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Alexander Fleming Biography

Sir Alexander Fleming (August 6, 1881 - March 11, 1955) is famous as the discoverer of the antibiotic substance lysozyme and for isolating the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum. Fleming was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. He later attended St Mary's Hospital medical school in London until World War I broke out. He participated in a battlefield hospital with many of his colleagues in the fronts of France. Being exposed to the horrid medical infections by the dying soldiers, he returned to St. Mary's after the war with renewed energy in searching for an improved antiseptic. Both of Fleming's discoveries happened entirely by accident during the 1920s. The first, lysozyme, was discovered after mucus from his nose dropped into a bacterium laced Petri dish (he sneezed). A few days later, it was noted that bacteria where the mucus had fallen had been destroyed. Fleming's labs were usually in disarray, which led to be to his advantage. In September 1928, he was sorting through the many idle experiments strewn about his lab. He inspected each specimen before discarding it and noticed an interesting fungal colony had grown as a contaminant on one of the agar plates streaked with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming inspected the Petri dish further and found that the bacterial colonies around the fungus were transparent because their cells were lysing. Lysis is the breakdown of cells, and in this case, potentially harmful bacteria. The importance was immediately recognized, however the discovery was still underestimated, initially used to clean his glassware. Fleming issued a publication about penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929. Fleming worked with the mould for some time, but refining and growing it was a difficult process better suited to chemists. In part by believing its effect may only hold valid with small infections and further by not being well received within the community, the drug was not developed for mass distribution until World War II when Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain developed a method of purifying penicillin to a form that was useful for medical treatment of infection. For his achievements, Fleming was knighted in 1944 and shared the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. Florey was later given the higher honour of a peerage for his monumental work in making penicillin available to the public and saving millions of lives in World War II. Florey's work proceeded over the misgivings of Fleming, who believed that penicillin, for all its intrinsic worth, would not be able to be produced in sufficient quantities to have an appreciable effect in a war situation. Fleming was long a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, a private club for artists of all genres, founded in 1891 at the suggestion of the painter James McNeil Whistler. Fleming was admitted to the club after he made "germ paintings," in which he drew with a culture loop using spores of highly pigmented bacteria. The bacteria were invisible while he painted, but when cultured made bright colours. Serratia marcescens - red Chromobacterium violaceum -purple Micrococcus luteus - yellow Micrococcus varians - white Micrococcus roseus - pink Bacillus sp. - orange Fleming died in 1955 of a heart attack. He was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. His discovery of penicillin had changed the world of modern medicines by introducing the age of useful antibiotics.

Alexander Graham Bell Biography

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 - August 2, 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and founder of the Bell telephone company. In addition to his work in telecommunications technology, he also was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.

Formative years
Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He came of a family associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, Mr. Alexander Melville Bell, in Edinburgh, were all professed elocutionists.

The latter has published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are well known, especially his treatise on Visible Speech, which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. In this he explains his ingenious method of instructing deaf mutes, by means of their eyesight, how to articulate words, and also how to read what other persons are saying by the motions of their lips. Graham Bell, his distinguished son, was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, from which he graduated at the age of thirteen. At the age of sixteen he secured a position as a pupil-teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy, at Elgin in Morayshire. The next year he spent at the University of Edinburgh. From 1866 to 1867 he was an instructor at Somersetshire College at Bath, England. While still in Scotland he is said to have turned his attention to the science of acoustics, with a view to ameliorate the deafness of his mother. In 1870 he moved with his family to Canada where they settled at Brantford, Ontario. Before he left Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell had turned his attention to telephony, and in Canada he continued an interest in communication machines. He designed a piano which could transmit its music to a distance by means of electricity. In 1873 he accompanied his father to Montreal, Quebec, where he was employed in teaching the system of visible speech. The elder Bell was invited to introduce the system into a large day-school for mutes at Boston, but he declined the post in favour of his son, who soon became famous in the United States for his success in this important work. Alexander Graham Bell published more than one treatise on the subject at Washington, and it is mainly through his efforts that thousands of deaf mutes in America are now able to speak almost, if not quite, as well as persons who are able to hear. At Boston he continued his researches in the same field, and endeavoured to produce a telephone which would not only send musical notes, but articulate speech. With financing from his American father-in-law, on March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent Number 174,465 covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.", the telephone. (It should be noted that the question of who invented the telephone continues to be debated. It is clear that several people were researching similar devices. However, supporters of Bell claim that his was the first fully working design. After obtaining the patent for the telephone, Bell continued his experiments in communication, which culminated in the invention of the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light -- a precursor of today's optical fiber systems. He also worked in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. The range of Bell's inventive genius is represented only in part by the 18 patents granted in his name alone and the 12 he shared with his collaborators. These included 14 for the telephone and telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five for aerial vehicles, four for hydroairplanes, and two for a selenium cell. In 1888 he was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society and became its second president. He was the recipient of many honors. The French Government conferred on him the decoration of the Lgion d'honneur (Legion of Honor), the Acadmie franaise bestowed on him the Volta Prize of 50,000 Francs, the Royal Society of Arts in London awarded him the Albert medal in 1902, and the University of Wrzburg, Bavaria, granted him the Degree of Ph.D. Bell married Mabel Hubbard on July 11, 1877. He died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia in 1922. In 2004, Alexander Graham Bell was nominated as one of the top 10 "Greatest Canadians" by viewers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 March 20, 1727 by the Julian calendar in use in England at the time; or January 4, 1643 March 31, 1727 by the Gregorian calendar) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and alchemist; who wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published July 5, 1687)1, where he described universal gravitation and, via his laws of motion, laid the groundwork for classical mechanics. Newton also shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of differential calculus. Newton was the first to demonstrate that the same natural laws govern both earthly motion and celestial motion. He is associated with the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism. Newton is also credited with providing mathematical substantiation for Kepler's laws of planetary motion. He would expand these laws by arguing that orbits (such as those of comets) were not only elliptic; but could also be hyperbolic and parabolic. He is also notable for his arguments that light was composed of particles; see: wave-particle duality. He was the first to realise that the spectrum of colours observed when white light was passed through a prism was inherent in the white light, and not added by the prism as Roger Bacon had claimed 400 years earlier. Newton also developed Newton's law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air; the binomial theorem in its entirety; and the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars.

Early life
Newton was born in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father had died three months before Newton's birth, and two years later his mother went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of his grandmother. Newton was a child prodigy. According to E.T. Bell (1937, Simon and Schuster) and H. Eves: Newton began his schooling in the village schools and later was sent to Grantham Grammar School where he became the top boy in the school. At Grantham he lodged with the local apothecary and eventually became engaged to the apothecary's stepdaughter, Miss Storey, before he went off to Cambridge University at the age of 19. But Newton became engrossed in his studies, the romance cooled and Miss Storey married someone else. It is said he kept a warm memory of this love, but Newton had no other recorded 'sweethearts' and never married. Newton was educated at Grantham Grammar School. In 1661 he joined Trinity College, Cambridge, where his uncle William Ayscough had studied. At that time the college's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. In 1665 he discovered the binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become calculus. Soon after Newton had collected his degree in 1665, the University closed down as a precaution against the Great Plague. For the next two years Newton worked at home on calculus, optics and gravitation. Tradition has it that Newton was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head, and this made him understand that earthly and celestial gravitation are the same. This is an exaggeration of Newton's own tale about sitting by the window of his home (Woolsthorpe Manor) and watching an apple fall from a tree. However it is now generally considered that even this story was invented by him in his later life, to try to show how clever he was at drawing inspiration from everyday events. A contemporary writer, William Stukeley, recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on April 15, 1726, in which Newton recalled "when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre." In similar terms, Voltaire wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree." Newton became a fellow of Trinity College in 1667. In the same year he circulated his findings in De Analysi per Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas (On Analysis by Infinite Series), and later in De methodis serierum et fluxionum (On the Methods of Series and Fluxions), whose title gave the name to his "method of fluxions". Newton and Leibniz developed the theory of calculus independently and used different notations. Although Newton had worked out his own method before Leibniz, the latter's notation and "Differential Method" were superior, and were generally adopted throughout the English-speaking world. (Curiously, in Germany the Newtonian notation is more popular.) Though Newton belongs among the brightest scientists of his era, the last twenty-five years of his life were marred by a bitter dispute with Leibniz, whom he accused of plagiarism. He was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669. Any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained at the

time. However the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the normal ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. This prevented the conflict that would have occurred between his nontrinitarian views and the orthodoxy of the church.

Newton and optics

From 1670 to 1672 he lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. From his work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented the reflecting telescope to bypass that problem. (Later, when glasses with a variety of refractive properties became available, achromatic lenses became possible.) In 1671 the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes On Colour, which he later expanded into his Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Due to Newton's paranoia, the two men remained enemies until Hooke's death. In one experiment, to prove that colour was caused by pressure on the eye, Newton slid a darning needle around the side of his eye until he could poke at its rear side, dispassionately noting "white, darke & coloured circles" so long as he kept stirring with "ye bodkin." He once said, in a letter to Hooke dated 5 February 1676: If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. In changing this quotation of Didacus Stella (Lucan (vol. II, 10) ) from "Pigmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves", Newton was perhaps making a more personal point than the mere expression of modesty - as Hooke was a man of short stature. Newton argued that light is composed of particles. Later physicists instead favored a wave explanation of light because of certain experimental findings. Today's quantum mechanics recognizes a "wave-particle duality" however photons bear very little semblance to Newton's corpuscles (e.g., corpuscles refracted by accelerating toward the denser medium). In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton relied on the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. Newton was in contact with Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist who was born in Grantham, on alchemy, and now his interest in the subject revived. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians." Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be isolated from his contributions to science. (This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science.) Had he not believed in the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he may not have developed his theory of gravity.

Physics
In 1679, Newton returned to his work on gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets, with reference to Kepler's laws of motion, and consulting with Hooke and Flamsteed on the subject. He published his results in De Motu Corporum (1684). This contained the beginnings of the laws of motion that would inform the Principia. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (now known as the Principia) was published in 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley. In this work Newton stated the three universal laws of motion that were not to be improved upon for the next three hundred years. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the force that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation. In the same work he presented the first analytical determination, based on Boyle's Law, of the speed of sound in air. With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693. The end of this friendship led Newton to a nervous breakdown.

Later life
In the 1690s Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. Henry More's belief in the infinity of the universe and rejection of Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to John Locke in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity was never published. Later works - The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) - were published after his death. He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy. Newton was also a member of Parliament from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed. Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, somewhat treading on the toes of Master Lucas (and finagling Edmond Halley into deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch). Newton became master of the Mint upon Lucas' death in 1699. These appointments were

intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously, exercising his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701. In 1701 Newton anonymously published a law of thermodynamics now known as "Newton's law of cooling" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In 1703 Newton became President of the Royal Society and an associate of the French Acadmie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by attempting to steal his catalogue of observations. Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. Newton never married, nor had any recorded children. He died in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Religious views
The law of gravity became Sir Isaac Newton's best-known discovery. Newton warned against using it to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." Despite his fame as one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived, the Bible was Sir Isaac Newton's greatest passion. He devoted more time to study of Scripture than to science, and said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily." Newton was secretly a unitarian; he did not believe in the church's doctrine of divine trinity. Had this become known while he lived, the law would have required his removal from his position as a professor in Cambridge University. His writings on this topic were published only posthumously.

Newton's legacy
Newton's laws of motion and gravity provided a basis for predicting a wide variety of different scientific or engineering situations, especially the motion of celestial bodies. His calculus proved vital to the development of further scientific theory. Finally, he unified many of the isolated physics facts that had been discovered earlier into a satisfying system of laws. For this reason, he is generally considered one of history's greatest scientists, ranking alongside such figures as Einstein and Gauss.

Quotations about Newton

"The Principia is preeminent above any other production of human genius." - Pierre-Simon Laplace "Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." - Gottfried Leibniz "All that has been accomplished in mathematics since his day has been a deductive, formal, and mathematical development of mechanics on the basis of Newton's laws." - Ernst Mach "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." - poem, Alexander Pope

Writings by Newton
Method of Fluxions (1671) De Motu Corporum (1684) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) Opticks (1704) Reports as Master of the Mint (1701-1725) Arithmetica Universalis (1707) An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture(1754) Short Chronicle, The System of the World, Optical Lectures, Universal Arithmetic, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended and De mundi systemate were published posthumously in 1728.

Winston Churchill
The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard SpencerChurchill, KG, OM, CH, FRS (November 30, 1874 - January 24, 1965) was a British politician, best known as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II. At various times an author, soldier, journalist, legislator and painter, Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most important leaders in British and world history.

Early career
Born at Blenheim Palace, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill was a descendant of the first famous member of the Churchill family: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (whose father was also a "Sir Winston Churchill"). Winston's politician father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough; Winston's mother was Lady Randolph Churchill (ne Jeanette "Jennie" Jerome) of Brooklyn, New York, daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome. As per tradition, Churchill spent much of his childhood at boarding schools, rarely visited by his mother, whom he worshipped, despite his letters begging her to either come or let his father let him come home. He had a distant relationship with his father, despite keenly following his father's career.

Periods in Office: May 10, 1940 to July 27, 1945 October 26, 1951 to April 7, 1955 PM Predecessors: Neville Chamberlain Clement Attlee PM Successors: Clement Attlee Anthony Eden Date of Birth: November 30, 1874 Place of Birth: Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England Death: January 24, 1965 Place of Death: London, England Political Party: Conservative

Once in 1886 he is reported to have proclaimed "My daddy is Chancellor of the Exchequer and one day that's what I'm going to be." His desolate, lonely childhood stayed with him throughout his life. He was very close to his nursemaid, and deeply saddened when she died. In 1893 he enrolled in the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He graduated two years later ranked eighth in his class. He was appointed Second Lieutenant in the 4th Hussars cavalry. In 1895, he went to Cuba as a military observer with the Spanish army in its fight against the independentists. He also reported for the Saturday Review. In 1898 he rode as a reporter with the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman. As the son of a prominent politician it was unsurprising that Churchill was soon drawn into politics himself. He started speaking at a number of Conservative meetings in the 1890s. It was noticeable that in the first few years of his political career, and again in the mid-1920s, he frequently used his father's slogan of "Tory Democracy". Many were to regard Churchill in his early years as being obsessed with continuing his father's battles from fifteen years earlier. In 1899 he was considered as a prospective candidate for Oldham. One of the town's two MPs had died, and with the other in ill health he was persuaded to resign so that both seats could be elected together. Churchill found himself thrust into a prominent by-election, alongside James Mawdsley, the Lancashire general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Cotton Spinners and one of the few prominent Conservative trade unionists. The Liberal candidates were Alfred Emmott and Walter Runciman, who later sat in the Cabinet alongside Churchill. The by-election was dominated by a number of issues, including a Clerical Tithes Bill in Parliament, the brunt of criticism for which fell upon Churchill as a candidate for the governing party and the only Anglican of the four (though he was non-practicising). Facing attacks on the Bill, Churchill repudiated it. He later commented "This was a frightful mistake. It is not the slightest use defending Governments or parties unless you defend the worst thing about which they are attacked." The Conservative leader in the Commons, Arthur Balfour commented "I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises." Despite this, Churchill and Mawdsley narrowly lost the marginal seat, though with no harm to themselves as the Conservative government was facing a period of unpopularity. Runciman is reported to have commented to Churchill: "Don't worry, I don't think this is the last the country has heard of either of us." Churchill then became a war correspondent in the second Anglo-Boer war between Britain and self-proclaimed Afrikaaners in South Africa. He was captured in a Boer ambush of a British Army train convoy, but managed a high profile escape and eventually crossed the South African border to Loureno Marques (now Maputo in Mozambique). Churchill returned to Oldham and used the status achieved to stand again for the seat in the 1900 general election when

he was narrowly elected for the seat. It was the successful launch of a Parliamentary career which would last a total of sixty-two years, serving as an MP in the House of Commons from 1900 to 1922 and from 1924 to 1964. He remained politically active even in his brief years out of the Commons. At first a member of the Conservative Party, he 'crossed the floor' in 1904 to join the Liberals over the issue of protective tariffs. In the 1906 general election, Churchill won a seat in Manchester. In the Liberal government of Henry Campbell-Bannerman he served as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Churchill soon became the most prominent member of the Government outside the Cabinet, and when Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, it came as little surprise when Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election. Churchill lost his Manchester seat to the Conservative William Joynson-Hicks, but was soon elected in another by-election at Dundee. As President of the Board of Trade he pursued radical social reforms in conjunction with David Lloyd George, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1910 Churchill was promoted to Home Secretary, where he was to prove somewhat controversial. A famous photograph from the time shows the impetuous Churchill taking personal charge of the January 1911 Sidney Street Siege, peering around a corner to view a gun battle between cornered anarchists and Scots Guards. His role attracted much criticism. Arthur Balfour asked, "He [Churchill] and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing but what was the Right Honourable gentleman doing?" In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he would hold into the First World War. He was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during World War I, which led to his description as "the butcher of Gallipoli". When Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded Churchill's demotion as the price for entry. For several months Churchill served in the non-portfolio job of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before resigning from the government feeling his energies were not being used. He rejoined the army, though remained an MP, and served for several months on the Western Front. During this period his second in command was a young Archibald Sinclair who would later lead the Liberal Party. In December 1916, Asquith fell and was replaced by Lloyd George, however the time was thought to not yet be right to risk the Conservatives' wrath by bringing Churchill back into government. However in July 1917 Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions. After the ending of the war Churchill served as both Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air (1919-1921). Churchill suggested chemical weapons be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He said, "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected." During this time (1919-1921), he undertook with surprising zeal the cutting of military expenditure. However, the major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He secured from a divided and loosely organized Cabinet an intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation--and in the face of the bitter hostility of labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded the Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 which established the Irish Free State. In October 1922, Churchill underwent an operation to remove his appendix. Upon his return, he learnt that the government had fallen and a General Election was looming. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division and Churchill's campaign was weak. He lost his seat at Dundee, quipping that he had lost his ministerial office, his seat and his appendix all at once. The victorious candidates for the two-member seat included the Prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour. Churchill stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, but over the next twelve months he moved towards the Conservative Party, though initially using the labels "Anti-Socialist" and "Constitutionalist". Two years later in the General Election of 1924 he was elected to represent Epping (where there is now a statue of him) as a "Constitutionalist" with Conservative backing. The following year he formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting that, "Anyone can rat [change parties], but it takes a certain ingenuity to rerat." He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw the UK's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926. During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns should be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, and during the dispute he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country". Furthermore, he was to controversially claim that the Fascism of Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world", showing as it had "a way to combat subversive forces" that is, he considered the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of Communist revolution. The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. In the next two years Churchill became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931 Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career in a period known as 'the wilderness years.' He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, including A History of the English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition towards the granting of independence to India. Soon though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on

Britain to re-arm itself and counter the belligerence of Germany. Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. He was also an outspoken supporter of Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis leading to some speculation that he might be appointed Prime Minister if the King refused to take Baldwin's advice and consequently the government resigned. However this did not happen and Churchill found himself isolated and in a bruised position for some time after this.

