History.

Development: 1989–2000.

In 1989, HP determined that Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architectures were approaching a processing limit at one instruction per cycle. HP researchers investigated a new architecture, later named Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), that allows the processor to execute multiple instructions in each clock cycle. EPIC implements a form of very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture, in which a single instruction word contains multiple instructions. With EPIC, the compiler determines in advance which instructions can be executed at the same time, so the microprocessor simply executes the instructions and does not need elaborate mechanisms to determine which instructions to execute in parallel. The goal of this approach is twofold: to enable deeper inspection of the code at compile time to identify additional opportunities for parallel execution, and to simplify processor design and reduce energy consumption by eliminating the need for runtime scheduling circuitry.  HP believed that it was no longer cost-effective for individual enterprise systems companies such as itself to develop proprietary microprocessors, so it partnered with Intel in 1994 to develop the IA-64 architecture, derived from EPIC. Intel was willing to undertake a very large development effort on IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting microprocessor would be used by the majority of enterprise systems manufacturers. HP and Intel initiated a large joint development effort with a goal of delivering the first product, Merced, in 1998.  During development, Intel, HP, and industry analysts predicted that IA-64 would dominate in servers, workstations, and high-end desktops, and eventually supplant RISC and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications. Compaq and Silicon Graphics decided to abandon further development of the Alpha and MIPS architectures respectively in favor of migrating to IA-64.  Several groups ported operating systems for the architecture, including Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, and Monterey/64. The latter three were canceled before reaching the market. By 1997, it was apparent that the IA-64 architecture and the compiler were much more difficult to implement than originally thought, and the delivery timeframe of Merced began slipping.  Intel announced the official name of the processor, "Itanium", on October 4, 1999. Within hours, the name "Itanic" had been coined on a Usenet newsgroup, a reference to the RMS "Titanic", the "unsinkable" ocean liner that sank on her maiden voyage in 1912. "Itanic" has since often been used by "The Register", and others, to imply that the multibillion-dollar investment in Itanium—and the early hype associated with it—would be followed by its relatively quick demise.

Itanium (Merced): 2001.

By the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors. Itanium competed at the low-end (primarily four-CPU and smaller systems) with servers based on x86 processors, and at the high-end with IBM POWER and Sun Microsystems SPARC processors. Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing, attempting to duplicate x86's successful "horizontal" market (i.e., single architecture, multiple systems vendors). The success of this initial processor version was limited to replacing PA-RISC in HP systems, Alpha in Compaq systems and MIPS in SGI systems, though IBM also delivered a supercomputer based on this processor. POWER and SPARC remained strong, while the 32-bit x86 architecture continued to grow into the enterprise space, building on economies of scale fueled by its enormous installed base.  Only a few thousand systems using the original "Merced" Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability. Recognizing that the lack of software could be a serious problem for the future, Intel made thousands of these early systems available to independent software vendors (ISVs) to stimulate development. HP and Intel brought the next-generation Itanium 2 processor to market a year later.

Itanium 2: 2002–2010.

The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002, and was marketed for enterprise servers rather than for the whole gamut of high-end computing. The first Itanium 2, code-named "McKinley", was jointly developed by HP and Intel. It relieved many of the performance problems of the original Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by an inefficient memory subsystem. "McKinley" contains 221 million transistors (of which 25 million are for logic), measured 19.5 mm by 21.6 mm (421 mm) and was fabricated in a 180 nm, bulk CMOS process with six layers of aluminium metallization.  In 2003, AMD released the Opteron CPU, which implements its own 64-bit architecture called AMD64. Opteron gained rapid acceptance in the enterprise server space because it provided an easy upgrade from x86. Under influence by Microsoft, Intel responded by implementing AMD's x86-64 instruction set architecture instead of IA-64 in its Xeon microprocessors in 2004, resulting in a new industry-wide "de facto" standard.  Intel released a new Itanium 2 family member, codenamed "Madison", in 2003. Madison used a 130 nm process and was the basis of all new Itanium processors until Montecito was released in June 2006.  In March 2005, Intel announced that it was working on a new Itanium processor, codenamed "Tukwila", to be released in 2007. Tukwila would have four processor cores and would replace the Itanium bus with a new Common System Interface, which would also be used by a new Xeon processor. Later that year, Intel revised Tukwila's delivery date to late 2008.  In November 2005, the major Itanium server manufacturers joined with Intel and a number of software vendors to form the Itanium Solutions Alliance to promote the architecture and accelerate software porting. The Alliance announced that its members would invest $10 billion in Itanium solutions by the end of the decade.  In 2006, Intel delivered "Montecito" (marketed as the Itanium 2 9000 series), a dual-core processor that roughly doubled performance and decreased energy consumption by about 20 percent.  Intel released the Itanium 2 9100 series, codenamed "Montvale", in November 2007. In May 2009, the schedule for Tukwila, its follow-on, was revised again, with release to OEMs planned for the first quarter of 2010.

Itanium 9300 (Tukwila): 2010.

The Itanium 9300 series processor, codenamed "Tukwila", was released on February 8, 2010, with greater performance and memory capacity.  The device uses a 65 nm process, includes two to four cores, up to 24 MB on-die caches, Hyper-Threading technology and integrated memory controllers. It implements double-device data correction, which helps to fix memory errors. Tukwila also implements Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) to replace the Itanium bus-based architecture. It has a peak interprocessor bandwidth of 96 GB/s and a peak memory bandwidth of 34 GB/s. With QuickPath, the processor has integrated memory controllers and interfaces the memory directly, using QPI interfaces to directly connect to other processors and I/O hubs. QuickPath is also used on Intel processors using the "Nehalem" microarchitecture, which possibly enabled Tukwila and Nehalem to use the same chipsets. Tukwila incorporates four memory controllers, each of which supports multiple DDR3 DIMMs via a separate memory controller, much like the Nehalem-based Xeon processor code-named "Beckton".

Itanium 9500 (Poulson): 2012.

The Itanium 9500 series processor, codenamed "Poulson", is the follow-on processor to Tukwila and was released on November 8, 2012. According to Intel, it skips the 45 nm process technology and uses a 32 nm process technology. It features eight cores and has a 12-wide issue architecture, multithreading enhancements, and new instructions to take advantage of parallelism, especially in virtualization. The Poulson L3 cache size is 32 MB. L2 cache size is 6 MB, 512 I KB, 256 D KB per core. Die size is 544 mm2, less than its predecessor Tukwila (698.75 mm2).  At ISSCC 2011, Intel presented a paper called "A 32nm 3.1 Billion Transistor 12-Wide-Issue Itanium Processor for Mission Critical Servers." Given Intel's history of disclosing details about Itanium microprocessors at ISSCC, this paper most likely referred to Poulson. Analyst David Kanter speculated that Poulson would use a new microarchitecture, with a more advanced form of multithreading that uses up to two threads, to improve performance for single threaded and multithreaded workloads. Some information was also released at the Hot Chips conference.  Information presented improvements in multithreading, resiliency improvements (Intel Instruction Replay RAS) and few new instructions (thread priority, integer instruction, cache prefetching, and data access hints).  Intel's Product Change Notification (PCN) 111456-01 lists four models of Itanium 9500 series CPU, which was later removed in a revised document. The parts were later listed in Intel's Material Declaration Data Sheets (MDDS) database. Intel later posted Itanium 9500 reference manual.  The models are the following:

"HP vs. Oracle".

During the 2012 "Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Oracle Corp." support lawsuit, court documents unsealed by a Santa Clara County Court judge revealed that in 2008, Hewlett-Packard had paid Intel around $440 million to keep producing and updating Itanium microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium CPUs for HP's machines until 2017. Under the terms of the agreements, HP has to pay for chips it gets from Intel, while Intel launches Tukwila, Poulson, Kittson, and Kittson+ chips in a bid to gradually boost performance of the platform.

Itanium 9700 (Kittson): 2017.

Rumors of a successor to Poulson (code named "Kittson") began to circulate in 2012–2013. This was at first associated with a forthcoming 22 nm process shrink, and later revised in the face of declining Itanium sales to a less-ambitious 32 nm node. In April 2015, Intel, although it had not yet confirmed formal specifications, did confirm that it continued to work on the project. Meanwhile, the aggressively multicore Xeon E7 platform displaced Itanium-based solutions in the Intel roadmap.  In July 2016, the HP spin-off Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced in "Computer World" that Kittson would be released mid-2017. In February 2017, Intel reported that it was shipping Kittson to test customers, with plans to ship in volume later that year.  Intel officially launched the Itanium 9700 series processor family on May 11, 2017. Notably, Kittson has no microarchitecture improvements over Poulson, only higher clock speeds.  Intel has announced that the 9700 series will be the last Itanium chips produced.  The models are:

Market share.

