Ballet-héroïque" entitled "Zaïde, Reine De Grenade", by the French Baroque composer Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (c. 1705–1755), takes place at the Alhambra. Alhambra has directly inspired musical compositions as Francisco Tárrega's famous tremolo study for guitar "Recuerdos De La Alhambra". Claude Debussy's piece for two pianos composed in 1901, "Lindaraja", and the prelude, "La Puerta Del Vino", from the second book of preludes composed from 1912 to 1913. Isaac Albéniz wrote a piano suite "Recuerdos De viaje", which included a piece called "En La Alhambra", while his suite "Iberia" contained a piece called "El Albacin". Albéniz also composed an uncompleted "Suite Alhambra".
"En Los Jardines Del Generalife", the first movement of Manuel de Falla's "Noches En Los Jardines De España", and other pieces by composers such as Ruperto Chapí ("Los Gnomos De La Alhambra", 1891), Tomás Bretón, and many others are included in a stream referred to by scholars as "Alhambrismo".
In 1976, filmmaker Christopher Nupen filmed "The Song of the Guitar" at the Alhambra which was an hour-long program featuring the legendary Spanish guitarist, Andrés Segovia.
British composer Peter Seabourne wrote an extended piano cycle "Steps Volume 3: Arabesques" (2008-2012) based on shared experiences of the Alhambra with his painter aunt Ann Seabourne, and a movement from his Steps Volume 1 is entitled "El Suspiro del Moro" inspired by the legend of the expulsion of the last Moorish King of Granada. Julian Anderson wrote an orchestral piece, "Alhambra Fantasy".
In pop and folk music, Alhambra is the subject of the Ghymes song of the same name. The rock band Grateful Dead released a song called "Terrapin Station" on the 1977 album of the same name. It consisted of a series of small compositions penned by Robert Hunter and put to music by Jerry Garcia; a lyrical section of this suite was called "Alhambra". In September 2006, Canadian singer/composer Loreena McKennitt performed live at the Alhambra. The resulting video recordings premiered on PBS and were later released as a 3-disc DVD/CD set called "Nights from the Alhambra". The Basque pop group Mocedades performed a song called "Juntos En La Alhambra". "Alhambra" is the title of an EP recording by Canadian rock band, The Tea Party, containing acoustic versions of a few of their songs. Alhambra and Albaicín are mentioned in the Mägo de Oz song named "El Paseo De Los Tristes" from the album entitled "Gaia II". On California rapper Dom Kennedy's 2015 album "By Dom Kennedy", there is a song entitled "Alhambra".
The Alhambra tiles are remarkable in that they contain nearly all, if not all, of the seventeen mathematically possible wallpaper groups. This is a unique accomplishment in world architecture. M. C. Escher's visit in 1922 and study of the Moorish use of symmetries in the Alhambra tiles inspired his subsequent work on tessellation, which he called "regular divisions of the plane".
Marcel L'Herbier's 1921 film "El Dorado" features many scenes shot in and around the Alhambra palace. This was the first time permission had been granted for a feature film company to shoot inside the Alhambra palace and L'Herbier gave prominent place to its gardens, fountains and geometric architectural patterns, which became some of the film's most memorable images.
Animated films by Spanish director Juan Bautista Berasategui such as "Ahmed, El Principe De La Alhambra" and "El Embrujo Del Sur" are based on stories in Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra".
Columbus interview with Queen Isabella in Conquest of Paradise representing Granada after the Reconquest were filmed at Alhambra. As well as the Palace Scenes of Kingdom of Heaven representing Jerusalem during the Crusades. Both films were made by Ridley Scott.
The Court of the Lions was depicted in "Assassin's Creed" (2016) when Sultan Muhammad XII surrenders the 'Apple of Eden', a powerful artifact in the center of the movie plot, in exchange for his son's safe return. Both the Court of the Lions and Granada's Albaicin are featured on The animated film .
The fictional Broadway theatre (the interior actually Auckland, New Zealand's Civic Theatre), in which Kong is displayed as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' in 2005's "King Kong", is named "The Alhambra".
2018 South Korean television series Memories of the Alhambra is based in Granada, Spain. The CEO of an investment company that specializes in optical devices, travels to Granada, Spain to meet the creator of the game. He gets entangled in a mysterious incident, and the border between the real world and the AR world begins to blur.
There is a main belt asteroid named Alhambra.
The Alhambra inspired: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30543 |
The Wizard of Id
The Wizard of Id is a daily newspaper comic strip created by American cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart. Beginning November 16, 1964, the strip follows the antics of a large cast of characters in a shabby medieval kingdom called "Id". The title is a play on "The Wizard of Oz", combined with the Freudian psychological term Id, which represents the instinctive and primal part of the human psyche.
In 1997, Brant Parker passed his illustrator's duties on to his son, Jeff Parker, who had already been involved with creating "Id" for a decade. In 2002, the strip appeared in some 1,000 newspapers all over the world, syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni took over writing duties on the strip after Hart's death in 2007. The new byline, "B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart," appeared for the first time in another of their strips on January 3, 2010. On December 14, 2015, Jeff Parker also passed his duties on to Mastroianni.
In the early 1960s, Johnny Hart, having already created the successful "B.C.", began collaborating with his friend, then-unpublished cartoonist Brant Parker, on a new comic strip. (Parker would later create or co-create the strips "Goosemyer", "Crock" and "Out of Bounds".) Having already drawn cartoons about the Stone Age, Hart advanced through time to the Middle Ages, taking the idea from a deck of playing cards. "The Wizard of Id" was first syndicated on November 16, 1964, drawn by Parker and co-written by Parker and Hart.
On November 17, 2014, the strip formally celebrated its 50th anniversary, and a number of other strips, including "Beetle Bailey", "BC", "Ballard Street", "Dennis the Menace", "Garfield", "Mother Goose and Grimm", "Pickles", "Mutts", "Pooch Café", "The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee", and "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" ran special 50th anniversary commemorative strips (e.g., Beetle called Sarge "a fink," and ended up sharing a dungeon cell with Spookingdorf). "Hi and Lois" ran an otherwise-ordinary strip with a portrait of the Wizard in the last panel, while "Speed Bump" ran a cartoon of Harry Potter in a Wizard of Id T-shirt, "Family Circus" put a greeting on a book (being held upside down), and "Blondie" showed a greeting written on a cake in the first panel.
"The Wizard of Id" deals with the goings-on of the rundown and oppressed mythical kingdom of Id. It follows people from all corners of the kingdom, but concentrates on the court of a tyrannical, dwarfish monarch known only as "the King". The strip's humor occasionally satirizes modern American culture, and deliberate anachronisms are rampant. Technology changes to suit whatever a gag requires; a battle with spears and arrows might be followed by a peasant using an ATM.
In some strips the king is elected to his monarchial position (albeit through rigged ballots). The aspects that stay the same, however, are that Id is in the middle of nowhere, home to a large castle surrounded by a moat. The king and his subjects run an inept army perpetually at war with "the Huns", while the unhappy, overtaxed peasants (or "Idiots") make little money as farmers and stablehands to keep modest lifestyles.
"The Wizard of Id" follows a gag-a-day format, plus a color Sunday page. There are running gags relating to the main cast, to a variety of secondary, continuing characters, and to the kingdom itself. Occasionally it will run an extended sequence on a given theme over a week or two.
According to Don Markstein's "Toonopedia" "The strip's humor style—quite contemporary, in contrast to its medieval setting—ranges from broad and low to pure black".
The style in which certain characters are drawn has changed from the early years of the strip to today. For example, the old style of the King's head was more rectangular, he had a crown with identifiable card suits on it (club, diamond, heart), his mustache and beard always hid his mouth, and his beard frequently extended to a curved point when the King was shown in profile (see "The Wondrous Wizard of Id", 1970, Fawcett Publications). In the new style, the King's head is more trapezoidal with a slightly smaller and undecorated crown, he has a huge nose (even bigger than Rodney's) which covers his mouth and chin, and when he opens his mouth it appears that his beard has been shaved off.
On December 14, 2015, Mason Mastroianni took over the strip from Jeff Parker.
In addition to the main cast, several recurring jokes have run throughout the life of the comic strip for which certain characters come back from time to time.
In 1969, Jim Henson and Don Sahlin produced a test pilot for "The Wizard of Id". By the time interest was expressed in the concept Henson was deeply involved in other projects and decided to not pursue it any further.
The comic was also adapted into a cartoon short in 1970, produced by Chuck Jones, directed by Abe Levitow and with voices from Paul Winchell and Don Messick.
"The Wizard of Id" was named best humor strip by the National Cartoonists Society in 1971, 1976, 1980, 1982 and 1983. In 1984, Parker received a Reuben Award for his work on the strip. Dozens of paperback collections have been published since 1965, and some of the older titles were still in print as of 2010. In 2009, Titan Books began re-publishing the strips and is printing the complete daily and Sunday strips starting with 1971, publishing one annual collection per year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30546 |
Trans-Neptunian object
A trans-Neptunian object (TNO), also written transneptunian object, is any minor planet or dwarf planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune, which has a semi-major axis of 30.1 astronomical units (AU).
Typically, TNOs are further divided into the classical and resonant objects of the Kuiper belt, the scattered disc and detached objects with the sednoids being the most distant ones. As of October 2018, the catalog of minor planets contains 528 numbered and more than 2,000 unnumbered TNOs.
The first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. It took until 1992 to discover a second trans-Neptunian object orbiting the Sun directly, 15760 Albion. The most massive TNO known is Eris, followed by Pluto, , , and . More than 80 satellites have been discovered in orbit of trans-Neptunian objects. TNOs vary in color and are either grey-blue (BB) or very red (RR). They are thought to be composed of mixtures of rock, amorphous carbon and volatile ices such as water and methane, coated with tholins and other organic compounds.
Twelve minor planets with a semi-major axis greater than 150 AU and perihelion greater than 30 AU are known, which are called extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs).
The orbit of each of the planets is slightly affected by the gravitational influences of the other planets. Discrepancies in the early 1900s between the observed and expected orbits of Uranus and Neptune suggested that there were one or more additional planets beyond Neptune. The search for these led to the discovery of Pluto in February 1930, which was too small to explain the discrepancies. Revised estimates of Neptune's mass from the "Voyager 2" flyby in 1989 showed that the problem was spurious. Pluto was easiest to find because it has the highest apparent magnitude of all known trans-Neptunian objects. It also has a lower inclination to the ecliptic than most other large TNOs.
After Pluto's discovery, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh continued searching for some years for similar objects, but found none. For a long time, no one searched for other TNOs as it was generally believed that Pluto, which up to August 2006 was classified a planet, was the only major object beyond Neptune. Only after the 1992 discovery of a second TNO, 15760 Albion, did systematic searches for further such objects begin. A broad strip of the sky around the ecliptic was photographed and digitally evaluated for slowly moving objects. Hundreds of TNOs were found, with diameters in the range of 50 to 2,500 kilometers. Eris, the most massive TNO, was discovered in 2005, revisiting a long-running dispute within the scientific community over the classification of large TNOs, and whether objects like Pluto can be considered planets. Pluto and Eris were eventually classified as dwarf planets by the International Astronomical Union. In December 2018, the discovery of , nicknamed "Farout", was announced. Farout is the most distant solar system object so-far observed and is about 120 AU away from the sun, likely taking more than 1,000 years to complete one orbit.
According to their distance from the Sun and their orbital parameters, TNOs are classified in two large groups: the Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) and the scattered disc objects (SDOs). The diagram to the right illustrates the distribution of known trans-Neptunian objects (up to 70 AU) in relation to the orbits of the planets and the centaurs for reference. Different classes are represented in different colours. Resonant objects (including Neptune trojans) are plotted in red, classical Kuiper belt objects in blue. The scattered disc extends to the right, far beyond the diagram, with known objects at mean distances beyond 500 AU (Sedna) and aphelia beyond 1,000 AU ().
The Edgeworth-Kuiper belt contains objects with an average distance to the Sun of 30 to about 55 AU, usually having close-to-circular orbits with a small inclination from the ecliptic. Edgeworth-Kuiper belt objects are further classified into the resonant trans-Neptunian object, that are locked in an orbital resonance with Neptune, and the classical Kuiper belt objects, also called "cubewanos", that have no such resonance, moving on almost circular orbits, unperturbed by Neptune. There are a large number of resonant subgroups, the largest being the twotinos (1:2 resonance) and the plutinos (2:3 resonance), named after their most prominent member, Pluto. Members of the classical Edgeworth-Kuiper belt include 15760 Albion, 50000 Quaoar and Makemake.
The scattered disc contains objects farther from the Sun, with very eccentric and inclined orbits. These orbits are non-resonant and non-planetary-orbit-crossing. A typical example is the most-massive-known TNO, Eris. Based on the Tisserand parameter relative to Neptune (TN), the objects in the scattered disc can be further divided into the "typical" scattered disc objects (SDOs, Scattered-near) with a TN of less than 3, and into the detached objects (ESDOs, Scattered-extended) with a TN greater than 3. In addition, detached objects have a time-averaged eccentricity greater than 0.2 The Sednoids are a further extreme sub-grouping of the detached objects with perihelia so distant that it is confirmed that their orbits cannot be explained by perturbations from the giant planets, nor by interaction with the galactic tides.
Given the apparent magnitude (>20) of all but the biggest trans-Neptunian objects, the physical studies are limited to the following:
Studying colours and spectra provides insight into the objects' origin and a potential correlation with other classes of objects, namely centaurs and some satellites of giant planets (Triton, Phoebe), suspected to originate in the Kuiper belt. However, the interpretations are typically ambiguous as the spectra can fit more than one model of the surface composition and depend on the unknown particle size. More significantly, the optical surfaces of small bodies are subject to modification by intense radiation, solar wind and micrometeorites. Consequently, the thin optical surface layer could be quite different from the regolith underneath, and not representative of the bulk composition of the body.
Small TNOs are thought to be low-density mixtures of rock and ice with some organic (carbon-containing) surface material such as tholin, detected in their spectra. On the other hand, the high density of , 2.6–3.3 g/cm3, suggests a very high non-ice content (compare with Pluto's density: 1.86 g/cm3). The composition of some small TNOs could be similar to that of comets. Indeed, some centaurs undergo seasonal changes when they approach the Sun, making the boundary blurred "(see 2060 Chiron and 7968 Elst–Pizarro)". However, population comparisons between centaurs and TNOs are still controversial.
Colour indices are simple measures of the differences in the apparent magnitude of an object seen through blue (B), visible (V), i.e. green-yellow, and red (R) filters. The diagram illustrates known colour indices for all but the biggest objects (in slightly enhanced colour).
For reference, two moons: Triton and Phoebe, the centaur Pholus and the planet Mars are plotted "(yellow labels, size not to scale)". Correlations between the colours and the orbital characteristics have been studied, to confirm theories of different origin of the different dynamic classes:
While the relatively dimmer bodies, as well as the population as the whole, are reddish (V−I = 0.3–0.6), the bigger objects are often more neutral in colour (infrared index V−I < 0.2). This distinction leads to suggestion that the surface of the largest bodies is covered with ices, hiding the redder, darker areas underneath.
Among TNOs, as among centaurs, there is a wide range of colors from blue-grey (neutral) to very red, but unlike the centaurs, clearly regrouped into two classes, the distribution appears to be uniform. The wide range of spectra differ in reflectivity in visible red and near infrared. Neutral objects present a flat spectrum, reflecting as much red and infrared as visible spectrum. Very red objects present a steep slope, reflecting much more in red and infrared.
A recent attempt at classification (common with centaurs) uses the total of four classes from BB (blue, average B−V 0.70, V−R 0.39, e.g. Orcus) to RR (very red, B−V 1.08, V−R 0.71, e.g. Sedna) with BR and IR as intermediate classes. BR and IR differ mostly in the infrared bands I, J and H.
Typical models of the surface include water ice, amorphous carbon, silicates and organic macromolecules, named tholins, created by intense radiation. Four major tholins are used to fit the reddening slope:
As an illustration of the two extreme classes BB and RR, the following compositions have been suggested
Characteristically, big (bright) objects are typically on inclined orbits, whereas the invariable plane regroups mostly small and dim objects.
It is difficult to estimate the diameter of TNOs. For very large objects, with very well known orbital elements (like Pluto), diameters can be precisely measured by occultation of stars. For other large TNOs, diameters can be estimated by thermal measurements. The intensity of light illuminating the object is known (from its distance to the Sun), and one assumes that most of its surface is in thermal equilibrium (usually not a bad assumption for an airless body). For a known albedo, it is possible to estimate the surface temperature, and correspondingly the intensity of heat radiation. Further, if the size of the object is known, it is possible to predict both the amount of visible light and emitted heat radiation reaching Earth. A simplifying factor is that the Sun emits almost all of its energy in visible light and at nearby frequencies, while at the cold temperatures of TNOs, the heat radiation is emitted at completely different wavelengths (the far infrared).
Thus there are two unknowns (albedo and size), which can be determined by two independent measurements (of the amount of reflected light and emitted infrared heat radiation). Unfortunately, TNOs are so far from the Sun that they are very cold, hence producing black-body radiation around 60 micrometres in wavelength. This wavelength of light is impossible to observe on the Earth's surface, but only from space using, e.g. the Spitzer Space Telescope. For ground-based observations, astronomers observe the tail of the black-body radiation in the far infrared. This far infrared radiation is so dim that the thermal method is only applicable to the largest KBOs. For the majority of (small) objects, the diameter is estimated by assuming an albedo. However, the albedos found range from 0.50 down to 0.05, resulting in a size range of 1200–3700 km for an object of magnitude of 1.0.
The only mission to date that primarily targeted a trans-Neptunian object was NASA's New Horizons, which was launched in January 2006 and flew by the Pluto system in July 2015 and 486958 Arrokoth in January 2019.
In 2011, a design study explored a spacecraft survey of Quaoar, Sedna, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris.
In 2019 one mission to TNOs included designs for orbital capture and multi-target scenarios.
Some TNOs that were studied in a design study paper were , , and Lempo.
The existence of planets beyond Neptune, ranging from less than an Earth mass (Sub-Earth) up to a brown dwarf has been often postulated for different theoretical reasons to explain several observed or speculated features of the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. It was recently proposed to use ranging data from the "New Horizons" spacecraft to constrain the position of such a hypothesized body.
NASA has been working towards a dedicated Interstellar Precursor in the 21st century, one intentionally designed to reach the interstellar medium, and as part of this the flyby of objects like Sedna are also considered. Overall this type of spacecraft studies have proposed a launch in the 2020s, and would try to go a little faster than the Voyagers using existing technology. One 2018 design study for an Interstellar Precursor, included a visitation of minor planet 50000 Quaoar, in the 2030s.
Among the extreme trans-Neptunian objects are three high-perihelion objects classified as sednoids: 90377 Sedna, , and 541132 Leleākūhonua. They are distant detached objects with perihelia greater than 70 AU. Their high perihelia keep them at a sufficient distance to avoid significant gravitational perturbations from Neptune. Previous explanations for the high perihelion of Sedna include a close encounter with an unknown planet on a distant orbit and a distant encounter with a random star or a member of the Sun's birth cluster that passed near the Solar System. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30549 |
Taxation in the United States
The United States of America has separate federal, state, and local governments with taxes imposed at each of these levels. Taxes are levied on income, payroll, property, sales, capital gains, dividends, imports, estates and gifts, as well as various fees. In 2010, taxes collected by federal, state, and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP. In the OECD, only Chile and Mexico are taxed less as a share of their GDP.
Taxes fall much more heavily on labor income than on capital income. Divergent taxes and subsidies for different forms of income and spending can also constitute a form of indirect taxation of some activities over others. For example, individual spending on higher education can be said to be "taxed" at a high rate, compared to other forms of personal expenditure which are formally recognized as investments.
Taxes are imposed on net income of individuals and corporations by the federal, most state, and some local governments. Citizens and residents are taxed on worldwide income and allowed a credit for foreign taxes. Income subject to tax is determined under tax accounting rules, not financial accounting principles, and includes almost all income from whatever source. Most business expenses reduce taxable income, though limits apply to a few expenses. Individuals are permitted to reduce taxable income by personal allowances and certain non-business expenses, including home mortgage interest, state and local taxes, charitable contributions, and medical and certain other expenses incurred above certain percentages of income. State rules for determining taxable income often differ from federal rules. Federal marginal tax rates vary from 10% to 37% of taxable income. State and local tax rates vary widely by jurisdiction, from 0% to 13.30% of income, and many are graduated. State taxes are generally treated as a deductible expense for federal tax computation, although the 2017 tax law imposed a $10,000 limit on the state and local tax ("SALT") deduction, which raised the effective tax rate on medium and high earners in high tax states. Prior to the SALT deduction limit, the average deduction exceeded $10,000 in most of the Midwest, and exceeded $11,000 in most of the Northeastern United States, as well as California and Oregon. The states impacted the most by the limit were the tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT) and California; the average SALT deduction in those states was greater than $17,000 in 2014.
The United States is one of two countries in the world that taxes its non-resident citizens on worldwide income, in the same manner and rates as residents; the other is Eritrea. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of imposition of such a tax in the case of "Cook v. Tait".
Payroll taxes are imposed by the federal and all state governments. These include Social Security and Medicare taxes imposed on both employers and employees, at a combined rate of 15.3% (13.3% for 2011 and 2012). Social Security tax applies only to the first $132,900 of wages in 2019. There is an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% on wages above $200,000. Employers must withhold income taxes on wages. An unemployment tax and certain other levies apply to employers. Payroll taxes have dramatically increased as a share of federal revenue since the 1950s, while corporate income taxes have fallen as a share of revenue. (Corporate profits have not fallen as a share of GDP).
Property taxes are imposed by most local governments and many special purpose authorities based on the fair market value of property. School and other authorities are often separately governed, and impose separate taxes. Property tax is generally imposed only on realty, though some jurisdictions tax some forms of business property. Property tax rules and rates vary widely with annual median rates ranging from 0.2% to 1.9% of a property's value depending on the state.
Sales taxes are imposed by most states and some localities on the price at retail sale of many goods and some services. Sales tax rates vary widely among jurisdictions, from 0% to 16%, and may vary within a jurisdiction based on the particular goods or services taxed. Sales tax is collected by the seller at the time of sale, or remitted as use tax by buyers of taxable items who did not pay sales tax.
The United States imposes tariffs or customs duties on the import of many types of goods from many jurisdictions. These tariffs or duties must be paid before the goods can be legally imported. Rates of duty vary from 0% to more than 20%, based on the particular goods and country of origin.
Estate and gift taxes are imposed by the federal and some state governments on the transfer of property inheritance, by will, or by lifetime donation. Similar to federal income taxes, federal estate and gift taxes are imposed on worldwide property of citizens and residents and allow a credit for foreign taxes.
The U.S. has an assortment of federal, state, local, and special-purpose governmental jurisdictions. Each imposes taxes to fully or partly fund its operations. These taxes may be imposed on the same income, property or activity, often without offset of one tax against another. The types of tax imposed at each level of government vary, in part due to constitutional restrictions. Income taxes are imposed at the federal and most state levels. Taxes on property are typically imposed only at the local level, although there may be multiple local jurisdictions that tax the same property. Other excise taxes are imposed by the federal and some state governments. Sales taxes are imposed by most states and many local governments. Customs duties or tariffs are only imposed by the federal government. A wide variety of user fees or license fees are also imposed.
A federal wealth tax would be required by the U.S. Constitution to be distributed to the States according to their populations, as this type of tax is considered a direct tax. State and local government property taxes are wealth taxes on real estate.
Taxes may be imposed on individuals (natural persons), business entities, estates, trusts, or other forms of organization. Taxes may be based on property, income, transactions, transfers, importations of goods, business activities, or a variety of factors, and are generally imposed on the type of taxpayer for whom such tax base is relevant. Thus, property taxes tend to be imposed on property owners. In addition, certain taxes, particularly income taxes, may be imposed on the members of organizations for the organization's activities. Therefore, partners are taxed on the income of their partnership.
With a few exceptions, one level of government does not impose tax on another level of government or its instrumentalities.
Taxes based on income are imposed at the federal, most state, and some local levels within the United States. The tax systems within each jurisdiction may define taxable income separately. Many states refer to some extent to federal concepts for determining taxable income.
The first Income tax in the United States was implemented with the Revenue Act of 1861 by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. federal income tax on interest income, dividend income and rental income was unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., because it was a direct tax. The "Pollock" decision was overruled by the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913, and by subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions including "Graves v. New York ex rel. O'Keefe," "South Carolina v. Baker," and "Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co."
The U.S. income tax system imposes a tax based on income on individuals, corporations, estates, and trusts. The tax is taxable income, as defined, times a specified tax rate. This tax may be reduced by credits, some of which may be refunded if they exceed the tax calculated. Taxable income may differ from income for other purposes (such as for financial reporting). The definition of taxable income for federal purposes is used by many, but far from all states. Income and deductions are recognized under tax rules, and there are variations within the rules among the states. Book and tax income may differ. Income is divided into "capital gains", which are taxed at a lower rate and only when the taxpayer chooses to "realize" them, and "ordinary income", which is taxed at higher rates and on an annual basis. Because of this distinction, capital is taxed much more lightly than labor.
Under the U.S. system, individuals, corporations, estates, and trusts are subject to income tax. Partnerships are not taxed; rather, their partners are subject to income tax on their shares of income and deductions, and take their shares of credits. Some types of business entities may elect to be treated as corporations or as partnerships.
Taxpayers are required to file tax returns and self assess tax. Tax may be withheld from payments of income ("e.g.", withholding of tax from wages). To the extent taxes are not covered by withholdings, taxpayers must make estimated tax payments, generally quarterly. Tax returns are subject to review and adjustment by taxing authorities, though far fewer than all returns are reviewed.
Taxable income is gross income less exemptions, deductions, and personal exemptions. Gross income includes "all income from whatever source". Certain income, however, is subject to tax exemption at the federal or state levels. This income is reduced by tax deductions including most business and some nonbusiness expenses. Individuals are also allowed a deduction for personal exemptions, a fixed dollar allowance. The allowance of some nonbusiness deductions is phased out at higher income levels.
The U.S. federal and most state income tax systems tax the worldwide income of citizens and residents. A federal foreign tax credit is granted for foreign income taxes. Individuals residing abroad may also claim the foreign earned income exclusion. Individuals may be a citizen or resident of the United States but not a resident of a state. Many states grant a similar credit for taxes paid to other states. These credits are generally limited to the amount of tax on income from foreign (or other state) sources.
Federal and state income tax is calculated, and returns filed, for each taxpayer. Two married individuals may calculate tax and file returns jointly or separately. In addition, unmarried individuals supporting children or certain other relatives may file a return as a head of household. Parent-subsidiary groups of companies may elect to file a consolidated return.
Income tax rates differ at the federal and state levels for corporations and individuals. Federal and many state income tax rates are higher (graduated) at higher levels of income. The income level at which various tax rates apply for individuals varies by filing status. The income level at which each rate starts generally is higher ("i.e.", tax is lower) for married couples filing a joint return or single individuals filing as head of household.
Individuals are subject to federal graduated tax rates from 10% to 39.6%. Corporations are subject to federal graduated rates of tax from 15% to 35%; a rate of 34% applies to income from $335,000 to $15,000,000. State income tax rates, in states which have a tax on personal incomes, vary from 1% to 16%, including local income tax where applicable. Nine (9) states do not have a tax on ordinary personal incomes. These include Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Two states with a tax only on interest and dividend income of individuals, are New Hampshire and Tennessee. State and local taxes are generally deductible in computing federal taxable income. Federal and many state individual income tax rate schedules differ based on the individual's filing status.
Taxable income is gross income less adjustments and allowable tax deductions. Gross income for federal and most states is receipts and gains from all sources less cost of goods sold. Gross income includes "all income from whatever source", and is not limited to cash received. Income from illegal activities is taxable and must be reported to the IRS.
The amount of income recognized is generally the value received or which the taxpayer has a right to receive. Certain types of income are specifically excluded from gross income. The time at which gross income becomes taxable is determined under federal tax rules. This may differ in some cases from accounting rules.
Certain types of income are excluded from gross income (and therefore subject to tax exemption). The exclusions differ at federal and state levels. For federal income tax, interest income on state and local bonds is exempt, while few states exempt any interest income except from municipalities within that state. In addition, certain types of receipts, such as gifts and inheritances, and certain types of benefits, such as employer-provided health insurance, are excluded from income.
Foreign non-resident persons are taxed only on income from U.S. sources or from a U.S. business. Tax on foreign non-resident persons on non-business income is at 30% of the gross income, but reduced under many tax treaties.
These brackets are the taxable income plus the standard deduction for a joint return. That deduction is the first bracket. For example, a couple earning $88,600 by September owes $10,453; $1,865 for 10% of the income from $12,700 to $31,500, plus $8,588 for 15% of the income from $31,500 to $88,600. Now, for every $100 they earn, $25 is taxed until they reach the next bracket.
After making $400 more; going down to the 89,000 row the tax is $100 more. The next column is the tax divided by 89,000. The new law is the next column. This tax equals 10% of their income from $24,000 to $43,050 plus 12% from $43,050 to $89,000. The singles' sets of markers can be set up quickly. The brackets with its tax are cut in half.
Itemizers can figure the tax without moving the scale by taking the difference off the top. The couple above, having receipts for $22,700 in deductions, means that the last $10,000 of their income is tax free. After seven years the papers can be destroyed; if unchallenged.
Source and Method
The U.S. system allows reduction of taxable income for both business and some nonbusiness expenditures, called deductions. Businesses selling goods reduce gross income directly by the cost of goods sold. In addition, businesses may deduct most types of expenses incurred in the business. Some of these deductions are subject to limitations. For example, only 50% of the amount incurred for any meals or entertainment may be deducted. The amount and timing of deductions for business expenses is determined under the taxpayer's tax accounting method, which may differ from methods used in accounting records.
Some types of business expenses are deductible over a period of years rather than when incurred. These include the cost of long lived assets such as buildings and equipment. The cost of such assets is recovered through deductions for depreciation or amortization.
In addition to business expenses, individuals may reduce income by an allowance for personal exemptions and either a fixed standard deduction or itemized deductions. One personal exemption is allowed per taxpayer, and additional such deductions are allowed for each child or certain other individuals supported by the taxpayer. The standard deduction amount varies by taxpayer filing status. Itemized deductions by individuals include home mortgage interest, property taxes, certain other taxes, contributions to recognized charities, medical expenses in excess of 7.5% of adjusted gross income, and certain other amounts.
Personal exemptions, the standard deduction, and itemized deductions are limited (phased out) above certain income levels.
Corporations must pay tax on their taxable income independently of their shareholders. Shareholders are also subject to tax on dividends received from corporations. By contrast, partnerships are not subject to income tax, but their partners calculate their taxes by including their shares of partnership items. Corporations owned entirely by U.S. citizens or residents (S corporations) may elect to be treated similarly to partnerships. A limited liability company and certain other business entities may elect to be treated as corporations or as partnerships. States generally follow such characterization. Many states also allow corporations to elect S corporation status. Charitable organizations are subject to tax on business income.
Certain transactions of business entities are not subject to tax. These include many types of formation or reorganization.
A wide variety of tax credits may reduce income tax at the federal and state levels. Some credits are available only to individuals, such as the child tax credit for each dependent child, American Opportunity Tax Credit for education expenses, or the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income wage earners. Some credits, such as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, are available to businesses, including various special industry incentives. A few credits, such as the foreign tax credit, are available to all types of taxpayers.
The United States federal and state income tax systems are self-assessment systems. Taxpayers must declare and pay tax without assessment by the taxing authority. Quarterly payments of tax estimated to be due are required to the extent taxes are not paid through withholdings. Employers must withhold income tax, as well as Social Security and Medicare taxes, from wages. Amounts to be withheld are computed by employers based on representations of tax status by employees on Form W-4, with limited government review.
Forty-three states and many localities in the U.S. impose an income tax on individuals. Forty-seven states and many localities impose a tax on the income of corporations. Tax rates vary by state and locality, and may be fixed or graduated. Most rates are the same for all types of income. State and local income taxes are imposed in addition to federal income tax. State income tax is allowed as a deduction in computing federal income, but is capped at $10,000 per household since the passage of the 2017 tax law. Prior to the change, the average deduction exceeded $10,000 in most of the Midwest, most of the Northeast, as well as California and Oregon.
State and local taxable income is determined under state law, and often is based on federal taxable income. Most states conform to many federal concepts and definitions, including defining income and business deductions and timing thereof. State rules vary widely regarding to individual itemized deductions. Most states do not allow a deduction for state income taxes for individuals or corporations, and impose tax on certain types of income exempt at the federal level.
Some states have alternative measures of taxable income, or alternative taxes, especially for corporations.
States imposing an income tax generally tax all income of corporations organized in the state and individuals residing in the state. Taxpayers from another state are subject to tax only on income earned in the state or apportioned to the state. Businesses are subject to income tax in a state only if they have sufficient nexus in (connection to) the state.
Foreign individuals and corporations not resident in the United States are subject to federal income tax only on income from a U.S. business and certain types of income from U.S. sources. States tax individuals resident outside the state and corporations organized outside the state only on wages or business income within the state. Payers of some types of income to non-residents must withhold federal or state income tax on the payment. Federal withholding of 30% on such income may be reduced under a tax treaty. Such treaties do not apply to state taxes.
An alternative minimum tax (AMT) is imposed at the federal level on a somewhat modified version of taxable income. The tax applies to individuals and corporations. The tax base is adjusted gross income reduced by a fixed deduction that varies by taxpayer filing status. Itemized deductions of individuals are limited to home mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and a portion of medical expenses. AMT is imposed at a rate of 26% or 28% for individuals and 20% for corporations, less the amount of regular tax. A credit against future regular income tax is allowed for such excess, with certain restrictions.
Many states impose minimum income taxes on corporations or a tax computed on an alternative tax base. These include taxes based on capital of corporations and alternative measures of income for individuals. Details vary widely by state.
In the United States, taxable income is computed under rules that differ materially from U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. Since only publicly traded companies are required to prepare financial statements, many non-public companies opt to keep their financial records under tax rules. Corporations that present financial statements using other than tax rules must include a detailed reconciliation of their financial statement income to their taxable income as part of their tax returns. Key areas of difference include depreciation and amortization, timing of recognition of income or deductions, assumptions for cost of goods sold, and certain items (such as meals and entertainment) the tax deduction for which is limited.
Income taxes in the United States are self-assessed by taxpayers by filing required tax returns. Taxpayers, as well as certain non-tax-paying entities, like partnerships, must file annual tax returns at the federal and applicable state levels. These returns disclose a complete computation of taxable income under tax principles. Taxpayers compute all income, deductions, and credits themselves, and determine the amount of tax due after applying required prepayments and taxes withheld. Federal and state tax authorities provide preprinted forms that must be used to file tax returns. IRS Form 1040 series is required for individuals, Form 1120 series for corporations, Form 1065 for partnerships, and Form 990 series for tax exempt organizations.
The state forms vary widely, and rarely correspond to federal forms. Tax returns vary from the two-page (Form 1040EZ) used by nearly 70% of individual filers to thousands of pages of forms and attachments for large entities. Groups of corporations may elect to file consolidated returns at the federal level and with a few states. Electronic filing of federal and many state returns is widely encouraged and in some cases required, and many vendors offer computer software for use by taxpayers and paid return preparers to prepare and electronically file returns.
Individuals and corporations pay U.S. federal income tax on the net total of all their capital gains. The tax rate depends on both the investor's tax bracket and the amount of time the investment was held. Short-term capital gains are taxed at the investor's ordinary income tax rate and are defined as investments held for a year or less before being sold. Long-term capital gains, on dispositions of assets held for more than one year, are taxed at a lower rate.
In the United States, payroll taxes are assessed by the federal government, many states, the District of Columbia, and numerous cities. These taxes are imposed on employers and employees and on various compensation bases. They are collected and paid to the taxing jurisdiction by the employers. Most jurisdictions imposing payroll taxes require reporting quarterly and annually in most cases, and electronic reporting is generally required for all but small employers. Because payroll taxes are imposed only on wages and not on income from investments, taxes on labor income are much heavier than taxes on income from capital.
Federal, state, and local withholding taxes are required in those jurisdictions imposing an income tax. Employers having contact with the jurisdiction must withhold the tax from wages paid to their employees in those jurisdictions. Computation of the amount of tax to withhold is performed by the employer based on representations by the employee regarding his/her tax status on IRS Form W-4. Amounts of income tax so withheld must be paid to the taxing jurisdiction, and are available as refundable tax credits to the employees. Income taxes withheld from payroll are not final taxes, merely prepayments. Employees must still file income tax returns and self assess tax, claiming amounts withheld as payments.
Federal social insurance taxes are imposed equally on employers and employees, consisting of a tax of 6.2% of wages up to an annual wage maximum ($132,900 in 2019) for Social Security plus a tax of 1.45% of total wages for Medicare. For 2011, the employee's contribution was reduced to 4.2%, while the employer's portion remained at 6.2%. There is an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% on wages over $200,000, to be paid only by the employee (reported separately on the employee's tax return on Form 8959). To the extent an employee's portion of the 6.2% tax exceeds the maximum by reason of multiple employers (each of whom will collect up to the annual wage maximum), the employee is entitled to a refundable tax credit upon filing an income tax return for the year.
Employers are subject to unemployment taxes by the federal and all state governments. The tax is a percentage of taxable wages with a cap. The tax rate and cap vary by jurisdiction and by employer's industry and experience rating. For 2009, the typical maximum tax per employee was under $1,000. Some states also impose unemployment, disability insurance, or similar taxes on employees.
Employers must report payroll taxes to the appropriate taxing jurisdiction in the manner each jurisdiction provides. Quarterly reporting of aggregate income tax withholding and Social Security taxes is required in most jurisdictions. Employers must file reports of aggregate unemployment tax quarterly and annually with each applicable state, and annually at the federal level.
Each employer is required to provide each employee an annual report on IRS Form W-2 of wages paid and federal, state and local taxes withheld, with a copy sent to the IRS and the taxation authority of the state. These are due by January 31 and February 28 (March 31 if filed electronically), respectively, following the calendar year in which wages are paid. The Form W-2 constitutes proof of payment of tax for the employee.
Employers are required to pay payroll taxes to the taxing jurisdiction under varying rules, in many cases within 1 banking day. Payment of federal and many state payroll taxes is required to be made by electronic funds transfer if certain dollar thresholds are met, or by deposit with a bank for the benefit of the taxing jurisdiction.
Failure to timely and properly pay federal payroll taxes results in an automatic penalty of 2% to 10%. Similar state and local penalties apply. Failure to properly file monthly or quarterly returns may result in additional penalties. Failure to file Forms W-2 results in an automatic penalty of up to $50 per form not timely filed. State and local penalties vary by jurisdiction.
A particularly severe penalty applies where federal income tax withholding and Social Security taxes are not paid to the IRS. The penalty of up to 100% of the amount not paid can be assessed against the employer entity as well as any person (such as a corporate officer) having control or custody of the funds from which payment should have been made.
There is no federal sales or use tax in the United States. All but five states impose sales and use taxes on retail sale, lease and rental of many goods, as well as some services. Many cities, counties, transit authorities and special purpose districts impose an additional local sales or use tax. Sales and use tax is calculated as the purchase price times the appropriate tax rate. Tax rates vary widely by jurisdiction from less than 1% to over 10%. Sales tax is collected by the seller at the time of sale. Use tax is self assessed by a buyer who has not paid sales tax on a taxable purchase.
Unlike value added tax, sales tax is imposed only once, at the retail level, on any particular goods. Nearly all jurisdictions provide numerous categories of goods and services that are exempt from sales tax, or taxed at a reduced rate. Purchase of goods for further manufacture or for resale is uniformly exempt from sales tax. Most jurisdictions exempt food sold in grocery stores, prescription medications, and many agricultural supplies. Generally cash discounts, including coupons, are not included in the price used in computing tax.
Sales taxes, including those imposed by local governments, are generally administered at the state level. States imposing sales tax require retail sellers to register with the state, collect tax from customers, file returns, and remit the tax to the state. Procedural rules vary widely. Sellers generally must collect tax from in-state purchasers unless the purchaser provides an exemption certificate. Most states allow or require electronic remittance of tax to the state. States are prohibited from requiring out of state sellers to collect tax unless the seller has some minimal connection with the state.
Excise taxes may be imposed on the sales price of goods or on a per unit or other basis, in theory to discourage consumption of the taxed goods or services. Excise tax may be required to be paid by the manufacturer at wholesale sale, or may be collected from the customer at retail sale. Excise taxes are imposed at the federal and state levels on a variety of goods, including alcohol, tobacco, tires, gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, firearms, telephone service, air transportation, unregistered bonds, and many other goods and services. Some jurisdictions require that tax stamps be affixed to goods to demonstrate payment of the tax.
Most jurisdictions below the state level in the United States impose a tax on interests in real property (land, buildings, and permanent improvements). Some jurisdictions also tax some types of business personal property. Rules vary widely by jurisdiction. Many overlapping jurisdictions (counties, cities, school districts) may have authority to tax the same property. Few states impose a tax on the value of property.
Property tax is based on fair market value of the subject property. The amount of tax is determined annually based on the market value of each property on a particular date, and most jurisdictions require redeterminations of value periodically. The tax is computed as the determined market value times an assessment ratio times the tax rate. Assessment ratios and tax rates vary widely among jurisdictions, and may vary by type of property within a jurisdiction. Where a property has recently been sold between unrelated sellers, such sale establishes fair market value. In other ("i.e.", most) cases, the value must be estimated. Common estimation techniques include comparable sales, depreciated cost, and an income approach. Property owners may also declare a value, which is subject to change by the tax assessor.
Property taxes are most commonly applied to real estate and business property. Real property generally includes all interests considered under that state's law to be ownership interests in land, buildings, and improvements. Ownership interests include ownership of title as well as certain other rights to property. Automobile and boat registration fees are a subset of this tax. Other nonbusiness goods are generally not subject to property tax, though Virginia maintains a unique personal property tax on all motor vehicles, including non-business vehicles.
The assessment process varies by state, and sometimes within a state. Each taxing jurisdiction determines values of property within the jurisdiction and then determines the amount of tax to assess based on the value of the property. Tax assessors for taxing jurisdictions are generally responsible for determining property values. The determination of values and calculation of tax is generally performed by an official referred to as a tax assessor. Property owners have rights in each jurisdiction to declare or contest the value so determined. Property values generally must be coordinated among jurisdictions, and such coordination is often performed by equalization.
Once value is determined, the assessor typically notifies the last known property owner of the value determination. After values are settled, property tax bills or notices are sent to property owners. Payment times and terms vary widely. If a property owner fails to pay the tax, the taxing jurisdiction has various remedies for collection, in many cases including seizure and sale of the property. Property taxes constitute a lien on the property to which transfers are also subject. Mortgage companies often collect taxes from property owners and remit them on behalf of the owner.
The United States imposes tariffs or customs duties on imports of goods. The duty is levied at the time of import and is paid by the importer of record. Customs duties vary by country of origin and product. Goods from many countries are exempt from duty under various trade agreements. Certain types of goods are exempt from duty regardless of source. Customs rules differ from other import restrictions. Failure to properly comply with customs rules can result in seizure of goods and criminal penalties against involved parties. United States Customs and Border Protection ("CBP") enforces customs rules.
Goods may be imported to the United States subject to import restrictions. Importers of goods may be subject to tax ("customs duty" or "tariff") on the imported value of the goods. "Imported goods are not legally entered until after the shipment has arrived within the port of entry, delivery of the merchandise has been authorized by CBP, and estimated duties have been paid." Importation and declaration and payment of customs duties is done by the importer of record, which may be the owner of the goods, the purchaser, or a licensed customs broker. Goods may be stored in a bonded warehouse or a Foreign-Trade Zone in the United States for up to five years without payment of duties. Goods must be declared for entry into the U.S. within 15 days of arrival or prior to leaving a bonded warehouse or foreign trade zone. Many importers participate in a voluntary self-assessment program with CBP. Special rules apply to goods imported by mail. All goods imported into the United States are subject to inspection by CBP. Some goods may be temporarily imported to the United States under a system similar to the ATA Carnet system. Examples include laptop computers used by persons traveling in the U.S. and samples used by salesmen.
Rates of tax on transaction values vary by country of origin. Goods must be individually labeled to indicate country of origin, with exceptions for specific types of goods. Goods are considered to originate in the country with the highest rate of duties for the particular goods unless the goods meet certain minimum content requirements. Extensive modifications to normal duties and classifications apply to goods originating in Canada or Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
All goods that are not exempt are subject to duty computed according to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule published by CBP and the U.S. International Trade Commission. This lengthy schedule provides rates of duty for each class of goods. Most goods are classified based on the nature of the goods, though some classifications are based on use.
Customs duty rates may be expressed as a percentage of value or dollars and cents per unit. Rates based on value vary from zero to 20% in the 2011 schedule. Rates may be based on relevant units for the particular type of goods (per ton, per kilogram, per square meter, etc.). Some duties are based in part on value and in part on quantity.
Where goods subject to different rates of duty are commingled, the entire shipment may be taxed at the highest applicable duty rate.
Imported goods are generally accompanied by a bill of lading or air waybill describing the goods. For purposes of customs duty assessment, they must also be accompanied by an invoice documenting the transaction value. The goods on the bill of lading and invoice are classified and duty is computed by the importer or CBP. The amount of this duty is payable immediately, and must be paid before the goods can be imported. Most assessments of goods are now done by the importer and documentation filed with CBP electronically.
After duties have been paid, CBP approves the goods for import. They can then be removed from the port of entry, bonded warehouse, or Free-Trade Zone.
After duty has been paid on particular goods, the importer can seek a refund of duties if the goods are exported without substantial modification. The process of claiming a refund is known as duty drawback.
Certain civil penalties apply for failures to follow CBP rules and pay duty. Goods of persons subject to such penalties may be seized and sold by CBP. In addition, criminal penalties may apply for certain offenses. Criminal penalties may be as high as twice the value of the goods plus twenty years in jail.
Foreign-Trade Zones are secure areas physically in the United States but legally outside the customs territory of the United States. Such zones are generally near ports of entry. They may be within the warehouse of an importer. Such zones are limited in scope and operation based on approval of the Foreign-Trade Zones Board. Goods in a Foreign-Trade Zone are not considered imported to the United States until they leave the Zone. Foreign goods may be used to manufacture other goods within the zone for export without payment of customs duties.
Estate and gift taxes in the United States are imposed by the federal and some state governments. The estate tax is an excise tax levied on the right to pass property at death. It is imposed on the estate, not the beneficiary. Some states impose an inheritance tax on recipients of bequests. Gift taxes are levied on the giver (donor) of property where the property is transferred for less than adequate consideration. An additional generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax is imposed by the federal and some state governments on transfers to grandchildren (or their descendants).
The federal gift tax is applicable to the donor, not the recipient, and is computed based on cumulative taxable gifts, and is reduced by prior gift taxes paid. The federal estate tax is computed on the sum of taxable estate and taxable gifts, and is reduced by prior gift taxes paid. These taxes are computed as the taxable amount times a graduated tax rate (up to 35% in 2011). The estate and gift taxes are also reduced by a "unified credit" equivalent to an exclusion ($5 million in 2011). Rates and exclusions have varied, and the benefits of lower rates and the credit have been phased out during some years.
Taxable gifts are certain gifts of U.S. property by nonresident aliens, most gifts of any property by citizens or residents, in excess of an annual exclusion ($13,000 for gifts made in 2011) per donor per donee. Taxable estates are certain U.S. property of non-resident alien decedents, and most property of citizens or residents. For aliens, residence for estate tax purposes is primarily based on domicile, but U.S. citizens are taxed regardless of their country of residence. U.S. real estate and most tangible property in the U.S. are subject to estate and gift tax whether the decedent or donor is resident or nonresident, citizen or alien.
The taxable amount of a gift is the fair market value of the property in excess of consideration received at the date of gift. The taxable amount of an estate is the gross fair market value of all rights considered property at the date of death (or an alternative valuation date) ("gross estate"), less liabilities of the decedent, costs of administration (including funeral expenses) and certain other deductions. State estate taxes are deductible, with limitations, in computing the federal taxable estate. Bequests to charities reduce the taxable estate.
Gift tax applies to all irrevocable transfers of interests in tangible or intangible property. Estate tax applies to all property owned in whole or in part by a citizen or resident at the time of his or her death, to the extent of the interest in the property. Generally, all types of property are subject to estate tax. Whether a decedent has sufficient interest in property for the property to be subject to gift or estate tax is determined under applicable state property laws. Certain interests in property that lapse at death (such as life insurance) are included in the taxable estate.
Taxable values of estates and gifts are the fair market value. For some assets, such as widely traded stocks and bonds, the value may be determined by market listings. The value of other property may be determined by appraisals, which are subject to potential contest by the taxing authority. Special use valuation applies to farms and closely held businesses, subject to limited dollar amount and other conditions. Monetary assets, such as cash, mortgages, and notes, are valued at the face amount, unless another value is clearly established.
Life insurance proceeds are included in the gross estate. The value of a right of a beneficiary of an estate to receive an annuity is included in the gross estate. Certain transfers during lifetime may be included in the gross estate. Certain powers of a decedent to control the disposition of property by another are included in the gross estate.
The taxable estate of a married decedent is reduced by a deduction for all property passing to the decedent's spouse. Certain terminable interests are included. Other conditions may apply.
Donors of gifts in excess of the annual exclusion must file gift tax returns on IRS Form 709 and pay the tax. Executors of estates with a gross value in excess of the unified credit must file an estate tax return on IRS Form 706 and pay the tax from the estate. Returns are required if the gifts or gross estate exceed the exclusions. Each state has its own forms and filing requirements. Tax authorities may examine and adjust gift and estate tax returns.
Many jurisdictions within the United States impose taxes or fees on the privilege of carrying on a particular business or maintaining a particular professional certification. These licensing or occupational taxes may be a fixed dollar amount per year for the licensee, an amount based on the number of practitioners in the firm, a percentage of revenue, or any of several other bases. Persons providing professional or personal services are often subject to such fees. Common examples include accountants, attorneys, barbers, casinos, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, plumbers, and stock brokers. In addition to the tax, other requirements may be imposed for licensure.
All 50 states impose vehicle license fee. Generally, the fees are based on type and size of vehicle and are imposed annually or biannually. All states and the District of Columbia also impose a fee for a driver's license, which generally must be renewed with payment of fee every few years.
Fees are often imposed by governments for use of certain facilities or services. Such fees are generally imposed at the time of use. Multi-use permits may be available. For example, fees are imposed for use of national or state parks, for requesting and obtaining certain rulings from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), for the use of certain highways (called "tolls" or toll roads), for parking on public streets, and for the use of public transit.
Taxes in the United States are administered by hundreds of tax authorities. At the federal level there are three tax administrations. Most domestic federal taxes are administered by the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms taxes are administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Taxes on imports (customs duties) are administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). TTB is also part of the Department of the Treasury and CBP belongs to the Department of Homeland Security.
Organization of state and local tax administrations varies widely. Every state maintains a tax administration. A few states administer some local taxes in whole or part. Most localities also maintain a tax administration or share one with neighboring localities.
The Internal Revenue Service administers all U.S. federal tax laws on domestic activities, except those taxes administered by TTB. IRS functions include:
The IRS maintains several Service Centers at which tax returns are processed. Taxpayers generally file most types of tax returns by mail with these Service Centers, or file electronically. The IRS also maintains a National Office in Washington, DC, and numerous local offices providing taxpayer services and administering tax examinations.
Tax returns filed with the IRS are subject to examination and adjustment, commonly called an IRS audit. Only a small percentage of returns (about 1% of individual returns in IRS FY 2008) are examined each year. The selection of returns uses a variety of methods based on IRS experiences. On examination, the IRS may request additional information from the taxpayer by mail, in person at IRS local offices, or at the business location of the taxpayer. The taxpayer is entitled to representation by an attorney, Certified Public Accountant (CPA), or enrolled agent, at the expense of the taxpayer, who may make representations to the IRS on behalf of the taxpayer.
Taxpayers have certain rights in an audit. Upon conclusion of the audit, the IRS may accept the tax return as filed or propose adjustments to the return. The IRS may also assess penalties and interest. Generally, adjustments must be proposed within three years of the due date of the tax return. Certain circumstances extend this time limit, including substantial understatement of income and fraud. The taxpayer and the IRS may agree to allow the IRS additional time to conclude an audit. If the IRS proposes adjustments, the taxpayer may agree to the adjustment, appeal within the IRS, or seek judicial determination of the tax.
In addition to enforcing tax laws, the IRS provides formal and informal guidance to taxpayers. While often referred to as IRS Regulations, the regulations under the Internal Revenue Code are issued by the Department of Treasury. IRS guidance consists of:
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Trade Bureau (TTB), a division of the Department of the Treasury, enforces federal excise tax laws related to alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. TTB has six divisions, each with discrete functions:
Criminal enforcement related to TTB is done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, collects customs duties and regulates international trade. It has a workforce of over 58,000 employees covering over 300 official ports of entry to the United States. CBP has authority to seize and dispose of cargo in the case of certain violations of customs rules.
Every state in the United States has its own tax administration, subject to the rules of that state's law and regulations. For example, the California Franchise Tax Board. These are referred to in most states as the Department of Revenue or Department of Taxation. The powers of the state taxing authorities vary widely. Most enforce all state level taxes but not most local taxes. However, many states have unified state-level sales tax administration, including for local sales taxes.
State tax returns are filed separately with those tax administrations, not with the federal tax administrations. Each state has its own procedural rules, which vary widely.
Most localities within the United States administer most of their own taxes. In many cases, there are multiple local taxing jurisdictions with respect to a particular taxpayer or property. For property taxes, the taxing jurisdiction is typically represented by a tax assessor/collector whose offices are located at the taxing jurisdiction's facilities.
The United States Constitution provides that Congress "shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises ... but all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." Prior to amendment, it provided that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be Laid unless in proportion to the Census ..." The 16th Amendment provided that "Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." The 10th Amendment provided that "powers not delegated to the United States by this Constitution, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Congress has enacted numerous laws dealing with taxes since adoption of the Constitution. Those laws are now codified as Title 19, Customs Duties, Title 26, Internal Revenue Code, and various other provisions. These laws specifically authorize the United States Secretary of the Treasury to delegate various powers related to levy, assessment and collection of taxes.
State constitutions uniformly grant the state government the right to levy and collect taxes. Limitations under state constitutions vary widely.
Various fringe individuals and groups have questioned the legitimacy of United States federal income tax. These arguments are varied, but have been uniformly rejected by the Internal Revenue Service and by the courts and ruled to be frivolous.
Commentators Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright contend that Federal tax policy in relation to regulation and reform in the United States tends to favor wealthy Americans. They assert that political influence is a legal right the wealthy can exercise by contributing funds to lobby for their policy preference.
Each major type of tax in the United States has been used by some jurisdiction at some time as a tool of social policy. Both liberals and conservatives have called for more progressive taxes in the U.S. Page, Bartels and Seawright assert that although members of the government favor a move toward progressive taxes, due to budget deficits upper class citizens are not yet willing to make a push for the change. Tax cuts were provided during the Bush administration, and were extended in 2010, making federal income taxes less progressive.
The Internal Revenue Service estimated that in 2001, the tax gap was $345 billion. The tax gap is the difference between the amount of tax legally owed and the amount actually collected by the government. The tax gap in 2006 was estimated to be $450 billion. The tax gap two years later in 2008 was estimated to be in the range of $450–$500 billion and unreported income was estimated to be approximately $2 trillion. Therefore, 18–19 percent of total reportable income was not properly reported to the IRS.
The complexity of the US tax code causes economic inefficiency.
Before 1776, the American Colonies were subject to taxation by Great Britain and also imposed local taxes. Property taxes were imposed in the Colonies as early as 1634. In 1673, the English Parliament imposed a tax on exports from the American Colonies, and with it created the first tax administration in what would become the United States. Other tariffs and taxes were imposed by Parliament. Most of the colonies and many localities adopted property taxes.
Under Article VIII of the Articles of Confederation, the United States government did not have the power to tax. All such power lay with the states. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, authorized the federal government to lay and collect taxes, but required that some types of tax revenues be given to the states in proportion to population. Tariffs were the principal federal tax through the 1800s.
By 1796, state and local governments in fourteen of the 15 states taxed land. Delaware taxed the income from property. The War of 1812 required a federal sales tax on specific luxury items due to its costs. However, internal taxes were dropped in 1817 in favor of import tariffs that went to the federal government. By the American Civil War, the principle of taxation of property at a uniform rate had developed, and many of the states relied on property taxes as a major source of revenue. However, the increasing importance of intangible property, such as corporate stock, caused the states to shift to other forms of taxation in the 1900s.
Income taxes in the form of "faculty" taxes were imposed by the colonies. These combined income and property tax characteristics, and the income element persisted after 1776 in a few states. Several states adopted income taxes in 1837. Wisconsin adopted a corporate and individual income tax in 1911, and was the first to administer the tax with a state tax administration.
The first federal income tax was adopted as part of the Revenue Act of 1861. The tax lapsed after the American Civil War. Subsequently enacted income taxes were held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in "Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co." because they did not apportion taxes on property by state population. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, permitting the federal government to levy an income tax on both property and labor.
The federal income tax enacted in 1913 included corporate and individual income taxes. It defined income using language from prior laws, incorporated in the Sixteenth Amendment, as "all income from whatever source derived". The tax allowed deductions for business expenses, but few non-business deductions. In 1918 the income tax law was expanded to include a foreign tax credit and more comprehensive definitions of income and deduction items. Various aspects of the present system of definitions were expanded through 1926, when U.S. law was organized as the United States Code. Income, estate, gift, and excise tax provisions, plus provisions relating to tax returns and enforcement, were codified as Title 26, also known as the Internal Revenue Code. This was reorganized and somewhat expanded in 1954, and remains in the same general form.
Federal taxes were expanded greatly during World War I. In 1921, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon engineered a series of significant income tax cuts under three presidents. Mellon argued that tax cuts would spur growth. Taxes were raised again in the latter part of the Great Depression, and during World War II. Income tax rates were reduced significantly during the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan presidencies. Significant tax cuts for corporations and all individuals were enacted during the second Bush presidency.
In 1986, Congress adopted, with little modification, a major expansion of the income tax portion of the IRS Code proposed in 1985 by the U.S. Treasury Department under President Reagan. The thousand-page Tax Reform Act of 1986 significantly lowered tax rates, adopted sweeping expansions of international rules, eliminated the lower individual tax rate for capital gains, added significant inventory accounting rules, and made substantial other expansions of the law.
Federal income tax rates have been modified frequently. Tax rates were changed in 34 of the 97 years between 1913 and 2010. The rate structure has been graduated since the 1913 act.
The first individual income tax return Form 1040 under the 1913 law was four pages long. In 1915, some Congressmen complained about the complexity of the form. In 1921, Congress considered but did not enact replacement of the income tax with a national sales tax.
By the 1920s, many states had adopted income taxes on individuals and corporations. Many of the state taxes were simply based on the federal definitions. The states generally taxed residents on all of their income, including income earned in other states, as well as income of nonresidents earned in the state. This led to a long line of Supreme Court cases limiting the ability of states to tax income of nonresidents.
The states had also come to rely heavily on retail sales taxes. However, as of the beginning of World War II, only two cities (New York and New Orleans) had local sales taxes.
The Federal Estate Tax was introduced in 1916, and Gift Tax in 1924. Unlike many inheritance taxes, the Gift and Estate taxes were imposed on the transferor rather than the recipient. Many states adopted either inheritance taxes or estate and gift taxes, often computed as the amount allowed as a deduction for federal purposes. These taxes remained under 1% of government revenues through the 1990s.
All governments within the United States provide tax exemption for some income, property, or persons. These exemptions have their roots both in tax theory, federal and state legislative history, and the United States Constitution.
Government sources:
Law & regulations:
Standard texts (most updated annually):
Reference works:
Popular publications (annual): | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30552 |
Tychonoff space
In topology and related branches of mathematics, Tychonoff spaces and completely regular spaces are kinds of topological spaces. These conditions are examples of separation axioms.
Tychonoff spaces are named after Andrey Nikolayevich Tychonoff, whose Russian name (Тихонов) is variously rendered as "Tychonov", "Tikhonov", "Tihonov", "Tichonov" etc, who introduced them in 1930 in order to avoid the pathological situation of Hausdorff spaces whose only continuous real-valued functions are constant maps.
A topological space, formula_1, is called "completely regular" exactly in case points can be separated from closed sets via (bounded) continuous real-valued functions. In technical terms this means: for any closed set formula_2 and any point formula_3, there exists a real-valued continuous function formula_4 such that formula_5 and formula_6. (Equivalently one can choose any two values instead of formula_7 and formula_8 and even demand that formula_9 be a bounded function.)
A topological space, formula_1, is furthermore called a "Tychonoff space" (alternatively: "T3½ space", or "Tπ space", or "completely T3 space") in case it is a completely regular Hausdorff space.
Remark. Completely regular spaces and Tychonoff spaces are related through the notion of Kolmogorov equivalence. A topological space is Tychonoff if and only if it's both completely regular and T0. On the other hand, a space is completely regular if and only if its Kolmogorov quotient is Tychonoff.
Across mathematical literature different conventions are applied when it comes to the term "completely regular" and the "T"-Axioms. The definitions in this section are in typical modern usage. Some authors, however, switch the meanings of the two kinds of terms, or use all terms interchangeably. In Wikipedia, the terms "completely regular" and "Tychonoff" are used freely and the "T"-notation is generally avoided. In standard literature, caution is thus advised, to find out which definitions the author is using. For more on this issue, see History of the separation axioms.
Almost every topological space studied in mathematical analysis is Tychonoff, or at least completely regular.
For example, the real line is Tychonoff under the standard Euclidean topology.
Other examples include:
Complete regularity and the Tychonoff property are well-behaved with respect to initial topologies. Specifically, complete regularity is preserved by taking arbitrary initial topologies and the Tychonoff property is preserved by taking point-separating initial topologies. It follows that:
Like all separation axioms, complete regularity is not preserved by taking final topologies. In particular, quotients of completely regular spaces need not be regular. Quotients of Tychonoff spaces need not even be Hausdorff. There are closed quotients of the Moore plane that provide counterexamples.
For any topological space "X", let "C"("X") denote the family of real-valued continuous functions on "X" and let "C"b("X") be the subset of bounded real-valued continuous functions.
Completely regular spaces can be characterized by the fact that their topology is completely determined by "C"("X") or "C"b("X"). In particular:
Given an arbitrary topological space ("X", τ) there is a universal way of associating a completely regular space with ("X", τ). Let ρ be the initial topology on "X" induced by "C"τ("X") or, equivalently, the topology generated by the basis of cozero sets in ("X", τ). Then ρ will be the finest completely regular topology on "X" that is coarser than τ. This construction is universal in the sense that any continuous function
to a completely regular space "Y" will be continuous on ("X", ρ). In the language of category theory, the functor that sends ("X", τ) to ("X", ρ) is left adjoint to the inclusion functor CReg → Top. Thus the category of completely regular spaces CReg is a reflective subcategory of Top, the category of topological spaces. By taking Kolmogorov quotients, one sees that the subcategory of Tychonoff spaces is also reflective.
One can show that "C"τ("X") = "C"ρ("X") in the above construction so that the rings "C"("X") and "C"b("X") are typically only studied for completely regular spaces "X".
The category of realcompact Tychonoff spaces is anti-equivalent to the category of the rings "C"("X") (where "X" is realcompact) together with ring homomorphisms as maps. For example one can reconstruct "X" from "C"("X") when "X" is (real) compact. The algebraic theory of these rings is therefore subject of intensive studies.
A vast generalisation of this class of rings that still resembles many properties of Tychonoff spaces, but is also applicable in real algebraic geometry, is the class of real closed rings.
Tychonoff spaces are precisely those spaces that can be
embedded in compact Hausdorff spaces. More precisely, for every Tychonoff space "X", there exists a compact Hausdorff space "K" such that "X" is homeomorphic to a subspace of "K".
In fact, one can always choose "K" to be a Tychonoff cube (i.e. a possibly infinite product of unit intervals). Every Tychonoff cube is compact Hausdorff as a consequence of Tychonoff's theorem. Since every subspace of a compact Hausdorff space is Tychonoff one has:
Of particular interest are those embeddings where the image of "X" is dense in "K"; these are called Hausdorff compactifications of "X". Given any embedding of a Tychonoff space "X" in a compact Hausdorff space "K" the closure of the image of "X" in "K" is a compactification of "X".
Among those Hausdorff compactifications, there is a unique "most general" one, the Stone–Čech compactification β"X".
It is characterised by the universal property that, given a continuous map "f" from "X" to any other compact Hausdorff space "Y", there is a unique continuous map "g" from β"X" to "Y" that extends "f" in the sense that "f" is the composition of "g" and "j".
Complete regularity is exactly the condition necessary for the existence of uniform structures on a topological space. In other words, every uniform space has a completely regular topology and every completely regular space "X" is uniformizable. A topological space admits a separated uniform structure if and only if it is Tychonoff.
Given a completely regular space "X" there is usually more than one uniformity on "X" that is compatible with the topology of "X". However, there will always be a finest compatible uniformity, called the fine uniformity on "X". If "X" is Tychonoff, then the uniform structure can be chosen so that β"X" becomes the completion of the uniform space "X". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30554 |
Tattoo
A tattoo is a form of body modification where a design is made by inserting ink, dyes and pigments, either indelible or temporary, into the dermis layer of the skin to change the pigment. The art of making tattoos is tattooing.
Tattoos fall into three broad categories: purely decorative (with no specific meaning); symbolic (with a specific meaning pertinent to the wearer); and pictorial (a depiction of a specific person or item). In addition, tattoos can be used for identification such as ear tattoos on livestock as a form of branding.
The word "tattoo", or "tattow" in the 18th century, is a loanword from the Samoan word "tatau", meaning "to strike". The "Oxford English Dictionary" gives the etymology of tattoo as "In 18th c. tattaow, tattow. From Polynesian (Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan, etc.) tatau. In Marquesan, tatu." Before the importation of the Polynesian word, the practice of tattooing had been described in the West as painting, scarring or staining.
The etymology of the body modification term is not to be confused with the origins of the word for the military drumbeat or performance — see "military tattoo". In this case, the English word "tattoo" is derived from the Dutch word "taptoe".
Copyrighted tattoo designs that are mass-produced and sent to tattoo artists are known as "flash", a notable instance of industrial design. Flash sheets are prominently displayed in many tattoo parlors for the purpose of providing both inspiration and ready-made tattoo images to customers.
The Japanese word "irezumi" means "insertion of ink" and can mean tattoos using "tebori", the traditional Japanese hand method, a Western-style machine or any method of tattooing using insertion of ink. The most common word used for traditional Japanese tattoo designs is "horimono". Japanese may use the word "tattoo" to mean non-Japanese styles of tattooing.
British anthropologist Ling Roth in 1900 described four methods of skin marking and suggested they be differentiated under the names "tatu", "moko", "cicatrix" and "keloid". The first is by pricking that leaves the skin smooth, as found in places including the Pacific Islands, the second a tattoo combined with chiselling to leave furrows in the skin, as found in places including New Zealand, the third is scarification using a knife or chisel, as found in places including West Africa, and the fourth is scarification by irritating and re-opening a preexisting wound, rescarification, to form a raised scar, as found in places including Tasmania, Australia, Melanesia, and Central Africa. "Impicit in the classification was an evolutionary development from the most primitive form of body modification [the last] to the most sophisticated [the first]."
The American Academy of Dermatology distinguishes five types of tattoos: traumatic tattoos, also called "natural tattoos", that result from injuries, especially asphalt from road injuries or pencil lead; amateur tattoos; professional tattoos, both via traditional methods and modern tattoo machines; cosmetic tattoos, also known as "permanent makeup"; and medical tattoos.
A traumatic tattoo occurs when a substance such as asphalt or gunpowder is rubbed into a wound as the result of some kind of accident or trauma. Coal miners could develop characteristic tattoos owing to coal dust getting into wounds. These are particularly difficult to remove as they tend to be spread across several layers of skin, and scarring or permanent discoloration is almost unavoidable depending on the location. An amalgam tattoo is when amalgam particles are implanted in to the soft tissues of the mouth, usually the gums, during dental filling placement or removal. Another example of such accidental tattoos is the result of a deliberate or accidental stabbing with a pencil or pen, leaving graphite or ink beneath the skin.
Many tattoos serve as rites of passage, marks of status and rank, symbols of religious and spiritual devotion, decorations for bravery, sexual lures and marks of fertility, pledges of love, amulets and talismans, protection, and as punishment, like the marks of outcasts, slaves and convicts. The symbolism and impact of tattoos varies in different places and cultures. Tattoos may show how a person feels about a relative (commonly mother/father or daughter/son) or about an unrelated person. Today, people choose to be tattooed for artistic, cosmetic, sentimental/memorial, religious, and magical reasons, and to symbolize their belonging to or identification with particular groups, including criminal gangs (see criminal tattoos) or a particular ethnic group or law-abiding subculture. Popular texts include the Biblical verses John 3:16, Philippians 4:13, and Psalm 23.
Extensive decorative tattooing is common among members of traditional freak shows and by performance artists who follow in their tradition.
People throughout history have also been forcibly tattooed for means of identification.
A well-known example is the Nazi practice of forcibly tattooing concentration camp inmates with identification numbers during the Holocaust as part of the Nazis' identification system, beginning in fall 1941. The SS introduced the practice at Auschwitz concentration camp in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners in the concentration camps. During registration, guards would pierce the outlines of the serial-number digits onto the prisoners' arms. Of the Nazi concentration camps, only Auschwitz put tattoos on inmates. The tattoo was the prisoner's camp number, sometimes with a special symbol added: some Jews had a triangle, and Romani had the letter "Z" (from German "Zigeuner" for "Gypsy"). In May 1944, Jewish men received the letters "A" or "B" to indicate a particular series of numbers.
Tattoos have also been used for identification in other ways. As early as the Zhou, Chinese authorities would employ facial tattoos as a punishment for certain crimes or to mark prisoners or slaves. During the Roman Empire, gladiators and slaves were tattooed: exported slaves were tattooed with the words "tax paid", and it was a common practice to tattoo "fugitive" (denoted by the letters "FUG") on the foreheads of runaway slaves. Owing to the Biblical strictures against the practice, Emperor Constantine I banned tattooing the face around AD 330, and the Second Council of Nicaea banned all body markings as a pagan practice in AD 787.
In the period of early contact between the Māori and Europeans, the Māori people hunted and decapitated each other for their moko tattoos, which they traded for European items including axes and firearms. Moko tattoos were facial designs worn to indicate lineage, social position, and status within the tribe. The tattoo art was a sacred marker of identity among the Māori and also referred to as a vehicle for storing one's tapu, or spiritual being, in the afterlife.
Tattoos are sometimes used by forensic pathologists to help them identify burned, putrefied, or mutilated bodies. As tattoo pigment lies encapsulated deep in the skin, tattoos are not easily destroyed even when the skin is burned.
Tattoos are also placed on animals, though rarely for decorative reasons. Pets, show animals, thoroughbred horses, and livestock are sometimes tattooed with identification and other marks. Tattooing with a 'slap mark' on the shoulder or on the ear is the standard identification method in commercial pig farming. Branding is used for similar reasons and is often performed without anesthesia, but is different from tattooing as no ink or dye is inserted during the process, the mark instead being caused by permanent scarring of the skin. Pet dogs and cats are sometimes tattooed with a serial number (usually in the ear, or on the inner thigh) via which their owners can be identified. However, the use of a microchip has become an increasingly popular choice and since 2016 is a legal requirement for all 8.5 million pet dogs in the UK.
Permanent makeup is the use of tattoos to enhance eyebrows, lips (liner and/or lipstick), eyes (liner), and even moles, usually with natural colors, as the designs are intended to resemble makeup.
A growing trend in the US and UK is to place artistic tattoos over the surgical scars of a mastectomy. "More women are choosing not to reconstruct after a mastectomy and tattoo over the scar tissue instead... The mastectomy tattoo will become just another option for post cancer patients and a truly personal way of regaining control over post cancer bodies..." However, the tattooing of nipples on reconstructed breasts remains in high demand.
Functional tattoos are used primarily for a purpose other than aesthetics. One such use is to tattoo Alzheimer patients with their names, so they may be easily identified if they go missing.
Medical tattoos are used to ensure instruments are properly located for repeated application of radiotherapy and for the areola in some forms of breast reconstruction. Tattooing has also been used to convey medical information about the wearer (e.g., blood group, medical condition, etc.). Additionally, tattoos are used in skin tones to cover vitiligo, a skin pigmentation disorder.
SS blood group tattoos () were worn by members of the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany during World War II to identify the individual's blood type. After the war, the tattoo was taken to be prima facie, if not perfect, evidence of being part of the Waffen-SS, leading to potential arrest and prosecution. This led a number of ex-Waffen-SS to shoot themselves through the arm with a gun, removing the tattoo and leaving scars like the ones resulting from pox inoculation, making the removal less obvious.
Tattoos were probably also used in ancient medicine as part of the treatment of the patient. In 1898, Daniel Fouquet, a medical doctor, wrote an article on "medical tattooing" practices in Ancient Egypt, in which he describes the tattooed markings on the female mummies found at the Deir el-Bahari site. He speculated that the tattoos and other scarifications observed on the bodies may have served a medicinal or therapeutic purpose: "The examination of these scars, some white, others blue, leaves in no doubt that they are not, in essence, ornament, but an established treatment for a condition of the pelvis, very probably chronic pelvic peritonitis."
Preserved tattoos on ancient mummified human remains reveal that tattooing has been practiced throughout the world for many centuries. In 2015, scientific re-assessment of the age of the two oldest known tattooed mummies identified Ötzi as the oldest example then known. This body, with 61 tattoos, was found embedded in glacial ice in the Alps, and was dated to 3250 BCE. In 2018, the oldest figurative tattoos in the world were discovered on two mummies from Egypt which are dated between 3351 and 3017 BCE.
Ancient tattooing was most widely practiced among the Austronesian people. It was one of the early technologies developed by the Proto-Austronesians in Taiwan and coastal South China prior to at least 1500 BCE, before the Austronesian expansion into the islands of the Indo-Pacific. It may have originally been associated with headhunting. Tattooing traditions, including facial tattooing, can be found among all Austronesian subgroups, including Taiwanese Aborigines, Islander Southeast Asians, Micronesians, Polynesians, and the Malagasy people. Austronesians used the characteristic hafted skin-puncturing technique, using a small mallet and a piercing implement made from "Citrus" thorns, fish bone, bone, and oyster shells.
Ancient tattooing traditions have also been documented among Papuans and Melanesians, with their use of distinctive obsidian skin piercers. Some archeological sites with these implements are associated with the Austronesian migration into Papua New Guinea and Melanesia. But other sites are older than the Austronesian expansion, being dated to around 1650 to 2000 BCE, suggesting that there was a preexisting tattooing tradition in the region.