Role as wartime Prime Minister

At the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In this job he proved to be one of the highest profile ministers during the so called "Bore War" when the only noticeable action was at sea. On Chamberlain's resignation in May, 1940, Churchill was appointed Prime Minister and formed an all-party government. In response to previous criticisms that there had been no clear single minister in charge of the prosecution of the war, he created and took the additional position of Minister of Defence. He immediately put his friend and confidant, the industrialist and newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook in charge of aircraft production. It was Beaverbrook's astounding business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering that eventually made the difference in the war. His speeches were a great inspiration to the embattled United Kingdom. His famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech was his first as Prime Minister. He followed that closely, before the Battle of Britain, with "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Additional speeches: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few....The task which lies before us immediately is at once more practical, more simple and more stern. I hope-indeed, I pray-that we shall not be found unworthy of our victory if after toil and tribulation it is granted to us. For the rest, we have to gain the victory. That is our task." and This was their finest hour. His good relationship with Franklin Roosevelt secured the United Kingdom vital supplies via the North Atlantic Ocean shipping routes. It was for this reason that Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected. Upon re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new method of not only providing military hardware to Britain without the need for monetary payment, but also of providing, free of fiscal charge, much of the shipping that transported the supplies. Put simply, Roosevelt persuaded congress that repayment for this immensely costly service would take the form of defending the USA; and so Lend-lease was born. Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE), under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which established the pattern for most of the world's current Special Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British Bulldog". However, some of the military actions during the war remain controversial. Churchill was at best indifferent and perhaps complicit in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 which took the lives of at least 2.5 million Bengalis. Japanese troops were threatening British India after having successfully taken neighbouring British Burma. Some consider the British government's policy of denying effective famine relief a deliberate and callous scorched earth policy adopted in the event of a successful Japanese invasion. Churchill supported the bombing of Dresden shortly before the end of the war; Dresden was a mostly civilian target with many refugees from the East and of allegedly little military value. However, the bombing was helpful to the allied Soviets. Churchill was party to treaties that would re-draw post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. The boundary between North Korea and South Korea was proposed at the Yalta Conference, as well as the expulsion of Japanese forces from those countries. Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were discussed as early as 1943 by Roosevelt and Churchill; the settlement was officially agreed to by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam (Article XIII of the Potsdam protocol). One of these settlements was about the borders of Poland, i.e. the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union, the so called Curzon line, and between Germany and Poland, the so called the Oder-Neisse line. Despite the fact that Poland was the first country that resisted Hitler, Polish borders and government were determined by the Great Powers without asking the voice of the Polish government in exile. Poles who had fought alongside Britain throughout the war felt betrayed. Churchill himself opposed the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it at the conferences.

A part of the settlement was an agreement to transfer the remaining citizens of Germany from the area. (Transfer of Poles didn't need to be approved.) The exact numbers and movement of ethnic populations over the Polish-German and Polish-USSR borders in the period at the end of World War II is extremely difficult to determine. This is not least because, under the Nazi regime, many Poles were replaced in their homes by the conquering Germans in an attempt to consolidate Nazi power.

In the case of the post-WWII settlement, Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders. As Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions." Although the importance of Churchill's role in World War II was undeniable, he produced many enemies in his own country. His expressed contempt for ideas such as public health care and for better education for the majority of the population in particular produced much dissatisfaction amongst the population, particularly those who had fought in the war. Immediately following the close of the war in Europe Churchill was heavily defeated at election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. Winston Churchill was an early supporter of the pan-Europeanism that eventually lead to the formation of the European Common market and later the European Union (for which one of the three main buildings of the European Parliament is named in his honour). Churchill was also instrumental in giving France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (which he supported in order to have another European power to counter-balance the Soviet Union's permanent seat). At the beginning of the Cold War he coined the term the "Iron Curtain," a phrase originally created by Joseph Goebbels that entered the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri when Churchill famously declared "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere."

Second term
Following Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill again became Prime Minister. His third government after the wartime national government and the short caretaker government of 1945, would last until his resignation in 1955. During this period he renewed what he called the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, engaged himself in the formation of the post-War order. His domestic priorities were, however, overshadowed by a series of foreign policy crisises, which were the result of the continued decline of British military and imperial prestige. Being a strong proponent of Britain as an international power, Churchill would often meet such moments with direct action.

Anglo-Iranian Oil Dispute

The crisis began under the government of Clement Attlee, in March of 1951, the Iranian parliamentthe Majlisvoted to nationalize the A.I.O.C. and its holdings by passing a bill strongly backed by the elderly statesman Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who was elected Prime Minister the following April by a large majority of the parliament. The International Court of Justice was called into settle the dispute, but a 50-50 profit sharing arrangement, with recognition of nationalization, was rejected by Mossadegh. Direct negotiations between the British and the Iranian government ceased, and over the course of 1951, the British racheted up the pressure on the Iranian government, and explored the possibility of a coup against it. American President Harry Truman was reluctant to agree, given the priority of the Korean War. The effects of the blockade and embargo were staggering, and lead to a virtual shutdown of Irans oil exports. Churchill's coming to power brought with it a policy of undermining the Mossadegh government. While counter-proposals from Mossadegh's government, including a deal to give the British 25% of the profits in the nationalized oil company were floated, the British were not interested, and wanted a return to the previous arrangement as well as a removal of Mossadegh. As the blockade's political and economic costs mounted inside Iran, coup plots rose from the army, the "National Front" and from pro-British factions in the Majlis.

Churchill and his Foreign Secretary pursued two mutually exclusive goals. On one hand they wanted "development and reform" in Iran, on the otherhand, they did not want to give up the control or revenue from AOIC that would have permitted that development and reform to go forward. Initially they backed Sayyid Zia as an individual they could do business with, but as the embargo dragged on, they turned more and more to an alliance with the military. Churchill's government had come full circle, from ending the Attlee plans for coup, to planning one itself. The crisis dragged on until 1953, Churchill, approves a plan with help from American President Dwight Eisenhower back a coup in Iran. The combination of external and internal political pressure converged around Fazlollah Zahedi. Over the course of the Summer of 1953, demonstrations grew in Iran, and with the failure of a plebescite, the government was destabilized. Zahedi, using financing from the outside, took power, and Mossadegh surrendered to him on August 20th, 1953. The coup pointed to an underlying tension within the post-War order: the industrialized Democracies, hungry for resources to rebuild in the wake of World War II, and to engage the Soviet Union in the Cold War, dealt with emerging states such as Iran as they had with colonies in a previous era. On one hand, spurred by the fear of a third world war against the USSR, and committed to a policy of containment at any cost, they were more than willing to circumvent local political perogatives, on the other hand, many of these local governments were both unstable and corrupt. The two factors formed a vicious circle - intervention lead to more dicatorial rule and corruption, which made intervention rather than establishment of strong local political institutions a greater and greater temptation. The Mau Mau Rebellion In 1951, greivances against the colonial distribution of land came to a head with the Kenya Africa Union demanding greater represenation and land reform, when these demands were rejected, more radical elements came forward and launched the Mau Mau rebellion in 1952. On 17 August 1952, a state of emergency was declared, and British troops were flown to Kenya to deal with the rebellion. As both sides increased the ferocity of their attacks, the country moved to full scale civil war. In 1953 the Lari massacre, perpetrated by Mau-Mau insurgents against Kikuyu loyal to the British changed the political complexion of the rebellion, and gave the public relations advantage to the British. Churchill's strategy was to use a military stick, combined with implementing many of the concessions that Attlee's government had blocked in 1951. He ordered an increased military presence and appointed General Sir George Erskine, who would implement Operation Anvil in 1954 that broke the back of the rebellion in the city of Nairobi, and Operation Hammer which was designed to root out rebels in the country-side. Churchill ordered peace talks opened, but these collapsed shortly after his leaving office. Malaya Emergency In Malaysia a rebellion against British rule had been in progress since 1948, and on October 7, 1951, the British High Commissioner Henry Gurney. Once again, Churchill's second government inherited a crisis, and once again Churchill chose to use direct military action against those in rebellion, while attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. He stepped up the implementation of a "hearts and minds" campaign, and approved the creation of villages, a tactic that would become a recurring part of Western military strategy in South-East Asia. (See Vietnam War). The Malaya Emergency was a more direct case of a guerilla movement, centered in an ethnic group, but backed by the Soviety Union. As such, Britian's policy of direct confrontation and military victory had a great deal more support than in Iran or in Kenya. At the highpoint of the conflict, over 35,000 British troops were stationed in Malaysia. As the rebellion lost ground, it began to lose favor with the local population. While the rebellion was slowly being defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain was no longer tenable, in 1953 plans began to be drawn up for independence for Singapore and the other crown colonies in the area. The first elections were held in 1955, just days before Churhill's own resignation, and by 1957, under Anthony Eden, Malaysia became independent. Honours for Churchill In 1953 he was awarded two major honours. He was knighted and became Sir Winston Churchill and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". A stroke in June of that year led to him being paralysed down his left side. He retired because of his health on April 5, 1955 but retained his post as Chancellor of the University of Bristol. In 1956 he received the Karlspreis (engl.: Charlemagne Award) an Award by the German city of Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea and European peace. During the next few years he revised and finally published A History of the English Speaking Peoples in four volumes. In 1959 Churchill inherited the title of Father of the House, becoming the MP with the longest continuous service since 1924. He was to hold the position until his retirement from the Commons in 1964, the position of Father of the House passing to Rab Butler.

Family
On September 2, 1908, at the socially desirable St. Margaret's, Westminster, Churchill married Clementine Hozier, a dazzling but largely penniless beauty whom he met at a dinner party that March (he had proposed to actress Ethel Barrymore, but was turned down). They had five children: Diana; Randolph; Sarah, who co-starred with Fred Astaire in

Royal Wedding; Marigold; and Mary, who has written a book on her parents. Clementine's mother was Lady Blanche Henrietta Ogilvy, second wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier and a daughter of the 7th Earl of Airlie. Clementine's paternity, however, is open to healthy debate. Lady Blanche was well known for sharing her favours and was eventually divorced as a result. She maintained that Clementine's father was Capt. William George "Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman. But Clementine's biographer Joan Hardwick has surmised, due to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed sterility, that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister's husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, better known as a grandfather of the infamous Mitford sisters of the 1920s. Churchill's son, Randolph, and grandson, Winston, both followed him into Parliament.

Last days
On January 15, 1965 Churchill suffered another stroke a severe cerebral thrombosis that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later on January 24, 1965, 70 years to the day of his father's death. His body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. This was the first state funeral for a commoner since that of Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar in 1914. It was Churchill's wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill's) funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. As his coffin passed down the Thames on a boat, the cranes of London's docklands bowed in salute. At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at Saint Martin's Churchyard, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.

Writings
Churchill was also a notable historian, producing many works. Some of his twentieth century writings such as The World Crisis (detailing the First World War) and The Second World War are highly autobiographical, telling the story of the conflict. Initially Churchill used the name Winston Churchill for his books. However early on he discovered that there was also an American writer of the same name, who had been published first. So as to prevent the two being confused, they agreed that the American would publish as Winston Churchill, and the Englishman as Winston Spencer Churchill (sometimes abbreviated to Winston S. Churchill). Churchill's works include: The River War - Published in 1899 (2 vols) Kitchner's reconquest of the Sudan in 1898. Also published in a 1 vol abridged edn. Savrola - Churchill's only novel. Published in 1900 Lord Randolph Churchill - A two-volume biography of his father. The World Crisis - Six volumes covering the Great War My African Journey - African travels and experiences. Published in 1908. My Early Life - An autobiography covering the first quarter century of his career. Marlborough: His Life and Times - A biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, published in 4-, 6-, and 2-volume editions. ISBN 0226106330 The Second World War 6 volumes (sometimes reprinted as 12) A History of the English Speaking Peoples - used as the basis of the BBC radio series This Sceptred Isle The Scaffolding of Rhetoric - a 1,763-word essay on oratory; unpublished, written 1897. Painting as a Pastime - a short appreciation of painting

Miscellany
Churchill was an ardent supporter of Zionism, following his meetings with Chaim Weizmann and the visits in Eretz Israel Palestina. He kept supporting it (and later, Israel) even after WWII. Churchill College, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, was founded in 1960 as the national and commonwealth memorial to Winston Churchill. The Churchill tank, a heavy infantry tank of World War II, was named in his honour. Many attribute some of Churchills extraordinary abilities to his being affected by bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. You can see with whom he shares this identification by clicking on the People with Bipolar Disorder category link at the foot of this page. In his last years, Churchill is believed by several writers to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, though the Churchill Centre disputes this. Certainly he suffered from fits of depression that he called his "black dog," Some researchers also believe that Churchill was dyslexic, based on the difficulties he described himself having at school. However, the Churchill Centre strongly refutes this. The United States Navy destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81) is named in his honour. Churchill was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill's mother was American and some, including Churchill himself, have said that his maternal grandmother was an

Iroquois, which would make Churchill the only British Prime Minister of Native American descent. Research has failed to validate this contention, and some doubt its accuracy. Churchill was voted as "The Greatest Briton" in 2002 "100 Greatest Britons" poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public. He was also named Time Magazine "Man of the Half-Century" in the early 1950s. The American song writer Jerome Kern was christened Jerome because his parents lived near a park named Jerome Park. This park was in turn named after Churchill's grandfather (the father of Churchill's mother Jennie Jerome). The Churchill cigar size actually was named after him. Churchill's war cabinet, May 1940 - May 1945 Winston Churchill - Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and Leader of the House of Commons. Neville Chamberlain - Lord President of the Council Clement Attlee - Lord Privy Seal and effective Deputy Leader of the House of Commons. Lord Halifax - Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur Greenwood - Minister without Portfolio

Socrates Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who is widely credited for laying the foundation for Western philosophy. He was born and lived in Athens, where he spent most of his time in enthusiastic pursuit of wisdom (philospophy). He "followed the argument" in his personal reflection, and in a sustained and rigorous dialogue between friends, followers, and contemporary itinerant teachers of wisdom. Later in his life he became known as the wisest man in all of Greece. Opinions about Socrates were widely polarized, drawing very high praise or very severe ridicule. He had many devoted followers (such as Plato), and many angry detractors. As an old man, he fell into grave disrepute with the Athenian state powers, and was commanded to stop his public disputes, and his associations with young aristocrats. He carried on as usual. Finally, he was arrested and accused of corrupting the youth, inventing new deities (heresy), and disbelieving in the divine (atheism). According to traditional accounts, he was sentenced to die by drinking poison. Presented with an opportunity to leave Athens, he believed it would be more honorable to stay in his home country. Therefore, at the age of 70, he drank the hemlock and died. Life Most of what is known about Socrates is derived from information that recurs across various contemporary sources: the dialogues written by Plato, one of Socrates' students; the works of

Xenophon, one of his contemporaries; and writings by Aristophanes and Aristotle. Anything Socrates wrote himself has not survived. Additionally, Aristophanes' account of Socrates is in fact a satirical attack on philosophers and does not purport to be a factual account of events in the life of Socrates. Another complication is the Ancient Greek tradition of scholars attributing their own ideas, theories and sometimes even personal traits to their mentors, a tradition Plato appears to have followed. Gabriele Giannantoni, in his monumental 1991 work Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, attempts to compile every scrap of evidence regarding Socrates, including material attributed to Aeschines Socraticus, Antisthenes and a number of others supposed to have known him. According to accounts from antiquity, Socrates' father was the sculptor Sophroniscus and his mother Phaenarete, a midwife. Socrates married Xanthippe, who bore him three sons Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus who were all quite young at the time of his death. Traditionally, Xanthippe is thought to have been an ill-tempered scold, mainly due to her characterization by Xenophon. It is unclear how Socrates earned a living. According to Xenophon's Symposium, Socrates is reported as saying he devotes himself only to what he regards as the most important art or occupation: discussing philosophy. Although he inherited money following his father's death, it is unlikely it was sufficient to keep him for long. Xenophon and Aristophanes respectively portray Socrates as accepting payment for teaching and running a sophist school with Chaerephon, whilst in Plato's Symposium Socrates explicitly denies accepting payment for teaching. It is possible Socrates relied on the generosity of wealthy and powerful friends such as Crito. Characters such as Alcibiades the name of one of Socrates' friends in the dialogues indicate that Socrates served in the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian War. Plato's Symposium indicates that he was also decorated for bravery. In one instance, Socrates is said to have stayed on the battlefield to protect Alcibiades, probably saving his life; he then sought Alcibiades' recognition rather than accepting any of his own. It is also claimed he showed great heartiness during these military campaigns, such as walking without shoes or coat during winter. Trial and death Socrates lived during the time of the transition from the height of the Athenian Empire to its decline after its defeat by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. At a time when Athens was seeking to stabilize and recover from its humiliating defeat, the Athenian public court was induced by three leading public figures to try Socrates for impiety and for corrupting the youth of Athens. This was a time in culture when the Greeks thought of gods and goddesses as being associated with protecting particular cities. Athens, for instance, is named after its protecting goddess Athena. The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was interpreted as Athena judging the city for not being pious. The last thing Athens needed was more punishment from Athena for one man inciting its citizens to question her or the other gods. In the Apology, Socrates insists that this is a false charge. According to the version of his defense speech presented in Plato's Apology, Socrates' life as the

"gadfly" of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded negatively. Socrates, interpreting this as a riddle, set out to find men who were wiser than he was. He questioned the men of Athens about their knowledge of good, beauty, and virtue. Finding that they knew nothing and yet believed themselves to know much, Socrates came to the conclusion that he was wise only in so far as he knew that he knew nothing. Socrates' superior intellect made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. He was nevertheless found guilty as charged, and sentenced to death by drinking a silver goblet of hemlock. Socrates turned down the pleas of his disciples to attempt an escape from prison, drinking the hemlock and dying in the company of his friends. According to the Phaedo, Socrates had a calm death, enduring his sentence with fortitude. The Roman philosopher Seneca attempted to emulate Socrates' death by hemlock when forced to commit suicide by the Emperor Nero. According to Xenophon and Plato, Socrates had an opportunity to escape, as his followers were able to bribe the prison guards. After escaping, Socrates would have had to flee from Athens. In the painting "Death Of Socrates", under the death bed, there is an irregularly-shaped tile, which many believe is an escape hatch. Socrates refused to escape for several reasons. 1. He believed that such a flight would indicate a fear of death, which he believed no true philosopher has. 2. Even if he did leave, he, and his teaching, would fare no better in another country. 3. Having knowingly agreed to live under the city's laws, he implicitly subjected himself to the possibility of being accused of crimes by its citizens and judged guilty by its jury. To do otherwise would have caused him to break his 'contract' with the state, and by so doing harming it, an act contrary to Socratic principle. After Socrates's death, Plato described it in the dialogue Phaedo. "He walked about and, when he said his legs were heavy, lay down on his back, for such was the advice of the attendant. The man who had administered the poison laid his hands on him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. He said "No"; then after that, his thighs; and passing upwards in this way he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. ... To this question he made no reply, but after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed." Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo Philosophy Socratic method Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic (answering a question with a question) method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of elenchos, which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice. It was

first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. For this, Socrates is customarily regarded as the father of political philosophy and ethics or moral philosophy, and as a fountainhead of all the main themes in Western philosophy in general. In this method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. In fact, Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."[ Philosophical beliefs The beliefs of Socrates, as opposed to those of Plato, are difficult to discern. Little in the way of concrete evidence demarcates the two. There are some who claim that Socrates had no particular set of beliefs, and sought only to examine; the lengthy theories he gives in the Republic are considered to be the thoughts of Plato. Others argue that he did have his own theories and beliefs, but there is much controversy over what these might have been, owing to the difficulty of separating Socrates from Plato and the difficulty of interpreting even the dramatic writings concerning Socrates. Consequently, distinguishing the philosophical beliefs of Socrates from those of Plato and Xenophon is not easy and it must be remembered that what is attributed to Socrates might more closely reflect the specific concerns of these writers. Evidence from the dialogues suggests Socrates had only two teachers: Prodicus, a grammarian, and Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea who taught him about eros, or love. His knowledge of other contemporary thinkers such as Parmenides and Anaxagoras is evident from a number of dialogues, and historical sources often include both of them as Socrates' teachers. John Burnet argued that his principal teacher was the Anaxagroean Archelaus but that his ideas were as Plato described them; Eric A. Havelock, on the other hand, considered Socrates' association with the Anaxagoreans to be evidence of Plato's philosophical separation from Socrates. Apollo himself may be considered one of his teachers, as Socrates claims (in Plato's Apology) that his habit of constant conversation was obedience to God. See below for more on the divine sign. Knowledge Socrates seems to have often said that his wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates may have believed that wrongdoing was a consequence of ignorance, that those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates consistently claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love" which he connected with the concept of "the love of wisdom", i.e., philosophy. He never actually claimed to be wise, only to understand the path that a lover of wisdom must take in pursuing it. It is debatable whether Socrates believed that humans (as opposed to gods like Apollo) could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other, Plato's Symposium (Diotima's Speech) and Republic (Allegory of the Cave) describe a method for ascending to wisdom. In Plato's Theaetetus (150a) Socrates compares himself to a true matchmaker, as distinguished