In comparison with its Xeon family of server processors, Itanium has never been a high-volume product for Intel. Intel does not release production numbers. One industry analyst estimated that the production rate was 200,000 processors per year in 2007.  According to Gartner Inc., the total number of Itanium servers (not processors) sold by all vendors in 2007, was about 55,000. (It is unclear whether clustered servers counted as a single server or not.) This compares with 417,000 RISC servers (spread across all RISC vendors) and 8.4 million x86 servers. IDC reports that a total of 184,000 Itanium-based systems were sold from 2001 through 2007. For the combined POWER/SPARC/Itanium systems market, IDC reports that POWER captured 42% of revenue and SPARC captured 32%, while Itanium-based system revenue reached 26% in the second quarter of 2008. According to an IDC analyst, in 2007, HP accounted for perhaps 80% of Itanium systems revenue. According to Gartner, in 2008, HP accounted for 95% of Itanium sales. HP's Itanium system sales were at an annual rate of $4.4Bn at the end of 2008, and declined to $3.5Bn by the end of 2009, compared to a 35% decline in UNIX system revenue for Sun and an 11% drop for IBM, with an x86-64 server revenue increase of 14% during this period.  In December 2012, IDC released a research report stating that Itanium server shipments would remain flat through 2016, with annual shipment of 26,000 systems (a decline of over 50% compared to shipments in 2008).

Hardware support.

Systems.

By 2006, HP manufactured at least 80% of all Itanium systems, and sold 7,200 in the first quarter of 2006. The bulk of systems sold were enterprise servers and machines for large-scale technical computing, with an average selling price per system in excess of US$200,000. A typical system uses eight or more Itanium processors.  By 2012, only a few manufacturers offered Itanium systems, including HP, Bull, NEC, Inspur and Huawei. In addition, Intel offered a chassis that could be used by system integrators to build Itanium systems.  By 2015, only HP supplied Itanium-based systems. With HP split in late 2015, Itanium systems (branded as Integrity) are handled by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), with recent major update in 2017 (Integrity i6, and HP-UX 11i v3 Update 16). HPE also supports a few other operating systems, including Windows up to Server 2008 R2, Linux, OpenVMS and NonStop. Itanium is not affected by Spectre and Meltdown.

Chipsets.

The Itanium bus interfaces to the rest of the system via a chipset. Enterprise server manufacturers differentiate their systems by designing and developing chipsets that interface the processor to memory, interconnections, and peripheral controllers. The chipset is the heart of the system-level architecture for each system design. Development of a chipset costs tens of millions of dollars and represents a major commitment to the use of the Itanium. IBM created a chipset in 2003, and Intel in 2002, but neither of them developed chipsets to support newer technologies such as DDR2 or PCI Express. Before "Tukwila" moved away from the FSB, chipsets supporting such technologies were manufactured by all Itanium server vendors, such as HP, Fujitsu, SGI, NEC, and Hitachi.  The "Tukwila" Itanium processor model had been designed to share a common chipset with the Intel Xeon processor EX (Intel's Xeon processor designed for four processor and larger servers). The goal was to streamline system development and reduce costs for server OEMs, many of which develop both Itanium- and Xeon-based servers. However, in 2013, this goal was pushed back to be "evaluated for future implementation opportunities".

Software support.

Itanium is currently supported by the following operating systems:  Previously supported:

Emulation.

HP sells a virtualization technology for Itanium called Integrity Virtual Machines.  Emulation is a technique that allows a computer to execute binary code that was compiled for a different type of computer. Before IBM's acquisition of QuickTransit in 2009, application binary software for IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC could run via type of emulation called "dynamic binary translation" on Linux/Itanium. Similarly, HP implemented a method to execute PA-RISC/HP-UX on the Itanium/HP-UX via emulation, to simplify migration of its PA-RISC customers to the radically different Itanium instruction set. Itanium processors can also run the mainframe environment GCOS from Groupe Bull and several x86 operating systems via instruction set simulators.

Competition.

Itanium is aimed at the enterprise server and high-performance computing (HPC) markets. Other enterprise- and HPC-focused processor lines include Oracle's and Fujitsu's SPARC processors and IBM's POWER microprocessors. Measured by quantity sold, Itanium's most serious competition comes from x86-64 processors including Intel's own Xeon line and AMD's Opteron line. Since 2009, most servers were being shipped with x86-64 processors.  In 2005, Itanium systems accounted for about 14% of HPC systems revenue, but the percentage has declined as the industry shifted to x86-64 clusters for this application.  An October 2008 Gartner report on the Tukwila processor, stated that "...the future roadmap for Itanium looks as strong as that of any RISC peer like Power or SPARC."

Supercomputers and high-performance computing.

An Itanium-based computer first appeared on the list of the TOP500 supercomputers in November 2001. The best position ever achieved by an "Itanium 2" based system in the list was #2, achieved in June 2004, when Thunder (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) entered the list with an Rmax of 19.94 Teraflops. In November 2004, Columbia entered the list at #2 with 51.8 Teraflops, and there was at least one Itanium-based computer in the top 10 from then until June 2007. The peak number of Itanium-based machines on the list occurred in the November 2004 list, at 84 systems (16.8%); by June 2012, this had dropped to one system (0.2%), and no Itanium system remained on the list in November 2012.

Processors.

Released processors.

The Itanium processors show a progression in capability. Merced was a proof of concept. McKinley dramatically improved the memory hierarchy and allowed Itanium to become reasonably competitive. Madison, with the shift to a 130 nm process, allowed for enough cache space to overcome the major performance bottlenecks. Montecito, with a 90 nm process, allowed for a dual-core implementation and a major improvement in performance per watt. Montvale added three new features: core-level lockstep, demand-based switching and front-side bus frequency of up to 667 MHz.

Market reception.

High-end server market.

When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor, with one benchmark in 2001 reporting that it was equivalent at best to a 100 MHz Pentium in this mode (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time). Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and suffered further following the arrival of x86-64 systems which offered greater compatibility with older x86 applications.  In a 2009 article on the history of the processor — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years". Tech columnist Ashlee Vance commented that the delays and underperformance "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry". In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."  Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest; however, other Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Debian remain available for Itanium. On March 22, 2011, Oracle Corporation announced that it would no longer develop new products for HP-UX on Itanium, although it would continue to provide support for existing products. Following this announcement, HP sued Oracle for breach of contract, arguing that Oracle had violated conditions imposed during settlement over Oracle's hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd as its co-CEO, requiring the vendor to support Itanium on its software "until such time as HP discontinues the sales of its Itanium-based servers", and that the breach had harmed its business. In 2012, a court ruled in favor of HP, and ordered Oracle to resume its support for Itanium. In June 2016, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (the corporate successor to HP's server business) was awarded $3 billion in damages from the lawsuit.  A former Intel official reported that the Itanium business had become profitable for Intel in late 2009. By 2009, the chip was almost entirely deployed on servers made by HP, which had over 95% of the Itanium server market share, making the main operating system for Itanium HP-UX. On March 22, 2011, Intel reaffirmed its commitment to Itanium with multiple generations of chips in development and on schedule.

Other markets.

Although Itanium did attain limited success in the niche market of high-end computing, Intel had originally hoped it would find broader acceptance as a replacement for the original x86 architecture.  AMD chose a different direction, designing the less radical x86-64, a 64-bit extension to the existing x86 architecture, which Microsoft then supported, forcing Intel to introduce the same extensions in its own x86-based processors. These designs can run existing 32-bit applications at native hardware speed, while offering support for 64-bit memory addressing and other enhancements to new applications. This architecture has now become the predominant 64-bit architecture in the desktop and portable market. Although some Itanium-based workstations were initially introduced by companies such as SGI, they are no longer available.

Timeline.

1989 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2017 2019 2020

Itanium ( ) is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel.

Der Intel Itanium ist ein 64-Bit-Mikroprozessor, der gemeinsam von Hewlett-Packard und Intel entwickelt wurde und 2001 erstmals auf den Markt kam. Entwicklungsziel war eine Hochleistungsarchitektur der „Post-RISC-Ära“ unter Verwendung eines abgewandelten VLIW-Designs. Der native Befehlssatz des Itanium ist IA-64. Die Befehle der älteren x86-Prozessoren können nur in einem (sehr langsamen) Firmware-Emulationsmodus ausgeführt werden. Daneben bestehen Erweiterungen zur leichteren Migration von Software, die für Prozessoren der PA-RISC-Familie entwickelt wurde. Nachfolger ist der Itanium 2.


History.

The game evolved out of a coding system that the designer used in her job as a geneticist. "Set" won American Mensa's "Mensa Select" award in 1991 and placed 9th in the 1995 "Deutscher Spiele Preis".

Games.