Among other ethnolinguistic groups, tattooing was also practiced among the Ainu people of Japan; some Austroasians of Indochina; Berber women of Tamazgha (North Africa); the Yoruba, Fulani and Hausa people of Nigeria; Native Americans of the Pre-Columbian Americas; and Picts of Iron Age Britain.
In 1565, French sailors abducted from Canada an Inuit woman with facial tattoos and her daughter. They put them on public display in Antwerp, the Netherlands, drawing crowds for money. Sir Martin Frobisher, an English privateer, also abducted an Inuit man from Baffin Island, putting him on display in London before he died from European diseases. Frobisher returned to Baffin Island and abducted a man, a woman, and a child, also taking them back to London for public display. They also died from illness shortly afterwards.
Perhaps the most famous tattooed "curiosity" in Europe prior to the voyages of Captain Cook, was the "Painted Prince" - a slave named "Jeoly" from Mindanao, Philippines. He was initially bought with his mother (who died shortly afterwards) from a slave trader in Miangas Island in 1690 by the English explorer William Dampier. Dampier described Jeoly's intricate tattoos in his journals:
Jeoly told Dampier that he was the son of a "rajah" in Mindanao, and told him that gold ("bullawan") abounded in his island. These were likely embellishments told by Jeoly in an effort to convince Dampier to free him. He also mentions that the men and women of Mindanao were also tattooed similarly, and that his tattoos were done by one of his five wives. He is believed to be a Visayan "pintado", if he indeed came from Mindanao. Other authors have also identified him as Palauan due to the pattern of his tattoos and his account that he was tattooed by women (Visayan tattooists were male from the few surviving records; while Palauan tattooists were female), although this would conflict with his own admission that he originally came from Mindanao.
Dampier brought Jeoly with him to London, intending him to be a puppet prince for the British venture into the Spice Islands. He promised Jeoly that he would be paid well and allowed to return home. He invented a fictional backstory for him, renaming him "Prince Giolo" and claiming that he was the son and heir of the "King of Gilolo." Instead of being from Mindanao, Dampier now claimed that he was only shipwrecked in Mindanao with his mother and sister, whereupon he was captured and sold to slavery. Dampier also claimed that Jeoly's tattoos were created from an "herbal paint" that rendered him invulnerable to snake venom, and that the "royal" tattooing process was done naked in a room of venomous snakes.
Dampier initially toured around with Jeoly, showing his tattoos to crowds. Despite pretending to care for the "prince", Dampier eventually sold Jeoly to the Blue Boar Inn in Fleet Street. Jeoly was displayed as a sideshow by the inn, with his likeness printed on playbills and flyers advertising his "exquisitely painted" body. By this time, Jeoly had contracted smallpox and was very ill. He was later brought to the University of Oxford for examination, but he died shortly afterwards at around thirty years of age in the summer of 1692. His tattooed skin was preserved and was displayed in the Anatomy School of Oxford for a time, although it was lost prior to the 20th century.
It is commonly held that the modern popularity of tattooing stems from Captain James Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific in the late 18th century. Certainly, Cook's voyages and the dissemination of the texts and images from them brought more awareness about tattooing (and, as noted above, imported the word "tattow" into Western languages). On Cook's first voyage in 1768, his science officer and expedition botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, as well as artist Sydney Parkinson and many others of the crew, returned to England with a keen interest in with Banks writing about them extensively and Parkinson is believed to have gotten a tattoo himself in Tahiti. Banks was a highly regarded member of the English aristocracy that had acquired his position with Cook by co-financing the expedition with ten thousand pounds, a very large sum at the time. In turn, Cook brought back with him a tattooed Raiatean man, Omai, whom he presented to King George and the English Court. On subsequent voyages other crew members, from officers, such as American John Ledyard, to ordinary seamen, were tattooed.
The first documented professional tattooist in Britain was Sutherland Macdonald, who operated out of a salon in London beginning in 1894. In Britain, tattooing was still largely associated with sailors and the lower or even criminal class, but by the 1870s had become fashionable among some members of the upper classes, including royalty, and in its upmarket form it could be an expensive and sometimes painful process. A marked class division on the acceptability of the practice continued for some time in Britain. Recently, a trend has arisen marketed as 'Stick and Poke' tattooing; simple designs are tattooed either on oneself or by another person using 'DIY' kits that usually contain needles, ink, and often sample designs.
As most tattoos in the United States were done by Polynesian and Japanese amateurs, tattoo artists were in great demand in port cities all over the world, especially by European and American sailors. The first recorded professional tattoo artist in the US was a German immigrant, Martin Hildebrandt. He opened a shop in New York City in 1846 and quickly became popular during the American Civil War among soldiers and sailors of both Union and Confederate militaries.
Hildebrandt began traveling from camp to camp to tattoo soldiers, increasing his popularity and also giving birth to the tradition of getting tattoos while being an American serviceman. Soon after the Civil War, tattoos became fashionable among upper-class young adults. This trend lasted until the beginning of World War I. The invention of the electric tattoo machine caused popularity of tattoos among the wealthy to drop off. The machine made the tattooing procedure both much easier and cheaper, thus, eliminating the status symbol tattoos previously held, as they were now affordable for all socioeconomic classes. The status symbol of a tattoo shifted from a representation of wealth to a mark typically seen on rebels and criminals. Despite this change, tattoos remained popular among military servicemen, a tradition that continues today.
In 1975, there were only 40 tattoo artists in the country; in 1980, there were more than 5,000 self-proclaimed tattoo artists, appearing in response to booming popularity in the skin mural trade.
Many studies have been done of the tattooed population and society's view of tattoos. In June 2006, the "Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology" published the results of a telephone survey of 2004. It found that 36% of Americans ages 18–29, 24% of those 30–40, and 15% of those 41–51 had a tattoo. In September 2006, the Pew Research Center conducted a telephone survey that found that 36% of Americans ages 18–25, 40% of those 26–40 and 10% of those 41–64 had a tattoo. They concluded that Generation X and Millennials express themselves through their appearance, and tattoos are a popular form of self-expression. In January 2008, a survey conducted online by Harris Interactive estimated that 14% of all adults in the United States have a tattoo, slightly down from 2003, when 16% had a tattoo. Among age groups, 9% of those ages 18–24, 32% of those 25–29, 25% of those 30–39 and 12% of those 40–49 have tattoos, as do 8% of those 50–64. Men are slightly more likely to have a tattoo than women.
Richmond, Virginia has been cited as one of the most tattooed cities in the United States. That distinction led the Valentine Richmond History Center to create an online exhibit titled "History, Ink: The Tattoo Archive Project." The introduction to the exhibit notes, "In the past, western culture associated tattoos with those individuals who lived on the edge of society; however, today they are recognized as a legitimate art form and widely accepted in mainstream culture."
Since the 1970s, tattoos have become a mainstream part of Western fashion, common among both genders, to all economic classes and to age groups from the later teen years to middle age. For many young Americans, the tattoo has taken on a decidedly different meaning than for previous generations. The tattoo has undergone "dramatic redefinition" and has shifted from a form of deviance to an acceptable form of expression.
As of November 1, 2006, Oklahoma became the last state to legalize tattooing, having banned it since 1963.
Protection papers were used by American sailors to prevent themselves from being taken off American ships and impressed into the Royal Navy. These were simple documents that described the sailor as being an American sailor. Many of the protection certificates were so general, and it was so easy to abuse the system, that many impressment officers of the Royal Navy paid no attention to them. In applying for a duplicate Seaman's Protection Certificate in 1817, James Francis stated that he 'had a protection granted him by the Collector of this Port on or about 12 March 1806 which was torn up and destroyed by a British Captain when at sea.' One way of making them more specific was to describe a tattoo, which is highly personal, and thus use that description to identify the seaman. As a result, many of the later certificates carried information about tattoos and scars, as well as other specific information. This also perhaps led to an increase and proliferation of tattoos among American seamen. Frequently their 'protection papers' made reference to tattoos, clear evidence that individual was a seafaring man; rarely did members of the general public adorn themselves with tattoos.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tattoos were as much about self-expression as they were about having a unique way to identify a sailor's body should he be lost at sea or impressed by the British navy. The best source for early American tattoos is the protection papers issued following a 1796 congressional act to safeguard American seamen from impressment. These proto-passports catalogued tattoos alongside birthmarks, scars, race, and height. Using simple techniques and tools, tattoo artists in the early republic typically worked on board ships using anything available as pigments, even gunpowder and urine. Men marked their arms and hands with initials of themselves and loved ones, significant dates, symbols of the seafaring life, liberty poles, crucifixes, and other symbols."
Because these protection papers were used to define freemen and citizenship, many black sailors and other men also used them to show that they were freemen if they were stopped by officials or slave catchers. They also called them "free papers" because they certified their non-slave status. Many of the freed blacks used descriptions of tattoos for identification purposes on their freedom papers.
Branding was used by European authorities for marking criminals throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The practice was also used by British authorities to mark army deserters and military personnel court-martialed in Australia. In nineteenth century Australia tattoos were generally the result of personal rather than official decisions but British authorities started to record tattoos along with scars and other bodily markings to describe and manage convicts assigned for transportation. The practice of tattooing appears to have been a largely non-commercial enterprise during the convict period in Australia. For example, James Ross in the Hobart Almanac of 1833 describes how the convicts on board ship commonly spent time tattooing themselves with gunpowder.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were tattoo studios in Australia but they do not appear to have been numerous. For example, the Sydney tattoo studio of Fred Harris was touted as being the only tattoo studio in Sydney between 1916 and 1943. Tattoo designs often reflected the culture of the day and in 1923 Harris's small parlour experienced an increase in the number of women getting tattoos. Another popular trend was for women to have their legs tattooed so the designs could be seen through their stockings.
By 1937 Harris was one of Sydney's best-known tattoo artists and was inking around 2000 tattoos a year in his shop. Sailors provided most of the canvases for his work but among the more popular tattoos in 1938 were Australian flags and kangaroos for sailors of the visiting American Fleet.
Tattooing involves the placement of pigment into the skin's dermis, the layer of dermal tissue underlying the epidermis. After initial injection, pigment is dispersed throughout a homogenized damaged layer down through the epidermis and upper dermis, in both of which the presence of foreign material activates the immune system's phagocytes to engulf the pigment particles. As healing proceeds, the damaged epidermis flakes away (eliminating surface pigment) while deeper in the skin granulation tissue forms, which is later converted to connective tissue by collagen growth. This mends the upper dermis, where pigment remains trapped within successive generations of macrophages, ultimately concentrating in a layer just below the dermis/epidermis boundary. Its presence there is stable, but in the long term (decades) the pigment tends to migrate deeper into the dermis, accounting for the degraded detail of old tattoos.
In modern tattooing, an artist may use a Thermal stencil paper or Hectograph to first place the design print on the skin before working with the machine and needle on skin. This process has enabled Artists to create very detailed artworks on the skin.
Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made into needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, actual needles.
The most common method of tattooing in modern times is the electric tattoo machine, which inserts ink into the skin via a single needle or a group of needles that are soldered onto a bar, which is attached to an oscillating unit. The unit rapidly and repeatedly drives the needles in and out of the skin, usually 80 to 150 times a second. The needles are single-use needles that come packaged individually.
Tattooing is regulated in many countries because of the associated health risks to client and practitioner, specifically local infections and virus transmission. Disposable plastic aprons and eye protection can be worn depending on the risk of blood or other secretions splashing into the eyes or clothing of the tattooist. Hand hygiene, assessment of risks and appropriate disposal of all sharp objects and materials contaminated with blood are crucial areas. The tattoo artist must wash his or her hands and must also wash the area that will be tattooed. Gloves must be worn at all times and the wound must be wiped frequently with a wet disposable towel of some kind. All equipment must be sterilized in a certified autoclave before and after every use. It is good practice to provide clients with a printed consent form that outlines risks and complications as well as instructions for after care.
Among Austronesian societies, tattoos had various function. Among men, they were strongly linked to the widespread practice of head-hunting raids. In head-hunting societies, like the Ifugao and Dayak people, tattoos were records of how many heads the warriors had taken in battle, and was part of the initiation rites into adulthood. The number, design, and location of tattoos, therefore, were indicative of a warrior's status and prowess. They were also regarded as magical wards against various dangers like evil spirits and illnesses. Among the Visayans of the pre-colonial Philippines, tattoos were worn by the "tumao" nobility and the "timawa" warrior class as permanent records of their participation and conduct in maritime raids known as "mangayaw". In Austronesian women, like the facial tattoos among the women of the Tayal and Māori people, they were indicators of status, skill, and beauty.
The Government of Meiji Japan had outlawed tattoos in the 19th century, a prohibition that stood for 70 years before being repealed in 1948. As of 6 June 2012, all new tattoos are forbidden for employees of the city of Osaka. Existing tattoos are required to be covered with proper clothing. The regulations were added to Osaka's ethical codes, and employees with tattoos were encouraged to have them removed. This was done because of the strong connection of tattoos with the yakuza, or Japanese organized crime, after an Osaka official in February 2012 threatened a schoolchild by showing his tattoo.
Tattoos had negative connotations in historical China, where criminals often had been marked by tattooing. The association of tattoos with criminals was transmitted from China to influence Japan. Today, tattoos have remained a taboo in Chinese society.
The Romans tattooed criminals and slaves, and in the 19th century released U.S. convicts, Australian convicts and British army deserters were identified by tattoos. Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with an identification number. Today, many prison inmates still tattoo themselves as an indication of time spent in prison.
Native Americans also used tattoos to represent their tribe. Catholic Croats of Bosnia used religious Christian tattooing, especially of children and women, for protection against conversion to Islam during the Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
Tattoos are strongly empirically associated with deviance, personality disorders and criminality. Although the general acceptance of tattoos is on the rise in Western society, they still carry a heavy stigma among certain social groups. Tattoos are generally considered an important part of the culture of the Russian mafia.
Current cultural understandings of tattoos in Europe and North America have been greatly influenced by long-standing stereotypes based on deviant social groups in the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in North America, tattoos have been associated with stereotypes, folklore and racism. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did people associate tattoos with such societal outcasts as bikers and prisoners. Today, in the United States many prisoners and criminal gangs use distinctive tattoos to indicate facts about their criminal behavior, prison sentences and organizational affiliation. A teardrop tattoo, for example, can be symbolic of murder, or each tear represents the death of a friend. At the same time, members of the U.S. military have an equally well-established and longstanding history of tattooing to indicate military units, battles, kills, etc., an association that remains widespread among older Americans. In Japan, tattoos are associated with yakuza criminal groups, but there are non-yakuza groups such as Fukushi Masaichi's tattoo association that sought to preserve the skins of dead Japanese who have extensive tattoos. Tattooing is also common in the British Armed Forces. Depending on vocation, tattoos are accepted in a number of professions in America. Companies across many fields are increasingly focused on diversity and inclusion. Mainstream art galleries hold exhibitions of both conventional and custom tattoo designs, such as "Beyond Skin", at the Museum of Croydon.
In Britain, there is evidence of women with tattoos, concealed by their clothing, throughout the 20th century, and records of women tattooists such as Jessie Knight from the 1920s. A study of "at-risk" (as defined by school absenteeism and truancy) adolescent girls showed a positive correlation between body modification and negative feelings towards the body and low self-esteem; however, the study also demonstrated that a strong motive for body modification is the search for "self and attempts to attain mastery and control over the body in an age of increasing alienation". The prevalence of women in the tattoo industry in the 21st century, along with larger numbers of women bearing tattoos, appears to be changing negative perceptions.
In "Covered in Ink" by Beverly Yuen Thompson, she interviews heavily tattooed women in Washington, Miami, Orlando, Houston, Long Beach, and Seattle from 2007 to 2010 using participant observation and in-depth interviews of 70 women. Younger generations are typically more unbothered by heavily tattooed women, while older generation including the participants parents are more likely to look down on them, some even go to the extreme of disowning their children for getting tattoos. Typically how the family reacts is an indicator of their relationship in general. Family members who weren't accepting of tattoos often wanted to scrub the images off, pour holy water on them or have them surgically removed. Families who were emotionally accepting of their family members were able to maintain close bonds after tattooing.
Former sailor Rowland Hussey Macy, who formed Macy's department stores, used a red star tattoo that he had on his hand for the store's logo.
Tattoos have also been used in marketing and advertising with companies paying people to have logos of brands like HBO, Red Bull, ASOS.com and Sailor Jerry's rum tattooed in their bodies. This practice is known as "skinvertising".
B.T.'s Smokehouse, a barbecue restaurant located in Massachusetts, offered customers free meals for life if they had the logo of the establishment tattooed on a visible part of their bodies. Nine people took the business up on the offer.
Because it requires breaking the skin barrier, tattooing carries health risks including infection and allergic reactions. Tattooing can be uncomfortable to excruciating depending on the area and can result in the person fainting. Modern tattooists reduce risks by following universal precautions working with single-use items and sterilizing their equipment after each use. Many jurisdictions require that tattooists have blood-borne pathogen training such as that provided through the Red Cross and OSHA. As of 2009 (in the United States) there have been no reported cases of HIV contracted from tattoos.
In amateur tattooing, such as that practiced in prisons, however, there is an elevated risk of infection. Infections that can theoretically be transmitted by the use of unsterilized tattoo equipment or contaminated ink include surface infections of the skin, fungal infections, some forms of hepatitis, herpes simplex virus, HIV, staph, tetanus, and tuberculosis.
Tattoo inks have been described as "remarkably nonreactive histologically". However, cases of allergic reactions to tattoo inks, particularly certain colors, have been medically documented. This is sometimes due to the presence of nickel in an ink pigment, which triggers a common metal allergy. Occasionally, when a blood vessel is punctured during the tattooing procedure, a bruise/hematoma may appear. At the same time, a number of tattoo inks may contain hazardous substances, and a proposal has been submitted by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) to restrict the intentional use or concentration limit of approximately 4 000 substances when contained in tattoo inks. According to a study by the European Union Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON), a number of modern-day tattoo inks contain nanomaterials.
Certain colours - red or similar colours such as purple, pink, and orange - tend to cause more problems and damage compared to other colours. Red ink has even caused skin and flesh damages so severe that the amputation of a leg or an arm has been necessary. If part of a tattoo (especially if red) begins to cause even minor troubles, like becoming itchy or worse, lumpy, then Danish experts strongly suggest to remove the red parts.
In 2017, researchers from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France say the chemicals in tattoo ink can travel in the bloodstream and accumulate in the lymph nodes, obstructing their ability to fight infections. However, the authors noted in their paper that most tattooed individuals including the donors analyzed do not suffer from chronic inflammation.
Tattoo artists frequently recommend sun protection of skin to prevent tattoos from fading and to preserve skin integrity to make future tattooing easier.
While tattoos are considered permanent, it is sometimes possible to remove them, fully or partially, with laser treatments. Typically, black and some colored inks can be removed more completely than inks of other colors. The expense and pain associated with removing tattoos are typically greater than the expense and pain associated with applying them. Pre-laser tattoo removal methods include dermabrasion, salabrasion (scrubbing the skin with salt), cryosurgery and excision—which is sometimes still used along with skin grafts for larger tattoos. These older methods, however, have been nearly completely replaced by laser removal treatment options.
A temporary tattoo is a non-permanent image on the skin resembling a permanent tattoo. As a form of body painting, temporary tattoos can be drawn, painted, airbrushed, or needled in the same way as permanent tattoos, but with an ink which dissolves in the blood within 6 months.
Decal (press-on) temporary tattoos are used to decorate any part of the body. They may last for a day or for more than a week.
Foil temporary tattoos are a variation of decal-style temporary tattoos, printed using a foil stamping technique instead of using ink. The foil design is printed as a mirror image in order to be viewed in the right direction once it is applied to the skin. Each metallic tattoo is protected by a transparent protective film.
Although they have become more popular and usually require a greater investment, airbrush temporary tattoos are less likely to achieve the look of a permanent tattoo, and may not last as long as press-on temporary tattoos. An artist sprays on airbrush tattoos using a stencil with alcohol-based cosmetic inks. Like decal tattoos, airbrush temporary tattoos also are easily removed with rubbing alcohol or baby oil.
Another tattoo alternative is henna-based tattoos, which generally contain no additives. Henna is a plant-derived substance which is painted on the skin, staining it a reddish-orange-to-brown color. Because of the semi-permanent nature of henna, they lack the realistic colors typical of decal temporary tattoos. Due to the time-consuming application process, it is a relatively poor option for children. Dermatological publications report that allergic reactions to natural henna are very rare and the product is generally considered safe for skin application. Serious problems can occur, however, from the use of henna with certain additives. The FDA and medical journals report that painted black henna temporary tattoos are especially dangerous.
Decal temporary tattoos, when legally sold in the United States, have had their color additives approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as cosmetics – the FDA has determined these colorants are safe for "direct dermal contact". While the FDA has received some accounts of minor skin irritation, including redness and swelling, from this type of temporary tattoo, the agency has found these symptoms to be "child specific" and not significant enough to support warnings to the public. Unapproved pigments, however, which are sometimes used by non-US manufacturers, can provoke allergic reactions in anyone.
The types of airbrush paints manufactured for crafting, creating art or decorating clothing should never be used for tattooing. These paints can be allergenic or toxic.
The FDA regularly issues warnings to consumers about avoiding any temporary tattoos labeled as black henna or pre-mixed henna as these may contain potentially harmful ingredients including silver nitrate, carmine, pyrogallol, disperse orange dye and chromium. Black henna gets its color from paraphenylenediamine (PPD), a textile dye approved by the FDA for human use only in hair coloring. In Canada, the use of PPD on the skin, including hair dye, is banned. Research has linked these and other ingredients to a range of health problems including allergic reactions, chronic inflammatory reactions, and late-onset allergic reactions to related clothing and hairdressing dyes. They can cause these reactions long after application. Neither black henna nor pre-mixed henna are approved for cosmetic use by the FDA.
Egyptians originally used tattoos to show dedication to a god. This also showed protection.
In other religions like Hinduism and Neopaganism, tattoos are accepted. Christianity remains one of the religions without a definitive answer on tattoos.
Judaism generally prohibits tattoos among its adherents based on the commandments in Leviticus 19. Jews tend to believe this commandment only applies to Jews and not to gentiles. However, views amongst Rabbis are divided, and an increasing number of young Jews are getting tattoos either for fashion, or an expression of their faith.
There is no specific rule in the New Testament prohibiting tattoos, and most Christian denominations believe the laws in Leviticus are outdated as well as believing the commandment only applied to the Israelites, not to the gentiles. While most Christian groups tolerate tattoos, some Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations believe the commandment applies today for Christians and believe it is a sin to get one.
Many Coptic Christians in Egypt have a cross tattoo on their right wrist to differentiate themselves from Muslims.
Tattoos are considered to be haram in Sunni Islam, based on rulings from scholars and passages in the Sunni Hadith. Shia Islam does not prohibit tattooing, and many Shia Muslims (Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, Iranians) have tattoos, specifically with religious themes.
Southeast Asia has a tradition of protective tattoos variously known as "sak yant" or yantra tattoos that include Buddhist images, prayers, and symbols. Images of the Buddha or other religious figures have caused controversy in some Buddhist countries when incorporated into tattoos by Westerners who do not follow traditional customs regarding respectful display of images of Buddhas or deities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30555 |
Protein secondary structure
Protein secondary structure is the three dimensional form of "local segments" of proteins. The two most common secondary structural elements are alpha helices and beta sheets, though beta turns and omega loops occur as well. Secondary structure elements typically spontaneously form as an intermediate before the protein folds into its three dimensional tertiary structure.
Secondary structure is formally defined by the pattern of hydrogen bonds between the amino hydrogen and carboxyl oxygen atoms in the peptide backbone. Secondary structure may alternatively be defined based on the regular pattern of backbone dihedral angles in a particular region of the Ramachandran plot regardless of whether it has the correct hydrogen bonds.
The concept of secondary structure was first introduced by Kaj Ulrik Linderstrøm-Lang at Stanford in 1952. Other types of biopolymers such as nucleic acids also possess characteristic secondary structures.
The most common secondary structures are alpha helices and beta sheets. Other helices, such as the 310 helix and π helix, are calculated to have energetically favorable hydrogen-bonding patterns but are rarely observed in natural proteins except at the ends of α helices due to unfavorable backbone packing in the center of the helix. Other extended structures such as the polyproline helix and alpha sheet are rare in native state proteins but are often hypothesized as important protein folding intermediates. Tight turns and loose, flexible loops link the more "regular" secondary structure elements. The random coil is not a true secondary structure, but is the class of conformations that indicate an absence of regular secondary structure.
Amino acids vary in their ability to form the various secondary structure elements. Proline and glycine are sometimes known as "helix breakers" because they disrupt the regularity of the α helical backbone conformation; however, both have unusual conformational abilities and are commonly found in turns. Amino acids that prefer to adopt helical conformations in proteins include methionine, alanine, leucine, glutamate and lysine ("MALEK" in amino-acid 1-letter codes); by contrast, the large aromatic residues (tryptophan, tyrosine and phenylalanine) and Cβ-branched amino acids (isoleucine, valine, and threonine) prefer to adopt β-strand conformations. However, these preferences are not strong enough to produce a reliable method of predicting secondary structure from sequence alone.
Low frequency collective vibrations are thought to be sensitive to local rigidity within proteins, revealing beta structures to be generically more rigid than alpha or disordered proteins. Neutron scattering measurements have directly connected the spectral feature at ~1 THz to collective motions of the secondary structure of beta-barrel protein GFP.
Hydrogen bonding patterns in secondary structures may be significantly distorted, which makes automatic determination of secondary structure difficult. There are several methods for formally defining protein secondary structure (e.g., DSSP, DEFINE, STRIDE, ScrewFit, SST).
The Dictionary of Protein Secondary Structure, in short DSSP, is commonly used to describe the protein secondary structure with single letter codes. The secondary structure is assigned based on hydrogen bonding patterns as those initially proposed by Pauling et al. in 1951 (before any protein structure had ever been experimentally determined). There are eight types of secondary structure that DSSP defines:
'Coil' is often codified as ' ' (space), C (coil) or '–' (dash). The helices (G, H and I) and sheet conformations are all required to have a reasonable length. This means that 2 adjacent residues in the primary structure must form the same hydrogen bonding pattern. If the helix or sheet hydrogen bonding pattern is too short they are designated as T or B, respectively. Other protein secondary structure assignment categories exist (sharp turns, Omega loops, etc.), but they are less frequently used.
Secondary structure is defined by hydrogen bonding, so the exact definition of a hydrogen bond is critical. The standard hydrogen-bond definition for secondary structure is that of DSSP, which is a purely electrostatic model. It assigns charges of ±"q"1 ≈ 0.42"e" to the carbonyl carbon and oxygen, respectively, and charges of ±"q"2 ≈ 0.20"e" to the amide hydrogen and nitrogen, respectively. The electrostatic energy is
According to DSSP, a hydrogen-bond exists if and only if "E" is less than . Although the DSSP formula is a relatively crude approximation of the "physical" hydrogen-bond energy, it is generally accepted as a tool for defining secondary structure.
SST is a Bayesian method to assign secondary structure to protein coordinate data using the Shannon information criterion of Minimum Message Length (MML) inference. SST treats any assignment of secondary structure as a potential hypothesis that attempts to explain (compress) given protein coordinate data. The core idea is that the best secondary structural assignment is the one that can explain (compress) the coordinates of a given protein coordinates in the most economical way, thus linking the inference of secondary structure to lossless data compression. SST accurately delineates any protein chain into regions associated with the following assignment types:
SST detects π and 310 helical caps to standard α-helices, and automatically assembles the various extended strands into consistent β-pleated sheets. It provides a readable output of dissected secondary structural elements, and a corresponding PyMol-loadable script to visualize the assigned secondary structural elements individually.
The rough secondary-structure content of a biopolymer (e.g., "this protein is 40% α-helix and 20% β-sheet.") can be estimated spectroscopically. For proteins, a common method is far-ultraviolet (far-UV, 170–250 nm) circular dichroism. A pronounced double minimum at 208 and 222 nm indicate α-helical structure, whereas a single minimum at 204 nm or 217 nm reflects random-coil or β-sheet structure, respectively. A less common method is infrared spectroscopy, which detects differences in the bond oscillations of amide groups due to hydrogen-bonding. Finally, secondary-structure contents may be estimated accurately using the chemical shifts of an initially unassigned NMR spectrum.
Predicting protein tertiary structure from only its amino sequence is a very challenging problem (see protein structure prediction), but using the simpler secondary structure definitions is more tractable.
Early methods of secondary-structure prediction were restricted to predicting the three predominate states: helix, sheet, or random coil. These methods were based on the helix- or sheet-forming propensities of individual amino acids, sometimes coupled with rules for estimating the free energy of forming secondary structure elements. The first widely used techniques to predict protein secondary structure from the amino acid sequence were the Chou–Fasman method and the GOR method. Although such methods claimed to achieve ~60% accurate in predicting which of the three states (helix/sheet/coil) a residue adopts, blind computing assessments later showed that the actual accuracy was much lower.
A significant increase in accuracy (to nearly ~80%) was made by exploiting multiple sequence alignment; knowing the full distribution of amino acids that occur at a position (and in its vicinity, typically ~7 residues on either side) throughout evolution provides a much better picture of the structural tendencies near that position. For illustration, a given protein might have a glycine at a given position, which by itself might suggest a random coil there. However, multiple sequence alignment might reveal that helix-favoring amino acids occur at that position (and nearby positions) in 95% of homologous proteins spanning nearly a billion years of evolution. Moreover, by examining the average hydrophobicity at that and nearby positions, the same alignment might also suggest a pattern of residue solvent accessibility consistent with an α-helix. Taken together, these factors would suggest that the glycine of the original protein adopts α-helical structure, rather than random coil. Several types of methods are used to combine all the available data to form a 3-state prediction, including neural networks, hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Modern prediction methods also provide a confidence score for their predictions at every position.
Secondary-structure prediction methods were evaluated by the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiments and continuously benchmarked, e.g. by EVA (benchmark). Based on these tests, the most accurate methods were Psipred, SAM, PORTER, PROF, and SABLE. The chief area for improvement appears to be the prediction of β-strands; residues confidently predicted as β-strand are likely to be so, but the methods are apt to overlook some β-strand segments (false negatives). There is likely an upper limit of ~90% prediction accuracy overall, due to the idiosyncrasies of the standard method (DSSP) for assigning secondary-structure classes (helix/strand/coil) to PDB structures, against which the predictions are benchmarked.
Accurate secondary-structure prediction is a key element in the prediction of tertiary structure, in all but the simplest (homology modeling) cases. For example, a confidently predicted pattern of six secondary structure elements βαββαβ is the signature of a ferredoxin fold.
Both protein and nucleic acid secondary structures can be used to aid in multiple sequence alignment. These alignments can be made more accurate by the inclusion of secondary structure information in addition to simple sequence information. This is sometimes less useful in RNA because base pairing is much more highly conserved than sequence. Distant relationships between proteins whose primary structures are unalignable can sometimes be found by secondary structure.
It has been shown that α-helices are more stable, robust to mutations and designable than β-strands in natural proteins, thus designing functional all-α proteins is likely to be easier that designing proteins with both helices and strands; this has been recently confirmed experimentally. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28691 |
Sabermetrics
Sabermetrics or SABRmetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.
Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
Henry Chadwick, a sportswriter in New York, developed the box score in 1858. This was the first way statisticians were able to describe the sport of baseball by numerically tracking various aspects of game play. The creation of the box score has given baseball statisticians a summary of the individual and team performances for a given game.
Sabermetrics research began in the middle of the 20th century with the writings of Earnshaw Cook, one of the earliest sabermetricians. Cook's 1964 book, "Percentage Baseball", was one of the first of its kind. At first, the book was widely criticized and considered hocus pocus by organized baseball. The idea of a science of baseball statistics was not considered legitimate until Bill James began releasing his annual compendium of baseball data, "Baseball Abstracts", in 1977.
Bill James believed that people misunderstood how the game of baseball was played, claiming that it is actually defined by the conditions under which the sport is played. Sabermetricians, sometimes considered baseball statisticians, began trying to replace the longtime favorite statistic known as the batting average. It has been claimed that team batting average provides a relatively poor fit for team runs scored. Sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and that a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team.
Before Bill James made the concept of sabermetrics known, Davey Johnson used an IBM System/360 at team owner Jerold Hoffberger's brewery to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation while playing for the Baltimore Orioles in the early 1970s. He used his results in an unsuccessful attempt to promote to his manager Earl Weaver the idea that he should bat second in the lineup. He wrote IBM BASIC programs to help him manage the Tidewater Tides, and after becoming manager of the New York Mets in 1984, he arranged for a team employee to write a dBASE II application to compile and store advanced metrics on team statistics. Craig R. Wright was another employee in Major League Baseball, working with the Texas Rangers in the early 1980s. During his time with the Rangers, he became known as the first front office employee in MLB history to work under the title Sabermetrician.
David Smith founded Retrosheet in 1989, with the objective of computerizing the box score of every major league baseball game ever played, in order to more accurately collect and compare the statistics of the game.
The Oakland Athletics began to use a more quantitative approach to baseball by focusing on sabermetric principles in the 1990s. This initially began with Sandy Alderson as the former general manager of the team when he used the principles toward obtaining relatively undervalued players. His ideas were continued when Billy Beane took over as general manager in 1997, a job he held until 2015, and hired his assistant Paul DePodesta. Through the statistical analysis done by Beane and DePodesta in the 2002 season, the Oakland A's went on to win 20 games in a row. This was a historic moment for the franchise, in which the 20th game was played at the Alameda County Coliseum. His approaches to baseball soon gained national recognition when Michael Lewis published "" in 2003 to detail Beane's use of Sabermetrics. In 2011, a film based on Lewis' book also called "Moneyball" was released to further provide insight into the techniques used in the Oakland Athletics' front office.
Sabermetrics was created in an attempt for baseball fans to learn about the sport through objective evidence. This is performed by evaluating players in every aspect of the game, specifically batting, pitching, and fielding. These evaluation measures are usually phrased in terms of either runs or team wins as older statistics were deemed ineffective.
The traditional measure of batting performance is considered to be hits divided by the total number of at-bats. Bill James, along with other fathers of sabermetrics, found this measure to be flawed, as it ignores any other way a batter can reach base besides a hit. This led to the creation of the On-base percentage, which takes walks and hit-by-pitches into consideration. To calculate the On-Base percentage, the total number of hits + bases on balls + hit by pitch are divided by at bats + bases on balls + hit by pitch + sacrifice flies.
Another issue with the traditional measure of the batting average is that it does not distinguish between hits (i.e., singles, doubles, triples, and home runs) and gives each hit equal value. Thus, a measure that differentiates between these four hit outcomes, the slugging percentage, was created. To calculate the slugging percentage, the total number of bases of all hits is divided by the total numbers of time at bat. Stephen Jay Gould proposed that the disappearance of .400 batting average is actually a sign of general improvement in batting. This is because, in the modern era, players are becoming more focused on hitting for power than for average. Therefore, it has become more valuable to compare players using the slugging percentage and on-base percentage over the batting average.
These two improved sabermetric measures are important skills to measure in a batter and have been combined to create the modern statistic OPS. On-base plus slugging is the sum of the on-base percentage and the slugging percentage. This modern statistic has become useful in comparing players and is a powerful method of predicting runs scored from a certain player.
Some of the other statistics that sabermetricians use to evaluate batting performance are weighted on-base average, secondary average, runs created, and equivalent average.
The traditional measure of pitching performance is considered to be the earned run average. It is calculated by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number of innings pitched and multiplying by nine because of the nine innings. This statistic provides the number of runs that a pitcher allows per game. It has proven to be flawed as it does not separate the ability of the pitcher from the abilities of the fielders that he plays with. Another classic measure for pitching is a pitcher's winning percentage. Winning percentage is calculated by dividing wins by the number of decisions (wins plus losses). This statistic can also be flawed as it is dependent on the pitcher's teammates' performances at the plate and in the field.
Sabermetricians have attempted to find different measures of pitching performance that does not include the performances of the fielders involved. One of the earliest developed, and one of the most popular in use, is walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP), which while not completely defense-independent, tends to indicate how many times a pitcher is likely to put a player on base (either by base-on-balls, hit-by-pitch, or base hit) and thus how effective batters are against a particular pitcher in reaching base. A more recent development is the creation of defense independent pitching statistics (DIPS) system. Voros McCracken has been credited with the development of this system in 1999. Through his research, McCracken was able to show that there is little to no difference between pitchers in the number of hits they allow, regardless of their skill level. Some examples of these statistics are defense-independent ERA, fielding independent pitching, and defense-independent component ERA. Other sabermetricians have furthered the work in DIPS, such as Tom Tango who runs the "Tango on Baseball" sabermetrics website.
"Baseball Prospectus" created another statistics called the peripheral ERA. This measure of a pitcher's performance takes hits, walks, home runs allowed, and strikeouts while adjusting for ballpark factors. Each ballpark has different dimensions when it comes to the outfield wall so a pitcher should not be measured the same for each of these parks.
Batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is another useful measurement for determining pitcher's performance. When a pitcher has a high BABIP, they will often show improvements in the following season, while a pitcher with low BABIP will often show a decline in the following season. This is based on the statistical concept of regression to the mean. Others have created various means of attempting to quantify individual pitches based on characteristics of the pitch, as opposed to runs earned or balls hit.
Value over replacement player (VORP) is considered a popular sabermetric statistic. This statistic demonstrates how much a player contributes to his team in comparison to a fake replacement player that performs below average. This measurement was founded by Keith Woolner, a former writer for the sabermetric group/website "Baseball Prospectus".
Wins above replacement (WAR) is another popular sabermetric statistic that will evaluate a player's contributions to his team. Similar to VORP, WAR compares a certain player to a replacement-level player in order to determine the number of additional wins the player has provided to his team. WAR values vary with hitting positions and are largely determined by a player's successful performance and their amount of playing time.
Many traditional and modern statistics, such as ERA and Wins Shared, don't give a full understanding of what is taking place on the field. Simple ratios are not sufficient to understand the statistical data of baseball. Structured quantitative analysis is capable of explaining many aspects of the game, for example, to examine how often a team should attempt to steal.
Related rates can be used in baseball to give exact calculations of different plays in a game. For example, if a runner is being sent home from third, related rates can be used to show if a throw from the outfield would have been on time or if it was correctly cut off before the plate. Related rates also can aid in determining how fast a player can get around the bases after a batted ball, information that helps in the development of scouting reports and individual player development.
Momentum and force is a similar application of calculus in baseball. Particularly, the average force on a bat while hitting a ball can be calculated by combining different concepts within applied calculus. First, the change in the ball's momentum by the external force F(t) must be calculated. The momentum can be found by multiplying the mass and velocity. The external force F(t) is a continuous function of time.
Sabermetrics can be used for multiple purposes, but the most common are evaluating past performance and predicting future performance to determine a player's contributions to his team. These may be useful when determining who should win end-of-the-season awards such as MVP and when determining the value of making a certain trade.
Most baseball players tend to play a few years in the minor leagues before they are called up to the major league. The competitive differences coupled with ballpark effects make the exact comparison of a player's statistics a problem. Sabermetricians have been able to clear this problem by adjusting the player's minor league statistics, also known as the Minor-League Equivalency. Through these adjustments, teams are able to look at a player's performance in both AA and AAA to determine if he is fit to be called up to the majors.
Sabermetrics methods are generally used for three purposes:
A machine learning model can be built using data sets available at sources such as baseball-reference. This model will give probability estimates for the outcome of specific games or the performance of particular players. These estimates are increasingly accurate when applied to a large number of events over a long term. The game outcome (win/lose) is treated as having a binomial distribution.
Predictions can be made using a logistic regression model with explanatory variables including: opponents' runs scored, runs scored, shutouts time at bat, winning rate, and pitcher whip.
Many sabermetricians are still working hard to contribute to the field through creating new measures and asking new questions. Bill James' two "Historical Baseball Abstract" editions and "Win Shares" book have continued to advance the field of sabermetrics, 25 years after he helped start the movement. His former assistant Rob Neyer, who is now a senior writer at ESPN.com and national baseball editor of SBNation, also worked on popularizing sabermetrics since the mid-1980s.
Nate Silver, a former writer and managing partner of "Baseball Prospectus", invented PECOTA. This acronym stands for "Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm", and is a sabermetric system for forecasting Major League Baseball player performance. Simply put, it assumes that the player's careers will follow a similar trajectory to players that they are similar to now. This system has been owned by "Baseball Prospectus" since 2003 and helps the website's authors invent or improve widely relied upon sabermetric measures and techniques.
Beginning in the 2007 baseball season, the MLB started looking at technology to record detailed information regarding each pitch that is thrown in a game. This became known as the PITCHf/x system which is able to record the speed of the pitch, at its release point and as it crossed the plate, as well as the location and angle of the break of certain pitches through video cameras. FanGraphs is a website that favors this system as well as the analysis of play-by-play data. The website also specializes in publishing advanced baseball statistics as well as graphics that evaluate and track the performance of players and teams. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28692 |
Space Quest
Space Quest is a series of six comic science fiction computer adventure games released between 1986 and 1995. The games follow the adventures of a hapless janitor named Roger Wilco as he campaigns through the galaxy for "truth, justice and really clean floors".
Initially created for Sierra On-Line by Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy (who called themselves the "Two Guys from Andromeda"), the games parodied both science fiction properties such as "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" (the theme song itself is a parody of the "Star Wars" theme), as well as pop-culture phenomena from McDonald's to Microsoft. The series featured a silly sense of humor heavily reliant on puns and wacky storylines. Roger Wilco, a perpetual loser, is often depicted as the underdog who repeatedly saves the universe (often by accident) – only to be either ignored or punished for violating minor regulations in the process.
Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, who had already worked together on the Sierra game "The Black Cauldron", wanted to create a humorous science fiction adventure game. They also wanted it to star a janitor (a choice possibly inspired by the mop-wielding main character from Infocom's humorous sci-fi text adventure "Planetfall").
Murphy commented that "Sierra was in a mindset where everything was medieval and it was all fairly serious. I wanted to do a game that was more fun. We even liked the idea of 'fun death'! I mean, if the player is gonna die or fail, they should at least get a laugh out of it. So we came up with the idea of making death amusing. Let's face it, most adventure games involve a good deal of frustration for the player. But we felt that if we made failure fun, to an extent, you might have players actually going back and looking for new ways to die, just to see what happens!"
Crowe noted, "We wanted to do two things for the player. One, we wanted him to feel as if he were in a movie, where he could just sort of kick back and enjoy the scenery. We also wanted the player to feel as if he really was the character on the screen."
Although skeptical, Ken Williams gave the idea a shot. Scott and Mark created a short demo, which ended up becoming the first four rooms of "Space Quest I", at which point Ken gave the project a green-light.
Both "Space Quests I" and "II" were developed in Adventure Game Interpreter, Sierra's own programming language. "Space Quest III" was written in Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI), which had 3-D capabilities. "Space Quest IV" marked an evolution in terms of graphics by increasing the number of colors from 16 to 256 colors.
Roger Wilco is a fictional character and the protagonist of the "Space Quest" series, introduced in "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" in 1986. Roger is a bumbling if well-meaning everyman character, a spacefaring janitor who has a tendency to attract trouble and stumble into dangerous or interesting situations. Despite saving the universe on multiple occasions, he seems unable to gain any respect from society, and works as a "sanitation engineer" (in one form or another) throughout the series.
The character's name is a reference to voice procedure, one of many puns in the series (it means "receiving you, will comply"). The first two "Space Quest" games allowed the player to choose the character's name, which defaulted to Roger Wilco if left blank. This feature was later removed in the remake of the first game.
Roger is originally a janitor from the planet Xenon of the Earnon system. We first meet him as the janitor and sole survivor of the scientific research ship "Arcada", which was overrun by the apparently hostile Sariens. After several extremely deadly adventures and a bit of janitorial work, he enters the StarCon Academy. Graduating in "Space Quest V", he is promoted from a janitor to captain of the garbage scow "SCS Eureka". He also meets Beatrice Creakworm Wankmeister, with whom he becomes romantically involved. In "Space Quest 6", his spot in the limelight ends as he is busted back down to janitor and assigned to the backwoods of the cosmos.
It is revealed in the time travel tomfoolery that is "Space Quest IV" that Roger would eventually marry Beatrice and that they would have a son (Roger Wilco Jr.) As Wilco now owes his life to his son, this must happen. Beatrice is absent from "Space Quest 6", but she is mentioned in the game's closing credits and by Roger himself. We also learn that by "Space Quest XII", when Roger Jr. is a young adult, Roger will be "unavailable" for some reason. The details are never disclosed.
While Roger retains his basic appearance and sustains no lasting damage from his swashbucklings and repeated near-mutilations, his hair begins the series brown and changes to blonde in the upgrade between parts "III" and "IV". (The same has happened to fellow adventure protagonists Guybrush Threepwood and Devon Aidendale, in Devon's case to the other direction.) While this retcon is never addressed in the game itself, it spawned a full-fledged fangame, "Space Quest: The Lost Chapter".
Including him on the 2004 list of "top ten working class heroes", "Retro Gamer" opined that "for a hero that Ken Williams (co-founder of Sierra) was initially unimpressed with, Roger Wilco has become a classic cult figure."
The original "Space Quest" game was released in October 1986 and quickly became a hit, selling in excess of 100,000 copies (sales are believed to be around 200,000 to date, not including the many compilations it has been included in). It was remade and re-released in 1991 as "Space Quest I: Roger Wilco in the Sarien Encounter".
Released in 1987; Roger, with his newfound status of Hero, is transferred to the Xenon Orbital Station 4 and promoted to head (and only) janitor. All is quiet until he is abducted by Sludge Vohaul, who was behind the original Sarien attack of the "Arcada". As Roger is being transported to the Labion labour mines as punishment for thwarting Sludge's original plan, the prison ship crash-lands in a nearby jungle upon the planet. Our hero manages to escape his pursuers and the dangers of the Labion jungle and soon reaches Sludge's asteroid base. Once again, it's up to Roger alone to stop Vohaul's evil plan: to eradicate sentient life from Xenon by launching millions of cloned insurance salesmen at the planet.
Released in 1989; Roger's escape pod from the end of "SQII" is captured by an automated garbage freighter. He escapes the robot-controlled scow by repairing an old ship, the "Aluminum Mallard" (a play on Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose" and "Star Wars"' "Millennium Falcon"). He eventually discovers the sinister activities of a video game company known as ScumSoft run by the "Pirates of Pestulon".
Released in 1991; in this installment, Roger embarks on a wacky time-travel adventure through "Space Quest" games both past and future. A reborn Sludge Vohaul from "Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II" chases Roger through time in an attempt to finally kill him. Roger also visits "Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros" (whose title is a parody of Infocom's game "Leather Goddesses of Phobos") and "Space Quest I"; in the latter, the graphics and music revert to the style of the original game and Roger is threatened by a group of monochromatic bikers who consider Roger's 256 colors pretentious (or comment on other graphics modes if played in EGA or Monochrome).
The games "Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II" and "Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros" were never actually developed or released as full games, they exist only internally in "Space Quest IV".
Released in 1993; in "Space Quest V", Roger is now a cadet in the StarCon academy. He graduates (or rather, cheats through the final exam) and is appointed captain of his own spacecraft (actually a space garbage scow). The main plot is to stop a mutagenic disease that is spreading through the galaxy by discovering its source, and fighting everyone that got infected. In the end, the disease infected the crew members of the "SCS Goliath", a powerful warship, whose commander, Raemes T. Quirk (a rather blatant spoof of Captain Kirk), subsequently attacks the "Eureka". In the end, Roger sacrifices his ship to get rid of the plague – and suddenly, if temporarily, becomes the commander of the fleet's flagship.
Roger's cheating is, along with Raemes T. Quirk, an homage to William Shatner's "Star Trek" character, who famously cheated on his own Starfleet exam by reprogramming a "no-win" scenario so that he could successfully complete it. In a typical twist of luck, however, Roger's exam scores are still achieved by accident.
Released in 1995, this game was the last to be released in the "Space Quest" series. Having defeated the diabolical pukoid mutants in "Space Quest V", Captain Roger Wilco triumphantly returns to StarCon headquarters – only to be court-martialed due to breaking StarCon regulations while saving the galaxy. He's busted down to Janitor Second Class, and assigned to the "SCS DeepShip 86" (a parody of ""), commanded by Commander Kielbasa, a Cowardly Lion look-alike whose name is taken from the Polish sausage as well as being a play on the names of both the feline Kilrathi from the video game series Wing Commander and of the character Mufasa from the animated motion picture The Lion King. His voice is a parody of Captain Jean-Luc Picard from . The main villain in the game is a wrinkly old lady named Sharpei, a pun on the dog Shar Pei, a wrinkly dog.
The game's subtitle comes from the final portion, in which Roger has to undergo miniaturization and enter the body of a shipmate and romantic interest. (This segment also provided the game's original subtitle, "Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?", which was not used due to legal threats from the makers of the "Carmen Sandiego" products.)
The demo for "Space Quest 6" is actually a short game unto itself. It uses the SQ6 engine and takes place aboard the "SCS DeepShip 86" but is a stand-alone adventure. The ship is taken over by Borg-like invaders called the Bjorn, and Wilco must defeat them.
In "Space Quest IV", Roger travels into both the past and future of the game's timeline. Even in-game characters are conscious of living in a video game, and refer to eras with sequel numbers, not temporal units (such as years), even though specific years are named elsewhere in the "Space Quest" canon. Portions of the game took place in the time frames of the following "sequels":
These games were never actually created, and only exist within the plot of "Space Quest IV". Scott Murphy has stated that he did intend to use these titles if the series had made it that far and the storyline still permitted it.
Budget software including several mini-games taken from the "Space Quest" series. Including hoverspeeder, Monolith Burger maker, and Ms. Astro Chicken.
"Planet Pinball" is a series of three "Space Quest IV" themed pinball boards in Take a Break! Pinball. The boards include; Level One: Planet Xenon in the Beginning, Level Two: Spaced Travel, Level Three: Reformation Day.
Roger Wilco appears as an opponent in "Hoyle's Official Book of Games, Volume I". He has conversations with the other opponents, talking about his adventures in the first three "Space Quest" games. Roger Wilco is trapped in the Hoyle game, and is trying to find a way to escape back to his game world.
Roger Wilco returns in "Hoyle 3", along with bad guy characters, Arnoid and Vohaul, but the characters are limited to talking about the game itself.
Roger also appears as an opponent in "Hoyle Classic Card Games", the fourth game in the series. Again interaction is limited to the game only.
Sierra tried on several occasions to revive the series for another episode, with a working subtitle of "The Return to Roman Numerals", since the previous game was titled "Space Quest 6, not "Space Quest VI.
Development of "Space Quest VII" was underway in 1996 when Sierra released "The Space Quest Collection", which consisted of "Space Quest I" through "6" and included a brief trailer of "Space Quest VII" (consisting of Roger strapping a giant rocket to his back and using it to push himself forward on roller skates in a scene reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote). Little was released regarding story line, interface, et cetera, although there was speculation that the game would introduce a multiplayer aspect. Scott Murphy said during development that "Space Quest VII" would contain some 3D elements, but would not require the use of a 3D accelerator card. Due to poor sales of "Grim Fandango", a high-profile adventure game by LucasArts, there was a perception that humorous adventure games were no longer viable, so when Vivendi took over Sierra, "Space Quest VII" was cancelled.
This project was eventually restarted in 1999, and pitched to management, but ultimately did not have enough support to continue within the company. Few details are known about the "SQVII" relaunch, save that there was one very ardent supporter, who later left Vivendi.
Another "Space Quest" began development by Escape Factory for the Microsoft Xbox video game console in 2002, entitled simply "Space Quest".
This attempt at creating a new "Space Quest" was announced on February 7, 2002. Development proceeded for almost a year and a half before the project was cancelled. According to "Space Quest 6" designer Josh Mandel, the "SQVII" designers were forbidden from using story elements from the original "Space Quest" games or from even playing the games. This is disputable, since other sources claimed the developers had played the games before. Website FYI.com, also claimed that this "gutted" "SQVII" would not have been an adventure game at all and would have been released only on game console platforms such as the Xbox rather than the PC. Since then the Vivendi's Product Manager Bruce Goodwill, has confirmed that the title was going to be released only on console platforms.
The game was planned as a departure from the main "Space Quest" series, rumors it starred a new character named "Wilger", although Roger Wilco was playable (as seen in a production video). Though it would have maintained a comedic theme in space, no plan was made to connect it to the original series. It was cancelled around 2003.
Vivendi Universal has re-released the "Space Quest Collection" (originally named "Space Quest Compilation") that is compatible with Windows XP. The collection was released September 15, 2006.
The "Space Quest" games were made compatible by the licensing of DOSBox, a free program that allows users to play old DOS games on Windows XP. Valve's digital distribution platform re-released the XP/Vista compatible "Space Quest Collection" on July 23, 2009. It is so far unavailable in Australia and New Zealand.
"Space Quest" merchandise included the "Space Quest III" VHS tape and pin, "Space Quest 6" mug, calling card and patch and an autographed picture of Roger Wilco.
Two strategy guides were released that contained novelizations of the first five games from Roger Wilco's perspective.
The first of these included "The Space Quest Companion" by Peter and Jeremy Spear. The book is similar to Peter Spear's "The King's Quest Companion" and "The Official Uncensored Leisure Suit Larry Bedside Companion". The first edition covered the first four games (with a preview of SQ5), and the second added the fifth game. It was written from the perspective of Roger Wilco sending journals on disks back into the past, so that his adventures could be made into video games so that his great grand parents (x-times removed) would have a chance to meet each other and fall in love through their mutual love of the games. Thus by inspiring the game designers to create the games, he insured his own future existence. Each story began with Roger's daydreams and his fantasies of marrying Cornucopia Agricorp and later Beatrice Wankmeister.
The other was "The Official Guide To Roger Wilco's Space Adventures" by Jill Champion. It is similar to her "The Official Book of Police Quest". It came in two editions as well. The book contains two interviews with Roger Wilco (one just after events of "SQIV", and the other after "SQV"). The novels themselves are written as Roger's running monologues during his adventures. The first edition covers "SQ" EGA to "SQIV", and the second edition covers "SQI" remake to "SQV". The novel of SQ1 in the first edition is based on the original SQ1, and the version in the second edition is based on the remake of SQ1.
Adventure Comics (a division of Malibu Comics) released three issues in 1992 of a comic based on "Space Quest I" under the name "The Adventures of Roger Wilco". The first was written by John Shaw and was in full colour. The other two were written by Paul O'Connor and were black and white. The print run was very small and the books are very hard to find now.
The series has remained popular with Sierra fans, and several fan sites are still active and maintain a community dedicated to the games. There have been several attempts to create a "Space Quest" fan game, such as the now-canceled SQ7.org project, and several fan games have actually been released.
Games set in the "Space Quest" universe:
Games influenced by "Space Quest":
An action/adventure "Space Quest" game was planned for the Xbox, but was canceled. "Thy Dungeonman II", a text adventure game from the creators of Homestar Runner, uses cover art that depicts the title character holding a mop in the same way Roger Wilco does on the "Space Quest" box art. He is also described as a "custodial knight" and the mop is also used to defeat enemies in a maze portion of the game.
On April 14, 2012, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy announced they had reunited and were planning an original adventure game set in space. They established a new game development company called Two Guys from Andromeda for that purpose. Co-founder of the company Chris Pope (dubbed as "Space Pope" from fans) works to operate its marketing and interact directly with fans as well as Executive Producer. A Kickstarter project was launched to fund the development of the new game or "SpaceVenture", with plans to feature the voice of Gary Owens (narrator of "Space Quest IV" and "6"), prior to his death in 2015.
As of June 13, 2012, they achieved their goal of $500,000 eventually raising $539,768 from their Kickstarter campaign, and have begun work on the game. As of September 2012, enough funding has been achieved to enable them to translate the game into German, Spanish, French and Italian.
The game acts as a spiritual successor to the "Space Quest" series, including the use of a janitor as its protagonist. The hero in this case is named "Ace Hardway" after the home improvement chain Ace Hardware. Another character is "Cluck Y'egger", after test pilot Chuck Yeager. He is a chicken superhero based on the Astro Chicken running gag in the "Space Quest" series. The game will be rendered in CGI, but a "retro graphics" feature has been proposed.
In June 2013, it was announced that there would be a playable Alpha demo at the 2013 San Diego Comicon.
In January 2014, the game had a projected late 2015 release date. In October 2015, the "Two Guys of Andromeda" promised to continue development and to release the game in November 2016. The game remains in development, but has still (as of June 2020, nearly eight years after reaching its funding goal) not been given a release date. On June 2, 2019, an update was released on the Two Guys from Andromeda Twitter and Kickstarter pages revealing the box art for the game. More details about the game are posted on Two Guys from Andromeda Kickstarter project page.
As of March 20, 2020, the Two Guys are hoping for a June release. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28694 |
Mercy rule
A mercy rule, slaughter rule, knockout rule, or skunk rule ends a two-competitor sports competition earlier than the scheduled endpoint if one competitor has a very large and presumably insurmountable scoring lead over the other. It is called the "mercy" rule because it spares further humiliation for the loser. It is common in youth sports in North America, where running up the score is considered unsporting. It is especially common in baseball and softball in which there is no game clock and a dominant team could in theory continue an inning endlessly.
The rules vary widely, depending on the level of competition, but nearly all youth sports leagues and high school sports associations and many college sports associations in the United States have mercy rules for sports including baseball, softball, American football and association football.
However, mercy rules usually do not take effect until a prescribed point in the game (like the second half of an association football game). Thus, one team, particularly if it is decidedly better than a weaker opponent, can still "run up the score" before the rule takes effect. For instance, in American football, one team could be ahead by 70 points with three minutes left in the first half; in baseball, the better team could have a 20-run lead in the second inning, but the game would still continue.
At the middle- or high-school level, 34 states use a mercy rule that may involve a "continuous clock" (the clock continues to operate on most plays when the clock would normally stop, such as an incomplete pass) once a team has a certain lead (for example, 35 points) during the second half. That greatly decreases the amount of time taken for a game to complete, which reduces the leading team's chances to score more and the time that the trailing team must spend in facing an insurmountable deficit. In most states, the clock stops only for scores, timeouts (officials', injury, or charged), or the end of the quarter. Plays that would normally stop the clock, such as penalties, incomplete passes, going out of bounds, or change of possession, would not stop the clock. The rule varies by state; for example, the clock does not stop upon a score in Colorado, Kansas (regular-season games only), or Missouri (fourth quarter only).
In most states, once the point differential is reduced to below the mercy rule-invoking amount, normal timing procedures resume until either the end of the game or the mercy rule-invoking point differential is re-established; in Colorado, Georgia, and Kansas, the clock continues to run even if the differential falls below the threshold. Most states that have mercy rules waive this rule for a championship game.
In some states, coaches and game officials may choose to end a game at their own discretion at any time during the second half if the continuous clock rule is in effect; that usually happens if a lopsided margin continues to increase or if threatening weather is imminent. Sometimes the coach of the team that is losing agrees to shorten the length of a quarter in addition to the continuous clock rule. Although it is rare, some states or high school conferences have rules in which the team with a very large lead may not run a certain play for the rest of the game, such as a deep pass or outside run.
In some states (where 8-man and 6-man football is widely used), the rules call for a game to end when one team is ahead by a certain score (like 45 or 50 points) at halftime or any time thereafter. In other states with 6- or 8-man football, continuous clock rules are used, and the rule may be modified; for instance, in Iowa, the rule goes into effect if the 35-point differential is reached at any time after the first quarter.
In a variant on the mercy rule used in Connecticut high school football from 2006 to 2016, the team's coach was issued a one-game suspension (i.e., for the team's next game) if at any point the team had a 50-point lead. In 2016 it was replaced with a running clock rule.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association's mercy rule provides, "Any time during the game, the playing time of any remaining period or periods and the intermission between halves may be shortened by mutual agreement of the opposing head coaches and the referee." (NCAA Football Rule 3-2-2-a) NCAA Football Approved Ruling 3-2-2-I cites an example: "At halftime the score is 56–0. The coaches and the referee agree that the third and fourth quarters should be shortened to 12 minutes each. The coaches also request that the second half be played with a 'running clock' i.e., that the game clock not be stopped." The NCAA Football Rules Committee determined, "The remaining quarters may be shortened to 12 minutes each. However, the 'running clock' is not allowed; normal clock rules apply for the entire game."
The most recent example of an NCAA football game shortened by invoking this rule occurred September 1, 2018 during a game Georgia played against Austin Peay in Athens Georgia. With the score 45-0 in the 3rd quarter and a high heat index, the Austin Peay Coach Will Healy suggested to Georgia head coach Kirby Smart that they play a 10 minute fourth quarter instead of the typical 15 minute fourth quarter. The coaches and referee agreed and the game was shortened.
September 24, 2016 the Missouri Tigers led Delaware State 58–0 at halftime. The coaches agreed to shorten the third and fourth quarters from 15 minutes to 10 minutes each, shortening the total game time from 60 minutes to 50 minutes. Missouri added three touchdowns in the abbreviated second half to make the final score 79–0, setting team records for the most points scored in a game (79), the greatest margin of victory (79), and the largest number of touchdowns scored (11). (Missouri would have scored 80 points, but it had missed an extra point early in the game).
Also in 2016, the game between Clemson and South Carolina State had both the third and fourth quarters shortened from 15 minutes to 12 as a result of Clemson leading the game at half 45-0. The final score of the game was 59-0.
Earlier in 2016, the game between Texas State and Arkansas saw the fourth quarter shortened to 10 minutes when severe thunderstorms were approaching Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium. Arkansas led 42–3 at the end of the third quarter, and the final period was scoreless. A similar scenario took place in 2017 in the game between TCU and Kansas, where the coaches agreed to a running clock for the final 12:49 of the game due to severe thunderstorms approaching Amon G. Carter Stadium.
In a 2013 game, Old Dominion University (ODU) was losing to the University of North Carolina (UNC) 80–20 when ODU coach Bobby Wilder asked for the fourth quarter to be shortened by five minutes, which UNC coach Larry Fedora agreed to. Fedora also directed his quarterback to take a knee on fourth and goal with 1:53 remaining to not run up the score.
In a 1988 game, Kansas Jayhawks coach Glen Mason asked if a running clock could be used after his team trailed 49–0 at halftime to the Auburn Tigers. Auburn coach Pat Dye and the officials agreed, and Auburn ended up a 56–7 winner.
Despite the NCAA Football Rules Committee's subsequent ruling (A.R. 3-2-2-I) that a "running clock" is not permitted, a continuous clock was used September 5, 2013, beginning in the fourth quarter when the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets had a 63–0 lead against the Elon Phoenix. That was at the request of Elon coach Jason Swepson and agreed upon by Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson. Georgia Tech won the game 70–0.
However, in the Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges, a running clock is allowed if the team is ahead by 38 points or more. This rule, unique only to the MACJC, was instituted in 2013.
International Blind Sports Federation rules require that any time during a game in which one team has scored ten (10) more goals than the other team that game is deemed completed. In US high school soccer, most states use a mercy rule that ends the game if one team is ahead by 10 or more goals at any point from halftime onward. Youth soccer leagues use variations on the rule.
International competitions are sanctioned by the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), formed by the 2013 merger of the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) and International Softball Federation (ISF).
In international baseball competition and the World Baseball Classic (WBC), games are ended when one team is ahead by 10 runs, once at least seven completed innings are played by the trailing team. In seven inning contests (women's competition and doubleheaders), the same applies after five innings of a seven-inning game.
The inaugural WBC in 2006 followed the IBAF mercy rule, with an additional rule stopping a game after five innings when a team is ahead by at least 15 runs. The mercy rules applied to the round-robin (now double-elimination) matches only, not to the semi-finals or final.
In a six-inning game such as Little League Baseball and Softball, rules call for the game to end if the winning team is ahead by 15 runs after three innings played or 10 runs after four innings played by the trailing team.
Softball rules are different for fast/modified fast pitch and slow pitch. In WBSC-sanctioned competitions, the run ahead rule (the WBSC terminology) is, for fast or modified fast pitch, 20 runs after three innings, 15 after four, or 8 after 5. In slow pitch, the margin is 20 runs after four innings or 15 after five. The NCAA has also adopted the rule.
In regular season or conference tournament NCAA and NAIA college baseball, the IBAF rule may be implemented. Most NCAA conferences limit the rule to the final day of a series, for travel reasons, or primarily during conference tournaments where four to five games are played in a day, in order to allow the next game to start. The rule is not allowed in NCAA tournament play (regionals, super regionals and College World Series), in which all games must be at least nine innings.
In NCAA softball, the rule is invoked if one team is ahead by at least eight runs after five innings and, unlike with college baseball, applies in the NCAA tournament as well with the exception of the championship series. In American high school softball, most states use a mercy rule of 20 runs ahead in three innings or 10 in five innings. (In either case, if the home team is ahead by the requisite number of runs, the game will end after the top half of the inning.)
Most state high school associations (where games are seven innings) use the IBAF Women's rule after five innings have been played by the trailing team; some associations further the rule by ending a game after either three or four innings if the lead is at least 15 runs. For softball, the rule is 12 after three innings and 10 after five. However, since the home team has the last at-bat, the rules usually allow visiting teams to score an unlimited number of runs in the top half of an inning. That can be prevented by invoking the rule only after the home team has completed its half of the inning.
Due to the untimed nature of innings, some leagues either impose caps on the number of runs that can be scored in one inning (usually in the 4-8 range) or limit the number of plate appearances in an inning (typically, such a limit will consist of one rotation of the batting order). Such rules ensure that games will complete in a reasonable length of time, but it can also mean that a lead of a certain size becomes insurmountable by the cap, which can be prevented by not invoking the rule in such circumstances.
In high school basketball, many states have a "continuous clock" rule, similar to American football, which takes effect in the second half after a lead grows to a prescribed point (in Iowa, 35 points or more; in Kansas, 30 points or more but only in the fourth quarter). The clock stops only for charged, officials' or injury time-outs; or at the end of the third quarter. The clock would not stop when would normally stop, such as for fouls, free throws, out-of-bounds plays or substitutions.
The rules vary when normal timing procedures take effect after a lead is diminished (such as because of the trailing team's rally); for instance, in Iowa, normal timing procedures are enforced if the lead is lowered to 25 points but re-instituted once the lead grows back to 35 or more points. By comparison, in Kansas, if the running clock is triggered, it will not stop except for a timeout or an injury even if the differential is reduced to under 30 points. As with other sports, some states offer provisions to allow a team to end the game early by mutual decision of the coaches (for instance, if a large lead continues to grow and the talent disparity is obvious).
In amateur boxing, if a boxer trails by more than 20 points, the referee stops the fight and the boxer that is leading automatically wins; bouts which end this way may be noted as "RSC" (referee stopped contest) with notations for an outclassed opponent (RSCO), outscored opponent (RSCOS), injury (RSCI) or head injury (RSCH).
While a boxer who loses on the mercy rule is scored RSCO and would be similar to a technical knockout in professional boxing, it is not scored a loss by knockout, and the 28-day suspension for losing on a knockout does not apply.
In curling the loser team can concede at any time, except for international competitions, where they need to wait until the completion of the 6th end to do so (and 8th end in play-off games).
In special Curling, games end if 6 ends have passed and one team leads by 10 points.
In American collegiate wrestling and high school wrestling, a wrestler wins by technical fall, and the match ends, if he builds a 15-point lead. If a wrestler gains a 15-point lead by having his opponent in a near-fall, the referee will allow the offensive wrestler the opportunity to win by fall without liability to be reversed and pinned. The bout ends when a fall is awarded or the near-fall ends. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28695 |
Sumbawa
Sumbawa is an Indonesian island, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain, with Lombok to the west, Flores to the east, and Sumba further to the southeast. Along with Lombok, it is part of the province of West Nusa Tenggara, but there has been talk by the Indonesian government of turning the island into a separate province. Traditionally, the island is known as the source of sappanwood, as well as honey and sandalwood. Its savanna-like climate and vast grasslands are used to breed horses and cattle, as well as to hunt deer.
Sumbawa has an area (including minor offshore islands) of (three times the size of Lombok) with an etimated population (January 2014) of 1.39 million. It marks the boundary between the islands to the west, which were influenced by religion and culture spreading from India, and the region to the east that was less influenced. In particular this applies to both Hinduism and Islam.
The 14th-century Nagarakretagama mentioned several principalities identified to be on Sumbawa; Dompu, Bima, Sape and one on the Sang Hyang Api island just off the coast of northeast Sumbawa. Four principalities in western Sumbawa were dependencies of the Majapahit Empire of eastern Java. Because of Sumbawa's natural resources, it was regularly invaded by outside forces – from the Javanese, Balinese, Makassar, to the Dutch and Japanese. The Dutch first arrived in 1605, but did not effectively rule Sumbawa until the early 20th century.
For a short period of time, the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel ruled a part of western Sumbawa. The eastern parts of the island, on the other hand, were home to the Sultanate of Bima, an Islamic polity that had links to the Bugis and Makassar peoples of South Sulawesi, as well as other Malay-Islamic polities in the archipelago.
Historical evidence indicates that people on Sumbawa island were known in the East Indies for their honey, horses, sappanwood, which is used to make red dye, and sandalwood, which is used for incense and medications. The area was thought to be highly productive agriculturally.
In the 18th century, the Dutch introduced coffee plantation on the western slopes of Mount Tambora, a volcano on the north side of Sumbawa, thus creating the Tambora coffee variant. Tambora's colossal eruption in 1815 was one of the most powerful of all time, ejecting of ash and debris into the atmosphere. The eruption killed up to 71,000 people and triggered a period of global cooling known as the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816. It also apparently destroyed a small culture of Papuan affinity, known to archaeologists as the "Tambora culture".
Sumbawa is administratively divided into four regencies ("kabupaten") and one kota (city). They are:
Islam, the dominant faith of the island, was introduced by the Makassarese of Sulawesi.
Sumbawa had, historically speaking, three major linguistic groups who spoke languages that were unintelligible to each other. One group centered in the western side of the island speaks Basa Semawa (Indonesian: "Bahasa Sumbawa") which is similar to the Sasak language from nearby Lombok; the second group in the east speaks Nggahi Mbojo ("Bahasa Bima"). They were once separated by the Tambora culture, which spoke a language related to neither. After the demise of Tambora due to the 1815 eruption, local kingdoms based in Sumbawa Besar and Bima became the two focal points of Sumbawa. This division of the island into two parts remains today; Sumbawa Besar and Bima are the two largest towns on the island, and are the centers of distinct cultural groups that share the island.
The population of the island (including minor outlying islands) was 1.33 million at the latest decennial census in 2010, comprising 29.58% of the population of the entire Province of West Nusa Tenggara's 4.5 million people. Due to lack of work opportunities on the island and its frequent droughts, many people on the island seek work in the Middle East as laborers or domestic servants; some 500,000 workers, or over 10% of the population of West Nusa Tenggara, have left the country to work overseas.
The island is bound by bodies of water; to the west is Alas Strait, south is the Indian Ocean, Saleh Bay creates a major north-central indentation in the island, and the Flores Sea runs the length of the northern coastline. The Sape Strait lies to the east of the island and separates Sumbawa from Flores and the Komodo Islands, there are a number bays and gulfs, most notably Bima Bay, Cempi Bay, and Waworada Bay
Sumbawa's most distinguishing features are Saleh Bay and the Sanggar Peninsula. On the latter stands Mount Tambora (8°14’41”S, 117°59’35”E), a large stratovolcano famous for its VEI 7 eruption in 1815, one of only a few eruptions of such magnitude in the last 2,000 years. The eruption obliterated most of Tambora's summit, reducing its height by about a third and leaving a six kilometer-wide caldera. Regardless, Tambora remains the highest point on the island. Highlands rise in four spots on the island, as well as on Sangeang Island. The large western lobe of Sumbawa is dominated by a large central highland, and Tambora, Dompu and Bima each have more minor highlands.
There are a number of large surrounding islands, most notably are Moyo Island, volcanically active Sangeang Island, and the tourist Komodo Islands (administered under Flores) to the east.
Sumbawa is part of the Lesser Sundas deciduous forests ecoregion.
There are a number of smaller offshore islands which fall within the regencies based on Sumbawa Island:
Many of the island residents are at risk of starvation when crops fail due to lack of rainfall. The majority of the population works in agriculture. Tourism is just beginning, with a few surf spots renowned for being world class, Jelenga and Supersuck Beaches near the mine, as well as Hu'u and Lakey Beach in the Gulf of Cempi.
A large gold and copper mine, Newmont Mining Corporation's Batu Hijau mine began commercial operations in 2000, a decade after the copper and gold were discovered. Newmont holds a 45% stake in the operation through its shareholding in PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara. A local unit of Japan's Sumitomo Corporation has a 35% share. The mine is located in southwest Sumbawa.
Due to the mine, Sumbawa Barat Regency along with other remote mining towns, and Jakarta, have the highest GDP per capita rates in Indonesia, Sumbawa Barat's is 156.25 million rupiah ($17,170 USD) , Newmont and its partners have invested about $1.9 billion in the mine. The reserves are expected to last until 2034, making Batu Hijau one of the largest copper mines in the world.
There is a road network in Sumbawa, but it is poorly maintained and has long portions of rough gravel. Frequent ferry service to Sumbawa (Poto Tano) from Lombok (Labuhan Lombok) exists, however ferry service to Flores from Sape is infrequent. Bima is the largest city on Sumbawa and has ferry and bus service directly to Java and Bali, though service breakdowns are common.
The most convenient way to reach Sumbawa is via air. There are commercial flight service connected island's main airport, the Bima airport, to Denpasar and Makassar. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28696 |
Spike Milligan
Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a British-Irish comedian, writer, poet, playwright and actor. The son of an Irish father and an English mother, Milligan was born in India, where he spent his childhood, relocating to live and work the majority of his life in the United Kingdom. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
Milligan was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of the British radio programme "The Goon Show", performing a range of roles including the Eccles and Minnie Bannister characters. He was the earliest-born and last surviving member of the Goons. Milligan parlayed success with the Goon Show into television with "Q5", a surreal sketch show credited as a major influence on the members of "Monty Python's Flying Circus".
Milligan wrote and edited many books, including "Puckoon" (1963) and a seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with "" (1971). He also wrote comical verse, with much of his poetry written for children, including "Silly Verse for Kids" (1959).
Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, on 16 April 1918, the son of an Irish father, Captain Leo Alphonso Milligan, MSM, RA (1890–1969), who was serving in the British Indian Army.
His mother, Florence Mary Winifred (née Kettleband; 1893–1990), was English. He spent his childhood in Poona and later in Rangoon, capital of British Burma. He was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and later at St Paul's High School, Rangoon.
When he travelled, by sea, from India to England for the first time, he arrived on a winter's morning and was bemused by the climate, so different from India's, remembering the dock's "terrible noise, and everything so cold and grey." After moving to Brockley, south east London from the age of 12 in 1931, he attended Brownhill Road School (later to be renamed Catford Boys School) and St Saviours School, Lewisham High Road.