from a panderer. This distinction is echoed in Xenophon's Symposium (3.20), when Socrates jokes about his certainty of being able to make a fortune, if he chose to practise the art of pandering. For his part as a philosophical interlocutor, he leads his respondent to a clearer conception of wisdom, although he claims that he is not himself a teacher (Apology). His role, he claims, is more properly to be understood as analogous to a midwife (a?a). Socrates explains that he is himself barren of theories, but knows how to bring the theories of others to birth and determine whether they are worthy or mere "wind eggs". Perhaps significantly, he points out that midwives are barren due to age, and women who have never given birth are unable to become midwives; a truly barren woman would have no experience or knowledge of birth and would be unable to separate the worthy infants from those that should be left on the hillside to be exposed. To judge this, the midwife must have experience and knowledge of what she is judging. Virtue Socrates believed that the best way for people to live was to focus on self-development rather than the pursuit of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt that this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. His actions lived up to this: in the end, Socrates accepted his death sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go against the will of his community; as above, his reputation for valor on the battlefield was without reproach. The idea that humans possessed certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "virtue was the most valuable of all possessions; the ideal life was spent in search of the Good. Truth lies beneath the shadows of existence, and that it is the job of the philosopher to show the rest how little they really know." (Solomon 44) Ultimately, virtue relates to the form of the Good; to truly be good and not just act with "right opinion"; one must come to know the unchanging Good in itself. In the Republic, he describes the "divided line", a continuum of ignorance to knowledge with the Good on top of it all; only at the top of this line do we find true good and the knowledge of such. Politics It is often argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world that only the wise man can understand" making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. According to Plato's account, Socrates was in no way subtle about his particular beliefs on government. He openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates objected to any form of government that did not conform to his ideal of a perfect republic led by philosophers (Solomon 49), and Athenian government was far from that. During the last years of Socrates' life, Athens was in continual flux due to political upheaval. Democracy was at last overthrown by a junta known as the Thirty Tyrants, led by Plato's relative, Critias, who had been a student of Socrates. The Tyrants ruled for about a year before the Athenian democracy was reinstated, at which point it declared an amnesty for all recent

events. Four years later, it acted to silence the voice of Socrates. This argument is often denied, and the question is one of the biggest philosophical debates when trying to determine what, exactly, it was that Socrates believed. The strongest argument of those who claim that Socrates did not actually believe in the idea of philosopher kings is Socrates' constant refusal to enter into politics or participate in government of any sort; he often stated that he could not look into other matters or tell people how to live when he did not yet understand himself. He believed he was a philosopher engaged in the pursuit of Truth, and did not claim to know it fully. Socrates' acceptance of his death sentence, after his conviction by the Boule (Senate), can also support this view. It is often claimed that much of the anti-democratic leanings are from Plato, who was never able to overcome his disgust at what was done to his teacher. In any case, it is clear that Socrates thought that the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was at least as objectionable as democracy; when called before them to assist in the arrest of a fellow Athenian, Socrates refused and narrowly escaped death before the Tyrants were overthrown. He did however fulfill his duty to serve as prytanie when a trial of a group of generals who presided over a disastrous naval campaign were judged; even then he maintained an uncompromising attitude, being one of those who refused to proceed in a manner not supported by the laws, despite intense pressure. [1] Judging by his actions, he considered the rule of the Thirty Tyrants less legitimate than that of the democratic senate who sentenced him to death. Mysticism As depicted in the dialogues of Plato, Socrates often seems to manifest a mystical side, discussing reincarnation and the mystery religions; however, this is generally attributed to Plato. Regardless, this cannot be dismissed out of hand, as we cannot be sure of the differences between the views of Plato and Socrates; in addition, there seem to be some corollaries in the works of Xenophon. In the culmination of the philosophic path as discussed in Plato's Symposium and Republic, one comes to the Sea of Beauty or to the sight of the form of the Good in an experience akin to mystical revelation; only then can one become wise. (In the Symposium, Socrates credits his speech on the philosophic path to his teacher, the priestess Diotima, who is not even sure if Socrates is capable of reaching the highest mysteries). In the Meno, he refers to the Eleusinian Mysteries, telling Meno he would understand Socrates' answers better if only he could stay for the initiations next week. Perhaps the most interesting facet of this is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (?p?t?ept????) inner voice that Socrates heard only when Socrates was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as "daemonic" suggests that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. Satirical playwrights He was prominently lampooned in Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds, produced when Socrates

was in his mid-forties; he said at his trial (in Plato's version) that the laughter of the theater was a harder task to answer than the arguments of his accusers. In the play he is ridiculed for his dirtiness, which is associated with the Laconizing fad; also in plays by Callias, Eupolis, and Telecleides. In all of these, Socrates and the Sophists were criticised for "the moral dangers inherent in contemporary thought and literature". Prose sources Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle are the main sources for the historical Socrates; however, Xenophon and Plato were direct disciples of Socrates, and presumably, they idealize him; however, they wrote the only continuous descriptions of Socrates that have come down to us. Aristotle refers frequently, but in passing, to Socrates in his writings. Almost all of Plato's works center around Socrates. However Plato's latter works appear to be more his own philosophy put into the mouth of his mentor. The Socratic dialogues The Socratic dialogues are a series of dialogues written by Plato and Xenophon in the form of discussions between Socrates and other persons of his time, or as discussions between Socrates' followers over his concepts. Plato's Phaedo is an example of this latter category. Although his Apology is a monologue delivered by Socrates, it is usually grouped with the dialogues. The Apology professes to be a record of the actual speech that Socrates delivered in his own defense at the trial. In the Athenian jury system, an Apology is composed of three parts: a speech, followed by a counter-assessment, then some final words. "Apology" is a transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek apologia, meaning "defense"; in this sense it is not apologetic according to our contemporary use of the term. Plato generally does not place his own ideas in the mouth of a specific speaker; he lets ideas emerge via the Socratic method, under the guidance of Socrates. Most of the dialogues present Socrates applying this method to some extent, but nowhere as completely as in the Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro go through several iterations of refining the answer to Socrates' question, "...What is the pious, and what the impious?" In Plato's dialogues, learning appears as a process of remembering. The soul, before its incarnation in the body, was in the realm of Ideas (very similar to the Platonic "Forms"). There, it saw things the way they truly are, rather than the pale shadows or copies we experience on earth. By a process of questioning, the soul can be brought to remember the ideas in their pure form, thus bringing wisdom. Especially for Plato's writings referring to Socrates, it is not always clear which ideas brought forward by Socrates (or his friends) actually belonged to Socrates and which of these may have been new additions or elaborations by Plato this is known as the Socratic problem. Generally, the early works of Plato are considered to be close to the spirit of Socrates, whereas the later works including Phaedo and the "Republic" are considered to be possibly products of Plato's elaborations.

Ronnie Biggs Ronald Arthur Biggs, born 8 August 1929 in London's East End (known commonly as Ronnie Biggs), is a British prisoner who is known for his minor role in the Great Train Robbery of 1963. He and others stole 2.6 million from a mail train. After he was convicted he escaped from HM Prison Wandsworth in 1965 by scaling the wall with a rope ladder, got papers and a new face in Paris, and fled in 1970 to Adelaide, South Australia. He worked in Set Construction at Channel 10 when a reporter recognised him. He then fled toBlackburn North, in Melbourne, Australia, staying for some time before fleeing to Brazil in the same year. He allegedly had only 200 left when he arrived in Brazil. His wife, Charmian, and two sons stayed behind in Australia. He spent the next three decades of his life as a fugitive and became somewhat of a media celebrity. Despite being a rather minor figure in the actual robbery he could be argued to have gained the most actual profit from it. In 1974 he was found by the British police in Rio de Janeiro but couldn't be extradited because his current girlfriend (Raimunda de Castro, a nightclub dancer and prostitute) was pregnant. Brazilian law wouldn't allow the parent of a Brazilian child to be extradited. Unfortunately, his felon status also prevented him from working, but nothing prevented him from profiting from Scotland Yard's misfortune. "Ronnie Biggs" coffee cups and t-shirts suddenly started showing up in tourist traps throughout Rio. Supposedly, he went back and forth to the UK several times during the making of a documentary about the Great Train Robbery, always in disguise. Also, he recorded vocals on two songs for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Malcolm McLaren's film about the Sex Pistols. The basic tracks for "The Biggest Blow (A Punk Prayer)" (aka "No One is Innocent") and "Belsen Was a Gas" were recorded with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook at a studio in Brazil shortly after the Sex Pistols' final performance, with overdubs being added in a British studio at a later date. "The Biggest Blow" was released as a single in the UK and reached #6 on the British singles charts, with the sleeve showing Martin Bormann playing bass with the group (in actuality this was American actor James Jeter). Following the extradition attempt, Ronnie collaborated with Bruce Henry, an American bass player, Jaime Shields and Aureo de Souza to record "Mailbag Blues", a musical narrative of his life that he intended to use a movie soundtrack. This album was re-released in 2004 by whatmusic.com. In 1981 Biggs was kidnapped by a gang of adventurers who managed to smuggle him to Barbados, hoping to collect some reward from the British police. The coup was discovered, though, and Biggs made use of legal loopholes to have himself sent

back to Brazil. In February 2006 Channel 4 aired a documentary featuring dramatisations of the attempted kidnap and interviews with the ex-British Army personnel who carried it out. The team was headed by security consultant Patrick King. In the documentary King claims that the kidnap may have in fact been a deniable operation. Ronnie's Brazilian son by Raimunda, Michael, would eventually become a member of a child band of enormous success (Turma do Balo Mgico), bringing a welcome new source of income to his father, who would spend with abandon. In a short time, however, the band faded into obscurity and dissolved, leaving father and son in relatively dire straits again. In 1991, Biggs sung vocals for the song "Carnival In Rio (Punk Was)" by German punk band Die Toten Hosen. In 2001 Biggs announced to The Sun newspaper that he would be willing to return to the UK. He had suffered a stroke the previous year and was in poor health. His stated desire was to "walk into a pub a British man and have a pint of bitter". It is believed by some that he was probably only after the free health care available. He returned on 7 May 2001, and was re-imprisoned for his crimes. His trip back on a private jet was paid by The Sun, which has also reportedly paid Michael Biggs 20,000, plus other expenses. Ronald Biggs had 28 years of his sentence left. Since his return he has undergone numerous health scares, including two heart attacks, and has failed to get his sentence overturned or reduced. On 14 November 2001, Biggs petitioned Governor Hynd of HMP Belmarsh for early release on compassionate grounds based on his ill health. He had been treated four times by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich in less than six months. His health was deteriorating rapidly and he asked to be released to the care of his son for his remaining days. The application was denied. On 10th August 2005, it was reported that Biggs had contracted MRSA. His lawyers, seeking for Biggs's release on grounds of compassion, said that their client's death was likely imminent. On 26 October 2005, the Home Secretary Charles Clarke declined his appeal stating that his illness is not deemed terminal. Home Office compassion policy is to release prisoners with three months left to live. Biggs is nearly 80 years old, continues to need a tube for feeding and has difficulty speaking.

Guy Fawkes
Guido (Guy) Fawkes (also spelt contemporaneously Faukes) (April 13, 1570 - January 31, 1606), who also used the pseudonym John Johnson, was a member of a group of Catholic conspirators who endeavoured to blow up King James I and all the members of both branches of the Parliament of England while they were assembled in the House of Lords building for the formal opening of the 1605 session of Parliament. The plot was uncovered and the barrels of gunpowder defused before any damage was done. Fawkes was a convert to Catholicism, which occurred at about the age of 16 if his admission of recusancy at his preliminary interrogation is to be believed. Fawkes was born in Stonegate in York, where he was baptised in the church of St. Michaelle-Belfry, and attended St Peter's School. He served for many years as a soldier gaining considerable expertise with explosives. In 1593 he enlisted in the army of Archduke Albert of Austria in the Netherlands, fighting against the Protestant United Provinces in the Eighty Years' War. In 1596 he was present at the siege and capture of Calais but by 1602 he had risen no higher than the rank of ensign.

Gunpowder Plot
The beginnings of the Plot The Gunpowder Plot was concocted in May of 1604 with Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, John Wright, Robert Keyes, Thomas Wintour and Robert Wintour. Fawkes, who had considerable military experience and a good understanding of explosives, had been introduced to Catesby by a man named Hugh Owen. Some accounts indicate that Thomas Wintour was the prime mover in all of this, and that Fawkes was the tool towards the ultimate execution of the plot. Planning and preparation In March 1605, the conspirators rented a cellar beneath Parliament through Thomas Percy (also spelt Percye); Fawkes assisted in filling the room with gunpowder which was concealed beneath bric-a-brac in the cellars of the House of Lords building. The 36 barrels belonging to John Whynniard contained an estimated 2500 kg of gunpowder. The explosion could have reduced many of the buildings in the Old Palace of Westminster complex, including Abbey, to rubble and would have blown out windows in the surrounding area for a distance up to almost a mile. At around Easter 1605, Fawkes left Dover for Calais, travelling to St Omer and thence to Brussels. According to the confession made by Fawkes on November 5 1605, he there met with Hugh Owen, and Sir William Stanley. After that he made a pilgrimage in Brabant. He returned to England at the end of August or early September, again by way of Calais. There are suggestions that the original plan was to dig a tunnel from the cellar of an adjacent building by mining and then plant the explosives under the meeting chamber in the House of Lords. Discovery and arrest At around midnight November 4 or in the very early hours of November 5th, Fawkes, posing as a Mr John Johnson, was arrested in the cellar by a party of armed men led by Sir Thomas Knevytt (or Knevett). In Fawkes' possession were a watch, slow matches and touchpaper. On arrest Fawkes did not deny his intentions, stating that it had been his purpose to destroy the King and the Parliament. Interrogation of the prisoners Fawkes was brought into the king's bedchamber, where the ministers had hastily assembled, at one o'clock in the morning. He maintained an attitude of cool defiance, making no secret of his intentions. He replied to the king, who asked why he would kill him, that the pope had excommunicated him, that dangerous diseases require a desperate remedy, adding fiercely to the Scottish courtiers who surrounded him that one of his objects was to blow the Scots back into Scotland. Later in the morning, before noon, he was again interrogated. He was questioned on the nature of his accomplices, the involvement of Thomas Percy, what letters he had received from overseas, and whether he had spoken with Hugh Owen. He was taken to the Tower of London and there interrogated under torture. Since torture was forbidden except by the express instruction of the monarch or the Privy Council, King James I in a letter of November 6 stated: "The gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad maiora tenditur [and thus by increase to the worst], and so God speed your goode worke". Initially he resisted torture. On November 8, Fawkes verbally confessed revealed the names of his co-conspirators, and recounted the full details of the plot on November 9. He made a signed confession on November 10; his signature after torture on the rack is strikingly shaky.

Trial
A nominal trial then ensued on January 27, 1606 at which the sentences had already been predetermined. On January 31, Fawkes, Wintour, and a number of others implicated in the conspiracy were taken to Old Palace Yard in Westminster. There they were hanged, drawn and quartered.

Aftermath

According to historian Antonia Fraser, the gunpowder was taken to the Tower of London and would have been reissued if in good condition, or otherwise sold for recycling. However a sample of the gunpowder may have survived -- in March 2002 workers at the British Library, investigating archives of John Evelyn, found a box containing various samples of gunpowder and several notes: "Gunpowder 1605 in a paper inscribed by John Evelyn. Powder with which that villain Faux would have blown up the parliament." and "Gunpowder. Large package is supposed to be Guy Fawkes' gunpowder." and "But there was none left! WEH 1952". According to historian Ronald Hutton, when it was moved to the Tower of London magazine after Guy Fawkes was caught, it was discovered to be `decayed'; that is, it had done what gunpowder always did when left to sit for too long, and separated into its component chemical parts, rendering it harmless. If Guy had plunged in the torch with Parliament all ready above him, all that would have happened would have been a damp splutter. In England, the failure of the gunpowder plot is celebrated annually on Guy Fawkes Night.

Popularity
Guy Fawkes appears in the 2002 List of "100 Great Britons" (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public), alongside such other greats as David Beckham, Aleister Crowley, Winston Churchill and Johnny Rotten. Cynical Britons are sometimes known to comment that Guy Fawkes was the only man to go to Parliament with honourable intentions. In an interesting example of semantic progression, Guy Fawkes has become immortalised by one of the most common words in the English language, particularly in American spoken English. The burning on 5 November of an effigy of Fawkes, known as a "guy," led to the use of the word "guy" as a term for "a person of grotesque appearance" and then to a general reference for a man, as in "some guy called for you." In the 20th century, under the influence of American popular culture, "guy" gradually replaced "fellow," "bloke," "chap" and other such words there and the practice is spreading throughout the English-speaking world. The story of Guy Fawkes was a major inspiration for Alan Moore's post-nuclear war tale of a fascist Britain, V for Vendetta. The main character in that story is modeled on Fawkes

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest physicists of all time. He formulated the special and general theories of relativity. In addition, he made significant contributions to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. While best known for the Theory of Relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mc), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 (his "wonderful year" or "miraculous year") and "for his services to Theoretical Physics". Following the May-1919 British solar-eclipse expeditions, whose later analysis confirmed that light rays from distant stars were deflected by the Sun's gravitation as predicted by the Field Equation of general relativity, in November 1919 Albert Einstein became world-famous, an unusual achievement for a scientist. The London Times ran the headline on November 7, 1919: "Revolution in science New theory of the Universe Newtonian ideas overthrown". Nobel laureate Max Born viewed General Relativity as the "greatest feat of human thinking about nature"; fellow laureate Paul Dirac called it "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made". In popular culture, the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius.