Several games can be played with these cards, all involving the concept of a "set". A set consists of three cards satisfying "all" of these conditions:  The rules of "Set" are summarized by: If you can sort a group of three cards into "two of ____ and one of ____", then it is not a set.  For example, these three cards form a set:  Given any two cards from the deck, there is one and only one other card that forms a set with them.  In the standard Set game, the dealer lays out cards on the table until either twelve are laid down or someone sees a set and calls "Set!". The player who called "Set" takes the cards in the set, and the dealer continues to deal out cards until twelve are on the table. A player who sees a set among the twelve cards calls "Set" and takes the three cards, and the dealer lays three more cards on the table. (To call out "set" and not pick one up quickly enough results in a penalty.) It is possible that there is no set among the twelve cards; in this case, the dealer deals out three more cards to make fifteen dealt cards, or eighteen or more, as necessary. This process of dealing by threes and finding sets continues until the deck is exhausted and there are no more sets on the table. At this point, whoever has collected the most sets wins.  Variants were included with the Set game that involve different mechanics to find sets, as well as different player interaction. Additional variants continue to be created by avid players of the game.

Set (stylized as SET) is a real-time card game designed by Marsha Falco in 1974 and published by Set Enterprises in 1991. The deck consists of 81 unique cards that vary in four features across three possibilities for each kind of feature: number of shapes (one, two, or three), shape (diamond, squiggle, oval), shading (solid, striped, or open), and color (red, green, or purple). Each possible combination of features (e.g. a card with [three] [striped] [green] [diamonds]) appears as a card precisely "once" in the deck.

Set (früher auch "Set!") ist ein Kartenspiel, das 1974 von Marsha Jean Falco erfunden und 1991 von Set Enterprises veröffentlicht wurde. 1995 wurde das Spiel in Deutschland von F.X. Schmid verlegt, seit 2001 von Ravensburger und seit 2013 von Amigo. Nach der Übernahme von Set Enterprise im Jahr 2019 liegen die weltweiten Rechte am Spiel bei PlayMonster.


Planning and construction.

In July 1951 the United States Congress authorized the construction of a nuclear-powered submarine for the U.S. Navy, which was planned and personally supervised by Captain (later Admiral) Hyman G. Rickover, USN, known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." On 12 December 1951 the US Department of the Navy announced that the submarine would be called "Nautilus", the fourth U.S. Navy vessel officially so named. The boat carried the hull number SSN-571. She benefited from the Greater Underwater Propulsion Power (GUPPY) improvements to the American "Gato"-, "Balao"-, and "Tench"-class submarines.  "Nautilus"s keel was laid at General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut by Harry S. Truman on 14 June 1952. She was christened on 21 January 1954 and launched into the Thames River, sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower. "Nautilus" was commissioned on 30 September 1954, under the command of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, USN.  "Nautilus" was powered by the Submarine Thermal Reactor (STR), later redesignated the S2W reactor, a pressurized water reactor produced for the US Navy by Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, operated by Westinghouse, developed the basic reactor plant design used in "Nautilus" after being given the assignment on 31 December 1947 to design a nuclear power plant for a submarine. Nuclear power had the crucial advantage in submarine propulsion because it is a zero-emission process that consumes no air. This design is the basis for nearly all of the US nuclear-powered submarine and surface combat ships, and was adapted by other countries for naval nuclear propulsion. The first actual prototype (for "Nautilus") was constructed and tested by the Argonne National Laboratory in 1953 at the S1W facility, part of the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho.  "Nautilus"' ship's patch was designed by The Walt Disney Company, and her wardroom currently displays a set of tableware made of zirconium, as the nuclear fuel cladding was partly made of zirconium.

"Underway on nuclear power".

Following her commissioning, "Nautilus" remained dockside for further construction and testing. On the morning of 17 January 1955, at 11 am EST, "Nautilus"' first Commanding Officer, Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, ordered all lines cast off and signaled the memorable and historic message, "Underway on Nuclear Power." On 10 May, she headed south for shakedown. Submerged throughout, she traveled from New London to San Juan, Puerto Rico and covered in less than ninety hours. At the time, this was the longest submerged cruise by a submarine and at the highest sustained speed (for at least one hour) ever recorded. From 1955 to 1957, "Nautilus" continued to be used to investigate the effects of increased submerged speeds and endurance. The improvements rendered the progress made in anti-submarine warfare during World War II virtually obsolete. Radar and anti-submarine aircraft, which had proved crucial in defeating submarines during the war, proved ineffective against a vessel able to move quickly out of an area, change depth quickly and stay submerged for very long periods.  On 4 February 1957, "Nautilus" logged her 60,000th nautical mile (), matching the endurance of her namesake, the fictional "Nautilus" described in Jules Verne's novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea". In May, she departed for the Pacific Coast to participate in coastal exercises and the fleet exercise, operation "Home Run," which acquainted units of the Pacific Fleet with the capabilities of nuclear submarines.  "Nautilus" returned to New London, Connecticut, on 21 July and departed again on 19 August for her first voyage of under polar pack ice. Thereafter, she headed for the Eastern Atlantic to participate in NATO exercises and conduct a tour of various British and French ports where she was inspected by defense personnel of those countries. She arrived back at New London on 28 October, underwent upkeep, and then conducted coastal operations until the spring.

Operation Sunshine – under the North Pole.

In response to the nuclear ICBM threat posed by Sputnik, President Eisenhower ordered the U.S. Navy to attempt a submarine transit of the North Pole to gain credibility for the soon-to-come SLBM weapons system. On 25 April 1958, "Nautilus" was underway again for the West Coast, now commanded by Commander William R. Anderson, USN. Stopping at San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, she began her history-making polar transit, Operation "Sunshine", as she departed the latter port on 9 June. On 19 June she entered the Chukchi Sea, but was turned back by deep drift ice in those shallow waters. On 28 June she arrived at Pearl Harbor to await better ice conditions.  By 23 July 1958 her wait was over, and she set a course northward. She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on 1 August and on 3 August, at 2315 (EDT) she became the first watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole. The ability to navigate at extreme latitudes and without surfacing was enabled by the technology of the North American Aviation N6A-1 Inertial Navigation System, a naval modification of the N6A used in the Navaho cruise missile; it had been installed on "Nautilus" and after initial sea trials on in 1957. From the North Pole, she continued on and after 96 hours and under the ice, surfaced northeast of Greenland, having completed the first successful submerged voyage around the North Pole. The technical details of this mission were planned by scientists from the Naval Electronics Laboratory including Dr. Waldo Lyon who accompanied "Nautilus" as chief scientist and ice pilot.  Navigation beneath the arctic ice sheet was difficult. Above 85°N both magnetic compasses and normal gyrocompasses become inaccurate. A special gyrocompass built by Sperry Rand was installed shortly before the journey. There was a risk that the submarine would become disoriented beneath the ice and that the crew would have to play "longitude roulette". Commander Anderson had considered using torpedoes to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface.  The most difficult part of the journey was in the Bering Strait. The ice extended as much as below sea level. During the initial attempt to go through the Bering Strait, there was insufficient room between the ice and the sea bottom. During the second, successful attempt to pass through the Bering passage, the submarine passed through a known channel close to Alaska (this was not the first choice, as the submarine wanted to avoid detection).  The trip beneath the ice cap was an important boost to America as the Soviets had recently launched Sputnik, but had no nuclear submarine of their own. During the address announcing the journey, the president mentioned that one day nuclear cargo submarines might use that route for trade.  As "Nautilus" proceeded south from Greenland, a helicopter airlifted Commander Anderson to connect with transport to Washington, D.C. At a White House ceremony on 8 August, President Eisenhower presented him with the Legion of Merit and announced that the crew had earned a Presidential Unit Citation.  At her next port of call, the Isle of Portland, England, she received the Unit Citation, the first ever issued in peace time, from American Ambassador JH Whitney, and then crossed the Atlantic reaching New London, Connecticut on 29 October. For the remainder of the year "Nautilus" operated from her home port of New London.

Operational history.