On leaving school, he played the cornet and discovered jazz. He also joined the Young Communist League to demonstrate his hatred of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who were gaining support near his home in South London.
After returning from Burma, Milligan lived most of his life in the United Kingdom, apart from overseas service in the British Army in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
During most of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Milligan performed as an amateur jazz vocalist and trumpeter before, during and after being called up for military service in the fight against Nazi Germany, but even then he wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of concerts to entertain troops. After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington (1919–1993) (whose nickname 'Edge-ying-Tong', inspired one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the "Ying Tong Song") would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks. One biographer describes his early dance band work as follows: "He managed to croon like Bing Crosby and win a competition: he also played drums, guitar and trumpet, in which he was entirely self taught"; he also acquired a double bass, on which he took lessons and would strum in jazz sessions. Milligan had perfect pitch.
During the Second World War, Milligan served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery (later 19 Battery), as Gunner Milligan, 954024. The unit was equipped with the obsolete First World War era BL 9.2-inch howitzer and based in Bexhill on the south coast of England. Milligan describes training with these guns in part two of "Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall", claiming that, during training, gun crews resorted to shouting "bang" in unison as they had no shells with which to practise.
The unit was later re-equipped with the BL 7.2-inch howitzer and saw action as part of the First Army in the North African campaign and then in the succeeding Italian campaign. Milligan was appointed lance bombardier and was about to be promoted to bombardier, when he was wounded in action in the Italian theatre at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Subsequently, hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan "Jumbo" Jenkins) back to Gunner. It was Milligan's opinion that Major Jenkins did not like him, because Milligan constantly kept up the morale of his fellow soldiers, whereas Jenkins's approach was to take an attitude towards the troops similar to that of Lord Kitchener. An incident also mentioned was when Jenkins had invited Gunners Milligan and Edgington to his bivouac to play some jazz with him, only to discover that the musicianship of the gunners was far superior to his own ability to play the military tune "Whistling Rufus".
After hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called "The Bill Hall Trio", in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the trio but returned to Britain soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, which displayed many of the key elements of what would later become "The Goon Show" (originally called "Crazy People") with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.
Milligan returned to jazz in the late 1940s and made a precarious living with the Hall trio and other musical comedy acts. He was also trying to break into the world of radio, as a performer or script writer. His first success in radio was as writer for comedian Derek Roy's show. After a delayed start, Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine joined forces in a relatively radical comedy project, "The Goon Show". During its first season the BBC titled the show as "Crazy People", or in full, "The Junior Crazy Gang featuring those Crazy People, the Goons!", an attempt to make the programme palatable to BBC officials, by connecting it with the popular group of theatre comedians known as The Crazy Gang.
The first episode was broadcast on 28 May 1951 on the BBC Home Service. Although he did not perform as much in the early shows, Milligan eventually became a lead performer in almost all of the "Goon Show" episodes, portraying a wide range of characters including Eccles, Minnie Bannister, Jim Spriggs and the nefarious Count Moriarty. He was also the primary author of most of the scripts, although he co-wrote many scripts with various collaborators, most notably Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes. Most of the early shows were co-written with Stephens (and edited by Jimmy Grafton) but this partnership faltered after Series 3. Milligan wrote most of Series 4 but from Series 5 (coinciding with the birth of the Milligans' second child, Seán) and through most of Series 6, he collaborated with Eric Sykes, a development that grew out of his contemporary business collaboration with Sykes in Associated London Scripts. Milligan and Stephens reunited during Series 6 but towards the end of Series 8 Stephens was sidelined by health problems and Milligan worked briefly with John Antrobus. The Milligan-Stephens partnership was finally ended by Stephens' death from a brain haemorrhage in January 1959; Milligan later downplayed and disparaged Stephens' contributions.
"The Goon Show" was recorded before a studio audience and during the audience warm-up session, Milligan would play the trumpet, while Peter Sellers played on the orchestra's drums. For the first few years the shows were recorded live, direct to 16-inch transcription disc, which required the cast to adhere closely to the script but by Series 4, the BBC had adopted the use of magnetic tape. Milligan eagerly exploited the possibilities the new technology offered—the tapes could be edited, so the cast could now ad-lib freely and tape also enabled the creation of groundbreaking sound effects. Over the first three series, Milligan's demands for increasingly complex sound effects (or "grams", as they were then known) pushed technology and the skills of the BBC engineers to their limits—effects had to be created mechanically (foley) or played back from discs, sometimes requiring the use of four or five turntables running simultaneously. With magnetic tape, these effects could be produced in advance and the BBC engineers were able to create highly complex, tightly edited effects "stings" that would have been very difficult (if not impossible) to perform using foley or disc. In the later years of the series many Goon Show "grams" were produced for the series by members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a notable example being the "Major Bloodnok's Stomach" effect, realised by Dick Mills.
Although the Goons elevated Milligan to international stardom, the demands of writing and performing the series took a heavy toll. During Series 3 he suffered the first of several serious mental breakdowns, which also marked the onset of a decades-long cycle of manic-depressive illness. In late 1952, possibly exacerbated by suppressed tensions between the Goons' stars, Milligan apparently became irrationally convinced that he had to kill Sellers but when he attempted to gain entry to Sellers's neighbouring flat, armed with a potato knife, he accidentally walked straight through the plate-glass front door. He was hospitalised, heavily sedated for two weeks and spent almost two months recuperating; fortunately for the show, a backlog of scripts meant that his illness had little effect on production. Milligan later blamed the pressure of writing and performing "The Goon Show", for both his breakdown and the failure of his first marriage.
A lesser-known aspect of Milligan's life in the 1950s and 1960s was his involvement in the writers' agency Associated London Scripts. Milligan married for the first time and began a family. This reportedly distracted him from writing so much that he accepted an invitation from Eric Sykes to share his small office, leading to the creation of the co-operative agency.
Milligan made several forays into television as a writer-performer, in addition to his many guest appearances on interview, variety and sketch comedy series from the 1950s to the 2000s. "The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d" (1956), starring Peter Sellers, was the first attempt to translate Goons humour to TV; it was followed by "A Show Called Fred" and "Son of Fred", both made during 1956 and directed by Richard Lester, who went on to work with the Beatles. During a visit to Australia in 1958, a similar special was made for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, "The Gladys Half-Hour", which also featured local actors Ray Barrett and John Bluthal, who would appear in several later Milligan projects. In 1961, Milligan co-wrote two episodes of the popular sitcom "Sykes and a...", co-starring Sykes and Hattie Jacques and the one-off "Spike Milligan Offers a Series of Unrelated Incidents at Current Market Value".
The 15-minute series "The Telegoons" (1963), was the next attempt to transplant the Goons to television, this time using puppet versions of the familiar characters. The initial intention was to "visualise" original recordings of 1950s Goon Show episodes but this proved difficult, because of the rapid-fire dialogue and was ultimately frustrated by the BBC's refusal to allow the original audio to be used. Fifteen-minute adaptations of the original scripts by Maurice Wiltshire were used instead, with Milligan, Sellers and Secombe reuniting to provide the voices; according to a contemporary press report, they received the highest fees the BBC had ever paid for 15-minute shows. Two series were made in 1963 and 1964 and (presumably because it was shot on 35mm film rather than video) the entire series has reportedly been preserved in the BBC archives.
Milligan's next major TV venture was the sketch comedy series "The World of Beachcomber" (1968), made in colour for BBC 2; it is believed all 19 episodes are lost. That same year, the three Goons reunited for a televised re-staging of a vintage "Goon Show" for Thames Television, with John Cleese substituting for the late Wallace Greenslade but the pilot was not successful and no further programmes were made.
In early 1969, Milligan starred in blackface in the ill-fated situation comedy "Curry and Chips", created and written by Johnny Speight and featuring Milligan's old friend and colleague Eric Sykes. "Curry and Chips" set out to satirise racist attitudes in Britain in a similar vein to Speight's earlier creation, the hugely successful "Till Death Us Do Part", with Milligan 'blacking up' to play Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani–half-Irish factory worker. The series generated numerous complaints, because of its frequent use of racist epithets and 'bad language'—one viewer reportedly complained of counting 59 uses of the word "bloody" in one episode—and it was cancelled on the orders of the Independent Broadcasting Authority after only six episodes. Milligan was also involved in the ill-fated programme "The Melting Pot".
Director John Goldschmidt's film "The Other Spike" dramatised Milligan's nervous breakdown in a film for Granada Television, for which Milligan wrote the screenplay and in which he played himself. Later that year, he was commissioned by the BBC to write and star in "Q5", the first in the innovative "Q..." TV series, acknowledged as an important precursor to "Monty Python's Flying Circus", which premiered several months later. There was a hiatus of several years, before the BBC commissioned "Q6" in 1975. "Q7" appeared in 1977, "Q8" in 1978, "Q9" in 1980 and "There's a Lot of It About" in 1982. Milligan later complained of the BBC's cold attitude towards the series and stated that he would have made more programs, had he been given the opportunity. A number of episodes of the earlier "Q" series are missing, presumed wiped. In 1979 he hosted an episode of "The Muppet Show".
Milligan's daughter, Laura, conceived and co-wrote an animated series called "The Ratties" (1987). Milligan narrated the 26 five-minute episodes. He later voiced the highly successful animated series "Wolves, Witches and Giants", which aired on ITV from 1995 to 1998. The series was written by Ed Welch, who had previously appeared in the "Q" series, and collaborated with Spike on several audio productions produced and directed by Simon & Sara Bor. "Wolves, Witches and Giants" was broadcast in more than 100 territories, including the UK and the US.
Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. His poetry has been described by comedian Stephen Fry as "absolutely immortal—greatly in the tradition of Lear." One of his poems, "On the Ning Nang Nong", was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poets including Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme "Playschool". Milligan included it on his album "No One's Gonna Change Our World" in 1969, to aid the World Wildlife Fund. In December 2007 it was reported that, according to OFSTED, it is among the ten most commonly taught poems in primary schools in the UK.
While depressed, he wrote serious poetry. He also wrote a novel "Puckoon" and a series of war memoirs, including "" (1971), ""Rommel?" "Gunner Who?": A Confrontation in the Desert" (1974), "" (1976) and "" (1978). Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy and return to the UK).
He also wrote comedy songs, including "Purple Aeroplane", which was a parody of the Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine". Glimpses of his bouts with depression, which led to the nervous breakdowns, can be found in his serious poetry, which is compiled in "Open Heart University".
Bernard Miles gave Milligan his first straight acting role, as Ben Gunn, in the Mermaid Theatre production of "Treasure Island". Miles described Milligan as:
"Treasure Island" played twice daily through the winter of 1961–62 and was an annual production at the Mermaid Theatre for some years. In the 1968 production, Barry Humphries played the role of Long John Silver, alongside William Rushton as Squire Trelawney and Milligan as Ben Gunn. To Humphries, Milligan's "best performance must surely have been as Ben Gunn ..., Milligan stole the show every night, in a makeup which took at least an hour to apply. His appearance on stage always brought a roar of delight from the kids in the audience and Spike had soon left the text far behind as he went off into a riff of sublime absurdity."
In 1961–62, during the long pauses between the matinee and the evening show of "Treasure Island", Milligan began talking to Miles about the idea he and John Antrobus were exploring, of a dramatised post-nuclear world. This became the one-act play "The Bedsitting Room", which Milligan co-wrote with John Antrobus and which premiered at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury on 12 February 1962. It was adapted to a longer play and staged by Miles at London's Mermaid Theatre, making its debut on 31 January 1963. It was a critical and commercial success and was revived in 1967 with a provincial tour before opening at London's Saville Theatre on 3 May 1967. Richard Lester later directed a film version, released in 1969.
On 6 October 1964, Milligan appeared in Frank Dunlop's production of the play "Oblomov", at the Lyric Theatre in London, based on the novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov. According to Scudamore's biography:
Milligan's involvement transformed the play. The first night started poorly, Joan Greenwood played Olga and later recalled that her husband André Morell thought the show was so appalling, they should get her out of the play. According to Scudamore:
In an interview with Bernard Braden, Milligan described theatre as important to him:
In 1959 Ken Russell made a short 35 mm film about and with Milligan entitled "Portrait of a Goon". The making of the film is detailed in Paul Sutton's 2012 authorised biography "Becoming Ken Russell". In 1971 Milligan played a humble village priest in Russell's film "The Devils". The scene was cut from the release print and is considered lost but photographs from the scene, together with Murray Melvin's memory of that day's filming, are included in Sutton's 2014 book "Six English Filmmakers".
As illustrated in the description of his involvement in theatre, Milligan often ad-libbed. He also did this on radio and television. One of his last screen appearances was in the BBC dramatisation of Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" and he was (almost inevitably) noted as an ad-libber.
One of Milligan's ad-lib incidents occurred during a visit to Australia in the late 1960s. He was interviewed live on air and remained in the studio for the news broadcast that followed (read by Rod McNeil), during which Milligan constantly interjected, adding his own name to news items. As a result, he was banned from making any further live appearances on the ABC. The ABC also changed its national policy so that guests had to leave the studio after interviews were complete. A tape of the bulletin survives and has been included in an ABC Radio audio compilation, also on the BBC tribute CD, "Vivat Milligna".
Film and television director Richard Lester recalls that the television series "A Show Called Fred" was broadcast live. "I've seen very few moments of genius in my life but I witnessed one with Spike after the first show. He had brought around a silent cartoon" and asked Lester if his P.A. took shorthand. "She said she did. 'Good, this needs a commentary.' It was a ten-minute cartoon and Spike could have seen it only once, if that. He ad-libbed the commentary for it and it was perfect. I was open-mouthed at the raw comedy creation in front of me."
Milligan contributed occasional cartoons to the satirical magazine "Private Eye". Most were visualisations of one-line jokes. For example, a young boy sees the Concorde and asks his father "What's that?". The reply is "That's a flying groundnut scheme, son." Milligan was a keen painter.
In 1967, applying a satirical angle to a fashion for the inclusion of Superman-inspired characters in British television commercials, Milligan dressed up in a "Bat-Goons" outfit, to appear in a series of television commercials for British Petroleum. A contemporary reporter found the TV commercials "funny and effective". From 1980 to 1982, he advertised for the English Tourist Board, playing a Scotsman on a visit around the different regions of England.
Other advertising appearances included television commercials for Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Planters nuts.
In the 1970s, Charles Allen compiled a series of stories from British people's experiences of life in the British Raj, called "Plain Tales from the Raj", and published in 1975. Milligan was the youngest contributor, describing his life in India when it was under British rule. In it he mentions the imperial parades there:
"The most exciting sound for me was the sound of the Irregular Punjabi Regiment playing the "dhol" and "surmai" [a type of drum]—one beat was dum-da-da-dum, dum-da-da-dum, dum-da-da-dum! They wore these great long pantaloons, a gold dome to their turbans, khaki shirts with banded waistcoats, double-cross bandoliers, leather sandals, and they used to march very fast, I remember, bursting in through the dust on the heels of an English regiment. They used to come in with trailed arms and they'd throw their rifles up into the air, catch it with their left hand—always to this dum-da-da-dum, dum-da-da-dum—and then stamp their feet and fire one round, synchronising with the drums. They'd go left, right, left, right, "shabash"! "Hai"! Bang! Dum-da-da-dum—it was sensational!"
Milligan married his first wife, June (Marchinie) Marlow, in 1952; Peter Sellers was best man. They had three children—Laura, Seán and Síle—and divorced in 1960. He married Patricia Ridgeway (also known as Paddy) in June 1962, with George Martin as best man and the marriage produced one child, Jane Milligan (b. 1966). The marriage ended with Patricia's death from breast cancer in 1978.
In 1975 Milligan fathered a son, James (b. June 1976), in an affair with Margaret Maughan. Another child, a daughter Romany, is suspected to have been born at the same time, to a Canadian journalist named Roberta Watt. His last wife was Shelagh Sinclair, to whom he was married from 1983 until his death on 27 February 2002. Four of his children collaborated with documentary makers on a multi-platform programme called "I Told You I Was Ill: The Life and Legacy of Spike Milligan" (2005).
After marrying Shelagh, he revoked his existing will which had left everything to his children, and instead left his entire estate to Shelagh. The children attempted to overturn the will, to no avail. In October 2008 an array of Milligan's personal effects was sold at auction by his third wife, Shelagh, who was moving into a smaller home. These included his vast legacy of books and memorabilia, and a grand piano salvaged from a demolition and apparently played every morning by Paul McCartney, a neighbour in Rye in East Sussex.
Shelagh Milligan died in June 2011.
He suffered from severe bipolar disorder for most of his life, having at least ten serious mental breakdowns, several lasting over a year. He spoke candidly about his condition and its effect on his life:
Milligan was born in the British Empire to a British subject mother, and he felt that he was entitled to British citizenship, especially after having served in the British Army for six years. When British law related to Commonwealth-born residents, which had given him a secure place in the UK, changed, he applied, in 1960, for a British passport. The application was refused, partly because he would not swear an Oath of Allegiance. By right of his Irish father, he secured an "escape route" from his stateless condition, becoming an Irish citizen in 1962, and remaining so; this status gave him almost the same rights as a British subject.
Charles, Prince of Wales was a fan and when Milligan received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the British Comedy Awards in 1994, the Prince sent a congratulatory message to be read out on live television. The comedian interrupted the message to call the Prince a "little grovelling bastard". He later faxed the prince, saying: "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question?"
In reality he and the Prince were very close friends and Milligan had already been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992 (honorary because of his Irish citizenship). He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 2001.
On 23 July 1981, the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer were presented with a poem about the forthcoming Royal Wedding, delivered to Buckingham Palace on a 3-foot-9-inch parchment scroll, written under the pen name MacGoonical. A ridiculous verse written in the style of William McGonagall, the ode was commissioned by the Legal and General Assurance society as a "mark of esteem and affection". The verse, titled "Ode to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his Weeding", begins:Oh! Twas in the year 1981
Prince Philip was reading Page 3 of the "Sun"!
They were all sitting in Buckingham Palace
Roaring with laughter at the comedy "Dallas".
He was a strident campaigner on environmental matters, particularly arguing against unnecessary noise, such as the use of "muzak".
In 1971, Milligan caused controversy by attacking an art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery with a hammer. The artwork included catfish, oysters and shrimp which were to be electrocuted. He was a staunch and outspoken scourge of domestic violence, dedicating one of his books to Erin Pizzey.
Even late in life, Milligan's black humour had not deserted him. After the death of Harry Secombe from cancer, he said, "I'm glad he died before me, because I didn't want him to sing at my funeral." (A recording of Secombe singing was played at Milligan's memorial service.) He also wrote his own obituary, in which he stated repeatedly that he "wrote the Goon Show and died".
Milligan died from kidney failure, at the age of 83, on 27 February 2002, at his home in Rye, Sussex. On the day of his funeral, 8 March 2002, his coffin was carried to St Thomas Church in Winchelsea, East Sussex, and was draped in the flag of Ireland. He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words "I told you I was ill." He was buried at St Thomas' churchyard but the Chichester diocese refused to allow this epitaph. A compromise was reached with the Irish translation of "I told you I was ill", "Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite" and in English, "Love, light, peace". The additional epitaph "Grá mhór ort Shelagh" can be read as "Great love for you Shelagh".
According to a letter published in the "Rye and Battle Observer" in 2011, Milligan's headstone was removed from St Thomas' churchyard in Winchelsea and moved to be alongside the grave of his wife. However, in 2016 the headstone was again to be found in the churchyard of St Thomas' Winchelsea.
From the 1960s, Milligan was a regular correspondent with Robert Graves. Milligan's letters to Graves usually addressed a question to do with classical studies. The letters form part of Graves's bequest to St John's College, Oxford.
The film of "Puckoon", starring Sean Hughes, including Milligan's daughter, actress Jane Milligan, was released after his death.
Milligan lived for several years in Holden Road, Woodside Park, Finchley, at The Crescent, Barnet, and was a contributing founder and strong supporter of the Finchley Society. His old house in Woodside Park is now demolished but there is a blue plaque in his memory on the block of flats on the site.
A memorial bench featuring a bronze likeness of Milligan sits in his former home of Finchley. Over ten years the Finchley Society led by Barbara Warren raised funds—the Spike Milligan Statue Fund—to commission a statue of him by local sculptor John Somerville and erected on the grounds of Avenue House in East End Road. The memorial was unveiled on 4 September 2014 at a ceremony attended by a number of local dignitaries and showbusiness celebrities including Roy Hudd, Michael Parkinson, Maureen Lipman, Terry Gilliam, Kathy Lette, Denis Norden and Lynsey de Paul.
There is a campaign to erect a statue in the London Borough of Lewisham where he grew up. After coming to the UK from India in the 1930s, he lived at 50 Riseldine Road, Brockley and attended Brownhill Boys' School (later Catford Boys' School, which was demolished in 1994). There is a plaque and bench located at the Wadestown Library, Wellington, New Zealand, in an area called "Spike Milligan Corner".
In a 2005 poll to find the "Comedians' Comedian", he was voted among the top 50 comedy acts, by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. In a BBC poll in August 1999, Milligan was voted the "funniest person of the last 1,000 years".
Milligan has been portrayed twice in films. In the adaptation of his novel "Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall", he was played by Jim Dale, while Milligan played his father. He was portrayed by Edward Tudor-Pole in "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" (2004). In a 2008 stage play, "Surviving Spike", Milligan was played by Michael Barrymore.
On 9 June 2006, it was reported that Richard Wiseman had identified Milligan as the writer of the world's funniest joke as decided by the Laughlab project. Wiseman said the joke contained all three elements of what makes a good gag: anxiety, a feeling of superiority and an element of surprise.
Eddie Izzard described Milligan as "The Godfather of Alternative Comedy". "From his unchained mind came forth ideas that just had no boundaries. And he influenced a new generation of comedians who came to be known as 'alternative'."
Members of Monty Python greatly admired him. In one interview, which was widely quoted at the time, John Cleese stated "Milligan is the Great God to all of us". The Pythons gave Milligan a cameo role in their 1979 film "Monty Python's Life of Brian", when Milligan happened to be holidaying in Tunisia, near where the film was being shot; he was re-visiting where he had been stationed during wartime. Graham Chapman gave him a minor part in "Yellowbeard".
After their retirement, Milligan's parents and his younger brother Desmond moved to Australia. His mother lived the rest of her long life in the coastal town of Woy Woy on the New South Wales Central Coast, just north of Sydney. As a result, he became a regular visitor to Australia and made a number of radio and TV programmes there, including "The Idiot Weekly" with Bobby Limb. He also wrote several books including "Puckoon" during a visit to his mother's house in Woy Woy. Milligan named the town "the largest above-ground cemetery in the world" when visiting in the 1960s.
Milligan's mother became an Australian citizen in 1985, partly in protest at the circumstances which led to her son's ineligibility for British citizenship; Milligan himself was reportedly considering applying for Australian citizenship at the time as well. The suspension bridge on the cyclepath from Woy Woy to Gosford was renamed the Spike Milligan Bridge in his memory, and a meeting room in the Woy Woy Public Library is also named after him.
Milligan contributed his recollections of his childhood in India for the acclaimed 1970s BBC audio history series "Plain Tales From The Raj". The series was published in book form in 1975 by André Deutsch, edited by Charles Allen.
The War (and Peace) Memoirs. (The seven memoirs were also recorded as talking books with Spike reciting them in his own inimitable style.)
Does not include Goon Show-related recordings | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28698 |
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, "The Colossus and Other Poems" and "Ariel", as well as "The Bell Jar", a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for "The Collected Poems".
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. They had two children before separating in 1962.
Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She died by suicide in 1963.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who authored a book about bumblebees.
On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born, and in 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the "Boston Herald"s children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed". Plath also had an IQ of around 160.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery, in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path". After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942. In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950. Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in the "Christian Science Monitor."
In 1950 Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She excelled academically, and wrote to her mother. While at Smith she lived in Lawrence House, and a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited "The Smith Review." After her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at "Mademoiselle" magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel "The Bell Jar."
She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas—a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself." She hung around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs to see if she had enough "courage" to kill herself. During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar. Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother's sleeping pills.
She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion." She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college.
In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels", and in June graduated from Smith with highest honors.
She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper "Varsity". At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.
Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive), Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:
I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.
The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn in London (now in the Borough of Camden) with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija boards.
In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States, and from September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).
Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experience and she did so. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused poet and short-story writer. At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.
Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York State in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material. The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence. Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, "The Colossus".
In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In a letter to her therapist, Plath wrote that Hughes beat her two days before the miscarriage. In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar" and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. Nicholas was born in January 1962. In mid-1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.
In 1961, the couple rented their flat at Chalcot Square to Assia (née) Gutmann and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. In June 1962, Plath had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill and in September the couple separated.
Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection "Ariel" during the final months of her life. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.
The northern winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection, which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). Her only novel, "The Bell Jar," was published in January 1963, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.
Before her death, Plath tried several times to take her own life. On August 24, 1953, Plath overdosed on pills in the cellar of her mother's home. In June1962, Plath drove her car off the side of the road, into a river, which she later said was an attempt to take her own life.
In January1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner and a close friend who lived near her. She described the current depressive episode she was experiencing; it had been ongoing for six or seven months. While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life." Plath struggled with insomnia, taking medication at night to induce sleep, and frequently woke up early. She lost 20pounds. However, she continued to take care of her physical appearance and did not outwardly speak of feeling guilty or unworthy.
Horder prescribed her an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect.
The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. At approximately 4:30a.m. Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on. She was 30years old.
Some have suggested that Plath had not intended to kill herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr.Thomas, what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr.Horder," including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note. However, in her biography "Giving Up: The Last Days of SylviaPlath," Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker, wrote, "According to Mr.Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office, [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven and had really meant to die." Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart." In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, and spoke, in a BBC interview in March2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirtyyears old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."
An inquiry on the day following Plath's death gave a ruling of suicide. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated for six months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle, bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the Hindu text, the "Bhagavad Gita" or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel "Journey to the West" written by Wu Cheng'en.
The daughter of Plath and Hughes, Frieda Hughes, is a writer and artist. On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, their son, hanged himself at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression.
Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, her first poem appearing in the "Boston Traveller". By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over 50 short stories and published in a raft of magazines. In fact Plath desired much of her life to write prose and stories, and she felt that poetry was an aside. But, in sum, she was not successful in publishing prose. At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. Additionally, she won a summer editor position at the young women's magazine "Mademoiselle", and, on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea". Later, she wrote for the university publication, "Varsity".
By the time Heinemann published her first collection, "The Colossus and Other Poems" in the UK in late 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in "Harper's", "The Spectator" and "The Times Literary Supplement". All the poems in "The Colossus" had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with "The New Yorker". It was, however, her 1965 collection "Ariel", published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests. "Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme."
"The Colossus" received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting Plath's voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at "Punch" called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi at the "Manchester Guardian" said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less-glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets.
Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, which her mother wished to block, was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971. Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar". She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past". She dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in "The Bell Jar" is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel. Plath also used the novel to highlight the issue of women in the workforce during the 1950s. She strongly believed in their abilities to be writers and editors, while society forced them to fulfill secretarial roles.
In 1963, after "The Bell Jar" was published, Plath began working on another literary work titled "Double Exposure." It was never published and the manuscript disappeared around 1970. According to Hughes, Plath left behind "some 130 [typed] pages of another novel, provisionally titled "Double Exposure". " Theories about what happened to the unfinished manuscript are repeatedly brought up in the book "Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study" by Luke Ferretter. Ferretter also claims that the rare books department at Smith College in Massachusetts has a secret copy of the work under seal. Ferretter believes that the draft of "Double Exposure" may have been destroyed, stolen, or even lost. He presumes in his book that the draft may lie unfound in a university archive.
It was Plath's publication of "Ariel" in 1965 that precipitated her rise to fame. The poems in "Ariel" mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book "Life Studies" as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death. Posthumously published in 1966, the impact of "Ariel" was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as '"Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus". Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who has written about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance, but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life." Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes everyday elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality. Plath's poem "Morning Song" from "Ariel" is regarded as one of her finest poems on "freedom of expression" of an artist
Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in "The Bell Jar" is just that same story." The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.
In 1971, the volumes "Winter Trees" and "Crossing the Water" were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of "Ariel". Writing in "New Statesman," fellow poet Peter Porter wrote:
"Crossing the Water" is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as "The Colossus" or "Ariel".
The "Collected Poems", published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 2006 Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui". The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in the online journal "Blackbird".
Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection, "Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963", came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of "The Bell Jar" in America. Plath began keeping a diary from the age of 11 and continued doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1982 as "The Journals of Sylvia Plath," edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death.
During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath" (Plath 2000). More than half of the new volume contained newly released material; the American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event". Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."
As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. He has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it." Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.
Plath's gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath." When Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.
Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book "Monster" (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains. Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, although it remained in circulation among feminists. Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder. Plath's poem "The Jailor", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in Morgan's 1970 anthology "."
In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of "The Guardian" and "The Independent". In "The Guardian" on April 20, 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."
Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published "Birthday Letters" that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's subsequent suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes was suffering from terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath took her own life. Hughes himself died in 1998, only months after the book was published.
In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary "Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death" examined Hughes' life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.
Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's "Lost Son" sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 20. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. "The Colossus" is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.
Plath's landscape poetry, which she wrote throughout her life, has been described as "a rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked ... some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors." Her September 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights" takes its title from the Emily Brontë novel, but its content and style is Plath's own particular vision of the Pennine landscape.
It was Plath's publication of "Ariel" in 1965 that precipitated her rise to fame. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect, and remains so. "Time" and "Life" both reviewed the slim volume of "Ariel" in the wake of her death. The critic at "Time" said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to "Ariel", that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'"
Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius." Writer Honor Moore describes "Ariel" as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." Some feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.
Smith College, Plath's alma mater, holds her literary papers in the Smith College Library.
In 2018, "The New York Times" published an obituary for Plath as part of the Overlooked history project.
Plath's voice is heard in the BBC documentary about her life.
Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic "Sylvia" (2003). Despite criticism from Elizabeth Sigmund, a friend of Plath and Hughes, that Plath was portrayed as a "permanent depressive and possessive person," she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy." Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was two years old when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother" in "Tatler":
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll
The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012.
On October 27, 2019, Google commemorated the 87th anniversary of her birth with a Google Doodle in North America, parts of South America and Europe, Russia and Japan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28699 |
Shania Twain
Eilleen Twain OC (eye-LEEN) (born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965), known professionally as Shania Twain, is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She has sold over 100 million records, making her the best-selling female artist in country music history and among the best-selling music artists of all time. Her success garnered her several honorific titles including the "Queen of Country Pop".
Raised in Timmins, Ontario, Twain pursued singing and songwriting from a young age before signing with Mercury Nashville Records in the early 1990s. Her self-titled debut studio album saw little commercial success upon release in 1993. After collaborating with producer and later husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, Twain rose to fame with her second studio album, "The Woman in Me" (1995), which brought her widespread success. It sold 20 million copies worldwide, spawned widely successful singles such as "Any Man of Mine", and earned her a Grammy Award. Her third studio album, "Come On Over" (1997), became the best-selling studio album of all time by a female act in any genre and the best-selling country album, selling nearly 40 million copies worldwide. "Come On Over" produced twelve singles, including "You're Still the One", "From This Moment On" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", and earned Twain four Grammy Awards. Her fourth studio album, "Up!" (2002), was also certified Diamond in the United States.
In 2004, Twain entered a hiatus, revealing years later that diagnoses with Lyme disease and dysphonia led to a severely weakened singing voice. In 2011, she chronicled her vocal rehabilitation on the OWN miniseries "Why Not? with Shania Twain," released her first single in six years, "Today Is Your Day", and published an autobiography, "From This Moment On". Twain returned to performing the following year with an exclusive concert residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, "", which ran until 2014. In 2015, she launched the North American Rock This Country Tour, which was billed as her farewell tour. Twain released her first studio album in 15 years in 2017, "Now", and embarked on the Shania Now Tour in 2018.
Twain has received five Grammy Awards, 27 BMI Songwriter Awards, stars on Canada's Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and an induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. According to the RIAA she is the only female artist in history to have three (consecutive) albums certified Diamond by the RIAA. and is the sixth best-selling female artist in the United States. Altogether, Twain is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era.
Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, on August 28, 1965, to Sharon ("née" Morrison) and Clarence Edwards. She has two sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother moved to Timmins, Ontario, with her daughters. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa from the nearby Mattagami First Nation, and they had son Mark together. Jerry adopted the girls and legally changed their surname to Twain. When Mark was a toddler, Jerry and Sharon adopted Jerry's baby nephew Darryl when his mother died. Because of Twain's connection to Jerry, the media have incorrectly reported that she is of Ojibwe descent. When questioned as to why she chose not to publicly acknowledge Edwards as her father for years, Twain stated: My father (Jerry) went out of his way to raise three daughters that weren't even his. For me to acknowledge another man as my father, a man who was never there for me as a father, who wasn't the one who struggled everyday to put food on our table, would have hurt him terribly. We were a family. Step-father, step-brothers, we never used that vocabulary in our home. To have referred to him as my step-father would have been the worst slap across the face to him.Shania currently holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In 1991, the singer was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status into the United States. At that time, by virtue of her stepfather Jerry Twain being a full-blooded Ojibwe and the rights guaranteed to Native Americans in the Jay Treaty (1795), Shania became legally registered as having 50 percent Native American blood.
Twain has said that as a child she was told by her mother that her biological father was part Cree, a claim his family denies. Her confirmed ancestry includes English, French, and Irish. Through a maternal great-grandmother, she is a descendant of French carpenter Zacharie Cloutier. Her Irish maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, County Kildare.
Twain has said she had a difficult childhood. Her parents earned little money, and food was often scarce in their household. Twain did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. Her mother and stepfather's marriage was stormy at times, and from a young age she witnessed violence between them. Her mother also struggled with bouts of depression. In mid-1979, while Jerry was at work, at Twain's insistence, her mother drove the rest of the family south to a Toronto homeless shelter for assistance. Sharon returned to Jerry with the children in 1981. In Timmins, Twain started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to help pay her family's bills; she often earned $20 between midnight and 1 a.m. performing for remaining customers after the bar had finished serving alcohol. Although she expressed a dislike for singing in those bars, Twain believes that this was her own kind of performing-arts school on the road. She has said of the ordeal, "My deepest passion was music and it helped. There were moments when I thought, 'I hate this.' I hated going into bars and being with drunks. But I loved the music and so I survived." Twain wrote her first songs at the age of 10, "Is Love a Rose" and "Just Like the Storybooks," which were rhyming fairy tales. She states that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, "was very different from performing them and became progressively important".
At age 13, Twain was invited to perform on the CBC's "Tommy Hunter Show". While attending Timmins High and Vocational School, she was also the singer for a local band called Longshot, which covered Top 40 music. In the early 1980s, Twain spent some time working with her father's reforestation business in northern Ontario, which employed some 75 Ojibwe and Cree workers. Although the work was demanding and the pay low, Twain said, "I loved the feeling of being stranded. I'm not afraid of being in my own environment, being physical, working hard. I was very strong, I walked miles and miles every day and carried heavy loads of trees. You can't shampoo, use soap or deodorant, or makeup, nothing with any scent; you have to bathe and rinse your clothes in the lake. It was a very rugged existence, but I was very creative and I would sit alone in the forest with my dog and a guitar and would just write songs."
Twain graduated from Timmins High in June 1983 eager to expand her musical horizons. After Longshot's demise, Twain was approached by a cover band led by Diane Chase called "Flirt" and toured all over Ontario with them. She also took singing lessons from Toronto-based coach Ian Garrett, often cleaning his house as payment. In the autumn of 1984, Twain's talents were noticed by Toronto DJ Stan Campbell who wrote about her in a "Country Music News" article: "Eilleen possesses a powerful voice with an impressive range. She has the necessary drive, ambition and positive attitude to achieve her goals". Campbell happened to be making an album by Canadian musician (and present-day CKTB radio personality) Tim Denis at the time and Twain was featured on the backing vocals of the song "Heavy on the Sunshine". Campbell later took Twain to Nashville to record some demos, which she found particularly difficult to finance. She became acquainted with regional country singer Mary Bailey who had had some country chart success in 1976. Bailey had seen Twain perform in Sudbury, Ontario, saying "I saw this little girl up on stage with a guitar and it absolutely blew me away. She performed Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Her voice reminded me of Tanya Tucker, it had strength and character, a lot of feeling. She's a star, she deserves an opportunity." Bailey later said "She sang a few songs that she had written, and I thought to myself, this kid is like nineteen years old, where does she get this? This is from a person who's lived sixty years".
Bailey acquired the contract from Stan Campbell and Twain moved into Bailey's home on Kenogami Lake where she practised her music every day for hours. In the fall of 1985, Bailey took Twain down to Nashville to stay with a friend, record producer Tony Migliore, who at the time was producing an album for fellow Canadian singer Kelita Haverland and Twain was featured on the backing vocals to the song "Too Hot to Handle". She also recorded "demo" songs with Cyril Rawson but those efforts were unsuccessful, partly due to Twain's wish to become a rock singer, not a country artist. After five months she returned to Canada and moved in with Bailey in a flat in downtown Kirkland Lake, not far from Kenogami.
There she met rock keyboardist Eric Lambier, drummer Randy Yurko, guitarist Tom Gustar and formed a new band, moving three months later to Bowmanville, near Toronto. In late summer 1986, Mary Bailey arranged for Twain to meet John Kim Bell, a half Mohawk, half American conductor who had close contacts with the directors of the Canadian Country Music Association. Bell recognized Twain's ability as well as her looks and the two began secretly dating. In the fall of 1986 Twain continued to express her desire to be a pop or rock singer rather than country, which led to her falling out with Mary Bailey for two years. Twain's first break finally came on February 8, 1987, when Bell staged a fundraiser for the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, now Indspire, at the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto where Twain performed with Broadway star Bernadette Peters, guitarist Don Ross, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Her performance received little acclaim, but it convinced Bell, who hated pop music, that Twain should stay well away from it and concentrate on country music.
On November 1, 1987, Twain's mother and stepfather died in a car accident approximately 50 kilometres north of Wawa, Ontario. She moved back to Timmins to take care of her younger siblings and took them all to Huntsville, Ontario, where she supported them by earning money performing at the nearby Deerhurst Resort.
Several years later, when Twain's siblings moved out on their own, she assembled a demo tape of her songs and her Huntsville manager set up a showcase for her to present her material to record executives. She caught the attention of a few labels, including Mercury Nashville Records, who signed her within a few months. During this time, she changed her name to Shania, which was said to be an Ojibwa word which means "on my way." However, Twain's biographer, Robin Eggar, writes: "There is a continuing confusion about what 'Shania' means and if indeed it is an Ojibwe word or phrase at all. ... There is no mispronounced or misheard phrase in either Ojibwe or Cree that comes close to meaning 'on my way.' Yet the legend of her name continues to be repeated in the media to this day." Eggar was mistaken about there being no Ojibwe phrase that "comes close", as "Ani aya'aa", pronounced "Ah-nih Eye-uh-ah", means "someone on the way" in Ojibwe. It is therefore possible that someone with an imperfect knowledge of the Ojibwe language created Shania with the incorrect idea it would mean "she's on the way".
Twain's self-titled debut album was released in 1993 in North America and garnered her audiences outside Canada. Shortly before its release, she sang backing vocals for other Mercury artists, including Jeff Chance's 1992 album "Walk Softly on the Bridges" and Sammy Kershaw's 1993 album "Haunted Heart". While "Shania Twain" only reached No. 67 on the US Country Albums Chart, it gained positive reviews from critics. The album failed to sell significant copies initially. However, Twain's future success generated enough interest for the album to be certified platinum six years later by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting sales of over 1 million. The album yielded two minor hit singles in the United States with "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You". The album was more successful in Europe, where Twain won Country Music Television Europe's "Rising Video Star of the Year" award. In her 2011 autobiography "From This Moment On", Twain expressed displeasure with her debut studio album, revealing that she had very little creative control and expressed frustration with not being able to showcase her songwriting ability.
When rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange heard Twain's original songs and singing from her debut album, he offered to produce and write songs with her. After many telephone conversations, they met at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993. Twain and Lange became very close within just weeks, culminating in their wedding on December 28, 1993. Lange and Twain either wrote or co-wrote the songs that would form her second studio album, "The Woman in Me".
"The Woman in Me" was released on February 7, 1995. The album's first single, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?" went to No. 11 on the "Billboard" Country Chart. This was followed by her first Country Top 10 and No.1 hit single, "Any Man of Mine", which also cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. Twain had further hits from the album, including the title track which peaked at No.14 and three additional No.1 hits: "(If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here!", "You Win My Love", and "No One Needs to Know", which was selected for the original soundtrack for the 1996 film "Twister", a first for Twain, plus minor country hit "Home Ain't where His Heart Is (Anymore)" and a re-recorded gospel version of the album track "God Bless The Child" with new lyrics. Meanwhile, in Australia, five of these singles: "Any Man of Mine", "The Woman in Me", "I'm Outta Here!" "You Win My Love" and "God Bless The Child," were remixed for the Australian pop market, and "I'm Outta Here!" became Twain's breakthrough hit there, reaching No.5 on the ARIA charts.
As of 2007, the album had sold more than 12 million copies. The album was a quick breakthrough and because of this Twain performed selected international venues and television shows including two CMA Fan Fair performances with Nashville guitarists Randy Thomas (co-writer of the song "Butterfly Kisses"), Dan Schafer, Chris Rodriguez, Russ Taff, Hugh McDonald bass player of Bon Jovi, Dave Malachowski and Stanley T., formerly with The Beach Boys.
Mercury Nashville's promotion of the album was based largely upon a series of music videos. During this period, Twain made major television appearances on shows such as two performances on "Late Show with David Letterman", "Blockbuster Music Awards", "Billboard Music Awards" and the "American Music Awards". "The Woman in Me" won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album as well as the Academy of Country Music award for Album of the Year; the latter group also awarded Twain as Best New Female Vocalist.
In 1997, Twain released her follow-up album, "Come On Over". It established her as a successful crossover singer. Slowly, following the release of lead singles Love Gets Me Every Time" and "Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)", which allowed Twain to make more appearances in the "Billboard" Hot 100, the album started selling. It never hit the top spot, but with the multi-chart hit single "You're Still the One", it became popular. Other songs like "When", "Honey, I'm Home", "You've Got a Way", "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", "That Don't Impress Me Much", "From This Moment On", "Rock This Country!" and the title track are 8 of the 12 songs that eventually saw release as singles. "From This Moment On" is a duet with singer Bryan White and there was a re-recorded solo pop version as well.
The album stayed on the charts for the next two years, going on to sell 40 million copies worldwide, making it the biggest-selling album of all time by a female musician. She continued to break international boundaries for country music and female crossover artists. It is also the eighth biggest-selling album by any type of artist in the US and the top selling country album in history. Songs from the album won four Grammy Awards during this time, including Best Country Song and Best Female Country Performance (for "You're Still the One" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!") for Twain. Lange won Grammys for "You're Still the One" and "Come On Over".
Despite the album's record sales it wasn't able to top the "Billboard" 200, peaking at No. 2. In 1998, following the pop release of "You're Still the One", the "Come On Over" album was released in a remixed format for the European market as a pop album with less country instrumentation, and actually gave her the big breakthrough in Europe she and her producer husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange were looking for. "Come On Over" went to No. 1 on the UK album charts for 11 weeks. It became the biggest selling album of the year in Great Britain and a bestseller in other big European markets as well, selling more than one million copies in Germany and nearly 4 million in the UK alone. Although "You're Still The One" and the pop version of "From This Moment On" cracked the Top 10 of the UK charts and "When" had minor success in the Top 20, the songs that had finally drawn European attention to the album were the pop remixed singles "That Don't Impress Me Much", a No.3 in the UK and Top 10 hit in Germany in the summer of 1999, and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" which peaked at No.3 in both the UK and France in autumn of that year. Additionally, "You've Got a Way" was remixed specifically for inclusion on the "Notting Hill" soundtrack. Subsequently, a reissue of the international version of the album was released worldwide, including the US and Europe, containing three of these new remixes. Additionally, the album set the record for the longest ever stay in the Top 20 of the "Billboard" 200, remaining in the Top 20 for 99 weeks. "Billboard" magazine declared Shania Twain the most played artist on American radio in 1999.
In 1998, Twain launched her first major concert tour, aided by her manager Jon Landau, a veteran of many large-scale tours with Bruce Springsteen. The Come On Over Tour shows were a success, winning the "Country Tour of the Year" in 1998 and 1999 by Pollstar Concert Industry Awards.
In 2000, Twain was initially scheduled to release a Christmas album, but plans to release one were cancelled later in the year.
Following the success of "Come On Over", independent label Limelight Records released "The Complete Limelight Sessions" in October 2001. The album includes 16 tracks recorded in the late 1980s before Twain signed her record deal with Mercury.
After a change in management – QPrime replaced Landau – and a two-year break, along with the birth of their son, Eja (pronounced "Asia") D'Angelo, who was born on August 12, 2001, Twain and Lange returned to the studio. "Up!" was released on November 19, 2002. On January 26, 2003, Twain performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. About a year later, Twain kicked off the Up! Tour in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2003. "Up!" was released with three different discs – country/acoustic (green CD), pop/rock (red CD), and world/dance (blue CD). "Up!" was given four out of five stars by "Rolling Stone" magazine, and debuted at No.1 on the "Billboard" albums chart, selling 874,000 in the first week alone. It remained at the top of the charts for five weeks. Twain's crossover appeal in country, pop, and dance music, led the album "Up!" to sell over 11 million copies by 2004. "Up!" reached No.1 in Germany, No.2 in Australia and the Top Five in the UK and France. In Germany, "Up!" was certified 4x platinum and stayed in the Top 100 for one and a half years. The international music disc was remixed with Indian-style orchestral and percussion parts recorded in Mumbai, India. The new versions were produced by Simon and Diamond Duggal, brothers from Birmingham, England. They were originally invited to contribute parts to the pop version of "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" which retained the Indian influence.
Twain's popularity in UK was reflected by numerous appearances on the long-running music show "Top of the Pops", performing singles from "Come On Over" from 1999. In 2002 an entire special show was dedicated to her on sister show "TOTP2", in which Twain herself introduced some past performances of her greatest hits and new singles from "Up!". In November 2004, she appeared on the annual BBC charity telethon "Children in Need". During the show, she performed "Up!", and then took part in an all-star magic act in which she was sawn in half by magician Scott Penrose in an illusion called Clearly Impossible.
The first single from the album, "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" became a top 10 country hit in the US, after debuting at No. 24 after only five days of airplay; but only made the Top 40 on the pop charts. It was a much bigger hit on the other side of the Atlantic, released in a pop version, the single hit No. 4 in the UK. In Australia, Germany and France the song reached the Top 15 in each case. The follow-up single, "Up!", reached the Top 15 in the US country charts but failed to reach the pop Top 40. The second European single became the mid-tempo song "Ka-Ching!" (which was never released as a single in North America) with lyrics where Twain was criticizing unchecked consumerism. The song eventually became another smash hit in the important European markets, reaching No.1 in Germany and Austria and other European countries, the UK Top 10 and the Top 15 in France.
The third single from the album would be the most successful in the US. The romantic ballad "Forever and for Always" was released as a single in April 2003 and peaked at No.4 on the country chart and No.1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and made as well the "Billboard" Top 20. Again success was even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic with "Forever and For Always" again reaching the Top 10 in both, the UK and Germany. Further singles were "She's Not Just a Pretty Face", which was a country Top 10 hit, while the last US single, "It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing", made the Top 20 on both Country and AC. Due to the enormous European success of "Up!" and its first three singles, two more singles were released in the second half of 2003 with up-tempo "Thank You Baby" (No. 11 in the UK, Top 20 in Germany) and just before Christmas the romantic, acoustic ballad "When You Kiss Me," at least a minor hit in both territories. The title track "Up!" also saw a single release in a limited edition of European countries, such as Germany, in early 2004. In January 2008, "Up!" had sold 5.5 million copies in the US and was certified by the RIAA as 11x platinum (the organization counts double albums as two units).
In 2004, she released the "Greatest Hits" album, with three new tracks. As of 2012, it had sold over 4.15 million copies in the US. The first single, the multi-format duet "Party for Two", made the country top ten with Billy Currington, while the pop version with Sugar Ray lead singer Mark McGrath made top ten in the United Kingdom and Germany. The follow-up singles, "Don't!" and "I Ain't No Quitter" did not fare as well. The former made Top 20 on Adult Contemporary, while the latter did not gain enough airplay to reach the Country Top 40.
In August 2005, she released the single "Shoes" from the "Desperate Housewives" soundtrack. In late 2006, Twain and Anne Murray recorded a duet version of Murray's hit "You Needed Me" for her 2007 album, "". This was Twain's final recording with husband Lange as producer; on May 15, 2008, it was announced that Twain and Lange were separating. Their divorce was finalized in 2010.
In June 2009, Twain released a letter to her fans explaining the delays in the release of her next album, noting she had gone through personal pains and was focusing on raising her son Eja. In August 2009, at a conference in Timmins, Ontario, a spokesman for Twain's label said a new record from the singer was still "nowhere in sight".
In May 2011, Twain confirmed in an interview that she would release her first new single in six years, "Today Is Your Day", after the finale of "Why Not? with Shania Twain". Twain previewed the song in the first episode of the series. Twain worked with music producers David Foster and Nathan Chapman on the song. She also published her autobiography with Atria Books, "From This Moment On". The last episode of "Why Not?" features Twain and Lionel Richie recording "Endless Love" which would be the first single from his 2012 album, "Tuskegee". "Today Is Your Day" was officially released to iTunes and country radio on June 12, 2011. In addition to "Today Is Your Day", Twain also collaborated with Michael Bublé on his 2011 album "Christmas" (also produced by David Foster). Twain recorded "White Christmas" with Bublé, which was the first single from the album. On June 8, 2011, at a press conference at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Twain announced that she would headline Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for two years. Her show, titled "", began on December 1, 2012, with shows expected to run in 2013 and 2014.
In July 2013, Twain announced on Facebook that she was working on her album over the summer during a break from "Still the One". In October 2013, Twain sat down with Robin Roberts from "Good Morning America" as a featured artist on the Countdown to the CMA Awards. In the interview, Twain said that a new album was coming, but she said that she was still in the process of finding the right producer.
Outside of her show at Caesars Palace, Twain performed two concerts at the Calgary Stampede in Calgary, Alberta, on July 9 and 10, 2014. In a series of interviews leading up to her Calgary Stampede shows, Twain said she hoped to tour in 2015 and that it would lead to the release of a new album. Alongside her Calgary Stampede shows, Twain also headlined a show on Labour Day weekend at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
On March 4, 2015, Twain announced on "Good Morning America" she would be going on tour for the first time in 11 years, and would begin June 5 in Seattle, Washington and end on October 11 in Toronto, Ontario. Twain also announced this would be her last tour before her fifth studio album, which she intends to release while she is 50. In an interview on Global Television Network's "The Morning Show" on March 6, Twain confirmed that she is not retiring from her music career after the tour. In an interview with Radio.com published on March 5, she stated that she has found several producers for her upcoming album, describing it as "soul music".
On August 24, 2015, Twain stated: "First, I have to finish my new album this winter. Six tracks are already completed. I've written 38 songs in total, and now the process is underway to narrow that down to another six or eight to finish recording". That same month, it was announced by several sources, that even though her current Rock This Country Tour is her final time touring, she is possibly planning on extending the tour overseas because the Rock This Country tour was only based in the United States and Canada. Twain also mentioned, possibly returning to Las Vegas with a new residency show for possibly late 2016 or 2017. The new show would end up featuring music from her long-awaited new album as well as her hits.
In October 2016, Twain confirmed to "Rolling Stone" that she had new music coming "really soon." In December 2016 in an interview with "Billboard", she spoke about her forthcoming album, describing the finished product as "kind of schizophrenic musically" maintaining "She's the glue". In February 2017, Twain again spoke to "Rolling Stone" about the album; select song titles were confirmed, as Twain detailed that she had not only hoped to release a single in March, but that she planned to release the album in May. She performed at the 2017 Stagecoach Festival, held on April 29.
In April 2017, "Billboard" announced that Twain's new single, "Life's About to Get Good", would premiere in June, with the album projected for release in September. Twain headlined the 2017 Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California, where she previewed her new music for the first time. Twain performed on the "Today Show"s "Summer Concert Series" on June 16, 2017. Her fifth studio album, "Now," was released on September 29, 2017 and would debut at No. 1 on the "Billboard" 200.
In June 2017, Twain announced on ET Canada that she would in fact tour with her new album "Now". The Now Tour was announced by Twain on her official website on August 17, 2017.
The album's second single, "Swingin' With My Eyes Closed", was released on August 18, 2017. She has also internationally released two other promotional singles off of "Now", including "Poor Me" and "We've Got Something They Don't".
In June 2019, Twain announced her second Las Vegas residency, "Let's Go!", which opened on December 6, 2019, and will run for two years.
Twain's mainstream pop acceptance was further helped by her appearance in the 1998 first edition of the "VH1 Divas" concert where she sang alongside Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Carole King and Aretha Franklin, and also by VH1's 1999 heavily aired "Behind the Music", which concentrated on the tragic aspects of her early life as well as her physical attractiveness and Nashville's early resistance to her bare-midriff music videos. After "Divas", Twain sang background vocals with Lange for Dion's songs, "If Walls Could Talk" and "Goodbye's (The Saddest Word)".
Twain appeared as herself in the 2004 feature film "I Heart Huckabees".
On November 12, 2008, Twain made her first television appearance since her split from Lange, where she appeared as a surprise presenter at the 42nd CMA Awards.
In 2009, Twain served as a guest judge on "American Idol", for the show's August 30 and 31 episodes.
In April 2010, Twain announced plans for her own TV show, titled "Why Not? with Shania Twain". The show debuted on May 8, 2011 on OWN. Twain returned to "American Idol" as a guest mentor for a week where the top 6 contestants showcased her songs. After the conclusion of the ninth season Twain was very close to becoming a judge but ultimately it was Jennifer Lopez who got the job.
Twain guest starred on the Comedy Central series "Broad City", in a September 2017 episode titled "Twaining Day".
On October 23, 2017, Twain appeared as a guest judge on the 25th season of "Dancing with the Stars" during the show's "Movie Night", and also performed her song "Soldier". Twain appeared as a guest judge on episode five of the 10th Season of "Rupaul's Drag Race".
She competed against singer Meghan Trainor in an episode of TBS's "Drop the Mic" which aired in January 2018.
Twain was guest of honor for a "Lip Sync Battle" episode on Paramount Network pitting Derek Hough against Nicole Scherzinger that was dedicated to her and her music. The tribute episode aired June 21, 2018.
In November 2018, Twain appeared in the reality talent show "Real Country", as an executive producer and co-presenter with Jake Owen and Travis Tritt.
In 2019, Twain appeared in the film "Trading Paint", co-starring alongside John Travolta. Twain will play the role of the mother of singer Jeremy Camp in the 2020 biopic "I Still Believe".
In January 2005, Twain joined Scentstories by Febreze to create a limited edition scent disc with the proceeds going to America's Second Harvest.
In late 2005, Twain partnered with Coty to produce her namesake fragrance "Shania" by Stetson. A second fragrance was released in September 2007, called "Shania Starlight".
On January 1, 2010, Twain carried the Olympic Torch through her hometown as part of the 2010 Winter Olympics torch relay.
Twain is a vegetarian and a devotee of Sant Mat, an Eastern spiritual philosophy.
Twain met producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange after he heard her original songs and singing from her debut album; he then offered to produce and write songs with her. They first met at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993 and quickly became close. They were married on December 28, 1993 and had a son, Eja (pronounced "Asia"), in August 2001. On May 15, 2008, it was announced that Twain and Lange were separating after Lange allegedly had an affair with Twain's best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Their divorce was finalized on June 9, 2010. On December 20, 2010, it was reported that Twain was engaged to Swiss Nestlé executive Frédéric Thiébaud, the ex-husband of Marie-Anne. They were married on January 1, 2011, in Rincón, Puerto Rico.
She created Shania Kids Can in 2010, to address the needs of young school children who are typically overlooked by social assistance programs.
Twain's autobiography, "From This Moment On", was released on March 27, 2011.
Twain is a long-time resident of Corseaux, Switzerland, where her son was born.
In addition to her various awards for her singles and albums, Twain has received a number of personal honours:
Co-headlining tours
Headlining tours
Residencies | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28701 |
Session Description Protocol
The Session Description Protocol (SDP) is a format for describing multimedia communication sessions for the purposes of session announcement and session invitation. Its predominant use is in support of streaming media applications, such as voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing. SDP does not deliver any media streams itself but is used between endpoints for negotiation of network metrics, media types, and other associated properties. The set of properties and parameters are often called a "session profile".
SDP is extensible for the support of new media types and formats. SDP was originally a component of the Session Announcement Protocol (SAP), but found other uses in conjunction with the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), the Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and even as a standalone protocol for describing multicast sessions.
The IETF published the original specification as a Proposed Standard in April 1998, and subsequently published a revised specification as RFC 4566 in July 2006.
The Session Description Protocol describes a session as a group of fields in a text-based format, one field per line. The form of each field is as follows.
Where is a single case-sensitive character and is structured text in a format that depends on the attribute type. Values are typically UTF-8 encoded. Whitespace is not allowed immediately to either side of the equal sign.
An SDP message consists of three sections, detailing the session, timing, and media descriptions. Each message may contain multiple timing and media descriptions. Names are only unique within the associated syntactic construct.
Optional values are specified with codice_1 and each field must appear in the order shown below.
Below is a sample session description from RFC 4566. This session is originated by the user 'jdoe', at IPv4 address 10.47.16.5. Its name is "SDP Seminar" and extended session information ("A Seminar on the session description protocol") is included along with a link for additional information and an email address to contact the responsible party, Jane Doe. This session is specified to last for two hours using NTP timestamps, with a connection address (which indicates the address clients must connect to or — when a multicast address is provided, as it is here — subscribe to) specified as IPv4 224.2.17.12 with a TTL of 127. Recipients of this session description are instructed to only receive media. Two media descriptions are provided, both using RTP Audio Video Profile. The first is an audio stream on port 49170 using RTP/AVP payload type 0 (defined by RFC 3551 as PCMU), and the second is a video stream on port 51372 using RTP/AVP payload type 99 (defined as "dynamic"). Finally, an attribute is included which maps RTP/AVP payload type 99 to format h263-1998 with a 90kHz clock rate. RTCP ports for the audio and video streams of 49171 and 51373, respectively, are implied.
The SDP specification does not incorporate any transport protocol; it is purely a format for session description. It is intended to use different transport protocols as necessary, including SAP, SIP, and RTSP. SDP could even be transmitted by email or as an HTTP payload.
SDP uses attributes to extend the core protocol. Attributes can appear within the Session or Media sections and are scoped accordingly as "session-level" or "media-level". New attributes are added to the standard occasionally through registration with IANA.
Attributes take two forms:
Two of these attributes are specially defined:
The first one is used in the Session or Media sections to specify another character encoding (as registered in the IANA registry) than the default one highly recommended (UTF-8) where it is used in standard protocol keys whose values are containing a text intended to be displayed to a user. The second one is used to specify in which language it is written (alternate texts in multiple languages may be carried in the protocol, and selected automatically by the user agent according to user preferences. In both cases, each textual field in the protocol which are not interpreted symbolically by the protocol itself, will be interpreted as opaque strings, but rendered to the user or application with the values indicated in the last occurrence of the codice_6 and codice_7 in the current Media section, or otherwise their last value in the Session section).
The first 3 mandatory parameters (v=, s= and o=), even though they seem to contain displayable text, are not intended to be displayed to users and translated. The fields present in their values are considered in the protocol as opaque strings, they are used as identifiers, just like paths in an URL or filenames in a file system: the SDP standard indicates that they must be all non empty and should be UTF-8 encoded.
A few other attributes (described as part the standard SDP specifications in the same RFC) are also shown in the example above, either as a session-level attribute (such as the attribute in property form codice_8) which also applies to the described medias unless they override their value, or as a media-level attribute (such as the attribute in value form codice_9 for the video media in the example).
Absolute times are represented in Network Time Protocol (NTP) format (the number of seconds since 1900). If the stop time is 0 then the session is "unbounded." If the start time is also zero then the session is considered "permanent." Unbounded and permanent sessions are discouraged but not prohibited.
Intervals can be represented with NTP times or in typed time: a value and time units (days ('d'), hours ('h'), minutes ('m') and seconds ('s')) sequence.
Thus an hour meeting from 10 am UTC on 1 August 2010, with a single repeat time a week later at the same time can be represented as:
Or using typed time:
When repeat times are specified, the start time of each repetition may need to be adjusted so that it will occur at the same local time in a specific time zone throughout the period between the start time and the stop time (which are still specified in NTP format in UTC).
Instead of specifying this time zone and having to support a database of time zones for knowing when and where daylight adjustments will be needed, the repeat times are assumed to be all defined within the same time zone, and SDP supports the indication of NTP absolute times when a daylight offset (expressed in seconds or using a type time) will need to be applied to the repeated start time or end time falling at or after each daylight adjustment. All these offsets are relative to the start time, they are not cumulative. NTP supports this with the z= field which indicates a series of pairs, whose first item is the NTP absolute time when a daylight adjustment will occur, and the second item indicates the offset to apply relative to the absolute times computed with the r= field.
For example, if a daylight adjustment will subtract 1 hour on 31 October 2010 at 3 am UTC (i.e. 60 days minus 7 hours after the start time on Sunday 1 August 2010 at 10am UTC), and this will be the only daylight adjustment to apply in the scheduled period which would occur between 1 August 2010 up to the 28 November 2010 at 10 am UTC (the stop time of the repeated 1h session which is repeated each week at the same local time, which occurs 88 days later), this can be specified as:
If the weekly 1-hour session was repeated every Sunday for full one year, i.e. from Sunday 1 August 2010 3 am UTC to Sunday 26 June 2011 4 am UTC (stop time of the last repeat, i.e. 360 days plus 1 hour later, or 31107600 seconds later), so that it would include the transition back to Summer time on Sunday 27 March 2011 at 2 am (1 hour is added again to local time so that the second daylight transition would occur 209 days after the first start time):
As SDP announcements for repeated sessions should not be made to cover very long periods exceeding a few years, the number of daylight adjustments to include in the z= parameter should remain small.
Sessions may be repeated irregularly over a week but scheduled the same way for all weeks in the period, by adding more tuples in the "r" parameter. For example, to schedule the same event also on Saturday (at the same time of the day) you would use :
The SDP protocol does not support repeating sessions monthly and yearly schedules with such simple repeat times, because they are irregularly spaced in time; instead, additional "t"/"r" tuples may be supplied for each month or year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28702 |
Session Announcement Protocol
The Session Announcement Protocol (SAP) is an experimental protocol for advertising multicast session information. SAP typically uses Session Description Protocol (SDP) as the format for Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) session descriptions. Announcement data is sent using IP multicast and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).
Under SAP, senders periodically transmit SDP descriptions to a well-known multicast address and port number. A listening application constructs a guide of all advertised multicast sessions.
SAP was published by the IETF as RFC 2974.
The announcement interval is cooperatively modulated such that all SAP announcements in the multicast delivery scope, by default, consume 4000 bits per second. Regardless, the maximum announce interval is 300 seconds (5 minutes). Announcements automatically expire after 10 times the announcement interval or one hour, whichever is greater. Announcements may also be explicitly withdrawn by the original issuer.
SAP features separate methods for authenticating and encrypting announcements. Use of encryption is not recommended. Authentication prevents unauthorized modification and other DoS attacks. Authentication is optional. Two authentication schemes are supported:
The message body may optionally be compressed using the zlib format as defined in RFC 1950.
VLC media player monitors SAP announcements and presents the user a list of available streams.
SAP is one of the optional discovery and connection management techniques described in the AES67 audio-over-Ethernet interoperability standard. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28703 |
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL ()) is a World Wide Web Consortium recommended Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language to describe multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things. SMIL allows presenting media items such as text, images, video, audio, links to other SMIL presentations, and files from multiple web servers. SMIL markup is written in XML, and has similarities to HTML.
, the W3C Recommendation for SMIL is "SMIL 3.0".
SMIL 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation in June 1999.
"SMIL 2.0" became a W3C Recommendation in August 2001. SMIL 2.0 introduced a modular language structure that facilitated integration of SMIL semantics into other XML-based languages. Basic animation and timing modules were integrated into Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and the SMIL modules formed a basis for Timed-Text. The modular structure made it possible to define the standard SMIL language profile and the XHTML+SMIL language profile with common syntax and standard semantics.
"SMIL 2.1" became a W3C Recommendation in December 2005. SMIL 2.1 includes a small number of extensions based on practical experience gathered using SMIL in the Multimedia Messaging System on mobile phones.
"SMIL 3.0" became a W3C Recommendation in December 2008. It was first submitted as a W3C Working draft on December 21, 2006. The last draft revision was released on October 6, 2008.
Authoring and rendering tools for smilText and SMIL 3.0 PanZoom functionality:
Demos
A SMIL document is similar in structure to an HTML document in that they are typically divided between an optional codice_1 section and a required codice_2 section. The codice_1 section contains layout and metadata information. The codice_2 section contains the timing information, and is generally composed of combinations of three main tags—sequential ("codice_5", simple playlists), parallel ("codice_6", multi-zone/multi-layer playback) and exclusive ("codice_7", event-triggered interrupts). SMIL refers to media objects by URLs, allowing them to be shared between presentations and stored on different servers for load balancing. The language can also associate different media objects with different bandwidth requirements.
For playback scheduling, SMIL supports ISO-8601 codice_8 date/time specification to define begin/end events for playlists.
SMIL files take either a codice_9 or codice_10 file extension. However, SAMI files and Macintosh self mounting images also use codice_9, which creates some ambiguity at first glance. As a result, SMIL files commonly use the codice_10 file extension to avoid confusion.
File:Toy_train_SMIL.svg|thumb|right|500px|Example of a non-interactive SVG with SMIL demonstrating animation of transformation and motion.
default
File:SMIL_missile_demo.svg|thumb|right|250px|Example of an interactive SVG with SMIL demonstrating "mouse" events.
default
SMIL is one of three means by which SVG animation can be achieved (the others being JavaScript and CSS animations).
While RSS and Atom are web syndication methods, with the former being more popular as a syndication method for podcasts, SMIL is potentially useful as a script or playlist that can tie sequential pieces of multimedia together and can then be syndicated through RSS or Atom. In addition, the combination of multimedia-laden .smil files with RSS or Atom syndication would be useful for accessibility to audio-enabled podcasts by the deaf through Timed Text closed captions, and can also turn multimedia into hypermedia that can be hyperlinked to other linkable audio and video multimedia.
VoiceXML can be combined with SMIL to provide a sequential reading of several pre-provided pages or slides in a voice browser, while combining SMIL with MusicXML would allow for the creation of infinitely-recombinable sequences of music sheets. Combining SMIL+VoiceXML or SMIL+MusicXML with RSS or Atom could be useful in the creation of an audible pseudo-podcast with embedded hyperlinks, while combining SMIL+SVG with VoiceXML and/or MusicXML would be useful in the creation of an automatically audio-enabled vector graphics animation with embedded hyperlinks.
SMIL is anticipated for use within TEI documents.
SMIL is being implemented on handheld and mobile devices and has also spawned the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) which is a video and picture equivalent of Short Message Service (SMS).
SMIL is also one of the underlying technologies used for "Advanced Content" in the (discontinued) HD DVD format for adding interactive content (menus etc.).
The field of Digital Signage is embracing SMIL as a means of controlling dynamic advertising in public areas.
Most commonly used web browsers have native support for SMIL, but it has not been implemented in Microsoft browsers. It was to be deprecated in Google Chrome, but it has now been decided to suspend that intent until alternatives are sufficiently developed. Other software that implement SMIL playback include:
Media player boxes based on dedicated 1080p decoder chips such as the Sigma Designs 8634 processor are getting SMIL players embedded in them.
A SMIL file must be embedded, then opened using a plug-in such as Apple's QuickTime or Microsoft's Windows Media Player, to be viewed by a browser that doesn't support SMIL. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28704 |
SECAM
SECAM, also written SÉCAM (, " Séquentiel couleur à mémoire", French for "Sequential colour with memory"), is an analog color television system first used in France. It was one of three major color television standards, the others being PAL and NTSC.
All the countries using SECAM are currently in the process of conversion, or have already converted to DVB, the new pan-European standard for digital television. SECAM remained a major standard into the 2000s.
This page primarily discusses the SECAM colour encoding system. The articles on broadcast television systems, and analogue television further describe frame rates, image resolution and audio modulation.
The standard spread from France to its former African colonies. The system was also selected as the standard for color in the Soviet Union, which began broadcasts shortly after the French, and remained in use in most of those countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Other countries that selected this standard are Zaire, Tunisia, Surinam, Morocco, Mauricio, Monaco, Lebanon, Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, Hungary, Haiti, Greece, France and Egypt.
Development of SECAM began in 1956 by a team led by Henri de France working at "Compagnie Française de Télévision" (later bought by Thomson, now Technicolor). The technology was ready by the end of the 1950s, but this was too soon for a wide introduction. A version of SECAM for the French 819-line television standard was devised and tested, but not introduced. Following a pan-European agreement to introduce color TV only in 625 lines, France had to start the conversion by switching over to a 625-line television standard, which happened at the beginning of the 1960s with the introduction of a second network.
The first proposed system was called SECAM I in 1961, followed by other studies to improve compatibility and image quality.
These improvements were called SECAM II and SECAM III, with the latter being presented at the 1965 CCIR General Assembly in Vienna.
Further improvements were SECAM III A followed by SECAM III B, the adopted system for general use in 1967, and first SECAM broadcast was made in France that year.
Soviet technicians were involved in the development of the standard, and created their own incompatible variant called NIIR or SECAM IV, which was not deployed. The team was working in Moscow's Telecentrum under the direction of . The NIIR designation comes from the name of the "Nautchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Radio" ("NIIR", "rus." Научно-Исследовательский Институт Радио), a Soviet research institute involved in the studies. Two standards were developed: "Non-linear NIIR", in which a process analogous to gamma correction is used, and "Linear NIIR" or "SECAM IV" that omits this process.
SECAM was inaugurated in France on 1 October 1967, on "la deuxième chaîne" (the second channel), now called France 2. A group of four suited men—a presenter (Georges Gorse, Minister of Information) and three contributors to the system's development—were shown standing in a studio. Following a count from 10, at 2:15 pm the black-and-white image switched to color; the presenter then declared ""Et voici la couleur !"" (fr: And here is color!) In 1967, CLT of Lebanon became the third television station in the world, after the Soviet Union and France, to broadcast in color utilizing the French SECAM technology.
The first color television sets cost 5000 Francs. Color TV was not very popular initially; only about 1500 people watched the inaugural program in color. A year later, only 200,000 sets had been sold of an expected million. This pattern was similar to the earlier slow build-up of color television popularity in the US.
SECAM was later adopted by former French and Belgian colonies, Greece, Cyprus, the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries (except for Romania and Albania), and Middle Eastern countries. However, with the fall of communism, and following a period when multi-standard TV sets became a commodity, many Eastern European countries decided to switch to the West German-developed PAL system.
Other countries, notably the United Kingdom and Italy, briefly experimented with SECAM before opting for PAL.
Since late 2000s, SECAM is in the process of being phased out and replaced by DVB.
Some have argued that the primary motivation for the development of SECAM in France was to protect French television equipment manufacturers. However, incompatibility had started with the earlier unusual decision to adopt positive video modulation for French broadcast signals. The earlier systems System A & the 819-line systems were the only other systems to use positive video modulation. In addition, SECAM development predates PAL. NTSC was considered undesirable in Europe because of its tint problem requiring an additional control, which SECAM and PAL solved. Nonetheless, SECAM was partly developed for reasons of national pride. Henri de France's personal charisma and ambition may have been a contributing factor. PAL was developed by Telefunken, a German company, and in the post-war De Gaulle era there would have been much political resistance to dropping a French-developed system and adopting a German-developed one instead.
Unlike some other manufacturers, the company where SECAM was invented, Technicolor (known as Thomson until 2010), still sells TV sets worldwide under different brands; this may be due in part to the legacy of SECAM. Thomson bought the company that developed PAL, Telefunken, and today even co-owns the RCA brand —RCA being the creator of NTSC. Thomson also co-authored the ATSC standards which are used for American high-definition television.
The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations. According to this explanation, East German political authorities were well aware of West German television's popularity and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black & white, because the underlying TV standards remained essentially the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television". Later East German–produced TV sets even included a dual standard PAL/SECAM decoder.
Another explanation for the Eastern European adoption of SECAM, led by the Soviet Union, is that the Russians had extremely long distribution lines between broadcasting stations and transmitters. Long co-axial cables or microwave links can cause amplitude and phase variations, which do not affect SECAM signals.
However, PAL and SECAM are just standards for the color sub carrier, used in conjunction with ITU television broadcast systems for the base monochrome signals, identified with letters such as M, B/G, D/K, and L.
These signals are much more important to compatibility than the color sub carriers are. They differ by AM or FM sound modulation, signal polarization, relative frequencies within the channel, bandwidth, etc. For example, a PAL D/K TV set will be able to receive a SECAM D/K signal (although in black and white), while it will not be able to decode the sound of a PAL B/G signal. So even before SECAM came to Eastern European countries, most viewers (other than those in East Germany and Yugoslavia) could not have received Western programs. This, along with language issues, meant that in most countries monochrome-only reception did not pose a significant problem for the authorities.
Just as with the other color standards adopted for broadcast usage over the world, SECAM is a standard which permits existing monochrome television receivers predating its introduction to continue to be operated as monochrome televisions. Because of this compatibility requirement, color standards added a second signal to the basic monochrome signal, which carries the color information. The color information is called chrominance or C for short, while the black-and-white information is called the luminance or Y for short. Monochrome television receivers only display the luminance, while color receivers process both signals.
Additionally, for compatibility, it is required to use no more bandwidth than the monochrome signal alone; the color signal has to be somehow inserted into the monochrome signal, without disturbing it. This insertion is possible because the spectrum of the monochrome TV signal is not continuous (for most typical video content), hence empty space exists which can be utilized. This typical lack of continuity results from the discrete nature of the signal, which is divided into frames and lines. (Strictly speaking, monochrome video does use the full spectrum, if arbitrary and unconstrained movement of subjects and/or cameras is permitted. Therefore, all of these color systems compromise luma quality to some extent in exchange for the addition of color—i.e. all of these color signals look worse at some time or other than they would if the color signal were absent.) Analog color systems differ by the way in which infrequently used space in the frequency band of the signal is used. In all cases, the color signal is inserted at the end of the spectrum of the monochrome signal, where it causes less visual distortion (only affecting fine detail) in the uncommon case that the monochrome signal had significant frequency components overlapping the color signal.
In order to be able to separate the color signal from the monochrome one in the receiver, a fixed frequency sub carrier is used, this sub carrier being modulated by the color signal.