Biography Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, around 11:30 AM LMT, in the city of Ulm in Wrttemberg, Germany, about 100 km east of Stuttgart. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman who later ran an electrochemical works, and his mother was Pauline, ne Koch. They were married in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. At his birth, Albert's mother was reputedly frightened that her infant's head was so large and oddly shaped. Though the size of his head appeared to be less remarkable as he grew older, it's evident from photographs of Einstein that his head was proportionately large for his body throughout his life, a trait regarded as "benign macrocephaly" in large-headed individuals with no related disease or cognitive deficits. Another more famous aspect of Einstein's childhood is the fact that he spoke much later than the average child. Einstein claimed that he did not begin speaking until the age of three and only did so hesitantly, even beyond the age of nine. Because of Einstein's late speech development and his later childhood tendency to ignore any subject in school that bored him instead focusing intensely only on what interested him some observers at the time suggested that he might be "retarded," such as one of the Einstein's housekeepers. This latter observation was not the only time in his life that controversial labels and pathology would be applied to Einstein. Albert's family members were all non-observant Jews and he attended a Catholic elementary school. At the insistence of his mother, he was given violin lessons. Though he initially disliked the lessons, and eventually discontinued them, he would later take great solace in Mozart's violin sonatas When Einstein was five, his father showed him a small pocket compass, and Einstein realized that something in "empty" space acted upon the needle; he would later describe the experience as one of the most revelatory events of his life. He built models and mechanical devices for fun and showed great mathematical ability early on. In 1889, a medical student named Max Talmud (later: Talmey), who visited the Einsteins on Thursday nights for 6 years, introduced Einstein to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Two of his uncles would further foster his intellectual interests during his late childhood and early adolescence by recommending and providing books on science, mathematics and philosophy. Einstein attended the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received a relatively progressive education. He began to learn mathematics around age twelve; in 1891, he taught himself Euclidean plane geometry from a school booklet and began to study calculus 4 years later; Einstein realized the power of axiomatic deductive reasoning from the book of Euclid's Elements, which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book" (given by Max Talmud). While at the Gymnasium, Einstein clashed with authority and resented the school regimen, believing that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in such endeavors as strict memorization. In 1894, he came out of the closet, and then he wasfollowing the failure of Hermann Einstein's

electrochemical business, the Einsteins moved from Munich to Pavia, a city in Italy near Milan. Einstein's first scientific work, called "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields", was written contemporaneously for one of his uncles. Albert remained behind in Munich lodgings to finish school, completing only one term before leaving the gymnasium in the spring of 1895 to rejoin his family in Pavia. He quit a year and a half prior to final examinations without telling his parents, convincing the school to let him go with a medical note from a friendly doctor, but this meant that he had no secondary-school certificate. That year, at the age of 16, he performed the thought experiment known as "Albert Einstein's mirror". After gazing into a mirror, he examined what would happen to his image if he were moving at the speed of light; his conclusion, that the speed of light is independent of the observer, would later become one of the two postulates of special relativity. Although he excelled in the mathematics and science part of entrance examinations for the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, his failure of the liberal arts portion was a setback; his family sent him to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school, and it became clear that he was not going to be an electrical engineer as his father intended for him. There, he studied the seldom-taught Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and received his diploma in September 1896. During this time, he lodged with Professor Jost Winteler's family and became enamoured with Marie, their daughter and his first sweetheart. Einstein's sister, Maja, who was perhaps his closest confidant, was to later marry their son, Paul, and his friend, Michele Besso, married their other daughter, Anna. Einstein subsequently enrolled at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in October and moved to Zurich, while Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post. The same year, he renounced his Wrttemberg citizenship and became stateless. In the spring of 1896, the Serbian Mileva Maric started initially as a medical student at the University of Zurich, but after a term switched to the Federal Polytechnic Institute to study as the only woman that year for the same diploma as Einstein. Maric's relationship with Einstein developed into romance over the next few years, though his mother would cry that she was too old, not Jewish, and physically defective. In 1900, Einstein was granted a teaching diploma by the Federal Polytechnic Institute. Einstein then submitted his first paper to be published, on the capillary forces of a drinking straw, titled "Folgerungen aus den Capillarittserscheinungen", which translated is "Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena" (found in "Annalen der Physik" volume 4, page 513). In it, he tried to unify the laws of physics, an attempt he would continually make throughout his life. Through his friend Michele Besso, an engineer, Einstein was presented with the works of Ernst Mach, and would later consider him "the best sounding board in Europe" for physical ideas. During this time, Einstein discussed his scientific interests with a group of close friends, including Besso and Maric. The men referred to themselves as the "Olympia Academy". Einstein and Maric had a daughter out of wedlock, Lieserl Einstein, born in January 1902. Her fate is unknown; some believe she died in infancy, while others believe she was given out for adoption. Works and doctorate Einstein could not find a teaching post upon graduation, mostly because his brashness as a young

man had apparently irritated most of his professors. The father of a classmate helped him obtain employment as a technical assistant examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. There, Einstein judged the worth of inventors' patent applications for devices that required a knowledge of physics to understand in particular he was chiefly charged to evaluate patents relating to electromagnetic devices. He also learned how to discern the essence of applications despite sometimes poor descriptions, and was taught by the director how "to express [him]self correctly". He occasionally rectified their design errors while evaluating the practicality of their work. Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. Einstein's marriage to Maric, who was a mathematician, was both a personal and intellectual partnership: Einstein referred to Mileva as "a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am". Ronald W. Clark, a biographer of Einstein, claimed that Einstein depended on the distance that existed in his marriage to Mileva in order to have the solitude necessary to accomplish his work; he required intellectual isolation. Abram Joffe, a Soviet physicist who knew Einstein, wrote in an obituary of him, "The author of [the papers of 1905] was a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Maric" and this has recently been taken as evidence of a collaborative relationship. However, according to Alberto A. Martnez of the Center for Einstein Studies at Boston University, Joffe only ascribed authorship to Einstein, as he believed that it was a Swiss custom at the time to append the spouse's last name to the husband's name. Whatever the truth, the extent of her influence on Einstein's work is a highly controversial and debated question. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office had been made permanent, though he was passed over for promotion until he had "fully mastered machine technology". He obtained his doctorate under Alfred Kleiner at the University of Zurich after submitting his thesis "A new determination of molecular dimensions" ("Eine neue Bestimmung der Molekldimensionen") in 1905. Annus Mirabilis Papers During 1905, in his spare time, he wrote four articles that participated in the foundation of modern physics, without much scientific literature to which he could refer or many scientific colleagues with whom he could discuss the theories. Most physicists agree that three of those papers (on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity) deserved Nobel Prizes. Only the paper on the photoelectric effect would be mentioned by the Nobel committee in the award; at the time of the award, it had the most unchallenged experimental evidence behind it, although the Nobel committee expressed the opinion that Einstein's other work would be confirmed in due course. Some might regard the award for the photoelectric effect ironic, not only because Einstein is far better-known for relativity, but also because the photoelectric effect is a quantum phenomenon, and Einstein became somewhat disenchanted with the path quantum theory would take. Einstein submitted this series of papers to the "Annalen der Physik". They are commonly referred to as the "Annus Mirabilis Papers" (from Annus mirabilis, Latin for 'year of wonders'). The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) commemorated the 100th year of

the publication of Einstein's extensive work in 1905 as the 'World Year of Physics 2005'. The first paper, named "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", ("ber einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt") was specifically cited for his Nobel Prize. In this paper, Einstein extends Planck's hypothesis (E = h?) of discrete energy elements to his own hypothesis that electromagnetic energy is absorbed or emitted by matter in quanta of h? (where h is Planck's constant and ? is the frequency of the light), proposing a new law Emax = h? - P- to account for the photoelectric effect, as well as other properties of photoluminescence and photoionization. In later papers, Einstein used this law to describe the Volta effect (1906), the production of secondary cathode rays (1909) and the high-frequency limit of Bremsstrahlung (1911). Einstein's key contribution is his assertion that energy quantization is a general, intrinsic property of light, rather than a particular constraint of the interaction between matter and light, as Planck believed. Another, often overlooked result of this paper was Einstein's excellent estimate (6.17 1023) of Avogadro's number (6.02 1023). However, Einstein does not propose that light is a particle in this paper; the "photon" concept was not proposed until 1909. His second article in 1905, named "On the MotionRequired by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heatof Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", ("ber die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wrme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen") covered his study of Brownian motion, and provided empirical evidence for the existence of atoms. Before this paper, atoms were recognized as a useful concept, but physicists and chemists hotly debated whether atoms were real entities. Einstein's statistical discussion of atomic behavior gave experimentalists a way to count atoms by looking through an ordinary microscope. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the anti-atom school, later told Arnold Sommerfeld that he had been converted to a belief in atoms by Einstein's complete explanation of Brownian motion. Brownian motion was also explained by Louis Bachelier in 1900. Einstein's third paper that year, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" ("Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Krper"), was published in June 1905. This paper introduced the special theory of relativity, a theory of time, distance, mass and energy which was consistent with electromagnetism, but omitted the force of gravity. While developing this paper, Einstein wrote to Mileva about "our work on relative motion", and this has led some to ask whether Mileva played a part in its development. A few historians of science believe that Einstein and his wife were both aware that the famous French mathematical physicist Henri Poincar had already published the equations of relativity, a few weeks before Einstein submitted his paper. Most believe their work was independent and varied in metaphysical ways. Similarly, it is debatable if he knew the 1904 paper of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz which contained most of the theory and to which Poincar referred. Most historians, however, believe that Einsteinian relativity varied metaphysically from other theories of relativity which were circulating at the time, and that much of the questions about priority stem from the misleading trope of portraying Einstein as a genius working in total isolation. In a fourth paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", ("Ist die

Trgheit eines Krpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhngig?"), published late in 1905, he showed that from relativity's axioms, it is possible to deduce the famous equation which shows the equivalence between matter and energy. The energy equivalence (E) of some amount of mass (m) is that mass times the speed of light (c) squared: E = mc. However, it was Poincar who in 1900 first published the "energy equation" in slightly different form, namely as: m = E / c see also relativity priority dispute. Middle years In 1906, Einstein was promoted to technical examiner second class. In 1908, Einstein was licensed in Bern, Switzerland, as a Privatdozent (unsalaried teacher at a university). During this time, Einstein described why the sky is blue in his paper on the phenomenon of critical opalescence, which shows the cumulative effect of scattering of light by individual molecules in the atmosphere. In 1911, Einstein became first associate professor at the University of Zurich, and shortly afterwards full professor at the German language-section of the Charles University of Prague. While at Prague, Einstein published a paper calling on astronomers to test two predictions of his developing theory of relativity: a bending of light in a gravitational field, measurable at a solar eclipse; and a redshift of solar spectral lines relative to spectral lines produced on Earth's surface. A young German astronomer, Erwin Freundlich, began collaborating with Einstein and alerted other astronomers around the world about Einstein's astronomical tests. In 1912, Einstein returned to Zurich in order to become full professor at the ETH Zurich. At that time, he worked closely with the mathematician Marcel Grossmann, who introduced him to Riemannian geometry. In 1912, Einstein started to refer to time as the fourth dimension (although H.G. Wells had done this earlier, in 1895 in The Time Machine). In 1914, just before the start of World War I, Einstein settled in Berlin as professor at the local university and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He took Prussian citizenship. From 1914 to 1933, he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. He also held the position of extraordinary professor at the University of Leiden from 1920 until 1946, where he regularly gave guest lectures. In 1917, Einstein published "On the Quantum Mechanics of Radiation" ("Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung," Physkalische Zeitschrift 18, 121128). This article introduced the concept of stimulated emission, the physical principle that allows light amplification in the laser. He also published a paper that year that used the general theory of relativity to model the behavior of the entire universe, setting the stage for modern cosmology. In this work he created his selfdescribed "worst blunder": the cosmological constant. On May 14, 1904, Albert and Mileva's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born. Their second son, Eduard Einstein, was born on July 28, 1910. Hans Albert became a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, having little interaction with his father, but sharing his love for sailing and music. Eduard, the younger brother, intended to practice as a Freudian analyst but was institutionalized for schizophrenia and died in an asylum. Einstein divorced Mileva on February 14, 1919, and married his cousin Elsa Lwenthal (born Einstein: Lwenthal was the surname of her first husband, Max) on June 2, 1919. Elsa was Albert's first cousin (maternally) and his second cousin (paternally). She was three years older than Albert,

and had nursed him to health after he had suffered a partial nervous breakdown combined with a severe stomach ailment; there were no children from this marriage. General relativity In November 1915, Einstein presented a series of lectures before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in which he described a new theory of gravity, known as general relativity. The final lecture ended with his introduction of an equation that replaced Newton's law of gravity, the Einstein field equation. This theory considered all observers to be equivalent, not only those moving at a uniform speed. In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force (as it is in Newton's law of gravity) but is a consequence of the curvature of space-time. Einstein's published papers on general relativity were not available outside of Germany due to the war. News of Einstein's new theory reached English-speaking astronomers in England and America via Dutch physicists Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Paul Ehrenfest and their colleague Willem de Sitter, Director of Leiden Observatory. Arthur Stanley Eddington in England, who was Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, asked de Sitter to write a series of articles in English for the benefit of astronomers. He was fascinated with the new theory and became a leading proponent and popularizer of relativity. Most astronomers did not like Einstein's geometrization of gravity and believed that his light bending and gravitational redshift predictions would not be correct. In 1917, astronomers at Mt. Wilson Observatory in southern California published results of spectroscopic analysis of the solar spectrum that seemed to indicate that there was no gravitational redshift in the Sun. In 1918, astronomers at Lick Observatory in northern California obtained photographs at a solar eclipse visible in the United States. After the war ended, they announced results claiming that Einstein's general relativity prediction of light bending was wrong; but they never published their results due to large probable errors. During a solar eclipse in 1919, Arthur Eddington supervised measurements of the bending of star light as it passed close to the Sun, resulting in star positions appearing further away from the Sun. This effect is called gravitational lensing and amounts to twice the Newtonian prediction. The observations were carried out in Sobral, Cear, Brazil, as well as on the island of Principe, at the west coast of Africa. Eddington announced that the results confirmed Einstein's prediction and The Times reported that confirmation on November 7 of that year, thus cementing Einstein's fame. Many scientists were still unconvinced for various reasons ranging from the scientific (disagreement with Einstein's interpretation of the experiments, belief in the ether or that an absolute frame of reference was necessary) to the psycho-social (conservatism, anti-Semitism). In Einstein's view, most of the objections were from experimentalists with very little understanding of the theory involved. Einstein's public fame which followed the 1919 article created resentment among these scientists some of which lasted well into the 1930s. On March 30, 1921, Einstein went to New York to give a lecture on his new Theory of Relativity, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Though he is now most famous for his work on relativity, it was for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect that he was given the

Prize, as his work on general relativity was still disputed. The Nobel committee decided that citing his less-contested theory in the Prize would gain more acceptance from the scientific community. Copenhagen interpretation In 1909 Einstein presented a paper (ber die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen ber das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung, available in its English translation The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation) to a gathering of physicists on the history of aether theories and, more importantly, on the quantization of light. In this and an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that the energy quanta introduced by Max Planck also carried a well-defined momentum and acted in many respects as if they were independent, pointlike particles. This paper marks the introduction of the modern "photon" concept (although the term itself was introduced much later, in a 1926 paper by Gilbert N. Lewis). Even more importantly, Einstein showed that light must be simultaneously a wave and a particle, and foretold correctly that physics stood on the brink of a revolution that would require them to unite these dual natures of light. However, his own proposal for a solution that Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic fields be modified to allow wave solutions that are bound to singularities of the field was never developed, although it may have influenced Louis de Broglie's pilot wave hypothesis for quantum mechanics. Determinism Beginning in the mid-1920s, as the original quantum theory was replaced with a new theory of quantum mechanics, Einstein voiced his objections to the Copenhagen interpretation of the new equations. His opposition in this regard would continue all his life. The majority see the reason for his objection in terms of the view that he was a rigid determinist (see determinism). They would cite a 1926 letter to Max Born, where Einstein made the remark which history recalls the most: Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice. To this, Bohr, who sparred with Einstein on quantum theory, retorted, "Stop telling God what He must do!" The Bohr-Einstein debates on foundational aspects of quantum mechanics happened during the Solvay Conferences. Another important part of Einstein's viewpoint is the famous 1935 paper written by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Some physicists see this work as further supporting the notion that Einstein was a determinist. There is a case to be made, however, for a quite different view of Einstein's objections to quantum orthodoxy. Einstein himself made further statements beyond that just given, and an emphatic comment on the matter was made by his contemporary Wolfgang Pauli. The above 'God does not play dice' quotation was something stated quite early, and Einstein's later statements were concerned with other issues. The Wolfgang Pauli quotation is as follows:

I was unable to recognize Einstein whenever you talked about him in either your letter or your manuscript. It seemed to me as if you had erected some dummy Einstein for yourself, which you then knocked down with great pomp. In particular Einstein does not consider the concept of `determinism' to be as fundamental as it is frequently held to be (as he told me emphatically many times) he disputes that he uses as a criterion for the admissibility of a theory the question "Is it rigorously deterministic?" he was not at all annoyed with you, but only said that you were a person who will not listen. (emphasis due to Pauli) Incompleteness and Realism Many of Einstein's comments indicate his belief that quantum mechanics is 'incomplete'. This was first asserted in the famous 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR paradox) paper, and it appears again in the 1949 book Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist. The "EPR" paper entitled "Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?" has Einstein concluding: "While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible." In the Schilpp book, Einstein sets up a fascinating experimental proposal somewhat similar to Schrdinger's cat. He begins by addressing of the problem of the radioactive decay of an atom. If one begins with an undecayed atom and one waits a certain time interval, then quantum theory gives the probability that the atom has undergone the transformation of radioactive decay. Einstein then imagines the following system as a means to detect the decay: Rather than considering a system which comprises only a radioactive atom (and its process of transformation), one considers a system which includes also the means for ascertaining the radioactive transformation for example, a Geiger-counter with automatic registration mechanism. Let this include a registration-strip, moved by a clockwork, upon which a mark is made by tripping the counter. True, from the point of view of quantum mechanics this total system is very complex and its configuration space is of very high dimension. But there is in principle no objection to treating this entire system from the standpoint of quantum mechanics. Here too the theory determines the probability of each configuration of all coordinates for every time instant. If one considers all configurations of the coordinates, for a time large compared with the average decay time of the radioactive atom, there will be (at most) one such registrationmark on the paper strip. To each co-ordinate- configuration must correspond a definite position of the mark on the paper strip. But, inasmuch as the theory yields only the relative probability of the thinkable coordinate-configurations, it also offers only relative probabilities for the positions of the mark on the paperstrip, but no definite location for this mark. Einstein continues: If we attempt [to work with] the interpretation that the quantum-theoretical description is to be understood as a complete description of the individual system, we are forced to the interpretation that the location of the mark on the strip is nothing which belongs to the system per se, but that the existence of that location is essentially dependent upon the carrying out of an

observation made on the registration-strip. Such an interpretation is certainly by no means absurd from a purely logical point of standpoint; yet there is hardly anyone who would be inclined to consider it seriously. For, in the macroscopic sphere it simply is considered certain that one must adhere to the program of a realistic description in space and time; whereas in the sphere of microscopic situations, one is more readily inclined to give up, or at least to modify, this program." (emphasis due to Einstein) Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, using statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists, however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for strong objection to a physical theory. Pauli's testimony contradicts this, and Einstein's own statements indicate a focus on incompleteness, as his major concern. Summary Whatever his inner convictions, Einstein agreed that the quantum theory was the best available, but he looked for a more "complete" explanation, i.e., either more deterministic or one that could more fundamentally explain the reason for probabilities in a logical way. He could not abandon the belief that physics described the laws that govern "real things", nor could he abandon the belief that there are no explanations that contain contradictions, which had driven him to his successes explaining photons, relativity, atoms, and gravity. Bose-Einstein statistics In 1924, Einstein received a short paper from a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose describing light as a gas of photons and asking for Einstein's assistance in publication. Einstein realized that the same statistics could be applied to atoms, and published an article in German (then the lingua franca of physics) which described Bose's model and explained its implications. Bose-Einstein statistics now describe any assembly of these indistinguishable particles known as bosons. The Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon was predicted in the 1920s by Bose and Einstein, based on Bose's work on the statistical mechanics of photons, which was then formalized and generalized by Einstein. The first such condensate in alkali gases was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, though Bose-Einstein Condensation has been observed in superfluid Helium-4 since the 1930s. Einstein's original sketches on this theory were recovered in August 2005 in the library of Leiden University. Einstein also assisted Erwin Schrdinger in the development of the quantum Boltzmann distribution, a mixed classical and quantum mechanical gas model although he realized that this was less significant than the Bose-Einstein model and declined to have his name included on the paper. Unified field theory

Einstein's research efforts after developing the theory of general relativity consisted primarily of a long series of attempts to generalize his theory of gravitation in order to unify and simplify the fundamental laws of physics, particularly gravitation and electromagnetism. In 1950 he described this work, which he referred to as the Unified Field Theory, in a Scientific American article. Einstein was guided by a belief in a single origin for the entire set of physical laws. Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research on a generalized theory of gravitation and his attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces ignored work in the physics community at large (and vice versa), most notably the discovery of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not understood independently until around 1970, fifteen years after Einstein's death. Einstein's goal of unifying the laws of physics under a single model survives in the current drive for unification of the forces. Final years In 1948, Einstein served on the original committee which resulted in the founding of Brandeis University. A portrait of Einstein was taken by Yousuf Karsh on February 11 of that same year. In 1952, the Israeli government proposed to Einstein that he take the post of second president. He declined the offer, and is believed to be the only United States citizen ever to have been offered a position as a foreign head of state. Einstein's refusal might have stemmed from his disapproval of some of the Israeli policies during the war of independence. In a letter he signed, along with other Jewish leaders in the U.S., he criticised the Freedom Party under the leadership of Menachem Begin for "Nazi and Fascist" methods and philosophy.. On March 30, 1953, Einstein released a revised unified field theory. He died at 1:15 AM in Princeton hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76 from internal bleeding, which was caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurism, leaving the Generalized Theory of Gravitation unsolved. The only person present at his deathbed, a hospital nurse, said that just before his death he mumbled several words in German that she did not understand. He was cremated without ceremony on the same day he died at Trenton, New Jersey, in accordance with his wishes. His ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location. An autopsy was performed on Einstein by Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, who removed and preserved his brain. Harvey found nothing unusual with his brain, but in 1999 further analysis by a team at McMaster University revealed that his parietal operculum region was missing and, to compensate, his inferior parietal lobe was 15% wider than normal. The inferior parietal region is responsible for mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement. Einstein's brain also contained 73% more glial cells than the average brain.