Following fleet exercises in early 1959, "Nautilus" entered the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, for her first complete overhaul (28 May 1959 – 15 August 1960). Overhaul was followed by refresher training and on 24 October she departed New London for her first deployment with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, returning to her home-port 16 December.  "Nautilus" spent most of her career assigned to Submarine Squadron 10 (SUBRON 10) at State Pier in New London, Connecticut. "Nautilus" and other submarines in the squadron made their home tied up alongside the tender, where they received preventive maintenance and, if necessary, repairs, from the well-equipped submarine tender USS "Fulton" (AS-11) and her crew of machinists, millwrights, and other craftsmen.  "Nautilus" operated in the Atlantic, conducting evaluation tests for ASW improvements, participating in NATO exercises and, during October 1962, in the naval quarantine of Cuba, until she headed east again for a two-month Mediterranean tour in August 1963. On her return she joined in fleet exercises until entering the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for her second overhaul 17 January 1964.  On 2 May 1966, "Nautilus "returned to her homeport to resume operations with the Atlantic Fleet, and at some point around that month, logged her 300,000th nautical mile () underway. For the next year and a quarter she conducted special operations for ComSubLant and then in August 1967, returned to Portsmouth, for another year's stay. During an exercise in 1966 she collided with the aircraft carrier on 10 November, while diving shallow. Following repairs in Portsmouth she conducted exercises off the southeastern seaboard. She returned to New London in December 1968 and operated as a unit of Submarine Squadron 10 for most of the remainder of her career. On 9 April 1979, "Nautilus" set out from Groton, Connecticut on her final voyage under the command of Richard A. Riddell. She reached Mare Island Naval Shipyard of Vallejo, California on 26 May 1979, her last day underway. She was decommissioned and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 3 March 1980.

Noise.

Toward the end of her service, the hull and sail of "Nautilus" vibrated sufficiently that sonar became ineffective at more than speed. As noise generation is extremely undesirable in submarines, this made the vessel vulnerable to sonar detection. Lessons learned from this problem were applied to later nuclear submarines.

Awards and commendations.

Presidential Unit Citation.

To commemorate the first submerged voyage under the North Pole, all "Nautilus" crewmembers who made the voyage may wear a Presidential Unit Citation ribbon with a special clasp in the form of a gold block letter N (image above).

Museum.

"Nautilus" was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Secretary of the Interior on 20 May 1982.  She was named as the official state ship of Connecticut in 1983. Following an extensive conversion at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, "Nautilus" was towed back to Groton, under the command of Captain John Almon, arriving on 6 July 1985. On 11 April 1986, "Nautilus" opened to the public as part of the Submarine Force Library and Museum.  "Nautilus" now serves as a museum of submarine history operated by the Naval History and Heritage Command. The ship underwent a five-month preservation in 2002 at Electric Boat, at a cost of approximately $4.7 million. "Nautilus" attracts some 250,000 visitors annually to her present berth near Naval Submarine Base New London.  "Nautilus" celebrated the 50th anniversary of her commissioning on 30 September 2004 with a ceremony that included a speech from Vice Admiral Eugene P. Wilkinson, her first Commanding Officer, and a designation of the ship as an American Nuclear Society National Nuclear Landmark.  Visitors may tour the forward two compartments, with guidance from an automated system. Despite similar alterations to exhibit the engineering spaces, tours aft of the control room are not permitted due to safety and security concerns.

USS "Nautilus" (SSN-571) was the world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine and the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole on 3 August 1958. Her initial commanding officer was Eugene Parks "Dennis" Wilkinson, a widely respected naval officer who set the stage for many of the protocols of today's Nuclear Navy, and who had a storied career during military service and afterwards.

Die USS "Nautilus" (SSN-571) ist ein US-amerikanisches U-Boot und war das erste nukleargetriebene U-Boot der Welt. Es war das sechste Schiff der United States Navy, das diesen Namen trug. Im Altgriechischen bedeutet "nautílos" als Substantiv „Seefahrer“, „Schiffer“ bzw. als Adjektiv „zur Schifffahrt gehörig“.


Description.

The haddock has the elongated, tapering body shape typical of members of the cod family. It has a relatively small mouth which does not extend to below the eye; with the lower profile of the face being straight and the upper profile slightly rounded, this gives its snout a characteristic wedge-shaped profile. The upper jaw projects beyond the lower more so than in the Atlantic cod. There is a rather small barbel on the chin. There are three dorsal fins, the first being triangular in shape and these dorsal fins have 14 to 17 fin rays in the first, 20 to 24 in the second, and 19 to 22 in the third. There are also two anal fins and in these there are 21 to 25 fin rays in the first and 20 to 24 fin rays in the second. The anal and dorsal fins are all separated from each other. The pelvic fins are small with an elongated first fin ray.  The upper side of the haddock's body varies in colour from dark grey brown to nearly black while the lower part of the body is dull silvery white. It has a distinctive black lateral line contrasting with the whitish background colour and which curves slightly over the pectoral fins. It also has a distinctive oval black blotch or ‘thumbprint’, sometimes called the "Devil's thumbprint", which sits between the lateral line and the pectoral fin, a feature which leads to the name of the genus "Melanogrammus" which derives from Greek ""melanos"" meaning "black" and ""gramma"" meaning letter or signal. The dorsal, pectoral, and caudal fins are dark grey in colour while the anal fins are pale matching the colour of the silvery sides, with black speckles at their bases. The pelvic fins are white with a variable amount of black spots. Occasionally there are differently coloured variants recorded which may be barred, golden on the back or lack the dark shoulder blotch.  The longest haddock recorded was in length and weighed. However, haddock are rarely over in length and the vast majority of haddocks caught in the United Kingdom measure between. In eastern Canadian waters haddock range in size from in length and in weight.

Distribution.

The haddock has populations on either side of the north Atlantic but it is more abundant in the eastern Atlantic than it is on the North American side. In the north-east Atlantic it occurs from the Bay of Biscay north to Spitzbergen; however, it is most abundant north of the English Channel. It also occurs around Novaya Zemlya and the Barents Sea in the Arctic. The largest stocks are in the North Sea, off the Faroe Islands, off Iceland and the coast of Norway but these are discrete populations with little interchange between them. Off North America, the haddock is found from western Greenland south to Cape Hatteras, but the main commercially fished stock occurs from Cape Cod and the Grand Banks.

Habitat and biology.

The haddock is a demersal species which occurs at depths from, although it is most frequently recorded at. It is found over substrates made up of rock, sand, gravel or shells and it prefers temperatures of between. Off Iceland and in the Barents Sea, haddock undergo extensive migrations, but in the north western Atlantic its movements are more restricted, consisting of movements to and from their spawning areas. They reach sexual maturity at 4 years old in males and 5 years old in females, except for the population in the North Sea which matures at ages of 2 years in males and 3 years in females. The overall sex ratio is roughly 1:1, but in shallower areas, females predominate, while the males show a preference for waters further offshore.  The fecundity of the females varies with size: a fish of length bears 55,000 eggs while a fish at has 1,841,000 eggs. Spawning takes place from depths of around. In the northwestern Atlantic spawning lasts from January to July, although it does not occur simultaneously in all areas, and in the northeastern Atlantic the spawning season runs from February to June, peaking in March and April. The eggs are pelagic with a diameter of, and they take one to three weeks to hatch. Following metamorphosis, the past larval fish remain pelagic until they attain a length of around, when they settle to a demersal habit. Their growth rate shows considerable regional variation and fish at one year old can measure, at 2 years old, up to at 13 years old. Their lifespan is around 14 years. The most important spawning grounds are in the waters off the central coast of Norway, off the southwest of Iceland, and over the Georges Bank. The fish which spawn in inshore waters are normally smaller and younger fish than those which occur in offshore areas. The younger fish have a spawning season which is less than half of that of the larger and older stock offshore. Once hatched the larvae do not appear to travel far from their spawning grounds, however some larvae spawning off the west coast of Scotland are transported into the North Sea through the Fair Isle-Shetland Gap or to the northeast of Shetland.  In their larval stages, haddock mainly feed on the immature stages of copepods and the pelagic post-larvae up to in length prey on krill, Larvaceans, decapod larvae, copepods and on small fish. Once they have reached the settled, demersal, post-larval stage, benthic invertebrates become increasingly important although they still feed on pelagic organisms such as krill, however the benthic invertebrates form an increasing part of their diet as they grow. Adults prey on fish such as sand eels, "Trisopterus esmarkii", "Hippoglossoides platessoides", gobies, European sprat, and Atlantic herring, as well as capelin, silver hake, American eels and argentines. When a number of fish taken at the same time have their stomach contents sampled, the majority of stomachs contain similar prey, this suggests that haddocks feed in shoals. Shellfish, sea urchins, brittlestars and worms are also important prey, especially in the winter. Juvenile haddock are an important prey for larger demersal fish, including other gadoids, while seals prey on the larger fish.  The recorded growth rates of haddock underwent significant change over the 30 to 40 years up to 2011. Growth has been more rapid in recent years, with haddock attaining adult size much earlier than was noted 30–40 years ago. However, the degree to which these larger, younger fish contribute to reproductive success of the population is unknown. The growth rates of haddock, however, have slowed in recent years. There is some evidence which indicates that these slower growth rates may be the result of an exceptionally large year class in 2003. The haddock stock periodically has higher than normal productivity; for example in 1962 and 1967, and to a lesser extent, 1974 and 1999. These result in a more southerly distribution of the fish and have a strong effect on the biomass of the spawning stock, but because of high fishing mortality, these revivals do not have any lasting effect on the population. In general, there was above average recruitment from the 1960s up to the early 1980s, similar to recruitment for Atlantic cod and whiting, this has been called the "gadoid outburst". There was strong recruitment in 1999 but since then, the recruitment rate has been very low.