The color space is three-dimensional by the nature of the human vision, so after subtracting the luminance, which is carried by the base signal, the color sub carrier still has to carry a two-dimensional signal. Typically the red (R) and the blue (B) information are carried because their signal difference with luminance (R-Y and B-Y) is stronger than that of green (G-Y).
SECAM differs from the other color systems by the way the R-Y and B-Y signals are carried.
First, SECAM uses frequency modulation to encode chrominance information on the sub carrier.
Second, instead of transmitting the red and blue information together, it only sends one of them at a time, and uses the information about the other color from the preceding line. It uses an analog delay line, a memory device, for storing one line of color information. This justifies the "Sequential, With Memory" name.
Because SECAM transmits only one chrominance component at a time, it is free of the color artifacts present in NTSC and PAL resulting from the combined transmission of both signals.
This means that the vertical color resolution is halved relative to NTSC. The later PAL system also displays half the vertical resolution of NTSC (i.e., the same as SECAM). Although PAL does not eliminate half of vertical color information during encoding, it combines color information from adjacent lines at the decoding stage, in order to compensate for "color sub carrier phase errors" occurring during the transmission of the Amplitude/Phase-Modulated color sub carrier. This is normally done using a delay line like in SECAM (the result is called "PAL D" or PAL Delay-Line, sometimes interpreted as DeLuxe), but can be accomplished "visually" in cheap TV sets using PAL-S ("PAL simple") decoders. Because the FM modulation of SECAM's color sub carrier is insensitive to phase (or amplitude) errors, phase errors do not cause loss of color saturation in SECAM, although they do in PAL. In NTSC, such errors cause color shifts (hence the "Hue" control on all NTSC TV sets to adjust the color phase with a constant bias).
The color difference signals in SECAM are actually calculated in the YDbDr color space, which is a scaled version of the YUV color space. This encoding is better suited to the transmission of only one signal at a time.
FM modulation of the color information allows SECAM to be completely free of the dot crawl problem commonly encountered with the other analog standards. SECAM transmissions are more robust over longer distances than NTSC or PAL. However, owing to their FM nature, the color signal remains present, although at reduced amplitude, even in monochrome portions of the image, thus being subject to stronger cross color even though color crawl of the PAL type doesn't exist.
Though most of the pattern is removed from PAL and NTSC-encoded signals with a comb filter (designed to segregate the two signals where the luma spectrum may overlap into the spectral space used by the chroma) by modern displays, some can still be left in certain parts of the picture. Such parts are usually sharp edges on the picture, sudden color or brightness changes along the picture or certain repeating patterns, such as a checker board on clothing. Dot crawl patterns can be completely removed by connecting the display to the signal source through a cable or signal format different from composite video (yellow RCA cable) or a coaxial cable, such as S-Video, which carries the chroma signal in a separate band all its own, leaving the luma to use its entire band, including the usually empty parts when they are needed. FM SECAM is a continuous spectrum, so unlike PAL and NTSC even a perfect digital comb filter could not entirely separate SECAM Colour and Luminance.
The idea of reducing the vertical color resolution comes from Henri de France, who observed that color information is approximately identical for two successive lines. Because the color information was designed to be a cheap, backwards compatible addition to the monochrome signal, the color signal has a lower bandwidth than the luminance signal, and hence lower horizontal resolution. Fortunately, the human visual system is similar in design: it perceives changes in luminance at a higher resolution than changes in chrominance, so this asymmetry has minimal visual impact. It was therefore also logical to reduce the vertical color resolution.
A similar paradox applies to the vertical resolution in television in general: reducing the bandwidth of the video signal will preserve the vertical resolution, even if the image loses sharpness and is smudged in the horizontal direction. Hence, video could be sharper vertically than horizontally. Additionally, transmitting an image with too much vertical detail will cause annoying flicker on television screens, as small details will only appear on a single line (in one of the two interlaced fields), and hence be refreshed at half the frequency. (This is a consequence of interlaced scanning that is obviated by progressive scan.) Computer-generated text and inserts have to be carefully low-pass filtered to prevent this.
The latest European efforts towards an analog standard, resulting in MAC systems, still used the sequential color transmission idea of SECAM, with only one of time-compressed U and V components being transmitted on a given line. The D2-MAC standard enjoyed some short real market deployment, particularly in northern European countries. To some extent, this idea is still present in 4:2:0 digital sampling format, which is used by most digital video medias available to the public. In this case, however, color resolution is halved in both horizontal and vertical directions thus yielding a more symmetrical behavior.
There are six varieties of SECAM:
MESECAM is a method of recording SECAM color signals onto VHS or Betamax video tape. It should not be mistaken for a broadcast standard.
"Native" SECAM recording was originally devised for machines sold for the French market. At a later stage, countries where both PAL and SECAM signals were available, such as the USSR, developed a cheap method of converting PAL video machines to record SECAM signals also using the PAL circuitry. A tape produced by this method is not compatible with "native" SECAM tapes as produced by VCRs in the French market. It will play in black and white only, the color is lost. So the world is left with two different incompatible standards for recording SECAM on video cassette.
Although being a workaround, MESECAM is much more widespread than "native" SECAM. It has been the only method of recording SECAM signals to VHS in almost all countries that ever used SECAM, including as mentioned the Middle East and all countries in Eastern Europe. "Native" SECAM recording (marketing term: "SECAM-West") is only used in France and adjacent countries. Most VHS machines advertised as "SECAM capable" outside France can be expected to be of the MESECAM variety only.
On VHS tapes, the luminance signal is recorded FM-encoded (on VHS with reduced bandwidth, on S-VHS with full bandwidth) but the PAL or NTSC chrominance signal is too sensitive to small changes in frequency caused by inevitable small variations in tape speed to be recorded directly. Instead, it is first shifted down to the lower frequency of 630 kHz, and the complex nature of the PAL or NTSC sub carrier means that the down conversion must be done via heterodyning to ensure that information is not lost.
The SECAM sub carriers on the other hand, consisting of two simple FM signals at 4.41 MHz and 4.25 MHz, do not need this (actually simple) processing. The VHS specification for "native" SECAM recording specifies that they be divided by 4 on recording to give sub carriers of approximately 1.1 MHz and 1.06 MHz, and multiplied by 4 on playback. A true dual-standard PAL and SECAM video recorder therefore requires two color processing circuits, adding to complexity and expense. Since some countries in the Middle East use PAL and others use SECAM, the region has adopted a shortcut, and uses the PAL mixer-down converter approach for both PAL and SECAM. This works well and simplifies VCR design.
Many PAL VHS recorders, with MESECAM, have had their analog tuner modified in French-speaking western Switzerland (Switzerland used the PAL-B/G analog broadcast standard while the bordering France used SECAM-L; nowadays both countries have switched their broadcasting to digital-only). The original tuner in those PAL recorders allows only PAL-B/G reception. The Swiss importers added a little circuit, with a specific IC, for the French SECAM-L standard; the tuner thus became multistandard, but the VCR recorded French broadcasts, in MESECAM. Such tapes are played in black and white on "native" SECAM VCRs, and native SECAM tapes are also played in B/W in these modified tuner VCRs. A specific stamp was added on the machines saying "PAL+SECAM".
However some special VHS video recorders are available which can allow viewers the flexibility of enjoying PAL-M recordings using a standard PAL (625/50 Hz) color TV, or even through multi-system TV sets. Video recorders like Panasonic NV-W1E (AG-W1 for the USA), AG-W2, AG-W3, NV-J700AM, Aiwa HV-MX100, HV-MX1U, Samsung SV-4000W and SV-7000W feature a digital TV system conversion circuitry.
Unlike PAL or NTSC, analog SECAM programming cannot easily be edited in its native analog form. Because it uses frequency modulation, SECAM is not linear with respect to the input image (this is also what protects it against signal distortion), so electrically mixing two (synchronized) SECAM signals does not yield a valid SECAM signal, unlike with analog PAL or NTSC. For this reason, to mix two SECAM signals, they must be demodulated, the demodulated signals mixed, and are remodulated again. Hence, post-production is often done in PAL, or in component formats, with the result encoded or transcoded into SECAM at the point of transmission. Reducing the costs of running television stations is one reason for some countries' recent switchovers to PAL.
Most TVs currently sold in SECAM countries support both SECAM and PAL, and more recently composite video NTSC as well (though not usually broadcast NTSC, that is, they cannot accept a broadcast signal from an antenna). Although the older analog camcorders (VHS, VHS-C) were produced in SECAM versions, none of the 8 mm or Hi-band models (S-VHS, S-VHS-C, and Hi-8) recorded it directly. Camcorders and VCRs of these standards sold in SECAM countries are internally PAL. The result could be converted back to SECAM in some models; most people buying such expensive equipment would have a multistandard TV set and as such would not need a conversion. Digital camcorders or DVD players (with the exception of some early models) do not accept or output a SECAM analog signal. However, this is of dwindling importance: since 1980 most European domestic video equipment uses French-originated SCART connectors, allowing the transmission of RGB signals between devices. This eliminates the legacy of PAL, SECAM, and NTSC color sub carrier standards.
In general, modern professional equipment is now all-digital, and uses component-based digital interconnects such as CCIR 601 to eliminate the need for any analog processing prior to the final modulation of the analog signal for broadcast. However, large installed bases of analog professional equipment still exist, particularly in third world countries.
This is a list of nations that currently authorize the use of the SECAM standard for television broadcasting. Nations that have moved to PAL or DVB-T are listed separately.
The Slovakia, Hungary and the Baltic countries also changed their underlying sound carrier standard from D/K to B/G which is used in most of Western Europe, to facilitate use of imported broadcast equipment. This required viewers to purchase multistandard receivers though. The other countries mentioned kept their existing standards (B/G in the cases of East Germany and Greece, D/K for the rest). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28706 |
Stethoscope
The stethoscope is an acoustic medical device for auscultation, or listening to internal sounds of an animal or human body. It typically has a small disc-shaped resonator that is placed against the skin, and one or two tubes connected to two earpieces. A stethoscope can be used to listen to the sounds made by the heart, lungs or intestines, as well as blood flow in arteries and veins. In combination with a manual sphygmomanometer, it is commonly used when measuring blood pressure.
Less commonly, "mechanic's stethoscopes", equipped with rod shaped chestpieces, are used to listen to internal sounds made by machines (for example, sounds and vibrations emitted by worn ball bearings), such as diagnosing a malfunctioning automobile engine by listening to the sounds of its internal parts. Stethoscopes can also be used to check scientific vacuum chambers for leaks and for various other small-scale acoustic monitoring tasks.
A stethoscope that intensifies auscultatory sounds is called a phonendoscope.
The stethoscope was invented in France in 1816 by René Laennec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. It consisted of a wooden tube and was monaural. Laennec invented the stethoscope because he was not comfortable placing his ear directly onto a woman's chest to listen to her heart. He observed that a rolled piece of paper, placed between the patient's chest and his ear, could amplify heart sounds without requiring physical contact. Laennec's device was similar to the common ear trumpet, a historical form of hearing aid; indeed, his invention was almost indistinguishable in structure and function from the trumpet, which was commonly called a "microphone". Laennec called his device the "stethoscope" ("stetho-" + "-scope", "chest scope"), and he called its use "mediate auscultation", because it was auscultation with a tool intermediate between the patient's body and the physician's ear. (Today the word "auscultation" denotes all such listening, mediate or not.) The first flexible stethoscope of any sort may have been a binaural instrument with articulated joints not very clearly described in 1829. In 1840, Golding Bird described a stethoscope he had been using with a flexible tube. Bird was the first to publish a description of such a stethoscope, but he noted in his paper the prior existence of an earlier design (which he thought was of little utility) which he described as the snake ear trumpet. Bird's stethoscope had a single earpiece.
In 1851, Irish physician Arthur Leared invented a binaural stethoscope, and in 1852, George Philip Cammann perfected the design of the stethoscope instrument (that used both ears) for commercial production, which has become the standard ever since. Cammann also wrote a major treatise on diagnosis by auscultation, which the refined binaural stethoscope made possible. By 1873, there were descriptions of a differential stethoscope that could connect to slightly different locations to create a slight stereo effect, though this did not become a standard tool in clinical practice.
Somerville Scott Alison described his invention of the stethophone at the Royal Society in 1858; the stethophone had two separate bells, allowing the user to hear and compare sounds derived from two discrete locations. This was used to do definitive studies on binaural hearing and auditory processing that advanced knowledge of sound localization and eventually lead to an understanding of binaural fusion.
The medical historian Jacalyn Duffin has argued that the invention of the stethoscope marked a major step in the redefinition of disease from being a bundle of symptoms, to the current sense of a disease as a problem with an anatomical system even if there are no noticeable symptoms. This re-conceptualization occurred in part, Duffin argues, because prior to stethoscopes, there were no non-lethal instruments for exploring internal anatomy.
Rappaport and Sprague designed a new stethoscope in the 1940s, which became the standard by which other stethoscopes are measured, consisting of two sides, one of which is used for the respiratory system, the other for the cardiovascular system. The Rappaport-Sprague was later made by Hewlett-Packard. HP's medical products division was spun off as part of Agilent Technologies, Inc., where it became Agilent Healthcare. Agilent Healthcare was purchased by Philips which became Philips Medical Systems, before the walnut-boxed, $300, original Rappaport-Sprague stethoscope was finally abandoned ca. 2004, along with Philips' brand (manufactured by Andromed, of Montreal, Canada) electronic stethoscope model. The Rappaport-Sprague model stethoscope was heavy and short () with an antiquated appearance recognizable by their two large independent latex rubber tubes connecting an exposed leaf-spring-joined pair of opposing F-shaped chrome-plated brass binaural ear tubes with a dual-head chest piece.
Several other minor refinements were made to stethoscopes until, in the early 1960s, David Littmann, a Harvard Medical School professor, created a new stethoscope that was lighter than previous models and had improved acoustics. In the late 1970s, 3M-Littmann introduced the tunable diaphragm: a very hard (G-10) glass-epoxy resin diaphragm member with an overmolded silicone flexible acoustic surround which permitted increased excursion of the diaphragm member in a Z-axis with respect to the plane of the sound collecting area. The left shift to a lower resonant frequency increases the volume of some low frequency sounds due to the longer waves propagated by the increased excursion of the hard diaphragm member suspended in the concentric accountic surround. Conversely, restricting excursion of the diaphragm by pressing the stethoscope diaphragm surface firmly against the anatomical area overlying the physiological sounds of interest, the acoustic surround could also be used to dampen excursion of the diaphragm in response to "z"-axis pressure against a concentric fret. This raises the frequency bias by shortening the wavelength to auscultate a higher range of physiological sounds.
In 1999, Richard Deslauriers patented the first external noise reducing stethoscope, the DRG Puretone. It featured two parallel lumens containing two steel coils which dissipated infiltrating noise as inaudible heat energy. The steel coil "insulation" added .30 lb to each stethoscope. In 2005, DRG's diagnostics division was acquired by TRIMLINE Medical Products.
Stethoscopes are a symbol of healthcare professionals. Healthcare providers are often seen or depicted wearing a stethoscope around the neck. A 2012 research paper claimed that the stethoscope, when compared to other medical equipment, had the highest positive impact on the perceived trustworthiness of the practitioner seen with it.
Prevailing opinions on the utility of the stethoscope in current clinical practice vary depending on the medical specialty. Studies have shown that auscultation skill (i.e., the ability to make a diagnosis based on what is heard through a stethoscope) has been in decline for some time, such that some medical educators are working to re-establish it.
In general practice, traditional blood pressure measurement using a mechanical sphygmomanometer with inflatable cuff and stethoscope is gradually being replaced with automated blood pressure monitors.
Acoustic stethoscopes operate on the transmission of sound from the chest piece, via air-filled hollow tubes, to the listener's ears. The chestpiece usually consists of two sides that can be placed against the patient for sensing sound: a diaphragm (plastic disc) or bell (hollow cup). If the diaphragm is placed on the patient, body sounds vibrate the diaphragm, creating acoustic pressure waves which travel up the tubing to the listener's ears. If the bell is placed on the patient, the vibrations of the skin directly produce acoustic pressure waves traveling up to the listener's ears. The bell transmits low frequency sounds, while the diaphragm transmits higher frequency sounds. To deliver the acoustic energy primarily to either the bell or diaphragm, the tube connecting into the chamber between bell and diaphragm is open on only one side and can rotate. The opening is visible when connected into the bell. Rotating the tube 180 degrees in the head connects it to the diaphragm. This two-sided stethoscope was invented by Rappaport and Sprague in the early part of the 20th century.
One problem with acoustic stethoscopes was that the sound level was extremely low. This problem was surmounted in 1999 with the invention of the stratified continuous (inner) lumen, and the kinetic acoustic mechanism in 2002.
An electronic stethoscope (or stethophone) overcomes the low sound levels by electronically amplifying body sounds. However, amplification of stethoscope contact artifacts, and component cutoffs (frequency response thresholds of electronic stethoscope microphones, pre-amps, amps, and speakers) limit electronically amplified stethoscopes' overall utility by amplifying mid-range sounds, while simultaneously attenuating high- and low- frequency range sounds. Currently, a number of companies offer electronic stethoscopes. Electronic stethoscopes require conversion of acoustic sound waves to electrical signals which can then be amplified and processed for optimal listening. Unlike acoustic stethoscopes, which are all based on the same physics, transducers in electronic stethoscopes vary widely. The simplest and least effective method of sound detection is achieved by placing a microphone in the chestpiece. This method suffers from ambient noise interference and has fallen out of favor. Another method, used in Welch-Allyn's Meditron stethoscope, comprises placement of a piezoelectric crystal at the head of a metal shaft, the bottom of the shaft making contact with a diaphragm. 3M also uses a piezo-electric crystal placed within foam behind a thick rubber-like diaphragm. The Thinklabs' Rhythm 32 uses an electromagnetic diaphragm with a conductive inner surface to form a capacitive sensor. This diaphragm responds to sound waves, with changes in an electric field replacing changes in air pressure. The Eko Core enables wireless transmission of heart sounds to a smartphone or tablet.
Because the sounds are transmitted electronically, an electronic stethoscope can be a wireless device, can be a recording device, and can provide noise reduction, signal enhancement, and both visual and audio output. Around 2001, Stethographics introduced PC-based software which enabled a phonocardiograph, graphic representation of cardiologic and pulmonologic sounds to be generated, and interpreted according to related algorithms. All of these features are helpful for purposes of telemedicine (remote diagnosis) and teaching.
Electronic stethoscopes are also used with computer-aided auscultation programs to analyze the recorded heart sounds pathological or innocent heart murmurs.
Some electronic stethoscopes feature direct audio output that can be used with an external recording device, such as a laptop or MP3 recorder. The same connection can be used to listen to the previously recorded auscultation through the stethoscope headphones, allowing for more detailed study for general research as well as evaluation and consultation regarding a particular patient's condition and telemedicine, or remote diagnosis.
There are some smartphone apps that can use the phone as a stethoscope. At least one uses the phone's own microphone to amplify sound, produce a visualization, and e-mail the results. These apps may be used for training purposes or as novelties, but have not yet gained acceptance for professional medical use.
The first stethoscope that could work with a smartphone application was introduced in 2015
A "fetal stethoscope" or "fetoscope" is an acoustic stethoscope shaped like a listening trumpet. It is placed against the abdomen of a pregnant woman to listen to the heart sounds of the fetus. The fetal stethoscope is also known as a Pinard horn after French obstetrician Adolphe Pinard (1844–1934).
A Doppler stethoscope is an electronic device that measures the Doppler effect of ultrasound waves reflected from organs within the body. Motion is detected by the change in frequency, due to the Doppler effect, of the reflected waves. Hence the Doppler stethoscope is particularly suited to deal with moving objects such as a beating heart.
It was recently demonstrated that continuous Doppler enables the auscultation of valvular movements and blood flow sounds that are undetected during cardiac examination with a stethoscope in adults. The Doppler auscultation presented a sensitivity of 84% for the detection of aortic regurgitations while classic stethoscope auscultation presented a sensitivity of 58%. Moreover, Doppler auscultation was superior in the detection of impaired ventricular relaxation. Since the physics of Doppler auscultation and classic auscultation are different, it has been suggested that both methods could complement each other.
A military noise-immune Doppler based stethoscope has recently been developed for auscultation of patients in loud sound environments (up to 110 dB).
A 3D-printed stethoscope is an open-source medical device meant for auscultation and manufactured via means of 3D printing. The 3D stethoscope was developed by Dr. Tarek Loubani and a team of medical and technology specialists. The 3D-stethoscope was developed as part of the Glia project, and its design is open source from the outset. The stethoscope gained widespread media coverage in Summer 2015.
The need for a 3D-stethoscope was borne out of a lack of stethoscopes and other vital medical equipment because of the blockade of the Gaza Strip, where Loubani, a Palestinian-Canadian, worked as an emergency physician during the 2012 conflict in Gaza. The 1960s-era "Littmann Cardiology 3" stethoscope became the basis for the 3D-printed stethoscope developed by Loubani.
Prior to the 1960s, the esophageal stethoscope was a part of routine intraoperative monitoring.
Stethoscopes usually have rubber earpieces, which aid comfort and create a seal with the ear, improving the acoustic function of the device. Stethoscopes can be modified by replacing the standard earpieces with moulded versions, which improve comfort and transmission of sound. Moulded earpieces can be cast by an audiologist or made by the stethoscope user from a kit. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28714 |
System of a Down
System of a Down is an Armenian-American heavy metal band formed in Glendale, California in 1994. The band currently consists of founding members Serj Tankian (lead vocals, keyboards), Daron Malakian (vocals, guitar) and Shavo Odadjian (bass, backing vocals) as well as John Dolmayan (drums), who replaced original drummer Andy Khachaturian in 1997.
The band achieved commercial success with the release of five studio albums, three of which debuted at number one on the US "Billboard" 200. System of a Down has been nominated for four Grammy Awards and their song "B.Y.O.B." won a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2006. The band went on hiatus in 2006 and reunited in 2010; since then, they have performed live occasionally despite having not released any new material since the "Mezmerize" and "Hypnotize" albums in 2005. System of a Down has sold over 40 million records worldwide, while two of their singles "Aerials" and "Hypnotize" reached number one on "Billboard"s Alternative Songs chart.
Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian attended Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School as children, although due to their eight-year age difference they did not meet until 1992 while working on separate projects at the same recording studio. They formed a band named "Soil" with Tankian on vocals and keyboards, Malakian on vocals and guitar, Dave Hakopyan (who later played in The Apex Theory/Mt. Helium) on bass and Domingo "Dingo" Laranio on drums. The band hired Shavo Odadjian (another Rose and Alex Pilibos alumnus) as manager, although he eventually joined Soil as rhythm guitarist. In 1994, after only one live show at the Roxy and one jam session recording, Hakopyan and Laranio left the band.
After Soil split up, Tankian, Odadjian, and Malakian formed a new band, System of a Down. The group took its name from a poem that Malakian had written titled "Victims of a Down". The word "victims" was changed to "system" because Odadjian believed that it would appeal to a much wider audience and also because the group wanted their records to be alphabetically shelved closer to their musical heroes, Slayer. Odadjian switched from guitar to bass and passed on his managerial duties to Velvet Hammer Music and Management Group and its founder David "Beno" Benveniste. The band recruited drummer Ontronik "Andy" Khachaturian, an old school friend of Malakian and Odadjian who had played with Malakian in a band called Snowblind during their teens.
In early 1995, System played as "Soil" at the Cafe Club Fais Do-Do, a nightclub in Los Angeles. Shortly after the event, System of a Down made what is known as "Untitled 1995 Demo Tape", which was not commercially released but appeared on file sharing networks around the time of the band's success with "Toxicity" about six years later. "Demo Tape 2" was released in 1996. At the beginning of 1997, System of a Down recorded their final publicly released demo tape, "Demo Tape 3". In mid-1997, drummer Khachaturian left the band because of a hand injury (he subsequently co-founded The Apex Theory, which included former Soil bassist Dave Hakopyan). Khachaturian was replaced by John Dolmayan.
The band's first official and professionally recorded song was on a collection called "Hye Enk" ("we're Armenian" in English), an Armenian Genocide recognition compilation in 1997. After playing at notable Hollywood clubs such as the Whisky-A-Go-Go and Viper Room, the band attracted the attention of producer Rick Rubin, who asked them to keep in touch. Showing great interest, the group recorded "Demo Tape 4" near the end of 1997, specifically to be sent to record companies. Rubin signed the group to his American/Columbia Records and, with engineer Sylvia Massy, System began laying down tracks that would eventually be released on their debut album. "I loved them," Rubin recalled. "They were my favourite band, but I didn't think anyone was going to like them apart from a small, likeminded group of people like me who were crazy. No one was waiting for an Armenian heavy metal band. It had to be so good that it transcended all of that."
In 1997, the group won the Best Signed Band Award from the Rock City Awards.
In June 1998, System of a Down released their debut album, "System of a Down". They enjoyed moderate success as their first singles "Sugar" and "Spiders" became radio favorites and the music videos for both songs were frequently aired on MTV. After the release of the album, the band toured extensively, opening for Slayer and Metallica before making their way to the second stage of Ozzfest. Following Ozzfest, they toured with Fear Factory and Incubus before headlining the Sno-Core Tour with Puya, Mr. Bungle, The Cat and Incubus providing support.
In November 1998, System of a Down appeared on South Park's "" album, providing the music for the song "Will They Die 4 You?" Near the end of the song Tankian can be heard saying, "Why must we kill our own kind?", a line that would later be used in the song "Boom!" Although System of a Down is credited on the album, South Park character Chef does not introduce them as he does every other artist featured on the record.
System of a Down's former drummer, Ontronik Khachaturian, briefly reunited with the band at a show at The Troubadour in 1999, filling in on vocals for an ill Tankian. In 2000, the band contributed their cover of the Black Sabbath song "Snowblind" to the Black Sabbath tribute album "Nativity in Black 2."
On September 3, 2001, System of a Down had planned on launching their second album at a free concert in Hollywood as a "thank you" to fans. The concert, which was to be held in a parking lot, was set up to accommodate 3,500 people; however, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 fans showed up. Because of the large excess number of fans, the performance was cancelled by police officers just before the group took the stage. No announcement was made that the concert had been cancelled. Fans waited for more than an hour for the group to appear, but when a banner hanging at the back of the stage that read "System of a Down" was removed by security, the audience rushed the stage, destroying all the band's touring gear (approximately $30,000 worth of equipment) and began to riot, throwing rocks at police, breaking windows, and knocking over portable toilets. The riot lasted six hours, during which six arrests were made. The band's manager, David "Beno" Benveniste, later said that the riot could have been avoided if the group had been permitted to perform or had they been allowed to make a statement at the concert regarding the cancellation. System of a Down's scheduled in-store performance the next day was cancelled to prevent a similar riot.
The group's big break arrived when their second album, "Toxicity", debuted at No. 1 on the American and Canadian charts, despite the events of 9/11. The album has eventually achieved 3x multi-platinum certification in the United States It was still on top in America during the week of the 9/11 attacks and the political environment caused by the attacks added to the controversy surrounding the album's hit single "Chop Suey!" The song was taken off the radio as it contained politically sensitive lyrics according to the 2001 Clear Channel memorandum at the time such as "(I don't think you) trust in my self-righteous suicide." Regardless, the video gained constant play on MTV as did the album's second single, "Toxicity". Even with the controversy surrounding "Chop Suey!" (which earned a Grammy nomination), System of a Down still received constant airplay in the United States throughout late 2001 and 2002 with "Toxicity" and "Aerials". In May 2006, VH1 listed "Toxicity" in the number 14 slot in the "40 Greatest Metal Songs".
In 2001, the band went on tour with Slipknot throughout the United States and Mexico. Following a performance in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Odadjian was allegedly harassed, ethnically intimidated, and was physically assaulted by security guards backstage, who then dragged him out of the venue. Odadjian received medical attention from police and later filed a suit against the security company. Despite the incident, the tour was a success and System of a Down and Slipknot went on the Pledge of Allegiance Tour together with Rammstein in 2001.
In late 2001, unreleased tracks from the "Toxicity" sessions made their way onto the internet. This collection of tracks was dubbed "Toxicity II" by fans. The group released a statement that the tracks were unfinished material and subsequently released the final versions of the songs as their third album, "Steal This Album!", which was released on November 2002. "Steal This Album!" resembled a burnable CD that was marked with a felt-tip marker. About 50,000 special copies of the album with different CD designs were also released, each designed by a different member of the band. The name of the album is a reference to Abbie Hoffman's counter-culture book, "Steal This Book" as well as a message to those who leaked the songs onto the internet. The song "Innervision" was released as a promo single and received constant airplay on alternative radio. A video for "Boom!" was filmed with director Michael Moore as a protest against the War in Iraq.
Between 2004 and 2005, the group recorded the follow-up to "Steal This Album!", a double album, which they released as separate installments six months apart. The releases notably included album cover artwork by Malakian's father, Vartan Malakian, and were designed to connect the two separate album covers. The first album, "Mezmerize," was released on May 17, 2005 to favorable reviews by critics. It debuted at No. 1 in the United States, Canada, Australia and all around the world, making it System of A Down's second No. 1 album. First week sales exceeded 800,000 copies worldwide. The lead single "B.Y.O.B.", which questions the integrity of military recruiting in America, worked its way up the Billboard Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts, and would go on to win the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. "Question!" was released as the next single, with Shavo Odadjian co-directing the music video. Following the album's release, the band toured extensively throughout the United States and Canada with The Mars Volta and Bad Acid Trip supporting.
The second part of the double album, "Hypnotize," was released on November 22, 2005. Like "Mezmerize" it debuted at No. 1 in the US, making System of a Down, along with The Beatles, rappers 2Pac and DMX, the only artists to ever have two studio albums debut at No. 1 in the same year.. Hypnotize was released as the lead single and was followed by Lonely Day and Vicinity of Obscenity, both of which were also released as EPs, including several previously-unreleased cover songs as well as a collaboration with the Wu-Tang Clan. Kill Rock 'N Roll was released as the final promotional single.
Whereas on System of a Down's previous albums most of the lyrics were written and sung by Tankian and the music was co-written by Tankian and Malakian (and sometimes Odadjian), much of the music and lyrics on "Mezmerize"/"Hypnotize" were written by Malakian, who also took on a much more dominant role as vocalist on both albums, often leaving Tankian providing keyboards and backing vocals.
System of a Down's song "Lonely Day" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance in the 49th Grammy Awards in 2007 but lost to "Woman" by Wolfmother.
On May 2006 saw the UK publication of a biography of the band entitled "System of a Down: Right Here in Hollywood" by writer Ben Myers. It was published in the US in 2007 through The Disinformation Company. Additionally in 2006, concert footage and interviews with the band concerning the importance of helping create awareness and recognition of the Armenian Genocide were featured in the film "Screamers," directed by Carla Garapedian. An interview with Tankian's grandfather, a survivor of the Genocide, was also included in the film as well as Tankian's and Dolmayan's meeting with (then) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert during which the two musicians campaigned for the United States government's official recognition of the Genocide. Footage of Tankian and Dolmayan marching with protesters outside the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C. was also used in "Screamers".
In May as well, the band announced they were going on hiatus. Malakian confirmed the break would probably last a few years, which Odadjian specified as a minimum of three years in an interview with "Guitar" magazine. He told MTV, "We're not breaking up. If that was the case, we wouldn't be doing this Ozzfest. We're going to take a very long break after Ozzfest and do our own things. We've done System for over ten years, and I think it's healthy to take some rest." System of a Down's final performance before their separation took place on August 13, 2006 in West Palm Beach, Florida. "Tonight will be the last show we play for a long time together," Malakian told the crowd during Sunday's last performance. "We'll be back. We just don't know when."
During the band's hiatus, Malakian formed a band called Scars on Broadway, which was joined by Dolmayan. After one self-titled album, the project became dormant and Dolmayan left the band. However, the band released their long-awaited sophomore album in 2018, under the name Daron Malakian and Scars On Broadway. Dolmayan, alongside working with Scars on Broadway, formed his own band, Indicator, as well as opened Torpedo Comics, an online comic book store. Odadjian pursued his project with RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop group named AcHoZeN, worked on his urSESSION website/record label and performed as a member of funk legend George Clinton's backing band. Meanwhile, Tankian opted for a solo career and released his debut solo album "Elect the Dead" in the autumn of 2007. He has continued releasing solo albums, recording them almost entirely by himself even after System of a Down reunited.
On November 29, 2010, following several weeks of Internet rumors, System of a Down officially announced that they would be reuniting for a string of large European festival dates in June 2011. Among the announced tour dates included UK's Download Festival, Switzerland's Greenfield Festival, Germany's Rock am Ring/Rock im Park, Sweden's Metaltown, Austria's Nova Rock Festival and Finland's Provinssirock. The reunion tour commenced on May 10, 2011 in Edmonton, Alberta. System's first tour through Mexico and South America began on September 28, 2011 in Mexico City, ending in Santiago (Chile) on October 7, 2011. From late February to early March 2012, they headlined five dates at Soundwave festival. This was the band's first visit to Australia since 2005. The band have continued playing around the world. On August 11 and 12, 2012, they played the Heavy MTL and Heavy T.O. music festivals in Montreal and Toronto respectively. In August 2013 System of a Down played at the UK's Reading and Leeds Festivals, among other festivals and venues that year.
System of a Down played their only 2013 US performance at the Hollywood Bowl on July 29; tickets sold out hours after going on sale on March 22.
On November 23, 2014, System of a Down announced the Wake Up The Souls Tour to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The tour included a free concert in Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia on April 23, 2015, their first show in the country.
In a November 2016 interview with "Kerrang!", drummer John Dolmayan revealed that System of a Down was working on more than a dozen songs for their follow-up to the "Mezmerize" and "Hypnotize" albums. Although he stated that the band does not know when the album will be released, he added that, "I want everyone on board and feeling good about it. That's what we're trying to accomplish right now. There's a tremendous amount of pressure on us, though, because it's been 11 years—at least 12 by the time it comes out."
In a video Q&A session with fans on July 2, 2017, Shavo Odadjian was asked about the status of the next album and he responded, "I'm waiting for a new album too. It's not happening. I don't know. I don't know when it's gonna be. Not right now." In a December 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Serj Tankian said that System of a Down wrote some new material but was uncertain of what to do with it. He then said that he doesn't want to commit to a new album due to the lack of committing to longform touring.
In an April 2018 interview, Daron Malakian said that the band did not abandon the idea of making new material, and made a passing mention that System of a Down was not making any music at that time. Dolmayan said that he is ready to start work on the next album, but that "certain members of my band haven’t been able to make it work for themselves", expressing uncertainty on if it would ever be made.
Malakian singled Tankian out as the reason no new album had yet been released. Tankian detailed his view of the band's past and present conflicts and their overall situation, saying "[A]s we couldn’t see eye to eye on all these points we decided to put aside the idea of a record altogether for the time being." Dolmayan blamed all of the members due to the personal and creative differences that have been preventing them from recording a new studio album. Tankian also expressed uncertainty on whether the new album would be made or not but did not rule out the possibility. He went on to describe how he imagined the album sounding, "It's gotta be organic, it's gotta feel right in every way."
Odadjian said that the band has material written from "like the last 10, 12 years", but is uncertain on if it would form into a System of a Down album or not. He also said that Malakian and Tankian have visual differences on what the album should sound like, and that the band's inner tension had been building far longer than fans would be aware of despite having love and respect for one another nonetheless. He would later say that there is no conflict between the members, expressing confidence that System of a Down would eventually record a new album and claimed that they have material written which would be their best to date. However, Tankian stated that there was no talk of the band recording a new album.
Malakian explained that there is a mixture between the matter of different creative perspectives for the band's hesitation to record a new studio album and the lack of desire to tour; however he did not dismiss the possibility of an album being made, but that it would likely not happen anytime soon. He feels that the fans don't care that the band isn't making an album, "but I think a lot of the fans just want an album." He expressed hopes that the members would get together and record new music but is content with the direction of his band Scars on Broadway, noting about the members' good friendship, "But at the same time, I don't see that happening anytime soon that we're all going to get together and make a new System of a Down album." Malakian said that Tankian and the rest of the band members have been unable to come to an agreement over how to go about making new music, but insists that there is no negativity between them.
Despite System of a Down's ability to perform live, Odadjian expressed disappointment at their inability to record new music, explaining that there has been new material written by the other members in the form of a possible new album but without Tankian's presence no recordings had been made. He questioned why the band still hasn't made an album, citing creative differences as the problem. With the lack of commitment to record new music, Tankian however, is in favor of releasing a collection of previously unreleased System of a Down songs from the band's past album sessions but would have to convince all the members in order to see its release.
With the differences concerning the band members, Dolmayan became uncertain in wanting to make new music anymore. Although he did not want to put Tankian and Malakian at fault for the band's inability to record a new album, he said, "It takes four people to make this band, and it takes four people to unmake it. I think that we're all to blame. I could just blame Daron and Serj, because, quite frankly, they're the primary songwriters, so it's easy to blame them. But it's not just their fault. A lot of it is their fault, but it's not just their fault." Tankian on the other hand, announced that he would release an EP of rock songs that were originally intended to be featured on a System of a Down album.
System of a Down's lyrics are often oblique or dadaist and have discussed topics such as drug abuse, politics and suicide. "Prison Song" criticizes the War on Drugs whereas "Rolling Stone" describes "Roulette" as a "scared, wounded love letter". "Boom!", among the band's most straightforward and unambiguous songs, lambasts globalization and spending on bombs and armament. Commenting on the track "I-E-A-I-A-I-O", drummer John Dolmayan said it was inspired by an encounter he had with "Knight Rider"'s actor David Hasselhoff in a liquor store in Los Angeles when he was around 12. On "Mezmerize", "Cigaro" makes explicit references to phallic imagery and bureaucracy while "Violent Pornography" harshly views television and degradation of women. System of a Down's discontent towards the controversial Iraq War arises in "B.Y.O.B.", which includes a double entendre reference to both beer and bombs, containing the forthright lyric "Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?" "Old School Hollywood" describes a celebrity baseball game. On their album "Hypnotize", "Tentative" describes war, "Hypnotize" refers to the Tiananmen Square events and "Lonely Day" describes angst. The album title "Steal This Album!" is a play on the book "Steal This Book" by left-wing political activist Abbie Hoffman. System of a Down's firm commitment for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide emerges in two songs: "P.L.U.C.K." and "Holy Mountains", which rank among the band's most political songs.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated "Like many late-'90s metal bands System of a Down struck a balance between '80s underground thrash metal and metallic early-'90s alternative rockers like Jane's Addiction". System of a Down's music has variously been termed heavy metal, alternative metal, nu metal, hard rock, progressive metal, thrash metal, art rock and avant-garde metal.
Malakian has stated that "We don't belong to any one scene" and that "I don't like the nu-metal drop-A 7-string guitar sound; it is not my thing, at least not yet." In interview with Mike Lancaster, he also said, "People always seem to feel the need to put us into a category, but we just don't fit into any category." According to Tankian, "As far as arrangement and everything, [our music] is pretty much pop. To me, System of a Down isn't a progressive band. [...] But it's not a typical pop project, obviously. We definitely pay attention to the music to make sure that it's not something someone's heard before."
The band has used a wide range of instruments, such as electric mandolins, baritone electric guitars, acoustic guitars, ouds, sitars and twelve string guitars. According to Malakian, he would often write songs in E♭ tuning, which would later be changed to drop C tuning in order to be performed by the band. Malakian states that "For me, the drop-C tuning is right down the center. It has enough of the clarity and the crisp sound—most of our riffy stuff is done on the top two strings, anyway—but it's also thicker and ballsier."
System of a Down's influences include Middle Eastern music, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Scorpions, Morbid Angel, Death, Obituary, Eazy-E, N.W.A, Run-DMC, Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, the Bee Gees, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dead Kennedys, Metallica, Miles Davis, Alice In Chains, Bad Brains, Slayer and Kiss. One reviewer claimed that their music encompasses different sounds, from sounding like "Fugazi playing Rush" to sometimes "tread[ing] close to Frank Zappa territory." Malakian has stated that "I'm a fan of music. I'm not necessarily a fan of any one band." Dolmayan stated "I don't think we sound like anybody else. I consider us System of a Down." Odadjian stated "You can compare us to whoever you want. I don't care. Comparisons and labels have no effect on this band. Fact is fact: We are who we are and they are who they are."
System of a Down has been nominated for four Grammy Awards, winning one in 2006 for Best Hard Rock Performance for the song "B.Y.O.B." The band has also been nominated for several "Kerrang!" and MTV awards.
Current members
Former members
Occasional contributors | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28715 |
Smelting
Smelting is a process of applying heat to ore in order to extract a base metal. It is a form of extractive metallurgy. It is used to extract many metals from their ores, including silver, iron, copper, and other base metals. Smelting uses heat and a chemical reducing agent to decompose the ore, driving off other elements as gases or slag and leaving the metal base behind. The reducing agent is commonly a source of carbon, such as coke—or, in earlier times, charcoal.
The carbon (or carbon monoxide derived from it) removes oxygen from the ore, leaving the elemental metal. The carbon thus oxidizes in two stages, producing first carbon monoxide and then carbon dioxide. As most ores are impure, it is often necessary to use flux, such as limestone, to remove the accompanying rock gangue as slag.
Plants for the electrolytic reduction of aluminium are also generally referred to as aluminium smelters.
Smelting involves more than just melting the metal out of its ore. Most ores are the chemical compound of the metal and other elements, such as oxygen (as an oxide), sulfur (as a sulfide), or carbon and oxygen together (as a carbonate). To extract the metal, workers must make these compounds undergo a chemical reaction. Smelting therefore consists of using suitable reducing substances that combine with those oxidizing elements to free the metal.
In the case of sulfides and carbonates, a process called "roasting" removes the unwanted carbon or sulfur, leaving an oxide, which can be directly reduced. Roasting is usually carried out in an oxidizing environment. A few practical examples:
Reduction is the final, high-temperature step in smelting, in which the oxide becomes the elemental metal. A reducing environment (often provided by carbon monoxide, made by incomplete combustion in an air-starved furnace) pulls the final oxygen atoms from the raw metal. The required temperature varies over a very large range, both in absolute terms and in terms of the melting point of the base metal. Examples:
Flux and slag can provide a secondary service after the reduction step is complete: they provide a molten cover on the purified metal, preventing contact with oxygen while still hot enough to readily oxidize. This prevents impurities from forming in the metal.
Metal workers use fluxes in smelting for several purposes, chief among them catalyzing the desired reactions and chemically binding to unwanted impurities or reaction products. Calcium oxide, in the form of lime, was often used for this purpose, since it could react with the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide produced during roasting and smelting to keep them out of the working environment.
Of the seven metals known in antiquity, only gold occurred regularly in native form in the natural environment. The others – copper, lead, silver, tin, iron and mercury – occur primarily as minerals, though copper is occasionally found in its native state in commercially significant quantities. These minerals are primarily carbonates, sulfides, or oxides of the metal, mixed with other components such as silica and alumina. Roasting the carbonate and sulfide minerals in air converts them to oxides. The oxides, in turn, are smelted into the metal. Carbon monoxide was (and is) the reducing agent of choice for smelting. It is easily produced during the heating process, and as a gas comes into intimate contact with the ore.
In the Old World, humans learned to smelt metals in prehistoric times, more than 8000 years ago. The discovery and use of the "useful" metals — copper and bronze at first, then iron a few millennia later — had an enormous impact on human society. The impact was so pervasive that scholars traditionally divide ancient history into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.
In the Americas, pre-Inca civilizations of the central Andes in Peru had mastered the smelting of copper and silver at least six centuries before the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century, while never mastering the smelting of metals such as iron for use with weapon-craft.
In the Old World, the first metals smelted were tin and lead. The earliest known cast lead beads were found in the Çatal Höyük site in Anatolia (Turkey), and dated from about 6500 BC, but the metal may have been known earlier.
Since the discovery happened several millennia before the invention of writing, there is no written record about how it was made. However, tin and lead can be smelted by placing the ores in a wood fire, leaving the possibility that the discovery may have occurred by accident.
Lead is a common metal, but its discovery had relatively little impact in the ancient world. It is too soft to use for structural elements or weapons, though its high density relative to other metals makes it ideal for sling projectiles. However, since it was easy to cast and shape, workers in the classical world of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome used it extensively to pipe and store water. They also used it as a mortar in stone buildings.
Tin was much less common than lead and is only marginally harder, and had even less impact by itself.
After tin and lead, the next metal smelted appears to have been copper. How the discovery came about is debated. Campfires are about 200 °C short of the temperature needed, so some propose that the first smelting of copper may have occurred in pottery kilns. The development of copper smelting in the Andes, which is believed to have occurred independently of the Old World, may have occurred in the same way. The earliest current evidence of copper smelting, dating from between 5500 BC and 5000 BC, has been found in Pločnik and Belovode, Serbia. A mace head found in Can Hasan, Turkey and dated to 5000 BC, once thought to be the oldest evidence, now appears to be hammered native copper.
Combining copper with tin and/or arsenic in the right proportions produces bronze, an alloy that is significantly harder than copper. The first copper/arsenic bronzes date from 4200 BC from Asia Minor. The Inca bronze alloys were also of this type. Arsenic is often an impurity in copper ores, so the discovery could have been made by accident. Eventually arsenic-bearing minerals were intentionally added during smelting.
Copper–tin bronzes, harder and more durable, were developed around 3200 BC, also in Asia Minor.
How smiths learned to produce copper/tin bronzes is unknown. The first such bronzes may have been a lucky accident from tin-contaminated copper ores. However, by 2000 BC, people were mining tin on purpose to produce bronze—which is amazing given that tin is a semi-rare metal, and even a rich cassiterite ore only has 5% tin. Also, it takes special skills (or special instruments) to find it and locate richer lodes. However early peoples learned about tin, they understood how to use it to make bronze by 2000 BC.
The discovery of copper and bronze manufacture had a significant impact on the history of the Old World. Metals were hard enough to make weapons that were heavier, stronger, and more resistant to impact damage than wood, bone, or stone equivalents. For several millennia, bronze was the material of choice for weapons such as swords, daggers, battle axes, and spear and arrow points, as well as protective gear such as shields, helmets, greaves (metal shin guards), and other body armor. Bronze also supplanted stone, wood, and organic materials in tools and household utensils—such as chisels, saws, adzes, nails, blade shears, knives, sewing needles and pins, jugs, cooking pots and cauldrons, mirrors, and horse harnesses. Tin and copper also contributed to the establishment of trade networks that spanned large areas of Europe and Asia, and had a major effect on the distribution of wealth among individuals and nations.
The earliest evidence for iron-making is a small number of iron fragments with the appropriate amounts of carbon admixture found in the Proto-Hittite layers at Kaman-Kalehöyük and dated to 2200–2000 BC. Souckova-Siegolová (2001) shows that iron implements were made in Central Anatolia in very limited quantities around 1800 BC and were in general use by elites, though not by commoners, during the New Hittite Empire (∼1400–1200 BC).
Archaeologists have found indications of iron working in Ancient Egypt, somewhere between the Third Intermediate Period and 23rd Dynasty (ca. 1100–750 BC). Significantly though, they have found no evidence for iron ore smelting in any (pre-modern) period. In addition, very early instances of carbon steel were in production around 2000 years ago (around the first century AD.) in northwest Tanzania, based on complex preheating principles. These discoveries are significant for the history of metallurgy.
Most early processes in Europe and Africa involved smelting iron ore in a bloomery, where the temperature is kept low enough so that the iron does not melt. This produces a spongy mass of iron called a bloom, which then must be consolidated with a hammer to produce wrought iron. The earliest evidence to date for the bloomery smelting of iron is found at Tell Hammeh, Jordan (), and dates to 930 BC (C14 dating).
From the medieval period, an indirect process began to replace direct reduction in bloomeries. This used a blast furnace to make pig iron, which then had to undergo a further process to make forgeable bar iron. Processes for the second stage include fining in a finery forge and, from the Industrial Revolution, puddling. Both processes are now obsolete, and wrought iron is now rarely made. Instead, mild steel is produced from a bessemer converter or by other means including smelting reduction processes such as the Corex Process.
The ores of base metals are often sulfides. In recent centuries, reverberatory furnaces have been used to keep the charge being smelted separate from the fuel. Traditionally, they were used for the first step of smelting: forming two liquids, one an oxide slag containing most of the impurities, and the other a sulfide matte containing the valuable metal sulfide and some impurities. Such "reverb" furnaces are today about 40 meters long, 3 meters high and 10 meters wide. Fuel is burned at one end to melt the dry sulfide concentrates (usually after partial roasting) which are fed through openings in the roof of the furnace. The slag floats over the heavier matte and is removed and discarded or recycled. The sulfide matte is then sent to the converter. The precise details of the process vary from one furnace to another depending on the mineralogy of the orebody.
While reverberatory furnaces produced slags containing very little copper, they were relatively energy inefficient and off-gassed a low concentration of sulfur dioxide that was difficult to capture; a new generation of copper smelting technologies has supplanted them. More recent furnaces exploit bath smelting, top-jetting lance smelting, flash smelting and blast furnaces. Some examples of bath smelters include the Noranda furnace, the Isasmelt furnace, the Teniente reactor, the Vunyukov smelter and the SKS technology. Top-jetting lance smelters include the Mitsubishi smelting reactor. Flash smelters account for over 50% of the world's copper smelters. There are many more varieties of smelting processes, including the Kivset, Ausmelt, Tamano, EAF, and BF.
Smelting has serious effects on the environment, producing wastewater and slag and releasing such toxic metals as copper, silver, iron, cobalt and selenium into the atmosphere. Smelters also release gaseous sulfur dioxide, contributing to acid rain, which acidifies soil and water.
Wastewater pollutants discharged by iron and steel mills includes gasification products such as benzene, naphthalene, anthracene, cyanide, ammonia, phenols and cresols, together with a range of more complex organic compounds known collectively as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).
Pollutants generated by other types of smelters varies with the base metal ore. For example, aluminum smelters typically generate fluoride, benzo(a)pyrene, antimony and nickel, as well as aluminum. Copper smelters typically discharge cadmium, lead, zinc, arsenic and nickel, in addition to copper.
Labourers working in the smelting industry have reported respiratory illnesses inhibiting their ability to perform the physical tasks demanded by their jobs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28716 |
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol , known informally as Schiphol Airport (, ), is the main international airport of the Netherlands. It is located 9 kilometres (5.6 miles) southwest of Amsterdam, in the municipality of Haarlemmermeer in the province of North Holland. With almost 72 million passengers in 2019, it is the third-busiest airport in Europe in terms of passenger volume and the busiest in Europe in terms of aircraft movements. With an annual cargo tonnage of 1.74 million, it is the 4th busiest in Europe. The airport is built as a single-terminal concept: one large terminal split into three large departure halls.
Schiphol is the hub for KLM and its regional affiliate KLM Cityhopper as well as for Corendon Dutch Airlines, Martinair, Transavia and TUI fly Netherlands. The airport also serves as a base for EasyJet.
Schiphol opened on 16 September 1916 as a military airbase. The end of the First World War also saw the beginning of civilian use of Schiphol Airport and the airport eventually lost its military role completely. By 1940, Schiphol had four asphalt runways at 45-degree angles. The airport was captured by the German military that same year and renamed "Fliegerhorst Schiphol". The airport was destroyed through bombing but at the end of the war, the airfield was soon rebuilt. In 1949, it was decided that Schiphol was to become the primary airport of the Netherlands. Schiphol Airport was voted the Best Airport in Western Europe in 2020.
Schiphol Airport is an important European airport, ranking as Europe's third busiest and the world's eleventh busiest by total passenger traffic in 2017 (12th in 2016, 14th in 2015, 2014 and 2013 and 16th in 2012). It also ranks as the world's fifth busiest by international passenger traffic and the world's sixteenth busiest for cargo tonnage. 63,625,664 passengers passed through the airport in 2016. Schiphol's main competitors in terms of passenger traffic and cargo throughput are London-Heathrow, Frankfurt, Paris–Charles de Gaulle and Istanbul.
In 2010, 65.9% of passengers using the airport flew to and from Europe, 11.7% to and from North America and 8.8% to and from Asia; cargo volume was mainly between Schiphol and Asia (45%) and North America (17%).
In 2010, 106 carriers provided a total of 301 destinations on a regular basis. Passenger destinations were offered by 91 airlines. Direct (non-stop) destinations grew by nine to a total of 274. Regular destinations serviced exclusively by full freighters (non-passenger) grew by eight to a total of twenty-seven.
The airport is built as one large terminal (a single-terminal concept), split into three large departure halls, which connect again once airside. The most recent of these was completed in 1994 and expanded in 2007 with a new section, called Terminal 4, although it is not considered a separate building. A new pier is to be opened in 2019 with a terminal extension planned to be operational by 2023. Plans for further terminal and gate expansion exist, including the construction of a separate new terminal between the Zwanenburgbaan and Polderbaan runways that would end the one-terminal concept.
Because of intense traffic and high landing fees (due to the limit of 500,000 flights a year), some low-cost carriers decided to move their flights to smaller airports, such as Rotterdam The Hague Airport and Eindhoven Airport. Many low-cost carriers, such as EasyJet and Transavia, however, continue to operate at Schiphol, using the low-cost H pier. Lelystad Airport is currently being expanded aimed at accommodating some of the low-cost and leisure flights currently operating out of Schiphol, eventually taking up to 45,000 flights a year.
Before 1852, the entire polder of Haarlemmermeer in which the airport lies was a large lake with some shallow areas. There are multiple stories of how the place got its name. The most popular story is that in the shallow waters sudden violent storms could claim many ships. Winds were particularly strong in the Schiphol area since the prevailing wind direction is from the south-west, and Schiphol lies in the north-eastern corner of the lake. In English, translates to 'ships hell', a reference to many ships supposedly lost in the lake. When the lake was reclaimed, however, no shipwrecks were found. Another possible origin of the name is the word . A is a ditch or small canal in which ships would be towed from one lake to another. A third explanation would be that the name derived from the words . This is a low-lying area of land () from where wood would be obtained to build ships.
After the lake was dredged in the mid-1800s, a fortification named Fort Schiphol was built in the area which was part of the Stelling van Amsterdam defence works.
Schiphol opened on 16 September 1916 as a military airbase, with a few barracks and a field serving as platform and runways. When civil aircraft started to use the field (17 December 1920), it was often called . The Fokker aircraft manufacturer started a factory near Schiphol airport in 1919. The end of the First World War also saw the beginning of civilian use of Schiphol Airport and the airport eventually lost its military role completely.
By 1940, Schiphol had four asphalt runways at 45-degree angles, all or less. One was extended to become today's runway 04/22; two others crossed that runway at . The airport was captured by the German military that same year and renamed . A large number of anti-aircraft defences were installed in the vicinity of the airport and fake decoy airfields were constructed in the vicinity near Bennebroek, Vijfhuizen, and Vogelenzang to try to confuse allied bombers. A railway connection was also built. Despite these defences, the airfield was still bombed intensively; an exceptionally heavy attack on 13 December 1943 caused so much damage that it rendered the airfield unusable as an active base. After that, it served only as an emergency landing field, until the Germans themselves destroyed the remnants of the airfield at the start of Operation Market Garden. At the end of the war, the airfield was quickly restored: the first aircraft, a Douglas DC-3, landed on 8 July 1945.
A new terminal building was completed in 1949 and it was decided that Schiphol was to become the primary airport of the Netherlands. The expansion came at the cost of a small town called Rijk, which was demolished to make room for the growing airport. The name of this town is remembered in the name of the present Schiphol-Rijk industrial estate. In 1967, Schiphol expanded even further with a new terminal area at its current location. Most of the 1967 terminal is still in use today (Departure Halls 1 and 2) as are parts of the original piers (now called C, D, and E). Dutch designer Benno Wissing created signage for Schiphol Airport, well known for its clear writing and thorough colour-coding; to avoid confusion, he prohibited any other signage in the shades of yellow and green used. The new terminal building replaced the older facilities once located on what is now the east side of the airport. The A-Pier (now C-pier) of the airport was modified in 1970 to allow Boeing 747 aircraft to use the boarding gates. A new pier (D, now called F) opened in 1977, dedicated to handling wide-body aircraft. The first railway station at the airport followed in 1978.
The construction of a new Air Traffic Control tower was completed in 1991 as the existing tower could no longer oversee all of the airports as it was further expanded. Departure Hall 3 was added to the terminal in 1993, as was another pier, G-pier. New wayfinding signage was designed that year as well by Paul Mijksenaar. A sixth runway was completed at quite some distance west of the rest of airport in 2003 and was nicknamed the Polderbaan, with the connecting taxiway crossing the A5 motorway. The distance of this runway means that taxi times to and from this runway can take between 10 and 20 minutes. It also required the construction of an additional Air Traffic Control tower as the primary tower is too far away to oversee this part of the airfield.
On 25 February 2005, a diamond robbery occurred at Schiphol's cargo terminal. The robbers used a stolen KLM van to gain airside access. The estimated value of the stones was around 75 million euros, making it one of the largest diamond robberies ever.
Later in 2005, a fire broke out at the airport's detention centre, killing 11 people and injuring 15. The complex was holding 350 people at the time of the incident.
Results from the investigation almost one year later showed that fire safety precautions were not in force. A national outrage resulted in the resignation of Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner (CDA) and Mayor Hartog of Haarlemmermeer. Spatial Planning Minister Sybilla Dekker (VVD) resigned as well, because she bore responsibility for safety failings cited in the report.
Schiphol uses a one-terminal concept, where all facilities are located under a single roof, radiating from the central plaza, Schiphol Plaza. The terminal is divided into three sections or halls designated 1, 2 and 3. The piers and concourses of each hall are connected so that it is possible, on both sides of security or border inspection, to walk between piers and halls, although border control separates Schengen from non-Schengen areas. The exception to this is the low-cost pier M: once airside (past security), passengers cannot access any other areas.
Schiphol Airport has approximately 223 boarding gates including eighteen double jetway gates used for widebody aircraft. The airport adopted a distinctive design, with the second jetway extending over the aircraft wing hanging from a steel cantilever structure. Recent refurbishments have seen most of these jetways being replaced with a more conventional layout. Two gates feature a third jetway for handling of the Airbus A380. Emirates was the first airline to fly the A380 to Schiphol in August 2012, deploying the aircraft on its double daily Dubai–Amsterdam service. During the summer, China Southern Airlines also uses the A380 on its Beijing–Amsterdam route.
Schiphol has large shopping areas as a source of revenue and as an additional attraction for passengers. Schiphol Plaza not only connects the three halls but also houses a large shopping centre and the railway station, also attracting general visitors.
Departure Hall 1 consists of Piers B and C, both of which are dedicated Schengen areas and shares D-pier with Departure hall 2. Pier B has 14 gates and Pier C has 21 gates.
Departure Hall 2 consists of Piers D and E.
Pier D is the largest pier and has two levels. The lower floor houses non-Schengen flights and the upper floor is used for Schengen flights. By using stairs, the same jetways are used to access the aircraft. Schengen gates are numbered beginning with D-59; non-Schengen gates are numbered from D-1 to D-57.
Pier E is a dedicated non-Schengen area and has 14 gates. It is typically home to SkyTeam hub airlines Delta Air Lines and KLM, along with other members, such as China Airlines and China Southern Airlines. Other Middle Eastern and Asian airlines such as Air Astana, EVA Air, Etihad Airways and Iran Air also typically operate out of Pier E.
Departure Hall 3 consists of three piers: F, G, and H/M. Pier F has 8 gates and is typically dominated by SkyTeam members such as primary airline KLM, Kenya Airways, China Airlines and China Southern Airlines, and other members. Pier G has 13 gates. Piers F and G are non-Schengen areas.
Piers H and M are physically one concourse consisting of 7 shared gates and are home to low-cost airlines. Operating completely separately, H handles non-Schengen flights while M is dedicated to flights within the Schengen area.
Gates G9, E18 and E22 (E22 refurbished in 2019) are equipped to handle daily Airbus A380 service by Emirates and China Southern Airlines.
A new general aviation terminal was opened in 2011 on the east side of the airport, operated as the "KLM Jet Center". The new terminal building has a floorspace of ; for the actual terminal and lounges, for office space and for parking.
The Rijksmuseum operates an annex at the airport, offering a small overview of both classical and contemporary art. Admission to the exhibits is free.
In summer 2010, Schiphol Airport Library opened alongside the museum, providing passengers access to a collection of 1,200 books (translated into 29 languages) by Dutch authors on subjects relating to the country's history and culture. The library offers e-books and music by Dutch artists and composers that can be downloaded free of charge to a laptop or mobile device.
For aviation enthusiasts, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol has a large rooftop viewing area, called the Panoramaterras. It is not accessible to connecting passengers unless they first exit the airport. Enthusiasts and the public can enter, free of charge, from the airport's landside. Since June 2011, it is the location for a KLM Cityhopper Fokker 100, modified to be a viewing exhibit. Besides the Panoramaterras, Schiphol has other spotting sites, especially along the newest Polderbaan runway and at the McDonald's restaurant at the north side of the airport.
Schiphol has its own mortuary, where the dead can be handled and kept before departure or after arrival. Since October 2006, people can also hold a wedding ceremony at Schiphol.
Schiphol also has a new state-of-the-art cube-shaped Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol with 433 rooms, rounded corners and diamond-shaped windows. The spacious atrium has a ceiling made of glass and is in the heart of the building. A covered walkway connects the hotel directly to the terminal. The hotel was completed in 2015.
In 2012, Schiphol Group announced an expansion of Schiphol, featuring a new pier, an expansion of the terminal, and a new parking garage. Pier A will be part of Departure Hall 1, which already has Pier B (14 gates) and Pier C (21 gates). The new Pier A will have 5 narrow-body gates and will initially have 3 wide-body gates, with two more planned for a later phase. The first activities are expected to start in 2017 and to be completed in 2023. The expansions will cost about 500 million euros.
First, the new Pier A will be built to the southwest of Pier B, in an area currently used as a freight platform. Expected to be operational by the end of 2019, pier A will mainly be used for flights within Europe. To handle future growth in passengers, Schiphol will further expand the terminal and build a fourth departure hall with facilities for both departures and arrivals. From this new building, direct access will be made to Schiphol Plaza, continuing the one-terminal concept. When finished in 2023, Schiphol will be able to handle over 70 million passengers. Due to rapid growth of Schengen passengers during 2016, Schiphol was however forced to rapidly build a temporary departure hall which opened in March 2017.
The Schiphol air traffic control tower, with a height of , was the tallest in the world when constructed in 1991. Schiphol is geographically one of the world's lowest major commercial airports. The entire airport is below sea level. The lowest point sits at below sea level: below the Dutch Normaal Amsterdams Peil (NAP). The runways are around below NAP.
Schiphol has six runways, one of which is used mainly by general aviation. AMS covers a total area of 6,887 acres (2,787 ha) of land.
Other regular users of Schiphol are the Netherlands Coastguard whose aircraft are operated by the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Dienst Luchtvaart Politie and the Dutch Dakota Association.
The TransPort Building on the Schiphol Airport property houses the head offices of Martinair and Transavia. Construction of the building, which has of rentable space, began on 17 March 2009. Schiphol Group and the architect firm Paul de Ruiter designed the building, while De Vries and Verburg, a firm of Stolwijk, constructed the building.
The World Trade Center Schiphol Airport houses the head office of SkyTeam, the Netherlands office of China Southern Airlines, and the Netherlands offices of Iran Air. The head office of Schiphol Group, the airport's operator, is located on the airport property. The Convair Building, with its development beginning after a parcel was earmarked for its development in 1999, houses KLM offices, including KLM Recruitment Services and the head office of KLM Cityhopper. The original control tower of Schiphol Airport, which the airport authorities had moved slightly from its original location, now houses a restaurant. The area Schiphol-Rijk includes the head offices of TUI fly Netherlands and Amsterdam Airlines.
At one time, KLM had its head office briefly on the grounds of Schiphol Airport. Its current head office in nearby Amstelveen had a scheduled completion at the end of 1970. Previously Martinair had its head office in the Schiphol Center () at Schiphol Airport. Formerly, the head office of Transavia was in the Building Triport III at Schiphol Airport. NLM Cityhopper and later KLM Cityhopper previously had their head offices in Schiphol Airport building 70.
Nippon Cargo Airlines has its Europe regional headquarters at Schiphol. The National Aerospace Museum Aviodome–Schiphol was previously located at Schiphol. In 2003, the museum moved to Lelystad Airport and was renamed the "Aviodrome."
The Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the national Dutch train operator, has a major passenger railway station directly underneath the passenger terminal complex that offers transportation 24 hours a day into the four major cities Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and Rotterdam. There are efficient and often direct services to many other cities in the country. There are intercity connections to Almere, Lelystad, Amsterdam Centraal, Utrecht Centraal, both The Hague Centraal and The Hague HS, Rotterdam Centraal, Eindhoven, 's-Hertogenbosch, Leeuwarden, Groningen, Amersfoort Centraal, Apeldoorn, Deventer, Enschede, Arnhem Centraal, Nijmegen and Venlo. Schiphol is also a stop for the Thalys international high-speed train, connecting the airport directly to Antwerp, Brussels and Paris Gare du Nord, as well as to Bourg St Maurice (winter) and Marseille (summer). The Intercity-Brussel (also named "beneluxtrein") to Antwerp and Brussels stops at the airport.
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is also easily accessible by bus, as many services call or terminate at the bus station located outside in front of the terminal building.
The Taiwanese EVA Air provides private bus services from Schiphol to Belgium for its Belgium-based customers. The service, which departs from and arrives at bus stop C11, goes to Sint-Gillis, Brussels (near the Brussels-South (Midi) railway station) and Berchem, Antwerp (near Antwerp-Berchem bus station). The service is co-operated with Reizen Lauwers NV.
Schiphol Airport can easily be reached by car via the A4 and A9 motorways. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28721 |
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, "Midnight's Children" (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two separate occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.
His fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses" (1988), was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a "fatwā" calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The British government put Rushdie under police protection.
In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the UK's senior literary organisation. He was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked him thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published "," an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over "The Satanic Verses".
Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born on 19 June 1947 in Bombay, then British India, into a Kashmiri Muslim family. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. Anis Rushdie was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay, Rugby School in Warwickshire, and King's College, Cambridge, where he read history.
Rushdie worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. Collaborating with musician Ronnie Bond, Rushdie wrote the words for an advertising record on behalf of the now defunct Burnley Building Society which was recorded at Good Earth Studios, London. The song was called "The Best Dreams" and was sung by George Chandler. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote "Midnight's Children", before becoming a full-time writer.
Rushdie's first novel, "Grimus" (1975), a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, "Midnight's Children" (1981), catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. "Midnight's Children" follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating, "People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character."
After "Midnight's Children", Rushdie wrote "Shame" (1983), in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. "Shame" won France's "Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger" (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Kashmiri diaspora.
Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called "The Jaguar Smile". This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.
His most controversial work, "The Satanic Verses", was published in 1988 (see section below). It was followed by "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" in 1990. Written in the shadow of the fatwa, it is about the dangers of story-telling and an allegorical defence of the power of stories over silence.
In addition to books, Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in "East, West" (1994). "The Moor's Last Sigh", a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (1999) is a remaking of the myth of Orpheus that presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book; hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist.
Following the novel "Fury", set mainly in New York and avoiding the previous sprawling narrative style that spans generations, periods and places, Rushdie's 2005 novel "Shalimar the Clown", a story about love and betrayal set in Kashmir and Los Angeles, was hailed as a return to form by a number of critics.
In his 2002 non-fiction collection "Step Across This Line", he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass, and James Joyce. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's and praised her highly in the foreword of her collection "Burning your Boats".
2008 saw the publication of "The Enchantress of Florence", one of Rushdie's most challenging works that focuses on the past. It tells the story of a European's visit to Akbar’s court, and his revelation that he is a lost relative of the Mughal emperor. The novel was praised in a review in The Guardian as a ″sumptuous mixture of history with fable″.
His novel "Luka and the Fire of Life", a sequel to "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", was published in November 2010 to critical acclaim. Earlier that year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled "", which was published in September 2012.
In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks), when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.
2015 saw the publication of Rushdie's novel "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights", a shift back to his old beloved technique of magic realism. This novel is designed in the structure of a Chinese mystery box with different layers. Based on the central conflict of scholar Ibn Rushd, (from whom Rushdie's family name derives), Rushdie goes on to explore several themes of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism by depicting a war of the universe which a supernatural world of jinns also accompanies.
In 2017 "The Golden House", a satirical novel set in contemporary America, was published.
2019 saw the publication of Rushdie's fourteenth novel "Quichotte", inspired by Miguel de Cervantes classic novel "Don Quijote".
Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels.
His works have been short listed for the Booker Prize five times, in 1981 for Midnight's Children, 1983 for Shame, 1988 for The Satanic Verses, 1995 for The Moor's Last Sigh, 2019 for Quichotte. In 1981 he was awarded the prize. His 2005 novel "Shalimar the Clown" received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in the UK, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award. Rushdie's works have spawned 30 book-length studies and over 700 articles on his writing.
Rushdie has mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival.
He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to "Free Expression Is No Offence", a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.
In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives. In 2014 he taught a seminar on British Literature and served as the 2015 keynote speaker
In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.
Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film "Bridget Jones's Diary" based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On 12 May 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on "The Charlie Rose Show", where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, "Water", faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of Elinor Lipman's novel "Then She Found Me". In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program "Real Time with Bill Maher". Rushdie has said that he was approached for a cameo in "Talladega Nights": "They had this idea, just one shot in which three very, very unlikely people were seen as NASCAR drivers. And I think they approached Julian Schnabel, Lou Reed, and me. We were all supposed to be wearing the uniforms and the helmet, walking in slow motion with the heat haze." In the end their schedules didn't allow for it.
Rushdie collaborated on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel "Midnight's Children" with director Deepa Mehta. The film was also called "Midnight's Children". Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Irrfan Khan participated in the film. Production began in September 2010; the film was released in 2012.
Rushdie announced in June 2011 that he had written the first draft of a script for a new television series for the US cable network Showtime, a project on which he will also serve as an executive producer. The new series, to be called "The Next People", will be, according to Rushdie, "a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people." The idea of a television series was suggested by his US agents, said Rushdie, who felt that television would allow him more creative control than feature film. "The Next People" is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind such projects as "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Shaun of the Dead".
Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C., and a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He is also a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the US Constitution.
In 2017, Salman Rushdie appeared as himself in Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", sharing scenes with Larry David to offer advice on how Larry should deal with the fatwa that has been ordered against him.
The publication of "The Satanic Verses" in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was seen by some to be an irreverent depiction of Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses ("Ayah") to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gabriel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities (13 in total: Iran, India, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Pakistan).
In response to the protests, on 22 January 1989 Rushdie published a column in "The Observer" that called Muhammad "one of the great geniuses of world history," but noted that Islamic doctrine holds Muhammad to be human, and in no way perfect. He held that the novel is not "an anti-religious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations."
On 14 February 1989—Valentine's Day, and also the day of his close friend Bruce Chatwin's funeral—a "fatwā" ordering Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam". (Chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an Imam in exile who returns to incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for their safety.) A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.
When, on BBC Radio 4, he was asked for a response to the threat, Rushdie said, "Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book," and "I'm very sad that it should have happened. It's not true that this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I doubt very much that Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or more than selected extracts out of context." Later, he wrote that he was "proud, then and always", of that statement; while he did not feel his book was especially critical of Islam, "a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably use a little criticism."
The publication of the book and the "fatwā" sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed. Many more people died in riots in some countries. Despite the danger posed by the fatwā, Rushdie made a public appearance at London's Wembley Stadium on 11 August 1993 during a concert by U2. In 2010, U2 bassist Adam Clayton recalled that "lead vocalist Bono had been calling Salman Rushdie from the stage every night on the Zoo TV tour. When we played Wembley, Salman showed up in person and the stadium erupted. You [could] tell from [drummer] Larry Mullen, Jr.'s face that we weren't expecting it. Salman was a regular visitor after that. He had a backstage pass and he used it as often as possible. For a man who was supposed to be in hiding, it was remarkably easy to see him around the place."
On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with the UK, the Iranian government, then headed by Mohammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."
Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's "fatwā" was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards declared that the death sentence on him is still valid.
Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on 14 February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him and has jokingly referred it as "my unfunny Valentine" in a reference to the song "My Funny Valentine". He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat." Despite the threats on Rushdie personally, he said that his family has never been threatened, and that his mother, who lived in Pakistan during the later years of her life, even received outpourings of support. Rushdie himself has been prevented from entering Pakistan, however.
A former bodyguard to Rushdie, Ron Evans, planned to publish a book recounting the behaviour of the author during the time he was in hiding. Evans claimed that Rushdie tried to profit financially from the "fatwa" and was suicidal, but Rushdie dismissed the book as a "bunch of lies" and took legal action against Evans, his co-author and their publisher. On 26 August 2008, Rushdie received an apology at the High Court in London from all three parties. A memoir of his years of hiding, "Joseph Anton", was released on 18 September 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias.
In February 1997, Ayatollah Hasan Sane'i, leader of the bonyad panzdah-e khordad (Fifteenth of Khordad Foundation),
reported that the blood money offered by the foundation for the assassination of Rushdie would be increased from $2 million to $2.5 million. Then a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
In November 2015, former Indian minister P. Chidambaram acknowledged that banning "The Satanic Verses" was wrong.
In 1998, Iran's former president Mohammad Khatami proclaimed the fatwa “finished”; but it has never been officially lifted, and in fact has been reiterated several times by Ali Khamenei and other religious officials. Yet more money was added to the bounty in February 2016.
On 3 August 1989, while Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosive in a hotel in Paddington, Central London, the bomb exploded prematurely, destroying two floors of the hotel and killing Mazeh. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". There is a shrine in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, 3 August 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs' Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran–Iraq War. During the 2006 "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's "fatwā" against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that."
In 1990, soon after the publication of "The Satanic Verses", a Pakistani film entitled "International Gorillay" ("International Guerillas") was released that depicted Rushdie as a villain plotting to cause the downfall of Pakistan by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the country; he is ultimately killed at the end of the movie. The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and it "presents Rushdie as a Rambo-like figure pursued by four Pakistani guerrillas". The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate, as "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation." This effectively prevented the release of the film in the UK. Two months later, however, Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash", he would not sue if it were released. He later said, "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it". While the film was a great hit in Pakistan, it went virtually unnoticed elsewhere.
Rushdie was due to appear at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012. However, he later cancelled his event appearance, and a further tour of India at the time citing a possible threat to his life as the primary reason. Several days after, he indicated that state police agencies had lied, in order to keep him away, when they informed him that paid assassins were being sent to Jaipur to kill him. Police contended that they were afraid Rushdie would read from the banned "The Satanic Verses", and that the threat was real, considering imminent protests by Muslim organizations.
Meanwhile, Indian authors Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar abruptly left the festival, and Jaipur, after reading excerpts from Rushdie's banned novel at the festival. The four were urged to leave by organizers as there was a real possibility they would be arrested. In India the import of the book is banned via customs.