Martin Luther King

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929April 4, 1968) was a Nobel Laureate Baptist minister and African American civil rights activist. He is one of the most significant leaders in U.S. history and in the modern history of nonviolence, and is considered a hero, peacemaker and martyr by many people around the world. A decade and a half after his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King Day was established in his honor.

Biography
King was born in Atlanta, Georgia to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree (in Sociology) in 1948 and from Crozer Theological Seminary with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. The wedding ceremony took place in Scott's parent's house in Marion Alabama, and was performed by King's father. King and Scott had four children: Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama) Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama) Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia) Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia) In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which began when Rosa Parks refused to cede her seat to a white person. Dr. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses. Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to organise Civil Rights activism. He continued to dominate the organisation to his death, a position criticised by the more radical and democratic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SCLC derived its membership principally from black communities associated with Baptist churches. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mohandas Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organised by the SCLC. King correctly identified that organised, non-violent protest against the racist system of Southern separation known as Jim Crow, when violently attacked by racist authorities and covered extensively by the media, would create a wave of pro-Civil Rights public opinion, and this was the key relationship which brought Civil Rights to the forefront of American politics in the early 1960s. He organized and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, fair hiring, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were later successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with astonishing success by choosing the method of protest, and the places in which protests were carried out, in order to provoke the harshest and most shocking retaliation from racist authorities. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement in Albany in 19612, where splits within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated the movement, in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963, and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. King and SCLC joined SNCC in the city of Selma, Alabama in December 1964; SNCC had already been there working on voter registration for a number of months. King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organise a march which was intended to go from Selma to the state capital Montgomery starting on March 25, 1965. The first attempt to march, on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. The day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights movement, the clearest demonstration so far of the dramatic potential of King's techniques of nonviolence. King, however, was not present; after meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, and the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the nation, and aroused a national sense of public outrage. The second attempt at the march, on March 9, was ended when King stopped the march at the Pettus bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seems to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase "Black Power". King was instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington in 1963. This role was another which courted controversy, as King was one of the key figures who helped President John F. Kennedy change the intent of the march. Conceived as a further part of the Civil Rights protest, it became more of a celebration of the achievements of the

movementand the governmentso far, a development which angered activists who were more radical than King. King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States. Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In February and again in April of 1967, King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. Along the way, King also had an impact on popular entertainment. He met Nichelle Nichols who mentioned that she was going to leave the cast of the television series, Star Trek, since she felt was being mistreated by the studio. King personally persuaded her to remain with the series for the sake of being an excellent role model for African Americans on television. King was hated by many white southern segregationists. On the night before his assassination, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd: "I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I know tonight we, as a people, shall get to the promised land". King was assassinated before the march on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily-black Memphis sanitation workers' union. Friends inside the apartment he was in heard the shot fired, and ran to the balcony to find Martin Luther King Jr. shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. James Earl Ray confessed to the shooting and was convicted, though he later recanted his confession. Coretta Scott King, King's widow and also a civil rights leader, along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers, who claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. Since his death, King's reputation has grown to become one of the most revered names in American history to the point where his popular esteem has described him as effectively the 20th Century's equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Supporters of this idea point out that both were leaders credited with strongly advancing human rights against poor odds in a nation divided against itself on the issue and were assassinated in part for it. In 1986, a U.S. national holiday was established in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., which is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's birthday. On January 18, 1993, for the first time, Martin Luther King Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. In addition, many U.S. cities have officially renamed one of their streets to honor King. Since his death, Coretta Scott King has followed her husband's footsteps as a civil rights leader. Her children are also following their father's footsteps.

King and the FBI

King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison was a man whom the bureau suspected of involvement with the Communist Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"to which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious liar in the country." Later, the focus of the bureau's investigations shifted to "discrediting" King through revelations regarding his private life. The bureau distributed reports regarding King's extramarital sexual affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the "racial" movement.

Douglas Bader
Sir Douglas Robert Steuart Bader (February 10, 1910 - September 5, 1982), was a successful fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Bader is upheld as an inspirational leader and hero of the era, not least because he fought in spite of having both legs amputated. Bader joined the RAF as a Cranwell cadet in 1928. On December 14, 1931 he attempted some low flying acrobatics at Woodley airfield in a Bristol Bulldog fighter, apparently as part of a dare. The tip of the left wing of the plane touched the ground, causing it to crash. Following the accident Bader had both legs amputated one above and one below the knee. He left the RAF, but, equipped with artificial legs, he learned to fly again.

Upon the outbreak of war in 1939, Bader used his Cranwell connections to re-join the RAF, in spite of his disability. During the Battle of Britain he commanded a wing of fighters based at Duxford and as a close friend of Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory was an active agent in the Big Wing controversy. Later, he was to lead a series of offensive fighter sweeps known as CIRCUS operations over France. By the summer of 1941, Bader had shot down 23 German planes, the fifth-most prolific record in the RAF. On August 9, 1941 Bader collided mid-air with a German ME 109 over Le Touquet. He was captured by German forces and sent to a number of POW camps and was finally despatched to the Colditz Castle prison. He remained there until the end of the war. Bader was knighted in 1976. Bader's biography, Reach For the Sky was written after the war by Paul Brickhill and became a bestseller. A movie of the same title was made in 1956 and starred Kenneth More as Bader. One website containing the memoirs of a British navy medic detailing assisting Bader briefly while in England in 1942, contradicting the generally-accepted account of Bader's continuing imprisonment through 1941-45, though the individual concerned admits he has no hard evidence other than his own memories.

Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III, KBE, (born October 28, 1955), commonly known as Bill Gates, is the co-founder and current Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. According to Forbes magazine in 2004, Gates is the wealthiest person in the world, a position he has held steadily for many years.

Biography
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr., a corporate lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, board member of First Interstate Bank, Pacific Northwest Bell and the national board of United Way.

Gates attended Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive prep school, where he was able to develop his programming skills on the school's minicomputer. He later on went to study at Harvard University, but dropped out without graduating to pursue what would become a lifelong career in software development. While he was a student at Harvard, he co-authored with Paul Allen the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the first commercially successful personal computer) in the mid 1970s. It was inspired by BASIC, an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes. Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). They live in a very large earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington. It is a very modern 21st century house in the "Pacific lodge" style, with advanced electrical and electronic systems everywhere. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion: It has a large private library with a domed reading room. Also in 1994, he acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

In 1997, Gates was the victim of a bizarre extortion plot by Chicago resident Adam Quinn Pletcher. Gates testified at the subsequent trial. Pletcher was convicted and sentenced in July 1998 to six years in prison.

Microsoft Corporation
In 1975, Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation to market their version of BASIC, called Microsoft BASIC. It was the primary interpreted computer language of the MS-DOS operating system, and was key to Microsoft's early commercial success. In February 1976, Gates wrote the Open Letter to Hobbyists, which shocked the computer hobbyist community by asserting that a commercial market existed for computer software. Gates stated in the letter that software should not be copied without the publisher's permission, which he equated to piracy. While legally correct, Gates's proposal was unprecedented in a community that was influenced by its ham radio legacy and hacker ethic, in which innovations and knowledge were freely shared in the community. Nevertheless, Gates was right about the market prospects and his efforts paid off: Microsoft Corporation became one of the world's most successful commercial enterprises, and a key player in the creation of a retail software industry. Microsoft's key moment came when in the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. Gates licensed MS-DOS to IBM, which it had acquired from a local computer manufacturer. The story of how Microsoft acquired the original system (QDOS) has inspired much folklore, which often portrays Gates pouncing on a trivial mistake by Digital Research and stealing that company's lead in microcomputer operating systems. It is frequently cited by those who accuse Gates of unethical business practices. In reality, IBM did approach Digital Research for a version of CP/M for its upcoming IBM PC, and spoke to Gary Kildall's wife Dorothy. IBM representatives wanted Dorothy to sign their standard non-disclosure agreement, which Dorothy considered overly burdensome. IBM then returned to talk to Microsoft. He obtained rights to a cloned design of CP/M, QDOS, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer products, licensed it to IBM, and MSDOS/IBMDOS was born. Later, IBM discovered that Gates' operating system could have infringement problems with CP/M, contacted Kildall, and in exchange for a promise not to sue, made an agreement that CP/M would be sold along with IBMDOS when the IBM PC was released. The price set by IBM for CP/M was $250 and for MSDOS/IBMDOS it was $40. Obviously, MSDOS/IBMDOS outsold CP/M many times over, eventually becoming the standard. By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft gained unprecedented visibility in the microcomputer industry, even rivalling IBM. During the following years, Gates used his company's growing resources to displace competitors such as WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3, among many others. It is alleged (although never explained in detail) that Gates instructed Microsoft programmers to include special code in one of the MS-DOS versions to make Lotus 1-2-3 produce errors, making it appear to the users as if Lotus's software was the problem. In the mid-1980s Gates became excited about the possibilities of compact disc for storage, and sponsored the publication of the book CD-ROM: The New Papyrus that promoted the idea of CD-ROM. In the late 1980s, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a more advanced operating system, OS/2. The operating system was marketed in connection with a new hardware design, the PS/2, that was proprietary and secret to IBM. As the project progressed, Gates oversaw continuing friction with IBM over the system's design, hardware support, and user interface. Ultimately he came to believe that IBM wanted to marginalize Microsoft from having any input in OS/2's development. On May 16, 1991 Gates announced to Microsoft employees that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would henceforth focus its platform efforts on Windows and the NT kernel. In the ensuing years OS/2 fell to the side and Windows became the favored PC platform. Some years later, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser displaced Netscape's Navigator, in a turn of events that many attributed to Microsoft's inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows at no extra charge. An opposing view is that the inclusion in Windows was less important in Internet Explorer's adoption than Microsoft's improvement of the browser's features to a level comparable with Navigator. As the architect of Microsoft's product strategy, Gates has aggressively broadened the company's range of products and, once it has obtained a leading position in a category, has vigorously defended that position. His and other Microsoft executives' strategic decisions have more than once drawn the concern of competition regulators, and in some cases have been ruled illegal. In 2000, Gates promoted long-time friend and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer to the role of Chief Executive Officer and took on the role of "Chief Software Architect".

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

With his wife, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization. Critics have called this a response to negative public outcry over the seemingly monopolistic and anti-competitive practices of his company, but those close to Gates say that he had long expressed his plan to eventually give away most (in 1997 the Washington Post reported 90%) of his large fortune. The foundation's grants have provided funds for underrepresented minority college scholarships, AIDS prevention, diseases that strike mainly in the third world, and other causes. In June 1999, Gates and his wife donated US$5 billion to their foundation, the largest single donation ever by living individuals. He has donated more than 100 million dollars to help kids with AIDS.

Accolades
Honorary KBE from the United Kingdom announced, 2004 Top 100 influential people in media, the Guardian, 2001 The Sunday Times power list, 1999 Upside Elite 100, Ranked 2nd, 1999 Top 50 Cyber Elite, TIME magazine, Ranked 1st, 1998 Top 100 most powerful people in sports, The Sporting News, Ranked 28th, 1997 CEO of the year, Chief Executive Officers magazine, 1994Entomologists have named the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honour.

Estimated wealth
According to Forbes list of the World's Wealthiest People (figures in US Dollars): 1996 - $18.5 billion, ranked #1 1997 - $36.4 billion, ranked #2 1998 - $51.0 billion, ranked #1 1999 - $90.0 billion, ranked #1 2000 - $60.0 billion, ranked #1 2001 - $58.7 billion, ranked #1 2002 - $52.8 billion, ranked #1 2003 - $40.7 billion, ranked #1 2004 - $46.6 billion, ranked #1

Henry Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and one of the first to apply assembly line manufacturing to the mass production of affordable automobiles. This achievement not only revolutionized industrial production, it had such tremendous influence over modern culture that many social theorists identify this phase of economic and social history as "Fordism."

Background
Ford was born on a prosperous farm in Dearborn, Michigan owned by his parents, William and Mary Ford, immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. He was the eldest of six children. As a child, Henry was passionate about mechanics. At 12, he spent a lot of time in a machine shop, which he had equipped himself. By 15, he had built his first internal combustion engine. In 1879 he left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co. After completion of his apprenticeship, Ford got a job with the Westinghouse company working on gasoline engines. Upon his marriage to Clara Bryant in 1888 Ford supported himself by running a sawmill. In 1891 Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, and after his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle named the Quadricycle, which he test-drove on June 4th that year (this was also the first automobile he ever drove). After this initial success, Ford left Edison Illuminating and, with other investors, formed the Detroit Automobile Company. The Detroit Automobile Company, however, went bankrupt soon afterward because Ford continued to improve the design instead of selling cars. Ford raced his vehicles against those of other manufacturers to show the superiority of his designs. With the interest in his race cars, he formed a second company, the Henry Ford Company. During this period, he personally drove his Quadricycle to victory in a race against Alexander Winton, a well-known driver and the heavy favorite on October 10, 1901. Ford was forced out of the company by the investors, including Henry M. Leland in 1902, and the company was reorganized as Cadillac.

Ford Motor Company

Henry Ford, with eleven other investors and $28,000 in capital, incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In a newlydesigned car, Ford drove an exhibition in which the car covered the distance of a mile on the ice of Lake St. Clair in 39.4 seconds, which was a new land speed record. Convinced by this success, the famous race driver Barney Oldfield, who named this new Ford model "999" in honor of a racing locomotive of the day, took the car around the country and thereby made the Ford marque well-known throughout the U.S. Henry Ford was also one of the early backers of the Indianapolis 500.

The Model T
In 1908, the Ford company released the Model T. From 1909 to 1913, Ford entered stripped-down Model Ts into races as well, finishing first (although later disqualified) in an "ocean-to-ocean" (across the USA) race in 1909, and setting a onemile oval speed record at Detroit Fairgrounds in 1911 with driver Frank Kulick. In 1913, Ford attempted to enter a reworked Model T in the Indianapolis 500, but was told rules required the addition of another 1,000 pounds (450 kg) to the car before it could qualify. Ford dropped out of the race, and soon thereafter dropped out of racing permanently, citing dissatisfaction with the sport's rules and the demand on his time by the now booming production of the Model T. Racing was, by 1913, no longer necessary from a publicity standpointthe Model T was famous, and ubiquitous on American roads. It was in this year Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly belts into his plants, which enabled an enormous increase in production. By 1918 half of all cars in America were Model Ts. The design, fervently promoted and defended by Henry Ford, would continue through 1927 (well after its popularity had faded), with a final total production of fifteen million vehicles. This was a record which would stand for the next 45 years. Ford said "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

Ford's Manufacturing Philosophy

Henry Ford had very specific thoughts on relations with his employees. They were expected to work an eight-hour day, and in 1913 were paid a handsome $5 per day. The pay rate increased to $6 per day at the peak of Model T production in 1918; such a sum for laborers was, at the time, almost unheard-of. Ford also offered his employees an innovative profitsharing plan. Conversely, Ford was adamantly against labor unions in his plants. To forestall union activity, he hired Harry Bennett, titularly the head of the Service Department, who employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, in 1937, was a bloody brawl between company security men and organizers that became known as The Battle of the Overpass. A sit-down strike by the United Auto Workers union in 1941 finally admitted collective bargaining at some Ford plants, but it was not until Henry Ford and Harry Bennett left the company for good in 1945 that it would fully unionize. On January 1, 1919, Henry Ford turned the presidency of Ford Motor Company over to his son Edsel, although still maintaining a firm hand in its managementfew company decisions under Edsel's presidency were made without being approved by Henry, and those few that were, Henry often reversed. Also at this time, Henry and Edsel purchased all remaining stock from other investors, thus becoming sole owners of the company. This began a period of decline for Ford Motor Company, since the stock buyout caused them to borrow heavily just before the postwar recession hit the country. In about 1920, Ford purchased a vast tract of land in Brazil, Fordlndia to grow rubber for his car tires. It proved a financial disaster and by the time he sold it in 1945, he had lost a fortune. By the mid 1920's, sales of the Model T began to decline, in part because of the rise of consumer credit. Other auto makers offered payment plans through which consumers could buy their cars, which usually included more modern mechanical features and styling not available with the Model T. Despite urgings from his son Edsel, the company president, Henry Ford steadfastly refused to incorporate new features into the Model T or to form a customer credit plan (the former to keep prices low and affordable, the latter because he believed such plans were bad for the economy).

The Model A and later

By 1926, flagging sales of the Model T convinced Henry Ford of what Edsel had been suggesting for some time: a new model was necessary. The elder Ford pursued the project with a great deal of technical expertise in design of the engine, chassis and other mechanical necessities, while leaving it to his son to develop the body design. Edsel also managed to prevail over his father's initial objections in the inclusion of a sliding-shift transmission. The result was the highly successful Ford Model A, introduced December, 1927 and produced through 1931, with a total output of over four million automobiles. Subsequently the company adopted an annual model change system similar to that in use by automakers today. During the thirties, Ford also overcame his objection to finance companies, and the Ford-owned Universal Credit Company became a major car financing operation. Henry Ford long had an interest in plastics developed from agricultural products, especially soybeans. Soybean-based plastics were used in Ford automobiles throughout the 1930s in plastic parts such as car horns, in paint, etc. This project culminated in 1942, when on January 13 Ford patented an automobile made almost entirely of plastic, attached to a tubular welded frame. It weighed 30% less than a standard car of the same size, and was said to be able to withstand blows ten times greater than could steel. Futhermore, it ran on grain alchohol (ethanol Alcohol fuel) instead of gasoline. The design never caught on. On May 26, 1943, Edsel Ford died, leaving a vacancy in the company presidency. Henry Ford advocated the spot be taken by Harry Bennett. Edsel's widow Eleanor, who had inherited Edsel's voting stock, wanted her son Henry Ford II to take over the position. The issue was settled for a period when Henry himself, at the age of 79, took over the presidency

personally. The company saw hard times during the next two years, losing $10 million a month. President Roosevelt considered a federal bailout for Ford Motor Company so that wartime production could continue.

The Dearborn Independent

Henry Ford devoted much of his semi-retirement from Ford Motor to the publication of a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which he purchased in 1919. The paper ran for around eight years, during which it introduced to the United States a work (not written by Ford himself) called "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which has since been discredited by virtually all historians as a forgery. The American Jewish Historical Society describes his ideas during this period as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor and anti-Semitic". Ford also published, in his name, several anti-Jewish articles for the Independent which were released in the early 1920s as a set of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." Denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring rather to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves. These articles were written by several authors, including Ford's personal secretary of 34 years, Ernest Liebold. None were actually penned by Ford, though since he was the paper's publisher they required his tacit approval. Ford closed the Dearborn Independent in December 1927 and later retracted the International Jew and the Protocols. On January 7, 1942, Henry Ford wrote a public letter to the ADL denouncing hatred against the Jews and expressing his hope that anti-Jewish hatred would cease for all time. Some claim that Ford neither wrote or signed this letter and have called the sincerity of his apology into question. His writings continue to be used as propaganda by various groups, often appearing on anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites.

Henry Ford and Nazism

There is some evidence that Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler financial backing when Hitler was first starting out in politics. This can in part be traced to statements from Kurt Ludecke, Germany's representative to the U.S. in the 1920s, and Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, who said they requested funds from Ford to aid the National Socialist movement in Germany. However, a 1933 Congressional investigation into the matter was unable to substantiate one way or the other that funding was actually sent. Ford Motor Company was active in Germany's military buildup prior to World War II. In 1938, for instance, it opened an assembly plant in Berlin whose purpose was to supply trucks to the Wehrmacht. In July of that year, Ford was awarded (and accepted) the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle (Grokreuz des Deutschen Adlerordens). Ford was the first American and the fourth person given this award, at the time Nazi Germany's highest honorary award given to foreigners. Earlier the same year, Benito Mussolini had been decorated with the Grand Cross. The decoration was given "in recognition of [Ford's] pioneering in making motor cars available for the masses." The award was accompanied by a personal congratulatory message from Adolf Hitler. [Detroit News, July 31, 1938.]

The Ford Foundation

Henry Ford, with his son Edsel, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936 as a local philanthropy in the state of Michigan with a broad charter to promote human welfare. The Foundation has grown immensely and by 1950 had become national and international in scope. The foundation no longer has any association with the Ford Motor Company, nor with the family or descendants of Henry Ford.