Parasites.

Cod and related species are plagued by parasites. For example, the cod worm, "Lernaeocera branchialis", starts life as a copepod, a small, free-swimming crustacean larva. The first host used by cod worm is a flatfish or lumpsucker, which they capture with grasping hooks at the front of their bodies. They penetrate the lumpsucker with a thin filament which they use to suck its blood. The nourished cod worms then mate on the lumpsucker.  The female worm, with her now fertilized eggs, then finds a cod, or a cod-like fish such as a haddock or whiting. There, the worm clings to the gills while it metamorphoses into a plump, sinusoidal, wormlike body, with a coiled mass of egg strings at the rear. The front part of the worm's body penetrates the body of the cod until it enters the rear bulb of the host's heart. There, firmly rooted in the cod's circulatory system, the front part of the parasite develops like the branches of a tree, reaching into the main artery. In this way, the worm extracts nutrients from the cod's blood, remaining safely tucked beneath the cod's gill cover until it releases a new generation of offspring into the water.

Taxonomy and etymology.

The haddock was first formally described as "Gadus aeglefinus" in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus in the 10th edition of volume one of his "Systema naturae" with a type locality given as "European seas". In 1862 Theodore Nicholas Gill created the genus "Melanogrammus" with "M. aeglefinus" as its only species. The generic name "Melanogrammus" means "black line", a reference to the black lateral line of this species. The specific name is a latinisation of the vernacular names “Egrefin” and “Eglefin”, used in France and England.

Fisheries.

Haddock is fished year-round using gear such as Danish seine nets, trawlers, long lines and gill nets and is often caught in mixed species fishery with other groundfish species such as cod and whiting. The main fishing grounds in the eastern Atlantic are in the Barents Sea, around Iceland, around the Faeroe Islands, in the North Sea, Celtic Sea, and in the English Channel. Landings in the eastern Atlantic have fluctuated around 200–350 thousand tonnes in the period 1980–2017. During the 1980s, the largest portion of the catch was taken at Rockall but from about 2000, the majority of the catch is caught in the Barents Sea. All the stocks in eastern Atlantic are assessed by ICES which publish a recommendations on an annual basis for Total Allowable Catch.  In the western Atlantic the eastern Georges Bank haddock stock is jointly assessed on an annual basis by Canada and the United States and the stock is collaboratively managed through the Canada-United States Transboundary Management Guidance Committee, this committee was established in 2000. The commercial catch of haddock in North America was approximately 40–60 thousand tonnes per year between 1920 and 1960, this declined sharply in the late 1960s to between 5 and 30 thousand tonnes per year. Despite a few good year classes post 1970, landings have not returned to historical levels.  Haddock currently resides on the Greenpeace seafood red due to concerns regarding the impact of bottom trawls on the marine environment. In contrast, Monterey Bay Aquarium considers haddock a "good alternative". Many haddock fisheries have been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. All seven stocks assessed in the eastern Atlantic are currently considered by ICES to be harvested sustainably. The haddock populations in the western Atlantic (offshore grounds of Georges Bank off New England and Nova Scotia) are also considered to be harvested sustainably.

As food.

Haddock is very popular as a food fish. It is sold fresh or preserved by smoking, freezing, drying, or to a small extent canning. Haddock, along with Atlantic cod and plaice, is one of the most popular fish used in British fish and chips.When fresh, the flesh of haddock is clean and white and its cooking is often similar to that of cod. A fresh haddock fillet will be firm and translucent and hold together well but less fresh fillets will become nearly opaque. Young, fresh haddock and cod fillets are often sold as scrod in Boston, Massachusetts; this refers to the size of the fish which have a variety of sizes, i.e., scrod, markets, and cows. Haddock is the predominant fish of choice in Scotland in a fish supper. It is also the main ingredient of Norwegian fishballs ("fiskeboller"). Unlike cod, haddock is not an appropriate fish for salting and preservation is more commonly effected by drying and smoking.  The smoking of haddock was highly refined in Grimsby. Traditional Grimsby smoked fish (mainly haddock, but sometimes cod) is produced in the traditional smokehouses in Grimsby, which are mostly family-run businesses that have developed their skills over many generations. Grimsby fish market sources its haddock from the North East Atlantic, principally Iceland, Norway and the Faroe Islands. These fishing grounds are sustainably managed and have not seen the large scale depreciation in fish stocks seen in EU waters.  One popular form of haddock is Finnan haddie which is named after the fishing village of Finnan or Findon in Scotland, where the fish was originally cold-smoked over smouldering peat. Finnan haddie is often poached in milk and served for breakfast.  The town of Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland produces the Arbroath smokie. This is a hot-smoked haddock which requires no further cooking before eating.  Smoked haddock is naturally an off-white colour and it is frequently dyed yellow, as are other smoked fish. Smoked haddock is the essential ingredient in the Anglo-Indian dish kedgeree, and also in the Scottish dish Cullen skink, a chowder-like soup.

The haddock ("Melanogrammus aeglefinus") is a saltwater fish from the family Gadidae, the true cods. It is the only species in the monotypic genus "Melanogrammus". It is found in the North Atlantic Ocean and associated seas where it is an important species for fisheries, especially in northern Europe where it is marketed fresh, frozen and smoked; smoked varieties include the Finnan haddie and the Arbroath smokie.

Der Schellfisch ("Melanogrammus aeglefinus") ist ein Speisefisch aus der Familie der Dorsche (Gadidae), der in Meeren der gemäßigten Zonen vorkommt.


Geography.

Location.

Oberwesel lies on the river Rhine’s left (west) bank in the Rhine Gorge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, between the neighbouring towns of Sankt Goar and Bacharach.

Constituent communities.

The town is made up of several "Stadtteile", namely the main centre, also called Oberwesel, and the outlying centres of Engehöll, Dellhofen and Langscheid.

Climate.

Yearly precipitation in Oberwesel amounts to 604 mm, which is very low, falling into the lowest fourth of the precipitation chart for all Germany. Only at 22% of the German Weather Service’s weather stations are even lower figures recorded. The driest month is February. The most rainfall comes in June. In that month, precipitation is 1.6 times what it is in February. Precipitation varies only slightly. At only 1% of the weather stations are lower seasonal recorded.

History.

As in many of the region’s towns, Oberwesel quite possibly had its beginnings as a Celtic settlement, named "Vosavia" or "Volsolvia". The Romans later maintained a horse-changing station with a hostel here. After the fall of the limes, Oberwesel became a Frankish royal holding with a royal estate. The Wesel Estate passed under Emperor Otto I in 966 to the Archbishopric of Magdeburg. In 1220, Emperor Frederick II dissolved the pledge and Oberwesel became a free imperial city. In 1255, Oberwesel became a member of the Rhenish League of Towns ("Rheinischer Städtebund"), but in 1309, it lost its status as a free imperial city and fell under the lordship of the Electorate of Trier, to which it belonged until Secularization after the French Revolutionary Wars in 1802. In the so-called "Weseler Krieg" (“Wesel War”) in 1390 and 1391, the town tried yet again to turn over a new leaf, but after a successful siege by Archbishop of Trier Werner von Falkenstein, it had to back down.  Winegrowing, fishing, trade and handicrafts helped the town gather enough wealth to begin work on the town walls in 1220, building them in three phases from then until the mid 14th century. The town's importance in the Middle Ages can be gathered from the two great ecclesiastical foundations that it harboured (Our Lady's – or "Liebfrauen" in German – and Saint Martin's), as well as the two monasteries and the "Beginenhof". All together, nine monasteries had sizeable commercial holdings in town.  In 1689, in the Nine Years' War (known in Germany as the "Pfälzischer Erbfolgekrieg", or War of the Palatine Succession), Oberwesel was destroyed for the first time, by soldiers of the First French Empire. In 1794, the town was occupied by French Revolutionary troops and in 1802 was annexed by France. After the Congress of Vienna, Oberwesel became, along with the rest of the Rhine's left bank, Prussian.

“Saint” Werner.