A proposed video link session between Rushdie and the Jaipur Literature Festival was also cancelled at the last minute after the government pressured the festival to stop it. Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in Delhi on 16 March 2012.
In 2010 Anwar al-Awlaki published an Al-Qaeda hit list in "Inspire" magazine, including Rushdie along with other figures claimed to have insulted Islam, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cartoonist Lars Vilks and three "Jyllands-Posten" staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. The list was later expanded to include Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in a terror attack on "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda called for more killings.
Rushdie expressed his support for "Charlie Hebdo". He said, "I stand with "Charlie Hebdo", as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity ... religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today." In response to the attack, Rushdie commented on what he perceived as victim-blaming in the media, stating "You can dislike "Charlie Hebdo". ... But the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak. The fact you dislike them certainly doesn't in any way excuse their murder".
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007. He remarked: "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Parliamentarians of several of these countries condemned the action, and Iran and Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest formally. Controversial condemnation issued by Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq was in turn rebuffed by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie.
Al-Qaeda condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that UK's award for Kashmiri-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response."
Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family but is now an atheist. In a 2006 interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a "hardline atheist".
In 1989, in an interview following the "fatwa", Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though "shaped by Muslim culture more than any other", and a student of Islam. In another interview the same year, he said, "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu."
In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam made by characters in his novel, and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".
Rushdie advocates the application of higher criticism, pioneered during the late 19th century. Rushdie called for a reform in Islam in a guest opinion piece printed in "The Washington Post" and "The Times" in mid-August 2005:
Rushdie is a critic of cultural relativism. He favours calling things by their true names and constantly argues about what is wrong and what is right. In an interview with Point of Inquiry in 2006 he described his view as follows:
Rushdie is an advocate of religious satire. He condemned the Charlie Hebdo shooting and defended comedic criticism of religions in a comment originally posted on English PEN where he called religions a medieval form of unreason. Rushdie called the attack a consequence of "religious totalitarianism" which according to him had caused "a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam":
Rushdie is a self-professed humanist; believing that reading and writing is a pathway for understanding human existence. When asked about reading and writing as a human right Rushdie states, “the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation, and family, and clan, and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.” Though Rushdie believes the freedoms of literature to be universal, the bulk of his fictions portrays the struggles of the marginally underrepresented. This can be seen in his portrayal of the role of females in his novel Shame. In this novel, Rushdie, “suggests that it is women who suffer most from the injustices of the Pakistani social order.” With this, we can see his support of feminism.
In the 1980s in the United Kingdom, he was a supporter of the Labour Party and championed measures to end racial discrimination and alienation of immigrant youth and racial minorities.
Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading the leftist Tariq Ali to label Rushdie and other "warrior writers" as "the belligerati'". He was supportive of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, but was a vocal critic of the 2003 war in Iraq. He has stated that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was unjustifiable.
In the wake of the "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy in March 2006—which many considered an echo of the death threats and "fatwā" that followed publication of "The Satanic Verses" in 1989—Rushdie signed the manifesto "Together Facing the New Totalitarianism", a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism. The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French weekly "Charlie Hebdo" in March 2006.
In 2006, Rushdie stated that he supported comments by the then-Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw, who criticised the wearing of the niqab (a veil that covers all of the face except the eyes). Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never wear the veil. He said, "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on Straw's side."
Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, a former admirer of Rushdie's work, attacked him, saying he "cheered on the Pentagon's criminal ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan". Eagleton subsequently apologised for having misrepresented Rushdie's views.
When Amnesty International suspended human rights activist Gita Sahgal for saying to the press that she thought Amnesty International should distance itself from Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Rushdie said: Amnesty … has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns. Gita Sahgal is a woman of immense integrity and distinction... It is people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement; Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt.
Rushdie supported the election of Democrat Barack Obama for the American presidency and has often criticized the Republican Party. In Indian politics, Rushdie has criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Rushdie was involved in the Occupy Movement, both as a presence at Occupy Boston and as a founding member of Occupy Writers. Rushdie is a supporter of gun control, blaming a shooting at a Colorado cinema in July 2012 on the American right to keep and bear arms.
Rushdie supported the vote to remain in the EU during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. He attained American citizenship in 2016 and voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
In August 2019, Rushdie criticized the communications-blackout and lockdown in Indian-administered Kashmir, tweeting "Even from seven thousand miles away it’s clear that what’s happening in Kashmir is an atrocity. Not much to celebrate this August 15th.". He has previously referred to crackdowns in Indian-administered Kashmir as pretexts for rape and brutalization by Indian authorities, further describing it as"A kind of holocaust unleashed against the Kashmiri people . . . And the level of brutality is quite spectacular. And, frankly, without that the jihadists would have had very little response from the Kashmiri people who were not really traditionally interested in radical Islam. So now they're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and that's the tragedy of the place. . . And really what I was trying to do was say exactly that the attraction of the jihad in Kashmir arose out of the activities of the Indian army. One of the most obvious facts about Kashmir is the gigantic amount of military equipment that's there everywhere: tanks, trucks, howitzers, bazookas, huge arms depots, endless arms convoys which go up these little mountain roads for six hours at a time from one end of the convoy to the other – and God help you if you're stuck behind it, because there's no way to pass it." He laments the division of Kashmir into zones of Pakistani and Indian administration as "cutting his family down the middle" in an interview about his book "Shalimar the Clown".
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1979). He left her in the mid-'80s for the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, to whom he was introduced by their mutual friend Bruce Chatwin. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1997). In 2004, he married Padma Lakshmi, an Indian-American actress, model, and host of the American reality-television show "Top Chef". The marriage ended on 2 July 2007.
In 1999, Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a problem with the levator palpebrae muscle, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.
Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. He is a fan of the English football club Tottenham Hotspur. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28722 |
Shirley Dean
Shirley Ann Dean (née Bryant, born 1935-36), considered moderate in Berkeley politics, is an American politician who served as the Mayor of Berkeley, California (1994-2002). Before serving two terms as Berkeley's Mayor, Dean served on the Berkeley City Council for 15 years (1975–94) and was a leader of the Berkeley Democratic Club.
Shirley Dean grew up in a single parent family and graduated from Berkeley High School (1952). She was selected as a Distinguished Graduate in the Berkeley High School Hall of Fame and was the first in her family to attend college. She graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a BA in Social Welfare in 1956.
During part of the time she served as Mayor, she worked half-time for UC Berkeley Undergraduate Admission and Relations with Schools and the Office of Admissions. Her responsibilities included writing the plan and supervising field work for the recruitment of minority students to the UC Berkeley campus and visiting high schools throughout California. She received two Distinguished Service Awards from UC Berkeley for her work before she retired in March, 2000.
Shirley Dean was first elected Mayor of Berkeley in 1994 after a close run-off race. Dean actually trailed in the November 1994 general election, with fellow council member Don Jelinek capturing 49.2% of the vote against Dean’s 45.5%. Umder city law, that forced a runoff in December, which Dean won due to lower turnout in the college town.
She was re-elected by more than 56% of the vote in 1998. A month before her 1998 victory, her opponent, Don Jelinek, accused her of disguising her identity while visiting Wilmington College, the college attended by rival Council member and Jelinek supporter Kriss Worthington. Dean stated that she visited the school to read about Worthington in the college newspaper, a public record. She also stated she did not ask for non-public records and that upon the request of the college showed her California Driver License bearing her full name and address. There is no record that she used any material from the college newspaper.
During most of her two-term tenure as Mayor, she worked with divided City Council that had a 5-4 progressive majority. The position of mayor in the city of Berkeley is largely a symbolic post, carrying no more power than other council members. Dean compensated by working relentlessly on programs she thought were best for the city. For much of her career, Dean's political base was the very active network of Berkeley neighborhood organizations; however, many of her critics and rivals found her to be too conservative. Dean and other members of the City Council were openly mocked at a city-sponsored art festival where a satirical mock City Council meeting was staged in which actors took over the Council Chambers and ridiculed Berkeley's elected officials.
After September 11, when the progressive City Council majority voted to condemn the war in Afghanistan, Dean went on Fox News and reported that the Council’s actions were prompting a flood of letters and e-mails threatening an economic boycott of the City. On a television show regarding the issue, she called her Council colleagues who had voted for the measure “patriots” who had every right to protest.
Dean lost her bid for re-election in 2002 to fellow Democrat Tom Bates. The day before the election Tom Bates stole 1,000 copies of The Daily Californian because the paper had endorsed Dean. Bates was charged with the theft, pleaded guilty, was fined, and ordered to pay the paper restitution. Dean ran for Mayor against Bates once more in 2008, but was soundly defeated.
Dean's accomplishments as Mayor include:
Dean started her political career by organizing the Bonita-Berryman Neighborhood Association, which led to her appointment in 1971 to the city's Planning Commission. In the early 70s, she worked with Urban Care to stop the development of a large shopping center on the waterfront. She also worked with Urban Care to achieve Council approval for what is recognized as one of the best Landmarks Preservation Ordinances in the Nation. In 1976, she was elected from a caucus in her congressional district as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in New York City pledged to Senator Frank Church.
Dean served on the Berkeley City Council for 15 years between 1975 and 1994. She was first elected to the City Council in 1975 as an at large member, she served on the council until 1982. When district elections were adopted in Berkeley in 1986 Dean was the first elected council member from District 5, she held the seat until 1994 when she was elected Mayor.
Since leaving the Mayor’s Office in 2002, Dean has been involved in several community and environmental organizations, serving on the boards of:
In 2003, Dean was named Woman of the year by the Zonta Club of Berkeley/North Bay.
In 2009, Dean appeared in the documentary film "" about the controversial greening of Berkeley after the passage of Berkeley Proposition G.
Dean made headlines in 2007 when she, at age 71, city council member Betty Olds, 86, and noted environmentalist and co-founder of Save the Bay, Sylvia McLaughlin, 90, climbed a ladder to briefly join a tree-sit aimed at saving the Memorial Oak Grove outside the stadium of the University of California, Berkeley.
After a 21-month protest, the oak trees were cut down. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28724 |
Superconducting magnetic energy storage
Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems store energy in the magnetic field created by the flow of direct current in a superconducting coil which has been cryogenically cooled to a temperature below its superconducting critical temperature.
A typical SMES system includes three parts: superconducting coil, power conditioning system and cryogenically cooled refrigerator. Once the superconducting coil is charged, the current will not decay and the magnetic energy can be stored indefinitely.
The stored energy can be released back to the network by discharging the coil. The power conditioning system uses an inverter/rectifier to transform alternating current (AC) power to direct current or convert DC back to AC power. The inverter/rectifier accounts for about 2–3% energy loss in each direction. SMES loses the least amount of electricity in the energy storage process compared to other methods of storing energy. SMES systems are highly efficient; the round-trip efficiency is greater than 95%.
Due to the energy requirements of refrigeration and the high cost of superconducting wire, SMES is currently used for short duration energy storage. Therefore, SMES is most commonly devoted to improving power quality.
There are several reasons for using superconducting magnetic energy storage instead of other energy storage methods. The most important advantage of SMES is that the time delay during charge and discharge is quite short. Power is available almost instantaneously and very high power output can be provided for a brief period of time. Other energy storage methods, such as pumped hydro or compressed air, have a substantial time delay associated with the energy conversion of stored mechanical energy back into electricity. Thus if demand is immediate, SMES is a viable option. Another advantage is that the loss of power is less than other storage methods because electric currents encounter almost no resistance. Additionally the main parts in a SMES are motionless, which results in high reliability.
There are several small SMES units available for commercial use and several larger test bed projects. Several 1 MW·h units are used for power quality control in installations around the world, especially to provide power quality at manufacturing plants requiring ultra-clean power, such as microchip fabrication facilities.
These facilities have also been used to provide grid stability in distribution systems. SMES is also used in utility applications. In northern Wisconsin, a string of distributed SMES units were deployed to enhance stability of a transmission loop. The transmission line is subject to large, sudden load changes due to the operation of a paper mill, with the potential for uncontrolled fluctuations and voltage collapse.
The Engineering Test Model is a large SMES with a capacity of approximately 20 MW·h, capable of providing 40 MW of power for 30 minutes or 10 MW of power for 2 hours.
The magnetic energy stored by a coil carrying a current is given by one half of the inductance of the coil times the square of the current.
Where
Now let's consider a cylindrical coil with conductors of a rectangular cross section. The mean radius of coil is "R". "a" and "b" are width and depth of the conductor. "f" is called form function which is different for different shapes of coil. "ξ" (xi) and "δ" (delta) are two parameters to characterize the dimensions of the coil. We can therefore write the magnetic energy stored in such a cylindrical coil as shown below. This energy is a function of coil dimensions, number of turns and carrying current.
Where
Besides the properties of the wire, the configuration of the coil itself is an important issue from a mechanical engineering aspect. There are three factors which affect the design and the shape of the coil - they are: Inferior strain tolerance, thermal contraction upon cooling and Lorentz forces in a charged coil. Among them, the strain tolerance is crucial not because of any electrical effect, but because it determines how much structural material is needed to keep the SMES from breaking. For small SMES systems, the optimistic value of 0.3% strain tolerance is selected. Toroidal geometry can help to lessen the external magnetic forces and therefore reduces the size of mechanical support needed. Also, due to the low external magnetic field, toroidal SMES can be located near a utility or customer load.
For small SMES, solenoids are usually used because they are easy to coil and no pre-compression is needed. In toroidal SMES, the coil is always under compression by the outer hoops and two disks, one of which is on the top and the other is on the bottom to avoid breakage. Currently, there is little need for toroidal geometry for small SMES, but as the size increases, mechanical forces become more important and the toroidal coil is needed.
The older large SMES concepts usually featured a low aspect ratio solenoid approximately 100 m in diameter buried in earth. At the low extreme of size is the concept of micro-SMES solenoids, for energy storage range near 1 MJ.
Under steady state conditions and in the superconducting state, the coil resistance is negligible. However, the refrigerator necessary to keep the superconductor cool requires electric power and this refrigeration energy must be considered when evaluating the efficiency of SMES as an energy storage device.
Although the high-temperature superconductor (HTSC) has higher critical temperature, flux lattice melting takes place in moderate magnetic fields around a temperature lower than this critical temperature. The heat loads that must be removed by the cooling system include conduction through the support system, radiation from warmer to colder surfaces, AC losses in the conductor (during charge and discharge), and losses from the cold–to-warm power leads that connect the cold coil to the power conditioning system. Conduction and radiation losses are minimized by proper design of thermal surfaces. Lead losses can be minimized by good design of the leads. AC losses depend on the design of the conductor, the duty cycle of the device and the power rating.
The refrigeration requirements for HTSC and low-temperature superconductor (LTSC) toroidal coils for the baseline temperatures of 77 K, 20 K, and 4.2 K, increases in that order. The refrigeration requirements here is defined as electrical power to operate the refrigeration system. As the stored energy increases by a factor of 100, refrigeration cost only goes up by a factor of 20. Also, the savings in refrigeration for an HTSC system is larger (by 60% to 70%) than for an LTSC systems.
Whether HTSC or LTSC systems are more economical depends because there are other major components determining the cost of SMES: Conductor consisting of superconductor and copper stabilizer and cold support are major costs in themselves. They must be judged with the overall efficiency and cost of the device. Other components, such as vacuum vessel insulation, has been shown to be a small part compared to the large coil cost. The combined costs of conductors, structure and refrigerator for toroidal coils are dominated by the cost of the superconductor. The same trend is true for solenoid coils. HTSC coils cost more than LTSC coils by a factor of 2 to 4. We expect to see a cheaper cost for HTSC due to lower refrigeration requirements but this is not the case. So, why is the HTSC system more expensive?
To gain some insight consider a breakdown by major components of both HTSC and LTSC coils corresponding to three typical stored energy levels, 2, 20 and 200 MW·h. The conductor cost dominates the three costs for all HTSC cases and is particularly important at small sizes. The principal reason lies in the comparative current density of LTSC and HTSC materials. The critical current of HTSC wire is lower than LTSC wire generally in the operating magnetic field, about 5 to 10 teslas (T). Assume the wire costs are the same by weight. Because HTSC wire has lower ("J"c) value than LTSC wire, it will take much more wire to create the same inductance. Therefore, the cost of wire is much higher than LTSC wire. Also, as the SMES size goes up from 2 to 20 to 200 MW·h, the LTSC conductor cost also goes up about a factor of 10 at each step. The HTSC conductor cost rises a little slower but is still by far the costliest item.
The structure costs of either HTSC or LTSC go up uniformly (a factor of 10) with each step from 2 to 20 to 200 MW·h. But HTSC structure cost is higher because the strain tolerance of the HTSC (ceramics cannot carry much tensile load) is less than LTSC, such as Nb3Ti or Nb3Sn, which demands more structure materials. Thus, in the very large cases, the HTSC cost can not be offset by simply reducing the coil size at a higher magnetic field.
It is worth noting here that the refrigerator cost in all cases is so small that there is very little percentage savings associated with reduced refrigeration demands at high temperature. This means that if a HTSC, BSCCO for instance, works better at a low temperature, say 20K, it will certainly be operated there. For very small SMES, the reduced refrigerator cost will have a more significant positive impact.
Clearly, the volume of superconducting coils increases with the stored energy. Also, we can see that the LTSC torus maximum diameter is always smaller for a HTSC magnet than LTSC due to higher magnetic field operation. In the case of solenoid coils, the height or length is also smaller for HTSC coils, but still much higher than in a toroidal geometry (due to low external magnetic field).
An increase in peak magnetic field yields a reduction in both volume (higher energy density) and cost (reduced conductor length). Smaller volume means higher energy density and cost is reduced due to the decrease of the conductor length. There is an optimum value of the peak magnetic field, about 7 T in this case. If the field is increased past the optimum, further volume reductions are possible with minimal increase in cost. The limit to which the field can be increased is usually not economic but physical and it relates to the impossibility of bringing the inner legs of the toroid any closer together and still leave room for the bucking cylinder.
The superconductor material is a key issue for SMES. Superconductor development efforts focus on increasing Jc and strain range and on reducing the wire manufacturing cost.
The energy content of current SMES systems is usually quite small. Methods to increase the energy stored in SMES often resort to large-scale storage units. As with other superconducting applications, cryogenics are a necessity. A robust mechanical structure is usually required to contain the very large Lorentz forces generated by and on the magnet coils. The dominant cost for SMES is the superconductor, followed by the cooling system and the rest of the mechanical structure.
Several issues at the onset of the technology have hindered its proliferation:
These still pose problems for superconducting applications but are improving over time. Advances have been made in the performance of superconducting materials. Furthermore, the reliability and efficiency of refrigeration systems has improved significantly. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28728 |
Solution
In chemistry, a solution is a special type of homogeneous mixture composed of two or more substances. In such a mixture, a solute is a substance dissolved in another substance, known as a solvent. The mixing process of a solution happens at a scale where the effects of chemical polarity are involved, resulting in interactions that are specific to solvation. The solution usually has the state of the solvent when the solvent is the larger fraction of the mixture, as is commonly the case. One important parameter of a solution is the concentration, which is a measure of the amount of solute in a given amount of solution or solvent. The term "aqueous solution" is used when one of the solvents is water.
"Homogeneous" means that the components of the mixture form a single phase. "Heterogeneous" means that the components of the mixture are of different phase. The properties of the mixture (such as concentration, temperature, and density) can be uniformly distributed through the volume but only in absence of diffusion phenomena or after their completion. Usually, the substance present in the greatest amount is considered the solvent. Solvents can be gases, liquids or solids. One or more components present in the solution other than the solvent are called solutes. The solution has the same physical state as the solvent.
If the solvent is a gas, only gases are dissolved under a given set of conditions. An example of a gaseous solution is air (oxygen and other gases dissolved in nitrogen). Since interactions between molecules play almost no role, dilute gases form rather trivial solutions. In part of the literature, they are not even classified as solutions, but addressed as mixtures.
If the solvent is a liquid, then almost all gases, liquids, and solids can be dissolved. Here are some examples:
Counter examples are provided by liquid mixtures that are not homogeneous: colloids, suspensions, emulsions are not considered solutions.
Body fluids are examples for complex liquid solutions, containing many solutes. Many of these are electrolytes, since they contain solute ions, such as potassium. Furthermore, they contain solute molecules like sugar and urea. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are also essential components of blood chemistry, where significant changes in their concentrations may be a sign of severe illness or injury.
If the solvent is a solid, then gases, liquids and solids can be dissolved.
The ability of one compound to dissolve in another compound is called solubility. When a liquid can completely dissolve in another liquid the two liquids are "miscible". Two substances that can never mix to form a solution are said to be "immiscible".
All solutions have a positive entropy of mixing. The interactions between different molecules or ions may be energetically favored or not. If interactions are unfavorable, then the free energy decreases with increasing solute concentration. At some point the energy loss outweighs the entropy gain, and no more solute particles can be dissolved; the solution is said to be saturated. However, the point at which a solution can become saturated can change significantly with different environmental factors, such as temperature, pressure, and contamination. For some solute-solvent combinations a supersaturated solution can be prepared by raising the solubility (for example by increasing the temperature) to dissolve more solute, and then lowering it (for example by cooling).
Usually, the greater the temperature of the solvent, the more of a given solid solute it can dissolve. However, most gases and some compounds exhibit solubilities that decrease with increased temperature. Such behavior is a result of an exothermic enthalpy of solution. Some surfactants exhibit this behaviour. The solubility of liquids in liquids is generally less temperature-sensitive than that of solids or gases.
The physical properties of compounds such as melting point and boiling point change when other compounds are added. Together they are called colligative properties. There are several ways to quantify the amount of one compound dissolved in the other compounds collectively called concentration. Examples include molarity, volume fraction, and mole fraction.
The properties of ideal solutions can be calculated by the linear combination of the properties of its components. If both solute and solvent exist in equal quantities (such as in a 50% ethanol, 50% water solution), the concepts of "solute" and "solvent" become less relevant, but the substance that is more often used as a solvent is normally designated as the solvent (in this example, water).
In principle, all types of liquids can behave as solvents: liquid noble gases, molten metals, molten salts, molten covalent networks, and molecular liquids. In the practice of chemistry and biochemistry, most solvents are molecular liquids. They can be classified into polar and non-polar, according to whether their molecules possess a permanent electric dipole moment. Another distinction is whether their molecules can form hydrogen bonds (protic and aprotic solvents). Water, the most commonly used solvent, is both polar and sustains hydrogen bonds.
Salts dissolve in polar solvents, forming positive and negative ions that are attracted to the negative and positive ends of the solvent molecule, respectively. If the solvent is water, hydration occurs when the charged solute ions become surrounded by water molecules. A standard example is aqueous saltwater. Such solutions are called electrolytes. Whenever salt dissolves in water ion association has to be taken into account.
Polar solutes dissolve in polar solvents, forming polar bonds or hydrogen bonds. As an example, all alcoholic beverages are aqueous solutions of ethanol. On the other hand, non-polar solutes dissolve better in non-polar solvents. Examples are hydrocarbons such as oil and grease that easily mix with each other, while being incompatible with water.
An example for the immiscibility of oil and water is a leak of petroleum from a damaged tanker, that does not dissolve in the ocean water but rather floats on the surface.
It is common practice in laboratories to make a solution directly from its constituent ingredients. There are three cases in practical calculation:
In the following equations, A is solvent, B is solute, and C is concentration. Solute volume contribution is considered through ideal solution model.
Example: Make 2 g/100mL of NaCl solution with 1 L water Water (properties). The density of resulting solution is considered to be equal to that of water, statement holding especially for dilute solutions, so the density information is not required. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28729 |
Security engineering
Security engineering is a specialized field of engineering that focuses on the security aspects in the design of systems that need to be able to deal robustly with possible sources of disruption, ranging from natural disasters to malicious acts. It is similar to other systems engineering activities in that its primary motivation is to support the delivery of engineering solutions that satisfy pre-defined functional and user requirements, but it has the added dimension of preventing misuse and malicious behavior. Those constraints and restrictions are often asserted as a security policy.
In one form or another, security engineering has existed as an informal field of study for several centuries. For example, the fields of locksmithing and security printing have been around for many years.
Recent catastrophic events, most notably 9/11, have made security engineering quickly become a rapidly-growing field. In fact, in a report completed in 2006, it was estimated that the global security industry was valued at US$150 billion.
Security engineering involves aspects of social science, psychology (such as designing a system to "fail well", instead of trying to eliminate all sources of error), and economics as well as physics, chemistry, mathematics, criminology architecture, and landscaping.
Some of the techniques used, such as fault tree analysis, are derived from safety engineering.
Other techniques such as cryptography were previously restricted to military applications. One of the pioneers of security engineering as a formal field of study is Ross Anderson.
No single qualification exists to become a security engineer.
However, an undergraduate and/or graduate degree, often in computer science, computer engineering, or physical protection focused degrees such as Security Science, in combination with practical work experience (systems, network engineering, software development, physical protection system modelling etc.) most qualifies an individual to succeed in the field. Other degree qualifications with a security focus exist. Multiple certifications, such as the Certified Information Systems Security Professional, or Certified Physical Security Professional are available that may demonstrate expertise in the field. Regardless of the qualification, the course must include a knowledge base to diagnose the security system drivers, security theory and principles including defense in depth, protection in depth, situational crime prevention and crime prevention through environmental design to set the protection strategy (professional inference), and technical knowledge including physics and mathematics to design and commission the engineering treatment solution.
All this knowledge must be braced by professional attributes including strong communication skills and high levels of literacy for engineering report writing. Security engineering also goes by the label Security Science.
Technological advances, principally in the field of computers, have now allowed the creation of far more complex systems, with new and complex security problems. Because modern systems cut across many areas of human endeavor, security engineers not only need consider the mathematical and physical properties of systems; they also need to consider attacks on the people who use and form parts of those systems using social engineering attacks. Secure systems have to resist not only technical attacks, but also coercion, fraud, and deception by confidence tricksters.
According to the "Microsoft Developer Network" the patterns and practices of security engineering consist of the following activities:
These activities are designed to help meet security objectives in the software life cycle.
Whatever the target, there are multiple ways of preventing penetration by unwanted or unauthorised persons. Methods include placing Jersey barriers, stairs or other sturdy obstacles outside tall or politically sensitive buildings to prevent car and truck bombings. Improving the method of visitor management and some new electronic locks take advantage of technologies such as fingerprint scanning, iris or retinal scanning, and voiceprint identification to authenticate users.
Computer-related
Physical
Misc. Topics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28730 |
Stow-on-the-Wold
Stow-on-the-Wold is a market town and civil parish in Gloucestershire, England, on top an 800-foot (244 m) hill at the junction of main roads through the Cotswolds, including the Fosse Way (A429), which is of Roman origin. The town was founded by Norman lords to take advantage of trade on the roads converging there. Fairs have been held by royal charter since 1330; an annual horse fair is still held on the edge of the town.
Stow-on-the-Wold, originally called Stow St. Edward or Edwardstow after the town's patron saint Edward, probably Edward the Martyr, is said to have originated as an Iron Age fort on this defensive position on a hill. Indeed, there are many sites of similar forts in the area, and Stone Age and Bronze Age burial mounds are common throughout the area. It is likely that Maugersbury was the primary settlement of the parish before Stow was built as a marketplace on the hilltop nearer to the crossroads, to take advantage of passing trade. Originally the small settlement was controlled by abbots from the local abbey, and when the first weekly market was set up in 1107 by Henry I, he decreed that the proceeds go to Evesham Abbey.
On 21 March 1646 the last battle of the first phase of the English Civil War took place one mile north of Stow on the Wold. After initial royalist success, the superiority of the parliamentary forces overwhelmed and routed the royalist forces. Fleeing the field, the royalists fought a running fight back into the streets of Stow where the final action took place, culminating in surrender in the market square.
In birth order:
The town belongs to the Stow electoral ward. This covers the parishes of Stow, Maugersbury and Swell. In 2010 these parishes had a total population of 2,594.
Stow-on-the-Wold has an active Parish Council with 10 members.
Stow-on-the-Wold is represented on Cotswold District Council by the Liberal Democrat Councillor Dilys Neill, who was elected in the 2019 local elections. The Stow Division is represented on Gloucestershire County Council by the Conservative Councillor Nigel Moor.
In 1330, Edward III set up an annual 7-day market to be held in August. In 1476, Edward IV replaced that with two 5-day fairs, two days before and two days after the feast of St Philip and St James in May, and similarly in October on the feast of St Edward the Confessor (the saint associated with the town). The aim of these annual charter fairs was to establish Stow as a place to trade, and to remedy the unpredictable passing trade. These fairs were located in the square, which is still the town centre.
As the fairs grew in fame and importance the town grew more prosperous. Traders who once only dealt in livestock, now dealt in many handmade goods, and the wool trade always stayed a large part of the trade Reportedly, 20,000 sheep changed hands at one 19th century fair. Many alleyways known as "tures" run between the buildings of Stow into the market square; these once were used in the herding of sheep into the square to be sold.
As the wool trade declined, people began to trade in horses, and these would be sold at every fair. This practice still continues today, although the fair has been moved from the Square, and is currently held in the large field towards the village of Maugersbury every May and October. It is still a very popular fair, with the roads around Stow being blocked for many hours on the day.
There has been controversy surrounding Stow Fair. The large number of visitors and traders has attracted more vendors not dealing in horses. Local businesses used to profit from the increased custom, but in recent years most pubs and shops close for 2 or 3 miles around due to the threat of theft or vandalism.
Stow played a role in the English Civil War. A number of fights took place around the area, the local church of St Edward being damaged in one such skirmish. On 21 March 1646, the Royalists, commanded by Sir Jacob Astley, were defeated at the Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold, with hundreds of prisoners being confined for some time in St. Edwards.
Given its exposed spot on the top of Stow Hill, the town is often referred to with the couplet "Stow on the Wold, where the winds blow cold".
Stow-on-the-Wold was prominently featured in the eleventh episode of series 6 of "Top Gear", when Jeremy Clarkson reviewed the Ford F-Series there. He chose to film it there because it is a typical village in the English countryside, as Jeremy compares it to the American countryside in the episode.
Several roads link Stow to the surrounding villages. The Fosse Way (A429), which runs from Exeter to Lincoln; the A424, which runs from Burford, into the A44 and into Evesham; and the A436, which connects Cheltenham and Gloucester with Stow.
From 1881 until 1962, Stow was served by Stow-on-the-Wold railway station which was on the Great Western Railway's Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway. The nearest railway station is now Moreton-in-Marsh (some 4 miles, 6 km, from Stow), on the Cotswold Line from Hereford to London Paddington. An alternative is Kingham railway station (some 5 miles, 8 km, from Stow) on the same line. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28731 |
Spaghetti code
Spaghetti code is a pejorative phrase for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code. Spaghetti code can be caused by several factors, such as volatile project requirements, lack of programming style rules, and insufficient ability or experience.
Code that overuses GOTO statements rather than structured programming constructs, resulting in convoluted and unmaintainable programs, is often called spaghetti code.
Such code has a complex and tangled control structure, resulting in a program flow that is conceptually like a bowl of spaghetti, twisted and tangled.
In a 1980 publication by the United States National Bureau of Standards, the phrase spaghetti program was used to describe older programs having "fragmented and scattered files".
Spaghetti code can also describe an anti-pattern in which object-oriented code is written in a procedural style, such as by creating classes whose methods are overly long and messy, or forsaking object oriented concepts like polymorphism. The presence of this form of spaghetti code can significantly reduce the comprehensibility of a system.
It is not clear when the phrase spaghetti code came into common usage; however, several references appeared in 1977 including "Macaroni is Better Than Spaghetti" by Steele published in Proceedings of the 1977 symposium on artificial intelligence and programming languages. In the 1978 book "A primer on disciplined programming using PL/I, PL/CS, and PL/CT", Richard Conway used the term to describe types of programs that "have the same clean logical structure as a plate of spaghetti", a phrase repeated in the 1979 book "An Introduction to Programming" he co-authored with David Gries. In the 1988 paper "A spiral model of software development and enhancement", the term is used to describe the older practice of the "code and fix model", which lacked planning and eventually led to the development of the waterfall model. In the 1979 book "Structured programming for the COBOL programmer", author Paul Noll uses the phrases "spaghetti code" and "rat's nest" as synonyms to describe poorly structured source code.
In the "Ada – Europe '93" conference, Ada was described as forcing the programmer to "produce understandable, instead of spaghetti code", because of its restrictive exception propagation mechanism.
In a 1981 computer languages spoof in "The Michigan Technic" titled "BASICally speaking...FORTRAN bytes!!", the author described FORTRAN as "proof positive that the cofounders of IBM were Italian, for it consists entirely of spaghetti code".
Richard Hamming described in his lectures the etymology of the term in the context of early programming in binary codes:
Ravioli code is a term specific to object-oriented programming. It describes code that comprises well-structured classes that are easy to understand in isolation, but difficult to understand as a whole.
Lasagna code refers to code whose layers are so complicated and intertwined that making a change in one layer would necessitate changes in all other layers.
Pizza code refers to code which has very flat architecture.
Here follows what would be considered a trivial example of spaghetti code in BASIC. The program prints each of the numbers 1 to 100 to the screen along with its square. Indentation is not used to differentiate the various actions performed by the code, and that the program's codice_1 statements create a reliance on line numbers. The flow of execution from one area to another is harder to predict. Real-world occurrences of spaghetti code are more complex and can add greatly to a program's maintenance costs.
1 i=0
2 i=i+1
3 PRINT i; "squared=";i*i
4 IF i>=100 THEN GOTO 6
5 GOTO 2
6 PRINT "Program Completed."
7 END
Here is the same code written in a structured programming style:
1 FOR i=1 TO 100
2 PRINT i;"squared=";i*i
3 NEXT i
4 PRINT "Program Completed."
5 END
The program jumps from one area to another, but this jumping is formal and more easily predictable, because for loops and functions provide flow control whereas the "goto" statement encourages arbitrary flow control. Though this example is small, real world programs are composed of many lines of code and are difficult to maintain when written in a spaghetti code fashion.
Here is another example of Spaghetti code with embedded GOTO statements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28732 |
Steganography
Steganography ( ) is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. The word "steganography" comes from Greek "steganographia", which combines the words "steganós" (), meaning "covered or concealed", and "-graphia" () meaning "writing".
The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his "Steganographia", a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic. Generally, the hidden messages appear to be (or to be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. For example, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter. Some implementations of steganography that lack a shared secret are forms of security through obscurity, and key-dependent steganographic schemes adhere to Kerckhoffs's principle.
The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable they are, arouse interest and may in themselves be incriminating in countries in which encryption is illegal.
Whereas cryptography is the practice of protecting the contents of a message alone, steganography is concerned both with concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent and its contents.
Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. For example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every hundredth pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet. The change is so subtle that someone who is not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice the change.
The first recorded uses of steganography can be traced back to 440 BC in Greece, when Herodotus mentions two examples in his "Histories". Histiaeus sent a message to his vassal, Aristagoras, by shaving the head of his most trusted servant, "marking" the message onto his scalp, then sending him on his way once his hair had regrown, with the instruction, "When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon." Additionally, Demaratus sent a warning about a forthcoming attack to Greece by writing it directly on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying its beeswax surface. Wax tablets were in common use then as reusable writing surfaces, sometimes used for shorthand.
In his work "Polygraphiae," Johannes Trithemius developed his so-called "Ave-Maria-Cipher" that can hide information in a Latin praise of God. ""Auctor Sapientissimus Conseruans Angelica Deferat Nobis Charitas Potentissimi Creatoris"" for example contains the concealed word "VICIPEDIA".
This book was forbiden beacause it had theme about magic and topics that Catholic church did not like.
Steganography has been widely used for centuries. Here are some examples:
Modern steganography entered the world in 1985 with the advent of personal computers being applied to classical steganography problems. Development following that was very slow, but has since taken off, going by the large number of steganography software available:
doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2006.890310
An image or a text can be converted into a soundfile, which is then analysed with a spectrogram to reveal the image. Various artists have used this method to conceal hidden pictures in their songs, such as Aphex Twin in Windowlicker or Nine Inch Nails in their album Year Zero.
In communities with social or government taboos or censorship, people use cultural steganography—hiding messages in idiom, pop culture references, and other messages they share publicly and assume are monitored. This relies on social context to make the underlying messages visible only to certain readers. Examples include:
Since the era of evolving network applications, steganography research has shifted from image steganography to steganography in streaming media such as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
In 2003, Giannoula et al. developed a data hiding technique leading to compressed forms of source video signals on a frame-by-frame basis.
In 2005, Dittmann et al. studied steganography and watermarking of multimedia contents such as VoIP.
In 2008, Yongfeng Huang and Shanyu Tang presented a novel approach to information hiding in low bit-rate VoIP speech stream, and theirs published work on steganography in is the first ever effort to improve the codebook partition by using Graph theory along with Quantization Index Modulation in low bit-rate streaming media.
In 2011 and 2012, Yongfeng Huang and Shanyu Tang devised new steganographic algorithms that use codec parameters as cover object to realise real-time covert VoIP steganography. Their findings were published in "IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security".
Academic work since 2012 demonstrated the feasibility of steganography for cyber-physical systems (CPS)/the Internet of Things (IoT). Some techniques of CPS/IoT steganography overlap with network steganography, i.e. hiding data in communication protocols used in CPS/the IoT. However, specific techniques hide data in CPS components. For instance, data can be stored in unused registers of IoT/CPS components and in the states of IoT/CPS actuators.
Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the "plaintext", may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a "ciphertext". Then, an innocuous "covertext" is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the "stegotext". For example, the letter size, spacing, typeface, or other characteristics of a covertext can be manipulated to carry the hidden message. Only a recipient who knows the technique used can recover the message and then decrypt it. Francis Bacon developed Bacon's cipher as such a technique.
The ciphertext produced by most digital steganography methods, however, is not printable. Traditional digital methods rely on perturbing noise in the channel file to hide the message, and as such, the channel file must be transmitted to the recipient with no additional noise from the transmission. Printing introduces much noise in the ciphertext, generally rendering the message unrecoverable. There are techniques that address this limitation, one notable example being ASCII Art Steganography.
Although not classic steganography, some types of modern color laser printers integrate the model, serial number and timestamps on each printout for traceability reasons using a dot-matrix code made of small, yellow dots not recognizable to the naked eye — see printer steganography for details.
The art of concealing data in a puzzle can take advantage of the degrees of freedom in stating the puzzle, using the starting information to encode a key within the puzzle / puzzle image.
For instance, steganography using sudoku puzzles has as many keys as there are possible solutions of a sudoku puzzle, which is .
In 1977, Kent concisely described the potential for covert channel signaling in general network communication protocols, even if the traffic is encrypted (in a footnote) in "Encryption-Based Protection for Interactive User/Computer Communication," Proceedings of the Fifth Data Communications Symposium, September 1977.
In 1987, Girling first studied covert channels on a local area network (LAN), identified and realised three obvious covert channels (two storage channels and one timing channel), and his research paper entitled “Covert channels in LAN’s” published in "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering", vol. SE-13 of 2, in February 1987.
In 1989, Wolf implemented covert channels in LAN protocols, e.g. using the reserved fields, pad fields and undefined fields in the TCP/IP protocol.
In 1997, Rowland used the IP identification field, the TCP initial sequence number and acknowledge sequence number fields in TCP/IP headers to build covert channels.
In 2002, Kamran Ahsan made an excellent summary of research on network steganography.
In 2005, Steven J. Murdoch and Stephen Lewis contributed a chapter entitled "Embedding Covert Channels into TCP/IP" in the ""Information Hiding"" book published by Springer.
All information hiding techniques that may be used to exchange steganograms in telecommunication networks can be classified under the general term of network steganography. This nomenclature was originally introduced by Krzysztof Szczypiorski in 2003. Contrary to typical steganographic methods that use digital media (images, audio and video files) to hide data, network steganography uses communication protocols' control elements and their intrinsic functionality. As a result, such methods can be harder to detect and eliminate.
Typical network steganography methods involve modification of the properties of a single network protocol. Such modification can be applied to the PDU (Protocol Data Unit), to the time relations between the exchanged PDUs, or both (hybrid methods).
Moreover, it is feasible to utilize the relation between two or more different network protocols to enable secret communication. These applications fall under the term inter-protocol steganography. Alternatively, multiple network protocols can be used simultaneously to transfer hidden information and so-called control protocols can be embedded into steganographic communications to extend their capabilities, e.g. to allow dynamic overlay routing or the switching of utilized hiding methods and network protocols.
Network steganography covers a broad spectrum of techniques, which include, among others:
Discussions of steganography generally use terminology analogous to and consistent with conventional radio and communications technology. However, some terms appear specifically in software and are easily confused. These are the most relevant ones to digital steganographic systems:
The "payload" is the data covertly communicated. The "carrier" is the signal, stream, or data file that hides the payload, which differs from the "channel", which typically means the type of input, such as a JPEG image. The resulting signal, stream, or data file with the encoded payload is sometimes called the "package", "stego file", or "covert message". The proportion of bytes, samples, or other signal elements modified to encode the payload is called the "encoding density" and is typically expressed as a number between 0 and 1.
In a set of files, the files that are considered likely to contain a payload are "suspects". A "suspect" identified through some type of statistical analysis can be referred to as a "candidate".
Detecting physical steganography requires careful physical examination, including the use of magnification, developer chemicals and ultraviolet light. It is a time-consuming process with obvious resource implications, even in countries that employ many people to spy on their fellow nationals. However, it is feasible to screen mail of certain suspected individuals or institutions, such as prisons or prisoner-of-war (POW) camps.
During World War II, prisoner of war camps gave prisoners specially-treated paper that would reveal invisible ink. An article in the 24 June 1948 issue of "Paper Trade Journal" by the Technical Director of the United States Government Printing Office had Morris S. Kantrowitz describe in general terms the development of this paper. Three prototype papers ("Sensicoat", "Anilith", and "Coatalith") were used to manufacture postcards and stationery provided to German prisoners of war in the US and Canada. If POWs tried to write a hidden message, the special paper rendered it visible. The US granted at least two patents related to the technology, one to Kantrowitz, , "Water-Detecting paper and Water-Detecting Coating Composition Therefor," patented 18 July 1950, and an earlier one, "Moisture-Sensitive Paper and the Manufacture Thereof," , patented 20 July 1948. A similar strategy issues prisoners with writing paper ruled with a water-soluble ink that runs in contact with water-based invisible ink.
In computing, steganographically encoded package detection is called steganalysis. The simplest method to detect modified files, however, is to compare them to known originals. For example, to detect information being moved through the graphics on a website, an analyst can maintain known clean copies of the materials and then compare them against the current contents of the site. The differences, if the carrier is the same, comprise the payload. In general, using extremely high compression rates makes steganography difficult but not impossible. Compression errors provide a hiding place for data, but high compression reduces the amount of data available to hold the payload, raising the encoding density, which facilitates easier detection (in extreme cases, even by casual observation).
There are a variety of basic tests that can be done to identify whether or not a secret message exists. This process is not concerned with the extraction of the message, which is a different process and a separate step. The most basic approaches of steganalysis are visual or aural attacks, structural attacks, and statistical attacks. These approaches attempt to detect the steganographic algorithms that were used. These algorithms range from unsophisticated to very sophisticated, with early algorithms being much easier to detect due to statistical anomalies that were present. The size of the message that is being hidden is a factor in how difficult it is to detect. The overall size of the cover object also plays a factor as well. If the cover object is small and the message is large, this can distort the statistics and make it easier to detect. A larger cover object with a small message decreases the statistics and gives it a better chance of going unnoticed.
Steganalysis that targets a particular algorithm has much better success as it is able to key in on the anomalies that are left behind. This is because the analysis can perform a targeted search to discover known tendencies since it is aware of the behaviors that it commonly exhibits. When analyzing an image the least significant bits of many images are actually not random. The camera sensor, especially lower end sensors are not the best quality and can introduce some random bits. This can also be affected by the file compression done on the image. Secret messages can be introduced into the least significant bits in an image and then hidden. A steganography tool can be used to camouflage the secret message in the least significant bits but it can introduce a random area that is too perfect. This area of perfect randomization stands out and can be detected by comparing the least significant bits to the next-to-least significant bits on image that hasn't been compressed.
Generally though, there are many techniques known to be able to hide messages in data using steganographic techniques. None are, by definition, obvious when users employ standard applications, but some can be detected by specialist tools. Others, however, are resistant to detection - or rather it is not possible to reliably distinguish data containing a hidden message from data containing just noise - even when the most sophisticated analysis is performed. Steganography is being used to conceal and deliver more effective cyber attacks, referred to as "Stegware". The term Stegware was first introduced in 2017 to describe any malicious operation involving steganography as a vehicle to conceal an attack. Detection of steganography is challenging, and because of that, not an adequate defence. Therefore, the only way of defeating the threat is to transform data in a way that destroys any hidden messages, a process called Content Threat Removal.
Some modern computer printers use steganography, including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox brand color laser printers. The printers add tiny yellow dots to each page. The barely-visible dots contain encoded printer serial numbers and date and time stamps.
The larger the cover message (in binary data, the number of bits) relative to the hidden message, the easier it is to hide the hidden message (as an analogy, the larger the "haystack", the easier it is to hide a "needle"). So digital pictures, which contain much data, are sometimes used to hide messages on the Internet and on other digital communication media. It is not clear how common this practice actually is.
For example, a 24-bit bitmap uses 8 bits to represent each of the three color values (red, green, and blue) of each pixel. The blue alone has 28 different levels of blue intensity. The difference between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye. Therefore, the least significant bit can be used more or less undetectably for something else other than color information. If that is repeated for the green and the red elements of each pixel as well, it is possible to encode one letter of ASCII text for every three pixels.
Stated somewhat more formally, the objective for making steganographic encoding difficult to detect is to ensure that the changes to the carrier (the original signal) because of the injection of the payload (the signal to covertly embed) are visually (and ideally, statistically) negligible. The changes are indistinguishable from the noise floor of the carrier. All media can be a carrier, but media with a large amount of redundant or compressible information is better suited.
From an information theoretical point of view, that means that the channel must have more capacity than the "surface" signal requires. There must be redundancy. For a digital image, it may be noise from the imaging element; for digital audio, it may be noise from recording techniques or amplification equipment. In general, electronics that digitize an analog signal suffer from several noise sources, such as thermal noise, flicker noise, and shot noise. The noise provides enough variation in the captured digital information that it can be exploited as a noise cover for hidden data. In addition, lossy compression schemes (such as JPEG) always introduce some error to the decompressed data, and it is possible to exploit that for steganographic use, as well.
Although steganography and digital watermarking seem similar, they are not. In steganography, the hidden message should remain intact until it reaches its destination. Steganography can be used for digital watermarking in which a message (being simply an identifier) is hidden in an image so that its source can be tracked or verified (for example, Coded Anti-Piracy) or even just to identify an image (as in the EURion constellation). In such a case, the technique of hiding the message (here, the watermark) must be robust to prevent tampering. However, digital watermarking sometimes requires a brittle watermark, which can be modified easily, to check whether the image has been tampered with. That is the key difference between steganography and digital watermarking.
In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleged that the Russian foreign intelligence service uses customized steganography software for embedding encrypted text messages inside image files for certain communications with "illegal agents" (agents without diplomatic cover) stationed abroad.
There are distributed steganography methods, including methodologies that distribute the payload through multiple carrier files in diverse locations to make detection more difficult. For example, by cryptographer William Easttom (Chuck Easttom).
The puzzles that are presented by Cicada 3301 incorporate steganography with cryptography and other solving techniques since 2012. As time goes on, more instigates that include steganography have been present in alternate reality games.
The communications of The Mayday Mystery incorporate steganography and other solving techniques since 1981. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28733 |
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is defined as (approximately ). It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of second. According to special relativity, is the upper limit for the speed at which conventional matter and information can travel. Though this speed is most commonly associated with light, it is also the speed at which all massless particles and field perturbations travel in vacuum, including electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves. Such particles and waves travel at regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial reference frame of the observer. Particles with nonzero rest mass can approach , but can never actually reach it. In the special and general theories of relativity, interrelates space and time, and also appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence .
The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than ; similarly, the speed of electromagnetic waves in wire cables is slower than . The ratio between and the speed at which light travels in a material is called the refractive index of the material (). For example, for visible light, the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at ; the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about , which is about slower than .
For many practical purposes, light and other electromagnetic waves will appear to propagate instantaneously, but for long distances and very sensitive measurements, their finite speed has noticeable effects. In communicating with distant space probes, it can take minutes to hours for a message to get from Earth to the spacecraft, or vice versa. The light seen from stars left them many years ago, allowing the study of the history of the universe by looking at distant objects. The finite speed of light also limits the data transfer between the CPU and memory chips in computers. The speed of light can be used with time of flight measurements to measure large distances to high precision.
Ole Rømer first demonstrated in 1676 that light travels at a finite speed (as opposed to instantaneously) by studying the apparent motion of Jupiter's moon Io. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed appearing in his theory of electromagnetism. In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. He explored the consequences of that postulate by deriving the theory of relativity and in doing so showed that the parameter had relevance outside of the context of light and electromagnetism.
After centuries of increasingly precise measurements, in 1975 the speed of light was known to be with a measurement uncertainty of 4parts per billion. In 1983, the metre was redefined in the International System of Units (SI) as the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1/ of a second.
The speed of light in vacuum is usually denoted by a lowercase , for "constant" or the Latin (meaning "swiftness, celerity"). In 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch had used for a different constant later shown to equal times the speed of light in vacuum. Historically, the symbol "V" was used as an alternative symbol for the speed of light, introduced by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. In 1894, Paul Drude redefined with its modern meaning. Einstein used "V" in his original German-language papers on special relativity in 1905, but in 1907 he switched to , which by then had become the standard symbol for the speed of light.
Sometimes is used for the speed of waves in "any" material medium, and 0 for the speed of light in vacuum. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28736 |
Synchronization
Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or "in time". Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronous or "in sync"—and those that are not are "asynchronous".
Today, time synchronization can occur between systems around the world through satellite navigation signals.
Time-keeping and synchronization of clocks has been a critical problem in long-distance ocean navigation. Before radio navigation and satellite-based navigation, navigators required accurate time in conjunction with astronomical observations to determine how far east or west their vessel traveled. The invention of an accurate marine chronometer revolutionized marine navigation. By the end of the 19th century, important ports provided time signals in the form of a signal gun, flag, or dropping time ball so that mariners could check their chronometers for error.
Synchronization was important in the operation of 19th century railways, these being the first major means of transport fast enough for differences in local time between nearby towns to be noticeable. Each line handled the problem by synchronizing all its stations to headquarters as a standard railroad time. In some territories, companies shared a single railroad track and needed to avoid collisions. The need for strict timekeeping led the companies to settle on one standard, and civil authorities eventually abandoned local mean solar time in favor of that standard.
In electrical engineering terms, for digital logic and data transfer, a synchronous circuit requires a clock signal. However, the use of the word "clock" in this sense is different from the typical sense of a clock as a device that keeps track of time-of-day; the clock signal simply signals the start and/or end of some time period, often very minute (measured in microseconds or nanoseconds), that has an arbitrary relationship to sidereal, solar, or lunar time, or to any other system of measurement of the passage of minutes, hours, and days.
In a different sense, electronic systems are sometimes synchronized to make events at points far apart appear simultaneous or near-simultaneous from a certain perspective. (Albert Einstein proved in 1905 in his first relativity paper that there actually are no such things as absolutely simultaneous events.) Timekeeping technologies such as the GPS satellites and Network Time Protocol (NTP) provide real-time access to a close approximation to the UTC timescale and are used for many terrestrial synchronization applications of this kind.
Synchronization is an important concept in the following fields:
Synchronization of multiple interacting dynamical systems can occur when the systems are autonomous oscillators. For instance, integrate-and-fire oscillators with either two-way (symmetric) or one-way coupling can synchronize when the strength of the coupling (in frequency units) is greater than the differences among the free-running natural oscillator frequencies. Poincare phase oscillators are model systems that can interact and partially synchronize within random or regular networks. In the case of global synchronization of phase oscillators, an abrupt transition from unsynchronized to full synchronization takes place when the coupling strength exceeds a critical threshold. This is known as the Kuramoto model phase transition. Synchronization is an emergent property that occurs in a broad range of dynamical systems, including neural signaling, the beating of the heart and the synchronization of fire-fly light waves.
Synchronization of movement is defined as similar movements between two or more people who are temporally aligned. This is different to mimicry, as these movements occur after a short delay. Muscular bonding is the idea that moving in time evokes particular emotions. This sparked some of the first research into movement synchronization and its effects on human emotion.
In groups, synchronization of movement has been shown to increase conformity, cooperation and trust. Military step has long been used for these purposes but more research on group synchronization is needed to determine its effects on the group as a whole and on individuals within a group. In dyads, groups of two people, synchronization has been demonstrated to increase affiliation, self-esteem, compassion and altruistic behaviour and increase rapport. During arguments, synchrony between the arguing pair has been noted to decrease, however it is not clear whether this is due to the change in emotion or other factors. There is evidence to show that movement synchronization requires other people to cause its beneficial effects, as the effect on affiliation does not occur when one of the dyad is synchronizing their movements to something outside the dyad. This is known as interpersonal synchrony.
There has been dispute regarding the true effect of synchrony in these studies. Research in this area detailing the positive effects of synchrony, have attributed this to synchrony alone; however, many of the experiments incorporate a shared intention to achieve synchrony. Indeed, the Reinforcement of Cooperation Model suggests that perception of synchrony leads to reinforcement that cooperation is occurring, which leads to the pro-social effects of synchrony. More research is required to separate the effect of intentionality from the beneficial effect of synchrony.
Some systems may be only approximately synchronized, or plesiochronous. Some applications require that relative offsets between events be determined. For others, only the order of the event is important. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28738 |
Sulawesi
Sulawesi , also known as Celebes (), is one of the four Greater Sunda Islands. It is governed by Indonesia. The world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Within Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger populations.
The landmass of Sulawesi includes four peninsulas: the northern Minahasa Peninsula; the East Peninsula; the South Peninsula; and the Southeast Peninsula. Three gulfs separate these peninsulas: the Gulf of Tomini between the northern Minahasa and East peninsulas; the Tolo Gulf between the East and Southeast peninsulas; and the Bone Gulf between the South and Southeast peninsulas. The Strait of Makassar runs along the western side of the island and separates the island from Borneo.
The name "Sulawesi" possibly comes from the words "sula" ("island") and "besi" ("iron") and may refer to the historical export of iron from the rich Lake Matano iron deposits. The name came into common use in English following Indonesian independence.
The name "Celebes" was originally given to the island by Portuguese explorers. While its direct translation is unclear, it may be considered a Portuguese rendering of the native name "Sulawesi".
Sulawesi is the world's eleventh-largest island, covering an area of . The central part of the island is ruggedly mountainous, such that the island's peninsulas have traditionally been remote from each other, with better connections by sea than by road. The three bays that divide Sulawesi's peninsulas are, from north to south, the Tomini, the Tolo and the Boni. These separate the Minahassa or Northern Peninsula, the East Peninsula, the Southeast Peninsula and the South Peninsula.
The Strait of Makassar runs along the western side of the island. The island is surrounded by Borneo to the west, by the Philippines to the north, by Maluku to the east, and by Flores and Timor to the south.
The Selayar Islands make up a peninsula stretching southwards from Southwest Sulawesi into the Flores Sea are administratively part of Sulawesi. The Sangihe Islands and Talaud Islands stretch northward from the northeastern tip of Sulawesi, while Buton Island and its neighbours lie off its southeast peninsula, the Togian Islands are in the Gulf of Tomini, and Peleng Island and Banggai Islands form a cluster between Sulawesi and Maluku. All the above-mentioned islands, and many smaller ones are administratively part of Sulawesi's six provinces.
The island slopes up from the shores of the deep seas surrounding the island to a high, mostly non-volcanic, mountainous interior. Active volcanoes are found in the northern Minahassa Peninsula, stretching north to the Sangihe Islands. The northern peninsula contains several active volcanoes such as Mount Lokon, Mount Awu, Soputan and Karangetang.
According to plate reconstructions, the island is believed to have been formed by the collision of terranes from the Asian Plate (forming the west and southwest) and from the Australian Plate (forming the southeast and Banggai), with island arcs previously in the Pacific (forming the north and east peninsulas). Because of its several tectonic origins, various faults scar the land and as a result the island is prone to earthquakes.
Sulawesi, in contrast to most of the other islands in the biogeographical region of Wallacea, is not truly oceanic, but a composite island at the centre of the Asia-Australia collision zone. Parts of the island were formerly attached to either the Asian or Australian continental margin and became separated from these areas by vicariant processes. In the west, the opening of the Makassar Strait separated West Sulawesi from Sundaland in the Eocene c. 45 Mya. In the east, the traditional view of collisions of multiple micro-continental fragments sliced from New Guinea with an active volcanic margin in West Sulawesi at different times since the Early Miocene c. 20 Mya has recently been replaced by the hypothesis that extensional fragmentation has followed a single Miocene collision of West Sulawesi with the Sula Spur, the western end of an ancient folded belt of Variscan origin in the Late Paleozoic.
Before October 2014, the settlement of South Sulawesi by modern humans had been dated to c. 30,000 BC on the basis of radiocarbon dates obtained from rock shelters in Maros. No earlier evidence of human occupation had at that point been found, but the island almost certainly formed part of the land bridge used for the settlement of Australia and New Guinea by at least 40,000 BC. There is no evidence of "Homo erectus" having reached Sulawesi; crude stone tools first discovered in 1947 on the right bank of the Walennae River at Berru, Indonesia, which were thought to date to the Pleistocene on the basis of their association with vertebrate fossils, are now thought to date to perhaps 50,000 BC.
Following Peter Bellwood's model of a southward migration of Austronesian-speaking farmers (AN), radiocarbon dates from caves in Maros suggest a date in the mid-second millennium BC for the arrival of a group from east Borneo speaking a Proto-South Sulawesi language (PSS). Initial settlement was probably around the mouth of the Sa'dan river, on the northwest coast of the peninsula, although the south coast has also been suggested.
Subsequent migrations across the mountainous landscape resulted in the geographical isolation of PSS speakers and the evolution of their languages into the eight families of the South Sulawesi language group. If each group can be said to have a homeland, that of the Bugis – today the most numerous group – was around lakes Témpé and Sidénréng in the Walennaé depression. Here for some 2,000 years lived the linguistic group that would become the modern Bugis; the archaic name of this group (which is preserved in other local languages) was Ugiq. Despite the fact that today they are closely linked with the Makasar, the closest linguistic neighbours of the Bugis are the Toraja.
Pre-1200 Bugis society was most likely organised into chiefdoms. Some anthropologists have speculated these chiefdoms would have warred and, in times of peace, exchanged women with each other. Further, they have speculated that personal security would have been negligible and head-hunting an established cultural practice. The political economy would have been a mixture of hunting and gathering and swidden or shifting agriculture. Speculative planting of wet rice may have taken place along the margins of the lakes and rivers.
In Central Sulawesi, there are over 400 granite megaliths, which various archaeological studies have dated to be from 3000 BC to AD 1300. They vary in size from a few centimetres to around . The original purpose of the megaliths is unknown. About 30 of the megaliths represent human forms. Other megaliths are in form of large pots ("Kalamba") and stone plates ("Tutu'na").
In October 2014, it was announced that cave paintings in Maros had been dated as being about 40,000 years old. One of a hand was 39,900 years old, which made it "the oldest hand stencil in the world". Dr Maxime Aubert, of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, said that the minimum age for the outli in Pettakere Cave in Maros, and added: "Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one."
In 11 December 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maxime Aubert announced the discovery of the oldest hunting scenes in prehistoric art in the world which is more than 44,000 years old from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4. Archaeologists determined the age of the depiction of hunting a pig and buffalo thanks to the calcite ‘popcorn’, different isotope levels of radioactive uranium and thorium. In March 2020, two small stone 'plaquettes' were found in the Leang Bulu Bettue cave, dated to a time between 26,000 and 14,000 years ago.
A bronze Amaravathi statue was discovered at Sikendeng, South Sulawesi near Karama river in 1921 which was dated to 2nd-7th century AD by Bosch (1933) In 1975, smal locally made Buddhist statues from 10th-11th century were also discovered in Bontoharu, on the island of Selayar, South Sulawesi.
Starting in the 13th century, access to prestige trade goods and to sources of iron started to alter long-standing cultural patterns and to permit ambitious individuals to build larger political units. It is not known why these two ingredients appeared together; one was perhaps the product of the other.
In 1367, several identified polities located on the island were mentioned in the Javanese manuscript Nagarakretagama dated from the Majapahit period. Canto 14 mentioned polities including Gowa, Makassar, Luwu and Banggai. It seems that by the 14th century, polities in the island were connected in an archipelagic maritime trading network, centered in the Majapahit port in East Java. By 1400, a number of nascent agricultural principalities had arisen in the western Cenrana valley, as well as on the south coast and on the west coast near modern Parepare.
The first Europeans to visit the island (which they believed to be an archipelago due to its contorted shape) were the Portuguese sailors Simão de Abreu, in 1523, and Gomes de Sequeira (among others) in 1525, sent from the Moluccas in search of gold, which the islands had the reputation of producing. A Portuguese base was installed in Makassar in the first decades of the 16th century, lasting until 1665, when it was taken by the Dutch. The Dutch had arrived in Sulawesi in 1605 and were quickly followed by the English, who established a factory in Makassar. From 1660, the Dutch were at war with Gowa, the major Makassar west coast power. In 1669, Admiral Speelman forced the ruler, Sultan Hasanuddin, to sign the Treaty of Bongaya, which handed control of trade to the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch were aided in their conquest by the Bugis warlord Arung Palakka, ruler of the Bugis kingdom of Bone. The Dutch built a fort at Ujung Pandang, while Arung Palakka became the regional overlord and Bone the dominant kingdom. Political and cultural development seems to have slowed as a result of the status quo.
In 1905 the entire island became part of the Dutch state colony of the Netherlands East Indies until Japanese occupation in the Second World War. During the Indonesian National Revolution, the Dutch Captain 'Turk' Westerling led campaigns in which hundreds, maybe thousands died during the South Sulawesi Campaign. Following the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949, Sulawesi became part of the federal United States of Indonesia, which in 1950 became absorbed into the unitary Republic of Indonesia.
The Portuguese were rumoured to have a fort in Parigi in 1555. The Kaili were an important group based in the Palu valley and related to the Toraja. Scholars relate that their control swayed under Ternate and Makassar, but this might have been a decision by the Dutch to give their vassals a chance to govern a difficult group. Padbruge commented that in the 1700s Kaili numbers were significant and a highly militant society. In the 1850s a war erupted between the Kaili groups, including the Banawa, in which the Dutch decided to intervene. A complex conflict also involving the Sulu Island pirates and probably Wyndham (a British merchant who commented on being involved in arms dealing to the area in this period and causing a row).
In the late 19th century the Sarasins journeyed through the Palu valley as part of a major initiative to bring the Kaili under Dutch rule. Some very surprising and interesting photographs were taken of shamans called Tadulako. Further Christian religious missions entered the area to make one of the most detailed ethnographic studies in the early 20th century. A Swede by the name of Walter Kaudern later studied much of the literature and produced a synthesis. Erskine Downs in the 1950s produced a summary of Kruyts and Andrianis work: "The religion of the Bare'e-Speaking Toradja of Central Celebes," which is invaluable for English-speaking researchers. One of the most recent publications is "When the bones are left," a study of the material culture of central Sulawesi, offering extensive analysis. Also worthy of study are the brilliant works of Monnig Atkinson on the Wana shamans who live in the Mori area.
The 2000 census population of the provinces of Sulawesi was 14,946,488, about 7.25% of Indonesia's total population. By the 2010 Census the total had reached 17,371,782, and the latest official estimate (for July 2019) is 19,573,800. The largest city is Makassar.
Islam is the majority religion in Sulawesi. The conversion of the lowlands of the south western peninsula (South Sulawesi) to Islam occurred in the early 17th century. The kingdom of Luwu in the Gulf of Bone was the first to accept Islam in February 1605; the Makassar kingdom of Goa-Talloq, centred on the modern-day city of Makassar, followed suit in September. However, the Gorontalo and the Mongondow peoples of the northern peninsula largely converted to Islam only in the 19th century. Most Muslims are Sunnis.
Christians form a substantial minority on the island. According to the demographer Toby Alice Volkman, 17% of Sulawesi's population is Protestant and less than 2% is Roman Catholic. Christians are concentrated on the tip of the northern peninsula around the city of Manado, which is inhabited by the Minahasa, a predominantly Protestant people, and the northernmost Sangir and Talaud Islands. The Toraja people of Tana Toraja in Central Sulawesi have largely converted to Christianity since Indonesia's independence. There are also substantial numbers of Christians around Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi, among the Pamona speaking peoples of Central Sulawesi, and near Mamasa.
Though most people identify themselves as Muslims or Christians, they often subscribe to local beliefs and deities as well. It is not uncommon for both groups to make offerings to local gods, goddesses, and spirits.
Smaller communities of Buddhists and Hindus are also found on Sulawesi, usually among the Chinese, Balinese and Indian communities.
The island was administered as one province between 1945 and 1960. Now, it is subdivided into six provinces: Gorontalo, West Sulawesi, South Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi and North Sulawesi. West Sulawesi is the newest province, established in 2004. The largest cities on the island are the provincial capitals of Makassar, Manado, Palu, Kendari and Gorontalo.
Sulawesi is part of Wallacea, meaning that it has a mix of both Indomalayan and Australasian species that reached the island by crossing deep-water oceanic barriers. The flora includes one native eucalypt, "E. deglupta". There are 8 national parks on the island, of which 4 are mostly marine. The parks with the largest terrestrial area are Bogani Nani Wartabone with 2,871 km2 and Lore Lindu National Park with 2,290 km2. Bunaken National Park, which protects a rich coral ecosystem, has been proposed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Early in the Pleistocene, Sulawesi had a dwarf elephant and a dwarf form of "Stegodon", (an elephant relative, "S. sompoensis"); later both were replaced by larger forms. A giant suid, "Celebochoerus", was also formerly present. It is thought that many of the migrants to Sulawesi arrived via the Philippines, while Sulawesi in turn served as a way station for migrants to Flores. A Pleistocene faunal turnover is recognised, with the competitive displacement of several indigenous tarsiers by more recently arriving ones and by "Celebochoerus" by other medium-sized herbivores like the babirusa, anoa and Celebes warty pig.
There are 127 known extant native mammalian species in Sulawesi. A large percentage, 62% (79 species) are endemic, meaning that they are found nowhere else in the world. The largest of these are the two species of anoa or dwarf buffalo. Other artiodactyl species inhabiting Sulawesi are the warty pig and the babirusas, which are aberrant pigs. The only native carnivoran is the Sulawesi palm civet (Asian palm and Malayan civets have been introduced). Primates present include a number of nocturnal tarsiers ("T. fuscus", Dian's, Gursky's, Jatna's, Wallace's, the Lariang and pygmy tarsiers) as well as diurnal macaques (Heck's, the booted, crested black, Gorontalo, moor, and Tonkean macaques). While most of Sulawesi's mammals are placental and have Asian relatives, several species of cuscus, arboreal marsupials of Australasian origin, are also present ("Ailurops ursinus" and "Strigocuscus celebensis", which are diurnal and nocturnal, respectively).
Sulawesi is home to a large number of endemic rodent genera. Murid rodent genera endemic to Sulawesi and immediately adjacent islands (such as the Togian Islands, Buton Island, and Muna Island) are "Bunomys", "Echiothrix", "Margaretamys", "Taeromys" and "Tateomys" as well as the single-species genera "Eropeplus", "Hyorhinomys", "Melasmothrix", "Paucidentomys", "Paruromys", "Sommeromys" and the semiaquatic "Waiomys". All nine sciurids are from three endemic genera, "Hyosciurus", "Prosciurillus" and "Rubrisciurus".
While over 20 bat species are present on Sulawesi, only a portion of these are endemic: "Rhinolophus tatar", "Scotophilus celebensis" and the megabats "Acerodon celebensis", "Boneia bidens", "Dobsonia exoleta", "Harpyionycteris celebensis", "Neopteryx frosti", "Rousettus celebensis" and "Styloctenium wallacei".
Several endemic shrews, the Sulawesi shrew, Sulawesi tiny shrew and the Sulawesi white-handed shrew, are found on the island.
Sulawesi has no gliding mammals, being situated between Borneo with its colugos and flying squirrels, and Halmahera with its sugar gliders.
By contrast, Sulawesian bird species tend to be found on other nearby islands as well, such as Borneo; 31% of Sulawesi's birds are found nowhere else. One endemic (also found on small neighboring islands) is the largely ground-dwelling, chicken-sized maleo, a megapode which sometimes uses hot sand close to the island's volcanic vents to incubate its eggs. An international partnership of conservationists, donors, and local people have formed the Alliance for Tompotika Conservation, in an effort to raise awareness and protect the nesting grounds of these birds on the central-eastern arm of the island. Other endemic birds include the flightless snoring rail, the fiery-browed starling, the Sulawesi masked owl, the Sulawesi myna, the satanic nightjar and the grosbeak starling. There are around 350 known bird species in Sulawesi.
The larger reptiles of Sulawesi are not endemic and include reticulated and Burmese pythons, the Pacific ground boa, king cobras, water monitors, sailfin lizards, saltwater crocodiles and green sea turtles. An extinct giant tortoise, "Megalochelys atlas", was formerly present, but disappeared by 840,000 years ago, possibly because of the arrival of humans. Similarly, komodo dragons or similar lizards appear to have inhabited the island, being among its apex predators. The smaller snakes of Sulawesi include nonendemic forms such as the gliding species "Chrysopelea paradisi" and endemic forms such as "Calamaria boesemani", "Calamaria muelleri", "Calamaria nuchalis", "Cyclotyphlops", "Enhydris matannensis", "Ptyas dipsas", "Rabdion grovesi", "Tropidolaemus laticinctus" and "Typhlops conradi". Similarly, the smaller lizards of Sulawesi include nonendemic species such as "Bronchocela jubata", "Dibamus novaeguineae" and "Gekko smithii", as well as endemic species such as "Lipinia infralineolata" and "Gekko iskandari".
The amphibians of Sulawesi include the endemic frogs "Hylarana celebensis", "H. macrops", "H. mocquardi", "Ingerophrynus celebensis", "Limnonectes arathooni", "L. larvaepartus", "L. microtympanum", "Occidozyga celebensis", "O. semipalmata" and "O. tompotika" as well as the endemic "flying frogs" "Rhacophorus edentulus" and "R. georgii".
Sulawesi is home to more than 70 freshwater fish species, including more than 55 endemics. Among these are the genus "Nomorhamphus", a species flock of viviparous halfbeaks containing 12 species that only are found on Sulawesi (others are from the Philippines). In addition to "Nomorhamphus", the majority of Sulawesi's freshwater fish species are ricefishes, gobies ("Glossogobius" and "Mugilogobius") and Telmatherinid sail-fin silversides. The last family is almost entirely restricted to Sulawesi, especially the Malili Lake system, consisting of Matano and Towuti, and the small Lontoa (Wawantoa), Mahalona and Masapi. Another unusual endemic is "Lagusia micracanthus" from rivers in South Sulawesi, which is the sole member of its genus and among the smallest grunters. The gudgeon "Bostrychus microphthalmus" from the Maros Karst is the only described species of cave-adapted fish from Sulawesi, but an apparently undescribed species from the same region and genus also exists.
Many species of "Caridina" freshwater shrimp and parathelphusid freshwater crabs ("Migmathelphusa", "Nautilothelphusa", "Parathelphusa", "Sundathelphusa" and "Syntripsa") are endemic to Sulawesi. Several of these species have become very popular in the aquarium hobby, and since most are restricted to a single lake system, they are potentially vulnerable to habitat loss and overexploitation. There are also several endemic cave-adapted shrimp and crabs, especially in the Maros Karst. This includes "Cancrocaeca xenomorpha", which has been called the "most highly cave-adapted species of crab known in the world".
The genus "Tylomelania" of freshwater snails is also endemic to Sulawesi, with the majority of the species restricted to Lake Poso and the Malili Lake system.
The Indonesian coelacanth and the mimic octopus are present in the waters off Sulawesi's coast.
Sulawesi island was recently the subject of an Ecoregional Conservation Assessment, coordinated by The Nature Conservancy. Detailed reports about the vegetation of the island are available. The assessment produced a detailed and annotated list of 'conservation portfolio' sites. This information was widely distributed to local government agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Detailed conservation priorities have also been outlined in a recent publication.
The lowland forests on the island have mostly been removed. Because of the relative geological youth of the island and its dramatic and sharp topography, the lowland areas are naturally limited in their extent. The past decade has seen dramatic conversion of this rare and endangered habitat. The island also possesses one of the largest outcrops of serpentine soil in the world, which support an unusual and large community of specialized plant species. Overall, the flora and fauna of this unique center of global biodiversity is very poorly documented and understood and remains critically threatened.
The islands of Pepaya, Mas and Raja islands, located in Sumalata Village - North Gorontalo Regency (about 30 km from Saronde Island), have been named a nature reserve since the Dutch colonial time in 1936. Four of the only seven species of sea turtles can be found in the islands, the world's best turtle habitat. They include penyu hijau ("Chelonia midas"), penyu sisik ("Eretmochelys imbricata"), penyu tempayan ("Caretta caretta") and penyu belimbing ("Dermochelys coriacea"). In 2011, the habitat was threatened by human activities such as illegal poaching and fish bombing activities; furthermore, many coral reefs, which represent a source of food for turtles, have been damaged.
The largest environmental issue in Sulawesi is deforestation. In 2007, scientists found that 80 percent of Sulawesi's forest had been lost or degraded, especially centered in the lowlands and the mangroves. Forests have been felled for logging and large agricultural projects. Loss of forest has resulted in many of Sulawesi's endemic species becoming endangered. In addition, 99 percent of Sulawesi's wetlands have been lost or damaged.
Other environmental threats included bushmeat hunting and mining.
The island of Sulawesi has six national parks and nineteen nature reserves. In addition, Sulawesi has three marine protected areas. Many of Sulawesi's parks are threatened by logging, mining, and deforestation for agriculture. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28740 |
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the regions that are geographically south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent and north-west of Australia. Southeast Asia is bordered to the north by East Asia, to the west by South Asia and the Bay of Bengal, to the east by Oceania and the Pacific Ocean, and to the south by Australia and the Indian Ocean. The region is the only part of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere, although the majority of it is in the Northern Hemisphere. In contemporary definition, Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions:
The region lies near the intersection of geological plates, with both heavy seismic and volcanic activities. The Sunda Plate is the main plate of the region, featuring almost all Southeast Asian countries except Myanmar, northern Thailand, northern Laos, northern Vietnam, and northern Luzon of the Philippines. The mountain ranges in Myanmar, Thailand, and peninsular Malaysia are part of the Alpide belt, while the islands of the Philippines are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Both seismic belts meet in Indonesia, causing the region to have relatively high occurrences of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Southeast Asia covers about 4.5 million km2 (1.7 million mi2), which is 10.5% of Asia or 3% of earth's total land area. Its total population is more than floor(/1e6) million, about 8.5% of the world's population. It is the third most populous geographical region in the world after South Asia and East Asia. The region is culturally and ethnically diverse, with hundreds of languages spoken by different ethnic groups. Ten countries in the region are members of ASEAN, a regional organization established for economic, political, military, educational and cultural integration amongst its members.