The final days

At the end of the war, the elder Henry, in ill health, ceded the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II on September 21, 1945 and went into retirement. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 83 at Fair Lane, his estate in Dearborn, and is buried at the Ford Cemetery in Detroit.

Quotations
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today." - 1916 "The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the International Jew -- German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews. I believe that in all these countries except our own the Jewish financier is supreme... Here, the Jew is a threat." - 1920

Walt Disney
Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901December 15, 1966) was an American animated film producer and animator. He was also the creator of an American-based theme park called Disneyland, and the founder of the highly profitable corporation, now known as The Walt Disney Company.

Childhood
Disney was born in Chicago to Elias Disney and Flora Call. He was named after his father and after his father's close friend Walter Parr, the minister at St. Paul Congregational Church. In 1906, his family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri. The family sold the farm in 1909 and lived in a rented house until 1910, when they moved to Kansas City. Disney was nine years old at the time.

According to the Kansas City, Missouri, Public School District records, Disney began attending the Benton Grammar School 1911, and continued his formal education there until he graduated on June 8, 1917. During this time, Disney also enrolled in classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. In the fall of 1917, Disney rejoined his family. He left school at the age sixteen and became a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, after he changed his birth certificate to show his year of birth as 1900 in order to be able to enlist in the service. He served as a member of the American Red Cross Ambulance Force in France till 1919.

Origins of the studio

Disney returned to the USA, moved to Kansas City and started looking for a job. He was also interested in becoming a political cartoonist but after some time of being unemployed he had to settle for a job in Posman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio. In his new job Disney met and befriended Ubbe Ert Iwerks, later known as Ub Iwerks. The two friends were interested in creating their own company and in January, 1920 they formed "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". In 1922 Disney started making longer shorts based on well known fairy-tales like "Cinderella". In 1923 Disney also started experimenting with shorts combining live-action and animation. Few of the shorts that Disney worked on during these years have survived but they were locally successful at the time and Disney was getting ambitious. Disney was now working on his own company again along with Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising and Carmen Maxwell but the Laugh-O-Grams weren't satisfying him any more. Though reasonably popular near Kansas City they weren't truly financially successful.

Mixing live action and animation

His next attempt at success would involve the combination of live-action and animation. This was already the basis of the moderately successful series Out of the Inkwell by Max Fleischer and his brother Dave Fleischer that had begun in 1918 and was still running. However, the Fleischer brothers had their animated star Koko the Clown interacting with a live-action setting. Disney wanted to create a series of cartoons, called the Alice Comedies in which a live action little girl interacted with animated characters. The idea would be used successfully much later in Roger Rabbit cartoons but was quite original for its time. Disney and his team put all their efforts on creating Alice's Wonderland. The young actress playing Alice in this film was Virginia Davis, who had worked for the Kansas City Film Ad Company. Unfortunately for them, their profits from Laugh-OGraphs weren't enough to cover the expenses and the company went bankrupt in July, 1923. But Disney had his finished project in his hand and he left for Hollywood in hopes of finding interested distributors. Reportedly he had only 40 dollars left at this point. Ub followed him. But Ising, Harman and Maxwell decided to follow their own separate path. They would form Arabian Nights Cartoon Studio and later Harman-Ising Studio.

Contract and new studio

In Hollywood Disney found the interested distributors he was looking for, Margaret Winkler and her fiancee (and soon husband), Charles Mintz. They were already distributing the Felix the Cat series by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer. On October 16 they signed a contract for twelve films. However Disney, at this point, had no studio, artists or actors while the contract asked for the participation of Virginia Davis, still living in Kansas. But Disney was enthusiastic and started working on his problems. He enlisted the help of his older brother Roy Oliver Disney who became his new partner. They established a small studio at 4651 Kingswell Avenue and started working. Although they only managed to make ten films during 1924 they were successful enough. The two brothers were able to move to a larger studio at 4649 Kingswell and hire more staff. Besides

artists (including Disney's later wife), more child actors were hired, playing secondary roles. Disney convinced Virginia Davis and her family to move to Hollywood. At the distributors' suggestion a recurring animated character was added to the series, Alice's cat Julius. He first appeared in Alice's Spooky Adventure released on April 1, 1924 and originally Disney didn't intended to use him again. But the distributors were familiar with animated cats and insisted that the cat would join the cast permanently. In Julius they formed a copy of Felix.

The budding mogul

Disney married a female artist under his employ, Lillian Marie Bounds, on July 13, 1925 and became the father of two children: Diane Marie Disney (born December 18, 1933) Sharon Mae Disney (born December 21, 1936) Meanwhile, the Alice series was becoming successful and Disney had his contract renewed, this time asking for eighteen more films. But the distributors asked for a reduction in the production costs. Disney decided to reduce Virginia Davis's regular monthly salary to a daily-rate pay. The Davis family refused and Virginia continued her career as a child actress elsewhere. She was replaced by Dawn Paris under the stage name Dawn O'Day (she would later use the stage name; Anne Shirley). But Dawn's payment wasn't enough as the only source of income for her family and she quit, too. She was replaced by Margie Gay. Despite these problems, fifteen films of the Alice series were released during 1925. In 1926, Margaret Winkler married Charles Mintz and retired from business. Disney now had to deal with one distributor who felt that the series was declining. By this time Ub Iwerks was in charge of the animated films and Disney just supervised and dropped some ideas. The animation was getting better, the gags increased, but the live-action sequences were becoming less important and the scenarios tended to be repetitive. But the series was still successful enough. During the year, the name of the company changed from "The Disney Brothers Studio" to "The Walt Disney Studio". From then on Roy would still play an important part in the Company's financial department but had little to do with the films. Disney was now the head of the Studio, which moved to Hyperion Avenue. Disney felt that his youthful appearance (he was 25 years old) worked against him during contract negotiations and grew a mustache in an attempt to look older and more serious.

The end of Alice, the start of Oswald

In 1927 Winkler Pictures ceased ordering cartoons for the Alice series. It had reached its limitations and with Alice in the Big League released on August 27, 1927 it was over. Besides Black Pete, none of the series characters would appear again. But Disney had other plans. Charles Mintz's own employer Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios was interested in a new animated series starring a rabbit. Mintz assigned this to Disney and his company. They developed the new character and named him: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Poor Papa was produced by Spring of this year but Laemmle was less than pleased with the character. They wanted a likeable character like Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, Felix the Cat or even Julius from the Alice Comedies. What they got was a rabbit looking old, fat, sloppy and scruffy with a hooligan's personality. Poor Papa would be released on August 6, 1928 when the character's popularity was at its height but this wasn't the introduction of the character to the public that Universal wanted. The Disney studio had to redesign the character. But the next short they produced was what Universal wanted. Trolley Troubles featured a younger, slimmer, better Oswald with the personality of a naughty young boy. The film's release on September 5, 1927 made the character instantly successful. Nine shorts featuring Oswald were released during the year and the character became popular. Oswald merchandise appeared though Disney had nothing to do with it. Black Pete was now used as a recurring antagonist to Oswald. Disney had success at his hands... or so he thought. One of the more famous Disney quotes has been, "Remember, it all started with a mouse." But it more likely started with the Rabbit. Disney was successful enough to be able to hire his old colleagues Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who hadn't been so successful on their own but had improved in skills. Seventeen of Disney's Oswald cartoons were released during 1928, the final being Hot Dog, released on August 20, 1928.

Oswald moves on
Disney was quite confident when he went to negotiate with Charles Mintz in New York. He wanted his fee to increase from 2250 dollars per short to 2500 dollars per short. Instead Mintz wanted Disney's fee to decrease to 2000 dollars per short. When Disney refused, Mintz had some announcements to make. He didn't need Disney anymore. He had secretly met with a number of Disney's employees including Harman and Ising and had signed them on contracts of their own. As the distributor Universal held the rights to Oswald and they could make their own cartoons with him if they wanted to, Disney returned to his Studio in defeat and along with Ub Iwerks and the remaining employees he started working on a new project to replace Oswald as Disney's star. This meeting was very important for the history of animation because of its consequences in the long run. It is well known that Disney's next project was Mickey Mouse but there were other developments spawned from the meeting. Charles Mintz wasn't idle either. He continued to provide Universal with Oswald cartoons, produced now in a new Studio under his

brother-in-law George Winkler. Thanks to Harman and Ising, now chief animators, the 25 shorts produced till mid-1929 were of the same quality as those produced by Disney's Studio. But then Carl Laemmle decided to create an animation department for Universal and hand the rights to Oswald to it. The new Studio would be run by Walter Lantz and would later spawn even more famous characters like Woody Woodpecker. Ozzie of the Circus, released on January 5, 1929 was the first in a long series of shorts produced by Lantz' Studio. As for Mintz and Winkler, their Studio and their careers were over. But Harman and Ising weren't even started yet. They found employment again creating a partnership with producer Leon Schlesinger. Together they created an animation Studio on behalf of Warner Bros.. The short Sinkin' in the Bathtub, released on April 19, 1930 was the first of a long series of cartoons called Looney Tunes that would spawn more famous characters like Bugs Bunny. Ironically enough, Oswald, the reason for these developments, has long been obscured by characters later created by the Studios formed as a result of his creation.

Discovering Mickey
Returning to Disney's new project, his company claimed that it was the blowing of a train's whistle that inspired him to create Mickey Mouse. Apparently the whistle blowed "A moooouse! A mooouse!" It seems likely that Mickey evolved from a more pragmatic conversation between Disney and Iwerks. Mickey in fact was little more than a truncation of Oswald, round ears instead of long ones, and so forth. It has also been said that the name Mickey came from Disney's wife Lillian who disapproved of Disney's choice of Mortimer. The name itself came from an occasion when a young Mickey Rooney walked into Disney's office whilst on a visit; Disney showed Rooney some pictures of Mortimer Mouse (as he was called at the time), and it occurred to him that the name Mickey would have a better ring to it. A tall, strapping Mortimer would appear later in a Disney cartoon attempting to woo Minnie away from Mickey. He continued this inventive film making with Mickey Mouse. Mickey's first cartoon was Plane Crazy, in a story inspired by Charles Lindbergh. The best-remembered today, however, was the first "talkie" cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Disney found out that his distributor was stealing from him, so he broke away from them. Lessons learned from this experience would later prompt him to distribute his films with his own distribution company, Buena Vista. But Disney's distributor persuaded Iwerks to leave Disney and work for them. Iwerks owned one third of the Walt Disney Studios. He eventually returned to Disney and worked for him in R & D creating such historic inventions as the multi-plane camera which created three dimensional backgrounds in animated films. But his choice back then to leave the studio and sacrifice his percentage of the company cost him countless millions of dollars. While Iwerks's contribution may be overlooked by most people, among Disney historians his name is as well known as any Disney character. Mickey's films were successful, but it was in merchandising the studio became truly lucrative. Starting out with Mickey Mouse pencils and then expanding into watches, comics and toys, the Mouse created a true financial empire. The shorts also had success with their musical scores. The Three Little Pigs was so successful when it was released in theaters that it was actually billed above the features. The title song, composed by Frank Churchill, was a huge popular hit, subsequently covered by other artists like Benny Goodman.

Risk and reward in feature films

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, was Disney's first feature-length animated film, as well as the first American animated feature in color. To acquire the funding to complete, Disney had to show a rough cut of the motion picture to loan officers at the Bank of America. A string of animated films, such as Fantasia (1940) and Pinocchio (1940), followed. Not all were commercial successes, and Disney's financial situation was at times threadbare. Disney's relationship with his animators was strained when they went on strike in 1941, almost crippling the studio. To compensate for the diminished resources, Disney came out with movies like The Three Caballeros and Melody Time that were less complicated and relied upon short musical segments. Learning from the lack of success he had with Fantasia, Disney used music from artists like Dinah Shore and Nelson Riddle as opposed to Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky. There might have been even more of these films if not for World War II. The Army occupied part of Disney's studio. Perhaps the most important Disney film from this time would be Victory Through Air Power. Disney agreed to make training films for the United States Armed Forces. In these, the Seven Dwarfs would demonstrate how to set up camps and so forth. But Victory Through Air Power, in which an eagle defeats an octopus, was used by the military to explain the strategy behind D-Day.

The need to diversify

After the war, the unfavorable economics of concentrating exclusively on animated movies finally caught up with Disney and his company, as they diversified into television and live-action movies, still retaining their family-friendly nature. However, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he named several of his employees as

Communist sympathizers. Some historians believe that the animosity from the studio strike caused him to bear a grudge, along with his dislike and distrust of labor unions, leading to his testimony.

Building the Disney empire

Disney opened Disneyland, a theme park located in Anaheim, California in 1955. In the months before his death, Disney dreamed of building EPCOT, an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. He passed away before he could make that dream a reality. While the Walt Disney World theme park was built, the EPCOT, also known as the "Florida Project", was translated by Disney's sucessors into the EPCOT of today, essentially a living world's fair. The Epcot park that currently exists is a far cry from the actual living city that Disney envisioned. However, the Celebration, Florida new town built by Disney Corporation adjacent to Walt Disney World harkens back to the EPCOT vision.

Disney and space exploration

Well before any vehicles traveled to space, Disney produced three educational films on the space program in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun: Man in Space which aired March 9, 1955 followed by Man and the Moon also 1955, and Mars and Beyond, December 4, 1957. The films attracted the attention of not only the general public, but also the Soviet space program.

Trivia and rumors

It is often stated that Disney had his body frozen and became a cryonics patient after his death. This is in fact an urban myth; Disney was cremated, and his remains lie in a family crypt at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. Disney had very simple tastes in food. According to his daughter Diane, "He liked fried potatoes, hamburgers, western omelets, hotcakes, canned peas, hash, stew, roast beef sandwiches. He doesn't go for vegetables, but loves chicken livers or macaroni and cheese." Lillian Disney would complain, "Why should I plan a meal when all Disney really wants is a can of chili or a can of spaghetti?" In 1940, the US FBI recruited Disney as an Official Informant. He was later designated Special Agent in Charge.

Josiah Wedgwood
Josiah Wedgwood (July 12, 1730 January 3, 1795) was an English potter, credited with the industrialisation of the manufacture of pottery. Born the twelfth and youngest child of Thomas and Mary Wedgwood, Josiah Wedgwood survived a childhood bout of smallpox to serve as an apprentice potter under first his father who owned the Churchyard Works in Burslem, Staffordshire, England then his eldest brother. Smallpox left Josiah with a permanently weakened knee, which made him unable to work the foot pedal of a potter's wheel. As a result, he concentrated from an early age on designing pottery rather than making it.

In his early twenties, Wedgwood began working with the most renowned English pottery-maker of his day, Thomas Whieldon. There he began experimenting with a wide variety of pottery techniques, an experimentation that crossed in his mind with the burgeoning early industrial city of Manchester, which was nearby. Inspired, Wedgwood leased the Ivy Works in his home town of Burslem and set to work. Over the course of the next decade, his experimentation (and a considerable injection of capital from his marriage to a richly endowed distant cousin, Sally Wedgwood) transformed the sleepy artisan works into the first true pottery factory.

Marriage and Children

Wedgwood married Sarah Wedgwood (a third cousin). Together they had children: Susannah Wedgwood (17651817) (mother of the English naturalist Charles Darwin) John Wedgwood (17661844) Josiah Wedgwood II (17691843) Thomas Wedgwood (17711805) (no children) Catherine Wedwood (17741823) (no children) Sarah Wedgwood (17761856) (no children)

Mary Anne Wedgwood (17781786) (no children) Wedgwood's work was of very high quality, and by 1763 he was receiving orders from the highest levels of the British nobility, including Queen Charlotte. Wedgwood convinced her to let him name the line of pottery she purchased "Queen's Ware", and trumpeted the royal association in his paperwork and stationery. As a burgeoning industrialist, Wedgwood was a major backer of the Trent and Mersey Canal dug between the River Trent and River Mersey, during which time he became friends with Erasmus Darwin. Later that decade, his burgeoning business caused him to move from the smaller Ivy Works to the newly-built Etruria Works, which would run for 180 years. The factory was so-named after the Etruria district of Italy, where black porcelain dating to Etruscan times was being excavated. Wedgwood found this porcelain inspiring, and his first major commercial success was its duplication with what he called "Black Basalt". Not long after the new works opened, continuing trouble with his smallpox-afflicted knee made necessary the amputation of his right leg. In 1780, his long-time business partner Thomas Bentley died, and Wedgwood turned to his friend Erasmus Darwin for help in running the business. As a result of the close association that grew up between the Wedgwood and Darwin families, one of Josiah's daughters would later marry Erasmus' son. One of the children of that marriage, Charles Darwin, would also marry a Wedgwood Emma, Josiah's granddaughter. Essentially, this double-barrelled inheritance of Josiah's money permitted Charles Darwin the life of leisure that eventually led to the formulation of his theory of evolution. In the latter part of his life, Wedgwood's obsession was to duplicate the Portland Vase, a blue and white glass vase dating to the first century AD. For three years he worked on the project, eventually producing what he considered a satisfactory copy in 1789. After passing on his company to his sons, Wedgwood died in 1795. Wedgwood's company is still a famous name in pottery today, and "Wedgwood China" is the commonly used term for his jasper ware, the blue (or sometmes green) china with overlaid white decoration, still common throughout the world. He was an active member of the Lunar Society and is remembered on the Moonstones in Birmingham.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; January 27, 1756 December 5, 1791) was a prolific and highly influential composer of Classical music. His enormous output of more than six hundred compositions includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of European composers, and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire. Life - Family and early years Mozart was born to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart, in the front room of nine Getreidegasse in Salzburg, the capital of the sovereign Archbishopric of Salzburg, in what is now Austria, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. His only sibling who survived beyond infancy was an older sister: Maria Anna, nicknamed Nannerl. Mozart was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert's Cathedral. The baptismal record gives his name in Latinized form as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Of these names, the first two refer to John Chrysostom, one of the Church Fathers, and they were names not employed in everyday life, while the fourth, meaning "beloved of God", was variously translated in Mozart's lifetime as Amadeus (Latin), Gottlieb (German), and Amad (French). Mozart's father Leopold announced the birth of his son in a letter to the

publisher Johann Jakob Lotter with the words "...the boy is called Joannes Chrysostomus, Wolfgang, Gottlieb". Mozart himself preferred the third name, and he also took a fancy to "Amadeus" over the years. Mozart's father Leopold (17191787) was one of Europe's leading musical teachers. His influential textbook Versuch einer grndlichen Violinschule, was published in 1756, the year of Mozart's birth (English, as "A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing", transl. E.Knocker; Oxford-New York, 1948). He was deputy kapellmeister to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, and a prolific and successful composer of instrumental music. Leopold gave up composing when his son's outstanding musical talents became evident. They first came to light when Wolfgang was about three years old, and Leopold, proud of Wolfgang's achievements, gave him intensive musical training, including instruction in clavier, violin, and organ. Leopold was Wolfgang's only teacher in his earliest years. A note by Leopold in Nannerl's music book the Nannerl Notenbuch records that little Wolfgang had learned several of the pieces at the age of four. Mozart's first compositions, a small Andante (K. 1a) and Allegro (K. 1b), were written in 1761, when he was five years old. The years of travel During his formative years, Mozart made several European journeys, beginning with an exhibition in 1762 at the Court of the Elector of Bavaria in Munich, then in the same year at the Imperial Court in Vienna and Prague. A long concert tour spanning three and a half years followed, taking him with his father to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London (where Wolfgang Amadeus played with the famous Italian cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri), The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zrich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. During this trip Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other great composers. A particularly important influence was Johann Christian Bach, who befriended Mozart in London in 176465. Bach's work is often taken to be an inspiration for Mozart's music. They again went to Vienna in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768. On this trip Mozart contracted smallpox, and his healing was considered by Leopold as a proof of God's intentions concerning the child. After one year in Salzburg, three trips to Italy followed: from December 1769 to March 1771, from August to December 1771, and from October 1772 to March 1773. Mozart was commissioned to compose three operas: "Mitridate R di Ponto" (1770), "Ascanio in Alba" (1771), and "Lucio Silla" (1772), all three of which were performed in Milan. During the first of these trips, Mozart met Andrea Luchesi in Venice and G.B. Martini in Bologna, and was accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica. A highlight of the Italian journey, now an almost legendary tale, occurred when he heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican. On September 23, 1777, accompanied by his mother, Mozart began a tour of Europe that included Munich, Mannheim, and Paris. In Mannheim he became acquainted with members of the Mannheim orchestra, the best in Europe at the time. He fell in love with Aloysia Weber, who

later broke up the relationship with him. He was to marry her sister Constanze some four years later in Vienna. During his unsuccessful visit to Paris, his mother died (1778). Mozart in Vienna In 1780, Idomeneo, widely regarded as Mozart's first great opera, premiered in Munich. The following year, he visited Vienna in the company of his employer, the harsh Prince-Archbishop Colloredo. When they returned to Salzburg, Mozart, who was then Konzertmeister, became increasingly rebellious, not wanting to follow the whims of the archbishop relating to musical affairs, and expressing these views, soon fell out of favor with him. According to Mozart's own testimony, he was dismissed literally "with a kick in the arse".[3] Mozart chose to settle and develop his own freelance career in Vienna after its aristocracy began to take an interest in him. On August 4, 1782, against his father's wishes, he married Constanze Weber (17631842; her name is also spelled "Costanze"); her father Fridolin was a half-brother of Carl Maria von Weber's father Franz Anton Weber. Although they had six children, only two survived infancy. Neither of these two, Karl Thomas (17841858) and Franz Xaver Wolfgang (17911844); later a minor composer himself), married or had children who reached adulthood. Karl did father a daughter, Constanza, who died in 1833. The year 1782 was an auspicious one for Mozart's career: his opera Die Entfhrung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was a great success and he began a series of concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos as director of the ensemble and soloist. During 178283, Mozart became closely acquainted with the work of J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel as a result of the influence of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who owned many manuscripts of works by the Baroque masters. Mozart's study of these works led first to a number of works imitating Baroque style and later had a powerful influence on his own personal musical language, for example the fugal passages in Die Zauberflte ("The Magic Flute") and in the Symphony No. 41. In 1783, Wolfgang and Constanze visited Leopold in Salzburg, but the visit was not a success, as his father did not open his heart to Constanze. However, the visit sparked the composition of one of Mozart's great liturgical pieces, the Mass in C Minor, which, though not completed, was premiered in Salzburg, and is now one of his best-known works. Wolfgang featured Constanze as the lead female solo voice at the premiere of the work, hoping to endear her to his father's affection. In his early Vienna years, Mozart met Joseph Haydn and the two composers became friends. When Haydn visited Vienna, they sometimes played in an impromptu string quartet. Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 178285, and are often judged to be his response to Haydn's Opus 33 set from 1781. Haydn was soon in awe of Mozart, and when he first heard the last three of Mozart's series he told Leopold, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.