“Saint Werner’s Chapel” on the side of the town wall facing the Rhine was renovated in 2001. It was consecrated to the former saint, Werner of Oberwesel. In iconography, Werner was shown with a winegrower's billhook, a shovel and a pan as attributes, and was said to be the patron saint of winemakers. According to a blood libel, 16-year-old Werner was said to have been murdered on Maundy Thursday 1287 in Oberwesel by local Jews who were thought to have wanted to use his blood in their Passover rituals. A 14th-century Latin chronicle reports of an alleged host desecration: Jews from local communities hung Werner up by the feet to rob him of a piece of sacramental bread that he was about to swallow. The Jews then threw him in the Rhine. At the spot on the riverbank in Bacharach where his body washed up, the Gothic, "Rheinromantik" Saint Werner's Chapel was built. When word of the ritual murder spread, outraged mobs rose up, destroying not only Jewish communities on the Middle Rhine, but also up the Moselle and down on the Lower Rhine, too. In folk Christianity, the Cult of Werner arose, and it was only stricken from the calendar of the Diocese of Trier in 1963. Heinrich Heine treated the legend in his fragmentary tale, "Der Rabbi von Bacherach".

Amalgamations.

From 7 November 1970, the town formed with the municipalities of Damscheid, Dellhofen, Langscheid, Laudert, Niederburg, Perscheid, Urbar and Wiebelsheim the "Verbandsgemeinde" of Oberwesel. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, the new "Verbandsgemeinde" of Sankt Goar-Oberwesel was formed out of the towns of Sankt Goar and Oberwesel on 22 April 1972, with the administrative seat at Oberwesel. On 17 March 1974, the formerly self-administering municipalities of Langscheid, Dellhofen and Urbar were amalgamated with Oberwesel, although on 13 June 1999, Urbar once again became self-administering.

Politics.

Town council.

The council is made up of 20 council members, who were elected by proportional representation at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairman.  The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results:  Elections in 2014:

Mayor.

Oberwesel's mayor is Jürgen Port.  Oberwesel's mayors since the Second World War have been:

Coat of arms.

The German blazon reads: "In Gold ein rot bewehrter und rot bezungter schwarzer Adler."  The town's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Or an eagle displayed sable armed and langued gules.  From 1237 to 1309, the town was a free imperial city. Ever since, it has borne the Imperial Eagle as a charge in the town seal and the civic coat of arms.  The town's colours are black and yellow.

Culture and sightseeing.

Buildings.

The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:

Further information about buildings and sites.

The town wall, which was built in the early 13th century and some of whose parts are open to the public, was expanded and strengthened in the 14th century, and with 16 defensive towers – among them the "Hospitalgassenturm" (“Hospital Lane Tower”), the "Steingassenturm" (“Stone Lane Tower”), the "Katzenturm" (“Cats’ Tower”) and the "Ochsenturm" (“Ox’s Tower”), which is crenellated and has an octagonal top tower, making it a type of butter-churn tower ("Butterfassturm") – is the best preserved girding wall anywhere on the Rhine Gorge. There was planning to open further sections to the public in 2006.  “Saint” Werner's Chapel is nowadays more properly known as the "Mutter-Rosa-Kapelle", since its consecration to Werner has been rescinded and Werner has been stricken from the roll of saints. The chapel is now named after Rosa Flesch, the founder of a Franciscan order in the 19th century. Physically, it actually consists only of the quire of the chapel attached to the hospital, which itself was destroyed in 1689.  Building work on the Church of Our Lady ("Liebfrauenkirche", or "Pfarrkirche Liebfrauen" as it is styled above) began in 1308. In 1331, the church was consecrated and it was completed in 1375. It was built on the spot once occupied by another church, which was first mentioned in 1213. From the old church, the new one took over an endowment for secular clergy (as opposed to regular clergy). Given its architecture and appointments (golden altar, rood screen, wall paintings), it is among the Rhineland’s most important Gothic churches.  Saint Martin’s Church, too, is a Gothic building that arose on a foregoing church’s old site. It was built in 1350, but was not finished owing to strained finances. The tower, which in the Wesel War was incorporated into the town wall as a defensive structure, is an illustrative example of ecclesiastical defensive architecture in the Rhineland. Much of the Gothic appointments has been destroyed. Preserved, however, are a few wall paintings from about 1500 to 1600.  The Minorite monastery was a Franciscan institution founded in 1242 and dissolved in 1802 by Napoleon. In the great town fire of 1836, it was destroyed, and has been a ruin ever since.

Winegrowing.

Within the Middle Rhine wine region, Oberwesel is one of the biggest winegrowing centres. The winemaking appellation – "Großlage" – of Schloss Schönburg encompasses 72 ha. Individual winemakers within this appellation – "Einzellagen" – are Sieben Jungfrauen, Oelsberg, Bienenberg, St. Martinsberg, Goldemund, Bernstein and Römerkrug. The vineyards are steeply terraced and 80% of the area is planted with Riesling and 20% with other white grape varieties (Müller-Thurgau, Kerner, Pinot blanc) and less often with red varieties (Pinot noir, Dornfelder). All kinds of wine (mild, half-dry and dry) and quality levels ("Prädikat Kabinett" to the odd ice wine) are produced. Recently in the Oelsberg vineyards, some light "Flurbereinigung" was undertaken, and the now newly planted vineyards have been provided with an irrigation facility. This was meant to safeguard this traditional "Einzellage", for not only will it spare the winemakers some work, but it will also ensure good yields even in dry summers.  Some of the 30 or so winemaking estates in town have been under family ownership for more than 200 years; some also keep wine bars in the town.

Oberwesel is a town on the Middle Rhine in the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis (district) in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the "Verbandsgemeinde" Hunsrück-Mittelrhein, whose seat is in Emmelshausen.

Oberwesel ist eine Stadt am Mittelrhein. Sie liegt in Rheinland-Pfalz im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis. Die Stadt gehört der Verbandsgemeinde Hunsrück-Mittelrhein an, und ist einer der beiden Verwaltungssitze. Oberwesel ist ein staatlich anerkannter Fremdenverkehrsort und gemäß Landesplanung als Grundzentrum ausgewiesen.


Location.

The site is located in Mexico in the highlands of the municipality of Papantla in modern-day Veracruz, not far from the city of Poza Rica, which lies northwest of the port and city of Veracruz. The city is set in the low rolling mountains that lead from the Sierra Madre Oriental to the Gulf coast near the Tecolutla River. In ancient times, this city was located in the northeast corner of what is called Mesoamerica, and controlled an area from between the Cazones and Tecolutla Rivers to the modern state of Puebla. The main city is defined by two streams which merge to form the Tlahuanapa Arroyo, a tributary

Name.

When it was rediscovered by officialdom in 1785, the site was known to the local Totonac, whose ancestors may also have built the city, as El Tajín, which was said to mean “of thunder or lightning bolt”. Related to this is their belief that twelve old thunderstorm deities, known as Tajín, still inhabit the ruins. However, a series of indigenous

History of the city.

Chronology studies at Tajín and nearby sites show that the area has been occupied at least since 5600 BCE and show how nomadic hunters and gatherers eventually became sedentary farmers, building more complex societies prior to the rise of the city of El Tajin. The pace of this societal progression became more rapid with the rise of the neighboring Olmec civilization around 1150 BCE, although the Olmecs were never here in great numbers. It is unclear who built the city. Some argue in favor of the Totonacs and the Xapaneca; however, there is a significant amount of evidence that the area was populated by the Huastec at the time the settlement was founded in the 1st century CE Monumental construction started soon after and by 600 CE, El Tajín was a city. The rapid rise of Tajin was due to its strategic position along the old Mesoamerican trade routes. It controlled the flow of commodities, both exports such as vanilla and imports from other locations in what is now Mexico and Central America. From the early centuries, objects from Teotihuacan are abundant.  From 600 to 1200 CE, El Tajín was a prosperous city that eventually controlled much of what is now modern Veracruz state. The city-state was highly centralized, with the city itself having more than fifty ethnicities living there. Most of the population lived in the hills surrounding the main city, and the city

History of its rediscovery.

In 1785, an official by the name of Diego Ruiz stumbled upon the Pyramid of the Niches, whilst looking for clandestine tobacco plantings breaching the royal monopoly in this isolated area rarely visited by the authorities. He made a drawing of the pyramid and reported his find to a publication called Gaceta de Mexico. He claimed the natives had kept the place secret. The publication of the pyramid's existence in the Gaceta influenced academic circles in New Spain and Europe, attracting the attention of antiquarians José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez and Ciriaco Gonazlez Carvajal, who wrote about it. It also gained the interest of several academics, who compared the pyramid with the constructions of ancient Rome. The pyramid was further advertised by Italian Pietro Márquez in Europe and by Alexander von Humboldt. Since its discovery by Europeans, the site has attracted visitors for two centuries. German architect Charles Nebel visited the site in 1831 and was the first to graphically and narratively detail the Pyramid of the Niches as well as the nearby ruins of Mapilca and Tuzapan. He was also

World Heritage Site.