The region, together with part of South Asia, was well known by Europeans as the East Indies or simply the Indies until the 20th century. Chinese sources referred the region as "南洋" ("Nanyang"), which literally means the "Southern Ocean." The mainland section of Southeast Asia was referred to as Indochina by European geographers due to its location between China and the Indian subcontinent and its having cultural influences from both neighboring regions. In the 20th century, however, the term became more restricted to territories of the former French Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). The maritime section of Southeast Asia is also known as the Malay Archipelago, a term derived from the European concept of a Malay race. Another term for Maritime Southeast Asia is "Insulindia" (Indian Islands), used to describe the region between Indochina and Australasia.
The term "Southeast Asia" was first used in 1839 by American pastor Howard Malcolm in his book "Travels in South-Eastern Asia". Malcolm only included the Mainland section and excluded the Maritime section in his definition of Southeast Asia. The term was officially used in the midst of World War II by the Allies, through the formation of South East Asia Command (SEAC) in 1943. SEAC popularised the use of the term "Southeast Asia," although what constituted Southeast Asia was not fixed; for example, SEAC excluded the Philippines and a large part of Indonesia while including Ceylon. However, by the late 1970s, a roughly standard usage of the term "Southeast Asia" and the territories it encompasses had emerged. Although from a cultural or linguistic perspective the definitions of "Southeast Asia" may vary, the most common definitions nowadays include the area represented by the countries (sovereign states and dependent territories) listed below.
Ten of the eleven states of Southeast Asia are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while East Timor is an observer state. Papua New Guinea has stated that it might join ASEAN, and is currently an observer. Sovereignty issues exist over some territories in the South China Sea.
Southeast Asia is geographically divided into two subregions, namely Mainland Southeast Asia (or Indochina) and Maritime Southeast Asia (or the similarly defined Malay Archipelago) ().
Mainland Southeast Asia includes:
Maritime Southeast Asia includes:
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India are geographically considered part of Maritime Southeast Asia. Eastern Bangladesh and Northeast India have strong cultural ties with Southeast Asia and are sometimes considered both South Asian and Southeast Asian. Sri Lanka has on some occasions been considered a part of Southeast Asia because of its cultural ties to mainland Southeast Asia. The rest of the island of New Guinea which is not part of Indonesia, namely, Papua New Guinea, is sometimes included, and so are Palau, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which were all part of the Spanish East Indies with strong cultural and linguistic ties to the region, specifically, the Philippines.
The eastern half of Indonesia and East Timor (east of the Wallace Line) are considered to be biogeographically part of Oceania (Wallacea) due to their distinctive faunal features. New Guinea and its surrounding islands are geologically considered as a part of the Australian continent, connected via the Sahul Shelf.
The region was already inhabited by "Homo erectus" from 1,000,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene age. "Homo sapiens", the ancestors of modern Australo-Melanesians, reached the region by around 45,000 years ago, having moved eastwards from the Indian subcontinent. Rock art (parietal art) dating from 40,000 years ago (which is currently the world's oldest) has been discovered in the caves of Borneo. "Homo floresiensis" also lived in the area up until 12,000 years ago, when they became extinct.
In the late Neolithic, the Austronesian peoples, who form the majority of the modern population in Brunei, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, and the Philippines, migrated to Southeast Asia from Taiwan in the first seaborne human migration known as the Austronesian Expansion. They arrived in the northern Philippines in 2200 BC and rapidly spread further into the Northern Mariana Islands and Borneo by 1500 BC; Island Melanesia by 1300 BC; and to the rest of Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Vietnam, and Palau by 1000 BC. They often settled along coastal areas, assimilating the preexisting Australo-Melanesian peoples such as Orang Asli of peninsular Malaysia, Negritos of the Philippines, and Papuans of New Guinea.
The Austronesian peoples of Southeast Asia have been seafarers for thousands of years. They spread eastwards to Micronesia and Polynesia, as well as westwards to Madagascar, becoming the ancestors of modern-day Malagasy people, Micronesians, Melanesians, and Polynesians. Passage through the Indian Ocean aided the colonisation of Madagascar, as well as commerce between Western Asia, eastern coast of India and Chinese southern coast. Gold from Sumatra is thought to have reached as far west as Rome. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History about Chryse and Argyre, two legendary islands rich in gold and silver, located in the Indian Ocean. Their vessels, such as the vinta, were capable to sail across ocean. Magellan's voyage records how much more manoeuvrable their vessels were, as compared to the European ships. A slave from the Sulu Sea was believed to have been used in Magellan's voyage as a translator.
Studies presented by HUGO (Human Genome Organization) through genetic studies of the various peoples of Asia, show empirically that there was a single migration event from Africa, whereby the early people travelled along the south coast of Asia, first entered the Malay peninsula 50,000–90,000 years ago. The Orang Asli, in particular the Semang who show Negrito characteristics, are the direct descendants of these earliest settlers of Southeast Asia. These early people diversified and travelled slowly northwards to China, and the populations of Southeast Asia show greater genetic diversity than the younger population of China.
Solheim and others have shown evidence for a "Nusantao" maritime trading network ranging from Vietnam to the rest of the archipelago as early as 5000 BC to 1 AD. The Bronze Age Dong Son culture flourished in Northern Vietnam from about 1000 BC to 1 BC. Its influence spread to other parts Southeast Asia. The region entered the Iron Age era in 500 BC, when iron was forged also in northern Vietnam still under Dong Son, due to its frequent interactions with neighboring China.
Most Southeast Asian people were originally animist, engaged in ancestors, nature, and spirits worship. These belief systems were later supplanted by Hinduism and Buddhism after the region, especially coastal areas, came under contacts with Indian subcontinent during the 1st century. Indian Brahmins and traders brought Hinduism to the region and made contacts with local courts. Local rulers converted to Hinduism or Buddhism and adopted Indian religious traditions to reinforce their legitimacy, elevate ritual status above their fellow chief counterparts and facilitate trade with South Asian states. They periodically invited Indian Brahmins into their realms and began a gradual process of Indianisation in the region. Shaivism was the dominant religious tradition of many southern Indian Hindu kingdoms during the 1st century. It then spread into Southeast Asia via Bay of Bengal, Indochina, then Malay Archipelago, leading to thousands of Shiva temples on the islands of Indonesia as well as Cambodia and Vietnam, co-evolving with Buddhism in the region. Theravada Buddhism entered the region during the 3rd century, via maritime trade routes between the region and Sri Lanka. Buddhism later established a strong presence in Funan region in the 5th century. In present-day mainland Southeast Asia, Theravada is still the dominant branch of Buddhism, practiced by the Thai, Burmese and Cambodian Buddhists. This branch was fused with the Hindu-influenced Khmer culture. Mahayana Buddhism established presence in Maritime Southeast Asia, brought by Chinese monks during their transit in the region en route to Nalanda. It is still the dominant branch of Buddhism practiced by Indonesian and Malaysian Buddhists.
The spread of these two Indian religions confined the adherents of Southeast Asian indigenous beliefs into remote inland areas. Maluku Islands and New Guinea were never Indianised and its native people were predominantly animists until the 15th century when Islam began to spread in those areas. While in Vietnam, Buddhism never managed to develop strong institutional networks due to strong Chinese influence. In present-day Southeast Asia, Vietnam is the only country where its folk religion makes up the plurality. Recently, Vietnamese folk religion is undergoing a revival with the support of the government. Elsewhere, there are ethnic groups in Southeast Asia that resisted conversion and still retain their original animist beliefs, such as the Dayaks in Kalimantan, the Igorots in Luzon, and the Shans in eastern Myanmar.
After the region came under contacts with Indian subcontinent circa 400 BCE, it began a gradual process of Indianisation where Indian ideas such as religions, cultures, architectures and political administrations were brought by traders and religious figures and adopted by local rulers. In turn, Indian Brahmins and monks were invited by local rulers to live in their realms and help transforming local polities to become more Indianised, blending Indian and indigenous traditions. Sanskrit and Pali became the elite language of the region, which effectively made Southeast Asia part of the Indosphere. Most of the region had been Indianised during the first centuries, while the Philippines later Indianised circa 9th century when Kingdom of Tondo was established in Luzon. Vietnam, especially its northern part, was never fully Indianised due to the many periods of Chinese domination it experienced.
The first Indian-influenced polities established in the region were the Pyu city-states that already existed circa 2nd century BCE, located in inland Myanmar. It served as an overland trading hub between India and China. Theravada Buddhism was the predominant religion of these city states, while the presence of other Indian religions such as Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism were also widespread. In the 1st century, the Funan states centered in Mekong Delta were established, encompassed modern-day Cambodia, southern Vietnam, Laos, and eastern Thailand. It became the dominant trading power in mainland Southeast Asia for about five centuries, provided passage for Indian and Chinese goods and assumed authority over the flow of commerce through Southeast Asia. In maritime Southeast Asia, the first recorded Indianised kingdom was Salakanagara, established in western Java circa 2nd century CE. This Hindu kingdom was known by the Greeks as "Argyre" (Land of Silver).
By the 5th century CE, trade networking between East and West was concentrated in the maritime route. Foreign traders were starting to use new routes such as Malacca and Sunda Strait due to the development of maritime Southeast Asia. This change resulted in the decline of Funan, while new maritime powers such as Srivijaya, Tarumanagara, and Medang emerged. Srivijaya especially became the dominant maritime power for more than 5 centuries, controlling both Strait of Malacca and Sunda Strait. This dominance started to decline when Srivijaya were invaded by Chola Empire, a dominant maritime power of Indian subcontinent, in 1025. The invasion reshaped power and trade in the region, resulted in the rise of new regional powers such as the Khmer Empire and Kahuripan. Continued commercial contacts with the Chinese Empire enabled the Cholas to influence the local cultures. Many of the surviving examples of the Hindu cultural influence found today throughout Southeast Asia are the result of the Chola expeditions.
As Srivijaya influence in the region declined, The Hindu Khmer Empire experienced a golden age during the 11th to 13th century CE. The empire's capital Angkor hosts majestic monuments—such as Angkor Wat and Bayon. Satellite imaging has revealed that Angkor, during its peak, was the largest pre-industrial urban centre in the world. The Champa civilisation was located in what is today central Vietnam, and was a highly Indianised Hindu Kingdom. The Vietnamese launched a massive conquest against the Cham people during the 1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa, ransacking and burning Champa, slaughtering thousands of Cham people, and forcibly assimilating them into Vietnamese culture.
During the 13th century CE, the region experienced Mongol invasions, affected areas such as Vietnamese coast, inland Burma and Java. In 1258, 1285 and 1287, the Mongols tried to invade Đại Việt and Champa. The invasions were unsuccessful, yet both Dai Viet and Champa agreed to become tributary states to Yuan dynasty to avoid further conflicts. The Mongols also invaded Pagan Kingdom in Burma from 1277 to 1287, resulted in fragmentation of the Kingdom and rise of smaller Shan States ruled by local chieftains nominally submitted to Yuan dynasty. However, in 1297, a new local power emerged. Myinsaing Kingdom became the real ruler of Central Burma and challenged the Mongol rule. This resulted in the second Mongol invasion of Burma in 1300, which was repulsed by Myinsaing. The Mongols would later in 1303 withdrawn from Burma. In 1292, The Mongols sent envoys to Singhasari Kingdom in Java to ask for submission to Mongol rule. Singhasari rejected the proposal and injured the envoys, enraged the Mongols and made them sent a large invasion fleet to Java. Unbeknownst to them, Singhasari collapsed in 1293 due to a revolt by Kadiri, one of its vassals. When the Mongols arrived in Java, a local prince named Raden Wijaya offered his service to assist the Mongols in punishing Kadiri. After Kadiri was defeated, Wijaya turned on his Mongol allies, ambushed their invasion fleet and forced them to immediately leave Java.
After the departure of the Mongols, Wijaya established the Majapahit Empire in eastern Java in 1293. Majapahit would soon grew into a regional power. Its greatest ruler was Hayam Wuruk, whose reign from 1350 to 1389 marked the empire's peak when other kingdoms in the southern Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, and Bali came under its influence. Various sources such as the Nagarakertagama also mention that its influence spanned over parts of Sulawesi, Maluku, and some areas of western New Guinea and southern Philippines, making it one of the largest empire to ever exist in Southeast Asian history. By the 15th century CE however, Majapahit's influence began to wane due to many war of successions it experienced and the rise of new Islamic states such as Samudera Pasai and Malacca Sultanate around the strategic Strait of Malacca. Majapahit then collapsed around 1500. It was the last major Hindu kingdom and the last regional power in the region before the arrival of the Europeans.
Islam began to make contacts with Southeast Asia in the 8th-century CE, when the Umayyads established trade with the region via sea routes. However its spread into the region happened centuries later. In the 11th century, a turbulent period occurred in the history of Maritime Southeast Asia. The Indian Chola navy crossed the ocean and attacked the Srivijaya kingdom of Sangrama Vijayatungavarman in Kadaram (Kedah); the capital of the powerful maritime kingdom was sacked and the king was taken captive. Along with Kadaram, Pannai in present-day Sumatra and Malaiyur and the Malayan peninsula were attacked too. Soon after that, the king of Kedah Phra Ong Mahawangsa became the first ruler to abandon the traditional Hindu faith, and converted to Islam with the Sultanate of Kedah established in 1136. Samudera Pasai converted to Islam in 1267, the King of Malacca Parameswara married the princess of Pasai, and the son became the first sultan of Malacca. Soon, Malacca became the center of Islamic study and maritime trade, and other rulers followed suit. Indonesian religious leader and Islamic scholar Hamka (1908–1981) wrote in 1961: "The development of Islam in Indonesia and Malaya is intimately related to a Chinese Muslim, Admiral Zheng He."
There are several theories to the Islamisation process in Southeast Asia. Another theory is trade. The expansion of trade among West Asia, India and Southeast Asia helped the spread of the religion as Muslim traders from Southern Yemen (Hadramout) brought Islam to the region with their large volume of trade. Many settled in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. This is evident in the Arab-Indonesian, Arab-Singaporean, and Arab-Malay populations who were at one time very prominent in each of their countries. Finally, the ruling classes embraced Islam and that further aided the permeation of the religion throughout the region. The ruler of the region's most important port, Malacca Sultanate, embraced Islam in the 15th century, heralding a period of accelerated conversion of Islam throughout the region as Islam provided a positive force among the ruling and trading classes. Gujarati Muslims played a pivotal role in establishing Islam in Southeast Asia.
Trade among Southeast Asian countries has a long tradition. The consequences of colonial rule, struggle for independence and in some cases war influenced the economic attitudes and policies of each country until today.
From 111 BC to 938 AD northern Vietnam was under Chinese rule. Vietnam was successfully governed by a series of Chinese dynasties including the Han, Eastern Han, Eastern Wu, Cao Wei, Jin, Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang, Sui, Tang, and Southern Han.
Records from Magellan's voyage show that Brunei possessed more cannon than European ships, so the Chinese must have been trading with them.
Malaysian legend has it that a Chinese Ming emperor sent a princess, Hang Li Po, to Malacca, with a retinue of 500, to marry Sultan Mansur Shah after the emperor was impressed by the wisdom of the sultan. Han Li Po's well (constructed 1459) is now a tourist attraction there, as is Bukit Cina, where her retinue settled.
The strategic value of the Strait of Malacca, which was controlled by Sultanate of Malacca in the 15th and early 16th century, did not go unnoticed by Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa, who in 1500 wrote "He who is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".
Western influence started to enter in the 16th century, with the arrival of the Portuguese in Malacca, Maluku and the Philippines, the latter being settled by the Spanish years later. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch established the Dutch East Indies; the French Indochina; and the British Strait Settlements. By the 19th century, all Southeast Asian countries were colonised except for Thailand.
European explorers were reaching Southeast Asia from the west and from the east. Regular trade between the ships sailing east from the Indian Ocean and south from mainland Asia provided goods in return for natural products, such as honey and hornbill beaks from the islands of the archipelago.
Before the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Europeans mostly were interested in expanding trade links. For the majority of the populations in each country, there was comparatively little interaction with Europeans and traditional social routines and relationships continued. For most, a life with subsistence level agriculture, fishing and, in less developed civilizations, hunting and gathering was still hard.
Europeans brought Christianity allowing Christian missionaries to become widespread. Thailand also allowed Western scientists to enter its country to develop its own education system as well as start sending Royal members and Thai scholars to get higher education from Europe and Russia.
During World War II, Imperial Japan invaded most of the former western colonies. The Shōwa occupation regime committed violent actions against civilians such as the Manila massacre and the implementation of a system of forced labour, such as the one involving 4 to 10 million "romusha" in Indonesia. A later UN report stated that four million people died in Indonesia as a result of famine and forced labour during the Japanese occupation. The Allied powers who defeated Japan in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II then contended with nationalists to whom the occupation authorities had granted independence.
Gujarat, India had a flourishing trade relationship with Southeast Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. The trade relationship with Gujarat declined after the Portuguese invasion of Southeast Asia in the 17th century.
The United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898. It became a forward base for American trade with Asia.
Most countries in the region enjoy national autonomy. Democratic forms of government and the recognition of human rights are taking root. ASEAN provides a framework for the integration of commerce, and regional responses to international concerns.
China has asserted broad claims over the South China Sea, based on its Nine-Dash Line, and has built artificial islands in an attempt to bolster its claims. China also has asserted an exclusive economic zone based on the Spratly Islands. The Philippines challenged China in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2013, and in "Philippines v. China" (2016), the Court ruled in favor of the Philippines and rejected China's claims.
Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia and it also the largest archipelago in the world by size (according to the CIA World Factbook). Geologically. the Indonesian archipelago is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world. Geological uplifts in the region have also produced some impressive mountains, culminating in Puncak Jaya in Papua, Indonesia at , on the island of New Guinea; it is the only place where ice glaciers can be found in Southeast Asia. The highest mountain in Southeast Asia is Hkakabo Razi at and can be found in northern Burma sharing the same range of its parent peak, Mount Everest.
The South China Sea is the major body of water within Southeast Asia. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Singapore, have integral rivers that flow into the South China Sea.
Mayon Volcano, despite being dangerously active, holds the record of the world's most perfect cone which is built from past and continuous eruption.
Southeast Asia is bounded to the southeast by the Australian continent, a boundary which runs through Indonesia. But a cultural touch point lies between Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian region of the Papua and West Papua, which shares the island of New Guinea with Papua New Guinea.
The climate in Southeast Asia is mainly tropical–hot and humid all year round with plentiful rainfall. Northern Vietnam and the Myanmar Himalayas are the only regions in Southeast Asia that feature a subtropical climate, which has a cold winter with snow. The majority of Southeast Asia has a wet and dry season caused by seasonal shift in winds or monsoon. The tropical rain belt causes additional rainfall during the monsoon season. The rain forest is the second largest on earth (with the Amazon being the largest). An exception to this type of climate and vegetation is the mountain areas in the northern region, where high altitudes lead to milder temperatures and drier landscape. Other parts fall out of this climate because they are desert-like.
Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change in the world. Climate change will have a big effect on agriculture in Southeast Asia such as irrigation systems will be affected by changes in rainfall and runoff, and subsequently, water quality and supply. Climate change is also likely to pose a serious threat to the fisheries industry in Southeast Asia.
The vast majority of Southeast Asia falls within the warm, humid tropics, and its climate generally can be characterised as monsoonal.
The animals of Southeast Asia are diverse; on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the orangutan, the Asian elephant, the Malayan tapir, the Sumatran rhinoceros and the Bornean clouded leopard can also be found. Six subspecies of the binturong or "bearcat" exist in the region, though the one endemic to the island of Palawan is now classed as vulnerable.
Tigers of three different subspecies are found on the island of Sumatra (the Sumatran tiger), in peninsular Malaysia (the Malayan tiger), and in Indochina (the Indochinese tiger); all of which are endangered species.
The Komodo dragon is the largest living species of lizard and inhabits the islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang in Indonesia.
The Philippine eagle is the national bird of the Philippines. It is considered by scientists as the largest eagle in the world, and is endemic to the Philippines' forests.
The wild Asian water buffalo, and on various islands related dwarf species of "Bubalus" such as anoa were once widespread in Southeast Asia; nowadays the domestic Asian water buffalo is common across the region, but its remaining relatives are rare and endangered.
The mouse deer, a small tusked deer as large as a toy dog or cat, mostly can be found on Sumatra, Borneo (Indonesia) and in Palawan Islands (Philippines). The gaur, a gigantic wild ox larger than even wild water buffalo, is found mainly in Indochina. There is very little scientific information available regarding Southeast Asian amphibians.
Birds such as the peafowl and drongo live in this subregion as far east as Indonesia. The babirusa, a four-tusked pig, can be found in Indonesia as well. The hornbill was prized for its beak and used in trade with China. The horn of the rhinoceros, not part of its skull, was prized in China as well.
The Indonesian Archipelago is split by the Wallace Line. This line runs along what is now known to be a tectonic plate boundary, and separates Asian (Western) species from Australasian (Eastern) species. The islands between Java/Borneo and Papua form a mixed zone, where both types occur, known as Wallacea. As the pace of development accelerates and populations continue to expand in Southeast Asia, concern has increased regarding the impact of human activity on the region's environment. A significant portion of Southeast Asia, however, has not changed greatly and remains an unaltered home to wildlife. The nations of the region, with only few exceptions, have become aware of the need to maintain forest cover not only to prevent soil erosion but to preserve the diversity of flora and fauna. Indonesia, for example, has created an extensive system of national parks and preserves for this purpose. Even so, such species as the Javan rhinoceros face extinction, with only a handful of the animals remaining in western Java.
The shallow waters of the Southeast Asian coral reefs have the highest levels of biodiversity for the world's marine ecosystems, where coral, fish and molluscs abound. According to Conservation International, marine surveys suggest that the marine life diversity in the Raja Ampat (Indonesia) is the highest recorded on Earth. Diversity is considerably greater than any other area sampled in the Coral Triangle composed of Indonesia, Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. The Coral Triangle is the heart of the world's coral reef biodiversity, the Verde Passage is dubbed by Conservation International as the world's "center of the center of marine shorefish biodiversity". The whale shark, the world's largest species of fish and 6 species of sea turtles can also be found in the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean territories of the Philippines.
The trees and other plants of the region are tropical; in some countries where the mountains are tall enough, temperate-climate vegetation can be found. These rainforest areas are currently being logged-over, especially in Borneo.
While Southeast Asia is rich in flora and fauna, Southeast Asia is facing severe deforestation which causes habitat loss for various endangered species such as orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. Predictions have been made that more than 40% of the animal and plant species in Southeast Asia could be wiped out in the 21st century. At the same time, haze has been a regular occurrence. The two worst regional hazes were in 1997 and 2006 in which multiple countries were covered with thick haze, mostly caused by "slash and burn" activities in Sumatra and Borneo. In reaction, several countries in Southeast Asia signed the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution to combat haze pollution.
The 2013 Southeast Asian Haze saw API levels reach a hazardous level in some countries. Muar experienced the highest API level of 746 on 23 June 2013 at around 7 am.
Even prior to the penetration of European interests, Southeast Asia was a critical part of the world trading system. A wide range of commodities originated in the region, but especially important were spices such as pepper, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. The spice trade initially was developed by Indian and Arab merchants, but it also brought Europeans to the region. First Spaniards (Manila galleon) who sailed from the Americas and Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British and French became involved in this enterprise in various countries. The penetration of European commercial interests gradually evolved into annexation of territories, as traders lobbied for an extension of control to protect and expand their activities. As a result, the Dutch moved into Indonesia, the British into Malaya and parts of Borneo, the French into Indochina, and the Spanish and the US into the Philippines. An economic effect of this imperialism was the shift in the production of commodities. For example, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, Java, Vietnam and Cambodia, the tin mining of Malaya, the rice fields of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and Irrawaddy River delta in Burma, were a response to powerful market demands.
The overseas Chinese community has played a large role in the development of the economies in the region. The origins of Chinese influence can be traced to the 16th century, when Chinese migrants from southern China settled in Indonesia, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries. Chinese populations in the region saw a rapid increase following the Communist Revolution in 1949, which forced many refugees to emigrate outside of China.
The region's economy greatly depends on agriculture; rice and rubber have long been prominent exports. Manufacturing and services are becoming more important. An emerging market, Indonesia is the largest economy in this region. Newly industrialised countries include Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, while Singapore and Brunei are affluent developed economies. The rest of Southeast Asia is still heavily dependent on agriculture, but Vietnam is notably making steady progress in developing its industrial sectors. The region notably manufactures textiles, electronic high-tech goods such as microprocessors and heavy industrial products such as automobiles. Oil reserves in Southeast Asia are plentiful.
Seventeen telecommunications companies contracted to build the Asia-America Gateway submarine cable to connect Southeast Asia to the US This is to avoid disruption of the kind recently caused by the cutting of the undersea cable from Taiwan to the US in the 2006 Hengchun earthquakes.
Tourism has been a key factor in economic development for many Southeast Asian countries, especially Cambodia. According to UNESCO, "tourism, if correctly conceived, can be a tremendous development tool and an effective means of preserving the cultural diversity of our planet." Since the early 1990s, "even the non-ASEAN nations such as Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Burma, where the income derived from tourism is low, are attempting to expand their own tourism industries." In 1995, Singapore was the regional leader in tourism receipts relative to GDP at over 8%. By 1998, those receipts had dropped to less than 6% of GDP while Thailand and Lao PDR increased receipts to over 7%. Since 2000, Cambodia has surpassed all other ASEAN countries and generated almost 15% of its GDP from tourism in 2006. Furthermore, Vietnam is considered as a rising power in Southeast Asia due to its large foreign investment opportunities and the booming tourism sector, despite only having their trade embargo lifted in 1995.
Indonesia is the only member of G-20 major economies and is the largest economy in the region. Indonesia's estimated gross domestic product for 2016 was US$932.4 billion (nominal) or $3,031.3 billion (PPP) with per capita GDP of US$3,604 (nominal) or $11,717 (PPP).
Stock markets in Southeast Asia have performed better than other bourses in the Asia-Pacific region in 2010, with the Philippines' PSE leading the way with 22 percent growth, followed by Thailand's SET with 21 percent and Indonesia's JKSE with 19 percent.
Southeast Asia's GDP per capita is US$3,853 according to a 2015 United Nations report, which is comparable to Guatemala and Tonga.
Southeast Asia has an area of approximately . As of , around /1e6 round 0 million people live in the region, more than a fifth live (143 million) on the Indonesian island of Java, the most densely populated large island in the world. Indonesia is the most populous country with /1e6 round 0 million people, and also the 4th most populous country in the world. The distribution of the religions and people is diverse in Southeast Asia and varies by country. Some 30 million overseas Chinese also live in Southeast Asia, most prominently in Christmas Island, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, and also as the Hoa in Vietnam. People of Southeast Asian origins are known as Southeast Asians or Aseanites.
The Aslians and Negritos were believed as one of the earliest inhabitant in the region. They are genetically related to the Papuans in Eastern Indonesia, East Timor and Australian Aborigines. In modern times, the Javanese are the largest ethnic group in Southeast Asia, with more than 100 million people, mostly concentrated in Java, Indonesia. The second largest ethnic group in Southeast Asia is Vietnamese (Kinh people) with around 86 million population, mainly inhabiting in Vietnam, thus forming a significant minority in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The Thais is also a significant ethnic group with around 59 million population forming the majority in Thailand. In Burma, the Burmese account for more than two-thirds of the ethnic stock in this country.
Indonesia is clearly dominated by the Javanese and Sundanese ethnic groups, with hundreds of ethnic minorities inhabited the archipelago, including Madurese, Minangkabau, Bugis, Balinese, Dayak, Batak and Malays. While Malaysia is split between more than half Malays and one-quarter Chinese, and also Indian minority in the West Malaysia however Dayaks make up the majority in Sarawak and Kadazan-dusun makes up the majority in Sabah which are in the East Malaysia. The Malays are the majority in West Malaysia and Brunei, while they forming a significant minority in Indonesia, Southern Thailand, East Malaysia and Singapore. In city-state Singapore, Chinese are the majority, yet the city is a multicultural melting pot with Malays, Indians and Eurasian also called the island their home.
The Chams form a significant minority in Central and South Vietnam, also in Central Cambodia. While the Khmers are the majority in Cambodia, and form a significant minority in Southern Vietnam and Thailand, the Hmong people are the minority in Vietnam, China and Laos.
Within the Philippines, the Tagalog, Visayan (mainly Cebuanos, Warays and Hiligaynons), Ilocano, Bicolano, Moro (mainly Tausug, Maranao, and Maguindanao) and Central Luzon (mainly Kapampangan and Pangasinan) groups are significant.
Countries in Southeast Asia practice many different religions. By population, Islam is the most practised faith, numbering approximately 240 million adherents, or about 40% of the entire population, concentrated in Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Southern Thailand and in the Southern Philippines. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority country around the world.
There are approximately 205 million Buddhists in Southeast Asia, making it the second largest religion in the region, after Islam. Approximately 38% of the global Buddhist population resides in Southeast Asia. Buddhism is predominant in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Singapore. Ancestor worship and Confucianism are also widely practised in Vietnam and Singapore.
Christianity is predominant in the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, East Malaysia and East Timor. The Philippines has the largest Roman Catholic population in Asia. East Timor is also predominantly Roman Catholic due to a history of Portuguese rule.
No individual Southeast Asian country is religiously homogeneous. Some groups are protected "de facto" by their isolation from the rest of the world. In the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, Hinduism is dominant on islands such as Bali. Christianity also predominates in the rest of the part of the Philippines, New Guinea and Timor. Pockets of Hindu population can also be found around Southeast Asia in Singapore, Malaysia etc. Garuda (Sanskrit: Garuḍa), the phoenix who is the mount (vahanam) of Vishnu, is a national symbol in both Thailand and Indonesia; in the Philippines, gold images of Garuda have been found on Palawan; gold images of other Hindu gods and goddesses have also been found on Mindanao. Balinese Hinduism is somewhat different from Hinduism practised elsewhere, as Animism and local culture is incorporated into it. Christians can also be found throughout Southeast Asia; they are in the majority in East Timor and the Philippines, Asia's largest Christian nation. In addition, there are also older tribal religious practices in remote areas of Sarawak in East Malaysia, Highland Philippines and Papua in eastern Indonesia. In Burma, Sakka (Indra) is revered as a "nat". In Vietnam, Mahayana Buddhism is practised, which is influenced by native animism but with strong emphasis on ancestor worship.
The religious composition for each country is as follows: Some values are taken from the "CIA World Factbook":
Each of the languages have been influenced by cultural pressures due to trade, immigration, and historical colonization as well. There are nearly over 800 native languages in the region.
The language composition for each country is as follows (with official languages in bold):
The culture in Southeast Asia is very diverse: on mainland Southeast Asia, the culture is a mix of Burmese, Cambodian, Laotian and Thai (Indian) and Vietnamese (Chinese) cultures. While in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia the culture is a mix of indigenous Austronesian, Indian, Islamic, Western, and Chinese cultures. Also Brunei shows a strong influence from Arabia. Vietnam and Singapore show more Chinese influence in that Singapore, although being geographically a Southeast Asian nation, is home to a large Chinese majority and Vietnam was in China's sphere of influence for much of its history. Indian influence in Singapore is only evident through the Tamil migrants, which influenced, to some extent, the cuisine of Singapore. Throughout Vietnam's history, it has had no direct influence from India – only through contact with the Thai, Khmer and Cham peoples. Moreover, Vietnam is also categorized under the East Asian cultural sphere along with China, Korea, and Japan due to the large amount of Chinese influence embedded in their culture and lifestyle.
Rice paddy agriculture has existed in Southeast Asia for thousands of years, ranging across the subregion. Some dramatic examples of these rice paddies populate the Banaue Rice Terraces in the mountains of Luzon in the Philippines. Maintenance of these paddies is very labour-intensive. The rice paddies are well-suited to the monsoon climate of the region.
Stilt houses can be found all over Southeast Asia, from Thailand and Vietnam, to Borneo, to Luzon in the Philippines, to Papua New Guinea. The region has diverse metalworking, especially in Indonesia. This include weaponry, such as the distinctive kris, and musical instruments, such as the gamelan.
The region's chief cultural influences have been from some combination of Islam, India, and China. Diverse cultural influence is pronounced in the Philippines, derived particularly from the period of the Spanish and American rule, contact with Indian-influenced cultures, and the Chinese and Japanese trading era.
As a rule, the peoples who ate with their fingers were more likely influenced by the culture of India, for example, than the culture of China, where the peoples ate with chopsticks; tea, as a beverage, can be found across the region. The fish sauces distinctive to the region tend to vary.
The arts of Southeast Asia have affinity with the arts of other areas. Dance in much of Southeast Asia includes movement of the hands as well as the feet, to express the dance's emotion and meaning of the story that the ballerina is going to tell the audience. Most of Southeast Asia introduced dance into their court; in particular, Cambodian royal ballet represented them in the early 7th century before the Khmer Empire, which was highly influenced by Indian Hinduism. Apsara Dance, famous for strong hand and feet movement, is a great example of Hindu symbolic dance.
Puppetry and shadow plays were also a favoured form of entertainment in past centuries, a famous one being Wayang from Indonesia. The arts and literature in some of Southeast Asia is quite influenced by Hinduism, which was brought to them centuries ago. Indonesia, despite conversion to Islam which opposes certain forms of art, has retained many forms of Hindu-influenced practices, culture, art and literature. An example is the Wayang Kulit (Shadow Puppet) and literature like the Ramayana. The wayang kulit show has been recognized by UNESCO on 7 November 2003, as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
It has been pointed out that Khmer and Indonesian classical arts were concerned with depicting the life of the gods, but to the Southeast Asian mind the life of the gods was the life of the peoples themselves—joyous, earthy, yet divine. The Tai, coming late into Southeast Asia, brought with them some Chinese artistic traditions, but they soon shed them in favour of the Khmer and Mon traditions, and the only indications of their earlier contact with Chinese arts were in the style of their temples, especially the tapering roof, and in their lacquerware.
Traditional music in Southeast Asia is as varied as its many ethnic and cultural divisions. Main styles of traditional music can be seen: Court music, folk music, music styles of smaller ethnic groups, and music influenced by genres outside the geographic region.
Of the court and folk genres, gong-chime ensembles and orchestras make up the majority (the exception being lowland areas of Vietnam). "Gamelan" and "Angklung" orchestras from "Indonesia", "Piphat" /"Pinpeat" ensembles of Thailand and Cambodia and the "Kulintang" ensembles of the southern Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi and Timor are the three main distinct styles of musical genres that have influenced other traditional musical styles in the region. String instruments also are popular in the region.
On 18 November 2010, UNESCO officially recognized angklung as a "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity", and encourage Indonesian people and government to safeguard, transmit, promote performances and to encourage the craftsmanship of angklung making.
The history of Southeast Asia has led to a wealth of different authors, from both within and without writing about the region.
Originally, Indians were the ones who taught the native inhabitants about writing. This is shown through Brahmic forms of writing present in the region such as the Balinese script shown on split palm leaf called "lontar" (see image to the left — magnify the image to see the writing on the flat side, and the decoration on the reverse side).
The antiquity of this form of writing extends before the invention of paper around the year 100 in China. Note each palm leaf section was only several lines, written longitudinally across the leaf, and bound by twine to the other sections. The outer portion was decorated. The alphabets of Southeast Asia tended to be abugidas, until the arrival of the Europeans, who used words that also ended in consonants, not just vowels. Other forms of official documents, which did not use paper, included Javanese copperplate scrolls. This material would have been more durable than paper in the tropical climate of Southeast Asia.
In Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore, the Malay language is now generally written in the Latin script. The same phenomenon is present in Indonesian, although different spelling standards are utilised (e.g. 'Teksi' in Malay and 'Taksi' in Indonesian for the word 'Taxi').
The use of Chinese characters, in the past and present, is only evident in Vietnam and more recently, Singapore and Malaysia. The adoption of Chinese characters in Vietnam dates back to around 111 B.C., when it was occupied by the Chinese. A Vietnamese script called Chữ Nôm used modified Chinese characters to express the Vietnamese language. Both classical Chinese and Chữ Nôm were used up until the early 20th century.
However, the use of the Chinese script has been in decline, especially in Singapore and Malaysia as the younger generations are in favour of the Latin Script. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28741 |
Supercontinent
In geology, a supercontinent is the assembly of most or all of Earth's continental blocks or cratons to form a single large landmass. However, some earth scientists use a different definition: "a grouping of formerly dispersed continents", which leaves room for interpretation and is easier to apply to Precambrian times, although a minimum of about 75% of the continental crust then in existence has been proposed as a limit to separate supercontinents from other groupings.
Supercontinents have assembled and dispersed multiple times in the geologic past (see table). According to the modern definitions, a supercontinent does not exist today. The supercontinent Pangaea is the collective name describing all of the continental landmasses when they were most recently near to one another. The positions of continents have been accurately determined back to the early Jurassic, shortly before the breakup of Pangaea (see animated image). The earlier continent Gondwana is not considered a supercontinent under the first definition, since the landmasses of Baltica, Laurentia and Siberia were separate at the time.
The following table names reconstructed ancient supercontinents, using Bradley's 2011 looser definition, with an approximate timescale of millions of years ago (Ma).
There are two contrasting models for supercontinent evolution through geological time. The first model theorizes that at least two separate supercontinents existed comprising Vaalbara (from ~3636 to ) and Kenorland (from ~2720 to ). The Neoarchean supercontinent consisted of Superia and Sclavia. These parts of Neoarchean age broke off at ~2480 and and portions of them later collided to form Nuna (Northern Europe North America) (). Nuna continued to develop during the Mesoproterozoic, primarily by lateral accretion of juvenile arcs, and in Nuna collided with other land masses, forming Rodinia. Between ~825 and Rodinia broke apart. However, before completely breaking up, some fragments of Rodinia had already come together to form Gondwana (also known as Gondwanaland) by . Pangaea formed by through the collision of Gondwana, Laurasia (Laurentia and Baltica), and Siberia.
The second model (Kenorland-Arctica) is based on both palaeomagnetic and geological evidence and proposes that the continental crust comprised a single supercontinent from until break-up during the Ediacaran Period after . The reconstruction is derived from the observation that palaeomagnetic poles converge to quasi-static positions for long intervals between ~2.72–2.115, 1.35–1.13, and with only small peripheral modifications to the reconstruction. During the intervening periods, the poles conform to a unified apparent polar wander path. Because this model shows that exceptional demands on the paleomagnetic data are satisfied by prolonged quasi-integrity, it must be regarded as superseding the first model proposing multiple diverse continents, although the first phase (Protopangea) essentially incorporates Vaalbara and Kenorland of the first model. The explanation for the prolonged duration of the Protopangea-Paleopangea supercontinent appears to be that lid tectonics (comparable to the tectonics operating on Mars and Venus) prevailed during Precambrian times. Plate tectonics as seen on the contemporary Earth became dominant only during the latter part of geological times.
The Phanerozoic supercontinent Pangaea began to break up and is still doing so today. Because Pangaea is the most recent of Earth's supercontinents, it is the most well known and understood. Contributing to Pangaea's popularity in the classroom is the fact that its reconstruction is almost as simple as fitting the present continents bordering the Atlantic-type oceans like puzzle pieces.
A supercontinent cycle is the break-up of one supercontinent and the development of another, which takes place on a global scale. Supercontinent cycles are not the same as the Wilson cycle, which is the opening and closing of an individual oceanic basin. The Wilson cycle rarely synchronizes with the timing of a supercontinent cycle. However, supercontinent cycles and Wilson cycles were both involved in the creation of Pangaea and Rodinia.
Secular trends such as carbonatites, granulites, eclogites, and greenstone belt deformation events are all possible indicators of Precambrian supercontinent cyclicity, although the Protopangea-Paleopangea solution implies that Phanerozoic style of supercontinent cycles did not operate during these times. Also there are instances where these secular trends have a weak, uneven or absent imprint on the supercontinent cycle; secular methods for supercontinent reconstruction will produce results that have only one explanation, and each explanation for a trend must fit in with the rest.
The causes of supercontinent assembly and dispersal are thought to be driven by convection processes in the Earth's mantle. Approximately 660 km into the mantle, a discontinuity occurs, affecting the surface crust through processes like plumes and "superplumes". When a slab of subducted crust is denser than the surrounding mantle, it sinks to the discontinuity. Once the slabs build up, they will sink through to the lower mantle in what is known as a "slab avalanche". This displacement at the discontinuity will cause the lower mantle to compensate and rise elsewhere. The rising mantle can form a plume or superplume.
Besides having compositional effects on the upper mantle by replenishing the large-ion lithophile elements, volcanism affects plate movement. The plates will be moved towards a geoidal low perhaps where the slab avalanche occurred and pushed away from the geoidal high that can be caused by the plumes or superplumes. This causes the continents to push together to form supercontinents and was evidently the process that operated to cause the early continental crust to aggregate into Protopangea. Dispersal of supercontinents is caused by the accumulation of heat underneath the crust due to the rising of very large convection cells or plumes, and a massive heat release resulted in the final break-up of Paleopangea. Accretion occurs over geoidal lows that can be caused by avalanche slabs or the downgoing limbs of convection cells. Evidence of the accretion and dispersion of supercontinents is seen in the geological rock record.
The influence of known volcanic eruptions does not compare to that of flood basalts. The timing of flood basalts has corresponded with large-scale continental break-up. However, due to a lack of data on the time required to produce flood basalts, the climatic impact is difficult to quantify. The timing of a single lava flow is also undetermined. These are important factors on how flood basalts influenced paleoclimate.
Global paleogeography and plate interactions as far back as Pangaea are relatively well understood today. However, the evidence becomes more sparse further back in geologic history. Marine magnetic anomalies, passive margin match-ups, geologic interpretation of orogenic belts, paleomagnetism, paleobiogeography of fossils, and distribution of climatically sensitive strata are all methods to obtain evidence for continent locality and indicators of environment throughout time.
Phanerozoic (541 Ma to present) and Precambrian ( to ) had primarily passive margins and detrital zircons (and orogenic granites), whereas the tenure of Pangaea contained few. Matching edges of continents are where passive margins form. The edges of these continents may rift. At this point, seafloor spreading becomes the driving force. Passive margins are therefore born during the break-up of supercontinents and die during supercontinent assembly. Pangaea's supercontinent cycle is a good example for the efficiency of using the presence, or lack of, these entities to record the development, tenure, and break-up of supercontinents. There is a sharp decrease in passive margins between 500 and during the timing of Pangaea's assembly. The tenure of Pangaea is marked by a low number of passive margins during 336 to and its break-up is indicated accurately by an increase in passive margins.
Orogenic belts can form during the assembly of continents and supercontinents. The orogenic belts present on continental blocks are classified into three different categories and have implications of interpreting geologic bodies. Intercratonic orogenic belts are characteristic of ocean basin closure. Clear indicators of intercratonic activity contain ophiolites and other oceanic materials that are present in the suture zone. Intracratonic orogenic belts occur as thrust belts and do not contain any oceanic material. However, the absence of ophiolites is not strong evidence for intracratonic belts, because the oceanic material can be squeezed out and eroded away in an intercratonic environment. The third kind of orogenic belt is a confined orogenic belt which is the closure of small basins. The assembly of a supercontinent would have to show intercratonic orogenic belts. However, interpretation of orogenic belts can be difficult.
The collision of Gondwana and Laurasia occurred in the late Palaeozoic. By this collision, the Variscan mountain range was created, along the equator. This 6000-km-long mountain range is usually referred to in two parts: the Hercynian mountain range of the late Carboniferous makes up the eastern part, and the western part is called the Appalachians, uplifted in the Early Permian. (The existence of a flat elevated plateau like the Tibetan Plateau is under much debate.) The locality of the Variscan range made it influential to both the northern and southern hemispheres. The elevation of the Appalachians would greatly influence global atmospheric circulation.
Continents affect the climate of the planet drastically, with supercontinents having a larger, more prevalent influence. Continents modify global wind patterns, control ocean current paths and have a higher albedo than the oceans. Winds are redirected by mountains, and albedo differences cause shifts in onshore winds. Higher elevation in continental interiors produce cooler, drier climate, the phenomenon of continentality. This is seen today in Eurasia, and rock record shows evidence of continentality in the middle of Pangaea.
The term glacio-epoch refers to a long episode of glaciation on Earth over millions of years. Glaciers have major implications on the climate particularly through sea level change. Changes in the position and elevation of the continents, the paleolatitude and ocean circulation affect the glacio-epochs. There is an association between the rifting and breakup of continents and supercontinents and glacio-epochs. According to the first model for Precambrian supercontinents described above the breakup of Kenorland and Rodinia were associated with the Paleoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic glacio-epochs, respectively. In contrast, the second solution described above shows that these glaciations correlated with periods of low continental velocity and it is concluded that a fall in tectonic and corresponding volcanic activity was responsible for these intervals of global frigidity. During the accumulation of supercontinents with times of regional uplift, glacio-epochs seem to be rare with little supporting evidence. However, the lack of evidence does not allow for the conclusion that glacio-epochs are not associated with collisional assembly of supercontinents. This could just represent a preservation bias.
During the late Ordovician (~458.4 Ma), the particular configuration of Gondwana may have allowed for glaciation and high CO2 levels to occur at the same time. However, some geologists disagree and think that there was a temperature increase at this time. This increase may have been strongly influenced by the movement of Gondwana across the South Pole, which may have prevented lengthy snow accumulation. Although late Ordovician temperatures at the South Pole may have reached freezing, there were no ice sheets during the Early Silurian through the late Mississippian Agreement can be met with the theory that continental snow can occur when the edge of a continent is near the pole. Therefore, Gondwana, although located tangent to the South Pole, may have experienced glaciation along its coast.
Though precipitation rates during monsoonal circulations are difficult to predict, there is evidence for a large orographic barrier within the interior of Pangaea during the late Paleozoic The possibility of the SW-NE trending Appalachian-Hercynian Mountains makes the region's monsoonal circulations potentially relatable to present day monsoonal circulations surrounding the Tibetan Plateau, which is known to positively influence the magnitude of monsoonal periods within Eurasia. It is therefore somewhat expected that lower topography in other regions of the supercontinent during the Jurassic would negatively influence precipitation variations. The breakup of supercontinents may have affected local precipitation. When any supercontinent breaks up, there will be an increase in precipitation runoff over the surface of the continental land masses, increasing silicate weathering and the consumption of CO2.
Even though during the Archaean solar radiation was reduced by 30 percent and the Cambrian-Precambrian boundary by six percent, the Earth has only experienced three ice ages throughout the Precambrian. Erroneous conclusions are more likely to be made when models are limited to one climatic configuration (which is usually present day).
Cold winters in continental interiors are due to rate ratios of radiative cooling (greater) and heat transport from continental rims. To raise winter temperatures within continental interiors, the rate of heat transport must increase to become greater than the rate of radiative cooling. Through climate models, alterations in atmospheric CO2 content and ocean heat transport are not comparatively effective.
CO2 models suggest that values were low in the late Cenozoic and Carboniferous-Permian glaciations. Although early Paleozoic values are much larger (more than ten percent higher than that of today). This may be due to high seafloor spreading rates after the breakup of Precambrian supercontinents and the lack of land plants as a carbon sink.
During the late Permian, it is expected that seasonal Pangaean temperatures varied drastically. Subtropic summer temperatures were warmer than that of today by as much as 6–10 degrees and mid-latitudes in the winter were less than −30 degrees Celsius. These seasonal changes within the supercontinent were influenced by the large size of Pangaea. And, just like today, coastal regions experienced much less variation.
During the Jurassic, summer temperatures did not rise above zero degrees Celsius along the northern rim of Laurasia, which was the northernmost part of Pangaea (the southernmost portion of Pangaea was Gondwana). Ice-rafted dropstones sourced from Russia are indicators of this northern boundary. The Jurassic is thought to have been approximately 10 degrees Celsius warmer along 90 degrees East paleolongitude compared to the present temperature of today's central Eurasia.
Many studies of the Milankovitch fluctuations during supercontinent time periods have focused on the Mid-Cretaceous. Present amplitudes of Milankovitch cycles over present day Eurasia may be mirrored in both the southern and northern hemispheres of the supercontinent Pangaea. Climate modeling shows that summer fluctuations varied 14–16 degrees Celsius on Pangaea, which is similar or slightly higher than summer temperatures of Eurasia during the Pleistocene. The largest-amplitude Milankovitch cycles are expected to have been at mid- to high-latitudes during the Triassic and Jurassic.
Granites and detrital zircons have notably similar and episodic appearances in the rock record. Their fluctuations correlate with Precambrian supercontinent cycles. The U–Pb zircon dates from orogenic granites are among the most reliable aging determinants. Some issues exist with relying on granite sourced zircons, such as a lack of evenly globally sourced data and the loss of granite zircons by sedimentary coverage or plutonic consumption. Where granite zircons are less adequate, detrital zircons from sandstones appear and make up for the gaps. These detrital zircons are taken from the sands of major modern rivers and their drainage basins. Oceanic magnetic anomalies and paleomagnetic data are the primary resources used for reconstructing continent and supercontinent locations back to roughly 150 Ma.
Plate tectonics and the chemical composition of the atmosphere (specifically greenhouse gases) are the two most prevailing factors present within the geologic time scale. Continental drift influences both cold and warm climatic episodes. Atmospheric circulation and climate are strongly influenced by the location and formation of continents and megacontinents. Therefore, continental drift influences mean global temperature.
Oxygen levels of the Archaean Eon were negligible and today they are roughly 21 percent. It is thought that the Earth's oxygen content has risen in stages: six or seven steps that are timed very closely to the development of Earth's supercontinents.
The process of Earth's increase in atmospheric oxygen content is theorized to have started with continent-continent collision of huge land masses forming supercontinents, and therefore possibly supercontinent mountain ranges (supermountains). These supermountains would have eroded, and the mass amounts of nutrients, including iron and phosphorus, would have washed into oceans, just as we see happening today. The oceans would then be rich in nutrients essential to photosynthetic organisms, which would then be able to respire mass amounts of oxygen. There is an apparent direct relationship between orogeny and the atmospheric oxygen content). There is also evidence for increased sedimentation concurrent with the timing of these mass oxygenation events, meaning that the organic carbon and pyrite at these times were more likely to be buried beneath sediment and therefore unable to react with the free oxygen. This sustained the atmospheric oxygen increases.
During this time, there was an increase in molybdenum isotope fractionation. It was temporary, but supports the increase in atmospheric oxygen because molybdenum isotopes require free oxygen to fractionate. Between 2.45 and the second period of oxygenation occurred, it has been called the 'great oxygenation event.' There are many pieces of evidence that support the existence of this event, including red beds appearance (meaning that Fe3+ was being produced and became an important component in soils). The third oxygenation stage approximately is indicated by the disappearance of iron formations. Neodymium isotopic studies suggest that iron formations are usually from continental sources, meaning that dissolved Fe and Fe2+ had to be transported during continental erosion. A rise in atmospheric oxygen prevents Fe transport, so the lack of iron formations may have been due to an increase in oxygen. The fourth oxygenation event, roughly is based on modeled rates of sulfur isotopes from marine carbonate-associated sulfates. An increase (near doubled concentration) of sulfur isotopes, which is suggested by these models, would require an increase in oxygen content of the deep oceans. Between 650 and there were three increases in ocean oxygen levels, this period is the fifth oxygenation stage. One of the reasons indicating this period to be an oxygenation event is the increase in redox-sensitive molybdenum in black shales. The sixth event occurred between 360 and and was identified by models suggesting shifts in the balance of 34S in sulfates and 13C in carbonates, which were strongly influenced by an increase in atmospheric oxygen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28742 |
Slide rule
The slide rule, also known colloquially in the United States as a slipstick, is a mechanical analog computer. As graphical analog calculators, slide rules are closely related to nomograms, but the former are used for general calculations, whereas the latter are used for application-specific computations.
The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry, but typically not for addition or subtraction. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not meant to be used for measuring length or drawing straight lines.
Slide rules exist in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form with a standardized set of graduated markings (scales) essential to performing mathematical computations. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in calculations particular to those fields.
At its simplest, each number to be multiplied is represented by a length on a sliding ruler. As the rulers each have a logarithmic scale, it is possible to align them to read the sum of the logarithms, and hence calculate the product of the two numbers.
The Reverend William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the electronic calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of slide rules continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even as computers were being gradually introduced; but around 1974 the handheld electronic scientific calculator made them largely obsolete and most suppliers left the business.
In its most basic form, the slide rule uses two logarithmic scales to allow rapid multiplication and division of numbers. These common operations can be time-consuming and error-prone when done on paper. More elaborate slide rules allow other calculations, such as square roots, exponentials, logarithms, and trigonometric functions.
Scales may be grouped in decades, which are numbers ranging from 1 to 10 (i.e. 10n to 10n+1). Thus single decade scales C and D range from 1 to 10 across the entire width of the slide rule while double decade scales A and B range from 1 to 100 over the width of the slide rule.
In general, mathematical calculations are performed by aligning a mark on the sliding central strip with a mark on one of the fixed strips, and then observing the relative positions of other marks on the strips. Numbers aligned with the marks give the approximate value of the product, quotient, or other calculated result.
The user determines the location of the decimal point in the result, based on mental estimation. Scientific notation is used to track the decimal point in more formal calculations. Addition and subtraction steps in a calculation are generally done mentally or on paper, not on the slide rule.
Most slide rules consist of three parts:
Some slide rules ("duplex" models) have scales on both sides of the rule and slide strip, others on one side of the outer strips and both sides of the slide strip (which can usually be pulled out, flipped over and reinserted for convenience), still others on one side only ("simplex" rules). A sliding with a vertical alignment line is used to find corresponding points on scales that are not adjacent to each other or, in duplex models, are on the other side of the rule. The cursor can also record an intermediate result on any of the scales.
A logarithm transforms the operations of multiplication and division to addition and subtraction according to the rules formula_1 and formula_2.
Moving the top scale to the right by a distance of formula_3, by matching the beginning of the top scale with the label formula_4 on the bottom, aligns each number formula_5, at position formula_6 on the top scale, with the number at position formula_7 on the bottom scale. Because formula_8, this position on the bottom scale gives formula_9, the product of formula_4 and formula_5. For example, to calculate 3×2, the 1 on the top scale is moved to the 2 on the bottom scale. The answer, 6, is read off the bottom scale where 3 is on the top scale. In general, the 1 on the top is moved to a factor on the bottom, and the answer is read off the bottom where the other factor is on the top. This works because the distances from the "1" are proportional to the logarithms of the marked values:
Operations may go "off the scale;" for example, the diagram above shows that the slide rule has not positioned the 7 on the upper scale above any number on the lower scale, so it does not give any answer for 2×7. In such cases, the user may slide the upper scale to the left until its right index aligns with the 2, effectively dividing by 10 (by subtracting the full length of the C-scale) and then multiplying by 7, as in the illustration below:
Here the user of the slide rule must remember to adjust the decimal point appropriately to correct the final answer. We wanted to find 2×7, but instead we calculated (2/10)×7=0.2×7=1.4. So the true answer is not 1.4 but 14. Resetting the slide is not the only way to handle multiplications that would result in off-scale results, such as 2×7; some other methods are:
Method 1 is easy to understand, but entails a loss of precision. Method 3 has the advantage that it only involves two scales.
The illustration below demonstrates the computation of 5.5/2. The 2 on the top scale is placed over the 5.5 on the bottom scale. The 1 on the top scale lies above the quotient, 2.75. There is more than one method for doing division, but the method presented here has the advantage that the final result cannot be off-scale, because one has a choice of using the 1 at either end.
In addition to the logarithmic scales, some slide rules have other mathematical functions encoded on other auxiliary scales. The most popular are trigonometric, usually sine and tangent, common logarithm (log) (for taking the log of a value on a multiplier scale), natural logarithm (ln) and exponential ("ex") scales. Some rules include a Pythagorean ("P") scale, to figure sides of triangles, and a scale to figure circles. Others feature scales for calculating hyperbolic functions. On linear rules, the scales and their labeling are highly standardized, with variation usually occurring only in terms of which scales are included and in what order:
The Binary Slide Rule manufactured by Gilson in 1931 performed an addition and subtraction function limited to fractions.
There are single-decade (C and D), double-decade (A and B), and triple-decade (K) scales. To compute formula_12, for example, locate x on the D scale and read its square on the A scale. Inverting this process allows square roots to be found, and similarly for the powers 3, 1/3, 2/3, and 3/2. Care must be taken when the base, x, is found in more than one place on its scale. For instance, there are two nines on the A scale; to find the square root of nine, use the first one; the second one gives the square root of 90.
For formula_13 problems, use the LL scales. When several LL scales are present, use the one with "x" on it. First, align the leftmost 1 on the C scale with x on the LL scale. Then, find "y" on the C scale and go down to the LL scale with "x" on it. That scale will indicate the answer. If "y" is "off the scale," locate formula_14 and square it using the A and B scales as described above. Alternatively, use the rightmost 1 on the C scale, and read the answer off the next higher LL scale. For example, aligning the rightmost 1 on the C scale with 2 on the LL2 scale, 3 on the C scale lines up with 8 on the LL3 scale.
To extract a cube root using a slide rule with only C/D and A/B scales, align 1 on the B cursor with the base number on the A scale (taking care as always to distinguish between the lower and upper halves of the A scale). Slide the slide until the number on the D scale which is against 1 on the C cursor is the same as the number on the B cursor which is against the base number on the A scale. (Examples: A 8, B 2, C 1, D 2; A 27, B 3, C 1, D 3.)
Quadratic equations of the form formula_15 can be solved by first reducing the equation to the form formula_16 (where formula_17 and formula_18), and then sliding the index of the scale to the value formula_19 on the scale. The cursor is then moved along the rule until a position is found where the numbers on the and scales add up to formula_20. These two values are the roots of the equation.
The S, T, and ST scales are used for trig functions and multiples of trig functions, for angles in degrees.
For angles from around 5.7 up to 90 degrees, sines are found by comparing the S scale with C (or D) scale; though on many closed-body rules the S scale relates to the A scale instead, and what follows must be adjusted appropriately. The S scale has a second set of angles (sometimes in a different color), which run in the opposite direction, and are used for cosines. Tangents are found by comparing the T scale with the C (or D) scale for angles less than 45 degrees. For angles greater than 45 degrees the CI scale is used. Common forms such as formula_21 can be read directly from "x" on the S scale to the result on the D scale, when the C-scale index is set at "k". For angles below 5.7 degrees, sines, tangents, and radians are approximately equal, and are found on the ST or SRT (sines, radians, and tangents) scale, or simply divided by 57.3 degrees/radian. Inverse trigonometric functions are found by reversing the process.
Many slide rules have S, T, and ST scales marked with degrees and minutes (e.g. some Keuffel and Esser models (Doric duplex 5" models, for example), late-model Teledyne-Post Mannheim-type rules). So-called "decitrig" models use decimal fractions of degrees instead.
Base-10 logarithms and exponentials are found using the L scale, which is linear. Some slide rules have a Ln scale, which is for base e. Logarithms to any other base can be calculated by reversing the procedure for calculating powers of a number. For example, log2 values can be determined by lining up either leftmost or rightmost 1 on the C scale with 2 on the LL2 scale, finding the number whose logarithm is to be calculated on the corresponding LL scale, and reading the log2 value on the C scale.
Slide rules are not typically used for addition and subtraction, but it is nevertheless possible to do so using two different techniques.
The first method to perform addition and subtraction on the C and D (or any comparable scales) requires converting the problem into one of division. For addition, the quotient of the two variables plus one times the divisor equals their sum:
For subtraction, the quotient of the two variables minus one times the divisor equals their difference:
This method is similar to the addition/subtraction technique used for high-speed electronic circuits with the logarithmic number system in specialized computer applications like the Gravity Pipe (GRAPE) supercomputer and hidden Markov models.
The second method utilizes a sliding linear L scale available on some models. Addition and subtraction are performed by sliding the cursor left (for subtraction) or right (for addition) then returning the slide to 0 to read the result.
Using (almost) any strictly monotonic scales, other calculations can also be made with one movement. For example, reciprocal scales can be used for the equality formula_24(calculating parallel resistances, harmonic mean, etc.), and quadratic scales can be used to solve formula_25.
The width of the slide rule is quoted in terms of the nominal width of the scales. Scales on the most common "10-inch" models are actually 25 cm, as they were made to metric standards, though some rules offer slightly extended scales to simplify manipulation when a result overflows. Pocket rules are typically 5 inches. Models a couple of metres wide were made to be hung in classrooms for teaching purposes.
Typically the divisions mark a scale to a precision of two significant figures, and the user estimates the third figure. Some high-end slide rules have magnifier cursors that make the markings easier to see. Such cursors can effectively double the accuracy of readings, permitting a 10-inch slide rule to serve as well as a 20-inch model.
Various other conveniences have been developed. Trigonometric scales are sometimes dual-labeled, in black and red, with complementary angles, the so-called "Darmstadt" style. Duplex slide rules often duplicate some of the scales on the back. Scales are often "split" to get higher accuracy.
Circular slide rules come in two basic types, one with two cursors, and another with a free dish and one cursor. The dual cursor versions perform multiplication and division by holding a fast angle between the cursors as they are rotated around the dial. The onefold cursor version operates more like the standard slide rule through the appropriate alignment of the scales.
The basic advantage of a circular slide rule is that the widest dimension of the tool was reduced by a factor of about 3 (i.e. by π). For example, a 10 cm circular would have a maximum precision approximately equal to a 31.4 cm ordinary slide rule. Circular slide rules also eliminate "off-scale" calculations, because the scales were designed to "wrap around"; they never have to be reoriented when results are near 1.0—the rule is always on scale. However, for non-cyclical non-spiral scales such as S, T, and LL's, the scale width is narrowed to make room for end margins.
Circular slide rules are mechanically more rugged and smoother-moving, but their scale alignment precision is sensitive to the centering of a central pivot; a minute 0.1 mm off-centre of the pivot can result in a 0.2 mm worst case alignment error. The pivot, however, does prevent scratching of the face and cursors. The highest accuracy scales are placed on the outer rings. Rather than "split" scales, high-end circular rules use spiral scales for more complex operations like log-of-log scales. One eight-inch premium circular rule had a 50-inch spiral log-log scale. Around 1970, an inexpensive model from B. C. Boykin (Model 510) featured 20 scales, including 50-inch C-D (multiplication) and log scales. The RotaRule featured a friction brake for the cursor.
The main disadvantages of circular slide rules are the difficulty in locating figures along a dish, and limited number of scales. Another drawback of circular slide rules is that less-important scales are closer to the center, and have lower precisions. Most students learned slide rule use on the linear slide rules, and did not find reason to switch.
One slide rule remaining in daily use around the world is the E6B. This is a circular slide rule first created in the 1930s for aircraft pilots to help with dead reckoning. With the aid of scales printed on the frame it also helps with such miscellaneous tasks as converting time, distance, speed, and temperature values, compass errors, and calculating fuel use. The so-called "prayer wheel" is still available in flight shops, and remains widely used. While GPS has reduced the use of dead reckoning for aerial navigation, and handheld calculators have taken over many of its functions, the E6B remains widely used as a primary or backup device and the majority of flight schools demand that their students have some degree of proficiency in its use.
Proportion wheels are simple circular slide rules used in graphic design to calculate aspect ratios. Lining up the original and desired size values on the inner and outer wheels will display their ratio as a percentage in a small window. They are not as common since the advent of computerized layout, but
In 1952, Swiss watch company Breitling introduced a pilot's wristwatch with an integrated circular slide rule specialized for flight calculations: the Breitling Navitimer. The Navitimer circular rule, referred to by Breitling as a "navigation computer", featured airspeed, rate/time of climb/descent, flight time, distance, and fuel consumption functions, as well as kilometer—nautical mile and gallon—liter fuel amount conversion functions.
There are two main types of cylindrical slide rules: those with helical scales such as the Fuller, the Otis King and the Bygrave slide rule, and those with bars, such as the Thacher and some Loga models. In either case, the advantage is a much longer scale, and hence potentially greater precision, than afforded by a straight or circular rule.
Traditionally slide rules were made out of hard wood such as mahogany or boxwood with cursors of glass and metal. At least one high precision instrument was made of steel.
In 1895, a Japanese firm, Hemmi, started to make slide rules from bamboo, which had the advantages of being dimensionally stable, strong, and naturally self-lubricating. These bamboo slide rules were introduced in Sweden in September, 1933, and probably only a little earlier in Germany. Scales were made of celluloid, plastic, or painted aluminium. Later cursors were acrylics or polycarbonates sliding on Teflon bearings.
All premium slide rules had numbers and scales engraved, and then filled with paint or other resin. Painted or imprinted slide rules were viewed as inferior because the markings could wear off. Nevertheless, Pickett, probably America's most successful slide rule company, made all printed scales. Premium slide rules included clever catches so the rule would not fall apart by accident, and bumpers to protect the scales and cursor from rubbing on tabletops.
The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, shortly after John Napier's publication of the concept of the logarithm. In 1620 Edmund Gunter of Oxford developed a calculating device with a single logarithmic scale; with additional measuring tools it could be used to multiply and divide. In c. 1622, William Oughtred of Cambridge combined two handheld Gunter rules to make a device that is recognizably the modern slide rule. Oughtred became involved in a vitriolic controversy over priority, with his one-time student Richard Delamain and the prior claims of Wingate. Oughtred's ideas were only made public in publications of his student William Forster in 1632 and 1653.
In 1677, Henry Coggeshall created a two-foot folding rule for timber measure, called the Coggeshall slide rule, expanding the slide rule's use beyond mathematical inquiry.
In 1722, Warner introduced the two- and three-decade scales, and in 1755 Everard included an inverted scale; a slide rule containing all of these scales is usually known as a "polyphase" rule.
In 1815, Peter Mark Roget invented the log log slide rule, which included a scale displaying the logarithm of the logarithm. This allowed the user to directly perform calculations involving roots and exponents. This was especially useful for fractional powers.
In 1821, Nathaniel Bowditch, described in the "American Practical Navigator" a "sliding rule" that contained scales trigonometric functions on the fixed part and a line of log-sines and log-tans on the slider used to solve navigation problems.
In 1845, Paul Cameron of Glasgow introduced a nautical slide rule capable of answering navigation questions, including right ascension and declination of the sun and principal stars.
A more modern form of slide rule was created in 1859 by French artillery lieutenant Amédée Mannheim, "who was fortunate in having his rule made by a firm of national reputation and in having it adopted by the French Artillery." It was around this time that engineering became a recognized profession, resulting in widespread slide rule use in Europe–but not in the United States. There, Edwin Thacher's cylindrical rule took hold after 1881. The duplex rule was invented by William Cox in 1891, and was produced by Keuffel and Esser Co. of New York.
Astronomical work also required precise computations, and, in 19th-century Germany, a steel slide rule about two meters long was used at one observatory. It had a microscope attached, giving it accuracy to six decimal places..
In the 1920s, the novelist and engineer Nevil Shute Norway (he called his autobiography ) was "Chief Calculator" on the design of the British R100 airship for Vickers Ltd. from 1924. The stress calculations for each transverse frame required computations by a pair of "calculators" (people) using Fuller cylindrical slide rules for two or three months. The simultaneous equation contained up to seven unknown quantities, took about a week to solve, and had to be repeated with a different selection of slack wires if the guess on which of the eight radial wires were slack was wrong and one of the wires guessed to be slack was not slack. After months of labour filling perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with calculations "the truth stood revealed’ (and) produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience".
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the slide rule was the symbol of the engineer's profession in the same way the stethoscope is that of the medical profession.
German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun bought two "Nestler" slide rules in the 1930s. Ten years later he brought them with him when he moved to the U.S. after World War II to work on the American space effort. Throughout his life he never used any other slide rule. He used his two Nestlers while heading the NASA program that landed a man on the moon in July 1969.
Aluminium Pickett-brand slide rules were carried on Project Apollo space missions. The model N600-ES owned by Buzz Aldrin that flew with him to the moon on Apollo 11 was sold at auction in 2007. The model N600-ES taken along on Apollo 13 in 1970 is owned by the National Air and Space Museum.
Some engineering students and engineers carried ten-inch slide rules in belt holsters, a common sight on campuses even into the mid-1970s. Until the advent of the pocket digital calculator, students also might keep a ten- or twenty-inch rule for precision work at home or the office while carrying a five-inch pocket slide rule around with them.
In 2004, education researchers David B. Sher and Dean C. Nataro conceived a new type of slide rule based on "prosthaphaeresis", an algorithm for rapidly computing products that predates logarithms. However, there has been little practical interest in constructing one beyond the initial prototype.
Slide rules have often been specialized to varying degrees for their field of use, such as excise, proof calculation, engineering, navigation, etc., but some slide rules are extremely specialized for very narrow applications. For example, the John Rabone & Sons 1892 catalog lists a "Measuring Tape and Cattle Gauge", a device to estimate the weight of a cow from its measurements.
There were many specialized slide rules for photographic applications; for example, the actinograph of Hurter and Driffield was a two-slide boxwood, brass, and cardboard device for estimating exposure from time of day, time of year, and latitude.
Specialized slide rules were invented for various forms of engineering, business and banking. These often had common calculations directly expressed as special scales, for example loan calculations, optimal purchase quantities, or particular engineering equations. For example, the Fisher Controls company distributed a customized slide rule adapted to solving the equations used for selecting the proper size of industrial flow control valves.
Pilot balloon slide rules were used by meteorologists in weather services to determine the upper wind velocities from an ascending hydrogen or helium filled pilot balloon.
In World War II, bombardiers and navigators who required quick calculations often used specialized slide rules. One office of the U.S. Navy actually designed a generic slide rule "chassis" with an aluminium body and plastic cursor into which celluloid cards (printed on both sides) could be placed for special calculations. The process was invented to calculate range, fuel use and altitude for aircraft, and then adapted to many other purposes.
The E6-B is a circular slide rule used by pilots and navigators.
Circular slide rules to estimate ovulation dates and fertility are known as "wheel calculators".
The importance of the slide rule began to diminish as electronic computers, a new but rare resource in the 1950s, became more widely available to technical workers during the 1960s. (See History of computing hardware (1960s–present).)
Another step away from slide rules was the introduction of relatively inexpensive electronic desktop scientific calculators. The first included the Wang Laboratories LOCI-2, introduced in 1965, which used logarithms for multiplication and division; and the Hewlett-Packard HP 9100A, introduced in 1968. Both of these were programmable and provided exponential and logarithmic functions; the HP had trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, and tangent) and hyperbolic trigonometric functions as well. The HP used the CORDIC (coordinate rotation digital computer) algorithm, which allows for calculation of trigonometric functions using only shift and add operations. This method facilitated the development of ever smaller scientific calculators.
As with mainframe computing, the availability of these machines did not significantly affect the ubiquitous use of the slide rule until cheap hand held scientific electronic calculators became available in the mid-1970s, at which point, it rapidly declined.
The pocket-sized Hewlett-Packard HP-35 scientific calculator was the first handheld device of its type, but it cost US$395 in 1972. This was justifiable for some engineering professionals but too expensive for most students.
By 1975, basic four-function electronic calculators could be purchased for less than $50, and by 1976 the TI-30 scientific calculator was sold for less than $25 ($ adjusted for inflation).
Most people find slide rules difficult to understand and use. Even during their heyday, they never caught on with the general public. Addition and subtraction are not well-supported operations on slide rules and doing a calculation on a slide rule tends to be slower than on a calculator. This led engineers to use mathematical equations that favored operations that were easy on a slide rule over more accurate but complex functions; these approximations could lead to inaccuracies and mistakes. On the other hand, the spatial, manual operation of slide rules cultivates in the user an intuition for numerical relationships and scale that people who have used only digital calculators often lack. A slide rule will also display all the terms of a calculation along with the result, thus eliminating uncertainty about what calculation was actually performed.
A slide rule requires the user to separately compute the order of magnitude of the answer in order to position the decimal point in the results. For example, 1.5 × 30 (which equals 45) will show the same result as 1,500,000 × 0.03 (which equals 45,000). This separate calculation is less likely to lead to extreme calculation errors, but forces the user to keep track of magnitude in short-term memory (which is error-prone), keep notes (which is cumbersome) or reason about it in every step (which distracts from the other calculation requirements).
The typical arithmetic precision of a slide rule is about three significant digits, compared to many digits on digital calculators. As order of magnitude gets the greatest prominence when using a slide rule, users are less likely to make errors of false precision.
When performing a sequence of multiplications or divisions by the same number, the answer can often be determined by merely glancing at the slide rule without any manipulation. This can be especially useful when calculating percentages (e.g. for test scores) or when comparing prices (e.g. in dollars per kilogram). Multiple speed-time-distance calculations can be performed hands-free at a glance with a slide rule. Other useful linear conversions such as pounds to kilograms can be easily marked on the rule and used directly in calculations.
Being entirely mechanical, a slide rule does not depend on grid electricity or batteries. However, mechanical imprecision in slide rules that were poorly constructed or warped by heat or use will lead to errors.
Many sailors keep slide rules as backups for navigation in case of electric failure or battery depletion on long route segments. Slide rules are still commonly used in aviation, particularly for smaller planes. They are being replaced only by integrated, special purpose and expensive flight computers, and not general-purpose calculators. The E6B circular slide rule used by pilots has been in continuous production and remains available in a variety of models. Some wrist watches designed for aviation use still feature slide rule scales to permit quick calculations. The Citizen Skyhawk AT is a notable example.
Even in the 2000s, some people preferred a slide rule over an electronic calculator as a practical computing device. Others kept their old slide rules out of a sense of nostalgia, or collected them as a hobby.
A popular collectible model is the Keuffel & Esser "Deci-Lon", a premium scientific and engineering slide rule available both in a ten-inch (25 cm) "regular" ("Deci-Lon 10") and a five-inch "pocket" ("Deci-Lon 5") variant. Another prized American model is the eight-inch (20 cm) Scientific Instruments circular rule. Of European rules, Faber-Castell's high-end models are the most popular among collectors.
Although a great many slide rules are circulating on the market, specimens in good condition tend to be expensive. Many rules found for sale on are damaged or have missing parts, and the seller may not know enough to supply the relevant information. Replacement parts are scarce, expensive, and generally available only for separate purchase on individual collectors' web sites. The Keuffel and Esser rules from the period up to about 1950 are particularly problematic, because the end-pieces on the cursors, made of celluloid, tend to chemically break down over time.
There are still a handful of sources for brand new slide rules. The Concise Company of Tokyo, which began as a manufacturer of circular slide rules in July 1954, continues to make and sell them today. In September 2009, on-line retailer ThinkGeek introduced its own brand of straight slide rules, described as "faithful replica[s]" that are "individually hand tooled". These are no longer available in 2012. In addition, Faber-Castell had a number of slide rules in inventory, available for international purchase through their web store, until mid 2018. Proportion wheels are still used in graphic design.