During the years 17821785, Mozart put on a series of concerts in which he appeared as soloist in his piano concertos, widely considered among his greatest works. These concerts were financially successful. After 1785 Mozart performed far less and wrote only a few concertos. Maynard Solomon conjectures that he may have suffered from hand injuries [citation needed]; another possibility is that the fickle public ceased to attend the concerts in the same numbers. Mozart was influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment as an adult, and became a Freemason (1784). His lodge was a specifically Catholic, rather than a deistic one, and he worked fervently and successfully to convert his father before the latter's death in 1787. Die Zauberflte, his second last opera, includes Masonic themes and allegory. He was in the same Masonic Lodge as Haydn. Mozart's life was occasionally fraught with financial difficulty. Though the extent of this difficulty has often been romanticized and exaggerated, he nonetheless did resort to borrowing money from close friends, some debts remaining unpaid even to his death. During the years 1784-1787 he lived in a lavish, seven-room apartment, which may be visited today at Domgasse 5, behind St Stephen's Cathedral; it was here, in 1786, that Mozart composed the opera Le nozze di Figaro. Mozart and Prague Mozart had a special relationship with the city of Prague and its people. The audience there celebrated the Figaro with the much-deserved reverence he was missing in his hometown Vienna. His quotation "Meine Prager verstehen mich" (My Praguers understand me) became very famous in the Bohemian lands. Many tourists follow his tracks in Prague and visit the Mozart Museum of the Villa Bertramka where they can enjoy a chamber concert. In the later years of his life, Prague provided Mozart with many financial resources from commissions [citation needed]. In Prague, Don Giovanni premiered on October 29, 1787 at the Theatre of the Estates. Mozart wrote La clemenza di Tito for the festivities accompanying Leopold II's coronation in November 1790; Mozart obtained this commission after Antonio Salieri had allegedly rejected it. Final illness and death Mozart's final illness and death are difficult topics for scholars, obscured by romantic legends and replete with conflicting theories. Scholars disagree about the course of decline in Mozart's health particularly at what point (or if at all) Mozart became aware of his impending death and whether this awareness influenced his final works. The romantic view holds that Mozart declined gradually and that his outlook and compositions paralleled this decline. In opposition to this, some present-day scholars point out correspondence from Mozart's final year indicating that he was in good cheer, as well as evidence that Mozart's death was sudden and a shock to his family and friends. Mozart's attributed last words: "The taste of death is upon my lips...I feel something, that is not of this earth". The actual cause of Mozart's death is also a matter of conjecture. His death record listed "hitziges Frieselfieber" ("severe miliary fever," referring to a rash that looks like millet-seeds), a description that does not suffice to identify the cause as it would be diagnosed in modern medicine. Dozens of theories have been proposed, including trichinosis,

mercury poisoning, and rheumatic fever. The practice, common at that time, of bleeding medical patients is also cited as a contributing cause. Mozart died around 1 a.m. on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. Some days earlier, with the onset of his illness, he had largely ceased work on his final composition, the Requiem. Popular legend has it that Mozart was thinking of his own impending death while writing this piece, and even that a messenger from the afterworld commissioned it. However, documentary evidence has established that the anonymous commission came from one Count Franz Walsegg of Schloss Stuppach, and that most if not all of the music had been written while Mozart was still in good health. A younger composer, and Mozart's pupil at the time, Franz Xaver Sssmayr, was engaged by Constanze to complete the Requiem. However, he was not the first composer asked to finish the Requiem, as the widow had first approached another Mozart student, Joseph Eybler, who began work directly on the empty staves of Mozart's manuscript but then abandoned it. Because he was buried in an unmarked grave, it has been popularly assumed that Mozart was penniless and forgotten when he died. In fact, though he was no longer as fashionable in Vienna as before, he continued to have a well-paid job at court and receive substantial commissions from more distant parts of Europe, Prague in particular [citation needed]. He earned about 10,000 florins per year[6], equivalent to at least 42,000 US dollars in 2006, which places him within the top 5% of late 18th century wage earners[6], but he could not manage his own wealth. His mother wrote, "When Wolfgang makes new acquaintances, he immediately wants to give his life and property to them." His impulsive largesse and spending often put him in the position of having to ask others for loans. Many of his begging letters survive but they are evidence not so much of poverty as of his habit of spending more than he earned. He was not buried in a "mass grave" but in a regular communal grave according to the 1784 laws in Austria. Though the original grave in the St. Marx cemetery was lost, memorial gravestones (or cenotaphs) have been placed there and in the Zentralfriedhof. In 2005, new DNA testing was performed by Austria's University of Innsbruck and the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, to determine if a skull in an Austrian Museum was actually his, using DNA samples from the marked graves of his grandmother and Mozart's niece. However, test results were inconclusive, suggesting that none of the DNA samples were related to each other. In 1809, Constanze married Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen (17611826). Being a fanatical admirer of Mozart, he (and Constanze?) edited vulgar passages out of many of the composer's letters and wrote a Mozart biography. Nissen did not live to see his biography printed, and Constanze finished it. Works, musical style, and innovations Style Mozart's music, like Haydn's, stands as an archetypal example of the Classical style. His works spanned the period during which that style transformed from one exemplified by the style galant to one that began to incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque,

complexities against which the galant style had been a reaction. Mozart's own stylistic development closely paralleled the development of the classical style as a whole. In addition, he was a versatile composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. He also wrote a great deal of religious music, including masses; and he composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment. The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart's music. Clarity, balance, and transparency are hallmarks, though a simplistic notion of the delicacy of his music obscures for us the exceptional and even demonic power of some of his finest masterpieces, such as the Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491, the Symphony in G minor, K. 550, and the opera Don Giovanni. The famed writer on music Charles Rosen has written (in The Classical Style): "It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the center of Mozart's work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence. In a paradoxical way, Schumann's superficial characterization of the G minor Symphony can help us to see Mozart's daemon more steadily. In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous." Especially during his last decade, Mozart explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. The slow introduction to the "Dissonant" Quartet, K. 465, a work that Haydn greatly admired, rapidly explodes a shallow understanding of Mozart's style as light and pleasant. From his earliest years Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he travelled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language. When he went to London[7] as a child, he met J.C. Bach and heard his music; when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra; when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and the opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other chords, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are "homotonal" (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the tonic minor). Others mimic the works of J.C. Bach, and others show the simple rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna. As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of Baroque styles into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major K. 201 uses a contrapuntal main theme in its first movement, and experimentation with irregular phrase lengths. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had just published his opus 20 set. The influence of the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers at that time. Over the course of his working life Mozart switched his focus from instrumental music to operas,

and back again. He wrote operas in each of the styles current in Europe: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, or Cos fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo; and Singspiel, of which Die Zauberflte is probably the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas, he developed the use of subtle changes in instrumentation, orchestration, and tone colour to express or highlight psychological or emotional states and dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted. His increasingly sophisticated use of the orchestra in the symphonies and concerti served as a resource in his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas was reflected in his later non-operatic compositions. Influence Mozart's legacy to subsequent generations of composers (in all genres) is immense. Many important composers since Mozart's time have expressed profound appreciation of Mozart. Rossini averred, "He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge." Ludwig van Beethoven's admiration for Mozart is also quite clear. Beethoven used Mozart as a model a number of times: for example, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major demonstrates a debt to Mozart's Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503. A plausible story not corroborated regards one of Beethoven's students who looked through a pile of music in Beethoven's apartment. When the student pulled out Mozart's A major Quartet, K. 464, Beethoven exclaimed "Ah, that piece. That's Mozart saying 'here's what I could do, if only you had ears to hear!' "; Beethoven's own Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor is an obvious tribute to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, and yet another plausible if unconfirmed story concerns Beethoven at a concert with his sometime-student Ferdinand Ries. As they listened to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24, the orchestra reached the quite unusual coda of the last movement, and Beethoven whispered to Ries: "We'll never think of anything like that!" Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and Winds is another obvious tribute to Mozart, similar to Mozart's own quintet for the same ensemble. Beethoven also paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on several of his themes: for example, the two sets of variations for cello and piano on themes from Mozart's Magic Flute, and cadenzas to several of Mozart's piano concertos, most notably the Piano Concerto No. 20 K. 466. A famous legend asserts that, after the only meeting between the two composers, Mozart noted that Beethoven would "give the world something to talk about." However, it is not certain that the two ever met. Tchaikovsky wrote his Mozartiana in praise of Mozart; and Mahler's final word was alleged to have been simply "Mozart". The theme of the opening movement of the Piano Sonata in A major K. 331 (itself a set of variations on that theme) was used by Max Reger for his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, written in 1914 and among Reger's best-known works. In addition, Mozart received outstanding praise from several fellow composers including Frdric Chopin, Franz Schubert, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, and many more. Mozart has remained an influence in popular contemporary music in varying genres ranging from Jazz to modern Rock and Heavy metal. An example of this influence is the jazz pianist Chick Corea, who has performed piano concertos of Mozart and was inspired by them to write a concerto of his own.

The Kchel catalogue In the decades after Mozart's death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Kchel succeeded in this enterprise. Many of his famous works are referred to by their Kchel catalogue number; for example, the Piano Concerto in A major (Piano Concerto No. 23) is often referred to simply as "K. 488" or "KV. 488". The catalogue has undergone six revisions, labeling the works from K. 1 to K. 626. Myths and controversies Mozart is unusual among composers for being the subject of an abundance of legend, partly because none of his early biographers knew him personally. They often resorted to fiction in order to produce a work. Many myths began soon after Mozart died, but few have any basis in fact. An example is the story that Mozart composed his Requiem with the belief it was for himself. Sorting out fabrications from real events is a vexing and continuous task for Mozart scholars mainly because of the prevalence of legend in scholarship. Dramatists and screenwriters, free from responsibilities of scholarship, have found excellent material among these legends. An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and, in some versions, the tale that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart's death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart and Salieri, and Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. The last of these has been made into a feature-length film of the same name. Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated, but in fact frequently confirmed by the composer's letters and other memorabilia. For example, Mozart wrote canons on the words "Leck mich im Arsch" ("Lick my arse") and "Leck mich im Arsch recht fein schn sauber" ("Lick my arse nice and clean") as party pieces for his friends. The Kchel numbers of these canons are 231 and 233. Another debate involves Mozart's alleged status as a kind of superhuman prodigy, from childhood right up until his death. While some have criticised his earlier works as simplistic or forgettable, others revere even Mozart's juvenilia. In any case, several of his early compositions remain very popular. The motet Exultate, jubilate (K. 165), for example, composed when Mozart was seventeen years old, is among the most frequently recorded of his vocal compositions. It is also mentioned that around the time when he was five or six years old, he could play the piano blindfolded and with his hands crossed over one another. Benjamin Simkin, a medical doctor, argues in his book Medical and Musical Byways of Mozartiana[9] that Mozart had Tourette syndrome. However, no Tourette syndrome expert, organization, psychiatrist or neurologist has stated that there is credible evidence that Mozart had this syndrome, and several have stated now that they do not believe there is enough evidence to substantiate the claim. Amadeus (1984)

Milos Formans 1984 motion picture Amadeus, based on the play by Peter Shaffer, won eight Academy Awards and was one of the years most popular films. While the film did a great deal to popularize Mozarts work with the general public, it has been criticized for its historical inaccuracies, and in particular for its portrayal of Antonio Salieris intrigues against Mozart, for which little historical evidence can be found. On the contrary, it is likely that Mozart and Salieri regarded each other as friends and colleagues: it is well documented, for instance, that Salieri frequently lent Mozart musical scores from the court library, that he often chose compositions by Mozart for performance at state occasions, and Salieri taught Mozart's son, Franz Xaver. The idea that he never revised his compositions, dramatized in the film, is easily exploded by even a cursory examination of the autograph manuscripts, which contain many revisions. Mozart was a studiously hard worker, and by his own admission his extensive knowledge and abilities developed out of many years' close study of the European musical tradition. In fairness, Schaffer and Forman never claimed that Amadeus was intended to be an accurate biographical portrait of Mozart. Rather, as Shaffer reveals on the DVD release of the film, the dramatic narrative was inspired by the biblical story of Cain and Abel one brother loved by God, and the other scorned.
Gordon Ramsay
Gordon Ramsay (born November 8, 1966) is one of Britain's highest profile chefs. He is one of only three chefs in the country to maintain three Michelin stars for their restaurant (the others being Heston Blumenthal and Michel Roux). Gordon was born in Scotland but was brought up in England after his family moved to Stratford-upon-Avon. He played football as teenager for Oxford United F.C.'s youth side and was spotted by a scout for Rangers. He completed trials for the Scottish club and became a professional player at the age of 15. After suffering a knee injury that left him unable to regain full fitness he was released from the club. At the age of 19 Ramsay now turned his hand to cookery. He worked under Marco Pierre White and Albert Roux in London and Guy Savoy and Joel Robuchon in Paris before becoming head chef of the newly-opened Aubergine restaurant in 1993. By 1996, the restaurant had been awarded two Michelin stars. In 1998 Ramsay opened his first own restaurant, the eponymous Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea. The restaurant gained three Michelin stars in 1999, making Ramsay the first Scot to achieve the feat. From there his empire has expanded rapidly, first opening Petrus where six bankers famously spent over 44,000 on wine during a single meal in 2001, and then Amaryllis and later Gordon Ramsay at Claridges. Restaurants at the Dubai Creek and Connaught Hotels followed, the later branded under his protegee, Angela Hartnett's, name. Ramsay's company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, continued rapid expansion under Marcus Wareing as Chief Patron. Ramsay has published six books on cooking and also appeared in two fly-on-the-kitchen-wall documentaries - Boiling Point in 1998 and Beyond Boiling Point in 2000. The series revealed that Ramsay is a hot-tempered man in the kitchen; he was seen yelling obscenities at his staff and throwing equipment around. Food critic A. A. Gill, who was famously ejected from Ramsay's Chelsea restaurant (along with his dining companion Joan Collins), has said that Ramsay is "a wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being". In 2004, Ramsay appeared in two British television series. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares aired on Channel 4, and saw the chef troubleshooting failing restaurants over a two-week period. Hell's Kitchen was a reality show, which aired on ITV, and saw Ramsay attempt to train 10 British celebrities to be chefs, as they ran a restaurant on Brick Lane which opened to the public for the two-week duration of the show. Bibliography Gordon Ramsays Kitchen Heaven (2004) Gordon Ramsays Secrets (2003) Gordon Ramsays Just Deserts (2001)

A Chef For All Seasons (2000) Gordon Ramsays Passion For Seafood (1999) Gordon Ramsays Passion For Flavour (1996

Jamie Oliver
Jamie Oliver (born May 27, 1975), also known as the Naked Chef, is a British celebrity chef. Biography He grew up in a small Essex village called Clavering. He formed the band Scarlet Division with Leigh Haggerwood in 1989. His first TV break came in 1996 when he was "discovered" by television producer Pat Llewellyn while working at the River Caf in London. She saw him on a documentary called "Christmas at the River Caf" and recognised his star potential immediately. Two highly successful series of "The Naked Chef" were filmed in 1998 and 1999. And On June 24, 2000 he married Juliette Norton, also known as Jools. The couple currently have two daughters Poppy Honey and Daisy Boo. In June 2003 he was appointed an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. He set up the Fifteen charity restaurant where he trains 15 disadvantaged young people to work in the hospitality industry. He hopes to set up similar restaurants elsewhere in the UK as well as Sydney and New York City. He recently announced plans to relocate to a country house outside New York City. He told Night and Day magazine: "It's my wife's idea. She's talked about it for three years. I haven't a clue why." He has also written columns for The Times. Television shows The first series that featured Jamie Oliver was "The Naked Chef" on BBC Television. The title was a reference to the simplicity of Oliver's recipes, and nothing to do with nudity. The success of the programme led to "Return of the Naked Chef" and "Happy Days with the Naked Chef". His work on the Fifteen restaurant was shown as "Jamie's Kitchen" and "Return to Jamie's Kitchen" on Channel Four. His latest show is "Oliver's Twist". His programmes are shown in over 40 countries, including the USA's Food Network, where he is the second most popular presenter. Books He has written several successful cookbooks. These include: Jamie's Kitchen The Naked Chef Takes Off Happy Days with the Naked Chef The Naked Chef Music In 1989, Oliver and Leigh Haggerwood, school friends, formed the Indie/rock-style Scarlet Division. Scarlet Division has made numerous appearances on "The Naked Chef" and "Oliver's Twist"

Delia Smith
Delia Smith (born June 18, 1941) is a British television chef, known for her interest in food and teaching basic cookery. In 1969 Delia became cookery writer for The Daily Mirror, with her first piece featuring kipper pt, beef in beer and cheesecake. In 1972 she started writing for London's Evening Standard. She rose to fame teaching cookery on a television show, Family Fare (197375). Her How to Cook series (1998) reportedly led to a 10% rise in egg sales in Britain. Because of this fame, her first name has become sufficient to identify her to the public, and doing a Delia is the phrase used when preparing a dish according to one of her recipes. Delia, with her husband Michael Wynn Jones, is the majority shareholder of Norwich City Football Club.