El Tajín was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1992, because of its historical significance and architecture and engineering. “Its architecture, which is unique in Mesoamerica, is characterized by elaborate carved reliefs on the columns and frieze. The 'Pyramid of the Niches', a masterpiece of ancient Mexican and American architecture, reveals the astronomical and symbolic significance of the buildings.” The site is one of the most important in Mexico and the most important in the state of Veracruz.  Its significance is due to its size and unique forms of art and architecture. The borders of the city's residential areas have not yet been defined but is the entire site is estimated at. To date, only about fifty percent of the city's buildings has been excavated, revealing a series of plazas, palaces, and administrative buildings within a two-square-mile area. Unlike the highly rigid grid patterns of ancient cities in the central highlands of Mexico, the builders of El Tajin designed and aligned buildings as individual units. There are several architectural features here which are unique to the place or seen in only rarely in Mesoamerica. Adornment in the form of niches and stepped frets are omnipresent, decorating even utilitarian buttresses and platform walls. Stepped frets are seen in other parts of Mesoamerica but rarely to this extent. The use of niches is unique to El Tajin.  One notable aspect of the construction at El Tajin is the use of poured cement in forms. Surviving roof fragments from Building C in the Tajín Chico section is an example of cement roof constructions. Due to the lack of beams or other materials to prop it

Major monuments.

The entrance and site museum.

The entrance to the site is located at the south end. In being named a World Heritage Site in 1992, new facilities have been added to this area, such as a cafeteria, information services, a park and administrative offices. The site museum is also located here. In addition, the Danza de los Voladores is enacted at the entrance to the site and is considered a requirement for visitors. The voladores appear every half-hour at the pole and circle erected just outside the main gate.  The park is named Parque Takilhsukut and is located about one km outside the site proper. It is a modern facility with the aim of being a center of Veracruz indigenous identity. It covers 17 hectares with a capacity of 40,000 people. It hosts fairs, conventions and other events, including part of the annual Cumbre Tajín cultural festival which

Arroyo Group.

This is called the Arroyo Group because two streams surround it on three sides. This area is one of the oldest sections of the city, and is more than. It is flanked by four high buildings, named Buildings 16, 18, 19 and 20, which were topped by temples. Stairways lead from the plaza floor to the temples above. Unlike the rest of the city, these four buildings are uniform in height and nearly symmetrical. The pyramids here are primitive in comparison to the rest of the site, with niches that are not as finely formed. The east and west pyramids of the arroyo group each held three temples at the top. Another unusual

The Pyramid of the Niches.

This pyramid has as a number of names, including El Tajín, Pyramid of Papantla, Pyramid of the Seven Stories and the Temple of the Niches. It has become the focus of the site because of its unusual design and good state of preservation. It was prominent in ancient times as well. A large quantity of sculpture was recovered from this pyramid. The building is mostly constructed of carefully cut and crafted flagstones, the largest of which is estimated to be about eight metric tons in weight. The stones, especially around the niches are fitted together as to need a minimum amount of lime

Tajin Chico.

Tajin Chico is a multilevel portion of the site that stretches north-northwest from the older parts of the city up a hill. Much of this section was created by using massive amounts of landfill. It is an immense acropolis composed of numerous palaces and other civil structures. There are relatively few temples here. It is also more easily defended than other parts of the city. Tajin Chico is so named because it was initially thought to be a separate but related site. It is now known that it belonged to the center of the city. However, as the term was already in the literature about the site, it has stuck.  Building C was not a temple but its function is not entirely clear. Nearby buildings A and B were palaces. It is probably that this building was used by priests or rulers to receive visitors, petitioners and others. The roof of Building C was more than in size and

Buildings 3, 23, 15 and 5.

Building 3 or the Blue Temple has some features that set it apart from other pyramids at the site. Except for six benches on the staircase and at the top of the balustrades, probably later additions, there are no niches. The seven stories of the pyramid are composed of gently sloping walling divided into panels of varying widths. The unreconstructed north side has a large indentation made by looters before the site was protected by guards. No sculpture is known to have come from this building and nothing of the temple at the top remains. The building was covered in cement several times over its history,

The North and South Ballcourts.

The North Ballcourt is constructed by three layers of large flagstones. There are six carved panels with ritual scenes and an ornamental frieze that runs along both walls. The court is long, which is considered to be unusually small and has vertical rather than sloping walls. It is probably one of the oldest structures at Tajín.  Portions of the panels and friezes are worn to the point that large areas are incomplete. The four end panels have scenes relating to the ritual of the ball game that result in entreaties to the gods. The central panels depict the gods responding or performing a ritual of their own. Variant forms of the god of pulque appear over each of the end panels, suggesting that the drink was an important part of the ritual. The southeast, east and northwest panels show a ruler on a throne. The southwest panel has a

The Cumbre Tajín event.

The Cumbre Tajin is an annual artistic and cultural festival which is held at the site in March. The Cumbre Tajin is considered to be an identity festival of the Totonacs, who are considered to be the guardians of El Tajín. Events include those traditional to the Totonac culture as well as modern arts and events from cultures from as far as Tibet. Some of the events include musical concerts, experiencing a "temazcal", theatrical events and visiting El Tajin at night, with a total over 5,000 activities. Many of the cultural, craft and gastronomic events occur at the adjacent Parque Takilhsukut which just located just outside the archeological site. In 2008, 160,000 attended the event which featured Fito Páez, Ximena Sariñana and Los Tigres del Norte. Thirty percent of the revenue the event generates goes toward scholarships for Totonaca youth.  In 2009, the event added the Encuentro Internacional de Voladores (International Encounter of Voladores). For five days, voladores from various places perform at the poles erected at the site. The objective is not only to see the different costumes and styles of the groups but to share experiences about the fertility ritual. Voladores come from as far as San Luis Potosi and Guatemala.  The Cumbre Tajín has been criticized for its emphasis on modern shows rather than on cultural events. One criticism is the illumination of pyramids at night without any kind of cultural historical instruction. The criticism is that it disrespects the site and the Totonac people. There are also fears that large numbers of visitors to the site for events such as concerts by names such as Alejandra Guzmán damage the site. However, the Centro de Artes Indígenas de Veracruz states that it works very hard to preserve and promote Totonac culture through the event, sponsoring events such as traditional cooking, painting and the ritual of the Voladores.

El Tajín is a pre-Columbian archeological site in southern Mexico and is one of the largest and most important cities of the Classic era of Mesoamerica. A part of the Classic Veracruz culture, El Tajín flourished from 600 to 1200 CE and during this time numerous temples, palaces, ballcourts, and pyramids were built. From the time the city fell, in 1230, to 1785, no European seems to have known of its existence, until a government inspector chanced upon the Pyramid of the Niches.

El Tajín (spanisch-totonakisch „Der Blitz“) ist eine präkolumbische Ruinenstadt nahe der Ostküste Mexikos bei der Stadt Papantla, südöstlich von Poza Rica de Hidalgo im Bundesstaat Veracruz. Diese war wahrscheinlich zeitweilig Hauptstadt der Tachiwin ("aztekisch" Totonaken), weist mehrere große, pyramidenförmige Stufentempel auf und wurde vor 800 Jahren aufgegeben. Nach ihr wurde die Tajín-Kultur benannt.


Contemporary semaphore flag system.

The current flag semaphore system uses two short poles with square flags, which a signal person holds in different positions to signal letters of the alphabet and numbers. The signaller holds one pole in each hand, and extends each arm in one of eight possible directions. Except for in the rest position, the flags do not overlap. The flags are colored differently based on whether the signals are sent by sea or by land. At sea, the flags are colored red and yellow (the Oscar flag), while on land, they are white and blue (the Papa flag). Flags are not required; their purpose is to make the characters more obvious.

Characters.

The following 30 semaphore characters are presented as they would appear when facing the signalperson:  Numbers can be signaled by first signaling "Numerals". Letters can be signaled by first signaling "J".  The sender uses the "Attention" signal to request permission to begin a transmission. The receiver uses a "Ready to receive" signal not shown above to grant permission to begin the transmission. The receiver raises both flags vertical overhead and then drops them to the rest position, once only, to grant permission to send. The sender ends the transmission with the "Ready to receive" signal. The receiver can reply with the "Attention" signal. At this point, sender and receiver change places.

Origin.

Flag semaphore originated in 1866 as a handheld version of the optical telegraph system of Home Riggs Popham used on land, and its later improvement by Charles Pasley. The land system consisted of lines of fixed stations (substantial buildings) with two large, moveable arms pivoted on an upright member. Such a system was inconvenient to install on board a ship. Flag semaphore provided an easy method of communicating ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore when the distances were not too great. According to Alexander J. Field of Santa Clara University, "there is evidence" that Popham based his telegraph on the French coastal stations used for ship-to-shore communication. Many of the codepoints of flag semaphore match those of the Foy-Breguet electrical telegraph, also descended from the French optical telegraph. Although based on the optical telegraph, by the time flag semaphore was introduced the optical telegraph had been entirely replaced by the electrical telegraph some years previously.