Various slide rule simulator apps are available for Android and iOS-based smart phones and tablets.
Specialized slide rules such as the E6B used in aviation, and gunnery slide rules used in laying artillery are still used though no longer on a routine basis. These rules are used as part of the teaching and instruction process as in learning to use them the student also learns about the principles behind the calculations, it also allows the student to be able to use these instruments as a back up in the event that the modern electronics in general use fail.
The MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a collection of hundreds of slide rules, nomograms, and mechanical calculators. The Keuffel and Esser Company slide rule collection, from the slide rule manufacturer formerly located in Brooklyn, New York, was donated to MIT around 2005. Selected items from the collection are usually on display at the Museum. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28743 |
Sangha
Sangha is a Sanskrit word used in many Indian languages, including Pali, meaning "association", "assembly", "company" or "community". It was historically used in a political context to denote a governing assembly in a republic or a kingdom. It is used in modern times by groups such as the political party and social movement Rashtriya Seva Sangh. It has long been commonly used by religious associations including by Jains and Sikhs.
In Buddhism sangha refers to the monastic community of bhikkhus (monks) and bhikkhunis (nuns). These communities are traditionally referred to as the "bhikkhu-sangha" or "bhikkhuni-sangha". As a separate category, those who have attained any of the four stages of enlightenment, whether or not they are members of the monastic community, are referred to as the "āryasaṅgha" "noble Sangha".
According to the Theravada school, the term "sangha" does not refer to the community of sāvakas (lay followers) nor the community of Buddhists as a whole.
In a glossary of Buddhist terms, Richard Robinson et al. define sangha as:
Mahayana practitioners may use the word "sangha" as a collective term for all Buddhists, but the Theravada Pāli Canon uses the word "pariṣā" (Sanskrit "pariṣad") for the larger Buddhist community—the monks, nuns, lay men, and lay women who have taken the Three Refuges—with a few exceptions reserving "sangha" for a its original use in the Pāli Canon—the ideal ("arya") and the conventional.
The "Sangha" is the third of the Three Jewels in Buddhism. Common over all schools is that the "āryasaṅgha" is the foremost form of this third jewel. As for recognizable current-life forms, the interpretation of what is the Jewel depends on how a school defines Sangha. E.g. for many schools, monastic life is considered to provide the safest and most suitable environment for advancing toward enlightenment and liberation due to the temptations and vicissitudes of life in the world.
In Buddhism, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha each are described as having certain characteristics. These characteristics are chanted either on a daily basis and/or on Uposatha days, depending on the school of Buddhism. In Theravada tradition they are a part of daily chanting:
The Sangha: The Sangha of the Blessed One's disciples (sāvakas) is:
That is, the four pairs of persons, the eight types of individuals - This Sangha of the Blessed One's disciples is:
The Sangha was originally established by Gautama Buddha in the fifth century BCE in order to provide a means for those who wish to practice full-time in a direct and highly disciplined way, free from the restrictions and responsibilities of the household life. The Sangha also fulfils the function of preserving the Buddha’s original teachings and of providing spiritual support for the Buddhist lay-community. The Sangha has historically assumed responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the doctrine as well as the translation and propagation of the teachings of the Buddha.
The key feature of Buddhist monasticism is the adherence to the vinaya which contains an elaborate set of 227 main rules of conduct (known as "Patimokkha" in Pāli) including complete chastity, eating only before noon, and not indulging in malicious or salacious talk. Between midday and the next day, a strict life of scripture study, chanting, meditation, and occasional cleaning forms most of the duties for members of the Sangha. Transgression of rules carries penalties ranging from confession to permanent expulsion from the Sangha.
Saichō, the founder of the Japanese school of Tendai, decided to reduce the number of rules down to about 60 based on the Bodhisattva Precepts. In the Kamakura, many Japanese schools that originated in or were influenced by the Tendai such as Zen, Pure Land Buddhism and Nichiren Buddhism abolished traditional ordination in favor of this new model of the vinaya.
The Order of Interbeing, established in 1964 and associated with the Plum Village Tradition, has fourteen precepts observed by all monastics. They were written by Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Monks and nuns generally own a minimum of possessions due to their samaya as renunciants, including three robes, an alms bowl, a cloth belt, a needle and thread, a razor for shaving the head, and a water filter. In practice, they often have a few additional personal possessions.
Traditionally, Buddhist monks, nuns, and novices eschew ordinary clothes and wear robes. Originally the robes were sewn together from rags and stained with earth or other available dyes. The color of modern robes varies from community to community: saffron is characteristic for Theravada groups; blue, grey or brown for Mahayana Sangha members in Vietnam, maroon in Tibetan Buddhism, grey in Korea, and black in Japan.
A Buddhist monk is a "bhikkhu" in Pali, Sanskrit "bhikṣu" while a nun is a "bhikkhuni", Sanskrit "bhikṣuṇī". These words literally mean "beggar" or "one who lives by alms", and it was traditional in early Buddhism for the Sangha to go on "alms round" for food, walking or standing quietly in populated areas with alms bowls ready to receive food offerings each day. Although in the vinaya laid down by the Buddha the Sangha was not allowed to engage directly in agriculture, this later changed in some Mahayana schools when Buddhism moved to East Asia, so that in the East Asian cultural sphere, the monastic community traditionally has engaged in agriculture. An emphasis on working for food is attributed to additional training guidelines laid down by a Chan Buddhist master, Baizhang Huaihai, notably the phrase, "A day without work is a day without food" ().
The idea that all Buddhists, especially Sangha members, practice vegetarianism is a Western misperception.
In the Pali Canon, the Buddha rejected a suggestion by Devadatta to impose vegetarianism on the Sangha. According to the Pali Texts, the Buddha ate meat as long as the animal was not killed specifically for him. The Buddha in the Pali Canon allowed Sangha members to eat whatever food is donated to them by laypeople, except that they may not eat meat if they know or suspect the animal was killed specifically for them. Consequently, the Theravada tradition does not practice strict vegetarianism, although an individual may do so as his or her personal choice .
On this question, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions vary depending on their interpretation of their scriptures. In some Mahayana sutras, meat-eating is strongly discouraged and it is stated that the Buddha did not eat meat. In particular, East Asian Sangha members take on the Bodhisattva Precepts originating in the "Brahmajala Sutra", which has a vow of vegetarianism as part of the Triple Platform Ordination, where they receive the three sets of vows: śrāmaṇera/śrāmaṇerī (novitiate), monastic, and then Bodhisattva Precepts, whereas the Tibetan lineages transmit a tradition of Bodhisattva Precepts from Asanga's "Yogacarabhumi-sastra", which does not include a vow of vegetarianism. In some areas such as China, Korea and Vietnam the Sangha practices strict vegetarianism, while in other areas such as Japan or Tibet, they do not.
According to Mahayana sutras, Gautama Buddha always maintained that lay persons were capable of great wisdom and of reaching enlightenment. In some areas there has been a misconception that Theravada regards enlightenment to be an impossible goal for those outside the Sangha, but in Theravada suttas it is clearly recorded that the Buddha's uncle, a lay follower, reached enlightenment by hearing the Buddha's discourse, and there are many other such instances described in the Pāli Canon. Accordingly, emphasis on lay persons, as well as Sangha members, practicing the Buddhist path of morality, meditation, and wisdom is present in all major Buddhist schools.
Some scholars noted that "sangha" is frequently (and according to them, mistakenly) used in the West to refer to any sort of Buddhist community. The terms "parisa" and "gaṇa" are suggested as being more appropriate references to a community of Buddhists. "Pariṣā" means "following" and it refers to the four groups of the Buddha's followers: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. The Sanskrit term "gaṇa" has meanings of "flock, troop, multitude, number, tribe, series, class", and is usable as well in more mundane senses.
The Soka Gakkai, a new religious movement which began as a lay organization previously associated with Nichiren Shōshū in Japan, disputes the traditional definition of sangha. It interprets the meaning of the Three Jewels of Buddhism, in particular the "treasure of the Sangha," to include all people who practice Buddhism correctly, whether lay or clerical. After its excommunication in 1991, the organization re-published literature which then revised the terms such as" “Treasure of the Priesthood”" to "“The Buddhist Order”." Some, though not all, Nichiren Shu varying sects holds this position as do some progressive Mahayana movements as well.
Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism maintains the traditional definition of Sangha as the head temple priesthood collective as sole custodians and arbiters of Buddhist doctrine. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28747 |
Speed
In everyday use and in kinematics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of the change of its position; it is thus a scalar quantity. The average speed of an object in an interval of time is the distance travelled by the object divided by the duration of the interval; the instantaneous speed is the limit of the average speed as the duration of the time interval approaches zero.
Speed has the dimensions of distance divided by time. The SI unit of speed is the metre per second, but the most common unit of speed in everyday usage is the kilometre per hour or, in the US and the UK, miles per hour. For air and marine travel the knot is commonly used.
The fastest possible speed at which energy or information can travel, according to special relativity, is the speed of light in a vacuum "c" = metres per second (approximately or ). Matter cannot quite reach the speed of light, as this would require an infinite amount of energy. In relativity physics, the concept of rapidity replaces the classical idea of speed.
Italian physicist Galileo Galilei is usually credited with being the first to measure speed by considering the distance covered and the time it takes. Galileo defined speed as the distance covered per unit of time. In equation form, that is
where formula_2 is speed, formula_3 is distance, and formula_4 is time. A cyclist who covers 30 metres in a time of 2 seconds, for example, has a speed of 15 metres per second. Objects in motion often have variations in speed (a car might travel along a street at 50 km/h, slow to 0 km/h, and then reach 30 km/h).
Speed at some instant, or assumed constant during a very short period of time, is called "instantaneous speed". By looking at a speedometer, one can read the instantaneous speed of a car at any instant. A car travelling at 50 km/h generally goes for less than one hour at a constant speed, but if it did go at that speed for a full hour, it would travel 50 km. If the vehicle continued at that speed for half an hour, it would cover half that distance (25 km). If it continued for only one minute, it would cover about 833 m.
In mathematical terms, the instantaneous speed formula_2 is defined as the magnitude of the instantaneous velocity formula_6, that is, the derivative of the position formula_7 with respect to time:
If formula_9 is the length of the path (also known as the distance) travelled until time formula_4, the speed equals the time derivative of formula_9:
In the special case where the velocity is constant (that is, constant speed in a straight line), this can be simplified to formula_13. The average speed over a finite time interval is the total distance travelled divided by the time duration.
Different from instantaneous speed, "average speed" is defined as the total distance covered divided by the time interval. For example, if a distance of 80 kilometres is driven in 1 hour, the average speed is 80 kilometres per hour. Likewise, if 320 kilometres are travelled in 4 hours, the average speed is also 80 kilometres per hour. When a distance in kilometres (km) is divided by a time in hours (h), the result is in kilometres per hour (km/h).
Average speed does not describe the speed variations that may have taken place during shorter time intervals (as it is the entire distance covered divided by the total time of travel), and so average speed is often quite different from a value of instantaneous speed. If the average speed and the time of travel are known, the distance travelled can be calculated by rearranging the definition to
Using this equation for an average speed of 80 kilometres per hour on a 4-hour trip, the distance covered is found to be 320 kilometres.
Expressed in graphical language, the slope of a tangent line at any point of a distance-time graph is the instantaneous speed at this point, while the slope of a chord line of the same graph is the average speed during the time interval covered by the chord. Average speed of an object is
Vav = s÷t
Speed denotes only how fast an object is moving, whereas "velocity" describes both how fast and in which direction the object is moving. If a car is said to travel at 60 km/h, its "speed" has been specified. However, if the car is said to move at 60 km/h to the north, its "velocity" has now been specified.
The big difference can be discerned when considering movement around a circle. When something moves in a circular path and returns to its starting point, its average "velocity" is zero, but its average "speed" is found by dividing the circumference of the circle by the time taken to move around the circle. This is because the average "velocity" is calculated by considering only the displacement between the starting and end points, whereas the average "speed" considers only the total distance travelled.
Linear speed is the distance travelled per unit of time, while tangential speed (or tangential velocity) is the linear speed of something moving along a circular path. A point on the outside edge of a merry-go-round or turntable travels a greater distance in one complete rotation than a point nearer the center. Travelling a greater distance in the same time means a greater speed, and so linear speed is greater on the outer edge of a rotating object than it is closer to the axis. This speed along a circular path is known as "tangential speed" because the direction of motion is tangent to the circumference of the circle. For circular motion, the terms linear speed and tangential speed are used interchangeably, and both use units of m/s, km/h, and others.
Rotational speed (or "angular speed") involves the number of revolutions per unit of time. All parts of a rigid merry-go-round or turntable turn about the axis of rotation in the same amount of time. Thus, all parts share the same rate of rotation, or the same number of rotations or revolutions per unit of time. It is common to express rotational rates in revolutions per minute (RPM) or in terms of the number of "radians" turned in a unit of time. There are little more than 6 radians in a full rotation (2 radians exactly). When a direction is assigned to rotational speed, it is known as rotational velocity or angular velocity. Rotational velocity is a vector whose magnitude is the rotational speed.
Tangential speed and rotational speed are related: the greater the RPMs, the larger the speed in metres per second. Tangential speed is directly proportional to rotational speed at any fixed distance from the axis of rotation. However, tangential speed, unlike rotational speed, depends on radial distance (the distance from the axis). For a platform rotating with a fixed rotational speed, the tangential speed in the centre is zero. Towards the edge of the platform the tangential speed increases proportional to the distance from the axis. In equation form:
where "v" is tangential speed and ω (Greek letter omega) is rotational speed. One moves faster if the rate of rotation increases (a larger value for ω), and one also moves faster if movement farther from the axis occurs (a larger value for "r"). Move twice as far from the rotational axis at the centre and you move twice as fast. Move out three times as far and you have three times as much tangential speed. In any kind of rotating system, tangential speed depends on how far you are from the axis of rotation.
When proper units are used for tangential speed "v", rotational speed ω, and radial distance "r", the direct proportion of "v" to both "r" and ω becomes the exact equation
Thus, tangential speed will be directly proportional to "r" when all parts of a system simultaneously have the same ω, as for a wheel, disk, or rigid wand.
Units of speed include:
According to Jean Piaget, the intuition for the notion of speed in humans precedes that of duration, and is based on the notion of outdistancing. Piaget studied this subject inspired by a question asked to him in 1928 by Albert Einstein: "In what order do children acquire the concepts of time and speed?" Children's early concept of speed is based on "overtaking", taking only temporal and spatial orders into consideration, specifically: "A moving object is judged to be more rapid than another when at a given moment the first object is behind and a moment or so later ahead of the other object." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28748 |
Faster-than-light communication
Superluminal communication is a hypothetical process in which information is sent at faster-than-light (FTL) speeds. The current scientific consensus is that faster-than-light communication is not possible, and to date it has not been achieved in any experiment.
Superluminal communication is impossible because, in a Lorentz-invariant theory, it could be used to transmit information into the past. This contradicts causality and leads to logical paradoxes.
A number of theories and phenomena related to superluminal communication have been proposed or studied, including tachyons, quantum nonlocality, and wormholes.
Tachyonic particles are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light. These would allow superluminal communication, and for this reason are widely believed not to exist. By contrast, tachyonic fields - quantum fields with imaginary mass - certainly do exist, and exhibit superluminal group velocity under some circumstances. However, such fields have luminal signal velocity and do not allow superluminal communication.
Quantum mechanics is non-local in the sense that distant systems can be entangled. Entangled states lead to correlations in the results of otherwise random measurements, even when the measurements are made nearly simultaneously and at far distant points. The impossibility of superluminal communication led Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen to propose that quantum mechanics must be incomplete (see EPR paradox).
However, it is now well understood that quantum entanglement does not allow any influence or information to propagate superluminally. Technically, the microscopic causality postulate of axiomatic quantum field theory implies the impossibility of superluminal communication using any phenomena whose behavior can be described by orthodox quantum field theory. A special case of this is the no-communication theorem, which prevents communication using the quantum entanglement of a composite system shared between two spacelike-separated observers. Some authors have argued that using the no-communication theorem to deduce the impossibility of superluminal communication is circular, since the no-communication theorem assumes that the system is composite.
If wormholes are possible, then ordinary subluminal methods of communication could be sent through them to achieve superluminal transmission speeds. Considering the immense energy that current theories suggest would be required to open a wormhole large enough to pass spacecraft through, it may be that only atomic-scale wormholes would be practical to build, limiting their use solely to information transmission. Some hypotheses of wormhole formation would prevent them from ever becoming "timeholes", allowing superluminal communication without the additional complication of allowing communication with the past.
The terms "ultrawave" and "hyperwave" have been used by several authors, often interchangeably, to denote faster-than-light communications. Examples include:
The "Dirac communicator" features in several of the works of James Blish, notably his 1954 short story "". As alluded to in the title, any active device received the sum of all transmitted messages in universal space-time, in a single pulse, so that demultiplexing yielded information about the past, present, and future.
A later device was the ansible coined by Ursula K. Le Guin and used extensively in her Hainish cycle. Like Blish's device it provided instantaneous communication, but without the inconvenient beep.
The ansible is also a major plot element, nearly a MacGuffin, in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Much of the story line revolves around various parties attacking or repairing ansibles, and around the internal politics of ISC (InterStellar Communications), which holds a monopoly on the ansible technology.
Psychic links, generally considered to belong to pseudoscience, have been described as explainable by physical principles or unexplained, but they are claimed to operate instantaneously over large distances.
In the "Stargate" television series, characters are able to communicate instantaneously over long distances by transferring their consciousness into another person or being anywhere in the universe using "Ancient communication stones". It is not known how these stones operate, but the technology explained in the show usually revolves around wormholes for instant teleportation, faster-than-light, space-warping travel, and sometimes around quantum multiverses.
In Robert A. Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", twin telepathy was used to maintain communication with a distant spaceship.
Similar devices are present in the works of numerous others, such as Frank Herbert and Philip Pullman, who called his a "lodestone resonator".
Anne McCaffrey's "Crystal Singer" series posited an instantaneous communication device powered by rare "Black Crystal" from the planet Ballybran. Black Crystals cut from the same mineral deposit could be "tuned" to sympathetically vibrate with each other instantly, even when separated by interstellar distances, allowing instantaneous telephone-like voice and data communication. Similarly, in Gregory Keyes' series "The Age of Unreason", "aetherschreibers" use two halves of a single "chime" to communicate, aided by scientific alchemy. While the speed of communication is important, so is the fact that the messages cannot be overheard except by listeners with a piece of the same original crystal.
Stephen R. Donaldson, in his Gap cycle, proposed a similar system, "Symbiotic Crystalline Resonance Transmission", clearly ansible-type technology but very difficult to produce and limited to text messages.
In the story "With Folded Hands" (1947), by Jack Williamson, instant communication and power transfer through interstellar space is possible with something referred to as "rhodomagnetic waves".
In Ivan Yefremov's 1957 novel "Andromeda Nebula", a device for instant transfer of information and matter is made real by using "bipolar mathematics" to explore use of anti-gravitational shadow vectors through a zero field and the antispace, which enables them to make contact with the planet of Epsilon Tucanae.
In Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality novels and stories, interplanetary and interstellar communication is normally relayed from planet to planet, presumably at superluminal speed for each stage (at least between solar systems) but with a cumulative delay. For urgent communication there is the "instant message", which is effectively instantaneous but very expensive.
In Howard Taylor's web comic series Schlock Mercenary, superluminal communication is performed via the hypernet, a galaxy-spanning analogue to the internet. Through the hypernet, communications and data are routed through nanoscopic wormholes, using conventional electromagnetic signals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28751 |
Shah Jahan
Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram (5 January 1592 – 22 January 1666), better known by his regnal name Shah Jahan (Persian: ; "King of the World"), was the fifth Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1628 to 1658. He is widely considered one of the greatest Mughal emperors; under his reign the Mughal Empire reached the peak of its glory. Although an able military commander, Shah Jahan is perhaps best remembered for his architectural achievements. His reign ushered in the golden age of Mughal architecture. Shah Jahan commissioned many monuments, the best known of which is the Taj Mahal in Agra, which entombs his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. His relationship with Mumtaz Mahal has been heavily adapted into Indian art, literature, and cinema.
Shah Jahan was considered the most competent of Emperor Jahangir's four sons. Jahangir's death in late 1627 spurred a war of succession from which Shah Jahan emerged victorious after much intrigue. He put to death all of his rivals for the throne and crowned himself emperor in January 1628 in Agra under the regnal title "Shah Jahan" (which was originally given to him as a princely title). His rule saw many grand building projects, including the Red Fort and the Shah Jahan Mosque. Foreign affairs saw war with the Safavids and conflict with the Portuguese, but positive relations with the Ottoman Empire. Domestic concerns included putting down numerous rebellions, and a devastating famine from 1630-32.
In September 1657, Shah Jahan fell seriously ill. This set off a war of succession among his four sons in which his third son, Aurangzeb, emerged victorious and usurped his father. Shah Jahan recovered from his illness, but Aurangzeb put his father under house arrest in Agra Fort from July 1658 until his death in January 1666. He was laid to rest next to his wife in the Taj Mahal.
Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram was born on 5 January 1592 in Lahore, in modern-day Pakistan, and was the third son of Prince Salim (later known as 'Jahangir' upon his accession). His mother was a Rajput princess from Marwar called Princess Jagat Gosaini (her official name in Mughal chronicles was Bilqis Makani). The name "Khurram" ("joyous") was chosen for the young prince by his grandfather, Emperor Akbar, with whom the young prince shared a close relationship.
Just prior to Khurram's birth, a soothsayer had reportedly predicted to the childless Empress Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, Akbar's first wife and chief consort, that the still unborn child was destined for imperial greatness. So, when Khurram was born in 1592 and was only six days old, Akbar ordered that the prince be taken away from his mother and handed over to Ruqaiya so that he could grow up under her care, and Akbar could fulfil his wife's wish to raise a Mughal emperor. Ruqaiya assumed the primary responsibility for Khurram's upbringing and he grew up under her care. The two shared a close relationship with each other. Jahangir noted in his memoirs that Ruqaiya had loved his son, Khurram, "a thousand times more than if he had been her own [son]."
Khurram remained with her until he turned almost 14. After Akbar's death in 1605, the young prince was allowed to return to his father's household, and thus, be closer to his biological mother.
As a child, Khurram received a broad education befitting his status as a Mughal prince, which included martial training and exposure to a wide variety of cultural arts, such as poetry and Hindustani classical music, most of which was inculcated, according to court chroniclers, by Akbar and Ruqaiya. In 1605, as Akbar lay on his deathbed, Khurram, who at this point was 13, remained by his bedside and refused to move even after his mother tried to retrieve him. Given the politically uncertain times immediately preceding Akbar's death, Khurram was in a fair amount of physical danger from political opponents of his father, His conduct at this time can be understood as a precursor to the bravery that he would later be known for.
In 1605, his father succeeded to the throne, after crushing a rebellion by Prince Khusrau – Khurram remained distant from court politics and intrigues in the immediate aftermath of that event, which was apparently a conscious decision on Jahangir's part. As the third son, Khurram did not challenge the two major power blocs of the time, his father's and his step-brother's; thus, he enjoyed the benefits of imperial protection and luxury while being allowed to continue with his education and training. This relatively quiet and stable period of his life allowed Khurram to build his own support base in the Mughal court, which would be useful later on in his life.
Due to the long period of tensions between his father and step-brother, Khurram began to drift closer to his father and over time started to be considered the de facto heir-apparent by court chroniclers. This status was given official sanction when Jahangir granted the sarkar of Hissar-Feroza, which had traditionally been the fief of the heir-apparent, to Khurram in 1608. Nur Jahan was an intelligent and beautiful lady with an excellent educational background. She was an active participant in the decisions made by Jahangir. Slowly and gradually, she became the actual power behind the throne, as Jahangir became more indulgent in wine and opium. Coins began to be struck containing her name along with Jahangir's name. Her near and dear relatives acquired important positions in the Mughal court, termed as the Nur Jahan junta by historians. After the death of Jahangir in 1627, Nur Jahan was put under house arrest and led a quiet life.
In 1607, Khurram became engaged to Arjumand Banu Begum (1593–1631), who is also known as Mumtaz Mahal (Persian for "the chosen one of the Palace"). They met in their youth. They were about 14 and 15 when they were engaged, and five years later they got married. The young girl belonged to an illustrious Persian noble family that had been serving Mughal Emperors since the reign of Akbar. The family's patriarch was Mirza Ghiyas Beg, who was also known by his title I'timād-ud-Daulah or "Pillar of the State". He had been Jahangir's finance minister and his son, Asaf Khan – Arjumand Banu's father – played an important role in the Mughal court, eventually serving as Chief Minister. Her aunt was the Empress Nur Jahan and is thought to have played matchmaker in arranging the marriage.
The prince would have to wait five years before he was married in 1612 (1021 AH), on a date selected by the court astrologers as most conducive to ensuring a happy marriage. This was an unusually long engagement for the time. However, Shah Jahan first married Princess Kandahari Begum, the daughter of a great-grandson of Shah Ismail I of Persia with whom he had a daughter, his first child.
Politically speaking, the betrothal allowed Khurram to be considered as having officially entered manhood, and he was granted several jagir, including Hissar-Feroze and ennobled to a military rank of 8,000, which allowed him to take on official functions of the state, an important step in establishing his own claim to the throne.
In 1612, aged 20, Khurram married Arjumand Banu Begum, who became known by the title Mumtaz Mahal, on the auspicious date chosen by court astrologers. The marriage was a happy one and Khurram remained devoted to her. She bore him fourteen children, out of whom seven survived into adulthood. In addition, Khurram had two children from his first two wives.
Though there was genuine love between the two, Arjumand Banu Begum was a politically astute woman and served as a crucial advisor and confidante to her husband. Later on, as empress, Mumtaz Mahal wielded immense power, such as being consulted by her husband in state matters and being responsible for the imperial seal, which allowed her to review official documents in their final draft.
Mumtaz Mahal died at age 38 (7 July 1631) while giving birth to Gauhara Begum in Burhanpur. She died of a postpartum haemorrhage, which caused considerable blood-loss after a painful labour of thirty hours. Contemporary historians note that Princess Jahanara, aged 17, was so distressed by her mother's pain that she started distributing gems to the poor, hoping for divine intervention, and Shah Jahan was noted as being "paralysed by grief" and weeping fits. Her body was temporarily buried in a walled pleasure garden known as Zainabad, originally constructed by Shah Jahan's uncle Prince Daniyal along the Tapti River. Her death had a profound impact on Shah Jahan's personality and inspired the construction of the Taj Mahal, where she was later reburied.
In the intervening years Khurram had taken eight other wives, among which Kandahari Begum (m. 12 December 1609) and Izz un-Nisa Begum (m. 3 September 1617), the daughters of Muzaffar Husain Mirza Safawi and Shahnawaz Khan, son of Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khana, respectively. But according to court chroniclers, his relationship with his other wives was more out of political consideration, and they enjoyed only the status of being royal wives.
Prince Khurram showed extraordinary military talent. The first occasion for Khurram to test his military prowess was during the Mughal campaign against the Rajput state of Mewar, which had been a hostile force to the Mughals since Akbar's reign. In 1614, commanding an army numbering around 200,000, Khurram began the campaign against Mewar. After a year of a harsh war of attrition, Maharana Amar Singh I surrendered conditionally to the Mughal forces and became a vassal state of the Mughal Empire.
In 1617, Khurram was directed to deal with the Lodis in the Deccan to secure the Empire's southern borders and to restore imperial control over the region. His successes in these campaigns led to Jahangir granting him the title of Shah Jahan (Persian: "King of the World") and raised his military rank and allowed him a special throne in his Durbar, an unprecedented honour for a prince, thus further solidifying his status as crown prince.Edward S. Holden writes, "He was flattered by some, envied by others, loved by none."
Inheritance of power and wealth in the Mughal empire was not determined through primogeniture, but by princely sons competing to achieve military successes and consolidating their power at court. This often led to rebellions and wars of succession. As a result, a complex political climate surrounded the Mughal court in Khurram's formative years. In 1611 his father married Nur Jahan, the widowed daughter of a Persian noble. She rapidly became an important member of Jahangir's court and, together with her brother Asaf Khan, wielded considerable influence. Arjumand was Asaf Khan's daughter and her marriage to Khurram consolidated Nur Jahan and Asaf Khan's positions at court.
Court intrigues, however, including Nur Jahan's decision to have her daughter from her first marriage wed Prince Khurram's youngest brother Shahzada Shahryar and her support for his claim to the throne led to much internal division. Prince Khurram resented the influence Nur Jahan held over his father and was angered at having to play second fiddle to her favourite Shahryar, his half-brother and her son-in-law. When the Persians besieged Kandahar, Nur Jahan was at the helm of the affairs. She ordered Prince Khurram to march for Kandahar, but he refused. As a result of Prince Khurram's refusal to obey Nur Jahan's orders, Kandahar was lost to the Persians after a forty-five-day siege. Prince Khurram feared that in his absence Nur Jahan would attempt to poison his father against him and convince Jahangir to name Shahryar the heir in his place. This fear brought Prince Khurram to rebel against his father rather than fight against the Persians. In 1622 Prince Khurram raised an army with the support of Mahabat Khan and marched against his father and Nur Jahan.. He was defeated at Bilochpur in March 1623. Later he took refuge in Udaipur Mewar with Maharaja Karan Singh II . He was first lodged in Delwada Ki Haveli and subsequently shifted to Jagmandir Palace on his request. Prince Khurram exchanged his turban with maharana and that turban is still preserved in Pratap Museum, Udaipur.(R V Somani 1976). It is believed that the mosaic work of Jagmandir inspired him to use mosaic work in the Taj Mahal of Agra. His rebellion did not succeed and Khurram was forced to submit unconditionally. Although the prince was forgiven for his errors in 1626, tensions between Nur Jahan and her stepson continued to grow beneath the surface.
Upon the death of Jahangir in 1627, the wazir Asaf Khan, who had long been a quiet partisan of Prince Khurram, acted with unexpected forcefulness and determination to forestall his sister the empress Nur Jahan's plans to place Prince Shahryar on the throne. He put Nur Jahan in close confinement. He obtained control of Prince Khurram's three sons who were under her care. Asaf Khan also managed palace intrigues to ensure Prince Khurram's succession the throne. Prince Khurram succeeded to the Mughal throne as Abu ud-Muzaffar Shihab ud-Din Mohammad Sahib ud-Quiran ud-Thani Shah Jahan Padshah Ghazi (Urdu: شهاب الدین محمد خرم), or Shah Jahan.
His regnal name is divided into various parts. "Shihab ud-Din" mean "Star of the Faith", "Sahib al-Quiran ud-Thani" means "Second Lord of the Happy Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus". "Shah Jahan" means "King of the World", alluding to his pride in his Timurid roots and his ambitions. More epithets showed his secular and religious duties. He was also "Khalifat Panahi" ("Refuge of the Caliphate"), but "Zill-i Allahi", or the "Shadow of God on Earth".
His first act as ruler was to execute his chief rivals and imprison his stepmother Nur Jahan. Upon Shah Jahan's orders several executions took place on 23 January 1628. Those put to death included his own brother Shahryar; his nephews Dawar and Garshasp, sons of Shah Jahan's previously executed brother Prince Khusrau; and his cousins Tahmuras and Hoshang, sons of the late Prince Daniyal Mirza.
This allowed Shah Jahan to rule his empire without contention.
Evidence from the reign of Shah Jahan states that in 1648 the army consisted of 911,400 infantry, musketeers, and artillery men, and 185,000 Sowars commanded by princes and nobles.
His cultural and political initial steps have been described as a type of the Timurid Renaissance, in which he built historical and political bonds with his Timurd heritage mainly via his numerous unsuccessful military campaigns on his ancestral region of Balkh. In various forms, Shah Jahan appropriated his Timurid background and grafted it onto his imperial legacy.
During his reign the Marwari horse was introduced, becoming Shah Jahan's favourite, and various Mughal cannons were mass-produced in the Jaigarh Fort. Under his rule, the empire became a huge military machine and the nobles and their contingents multiplied almost fourfold, as did the demands for more revenue from their citizens. But due to his measures in the financial and commercial fields, it was a period of general stability—the administration was centralised and court affairs systematised.
The Mughal Empire continued to expand moderately during his reign as his sons commanded large armies on different fronts. India at the time was a rich centre of the arts, crafts and architecture, and some of the best of the architects, artisans, craftsmen, painters and writers of the world resided in Shah Jahan's empire. According to economist Angus Maddison, Mughal-era India's share of global gross domestic product (GDP) grew from 22.7% in 1600 to 24.4% in 1700, surpassing China to become the world's largest.
Shah Jahan annexed the Rajput kingdoms of Baglana, Mewar and Bundelkhand. He then chose his 16-year-old son Aurangzeb to serve in his place and subdue the rebellion by the Bundela Rajputs led by Jhujhar Singh.
A famine broke out in 1630–32 in Deccan, Gujarat and Khandesh as a result of three main crop failures. Two million died of starvation, grocers sold dogs' flesh and mixed powdered bones with flour. Parents ate their own children. Some villages were completely destroyed, their streets filled with human corpses. In response to the devastation, Shah Jahan set up "langar" (free kitchens) for the victims of the famine.
In 1632, Shah Jahan captured the fortress at Daulatabad, Maharashtra and imprisoned Husain Shah of the Nizam Shahi Kingdom of Ahmednagar. Golconda submitted in 1635 and then Bijapur in 1636. Shah Jahan appointed Aurangzeb as Viceroy of the Deccan, consisting of Khandesh, Berar, Telangana, and Daulatabad. During his viceroyalty, Aurangzeb conquered Baglana, then Golconda in 1656, and then Bijapur in 1657.
A rebellion of the Sikhs led by Guru Hargobind took place and in return Shah Jahan ordered the destruction of the Sikh temple in Lahore.
Shah Jahan and his sons captured the city of Kandahar in 1638 from the Safavids, prompting the retaliation of the Persians led by their ruler Abbas II of Persia, who recaptured it in 1649.
The Mughal armies were unable to recapture it despite repeated sieges during the Mughal–Safavid War. Shah Jahan also expanded the Mughal Empire to the west beyond the Khyber Pass to Ghazna and Kandahar.
While he was encamped in Baghdad, the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV met Shah Jahan's ambassadors, Mir Zarif and Mir Baraka, who presented 1000 pieces of finely embroidered cloth and even armour. Murad IV presented them with the finest weapons, saddles and Kaftans and ordered his forces to accompany the Mughals to the port of Basra, where they set sail to Thatta and finally Surat.
Shah Jahan gave orders in 1631 to Qasim Khan, the Mughal viceroy of Bengal, to drive out the Portuguese from their trading post at Port Hoogly. The post was heavily armed with cannons, battleships, fortified walls, and other instruments of war. The Portuguese were accused of trafficking by high Mughal officials and due to commercial competition the Mughal-controlled port of Saptagram began to slump. Shah Jahan was particularly outraged by the activities of Jesuits in that region, notably when they were accused of abducting peasants. On 25 September 1632 the Mughal Army raised imperial banners and gained control over the Bandel region and the garrison was punished.
Shah Jahan's treasurer was Sheikh Farid, who founded the city of Faridabad.
When Shah Jahan became ill in 1658, Dara Shikoh (Mumtaz Mahal's eldest son) assumed the role of regent in his father's stead, which swiftly incurred the animosity of his brothers. Upon learning of his assumption of the regency, his younger brothers, Shuja, Viceroy of Bengal, and Murad Baksh, Viceroy of Gujarat, declared their independence and marched upon Agra in order to claim their riches. Aurangzeb, the third son, gathered a well-trained army and became its chief commander. He faced Dara's army near Agra and defeated him during the Battle of Samugarh. Although Shah Jahan fully recovered from his illness, Aurangzeb declared him incompetent to rule and put him under house arrest in Agra Fort.
Jahanara Begum Sahib, Mumtaz Mahal's first daughter, voluntarily shared his 8-year confinement and nursed him in his dotage. In January 1666, Shah Jahan fell ill. Confined to bed, he became progressively weaker until, on 22 January, he commended the ladies of the imperial court, particularly his consort of later years Akbarabadi Mahal, to the care of Jahanara. After reciting the "Kal'ma" ("Laa ilaaha ill allah") and verses from the Quran, Shah Jahan died, aged 74.
Shah Jahan's chaplain Sayyid Muhammad Qanauji and Kazi Qurban of Agra came to the fort, moved his body to a nearby hall, washed it, enshrouded it and put it in a coffin of sandalwood.
Princess Jahanara had planned a state funeral which was to include a procession with Shah Jahan's body carried by eminent nobles followed by the notable citizens of Agra and officials scattering coins for the poor and needy. Aurangzeb refused to accommodate such ostentation. The body was taken to the Taj Mahal and was interred there next to the body of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
Shah Jahan left behind a grand legacy of structures constructed during his reign. He was one of the greatest patrons of Mughal architecture. His most famous building was the Taj Mahal, which he built out of love for his wife, the empress Mumtaz Mahal.
Its structure was drawn with great care and architects from all over the world were called for this purpose. The building took twenty years to complete and was constructed from white marble underlaid with brick. Upon his death, his son Aurangzeb had him interred in it next to Mumtaz Mahal. Among his other constructions are the Red Fort also called the "Delhi Fort" or "Lal Qila" in Urdu, large sections of Agra Fort, the Jama Masjid, the Wazir Khan Mosque, the Moti Masjid, the Shalimar Gardens, sections of the Lahore Fort, the Mahabat Khan Mosque in Peshawar, the Mini Qutub Minar in Hastsal, the Jahangir mausoleum—his father's tomb, the construction of which was overseen by his stepmother Nur Jahan and the Shahjahan Mosque. He also had the Peacock Throne, Takht e Taus, made to celebrate his rule. Shah Jahan also placed profound verses of the Quran on his masterpieces of architecture.
The Shah Jahan Mosque in Thatta, Sindh province of Pakistan (100 km / 60 miles from Karachi) was built during the reign of Shah Jahan in 1647. The mosque is built with red bricks with blue coloured glaze tiles probably imported from another Sindh's town of Hala. The mosque has overall 93 domes and it is the world's largest mosque having such a number of domes. It has been built keeping acoustics in mind. A person speaking inside one end of the dome can be heard at the other end when the speech exceeds 100 decibels. It has been on the tentative UNESCO World Heritage list since 1993.
Shah Jahan continued striking coins in three metals i.e. gold (mohur), silver (rupee) and copper (dam). His pre-accession coins bear the name Khurram.
Shah Jahan's full imperial title was:
"Shahanshah Al-Sultan al-'Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram, Malik-ul-Sultanat, Ala Hazrat Abu'l-Muzaffar Shahab ud-din Muhammad Shah Jahan I, Sahib-i-Qiran-i-Sani, Padshah Ghazi Zillu'llah, Firdaus-Ashiyani, Shahanshah—E—Sultanant Ul Hindiya Wal Mughaliya" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28752 |
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include "The Adventures of Augie March," "Henderson the Rain King", "Herzog", "Mr. Sammler's Planet", "Seize the Day", "Humboldt's Gift" and "Ravelstein". Bellow was widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors.
Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of "Henderson the Rain King", was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in "The Dean's December", called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from "Dangling Man") is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents, Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows, emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia. He had three elder siblings - sister Zelda (later Jane, born in 1907), brothers Moishe (later Maurice, born in 1908) and Schmuel (later Samuel, born in 1911). Bellow's family was Lithuanian-Jewish; his father was born in Vilnius. Bellow celebrated his birthday in June, although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community, it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar). Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:
A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, the city that formed the backdrop of many of his novels. Bellow's father, Abraham, had become an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger. Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17. She had been deeply religious and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age. Bellow's lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. Bellow also grew up reading Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century. In Chicago, he took part in anthroposophical studies at the Anthroposophical Society of Chicago. Bellow attended Tuley High School on Chicago's west side where he befriended fellow writer Isaac Rosenfeld. In his 1959 novel "Henderson the Rain King", Bellow modeled the character King Dahfu on Rosenfeld.
Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University. He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department was anti-Jewish. Instead, he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology. It has been suggested Bellow's study of anthropology had an influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his works. Bellow later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin.
Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see "Ravelstein"), John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."
In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. Many of the writers were radical: if they were not members of the Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers he had to suffer their taunts.
In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen, after discovering upon attempting to enlist in the armed forces that he had immigrated to the United States illegally as a child.
In 1943, Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.
During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, "Dangling Man" (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.
From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 1947, following a tour to promote his novel "The Victim", he moved into a large old house at 58 Orlin Street SE in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.
In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing "The Adventures of Augie March" (1953). Critics have remarked on the resemblance between Bellow's picaresque novel and the great 17th Century Spanish classic "Don Quixote". The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening paragraphs, and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style, "The Adventures of Augie March" established Bellow's reputation as a major author.
In 1958, Bellow once again taught at the University of Minnesota. During this time, he and his wife Sasha received psychoanalysis from University of Minnesota Psychology Professor Paul Meehl.
In the spring term of 1961 he taught creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras.
One of his students was William Kennedy, who was encouraged by Bellow to write fiction.
Bellow lived in New York City for a number of years, but he returned to Chicago in 1962 as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The committee's goal was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary approach to learning. Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom.
There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into the Hyde Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago vulgar but vital, and more representative of America than New York. He was able to stay in contact with old high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."
Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel "Herzog". Bellow was surprised at the commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novel "Humboldt's Gift". Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher. Bellow also used Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, anthroposophy, as a theme in the book, having attended a study group in Chicago. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.
Propelled by the success of "Humboldt's Gift", Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. In the 70-minute address he gave to an audience in Stockholm, Sweden, Bellow called on writers to be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.
The following year, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Bellow for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Bellow's lecture was entitled "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over."
From December 1981 to March 1982, Bellow was the Visiting Lansdowne Scholar at the University of Victoria (B.C.), and also held the title Writer-in-Residence.
Bellow traveled widely throughout his life, mainly to Europe, which he sometimes visited twice a year. As a young man, Bellow went to Mexico City to meet Leon Trotsky, but the expatriate Russian revolutionary was assassinated the day before they were to meet. Bellow's social contacts were wide and varied. He tagged along with Robert F. Kennedy for a magazine profile he never wrote, and was close friends with the author Ralph Ellison. His many friends included the journalist Sydney J. Harris and the poet John Berryman.
While sales of Bellow's first few novels were modest, that turned around with "Herzog". Bellow continued teaching well into his old age, enjoying its human interaction and exchange of ideas. He taught at Yale University, University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University, where he co-taught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss "Seize the Day"). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow moved in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on 5 April 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro, Vermont.
While he read voluminously, Bellow also played the violin and followed sports. Work was a constant for him, but he at times toiled at a plodding pace on his novels, frustrating the publishing company.
His early works earned him the reputation as a major novelist of the 20th century, and by his death he was widely regarded as one of the greatest living novelists. He was the first writer to win three National Book Awards in all award categories. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in "The New Republic", wrote:
Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce. His son by his first marriage, Greg Bellow, became a psychotherapist; Greg Bellow published "Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir" in 2013, nearly a decade after his father's death. Bellow's son by his second marriage, Adam, published a nonfiction book "In Praise of Nepotism" in 2003. Bellow's wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra (Sondra) Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, and Janis Freedman. In 2000, when he was 84, Bellow had his fourth child and first daughter, with Freedman.
The author's works speak to the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the countervailing ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness (or at least awareness). Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge. Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.
Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer." Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.
Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes. Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.
Martin Amis described Bellow as "The greatest American author ever, in my view".
For Linda Grant, "What Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive."
On the other hand, Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author were trying to revive the 19th-century European novel. In a private letter, Vladimir Nabokov once referred to Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity." Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum described Bellow's "Ravelstein" (2000) as the only book that rose above Bellow's failings as an author. Rosenbaum wrote,
Sam Tanenhaus wrote in "New York Times Book Review" in 2007:
But Tanenhaus went on to answer his question:
V. S. Pritchett praised Bellow, finding his shorter works to be his best. Pritchett called Bellow's novella "Seize the Day" a "small gray masterpiece."
As he grew older, Bellow moved decidedly away from leftist politics and became identified with cultural conservatism. His opponents included feminism, campus activism and postmodernism. Bellow also thrust himself into the often contentious realm of Jewish and African-American relations. Bellow was critical of multiculturalism and according to Alfred Kazin once said: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." Bellow distanced himself somewhat from these remarks, which he characterized as "off the cuff obviously and pedantic certainly." He, however, stood by his criticism of multiculturalism, writing:
Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. In a 2006 interview with "Stop Smiling" magazine, Studs Terkel said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night", when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend'. But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love "Seize the Day"."
Attempts to name a street after Bellow in his Hyde Park neighborhood were scotched by local alderman on the grounds that Bellow had made remarks about the neighborhood's current inhabitants that they considered racist. A one-block stretch of West Augusta Boulevard in Humboldt Park was named Saul Bellow Way in his honor instead.
Bellow is represented in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery with six portraits, including a photograph by Irving Penn, a painting by Sarah Yuster, a bust by Sara Miller, and drawings by Edward Sorel and Arthur Herschel Lidov. A copy of the Miller bust was installed at the Harold Washington Library Center in 1993.
Bellow's papers are held at the library of the University of Chicago.
"National Book Awards – 1954". National Book Foundation (NBF). Retrieved 2012-03-03. (With essay by Nathaniel Rich from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
"National Book Awards – 1965". NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-03. (With acceptance speech by Bellow and essay by Salvatore Scibona from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
"National Book Awards – 1971". NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-03. (With essay by Craig Morgan Teicher from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28754 |
Stereochemistry
Stereochemistry, a subdiscipline of chemistry, involves the study of the relative spatial arrangement of atoms that form the structure of molecules and their manipulation. The study of stereochemistry focuses on stereoisomers, which by definition have the same molecular formula and sequence of bonded atoms (constitution), but differ in the three-dimensional orientations of their atoms in space. For this reason, it is also known as 3D chemistry—the prefix "stereo-" means "three-dimensionality".
An important branch of stereochemistry is the study of chiral molecules. Stereochemistry spans the entire spectrum of organic, inorganic, biological, physical and especially supramolecular chemistry. Stereochemistry includes methods for determining and describing these relationships; the effect on the physical or biological properties these relationships impart upon the molecules in question, and the manner in which these relationships influence the reactivity of the molecules in question (dynamic stereochemistry).
Louis Pasteur could rightly be described as the first stereochemist, having observed in 1842 that salts of tartaric acid collected from wine production vessels could rotate the plane of polarized light, but that salts from other sources did not. This property, the only physical property in which the two types of tartrate salts differed, is due to optical isomerism. In 1874, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Joseph Le Bel explained optical activity in terms of the tetrahedral arrangement of the atoms bound to carbon. Kekulé used tetrahedral models earlier in 1862 but never published these; Emanuele Paternò probably knew of these but was the first to draw and discuss three dimensional structures, such as of 1,2-dibromoethane in the "Gazetta Chimica Italiana" in 1893.
Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules are part of a system for describing a molecule's stereochemistry. They rank the atoms around a stereocenter in a standard way, allowing the relative position of these atoms in the molecule to be described unambiguously. A Fischer projection is a simplified way to depict the stereochemistry around a stereocenter.
An often cited example of the importance of stereochemistry relates to the thalidomide disaster. Thalidomide is a pharmaceutical drug, first prepared in 1957 in Germany, prescribed for treating morning sickness in pregnant women. The drug was discovered to be teratogenic, causing serious genetic damage to early embryonic growth and development, leading to limb deformation in babies. Some of the several proposed mechanisms of teratogenicity involve a different biological function for the ("R")- and the ("S")-thalidomide enantiomers. In the human body however, thalidomide undergoes racemization: even if only one of the two enantiomers is administered as a drug, the other enantiomer is produced as a result of metabolism. Accordingly, it is incorrect to state that one stereoisomer is safe while the other is teratogenic. Thalidomide is currently used for the treatment of other diseases, notably cancer and leprosy. Strict regulations and controls have been enabled to avoid its use by pregnant women and prevent developmental deformations. This disaster was a driving force behind requiring strict testing of drugs before making them available to the public.
Many definitions that describe a specific conformer (IUPAC Gold Book) exist, developed by William Klyne and Vladimir Prelog, constituting their Klyne–Prelog system of nomenclature:
Torsional strain results from resistance to twisting about a bond. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28756 |
Spacetime
In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model which fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why different observers perceive where and when events occur differently.
Until the 20th century, it was assumed that the three-dimensional geometry of the universe (its spatial expression in terms of coordinates, distances, and directions) was independent of one-dimensional time. However, in 1905, Albert Einstein based on two postulates:
The logical consequence of taking these postulates together is the inseparable joining together of the four dimensions—hitherto assumed as independent—of space and time. Many counterintuitive consequences emerge: in addition to being independent of the motion of the light source, the speed of light is of constant magnitude regardless of the frame of reference in which it is measured; the distances and even temporal ordering of pairs of events change when measured in different inertial frames of reference (this is the relativity of simultaneity); and the linear additivity of velocities no longer holds true.
Einstein framed his theory in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies). His theory was an advance over Lorentz's 1904 theory of electromagnetic phenomena and Poincaré's electrodynamic theory. Although these theories included equations identical to those that Einstein introduced (i.e., the Lorentz transformation), they were essentially ad hoc models proposed to explain the results of various experiments—including the famous Michelson–Morley interferometer experiment—that were extremely difficult to fit into existing paradigms.
In 1908, Hermann Minkowski—once one of the math professors of a young Einstein in Zürich—presented a geometric interpretation of special relativity that fused time and the three spatial dimensions of space into a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space. A key feature of this interpretation is the formal definition of the spacetime interval. Although measurements of distance and time between events differ for measurements made in different reference frames, the spacetime interval is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which they are recorded.
Minkowski's geometric interpretation of relativity was to prove vital to Einstein's development of his 1915 general theory of relativity, wherein he showed how mass and energy curve flat spacetime into a pseudo-Riemannian manifold.
Non-relativistic classical mechanics treats time as a universal quantity of measurement which is uniform throughout space, and separate from space. Classical mechanics assumes that time has a constant rate of passage, independent of the observer's state of motion, or anything external. Furthermore, it assumes that space is Euclidean; it assumes that space follows the geometry of common sense.
In the context of special relativity, time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space, because the observed rate at which time passes for an object depends on the object's velocity relative to the observer. General relativity also provides an explanation of how gravitational fields can slow the passage of time for an object as seen by an observer outside the field.
In ordinary space, a position is specified by three numbers, known as dimensions. In the Cartesian coordinate system, these are called x, y, and z. A position in spacetime is called an "event", and requires four numbers to be specified: the three-dimensional location in space, plus the position in time (Fig. 1). Spacetime is thus four dimensional. An event is something that happens instantaneously at a single point in spacetime, represented by a set of coordinates "x", "y", "z" and "t".
The word "event" used in relativity should not be confused with the use of the word "event" in normal conversation, where it might refer to an "event" as something such as a concert, sporting event, or a battle. These are not mathematical "events" in the way the word is used in relativity, because they have finite durations and extents. Unlike the analogies used to explain events, such as firecrackers or lightning bolts, mathematical events have zero duration and represent a single point in spacetime.
The path of a particle through spacetime can be considered to be a succession of events. The series of events can be linked together to form a line which represents a particle's progress through spacetime. That line is called the particle's "world line".
Mathematically, spacetime is a "manifold", which is to say, it appears locally "flat" near each point in the same way that, at small enough scales, a globe appears flat. An extremely large scale factor, formula_1 (conventionally called the "speed-of-light") relates distances measured in space with distances measured in time. The magnitude of this scale factor (nearly in space being equivalent to one second in time), along with the fact that spacetime is a manifold, implies that at ordinary, non-relativistic speeds and at ordinary, human-scale distances, there is little that humans might observe which is noticeably different from what they might observe if the world were Euclidean. It was only with the advent of sensitive scientific measurements in the mid-1800s, such as the Fizeau experiment and the Michelson–Morley experiment, that puzzling discrepancies began to be noted between observation versus predictions based on the implicit assumption of Euclidean space.
In special relativity, an observer will, in most cases, mean a frame of reference from which a set of objects or events is being measured. This usage differs significantly from the ordinary English meaning of the term. Reference frames are inherently nonlocal constructs, and according to this usage of the term, it does not make sense to speak of an observer as having a location. In Fig. 1‑1, imagine that the frame under consideration is equipped with a dense lattice of clocks, synchronized within this reference frame, that extends indefinitely throughout the three dimensions of space. Any specific location within the lattice is not important. The latticework of clocks is used to determine the time and position of events taking place within the whole frame. The term "observer" refers to the entire ensemble of clocks associated with one inertial frame of reference. In this idealized case, every point in space has a clock associated with it, and thus the clocks register each event instantly, with no time delay between an event and its recording. A real observer, however, will see a delay between the emission of a signal and its detection due to the speed of light. To synchronize the clocks, in the data reduction following an experiment, the time when a signal is received will be corrected to reflect its actual time were it to have been recorded by an idealized lattice of clocks.
In many books on special relativity, especially older ones, the word "observer" is used in the more ordinary sense of the word. It is usually clear from context which meaning has been adopted.
Physicists distinguish between what one "measures" or "observes" (after one has factored out signal propagation delays), versus what one visually sees without such corrections. Failure to understand the difference between what one measures/observes versus what one sees is the source of much error among beginning students of relativity.
By the mid-1800s, various experiments such as the observation of the Arago spot and differential measurements of the speed of light in air versus water were considered to have proven the wave nature of light as opposed to a corpuscular theory. Propagation of waves was then assumed to require the existence of a "waving" medium; in the case of light waves, this was considered to be a hypothetical luminiferous aether. However, the various attempts to establish the properties of this hypothetical medium yielded contradictory results. For example, the Fizeau experiment of 1851 demonstrated that the speed of light in flowing water was less than the sum of the speed of light in air plus the speed of the water by an amount dependent on the water's index of refraction. Among other issues, the dependence of the partial aether-dragging implied by this experiment on the index of refraction (which is dependent on wavelength) led to the unpalatable conclusion that aether "simultaneously" flows at different speeds for different colors of light. The famous Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 (Fig. 1‑2) showed no differential influence of Earth's motions through the hypothetical aether on the speed of light, and the most likely explanation, complete aether dragging, was in conflict with the observation of stellar aberration.
George Francis FitzGerald in 1889, and Hendrik Lorentz in 1892, independently proposed that material bodies traveling through the fixed aether were physically affected by their passage, contracting in the direction of motion by an amount that was exactly what was necessary to explain the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. (No length changes occur in directions transverse to the direction of motion.)
By 1904, Lorentz had expanded his theory such that he had arrived at equations formally identical with those that Einstein were to derive later (i.e. the Lorentz transform), but with a fundamentally different interpretation. As a theory of dynamics (the study of forces and torques and their effect on motion), his theory assumed actual physical deformations of the physical constituents of matter. Lorentz's equations predicted a quantity that he called "local time", with which he could explain the aberration of light, the Fizeau experiment and other phenomena. However, Lorentz considered local time to be only an auxiliary mathematical tool, a trick as it were, to simplify the transformation from one system into another.
Other physicists and mathematicians at the turn of the century came close to arriving at what is currently known as spacetime. Einstein himself noted, that with so many people unraveling separate pieces of the puzzle, "the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905."
An important example is Henri Poincaré, who in 1898 argued that the simultaneity of two events is a matter of convention. In 1900, he recognized that Lorentz's "local time" is actually what is indicated by moving clocks by applying an explicitly "operational definition" of clock synchronization assuming constant light speed. In 1900 and 1904, he suggested the inherent undetectability of the aether by emphasizing the validity of what he called the principle of relativity, and in 1905/1906 he mathematically perfected Lorentz's theory of electrons in order to bring it into accordance with the postulate of relativity. While discussing various hypotheses on Lorentz invariant gravitation, he introduced the innovative concept of a 4-dimensional space-time by defining various four vectors, namely four-position, four-velocity, and four-force. He did not pursue the 4-dimensional formalism in subsequent papers, however, stating that this line of research seemed to "entail great pain for limited profit", ultimately concluding "that three-dimensional language seems the best suited to the description of our world". Furthermore, even as late as 1909, Poincaré continued to believe in the dynamical interpretation of the Lorentz transform. For these and other reasons, most historians of science argue that Poincaré did not invent what is now called special relativity.
In 1905, Einstein introduced special relativity (even though without using the techniques of the spacetime formalism) in its modern understanding as a theory of space and time. While his results are mathematically equivalent to those of Lorentz and Poincaré, Einstein showed that the Lorentz transformations are not the result of interactions between matter and aether, but rather concern the nature of space and time itself. He obtained all of his results by recognizing that the entire theory can be built upon two postulates: The principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of light speed.
Einstein performed his analysis in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies without reference to forces) rather than dynamics. His work introducing the subject was filled with vivid imagery involving the exchange of light signals between clocks in motion, careful measurements of the lengths of moving rods, and other such examples.
In addition, Einstein in 1905 superseded previous attempts of an electromagnetic mass-energy relation by introducing the general equivalence of mass and energy, which was instrumental for his subsequent formulation of the equivalence principle in 1907, which declares the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. By using the mass-energy equivalence, Einstein showed, in addition, that the gravitational mass of a body is proportional to its energy content, which was one of early results in developing general relativity. While it would appear that he did not at first think geometrically about spacetime, in the further development of general relativity Einstein fully incorporated the spacetime formalism.
When Einstein published in 1905, another of his competitors, his former mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski, had also arrived at most of the basic elements of special relativity. Max Born recounted a meeting he had made with Minkowski, seeking to be Minkowski's student/collaborator:
Minkowski had been concerned with the state of electrodynamics after Michelson's disruptive experiments at least since the summer of 1905, when Minkowski and David Hilbert led an advanced seminar attended by notable physicists of the time to study the papers of Lorentz, Poincaré et al. However, it is not at all clear when Minkowski began to formulate the geometric formulation of special relativity that was to bear his name, or to which extent he was influenced by Poincaré's four-dimensional interpretation of the Lorentz transformation. Nor is it clear if he ever fully appreciated Einstein's critical contribution to the understanding of the Lorentz transformations, thinking of Einstein's work as being an extension of Lorentz's work.
On 5 November 1907 (a little more than a year before his death), Minkowski introduced his geometric interpretation of spacetime in a lecture to the Göttingen Mathematical society with the title, "The Relativity Principle" ("Das Relativitätsprinzip"). On 21 September 1908, Minkowski presented his famous talk, "Space and Time" ("Raum und Zeit"), to the German Society of Scientists and Physicians. The opening words of "Space and Time" include Minkowski's famous statement that "Henceforth, space for itself, and time for itself shall completely reduce to a mere shadow, and only some sort of union of the two shall preserve independence." "Space and Time" included the first public presentation of spacetime diagrams (Fig. 1‑4), and included a remarkable demonstration that the concept of the "invariant interval" (discussed below), along with the empirical observation that the speed of light is finite, allows derivation of the entirety of special relativity.
The spacetime concept and the Lorentz group are closely connected to certain types of sphere, hyperbolic, or conformal geometries and their transformation groups already developed in the 19th century, in which invariant intervals analogous to the spacetime interval are used.
Einstein, for his part, was initially dismissive of Minkowski's geometric interpretation of special relativity, regarding it as "überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit" (superfluous learnedness). However, in order to complete his search for general relativity that started in 1907, the geometric interpretation of relativity proved to be vital, and in 1916, Einstein fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Minkowski, whose interpretation greatly facilitated the transition to general relativity. Since there are other types of spacetime, such as the curved spacetime of general relativity, the spacetime of special relativity is today known as "Minkowski spacetime."
In three-dimensions, the "distance" formula_2 between two points can be defined using the Pythagorean theorem:
Although two viewers may measure the x, y, and z position of the two points using different coordinate systems, the distance between the points will be the same for both (assuming that they are measuring using the same units). The distance is "invariant".
In special relativity, however, the distance between two points is no longer the same if measured by two different observers when one of the observers is moving, because of Lorentz contraction. The situation is even more complicated if the two points are separated in time as well as in space. For example, if one observer sees two events occur at the same place, but at different times, a person moving with respect to the first observer will see the two events occurring at different places, because (from their point of view) they are stationary, and the position of the event is receding or approaching. Thus, a different measure must be used to measure the effective "distance" between two events.
In four-dimensional spacetime, the analog to distance is the "interval". Although time comes in as a fourth dimension, it is treated differently than the spatial dimensions. Minkowski space hence differs in important respects from four-dimensional Euclidean space. The fundamental reason for merging space and time into spacetime is that space and time are separately not invariant, which is to say that, under the proper conditions, different observers will disagree on the length of time between two "events" (because of time dilation) or the distance between the two events (because of length contraction). But special relativity provides a new invariant, called the "spacetime interval", which combines distances in space and in time. All observers who measure time and distance carefully will find the same spacetime interval between any two events. Suppose an observer measures two events as being separated in time by formula_4 and a spatial distance formula_5. Then the spacetime interval formula_6 between the two events that are separated by a distance formula_7 in space and by formula_8 in the formula_9-coordinate is:
The constant formula_12, the speed of light, converts the units used to measure time (seconds) into units used to measure distance (meters).
Although for brevity, one frequently sees interval expressions expressed without deltas, including in most of the following discussion, it should be understood that in general, formula_13 means formula_7, etc. We are always concerned with "differences" of spatial or temporal coordinate values belonging to two events, and since there is no preferred origin, single coordinate values have no essential meaning.
The equation above is similar to the Pythagorean theorem, except with a minus sign between the formula_15 and the formula_16 terms. The spacetime interval is the quantity formula_17, not formula_18 itself. The reason is that unlike distances in Euclidean geometry, intervals in Minkowski spacetime can be negative. Rather than deal with square roots of negative numbers, physicists customarily regard formula_17 as a distinct symbol in itself, rather than the square of something.
Because of the minus sign, the spacetime interval between two distinct events can be zero. If formula_17 is positive, the spacetime interval is "timelike", meaning that two events are separated by more time than space. If formula_17 is negative, the spacetime interval is "spacelike", meaning that two events are separated by more space than time. Spacetime intervals are zero when formula_22. In other words, the spacetime interval between two events on the world line of something moving at the speed of light is zero. Such an interval is termed "lightlike" or "null". A photon arriving in our eye from a distant star will not have aged, despite having (from our perspective) spent years in its passage.
A spacetime diagram is typically drawn with only a single space and a single time coordinate. Fig. 2‑1 presents a spacetime diagram illustrating the "world lines" (i.e. paths in spacetime) of two photons, A and B, originating from the same event and going in opposite directions. In addition, C illustrates the world line of a slower-than-light-speed object. The vertical time coordinate is scaled by formula_12 so that it has the same units (meters) as the horizontal space coordinate. Since photons travel at the speed of light, their world lines have a slope of ±1. In other words, every meter that a photon travels to the left or right requires approximately 3.3 nanoseconds of time.
There are two sign conventions in use in the relativity literature:
These sign conventions are associated with the "metric signatures" and A minor variation is to place the time coordinate last rather than first. Both conventions are widely used within the field of study.
To gain insight in how spacetime coordinates measured by observers in different reference frames compare with each other, it is useful to work with a simplified setup with frames in a "standard configuration." With care, this allows simplification of the math with no loss of generality in the conclusions that are reached. In Fig. 2‑2, two Galilean reference frames (i.e. conventional 3-space frames) are displayed in relative motion. Frame S belongs to a first observer O, and frame S′ (pronounced "S prime") belongs to a second observer O′.
Fig. 2‑3a redraws Fig. 2‑2 in a different orientation. Fig. 2‑3b illustrates a spacetime diagram from the viewpoint of observer O. Since S and S′ are in standard configuration, their origins coincide at times "t" = 0 in frame S and "t"′ = 0 in frame S'. The "ct"′ axis passes through the events in frame S′ which have "x"′ = 0. But the points with "x"′ = 0 are moving in the "x"-direction of frame S with velocity "v", so that they are not coincident with the "ct" axis at any time other than zero. Therefore, the "ct"′ axis is tilted with respect to the "ct" axis by an angle "θ" given by
The "x"′ axis is also tilted with respect to the "x" axis. To determine the angle of this tilt, we recall that the slope of the world line of a light pulse is always ±1. Fig. 2‑3c presents a spacetime diagram from the viewpoint of observer O′. Event P represents the emission of a light pulse at "x"′ = 0, "ct"′ = −"a". The pulse is reflected from a mirror situated a distance "a" from the light source (event Q), and returns to the light source at "x"′ = 0, "ct"′ = "a" (event R).
The same events P, Q, R are plotted in Fig. 2‑3b in the frame of observer O. The light paths have slopes = 1 and −1 so that △PQR forms a right triangle. Since OP = OQ = OR, the angle between "x"′ and "x" must also be "θ".
While the rest frame has space and time axes that meet at right angles, the moving frame is drawn with axes that meet at an acute angle. The frames are actually equivalent. The asymmetry is due to unavoidable distortions in how spacetime coordinates can map onto a Cartesian plane, and should be considered no stranger than the manner in which, on a Mercator projection of the Earth, the relative sizes of land masses near the poles (Greenland and Antarctica) are highly exaggerated relative to land masses near the Equator.
In Fig. 2-4, event O is at the origin of a spacetime diagram, and the two diagonal lines represent all events that have zero spacetime interval with respect to the origin event. These two lines form what is called the "light cone" of the event O, since adding a second spatial dimension (Fig. 2‑5) makes the appearance that of two right circular cones meeting with their apices at O. One cone extends into the future (t>0), the other into the past (t<0).
A light (double) cone divides spacetime into separate regions with respect to its apex. The interior of the future light cone consists of all events that are separated from the apex by more "time" (temporal distance) than necessary to cross their "spatial distance" at lightspeed; these events comprise the "timelike future" of the event O. Likewise, the "timelike past" comprises the interior events of the past light cone. So in "timelike intervals" Δ"ct" is greater than Δ"x", making timelike intervals positive. The region exterior to the light cone consists of events that are separated from the event O by more "space" than can be crossed at lightspeed in the given "time". These events comprise the so-called "spacelike" region of the event O, denoted "Elsewhere" in Fig. 2‑4. Events on the light cone itself are said to be "lightlike" (or "null separated") from O. Because of the invariance of the spacetime interval, all observers will assign the same light cone to any given event, and thus will agree on this division of spacetime.
The light cone has an essential role within the concept of causality. It is possible for a not-faster-than-light-speed signal to travel from the position and time of O to the position and time of D (Fig. 2‑4). It is hence possible for event O to have a causal influence on event D. The future light cone contains all the events that could be causally influenced by O. Likewise, it is possible for a not-faster-than-light-speed signal to travel from the position and time of A, to the position and time of O. The past light cone contains all the events that could have a causal influence on O. In contrast, assuming that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light, any event, like e.g. B or C, in the spacelike region (Elsewhere), cannot either affect event O, nor can they be affected by event O employing such signalling. Under this assumption any causal relationship between event O and any events in the spacelike region of a light cone is excluded.
All observers will agree that for any given event, an event within the given event's future light cone occurs "after" the given event. Likewise, for any given event, an event within the given event's past light cone occurs "before" the given event. The before-after relationship observed for timelike-separated events remains unchanged no matter what the reference frame of the observer, i.e. no matter how the observer may be moving. The situation is quite different for spacelike-separated events. Fig. 2‑4 was drawn from the reference frame of an observer moving at From this reference frame, event C is observed to occur after event O, and event B is observed to occur before event O. From a different reference frame, the orderings of these non-causally-related events can be reversed. In particular, one notes that if two events are simultaneous in a particular reference frame, they are "necessarily" separated by a spacelike interval and thus are noncausally related. The observation that simultaneity is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame, is termed the relativity of simultaneity.
Fig. 2-6 illustrates the use of spacetime diagrams in the analysis of the relativity of simultaneity. The events in spacetime are invariant, but the coordinate frames transform as discussed above for Fig. 2‑3. The three events are simultaneous from the reference frame of an observer moving at From the reference frame of an observer moving at the events appear to occur in the order From the reference frame of an observer moving at , the events appear to occur in the order . The white line represents a "plane of simultaneity" being moved from the past of the observer to the future of the observer, highlighting events residing on it. The gray area is the light cone of the observer, which remains invariant.
A spacelike spacetime interval gives the same distance that an observer would measure if the events being measured were simultaneous to the observer. A spacelike spacetime interval hence provides a measure of "proper distance", i.e. the true distance = formula_27 Likewise, a timelike spacetime interval gives the same measure of time as would be presented by the cumulative ticking of a clock that moves along a given world line. A timelike spacetime interval hence provides a measure of the "proper time" = formula_28.
In Euclidean space (having spatial dimensions only), the set of points equidistant (using the Euclidean metric) from some point form a circle (in two dimensions) or a sphere (in three dimensions). In Minkowski spacetime (having one temporal and one spatial dimension), the points at some constant spacetime interval away from the origin (using the Minkowski metric) form curves given by the two equations
These equations describe two families of hyperbolae in an "x"–"ct" spacetime diagram, which are termed "invariant hyperbolae".
In Fig. 2‑7a, each magenta hyperbola connects all events having some fixed "spacelike" separation from the origin, while the green hyperbolae connect events of equal "timelike" separation.
Fig. 2‑7b reflects the situation in Minkowski spacetime (one temporal and two spatial dimensions) with the corresponding hyperboloids. Each "timelike" interval generates a hyperboloid of one sheet, while each spacelike interval generates a hyperboloid of two sheets.
The (1+2)-dimensional boundary between space- and timelike hyperboloids, established by the events forming a zero spacetime interval to the origin, is made up by degenerating the hyperboloids to the light cone. In (1+1)-dimensions the hyperbolae degenerate to the two grey 45°-lines depicted in Fig. 2‑7a.
The magenta hyperbolae, which cross the "x" axis, are termed "timelike" (in contrast to "spacelike") hyperbolae because all "distances" to the origin "along" the hyperbola are timelike intervals. Because of that, these hyperbolae represent actual paths that can be traversed by (constantly accelerating) particles in spacetime: between any two events on one hyperbola a causality relation is possible, because the inverse of the slope –representing the necessary speed– for all secants is less than formula_1. On the other hand, the green hyperbolae, which cross the "ct" axis, are termed "spacelike", because all intervals "along" these hyperbolae are spacelike intervals: no causality is possible between any two points on one of these hyperbolae, because all secants represent speeds larger than formula_1.
Fig. 2-8 illustrates the invariant hyperbola for all events that can be reached from the origin in a proper time of 5 meters (approximately ). Different world lines represent clocks moving at different speeds. A clock that is stationary with respect to the observer has a world line that is vertical, and the elapsed time measured by the observer is the same as the proper time. For a clock traveling at 0.3"c", the elapsed time measured by the observer is 5.24 meters (), while for a clock traveling at 0.7"c", the elapsed time measured by the observer is 7.00 meters (). This illustrates the phenomenon known as time dilation. Clocks that travel faster take longer (in the observer frame) to tick out the same amount of proper time, and they travel further along the x–axis within that proper time than they would have without time dilation. The measurement of time dilation by two observers in different inertial reference frames is mutual. If observer O measures the clocks of observer O′ as running slower in his frame, observer O′ in turn will measure the clocks of observer O as running slower.
Length contraction, like time dilation, is a manifestation of the relativity of simultaneity. Measurement of length requires measurement of the spacetime interval between two events that are simultaneous in one's frame of reference. But events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference are, in general, not simultaneous in other frames of reference.
Fig. 2-9 illustrates the motions of a 1 m rod that is traveling at 0.5 "c" along the "x" axis. The edges of the blue band represent the world lines of the rod's two endpoints. The invariant hyperbola illustrates events separated from the origin by a spacelike interval of 1 m. The endpoints O and B measured when = 0 are simultaneous events in the S′ frame. But to an observer in frame S, events O and B are not simultaneous. To measure length, the observer in frame S measures the endpoints of the rod as projected onto the "x"-axis along their world lines. The projection of the rod's "world sheet" onto the "x" axis yields the foreshortened length OC.
(not illustrated) Drawing a vertical line through A so that it intersects the "x"' axis demonstrates that, even as OB is foreshortened from the point of view of observer O, OA is likewise foreshortened from the point of view of observer O′. In the same way that each observer measures the other's clocks as running slow, each observer measures the other's rulers as being contracted.
In regards to mutual length contraction, 2‑9 illustrates that the primed and unprimed frames are mutually rotated by a hyperbolic angle (analogous to ordinary angles in Euclidean geometry). Because of this rotation, the projection of a primed meter-stick onto the unprimed x-axis is foreshortened, while the projection of an unprimed meter-stick onto the primed x′-axis is likewise foreshortened.
Mutual time dilation and length contraction tend to strike beginners as inherently self-contradictory concepts. If an observer in frame S measures a clock, at rest in frame S', as running slower than his', while S' is moving at speed "v" in S, then the principle of relativity requires that an observer in frame S' likewise measures a clock in frame S, moving at speed −"v" in S', as running slower than hers. How two clocks can run "both slower" than the other, is an important question that "goes to the heart of understanding special relativity."
This apparent contradiction stems from not correctly taking into account the different settings of the necessary, related measurements. These settings allow for a consistent explanation of the "only apparent" contradiction. It is not about the abstract ticking of two identical clocks, but about how to measure in one frame the temporal distance of two ticks of a moving clock. It turns out that in mutually observing the duration between ticks of clocks, each moving in the respective frame, different sets of clocks must be involved. In order to measure in frame S the tick duration of a moving clock W' (at rest in S'), one uses "two" additional, synchronized clocks W1 and W2 at rest in two arbitrarily fixed points in S with the spatial distance "d".
Conversely, for judging in frame S' the temporal distance of two events on a moving clock W (at rest in S), one needs two clocks at rest in S'.
The necessary recordings for the two judgements, with "one moving clock" and "two clocks at rest" in respectively S or S', involves two different sets, each with three clocks. Since there are different sets of clocks involved in the measurements, there is no inherent necessity that the measurements be reciprocally "consistent" such that, if one observer measures the moving clock to be slow, the other observer measures the one's clock to be fast.
Fig. 2-10 illustrates the previous discussion of mutual time dilation with Minkowski diagrams. The upper picture reflects the measurements as seen from frame S "at rest" with unprimed, rectangular axes, and frame S' "moving with "v" > 0", coordinatized by primed, oblique axes, slanted to the right; the lower picture shows frame S' "at rest" with primed, rectangular coordinates, and frame S "moving with −"v" < 0", with unprimed, oblique axes, slanted to the left.
Each line drawn parallel to a spatial axis ("x", "x′") represents a line of simultaneity. All events on such a line have the same time value ("ct", "ct′"). Likewise, each line drawn parallel to a temporal axis ("ct", "ct′") represents a line of equal spatial coordinate values ("x", "x′").
To show the mutual time dilation immediately in the upper picture, the event "D" may be constructed as the event at "x′" = 0 (the location of clock W' in S'), that is simultaneous to "C" ("OC" has equal spacetime interval as "OA") in S'. This shows that the time interval "OD" is longer than "OA", showing that the "moving" clock runs slower.