Publications How to Cheat at Cooking (1971) Recipes from Country Inns and Restaurants (1973) The Evening Standard Cookbook (1974) Frugal Food (1976) Delia Smith's Book of Cakes (1977) Delia Smith's Cookery Course (3 volumes: 1978, 1979 & 1980) One is Fun (1985) Delia Smith's Christmas (1990) Delia Smith's Summer Collection (1993) Delia Smith's Winter Collection (1995) Delia's How to Cook Book 1 (1998) (based on the television series) Delia's How to Cook Book 2 (1999) Delia's How to Cook Book 3 (2001)

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 May 2, 1519) was a celebrated Italian Renaissance architect, musician, inventor, engineer, sculptor and painter. He has been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man" and as a universal genius. Leonardo is well known for his masterly paintings, such as The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. He is also known for his many inventions that were conceived well before their time but of which few were constructed in his lifetime. In addition, he helped advance the study of anatomy, astronomy, and civil engineering.

Life
His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's biography Vite. Leonardo was born in Anchiano, near Vinci, Italy. He was an illegitimate child. His father Ser Piero da Vinci was a young lawyer and his mother, Caterina, was a peasant girl. It has been suggested that Caterina was a Middle Eastern slave owned by Piero, but the evidence is scant. This was before modern naming conventions developed in Europe. Therefore, his full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Piero, from Vinci". Leonardo himself simply signed his works "Leonardo" or "Io, Leonardo" ("I, Leonardo"). Most authorities therefore refer to his works as "Leonardos", not "da Vincis". Presumably he did not use his father's name because of his illegitimate status. Leonardo grew up with his father in Florence. He was a vegetarian throughout his life. He became an apprentice to painter Andrea del Verrocchio about 1466. Later, he became an independent painter in Florence. In 1476 he was anonymously accused of homosexual contact with a 17-year-old model, Jacopo Saltarelli, a notorious prostitute. He was charged, along with three other young men, with homosexual conduct. However, he was acquitted because of lack of evidence. For a time Leonardo and the others were under the watchful eye of Florence's "Officers of the Night" a kind of Renaissance vice squad. That Leonardo was homosexual is generally accepted. His longest-running relationship was with a beautiful delinquent Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom he nicknamed Salai (Little Devil), who entered his household at the age of 10. Leonardo supported Salai for twenty five years, and he left Salai half his vineyard in his will. From 1478 to 1499 Leonardo worked for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and maintained his own workshop with apprentices there. Seventy tons of bronze that had been set aside for Leonardo's "Gran Cavallo" horse statue were cast into weapons for the Duke in an attempt save Milan from the French under Charles VIII in 1495 see also Italian Wars. When the French returned under Louis XII in 1498, Milan fell without a fight, overthrowing Sforza. Leonardo stayed in Milan for a time, until one morning he found French archers using his life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. He left with his servant and assistant Salai (a.k.a. Gian Giacomo Caprotti) and his friend (and inventor of doubleentry bookkeeping) Luca Pacioli for Mantua, moving on after 2 months for Venice, then moving again to Florence at the end of April 1500.

In Florence he entered the services of Cesare Borgia (also called "Duca Valentino" and son of Pope Alexander VI) as a military architect and engineer. In 1506 he returned to Milan, now in the hands of Maximilian Sforza after Swiss mercenaries drove out the French. In 1507 Leonardo met a 15 year old aristocrat of great personal beauty, Count Francesco Melzi. Melzi became his pupil, life companion, and heir. From 1513 to 1516 he lived in Rome, where painters like Raphael and Michelangelo were active at the time; he did not have much contact with these artists, however. In 1515 Francis I of France retook Milan, and Leonardo was commissioned to make a centrepiece (of a mechanical lion) for the peace talks in Bologna between the French king and Pope Leo X, where he must have first met the king. In 1516, he entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Luc next to the king's residence at the Royal Chateau at Amboise, and receiving a generous pension. The king became a close friend. He died in Cloux, France in 1519. According to his wish, 60 beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Leonardo had a great number of friends, some of whom were: Fazio Cardano mathematician, jurist Giovanni Francesco Melzi painter, pupil Girolamo Melzi Captain in Milanese militia Giovanni Francesco Rustici Cesare Borgia warrior Niccolo Machiavelli writer Andrea da Ferrara Franchinus Gaffurius music theorist, composer Francesco Nani Brother in the Franciscan Order in Brescia Iacomo Andrea architect and author Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli Franciscan father Galeazzo da Sanseverino Commanded ducal army of Milan, singer Ginevra dei Benci Atalante Miglioretti singer, artist, actor Tomasso Masini da Peretola a.k.a. Zoroastro student of alchemy, occultist Benedetto Dei writer

Art
Leonardo is well known for the masterful paintings attributed to him, such as Last Supper (Ultima Cena or Cenacolo, in Milan), painted in 1498, and the Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda, now at the Louvre in Paris), painted in 1503 1506. There is significant debate however, whether da Vinci himself painted the Mona Lisa, or whether it was primarily the work of his students. Only seventeen of his paintings, and none of his statues survive. Of these paintings, only Ginevra de' Benci is in the Western Hemisphere. Leonardo often planned grandiose paintings with many drawings and sketches, only to leave the projects unfinished. In 1481 he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi". After extensive, ambitious plans and many drawings, the painting was left unfinished and Leonardo left for Milan. He there spent many years making plans and models for a monumental seven-metre (24-foot) high horse statue in bronze ("Gran Cavallo"), to be erected in Milan. Because of war with France, the project was never finished. Based on private initiative, a similar statue was completed according to some of his plans in 1999 in New York, given to Milan and erected there. The Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland has a small bronze horse, thought to be the work of an apprentice from Leonardo's original design. Back in Florence, he was commissioned for a large public mural, the "Battle of Anghiari"; his rival Michelangelo was to paint the opposite wall. After producing a fantastic variety of studies in preparation for the work, he left the city, with the mural unfinished due to technical difficulties. List of paintings Annunciation (1475-1480) Uffizi, Florence, Italy Ginevra de' Benci (~1475) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, U.S. The Benois Madonna (1478-1480) Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia The Virgin with Flowers (1478-1481) Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany Adoration of the Magi (1481) Uffizi, Florence, Italy Cecilia Gallerani with an Ermine (1488-90) Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, Poland A Musician (~1490), Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy Madonna Litta (1490-91) The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia La Belle Ferronire (1495-1498) Louvre, Paris, France

Last Supper (1498) Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy The Madonna of the Rocks (1483-86) Louvre, Paris, France The Madonna of the Rocks aka The Virgin of the Rocks (1508) National Gallery, London, England Leda and the Swan (1508) Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy Mona Lisa or La Gioconda Louvre, Paris, France The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (~1510) Louvre, Paris, France St. John the Baptist (~1514) Louvre, Paris, France Bacchus (1515) Louvre, Paris, France

Science and engineering

Perhaps even more impressive than his artistic work are his studies in science and engineering, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and science. He was left-handed and used mirror writing throughout his life. Explainable by fact that it is easier to pull a quill pen than to push it; by using mirror-writing, the left-handed writer is able to pull the pen from right to left. His approach to science was an observatory one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanations. Throughout his life, he planned a grand encyclopedia based on detailed drawings of everything. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, Leonardo the scientist was mostly ignored by contemporary scholars. He participated in autopsies and produced many extremely detailed anatomical drawings, planning a comprehensive work of human and comparative anatomy. Around the year 1490, he produced a study in his sketchbook of the Canon of Proportions as described in recently rediscovered writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius. The study, called the Vitruvian Man, is one of his most well-known works.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, formally Pablo Ruiz Picasso, (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973) was one of the recognized masters of 20th century art. Overview His name in full was Pablo (or Pablito) Diego Jos Santiago Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispn Crispiniano de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santsima Trinidad Ruiz Blasco y Picasso Lpez. His father was Jos Ruiz y Blasco; his mother, Mara Picasso y Lpez. In his early years he signed his name Ruiz Blasco after his father but, from about 1901 on, switched to using his mother's name. Picasso was born in Mlaga, Spain, and is probably most famous as the founder, along with Georges Braque, of Cubism. However in a long life he produced a wide and varied body of work, the best-known being the Blue Period works which feature moving depictions of acrobats, harlequins, prostitutes, beggars and artists. While Picasso was primarily a painter (in fact he believed that an artist must paint in order to be considered a true artist), he also worked with small ceramic and bronze sculptures, collage and even produced some poetry. "Je suis aussi un pote," as he quipped to his friends. Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. On May 4, 2004 Picasso's painting Garcon la Pipe was sold for USD $104 million at Sotheby's, thus establishing a new price

record (see also List of most expensive paintings). Picasso hated to be alone when he wasn't working. In Paris, in addition to having a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including Andr Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Gertrude Stein and others, he usually maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. In the 1915 photograph seen here is friends (left to right): Manuel Ortiz de Zrate, Henri-Pierre Roch (in uniform), Marie Vassilieff, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso. Picasso's most famous work is probably his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica, Spain; the Guernica (painting). This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. The painting of the picture was captured in a series of photographs by Picasso's most famous lover, Dora Maar, a distinguished artist in her own right. A Nazi officer is supposed to have come to his door brandishing a postcard and demanding, "Did you do this?" "No," Picasso is supposed to have replied, "you did." The Guernica hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years; Picasso stipulated that the painting should not return to Spain until democracy was restored in that country. In 1981 the Guernica was returned to Spain and exhibited at the Casn del Buen Retiro. In 1992 the painting became one of the main attractions in Madrid's Museo de La Reina Sofa (Queen Sofa's Museum) when it opened. As certain works, for example the Cubist pieces, tend to be associated in the public mind with Picasso, it is important to realize how talented Picasso was as a painter and draughtsman. He was capable of working with oils, watercolours, pastels, charcoal, pencil, ink, or indeed any medium with equally high facility. With his most extreme cubist works he came close to deconstructing a complex scene into just a few geometric shapes while at the same time being capable of photorealistic pen and ink sketches of his friends. Picasso had a massive talent for almost any artistic endeavor he turned his mind to, despite limited formal academic training (he finished only one year of his course of study at the Royal Academy in Madrid), and a ferocious work-ethic. Early life Picasso's father, Jos Ruiz y Blasco, was himself a painter and for most of his life was a professor of art at Spanish colleges. It is from Don Jos that Picasso learned the basics of formal academic art training figure drawing, and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended art schools thoughout his childhood, often those his father taught at, he never finished his college level course of study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, leaving after less than a year. The Picasso Museum in Barcelona features many of Picasso's early works, created while he was living in Spain, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabarts, Picasso's close friend from his Barcelona days, and for many years, Picasso's personal secretary. There are many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage that clearly demonstrate his firm grounding in classical techniques, as well as rarely

seen works from his old age. Picasso and pacifism Picasso remained neutral during the Spanish Civil War, World War I and World War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. Picasso never commented on this but encouraged the idea that it was because he was a pacifist. Some of his contemporaries though (including Braque) felt that this neutrality had more to do with cowardice than principle. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to the country to join either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemnation of Franco and the Fascists through his art he did not take up arms against them. He also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. No political movement seemed to compel his support to any great degree. After the Second World War, Picasso joined the French Communist party, and even attended an international peace conference in Poland. But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Communist politics. Personal life Picasso had a long string of lovers, four children by three women, and two wives. In the early years of the 20th century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, began a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier. It is she who appears in many of the Blue and Rose period paintings. After garnering fame and some fortune, Picasso left Fernande for Marcelle Humbert, whom Picasso called Eva. When it became clear that Eva was dying, Picasso left her as well. Picasso frequented brothels throughout his life, and also had numerous affairs. In 1918 Picasso married Olga Koklova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe. Olga introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a sometime motorcycle racer, sometime chauffeur to his father, and dissolute. Olga's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies, and the two lived in a state of near constant conflict. In 1927 Picasso met the then underage (17) Marie Thrse Walter, and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Olga soon ended in separation, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Olga to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Olga's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long standing affair with Marie Thrse, and fathered a daughter, Maya, with her. Marie Thrse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and

eventually hanged herself after Picasso's death. The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 30s and early 40s, and it was Dora who documented the painting of Guernica. Like all the women in his life, Dora was cruelly abused emotionally by the narcissistic Picasso. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Franoise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude, and Paloma. Uniquely among Picasso's women, Franoise eventually left Picasso in 1953 because of his abusive treatment, and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso, who was used to submissive women who lived for whatever scraps of affection or attention he deigned to give them. He went through a difficult period after Franoise's departure, coming to terms with his advancing age, and his perception that he was an old man, now in his seventies, who was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl. Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. Jacqueline worked at the Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso's life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Franoise. Franoise had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With Picasso's encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children's rights. Picasso then secretly married Jacqueline after Franoise had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him. Later works In his 80s and 90s, Picasso, no longer quite the energetic dynamo he had been in his youth, became more, and more reclusive. His second wife, Jacqueline Roque, screened all but the most important visitors, and closest friends, even excluding Picasso's two children, Claude and Paloma, both by his former partner, the painter Franoise Gilot. This reclusive existence intensified after Picasso underwent surgery for a prostate condition in 1965. This surgery is rumored to have left Picasso largely impotent. To a man for whom sexual adventure was such an important part of life, this was a serious life change, and Picasso seems to have dealt with it by redoubling his already prolific artistic output. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colorful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate engravings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man, or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper called them "the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man

in the antechamber of death". Only a decade later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism, and was, as usual, ahead of his time. Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at Mougins, France, and was interred at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhne. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. At the time of his death, Picasso, by now a multi-millionaire, owned a vast quantity of his own work, consisting of personal favorites which he had kept off the art market, or which he had not needed to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, like Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties, or estate tax to the French state were paid in the form of his works, and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense, and representative collection of the Muse Picasso in Paris. And recently in 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him, in his hometown of Malaga, Spain, called the Museo Picasso Mlaga. In 1999, Picasso's Les Noces de Pierrette (The Marriage of Pierrette) sold for more than USD $51 million
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890) was a Dutch painter, generally considered one of the greatest painters in European art history. He produced all of his work (some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings) during a period of only 10 years before he succumbed to mental illness (possibly bipolar disorder) and committed suicide. He had little success during his lifetime, but his posthumous fame grew rapidly, especially following a showing of 71 of van Gogh's paintings in Paris on March 17, 1901 (11 years after his death). (Properly, in Dutch language pronunciation, the name Gogh rhymes with the English language loch, in other languages than Dutch it is also pronounced 'goph', 'go' and 'goe'.)

Van Gogh's influence on expressionism, fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is dedicated to Van Gogh's work and that of his contemporaries. The Krller-Mller Museum in Otterlo (also in the Netherlands), has a considerable collection of Vincent van Gogh paintings as well. Several paintings by Van Gogh rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. On March 30, 1987 Van Gogh's painting Irises was sold for a record $53.9 million at Sotheby's, New York. On May 15, 1990 his Portrait of Doctor Gachet was sold for $82.5 million at Christie's, thus establishing a new price record (see also List of most expensive paintings). Life and work Vincent was born in Zundert, Netherlands. Son of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister, a profession that Vincent found appealing and to which he would be drawn to a certain extent later in his life. His sister described him as a serious and introspective child. At age 16 Vincent started to work for the art dealer Goupil & Co. in The Hague. His brother Theo, four years his junior and with whom Vincent cherished a lifelong friendship, would join the company later. This friendship is amply documented in the vast amount of letters they sent each other. These letters have been preserved and were published in 1914. They provide a lot of insight into the life of the painter, and show him to be a talented writer with a keen mind. Theo would support Vincent financially throughout his life.

In 1873, his firm transferred him to London, then to Paris. He became increasingly interested in religion; in 1876 Goupil dismissed him for lack of motivation. He became a teaching assistant in Ramsgate near London, then returned to Amsterdam to study theology in 1877. After dropping out in 1878, he became a lay minister in Belgium in a poor mining region known as the Borinage. He even preached down in the mines and was extremely concerned with the lot of the workers. He was dismissed after 6 months and continued without pay. During this period he started to produce charcoal sketches. In 1880, Vincent followed the suggestion of his brother Theo and took up painting in earnest. For a brief period Vincent took painting lessons from Anton Mauve at The Hague. Although Vincent and Anton soon split over a divergence of artistic views, influences of the Hague School of painting would remain in Vincent's work, notably in the way he played with light and in the looseness of his brush strokes. However his usage of colours, favouring dark tones, set him apart from his teacher. In 1881 he declared his love to his widowed cousin Kee Vos, who rejected him. Later he would move in with the prostitute Sien Hoornik and her children and considered marrying her; his father was strictly against this relationship and even his brother Theo advised against it. They later separated. Impressed and influenced by Jean-Franois Millet, van Gogh focused on painting peasants and rural scenes. He moved to the Dutch province Drenthe, later to Nuenen, North Brabant, also in The Netherlands. Here he painted in 1885 The Potato Eaters (Dutch Aardappeleters, now in The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam). In the winter of 1885-1886 Van Gogh attended the art academy of Antwerp, Belgium. This proved a disappointment as he was dismissed after a few months by Professor Eugne Siberdt. Van Gogh did however get in touch with Japanese art during this period, which he started to collect eagerly. He admired its bright colours, use of canvas space and the role lines played in the picture. These impressions would influence him strongly. Van Gogh made some paintings in Japanese style. Also some of the portraits he painted are set against a background which shows Japanese art. In spring 1886 Van Gogh went to Paris, where he moved in with his brother Theo; they shared a house on Montmartre. Here he met the painters Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Emile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. He discovered impressionism and liked its use of light and colour, more than its lack of social engagement (as he saw it). Especially the technique known as pointillism (where many small dots are applied to the canvas that blend into rich colors only in the eye of the beholder, seeing it from a distance) made its mark on Van Goghs own style. It should be noted that Van Gogh is regarded as a post-impressionist, rather than an impressionist. Van Gogh also used complementary colors, especially blue and orange, in close proximity in order to enhance the brilliance of each (see color). In 1888, when city life and living with his brother proved too much, Van Gogh left Paris and went to Arles, Bouches-du-Rhne, France. He was impressed with the local landscape and hoped to found an art colony. He decorated a "yellow house" and created a celebrated series of yellow sunflower paintings for this purpose. Only Paul Gauguin, whose simplified colour schemes and forms (known as synthetism) attracted van Gogh, followed his invitation. The admiration was mutual, and Gauguin painted van Gogh painting sunflowers. However their encounter ended in a quarrel. Van Gogh suffered a mental breakdown and cut off part of his left ear, which he gave to a startled prostitute friend. Gauguin left in December 1888.

One of Vincent's famous paintings, the Bedroom in Arles of 1888, uses bright yellow and unusual perspective effects in depicting the interior of his bedroom. The boldly vanishing lines are sometimes attributed to his changing mental condition. The only painting he sold during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, was created in 1888. It is now on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia. Van Gogh now exchanged painting dots for small stripes. He suffered from depression, and in 1889 on his own request Van Gogh was admitted to the psychiatric center at Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint Remy de Provence, Bouches-duRhne, France. During his stay here the clinic and its garden became his main subject. Pencil strokes changed again, now into swirls. In May 1890 Vincent left the clinic and went to the physician Paul Gachet, in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, where he was closer to his brother Theo, who had recently married. Gachet had been recommended to him by Pissarro; he had treated several artists before. Here van Gogh created his only etching: a portrait of the melancholic doctor Gachet. His depression aggravated, and on July 27 of the same year, at the age of 37, after a fit of painting activity, van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He died two days later, with Theo at his side, who reported his last words as "La tristesse durera toujours" (French: "The sadness will last forever"). He was buried at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise; Theo, unable to come to terms with his

brother's death, died 6 months later and, at his wife's request, was buried next to Vincent. It would not take long before Vincent's fame grew higher and higher. Large exhibitions were organised soon: Paris 1901, Amsterdam 1905, Cologne 1912, New York 1913 and Berlin 1914. Van Gogh's life forms the basis for Irving Stone's biographical novel Lust for Life. Notable Works (1885) The Potato Eaters (1888) Bedroom in Arles (1888) Cafe Terrace at Night (1888) The Red Vinyard (1889) The Starry Night (1889) Irises (1889) Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1889) Portrait de l'artiste sans barbe (1890) Portrait of Doctor Gachet Denotes paintings which are recent recordholders for the highest price paid for a painting at an auction. Influences on van Gogh (see also above) The Hague School. Painter Jean-Franois Millet (1814-1875), who also focused on peasant life. Writer Emile Zola (1840-1902) whose novels Van Gogh admired very much. Japanese woodblock prints. Impressionism, notably pointillists Georges Seurat (1859-1891) and Paul Signac (1836-1935). Paul Gauguin (1848-1903).