In the lower picture the frame S is moving with velocity -"v" in the frame S' at rest. The worldline of clock W is the "ct"-axis (slanted to the left), the worldline of W'1 is the vertical "ct′"-axis, and the worldline of W'2 is the vertical through event "C", with "ct′"-coordinate "D". The invariant hyperbola through event "C" scales the time interval "OC" to "OA", which is shorter than "OD"; also, "B" is constructed (similar to "D" in the upper pictures) as simultaneous to "A" in S, at "x" = 0. The result "OB" > "OC" corresponds again to above.
The word "measure" is important. In classical physics an observer cannot affect an observed object, but the object's state of motion "can" affect the observer's "observations" of the object.
Many introductions to special relativity illustrate the differences between Galilean relativity and special relativity by posing a series of "paradoxes". These paradoxes are, in fact, ill-posed problems, resulting from our unfamiliarity with velocities comparable to the speed of light. The remedy is to solve many problems in special relativity and to become familiar with its so-called counter-intuitive predictions. The geometrical approach to studying spacetime is considered one of the best methods for developing a modern intuition.
The twin paradox is a thought experiment involving identical twins, one of whom makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket, returning home to find that the twin who remained on Earth has aged more. This result appears puzzling because each twin observes the other twin as moving, and so at first glance, it would appear that each should find the other to have aged less. The twin paradox sidesteps the justification for mutual time dilation presented above by avoiding the requirement for a third clock. Nevertheless, the "twin paradox" is not a true paradox because it is easily understood within the context of special relativity.
The impression that a paradox exists stems from a misunderstanding of what special relativity states. Special relativity does not declare all frames of reference to be equivalent, only inertial frames. The traveling twin's frame is not inertial during periods when she is accelerating. Furthermore, the difference between the twins is observationally detectable: the traveling twin needs to fire her rockets to be able to return home, while the stay-at-home twin does not.
These distinctions should result in a difference in the twins' ages. The spacetime diagram of Fig. 2‑11 presents the simple case of a twin going straight out along the x axis and immediately turning back. From the standpoint of the stay-at-home twin, there is nothing puzzling about the twin paradox at all. The proper time measured along the traveling twin's world line from O to C, plus the proper time measured from C to B, is less than the stay-at-home twin's proper time measured from O to A to B. More complex trajectories require integrating the proper time between the respective events along the curve (i.e. the path integral) to calculate the total amount of proper time experienced by the traveling twin.
Complications arise if the twin paradox is analyzed from the traveling twin's point of view.
Weiss's nomenclature, designating the stay-at-home twin as Terence and the traveling twin as Stella, is hereafter used.
Stella is not in an inertial frame. Given this fact, it is sometimes incorrectly stated that full resolution of the twin paradox requires general relativity:
Although general relativity is not required to analyze the twin paradox, application of the Equivalence Principle of general relativity does provide some additional insight into the subject. Stella is not stationary in an inertial frame. Analyzed in Stella's rest frame, she is motionless for the entire trip. When she is coasting her rest frame is inertial, and Terence's clock will appear to run slow. But when she fires her rockets for the turnaround, her rest frame is an accelerated frame and she experiences a force which is pushing her as if she were in a gravitational field. Terence will appear to be high up in that field and because of gravitational time dilation, his clock will appear to run fast, so much so that the net result will be that Terence has aged more than Stella when they are back together. The theoretical arguments predicting gravitational time dilation are not exclusive to general relativity. Any theory of gravity will predict gravitational time dilation if it respects the principle of equivalence, including Newton's theory.
This introductory section has focused on the spacetime of special relativity, since it is the easiest to describe. Minkowski spacetime is flat, takes no account of gravity, is uniform throughout, and serves as nothing more than a static background for the events that take place in it. The presence of gravity greatly complicates the description of spacetime. In general relativity, spacetime is no longer a static background, but actively interacts with the physical systems that it contains. Spacetime curves in the presence of matter, can propagate waves, bends light, and exhibits a host of other phenomena. A few of these phenomena are described in the later sections of this article.
A basic goal is to be able to compare measurements made by observers in relative motion. If there is an observer O in frame S who has measured the time and space coordinates of an event, assigning this event three Cartesian coordinates and the time as measured on his lattice of synchronized clocks (see Fig. 1‑1). A second observer O′ in a different frame S′ measures the same event in her coordinate system and her lattice of synchronized clocks . With inertial frames, neither observer is under acceleration, and a simple set of equations allows us to relate coordinates to . Given that the two coordinate systems are in standard configuration, meaning that they are aligned with parallel coordinates and that when , the coordinate transformation is as follows:
Fig. 3-1 illustrates that in Newton's theory, time is universal, not the velocity of light. Consider the following thought experiment: The red arrow illustrates a train that is moving at 0.4 c with respect to the platform. Within the train, a passenger shoots a bullet with a speed of 0.4 c in the frame of the train. The blue arrow illustrates that a person standing on the train tracks measures the bullet as traveling at 0.8 c. This is in accordance with our naive expectations.
More generally, assuming that frame S′ is moving at velocity "v" with respect to frame S, then within frame S′, observer O′ measures an object moving with velocity . Velocity "u" with respect to frame S, since , , and , can be written as = = . This leads to and ultimately
which is the common-sense Galilean law for the addition of velocities.
The composition of velocities is quite different in relativistic spacetime. To reduce the complexity of the equations slightly, we introduce a common shorthand for the ratio of the speed of an object relative to light,
Fig. 3-2a illustrates a red train that is moving forward at a speed given by . From the primed frame of the train, a passenger shoots a bullet with a speed given by , where the distance is measured along a line parallel to the red axis rather than parallel to the black "x" axis. What is the composite velocity "u" of the bullet relative to the platform, as represented by the blue arrow? Referring to Fig. 3‑2b:
The relativistic formula for addition of velocities presented above exhibits several important features:
It is straightforward to obtain quantitative expressions for time dilation and length contraction. Fig. 3‑3 is a composite image containing individual frames taken from two previous animations, simplified and relabeled for the purposes of this section.
To reduce the complexity of the equations slightly, there are a variety of different shorthand notations for "ct" :
In Fig. 3-3a, segments "OA" and "OK" represent equal spacetime intervals. Time dilation is represented by the ratio "OB"/"OK". The invariant hyperbola has the equation where "k" = "OK", and the red line representing the world line of a particle in motion has the equation "w" = "x"/"β" = "xc"/"v". A bit of algebraic manipulation yields formula_44
The expression involving the square root symbol appears very frequently in relativity, and one over the expression is called the Lorentz factor, denoted by the Greek letter gamma formula_45:
If "v" is greater than or equal to "c", the expression for formula_45 becomes physically meaningless, implying that "c" is the maximum possible speed in nature. For any "v" greater than zero, the Lorentz factor will be greater than one, although the shape of the curve is such that for low speeds, the Lorentz factor is extremely close to one.
In Fig. 3-3b, segments "OA" and "OK" represent equal spacetime intervals. Length contraction is represented by the ratio "OB"/"OK". The invariant hyperbola has the equation , where "k" = "OK", and the edges of the blue band representing the world lines of the endpoints of a rod in motion have slope 1/"β" = "c"/"v". Event A has coordinates
("x", "w") = ("γk", "γβk"). Since the tangent line through A and B has the equation "w" = ("x" − "OB")/"β", we have "γβk" = ("γk" − "OB")/"β" and
The Galilean transformations and their consequent commonsense law of addition of velocities work well in our ordinary low-speed world of planes, cars and balls. Beginning in the mid-1800s, however, sensitive scientific instrumentation began finding anomalies that did not fit well with the ordinary addition of velocities.
Lorentz transformations are used to transform the coordinates of an event from one frame to another in special relativity.
The Lorentz factor appears in the Lorentz transformations:
The inverse Lorentz transformations are:
When "v" ≪ "c" and "x" is small enough, the "v"2/c2 and "vx"/"c"2 terms approach zero, and the Lorentz transformations approximate to the Galilean transformations.
formula_51 formula_52 etc., most often really mean formula_53 formula_54 etc. Although for brevity the Lorentz transformation equations are written without deltas, "x" means Δ"x", etc. We are, in general, always concerned with the space and time "differences" between events.
Calling one set of transformations the normal Lorentz transformations and the other the inverse transformations is misleading, since there is no intrinsic difference between the frames. Different authors call one or the other set of transformations the "inverse" set. The forwards and inverse transformations are trivially related to each other, since the "S" frame can only be moving forwards or reverse with respect to . So inverting the equations simply entails switching the primed and unprimed variables and replacing "v" with −"v".
Example: Terence and Stella are at an Earth-to-Mars space race. Terence is an official at the starting line, while Stella is a participant. At time , Stella's spaceship accelerates instantaneously to a speed of 0.5 "c". The distance from Earth to Mars is 300 light-seconds (about ). Terence observes Stella crossing the finish-line clock at . But Stella observes the time on her ship chronometer to be as she passes the finish line, and she calculates the distance between the starting and finish lines, as measured in her frame, to be 259.81 light-seconds (about ).
1).
There have been many dozens of derivations of the Lorentz transformations since Einstein's original work in 1905, each with its particular focus. Although Einstein's derivation was based on the invariance of the speed of light, there are other physical principles that may serve as starting points. Ultimately, these alternative starting points can be considered different expressions of the underlying principle of locality, which states that the influence that one particle exerts on another can not be transmitted instantaneously.
The derivation given here and illustrated in Fig. 3‑5 is based on one presented by Bais and makes use of previous results from the Relativistic Composition of Velocities, Time Dilation, and Length Contraction sections. Event P has coordinates ("w", "x") in the black "rest system" and coordinates in the red frame that is moving with velocity parameter . To determine and in terms of "w" and "x" (or the other way around) it is easier at first to derive the "inverse" Lorentz transformation.
The above equations are alternate expressions for the t and x equations of the inverse Lorentz transformation, as can be seen by substituting "ct" for "w", for , and "v"/"c" for "β". From the inverse transformation, the equations of the forwards transformation can be derived by solving for and .
The Lorentz transformations have a mathematical property called linearity, since "x" and "t" are obtained as linear combinations of "x" and "t", with no higher powers involved. The linearity of the transformation reflects a fundamental property of spacetime that was tacitly assumed in the derivation, namely, that the properties of inertial frames of reference are independent of location and time. In the absence of gravity, spacetime looks the same everywhere. All inertial observers will agree on what constitutes accelerating and non-accelerating motion. Any one observer can use her own measurements of space and time, but there is nothing absolute about them. Another observer's conventions will do just as well.
A result of linearity is that if two Lorentz transformations are applied sequentially, the result is also a Lorentz transformation.
Example: Terence observes Stella speeding away from him at 0.500 c, and he can use the Lorentz transformations with to relate Stella's measurements to his own. Stella, in her frame, observes Ursula traveling away from her at 0.250 c, and she can use the Lorentz transformations with to relate Ursula's measurements with her own. Because of the linearity of the transformations and the relativistic composition of velocities, Terence can use the Lorentz transformations with to relate Ursula's measurements with his own.
The Doppler effect is the change in frequency or wavelength of a wave for a receiver and source in relative motion. For simplicity, we consider here two basic scenarios: (1) The motions of the source and/or receiver are exactly along the line connecting them (longitudinal Doppler effect), and (2) the motions are at right angles to the said line (transverse Doppler effect). We are ignoring scenarios where they move along intermediate angles.
The classical Doppler analysis deals with waves that are propagating in a medium, such as sound waves or water ripples, and which are transmitted between sources and receivers that are moving towards or away from each other. The analysis of such waves depends on whether the source, the receiver, or both are moving relative to the medium. Given the scenario where the receiver is stationary with respect to the medium, and the source is moving directly away from the receiver at a speed of "vs" for a velocity parameter of "βs", the wavelength is increased, and the observed frequency "f" is given by
On the other hand, given the scenario where source is stationary, and the receiver is moving directly away from the source at a speed of "vr" for a velocity parameter of "βr", the wavelength is "not" changed, but the transmission velocity of the waves relative to the receiver is decreased, and the observed frequency "f" is given by
Light, unlike sound or water ripples, does not propagate through a medium, and there is no distinction between a source moving away from the receiver or a receiver moving away from the source. Fig. 3‑6 illustrates a relativistic spacetime diagram showing a source separating from the receiver with a velocity parameter "β", so that the separation between source and receiver at time "w" is "βw". Because of time dilation, . Since the slope of the green light ray is −1, . Hence, the relativistic Doppler effect is given by
Suppose that a source and a receiver, both approaching each other in uniform inertial motion along non-intersecting lines, are at their closest approach to each other. It would appear that the classical analysis predicts that the receiver detects no Doppler shift. Due to subtleties in the analysis, that expectation is not necessarily true. Nevertheless, when appropriately defined, transverse Doppler shift is a relativistic effect that has no classical analog. The subtleties are these:
In scenario (a), the point of closest approach is frame-independent and represents the moment where there is no change in distance versus time (i.e. dr/dt = 0 where r is the distance between receiver and source) and hence no longitudinal Doppler shift. The source observes the receiver as being illuminated by light of frequency "f", but also observes the receiver as having a time-dilated clock. In frame S, the receiver is therefore illuminated by blueshifted light of frequency
In scenario (b) the illustration shows the receiver being illuminated by light from when the source was closest to the receiver, even though the source has moved on. Because the source's clocks are time dilated as measured in frame S, and since dr/dt was equal to zero at this point, the light from the source, emitted from this closest point, is redshifted with frequency
Scenarios (c) and (d) can be analyzed by simple time dilation arguments. In (c), the receiver observes light from the source as being blueshifted by a factor of formula_45, and in (d), the light is redshifted. The only seeming complication is that the orbiting objects are in accelerated motion. However, if an inertial observer looks at an accelerating clock, only the clock's instantaneous speed is important when computing time dilation. (The converse, however, is not true.) Most reports of transverse Doppler shift refer to the effect as a redshift and analyze the effect in terms of scenarios (b) or (d).
In classical mechanics, the state of motion of a particle is characterized by its mass and its velocity. Linear momentum, the product of a particle's mass and velocity, is a vector quantity, possessing the same direction as the velocity: . It is a "conserved" quantity, meaning that if a closed system is not affected by external forces, its total linear momentum cannot change.
In relativistic mechanics, the momentum vector is extended to four dimensions. Added to the momentum vector is a time component that allows the spacetime momentum vector to transform like the spacetime position vector . In exploring the properties of the spacetime momentum, we start, in Fig. 3‑8a, by examining what a particle looks like at rest. In the rest frame, the spatial component of the momentum is zero, i.e. , but the time component equals "mc".
We can obtain the transformed components of this vector in the moving frame by using the Lorentz transformations, or we can read it directly from the figure because we know that and , since the red axes are rescaled by gamma. Fig. 3‑8b illustrates the situation as it appears in the moving frame. It is apparent that the space and time components of the four-momentum go to infinity as the velocity of the moving frame approaches "c".
We will use this information shortly to obtain an expression for the four-momentum.
Light particles, or photons, travel at the speed of "c", the constant that is conventionally known as the "speed of light". This statement is not a tautology, since many modern formulations of relativity do not start with constant speed of light as a postulate. Photons therefore propagate along a light-like world line and, in appropriate units, have equal space and time components for every observer.
A consequence of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is that light carries energy and momentum, and that their ratio is a constant: . Rearranging, , and since for photons, the space and time components are equal, "E/c" must therefore be equated with the time component of the spacetime momentum vector.
Photons travel at the speed of light, yet have finite momentum and energy. For this to be so, the mass term in "γmc" must be zero, meaning that photons are massless particles. Infinity times zero is an ill-defined quantity, but "E/c" is well-defined.
By this analysis, if the energy of a photon equals "E" in the rest frame, it equals in a moving frame. This result can be derived by inspection of Fig. 3‑9 or by application of the Lorentz transformations, and is consistent with the analysis of Doppler effect given previously.
Consideration of the interrelationships between the various components of the relativistic momentum vector led Einstein to several famous conclusions.
Another way of looking at the relationship between mass and energy is to consider a series expansion of at low velocity:
The second term is just an expression for the kinetic energy of the particle. Mass indeed appears to be another form of energy.
The concept of relativistic mass that Einstein introduced in 1905, "mrel", although amply validated every day in particle accelerators around the globe (or indeed in any instrumentation whose use depends on high velocity particles, such as electron microscopes, old-fashioned color television sets, etc.), has nevertheless not proven to be a "fruitful" concept in physics in the sense that it is not a concept that has served as a basis for other theoretical development. Relativistic mass, for instance, plays no role in general relativity.
For this reason, as well as for pedagogical concerns, most physicists currently prefer a different terminology when referring to the relationship between mass and energy. "Relativistic mass" is a deprecated term. The term "mass" by itself refers to the rest mass or invariant mass, and is equal to the invariant length of the relativistic momentum vector. Expressed as a formula,
This formula applies to all particles, massless as well as massive. For massless photons, it yields the same relationship as established earlier, .
Because of the close relationship between mass and energy, the four-momentum (also called 4‑momentum) is also called the energy-momentum 4‑vector. Using an uppercase "P" to represent the four-momentum and a lowercase p to denote the spatial momentum, the four-momentum may be written as
In physics, conservation laws state that certain particular measurable properties of an isolated physical system do not change as the system evolves over time. In 1915, Emmy Noether discovered that underlying each conservation law is a fundamental symmetry of nature. The fact that physical processes don't care "where" in space they take place (space translation symmetry) yields conservation of momentum, the fact that such processes don't care "when" they take place (time translation symmetry) yields conservation of energy, and so on. In this section, we examine the Newtonian views of conservation of mass, momentum and energy from a relativistic perspective.
To understand how the Newtonian view of conservation of momentum needs to be modified in a relativistic context, we examine the problem of two colliding bodies limited to a single dimension.
In Newtonian mechanics, two extreme cases of this problem may be distinguished yielding mathematics of minimum complexity:
For both cases (1) and (2), momentum, mass, and total energy are conserved. However, kinetic energy is not conserved in cases of inelastic collision. A certain fraction of the initial kinetic energy is converted to heat.
In case (2), two masses with momentums
and collide to produce a single particle of conserved mass traveling at the center of mass velocity of the original system, formula_69. The total momentum is conserved.
Fig. 3‑10 illustrates the inelastic collision of two particles from a relativistic perspective. The time components and add up to total "E/c" of the resultant vector, meaning that energy is conserved. Likewise, the space components and add up to form "p" of the resultant vector. The four-momentum is, as expected, a conserved quantity. However, the invariant mass of the fused particle, given by the point where the invariant hyperbola of the total momentum intersects the energy axis, is not equal to the sum of the invariant masses of the individual particles that collided. Indeed, it is larger than the sum of the individual masses: .
Looking at the events of this scenario in reverse sequence, we see that non-conservation of mass is a common occurrence: when an unstable elementary particle spontaneously decays into two lighter particles, total energy is conserved, but the mass is not. Part of the mass is converted into kinetic energy.
The freedom to choose any frame in which to perform an analysis allows us to pick one which may be particularly convenient. For analysis of momentum and energy problems, the most convenient frame is usually the "center-of-momentum frame" (also called the zero-momentum frame, or COM frame). This is the frame in which the space component of the system's total momentum is zero. Fig. 3‑11 illustrates the breakup of a high speed particle into two daughter particles. In the lab frame, the daughter particles are preferentially emitted in a direction oriented along the original particle's trajectory. In the COM frame, however, the two daughter particles are emitted in opposite directions, although their masses and the magnitude of their velocities are generally not the same.
In a Newtonian analysis of interacting particles, transformation between frames is simple because all that is necessary is to apply the Galilean transformation to all velocities. Since , the momentum . If the total momentum of an interacting system of particles is observed to be conserved in one frame, it will likewise be observed to be conserved in any other frame.
Conservation of momentum in the COM frame amounts to the requirement that both before and after collision. In the Newtonian analysis, conservation of mass dictates that . In the simplified, one-dimensional scenarios that we have been considering, only one additional constraint is necessary before the outgoing momenta of the particles can be determined—an energy condition. In the one-dimensional case of a completely elastic collision with no loss of kinetic energy, the outgoing velocities of the rebounding particles in the COM frame will be precisely equal and opposite to their incoming velocities. In the case of a completely inelastic collision with total loss of kinetic energy, the outgoing velocities of the rebounding particles will be zero.
Newtonian momenta, calculated as , fail to behave properly under Lorentzian transformation. The linear transformation of velocities is replaced by the highly nonlinear
The relativistic conservation law for energy and momentum replaces the three classical conservation laws for energy, momentum and mass. Mass is no longer conserved independently, because it has been subsumed into the total relativistic energy. This makes the relativistic conservation of energy a simpler concept than in nonrelativistic mechanics, because the total energy is conserved without any qualifications. Kinetic energy converted into heat or internal potential energy shows up as an increase in mass.
Example: Because of the equivalence of mass and energy, elementary particle masses are customarily stated in energy units, where electron volts. A charged pion is a particle of mass 139.57 MeV (approx. 273 times the electron mass). It is unstable, and decays into a muon of mass 105.66 MeV (approx. 207 times the electron mass) and an antineutrino, which has an almost negligible mass. The difference between the pion mass and the muon mass is 33.91 MeV.
Fig. 3‑12a illustrates the energy-momentum diagram for this decay reaction in the rest frame of the pion. Because of its negligible mass, a neutrino travels at very nearly the speed of light. The relativistic expression for its energy, like that of the photon, is which is also the value of the space component of its momentum. To conserve momentum, the muon has the same value of the space component of the neutrino's momentum, but in the opposite direction.
Algebraic analyses of the energetics of this decay reaction are available online, so Fig. 3‑12b presents instead a graphing calculator solution. The energy of the neutrino is 29.79 MeV, and the energy of the muon is Most of the energy is carried off by the near-zero-mass neutrino.
The topics in this section are of significantly greater technical difficulty than those in the preceding sections and are not essential for understanding "Introduction to curved spacetime."
Lorentz transformations relate coordinates of events in one reference frame to those of another frame. Relativistic composition of velocities is used to add two velocities together. The formulas to perform the latter computations are nonlinear, making them more complex than the corresponding Galilean formulas.
This nonlinearity is an artifact of our choice of parameters. We have previously noted that in an spacetime diagram, the points at some constant spacetime interval from the origin form an invariant hyperbola. We have also noted that the coordinate systems of two spacetime reference frames in standard configuration are hyperbolically rotated with respect to each other.
The natural functions for expressing these relationships are the hyperbolic analogs of the trigonometric functions. Fig. 4‑1a shows a unit circle with sin("a") and cos("a"), the only difference between this diagram and the familiar unit circle of elementary trigonometry being that "a" is interpreted, not as the angle between the ray and the , but as twice the area of the sector swept out by the ray from the . (Numerically, the angle and measures for the unit circle are identical.) Fig. 4‑1b shows a unit hyperbola with sinh("a") and cosh("a"), where "a" is likewise interpreted as twice the tinted area. Fig. 4‑2 presents plots of the sinh, cosh, and tanh functions.
For the unit circle, the slope of the ray is given by
In the Cartesian plane, rotation of point into point by angle "θ" is given by
In a spacetime diagram, the velocity parameter formula_72 is the analog of slope. The "rapidity", "φ", is defined by
where
The rapidity defined above is very useful in special relativity because many expressions take on a considerably simpler form when expressed in terms of it. For example, rapidity is simply additive in the collinear velocity-addition formula;
or in other words, formula_78
The Lorentz transformations take a simple form when expressed in terms of rapidity. The "γ" factor can be written as
Transformations describing relative motion with uniform velocity and without rotation of the space coordinate axes are called "boosts".
Substituting "γ" and "γβ" into the transformations as previously presented and rewriting in matrix form, the Lorentz boost in the may be written as
and the inverse Lorentz boost in the may be written as
In other words, Lorentz boosts represent hyperbolic rotations in Minkowski spacetime.
The advantages of using hyperbolic functions are such that some textbooks such as the classic ones by Taylor and Wheeler introduce their use at a very early stage.
Four‑vectors have been mentioned above in context of the energy-momentum , but without any great emphasis. Indeed, none of the elementary derivations of special relativity require them. But once understood, , and more generally tensors, greatly simplify the mathematics and conceptual understanding of special relativity. Working exclusively with such objects leads to formulas that are "manifestly" relativistically invariant, which is a considerable advantage in non-trivial contexts. For instance, demonstrating relativistic invariance of Maxwell's equations in their usual form is not trivial, while it is merely a routine calculation (really no more than an observation) using the field strength tensor formulation. On the other hand, general relativity, from the outset, relies heavily on , and more generally tensors, representing physically relevant entities. Relating these via equations that do not rely on specific coordinates requires tensors, capable of connecting such even within a "curved" spacetime, and not just within a "flat" one as in special relativity. The study of tensors is outside the scope of this article, which provides only a basic discussion of spacetime.
A 4-tuple, is a "4-vector" if its component "A i" transform between frames according to the Lorentz transformation.
If using coordinates, "A" is a if it transforms (in the ) according to
which comes from simply replacing "ct" with "A"0 and "x" with "A"1 in the earlier presentation of the Lorentz transformation.
As usual, when we write "x", "t", etc. we generally mean "Δx", "Δt" etc.
The last three components of a must be a standard vector in three-dimensional space. Therefore, a must transform like under Lorentz transformations as well as rotations.
As expected, the final components of the above are all standard corresponding to spatial , etc.
The first postulate of special relativity declares the equivalency of all inertial frames. A physical law holding in one frame must apply in all frames, since otherwise it would be possible to differentiate between frames. Newtonian momenta fail to behave properly under Lorentzian transformation, and Einstein preferred to change the definition of momentum to one involving rather than give up on conservation of momentum.
Physical laws must be based on constructs that are frame independent. This means that physical laws may take the form of equations connecting scalars, which are always frame independent. However, equations involving require the use of tensors with appropriate rank, which themselves can be thought of as being built up from .
It is a common misconception that special relativity is applicable only to inertial frames, and that it is unable to handle accelerating objects or accelerating reference frames. Actually, accelerating objects can generally be analyzed without needing to deal with accelerating frames at all. It is only when gravitation is significant that general relativity is required.
Properly handling accelerating frames does require some care, however. The difference between special and general relativity is that (1) In special relativity, all velocities are relative, but acceleration is absolute. (2) In general relativity, all motion is relative, whether inertial, accelerating, or rotating. To accommodate this difference, general relativity uses curved spacetime.
In this section, we analyze several scenarios involving accelerated reference frames.
The Dewan–Beran–Bell spaceship paradox (Bell's spaceship paradox) is a good example of a problem where intuitive reasoning unassisted by the geometric insight of the spacetime approach can lead to issues.
In Fig. 4‑4, two identical spaceships float in space and are at rest relative to each other. They are connected by a string which is capable of only a limited amount of stretching before breaking. At a given instant in our frame, the observer frame, both spaceships accelerate in the same direction along the line between them with the same constant proper acceleration. Will the string break?
When the paradox was new and relatively unknown, even professional physicists had difficulty working out the solution. Two lines of reasoning lead to opposite conclusions. Both arguments, which are presented below, are flawed even though one of them yields the correct answer.
The problem with the first argument is that there is no "frame of the spaceships." There cannot be, because the two spaceships measure a growing distance between the two. Because there is no common frame of the spaceships, the length of the string is ill-defined. Nevertheless, the conclusion is correct, and the argument is mostly right. The second argument, however, completely ignores the relativity of simultaneity.
A spacetime diagram (Fig. 4‑5) makes the correct solution to this paradox almost immediately evident. Two observers in Minkowski spacetime accelerate with constant magnitude formula_113 acceleration for proper time formula_114 (acceleration and elapsed time measured by the observers themselves, not some inertial observer). They are comoving and inertial before and after this phase. In Minkowski geometry, the length of the spacelike line segment formula_115 turns out to be greater than the length of the spacelike line segment formula_116.
The length increase can be calculated with the help of the Lorentz transformation. If, as illustrated in Fig. 4‑5, the acceleration is finished, the ships will remain at a constant offset in some frame formula_117 If formula_118 and formula_119 are the ships' positions in formula_120 the positions in frame formula_121 are:
The "paradox", as it were, comes from the way that Bell constructed his example. In the usual discussion of Lorentz contraction, the rest length is fixed and the moving length shortens as measured in frame formula_123. As shown in Fig. 4‑5, Bell's example asserts the moving lengths formula_116 and formula_125 measured in frame formula_123 to be fixed, thereby forcing the rest frame length formula_115 in frame formula_121 to increase.
Certain special relativity problem setups can lead to insight about phenomena normally associated with general relativity, such as event horizons. In the text accompanying Fig. 2‑7, the magenta hyperbolae represented actual paths that are tracked by a constantly accelerating traveler in spacetime. During periods of positive acceleration, the traveler's velocity just "approaches" the speed of light, while, measured in our frame, the traveler's acceleration constantly decreases.
Fig. 4‑6 details various features of the traveler's motions with more specificity. At any given moment, her space axis is formed by a line passing through the origin and her current position on the hyperbola, while her time axis is the tangent to the hyperbola at her position. The velocity parameter formula_72 approaches a limit of one as formula_9 increases. Likewise, formula_45 approaches infinity.
The shape of the invariant hyperbola corresponds to a path of constant proper acceleration. This is demonstrable as follows:
Fig. 4‑6 illustrates a specific calculated scenario. Terence (A) and Stella (B) initially stand together 100 light hours from the origin. Stella lifts off at time 0, her spacecraft accelerating at 0.01 c per hour. Every twenty hours, Terence radios updates to Stella about the situation at home (solid green lines). Stella receives these regular transmissions, but the increasing distance (offset in part by time dilation) causes her to receive Terence's communications later and later as measured on her clock, and she "never" receives any communications from Terence after 100 hours on his clock (dashed green lines).
After 100 hours according to Terence's clock, Stella enters a dark region. She has traveled outside Terence's timelike future. On the other hand, Terence can continue to receive Stella's messages to him indefinitely. He just has to wait long enough. Spacetime has been divided into distinct regions separated by an "apparent" event horizon. So long as Stella continues to accelerate, she can never know what takes place behind this horizon.
Newton's theories assumed that motion takes place against the backdrop of a rigid Euclidean reference frame that extends throughout all space and all time. Gravity is mediated by a mysterious force, acting instantaneously across a distance, whose actions are independent of the intervening space. In contrast, Einstein denied that there is any background Euclidean reference frame that extends throughout space. Nor is there any such thing as a force of gravitation, only the structure of spacetime itself.
In spacetime terms, the path of a satellite orbiting the Earth is not dictated by the distant influences of the Earth, Moon and Sun. Instead, the satellite moves through space only in response to local conditions. Since spacetime is everywhere locally flat when considered on a sufficiently small scale, the satellite is always following a straight line in its local inertial frame. We say that the satellite always follows along the path of a geodesic. No evidence of gravitation can be discovered following alongside the motions of a single particle.
In any analysis of spacetime, evidence of gravitation requires that one observe the relative accelerations of "two" bodies or two separated particles. In Fig. 5‑1, two separated particles, free-falling in the gravitational field of the Earth, exhibit tidal accelerations due to local inhomogeneities in the gravitational field such that each particle follows a different path through spacetime. The tidal accelerations that these particles exhibit with respect to each other do not require forces for their explanation. Rather, Einstein described them in terms of the geometry of spacetime, i.e. the curvature of spacetime. These tidal accelerations are strictly local. It is the cumulative total effect of many local manifestations of curvature that result in the "appearance" of a gravitational force acting at a long range from Earth.
Two central propositions underlie general relativity.
To go from the elementary description above of curved spacetime to a complete description of gravitation requires tensor calculus and differential geometry, topics both requiring considerable study. Without these mathematical tools, it is possible to write "about" general relativity, but it is not possible to demonstrate any non-trivial derivations.
In the discussion of special relativity, forces played no more than a background role. Special relativity assumes the ability to define inertial frames that fill all of spacetime, all of whose clocks run at the same rate as the clock at the origin. Is this really possible? In a nonuniform gravitational field, experiment dictates that the answer is no. Gravitational fields make it impossible to construct a "global" inertial frame. In small enough regions of spacetime, "local" inertial frames are still possible. General relativity involves the systematic stitching together of these local frames into a more general picture of spacetime.
Shortly after the publication of the general theory in 1916, a number of scientists pointed out that general relativity predicts the existence of gravitational redshift. Einstein himself suggested the following thought experiment: (i) Assume that a tower of height "h" (Fig. 5‑3) has been constructed. (ii) Drop a particle of rest mass "m" from the top of the tower. It falls freely with acceleration "g", reaching the ground with velocity , so that its total energy "E", as measured by an observer on the ground, is (iii) A mass-energy converter transforms the total energy of the particle into a single high energy photon, which it directs upward. (iv) At the top of the tower, an energy-mass converter transforms the energy of the photon "E" back into a particle of rest mass "m".
It must be that , since otherwise one would be able to construct a perpetual motion device. We therefore predict that , so that
A photon climbing in Earth's gravitational field loses energy and is redshifted. Early attempts to measure this redshift through astronomical observations were somewhat inconclusive, but definitive laboratory observations were performed by Pound & Rebka (1959) and later by Pound & Snider (1964).
Light has an associated frequency, and this frequency may be used to drive the workings of a clock. The gravitational redshift leads to an important conclusion about time itself: Gravity makes time run slower. Suppose we build two identical clocks whose rates are controlled by some stable atomic transition. Place one clock on top of the tower, while the other clock remains on the ground. An experimenter on top of the tower observes that signals from the ground clock are lower in frequency than those of the clock next to her on the tower. Light going up the tower is just a wave, and it is impossible for wave crests to disappear on the way up. Exactly as many oscillations of light arrive at the top of the tower as were emitted at the bottom. The experimenter concludes that the ground clock is running slow, and can confirm this by bringing the tower clock down to compare side-by-side with the ground clock. For a 1 km tower, the discrepancy would amount to about 9.4 nanoseconds per day, easily measurable with modern instrumentation.
Clocks in a gravitational field do not all run at the same rate. Experiments such as the Pound–Rebka experiment have firmly established curvature of the time component of spacetime. The Pound–Rebka experiment says nothing about curvature of the "space" component of spacetime. But the theoretical arguments predicting gravitational time dilation do not depend on the details of general relativity at all. "Any" theory of gravity will predict gravitational time dilation if it respects the principle of equivalence. This includes Newtonian gravitation. A standard demonstration in general relativity is to show how, in the "Newtonian limit" (i.e. the particles are moving slowly, the gravitational field is weak, and the field is static), curvature of time alone is sufficient to derive Newton's law of gravity.
Newtonian gravitation is a theory of curved time. General relativity is a theory of curved time "and" curved space. Given "G" as the gravitational constant, "M" as the mass of a Newtonian star, and orbiting bodies of insignificant mass at distance "r" from the star, the spacetime interval for Newtonian gravitation is one for which only the time coefficient is variable:
The formula_144 coefficient in front of formula_145 describes the curvature of time in Newtonian gravitation, and this curvature completely accounts for all Newtonian gravitational effects. As expected, this correction factor is directly proportional to formula_146 and formula_147, and because of the formula_148 in the denominator, the correction factor increases as one approaches the gravitating body, meaning that time is curved.
But general relativity is a theory of curved space "and" curved time, so if there are terms modifying the spatial components of the spacetime interval presented above, shouldn't their effects be seen on, say, planetary and satellite orbits due to curvature correction factors applied to the spatial terms?
The answer is that they "are" seen, but the effects are tiny. The reason is that planetary velocities are extremely small compared to the speed of light, so that for planets and satellites of the solar system, the formula_145 term dwarfs the spatial terms.
Despite the minuteness of the spatial terms, the first indications that something was wrong with Newtonian gravitation were discovered over a century-and-a-half ago. In 1859, Urbain Le Verrier, in an analysis of available timed observations of transits of Mercury over the Sun's disk from 1697 to 1848, reported that known physics could not explain the orbit of Mercury, unless there possibly existed a planet or asteroid belt within the orbit of Mercury. The perihelion of Mercury's orbit exhibited an excess rate of precession over that which could be explained by the tugs of the other planets. The ability to detect and accurately measure the minute value of this anomalous precession (only 43 arc seconds per tropical century) is testimony to the sophistication of 19th century astrometry.
As the famous astronomer who had earlier discovered the existence of Neptune "at the tip of his pen" by analyzing wobbles in the orbit of Uranus, Le Verrier's announcement triggered a two-decades long period of "Vulcan-mania", as professional and amateur astronomers alike hunted for the hypothetical new planet. This search included several false sightings of Vulcan. It was ultimately established that no such planet or asteroid belt existed.
In 1916, Einstein was to show that this anomalous precession of Mercury is explained by the spatial terms in the curvature of spacetime. Curvature in the temporal term, being simply an expression of Newtonian gravitation, has no part in explaining this anomalous precession. The success of his calculation was a powerful indication to Einstein's peers that the general theory of relativity could be correct.
The most spectacular of Einstein's predictions was his calculation that the curvature terms in the spatial components of the spacetime interval could be measured in the bending of light around a massive body. Light has a slope of ±1 on a spacetime diagram. Its movement in space is equal to its movement in time. For the weak field expression of the invariant interval, Einstein calculated an exactly equal but opposite sign curvature in its spatial components.
In Newton's gravitation, the formula_144 coefficient in front of formula_145 predicts bending of light around a star. In general relativity, the formula_154 coefficient in front of formula_155 predicts a "doubling" of the total bending.
The story of the 1919 Eddington eclipse expedition and Einstein's rise to fame is well told elsewhere.
In Newton's theory of gravitation, the only source of gravitational force is mass.
In contrast, general relativity identifies several sources of spacetime curvature in addition to mass. In the Einstein field equations,
the sources of gravity are presented on the right-hand side in formula_156 the stress–energy tensor.
Fig. 5‑5 classifies the various sources of gravity in the stress–energy tensor:
One important conclusion to be derived from the equations is that, colloquially speaking, "gravity itself creates gravity". Energy has mass. Even in Newtonian gravity, the gravitational field is associated with an energy, called the gravitational potential energy. In general relativity, the energy of the gravitational field feeds back into creation of the gravitational field. This makes the equations nonlinear and hard to solve in anything other than weak field cases. Numerical relativity is a branch of general relativity using numerical methods to solve and analyze problems, often employing supercomputers to study black holes, gravitational waves, neutron stars and other phenomena in the strong field regime.
In special relativity, mass-energy is closely connected to momentum. Just as space and time are different aspects of a more comprehensive entity called spacetime, mass-energy and momentum are merely different aspects of a unified, four-dimensional quantity called four-momentum. In consequence, if mass-energy is a source of gravity, momentum must also be a source. The inclusion of momentum as a source of gravity leads to the prediction that moving or rotating masses can generate fields analogous to the magnetic fields generated by moving charges, a phenomenon known as gravitomagnetism.
It is well known that the force of magnetism can be deduced by applying the rules of special relativity to moving charges. (An eloquent demonstration of this was presented by Feynman in volume II, of his "Lectures on Physics", available online.) Analogous logic can be used to demonstrate the origin of gravitomagnetism. In Fig. 5‑7a, two parallel, infinitely long streams of massive particles have equal and opposite velocities −"v" and +"v" relative to a test particle at rest and centered between the two. Because of the symmetry of the setup, the net force on the
central particle is zero. Assume so that velocities are simply additive. Fig. 5‑7b shows exactly the same setup, but in the frame of the upper stream. The test particle has a velocity of +"v", and the bottom stream has a velocity of +2"v". Since the physical situation has not changed, only the frame in which things are observed, the test particle should not be attracted towards either stream. But it is not at all clear that the forces exerted on the test particle are equal. (1) Since the bottom stream is moving faster than the top, each particle in the bottom stream has a larger mass energy than a particle in the top. (2) Because of Lorentz contraction, there are more particles per unit length in the bottom stream than in the top stream. (3) Another contribution to the active gravitational mass of the bottom stream comes from an additional pressure term which, at this point, we do not have sufficient background to discuss. All of these effects together would seemingly demand that the test particle be drawn towards the bottom stream.
The test particle is not drawn to the bottom stream because of a velocity-dependent force that serves to repel a particle "that is moving in the same direction as the bottom stream." This velocity-dependent gravitational effect is gravitomagnetism.
Matter in motion through a gravitomagnetic field is hence subject to so-called "frame-dragging" effects analogous to electromagnetic induction. It has been proposed that such gravitomagnetic forces underlie the generation of the relativistic jets (Fig. 5‑8) ejected by some rotating supermassive black holes.
Quantities that are directly related to energy and momentum should be sources of gravity as well, namely internal pressure and stress. Taken together, , momentum, pressure and stress all serve as sources of gravity: Collectively, they are what tells spacetime how to curve.
General relativity predicts that pressure acts as a gravitational source with exactly the same strength as mass-energy density. The inclusion of pressure as a source of gravity leads to dramatic differences between the predictions of general relativity versus those of Newtonian gravitation. For example, the pressure term sets a maximum limit to the mass of a neutron star. The more massive a neutron star, the more pressure is required to support its weight against gravity. The increased pressure, however, adds to the gravity acting on the star's mass. Above a certain mass determined by the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, the process becomes runaway and the neutron star collapses to a black hole.
The stress terms become highly significant when performing calculations such as hydrodynamic simulations of core-collapse supernovae.
These predictions for the roles of pressure, momentum and stress as sources of spacetime curvature are elegant and play an important role in theory. In regards to pressure, the early universe was radiation dominated, and it is highly unlikely that any of the relevant cosmological data (e.g. nucleosynthesis abundances, etc.) could be reproduced if pressure did not contribute to gravity, or if it did not have the same strength as a source of gravity as . Likewise, the mathematical consistency of the Einstein field equations would be broken if the stress terms did not contribute as a source of gravity.
Bondi distinguishes between different possible types of mass: (1) is the mass which acts as the source of a gravitational field; (2) is the mass which reacts to a gravitational field; (3) is the mass which reacts to acceleration.
In Newtonian theory,
In general relativity,
The classic experiment to measure the strength of a gravitational source (i.e. its active mass) was first conducted in 1797 by Henry Cavendish (Fig. 5‑9a). Two small but dense balls are suspended on a fine wire, making a torsion balance. Bringing two large test masses close to the balls introduces a detectable torque. Given the dimensions of the apparatus and the measurable spring constant of the torsion wire, the gravitational constant "G" can be determined.
To study pressure effects by compressing the test masses is hopeless, because attainable laboratory pressures are insignificant in comparison with the of a metal ball.
However, the repulsive electromagnetic pressures resulting from protons being tightly squeezed inside atomic nuclei are typically on the order of 1028 atm ≈ 1033 Pa ≈ 1033 kg·s−2m−1. This amounts to about 1% of the nuclear mass density of approximately 1018kg/m3 (after factoring in c2 ≈ 9×1016m2s−2).
If pressure does not act as a gravitational source, then the ratio formula_170 should be lower for nuclei with higher atomic number "Z", in which the electrostatic pressures are higher. (1968) did a Cavendish experiment using a Teflon mass suspended in a mixture of the liquids trichloroethylene and dibromoethane having the same buoyant density as the Teflon (Fig. 5‑9b). Fluorine has atomic number , while bromine has . Kreuzer found that repositioning the Teflon mass caused no differential deflection of the torsion bar, hence establishing active mass and passive mass to be equivalent to a precision of 5×10−5.
Although Kreuzer originally considered this experiment merely to be a test of the ratio of active mass to passive mass, Clifford Will (1976) reinterpreted the experiment as a fundamental test of the coupling of sources to gravitational fields.
In 1986, Bartlett and Van Buren noted that lunar laser ranging had detected a 2-km offset between the moon's center of figure and its center of mass. This indicates an asymmetry in the distribution of Fe (abundant in the Moon's core) and Al (abundant in its crust and mantle). If pressure did not contribute equally to spacetime curvature as does mass-energy, the moon would not be in the orbit predicted by classical mechanics. They used their measurements to tighten the limits on any discrepancies between active and passive mass to about 1×10−12.
The existence of gravitomagnetism was proven by Gravity Probe B , a satellite-based mission which launched on 20 April 2004. The spaceflight phase lasted until 2005. The mission aim was to measure spacetime curvature near Earth, with particular emphasis on gravitomagnetism.
Initial results confirmed the relatively large geodetic effect (which is due to simple spacetime curvature, and is also known as de Sitter precession) to an accuracy of about 1%. The much smaller frame-dragging effect (which is due to gravitomagnetism, and is also known as Lense–Thirring precession) was difficult to measure because of unexpected charge effects causing variable drift in the gyroscopes. Nevertheless, by August 2008, the frame-dragging effect had been confirmed to within 15% of the expected result, while the geodetic effect was confirmed to better than 0.5%.
Subsequent measurements of frame dragging by laser-ranging observations of the LARES, and satellites has improved on the measurement, with results (as of 2016) demonstrating the effect to within 5% of its theoretical value, although there has been some disagreement on the accuracy of this result.
Another effort, the Gyroscopes in General Relativity (GINGER) experiment, seeks to use three 6 m ring lasers mounted at right angles to each other 1400 m below the Earth's surface to measure this effect.
In Poincaré's conventionalist views, the essential criteria according to which one should select a Euclidean versus non-Euclidean geometry would be economy and simplicity. A realist would say that Einstein discovered spacetime to be non-Euclidean. A conventionalist would say that Einstein merely found it "more convenient" to use non-Euclidean geometry. The conventionalist would maintain that Einstein's analysis said nothing about what the geometry of spacetime "really" is.
Such being said,
In response to the first question, a number of authors including Deser, Grishchuk, Rosen, Weinberg, etc. have provided various formulations of gravitation as a field in a flat manifold. Those theories are variously called "bi-metric gravitation", the "field-theoretical approach to general relativity", and so forth. Kip Thorne has provided a popular review of these theories.
The flat spacetime paradigm posits that matter creates a gravitational field that causes rulers to shrink when they are turned from circumferential orientation to radial, and that causes the ticking rates of clocks to dilate. The flat spacetime paradigm is fully equivalent to the curved spacetime paradigm in that they both represent the same physical phenomena. However, their mathematical formulations are entirely different. Working physicists routinely switch between using curved and flat spacetime techniques depending on the requirements of the problem. The flat spacetime paradigm turns out to be especially convenient when performing approximate calculations in weak fields. Hence, flat spacetime techniques will be used when solving gravitational wave problems, while curved spacetime techniques will be used in the analysis of black holes.
For physical reasons, a spacetime continuum is mathematically defined as a four-dimensional, smooth, connected Lorentzian manifold formula_171. This means the smooth Lorentz metric formula_172 has signature formula_173. The metric determines the "", as well as determining the geodesics of particles and light beams. About each point (event) on this manifold, coordinate charts are used to represent observers in reference frames. Usually, Cartesian coordinates formula_174 are used. Moreover, for simplicity's sake, units of measurement are usually chosen such that the speed of light formula_1 is equal to 1.
A reference frame (observer) can be identified with one of these coordinate charts; any such observer can describe any event formula_176. Another reference frame may be identified by a second coordinate chart about formula_176. Two observers (one in each reference frame) may describe the same event formula_176 but obtain different descriptions.
Usually, many overlapping coordinate charts are needed to cover a manifold. Given two coordinate charts, one containing formula_176 (representing an observer) and another containing formula_180 (representing another observer), the intersection of the charts represents the region of spacetime in which both observers can measure physical quantities and hence compare results. The relation between the two sets of measurements is given by a non-singular coordinate transformation on this intersection. The idea of coordinate charts as local observers who can perform measurements in their vicinity also makes good physical sense, as this is how one actually collects physical data—locally.
For example, two observers, one of whom is on Earth, but the other one who is on a fast rocket to Jupiter, may observe a comet crashing into Jupiter (this is the event formula_176). In general, they will disagree about the exact location and timing of this impact, i.e., they will have different 4-tuples formula_174 (as they are using different coordinate systems). Although their kinematic descriptions will differ, dynamical (physical) laws, such as momentum conservation and the first law of thermodynamics, will still hold. In fact, relativity theory requires more than this in the sense that it stipulates these (and all other physical) laws must take the same form in all coordinate systems. This introduces tensors into relativity, by which all physical quantities are represented.
Geodesics are said to be time-like, null, or space-like if the tangent vector to one point of the geodesic is of this nature. Paths of particles and light beams in spacetime are represented by time-like and null (light-like) geodesics, respectively. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28758 |
SimCity (1989 video game)
SimCity, also known as Micropolis or SimCity Classic, is a city-building simulation video game developed by Will Wright and released for a number of platforms from 1989 to 1991. "SimCity" features two-dimensional graphics and an overhead perspective. The objective of the game is to create a city, develop residential and industrial areas, build infrastructure and collect taxes for further development of the city. Importance is put on increasing the standard of living of the population, maintaining a balance between the different sectors, and monitoring the region's environmental situation to prevent the settlement from declining and going bankrupt.
"SimCity" was independently developed by Will Wright beginning in 1985, and would not see its first release until 1989. Because the game lacked any of the arcade or action elements that dominated the video game market in the 1980s, video game publishers declined to release the title in fear of its commercial failure, until Brøderbund eventually agreed to distribute it. Although the game initially sold poorly, positive feedback from the gaming press boosted its sales. After becoming a best-seller, "SimCity" was released on several other platforms, most notably on the SNES in 1991, in which its gameplay was significantly improved with Nintendo's involvement.
"SimCity" was commercially successful, selling 300,000 units for personal computers and nearly 2 million units for the SNES. The game was recognized as a new phenomenon within the gaming industry, and it broke the widespread belief that computer games were primarily intended for children. "SimCity" was met with critical appraisal for its innovative and addictive gameplay in spite of the absence of platformer or shooter elements. Reviewers considered the game to be instructive and helpful toward the player's understanding of the basics of urban planning, politics and economics. "SimCity" received numerous awards from various news publishers and associations. The success of "SimCity" marked the beginning of the urban simulation genre of video games, as well as publisher Maxis's tradition of producing non-linear simulation games, one of which – "The Sims" – would surpass all its predecessors in popularity and become one of the best-selling franchises in the video game industry. It is considered one of the greatest video games of all time.
The objective of "SimCity" is to build and design a city, without specific goals to achieve. The player can mark land as being zoned as commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate, build a power grid, build transportation systems and take many other actions, to enhance the city. Once able to construct buildings in a particular area, the too-small-to-see residents, known as "Sims", may choose to construct and upgrade houses, apartment blocks, light or heavy industrial buildings, commercial buildings, hospitals, churches, and other structures. The Sims make these choices based on such factors as traffic levels, adequate electrical power, crime levels, and proximity to other types of buildings—for example, residential areas next to a power plant will seldom appreciate to the highest grade of housing. In the Super NES version and later, the player can also build rewards when they are given to them, such as a mayor's mansion or a casino.
The player may face disasters including flooding, tornadoes, fires (often from air disasters or shipwrecks), earthquakes and attacks by monsters. In addition, monsters and tornadoes can trigger train crashes by running into passing trains.
"SimCity" includes goal-centered, timed scenarios that could be won or lost depending on the performance of the player. The scenarios were an addition suggested by Brøderbund to make "SimCity" more like a game. The original cities were based on real world cities and attempted to re-create their general layout. While most scenarios either take place in a fictional timeline or have a city under siege by a fictional disaster, a handful of available scenarios are based on actual historical events.
"SimCity" was developed by game designer Will Wright. While working on the game "Raid on Bungeling Bay", in which the player flies a helicopter dropping bombs on islands, Wright found he enjoyed designing the islands in the level editor more than playing the actual game. This led him to develop increasingly sophisticated level editors. At the same time, Wright was cultivating a love of the intricacies and theories of urban planning and acknowledges the influence of System Dynamics which was developed by Jay Wright Forrester and whose book on the subject laid the foundations for what would become "SimCity". In addition, Wright also was inspired by reading "The Seventh Sally", a short story from "The Cyberiad" by Stanisław Lem, in which an engineer encounters a deposed tyrant, and creates a miniature city with artificial citizens for the tyrant to oppress. The game reflected Wright's approval of mass transit and disapproval of nuclear power; Maxis president Jeff Braun stated "We're pushing political agendas".
The first version of the game was developed for the Commodore 64 in 1985; it was not published for another four years. The original working title of SimCity was "Micropolis". The game was unusual in that it could neither be won nor lost; as a result, game publishers did not believe it was possible to market and sell such a game successfully. Brøderbund declined to publish the title when Wright proposed it, and he pitched it to a range of major game publishers without success. Finally, Braun, founder of the tiny software company Maxis, agreed to publish "SimCity" as one of two initial games for the company.
Wright and Braun returned to Brøderbund to formally clear the rights to the game in 1988, when "SimCity" was near completion. After Brøderbund executives Gary Carlston and Don Daglow saw "SimCity", they signed Maxis to a distribution deal for both of its initial games. With that, four years after initial development, "SimCity" was released for the Amiga and Macintosh platforms, followed by the IBM PC and Commodore 64 later in 1989.
After the original release on the Amiga and Macintosh, then the Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was ported to several other computer platforms and video game consoles, specifically the Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (which was later released on Virtual Console), EPOC32, mobile phone, Internet, Windows, FM-Towns, OLPC XO-1 and NeWS HyperLook on Sun Unix. The game is available as a multiplayer version for X11 Tcl/Tk on various Unix, Linux, DESQview and OS/2 operating systems. Certain versions have been re-released with various add-ons, including extra scenarios. An additional extra add on for the Windows version of "SimCity Classic" was a level editor. This editor could be opened without use of the disc. The level editor is a simple tool that allows the user to create grasslands, dirt land, and water portions. "SimCity Classic" was re-released in 1993 as part of the "SimClassics Volume 1" compilation alongside "SimAnt" and "SimLife" for PC, Mac and Amiga.
A version was developed in 1991 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but never released; a prototype version was found in 2017. On December 25, 2018, a ROM image of the unreleased NES version was released online by Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation.
The IBM version of "SimCity" is notable for the unusually large amount of graphics modes it supports; the game runs in CGA 640x200 mode, EGA 640x200 mode (for users with 200-line monitors), Tandy 640x200 mode, Hercules, EGA 640x350 mode (for users with 350-line monitors) and VGA 640x480 monochrome. A later release dropped all of the 200-line modes and added 640x480 color mode. Unlike most commercial PC games at the time, 320x200 resolutions were not used because they were inadequate for the amount of graphics detail the game needed. A port of "SimCity" was released for Windows 3.0 in 1992. It runs in the Windows GDI and does not support 256-color graphics or sound.
"SimCity" for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) features the same gameplay and scenario features; however, since it was developed and published by Nintendo, the company incorporated their own ideas. Instead of the Godzilla monster disaster, Bowser of the "Super Mario" series becomes the attacking monster, and once the city reaches a landmark 500,000 populace, the player receives a Mario statue that is placeable in the city. The Super NES port also features special buildings the player may receive as rewards, such as casinos, large parks, amusement parks, and expo centers; some of which would be incorporated into "SimCity 2000". A bank can be built which will allow a loan of $10,000 to be taken, but it must be paid back before another loan can be taken out. The game includes schools and hospitals, though they cannot be placed by the player; instead, the game will sometimes turn an empty residential lot into one. There are city classifications, such as becoming a metropolis at 100,000 people. It has some of the same pre-set scenarios in the PC and Mac versions and two new ones. One is in Las Vegas under attack by aliens and another called Freeland. Freeland has no water and no rewards buildings are given. Also unique to the Super NES version is a character named "Dr. Wright" (whose physical appearance is based on Will Wright) who acts as an adviser to the player. The soundtrack was composed by Soyo Oka. The edition is featured as Nintendo's Player's Choice as a million seller.
In August 1996, a version of the game entitled "BS Sim City Machizukuri Taikai" was broadcast to Japanese players via the Super Famicom's Satellaview subsystem. Later, a sequel titled "SimCity 64" was released for Nintendo 64DD, the Japan-only Nintendo 64 add-on.
A version for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was announced alongside the SNES version, and had been showcased at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, but the NES version was never properly released. However, prototype cartridges for the NES version were discovered in 2017, and one copy was obtained by video game preservationist Frank Cifaldi, who extensively documented its features compared to the original personal computer game and the SNES version. It featured a completely different soundtrack (also composed by Oka) than the SNES version; besides "Metropolis Theme", a composition that Oka herself considers one of her best works.
In January 2008, the "SimCity" source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license, renamed to "Micropolis" (the original working title) for trademark reasons, and developed by Don Hopkins. The release of the source code was motivated by the One Laptop Per Child program. The "Micropolis" source code has been translated to C++, integrated with Python and interfaced with both GTK+ and OpenLaszlo.
In 2008, Maxis established an online browser-based version of "SimCity". A second browser-based version was later released under the name "Micropolis". In 2013, a browser-based version was released, ported using JavaScript and HTML5, as "micropolisJS".
Since "Micropolis" is licensed under the GPL, users can do anything they want with it that conforms with the GPLthe only restriction is that they cannot call it "SimCity" (along with a few other limitations to protect EA's trademarks). This allows other, differently named projects to be forked from the Micropolis source code. Improvements to the open source code base that merits EA's approval may be incorporated into the official "OLPC SimCity" source code, to be distributed with the OLPC under the trademarked name "OLPC SimCity", but only after it has been reviewed and approved by EA.
"SimCity" was a financial success, selling one million copies by late 1992. In the United States, it was the ninth best-selling computer game from 1993 to 1999, with another 830,000 units sold. It was critically acclaimed and received significant recognition within a year after its initial release. As of December 1990, the game was reported to have won the following awards:
In addition, "SimCity" won the Origins Award for "Best Military or Strategy Computer Game" of 1989 in 1990, was named to "Computer Gaming World"s Hall of Fame for games readers highly rated over time, and the multiplayer X11 version of the game was also nominated in 1992 as the Best Product of the Year in "Unix World". "Macworld" named the Macintosh version of "SimCity" the Best Simulation Game of 1989, putting it into the Macintosh Game Hall of Fame. "Macworld", in their review, praised its graphics as well as its strategic gameplay, calling it "A challenging, dynamic game, realistic and unpredictable", and notes how "as the population grows the city's needs change." "SimCity" was named No. 4 "Ten Greatest PC Game Ever" by PC World in 2009. It was named one of the sixteen most influential games in history at Telespiele, a German technology and games trade show, in 2007. Sid Meier in 2008 named "SimCity" as one of the three most important innovations in videogame history, as it led to other games that encouraged players to create, not destroy. It was named No. 11 on IGN's 2009 "Top 25 PC Games of All Time" list. In 1996, "Computer Gaming World" declared "SimCity" the 6th-best computer game ever released.
"Entertainment Weekly" gave the game an B+.
In 1991, "PC Format" named "SimCity" one of the 50 best computer games ever. The editors called it "a town planner's dream".
The University of Southern California and University of Arizona used "SimCity" in urban planning and political science classes. Chuck Moss of "The Detroit News" found that Godzilla attacking the city in the 1972 Detroit scenario caused less destruction than the mayoralty of Coleman Young. In 1990 "The Providence Journal" invited five candidates for Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island to manage a "SimCity" town resembling the city. Victoria Lederberg blamed her close loss in the Democratic primary to the newspaper's description of her poor performance in the game; former mayor Buddy Cianci, the most successful player, won election that year.
The "SimCity Terrain Editor" was reviewed in 1989 in "Dragon" No. 147 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the expansion 4 out of 5 stars.
The ZX Spectrum version was voted number 4 in the "Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time".
On March 12, 2007, "The New York Times" reported that "SimCity" was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, the so-called game canon. The Library of Congress took up a video game preservation proposal and began with the games from this list, including "SimCity".
"SimCity" yielded several sequels. "Sim" games of many types were developedwith Will Wright and Maxis developing myriad titles including "SimEarth", "SimFarm", "SimTown", "Streets of SimCity", "SimCopter", "SimAnt", "SimLife", "", "SimTower", "SimPark", "SimSafari", and "The Sims", which spawned its own series, as well as the unreleased "SimsVille" and "SimMars." They also obtained licenses for some titles developed in Japan, such as "SimTower" and "Let's Take The A-Train" (released as "A-Train" outside Japan). "Spore", released in 2008, was originally going to be titled ""SimEverything""a name that Will Wright thought might accurately describe what he was trying to achieve.
"SimCity" inspired a new genre of video games. "Software toys" that were open-ended with no set objective were developed trying to duplicate "SimCity"'s success. The most successful was most definitely Wright's own "The Sims", which went on to be the best selling computer game of all time. The ideas pioneered in "SimCity" have been incorporated into real-world applications as well, as urban developers have recognized that the game's design was "gamification" of city planning by integrating numerous real-world systems for a city or region interacted to project growth or change. For example, VisitorVille simulates a city based on website statistics. Several real-world city improvement projects started with models inspired by "SimCity" prior to implementation, particularly with the onset of more-connected smart cities.
The series also spawned a "" collectible card game, produced by Mayfair Games. Rick Swan reviewed "Sim City: The Card Game" for "Dragon" magazine No. 221 (September 1995). Swan says that "While the card game doesn't scale the heights of the computer game, it comes close."
Dr. Wright from the Super NES version has made appearances in several video games. He is a non-player character in "", and an assist trophy in the "Super Smash Bros." series. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28760 |
Sofonisba Anguissola
Sofonisba Anguissola ( – 16 November 1625), also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting. She later became an official court painter to the king, Philip II, and adapted her style to the more formal requirements of official portraits for the Spanish court. After the queen's death, Philip helped arrange an aristocratic marriage for her. She moved to Sicily, and later Pisa and Genoa, where she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter.
Her most distinctive and attractive paintings are her portraits of herself and her family, which she painted before she moved to the Spanish court. In particular, her depictions of children were fresh and closely observed. At the Spanish court she painted formal state portraits in the prevailing official style, as one of the first, and most successful, of the relatively few female court painters. Later in her life she also painted religious subjects, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. In 1625, she died at age 93 in Palermo.
Anguissola's example, as much as her oeuvre, had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists, and her great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists. Her paintings can be seen at galleries in Boston (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum); Bergamo; Brescia; Budapest; Madrid (Museo del Prado); Naples; Siena; and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Her contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote that Anguissola "has shown greater application and better grace than any other woman of our age in her endeavors at drawing; she has thus succeeded not only in drawing, coloring and painting from nature, and copying excellently from others, but by herself has created rare and very beautiful paintings."
The origin and the name of the noble family are linked to an ancient Byzantine tradition, rich in historical details.
According to this tradition, the Anguissolas are descended from the Constantinopolitan warlord Galvano Sordo or Galvano de Soardi/Sourdi (Σούρδη, a family name still in use today in Greece, Constantinople and Smyrna). In 717, Galvano served in the army of the Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian, and "with an ingenious artificial fire, contributed to liberate the city of Constantinople from the Saracens who had kept it besieged by land and sea”. This “artificial fire” was the so-called Greek fire, an incendiary weapon developed in the late 7th century, which was responsible for many key Byzantine military victories, most notably the salvation of Constantinople from two Arab sieges, thus securing the Empire's survival.
Since the shield of the Sourdi carried the effigy of an asp (in Latin: "anguis"), after Galvano’s victory over the Umayyads, his brothers-in-arms and the people of Constantinople exclaimed: ""Anguis sola fecit victoriam"!", i.e.: "The snake alone brought the victory!" This saying became very popular, and Galvano himself was nicknamed "Anguissola". The emperor eventually bestowed the Anguissola surname to all his descendants. In this regard, it has been suggested that the monogram depicted on Sofonisba’s miniature self-portrait may contain the family motto ""Anguis sola fecit victoriam"" or, more simply, the name of Sofonisba's father, Amilcare.
Fleeing from a pestilence that raged in Constantinople, the descendants of the first Anguissola settled in Italy, intermarried with other noble families such as the Komnenoi, the Gonzagas, the Caracciolos, the Scottis and the Viscontis, and built autonomous estates in Piacenza, Cremona, Vicenza and other regions of Italy. The Anguissolas who settled in Venice belonged to the patriciate of that city from 1499 to 1612.
Sofonisba Anguissola was born in Cremona, Lombardy in 1532, the oldest of seven children, six of whom were girls. Her father, Amilcare Anguissola, was a member of the Cremonese nobility, and her mother, Bianca Ponzone, was also of noble background. The family lived near the site of a famous 2nd century B.C. battle, the battle of the Trebbia, between Romans and Carthaginians, and several members of the Anguissola family were named after ancient Carthaginian historical characters: Amilcare named his first daughter after the tragic Carthaginian figure Sophonisba, and his only son Asdrubale after the warlord Hasdrubal Barca. Amilcare Anguissola, inspired by Baldassare Castiglione's book Il Cortigiano, encouraged all his daughters (Sofonisba, Elena, Lucia, Europa, Minerva and Anna Maria) to cultivate and perfect their talents. Four of the sisters (Elena, Lucia, Europa and Anna Maria) became painters, but Sofonisba was by far the most accomplished and renowned and taught her younger siblings. Elena Anguissola (c. 1532 – 1584) abandoned painting to become a nun. Both Anna Maria and Europa gave up art upon marrying, while Lucia Anguissola (1536 or 1538 – 1565–1568), the best painter of Sophonisba's sisters, died young. The remaining sister, Minerva, became a writer and Latin scholar. Asdrubale, Sophonisba's brother, studied music and Latin, but not painting.
Her aristocratic father made sure that Anguissola and her sisters received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts. Anguissola was fourteen when her father sent her and her sister Elena to study with Bernardino Campi, a respected portrait and religious painter of the Lombard school. When Campi moved to another city, Anguissola continued her studies with painter Bernardino Gatti (known as Il Sojaro), a pupil of Correggio's. Anguissola's apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. Dates are uncertain, but Anguissola probably continued her studies under Gatti for about three years (1551–1553).
One of Anguissola's most important early works was "Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola" (c. 1550). The unusual double portrait depicts Anguissola's art teacher in the act of painting a portrait of her.
In 1554, at age twenty-two, Anguissola traveled to Rome, where she spent her time sketching various scenes and people. While in Rome, she was introduced to Michelangelo by another painter who was familiar with her work. Sofonisba initially showed Michelangelo a drawing of laughing girl, but the painter challenged her to draw a weeping boy, a subject which he felt would be more challenging. Anguissola drew "Boy Bitten by a Crayfish" and sent it back to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent. Michelangelo subsequently gave Anguissola sketches from his notebooks to draw in her own style and offered advice on the results. For at least two years, Anguissola continued this informal study, receiving substantial guidance from Michelangelo.
Anguissola's education and training had different implications from those of men, since men and women worked in separate spheres. Her training was not to help her into a profession where she would compete for commissions with male artists, but to make her a better wife, companion, and mother. Although Anguissola enjoyed significantly more encouragement and support than the average woman of her day, her social class did not allow her to transcend the constraints of her sex. Without the possibility of studying anatomy or drawing from life (it was considered unacceptable for a lady to view nudes), she could not undertake the complex multi-figure compositions required for large-scale religious or history paintings.
Instead, she experimented with new styles of portraiture, setting subjects informally. Self-portraits and family members were her most frequent subjects, as seen in such paintings as "Self-Portrait" (1554, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), "Portrait of Amilcare, Minerva and Asdrubale Anguissola" (c. 1557–1558, Nivaagaards Malerisambling, Niva, Denmark), and her most famous picture, "The Chess Game" (1555, Muzeum Narodowe, Poznań), which depicted her sisters Lucia, Minerva and Europa. Painted when Sofonisba was 23 years old, "The Chess Game" is an intimate representation of an everyday family scene, combining elaborate formal clothing with very informal facial expressions, which was unusual for Italian art at this time. "The Chess Game" explored a new kind of genre painting which places her sitters in a domestic setting instead of the formal or allegorical settings that were popular at the time. This painting has been regarded as a conversation piece, which is an informal portrait of a group engaging in lively conversation or some activity .
Anguissola's self-portraits also offer evidence of what she thought her place was as a woman artist. Normally, men were seen as creative actors and women as passive objects, but in her self-portrait of 1556, Anguissola presents herself as the artist, separating herself from the role as the object to be painted. Additional pieces show how she rebels against the notion that women are objects, in essence an instrument to be played by men. Her self-portrait of 1561 show her playing an instrument, taking on a different role.
She became well known outside of Italy, and in 1559 King Phillip II of Spain asked her to be lady-in-waiting and art teacher to Queen Elisabeth of Valois, who was only 14 at the time. Queen Elisabeth of Valois and Sofonisba became good friends, and when the Queen died nine years later, Sofonisba left the court because she was so sad. She had painted the entire royal family and even the Pope commissioned Anguissola to do a portrait of the Queen.
In 1558, already established as a painter, Anguissola went to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. He in turn recommended her to the Spanish king, Philip II. The following year, Anguissola was invited to join the Spanish Court, which was a turning point in her career.
Anguissola was approximately twenty-six when she left Italy to join the Spanish court. In the winter of 1559–1560, she arrived in Madrid to serve as a court painter and lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Elisabeth of Valois, Philip’s third wife, who was herself an amateur portraitist. Anguissola soon gained Elisabeth's admiration and confidence and spent the following years painting many official portraits for the court, including Philip II’s sister, Joanna, and his son, Don Carlos.
These types of paintings were far more demanding than the informal portraits upon which Anguissola had based her early reputation, as it took a tremendous amount of time and energy to render the many intricate designs of the fine fabrics and elaborate jewelry associated with royal subjects. Yet despite the challenge, Anguissola's paintings of Elisabeth of Valois – and later of Anne of Austria, Philip II’s fourth wife – were vibrant and full of life.
During her 14-year residence, she guided the artistic development of Queen Elisabeth, and influenced the art made by her two daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catherine Michelle. Anguissola painted a portrait of the King's sister, Margaret of Parma, for Pope Pius IV in 1561 and, after Queen Elisabeth 's death in childbirth in 1568, painted the likeness of Anne of Austria, Philip's fourth wife. While she continued painting portraits at the court, the Althorp "Self-Portrait" is the "only securely attributed work surviving from this period". For the royal family, Anguissola produced detailed scenes of their lives that now hang in the Prado Museum. With the gifts and a dowry of 12,000 scudi she earned along with her salary as court painter and lady-in-waiting to the queen, she amassed an admirable return from her craft.
While in the service of Elizabeth of Valois, Anguissola worked closely with Alonso Sanchez Coello. So closely in fact, that the famous painting of the middle-aged King Philip II was long attributed to Coello or Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Only recently has Anguissola been recognized as the painting's creator.
After the death of Elisabeth of Valois in 1568, Philip II took a special interest in Anguissola's future. He had wished to marry her to one of the nobles in the Spanish Court. In 1571, when she was approaching the age of 40, Anguissola entered an arranged marriage to a Sicilian nobleman chosen for her by the Spanish court. Philip II paid a dowry of 12,000 scudi for her marriage to , son of the Prince of Paternò, Viceroy of Sicily. Fabrizio was said to be supportive of her painting. Anguissola and her husband left Spain with the king's permission, and are believed to have lived in Paternò (near Catania) from 1573 to 1579, though some recent scholarship has suggested that the couple remained in Spain. She received a royal pension of 100 ducats that enabled her to continue working and tutoring would-be painters. Her private fortune also supported her family and brother Asdrubale following Amilcare Anguissola's financial decline and death. In Paternò she painted and donated "La Madonna dell'Itria".
Anguissola's husband died in 1579 under mysterious circumstances. Two years later, while traveling to Cremona by sea, she fell in love with the ship's captain, sea merchant Orazio Lomellino. Against the wishes of her brother, they married in Pisa on 24 December 1584 and lived in Genoa until 1620. She had no children, but maintained cordial relationships with her nieces and her stepson, Giulio.
Lomellino's fortune, plus a generous pension from Philip II, allowed Anguissola to paint freely and live comfortably. By now quite famous, Anguissola received many colleagues who came to visit and discuss the arts with her. Several of these were younger artists, eager to learn and mimic Anguissola's distinctive style.
In her later life, Anguissola painted not only portraits but religious themes, as she had done in the days of her youth, although many of the latter have been lost. She was the leading portrait painter in Genoa until she moved to Palermo in her last years. In 1620 she painted her last self-portrait.
On 12 July 1624, Anguissola was visited by the young Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, who recorded sketches from his visit to her in his sketchbook. Van Dyck, who believed her to be 96 years of age (she was actually about 92) noted that although "her eyesight was weakened", Anguissola was still mentally alert. Excerpts of the advice she gave him about painting survive from this visit, and he was said to have claimed that their conversation taught him more about the "true principles" of painting than anything else in his life. Van Dyck drew her portrait while visiting her. This last portrait made of Anguissola survives in on public display at Knole. The next year, she returned to Sicily.
Anguissola became a wealthy patron of the arts after the weakening of her sight. In 1625, she died at age 93 in Palermo.
Anguissola's adoring second husband, who described her as small of frame, yet "great among mortals", buried her with honor in Palermo at the Church of San Giorgio dei Genovesi. Seven years later, on the anniversary of what would have been her 100th birthday, her husband placed an inscription on her tomb that read in part:
The influence of Campi, whose reputation was based on portraiture, is evident in Anguissola's early works, such as the "Self-Portrait" (Florence, Uffizi). Her work was akin to the worldly tradition of Cremona, influenced greatly by the art of Parma and Mantua, in which even religious works were imbued with extreme delicacy and charm. From Gatti she seems to have absorbed elements reminiscent of Correggio, beginning a trend in Cremonese painting of the late 16th century. This new direction is reflected in "Lucia, Minerva and Europa Anguissola Playing Chess" (1555; Poznań, N. Mus.) in which portraiture merges into a quasi-genre scene, a characteristic derived from Brescian models.
The main body of Anguissola's earlier work consists of self-portraits (the many "autoritratti" reflect the fact that portraits of her were frequently requested due to her fame) and portraits of her family, which are considered by many to be her finest works.
Approximately fifty works have been attributed to Anguissola. Her paintings can be seen at galleries in Baltimore (Walters Art Museum), Bergamo, Berlin (Gemäldegalerie), Graz (Joanneum Alte Galerie), Madrid (Museo del Prado), Milan (Pinacoteca di Brera), Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum), Naples (National Museum of Capodimonte), Poznań (National Museum, Poznań), Siena (Pinacoteca Nazionale), Southampton (City Art Gallery), and Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum).
Sofonisba Anguissola's oeuvre had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists. Her portrait of Queen Elisabeth of Valois with a zibellino (the pelt of a marten set with a head and feet of jewelled gold) was widely copied by many of the finest artists of the time, such as Peter Paul Rubens, while Caravaggio allegedly took inspiration from Anguissola's work for his "Boy Bitten by a Lizard".
Anguissola is significant to feminist art historians. Although there has never been a period in Western history in which women were completely absent in the visual arts, Anguissola's great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists; Lavinia Fontana expressed in a letter written in 1579 that she and another woman, Irene di Spilimbergo, had “set [their] heart[s] on learning how to paint” after seeing one of Anguissola’s portraits. Some of her more well-known successors include Lavinia Fontana, Barbara Longhi, Fede Galizia and Artemisia Gentileschi.
A Cremonese school bears the name Liceo Statale Sofonisba Anguissola.
On 4 August 2017 a crater on Mercury was named after her. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28761 |
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