Japanese semaphore.

The Japanese merchant marine and armed services have adapted the flag semaphore system to the Japanese language. Because their writing system involves a syllabary of about twice the number of characters in the Latin alphabet, most characters take two displays of the flags to complete; others need three and a few only one. The flags are specified as a solid white square for the left hand and a solid red one for the right. The display motions chosen are not like the "rotary dial" system used for the Latin alphabet letters and numbers; rather, the displays represent the angles of the brush strokes used in writing in the katakana syllabary and in the order drawn. For example, the character for "O" [オ], which is drawn first with a horizontal line from left to right, then a vertical one from top to bottom, and finally a slant between the two; follows that form and order of the arm extensions. It is the right arm, holding the red flag, which moves as a pen would, but in mirror image so that the observer sees the pattern normally. As in telegraphy, the katakana syllabary is the one used to write down the messages as they are received. Also, the Japanese system presents the number 0 by moving flags in a circle, and those from 1 through 9 using a sort of the "rotary dial" system, but different from that used for European languages.

Practical use in communication.

Semaphore flags are also sometimes used as means of communication in the mountains where oral or electronic communication is difficult to perform. Although they do not carry flags, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers have used hand semaphore in this manner. Some surf-side rescue companies, such as the Ocean City, Maryland Beach Patrol, use semaphore flags to communicate between lifeguards. The letters of the flag semaphore are also a common artistic motif. One enduring example is the peace symbol, adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 from the original logo created by a commercial artist named Gerald Holtom from Twickenham, London. Holtom designed the logo for use on a protest march on the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, near Newbury, England. On 4 April 1958, the march left Trafalgar Square for rural Berkshire, carrying Ban the Bomb placards made by Holtom's children making it the first use of the symbol. Originally, it was purple and white and signified a combination of the semaphoric letters N and D, standing for "nuclear disarmament," circumscribed by a circle.  Along with Morse code, flag semaphore is currently used by the Navy and also continues to be a subject of study and training for young people of Scouts. In a satirical nod to the flag semaphore's enduring use into the age of the Internet, on April Fools' Day 2007 the Internet Engineering Task Force standards organization outlined the Semaphore Flag Signaling System, a method of transmitting Internet traffic via a chain of flag semaphore operators.

Use in popular culture.

The album cover for the Beatles' 1965 album "Help!" was originally to have portrayed the four band members spelling "help" in semaphore, but the result was deemed aesthetically unpleasing, and their arms were instead positioned in a meaningless but aesthetically pleasing arrangement.  The second episode in the second series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" depicted famous stories retold using various communication systems, including "Wuthering Heights" in semaphore.

Flag semaphore (from the Greek σῆμα, "sema", meaning sign and φέρω, "phero", meaning to bear; altogether the sign-bearer) is the telegraphy system conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. Information is encoded by the position of the flags; it is read when the flag is in a fixed position. Semaphores were adopted and widely used (with hand-held flags replacing the mechanical arms of shutter semaphores) in the maritime world in the 19th century. It is still used during underway replenishment at sea and is acceptable for emergency communication in daylight or using lighted wands instead of flags, at night.

Das Winkeralphabet (Semaphore) dient zur optischen Nachrichtenübermittlung zwischen Schiffen oder an Land. Mit der Entwicklung des Sprechfunks verlor es stark an Bedeutung, wird jedoch auf See noch heute vor allem militärisch genutzt, da es – im Gegensatz zu fast allen Funkverkehren – nur schwer abhörbar ist. Offizielles Kommunikationsmittel ist es noch bei der United States Navy und den Meeresselbstverteidigungsstreitkräften Japans, wird jedoch auch bei anderen Marinen noch gepflegt.


Biography.

Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria, to a Swiss father. His father, Fridolin (b. 1868), was a prominent industrialist in the Bulgarian city and also served as ambassador of Norway in Varna (1908–1933). The Zwicky House in Varna was designed and built by Fridolin Zwicky. Fritz's mother, Franziska Vrček (b. 1871), was an ethnic Czech of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fritz was the oldest of the Zwicky family's three children: he had a younger brother named Rudolf and a sister, Leonie. Fritz's mother died in Varna in 1927, and his father Fridolin remained in Bulgaria until 1945, when he returned to Switzerland. His sister Leonie married a Bulgarian from Varna and spent her entire life in the city.  In 1904, at the age of six, Fritz was sent to his grandparents in the family's ancestral canton of Glarus, Switzerland, to study commerce. His interests shifted to math and physics and he received an advanced education in mathematics and experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (today known as ETH Zurich) in Zurich. In 1925, he immigrated to the United States to work with Robert Millikan at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with an office down the hall from Robert Oppenheimer after receiving the "international fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation."  He was responsible for positing numerous cosmological theories that have a profound impact on the understanding of our universe today. He coined the term "supernova" during his fostering the concept of neutron stars. It would be five years later when Oppenheimer would publish his landmark paper announcing "neutron stars". Fritz was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Caltech in 1942 and also worked as a research director/consultant for Aerojet Engineering Corporation (1943–1961) and staff member of Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory for most of his career. He developed some of the earliest jet engines and holds over 50 patents, many in jet propulsion, and is the inventor of the Underwater Jet (TIME March 14, 1949), the Two Piece Jet Thrust Motor and Inverted Hydro Pulse.  In April 1932, Fritz Zwicky married Dorothy Vernon Gates (1904-1991), a member of a prominent local family and a daughter of California State Senator Egbert Gates. Her money was instrumental in the funding of the Palomar Observatory during the Great Depression. Nicholas Roosevelt, cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, was his brother-in-law by marriage to Tirzah Gates. Zwicky and Dorothy divorced amicably in 1941. In 1947 Zwicky was married in Switzerland to Anna Margaritha Zurcher and they had three daughters, Margrit, Franziska, and Barbarina. The Zwicky Museum at the Landesbibliothek, Glarus, houses many of his papers and scientific works, and the Fritz Zwicky Stiftung (Foundation) in Switzerland carries on his ideas relating to "Morphological analysis". Zwicky died in Pasadena on February 8, 1974, and was buried in Mollis, Switzerland.  Zwicky was an atheist.  He is remembered as both a genius and a curmudgeon. One of his favorite insults was to refer to people he did not approve of as "spherical bastards", because, he explained, they were bastards no matter which way one looked at them.  A recent biography in English was published by the Fritz Zwicky Foundation: Alfred Stöckli & Roland Müller: "Fritz Zwicky – An Extraordinary Astrophysicist". Cambridge Scientific Publishers, Cambridge, 2011. A review of the book is available from "Acta Morphologica Generalis".

Scientific work.

Fritz Zwicky was a prolific scientist and made important contributions in many areas of astronomy.

Ionic crystals and electrolytes.

His first scientific contributions pertained to ionic crystals and electrolytes.

Supernovae and neutron stars.

Together with colleague Walter Baade, Zwicky pioneered and promoted the use of the first Schmidt telescopes used in a mountain-top observatory in 1935. In 1934 he and Baade coined the term "supernova" and hypothesized that supernovae were the transition of normal stars into neutron stars, as well as the origin of cosmic rays. This was an opinion which contributed to determining the size and age of the universe subsequently.  In support of this hypothesis, Zwicky started looking for supernovae, and found a total of 120 by himself (and one more, SN 1963J, in concert with Paul Wild) over 52 years (SN 1921B through SN 1973K), a record which stood until 2009 when passed by Tom Boles. Zwicky did his laborious work, comparing photographic plates with the human eye, which is far more challenging and difficult than Boles accomplished using modern technology for his record.

Gravitational lenses.

In 1937, Zwicky posited that galaxies could act as gravitational lenses by the previously discovered Einstein effect. It was not until 1979 that this effect was confirmed by observation of the so-called "Twin Quasar" Q0957+561.

Dark matter.

While examining the Coma galaxy cluster in 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to discover the existence of a gravitational anomaly, which he termed "dunkle (kalt) Materie" 'dark matter'. The gravitational anomaly surfaced due to the excessive rotational velocity of luminous matter compared to the calculated gravitational attraction within the cluster. He calculated the gravitational mass of the galaxies within the cluster from the observed rotational velocities and obtained a value at least 400 times greater than expected from their luminosity. The same calculation today shows a smaller factor, based on greater values for the mass of luminous material; but it is still clear that the great majority of matter was correctly inferred to be dark.

Tired light.

When Edwin Hubble discovered a somewhat linear relationship between the distance to a galaxy and its redshift expressed as a velocity, Zwicky immediately pointed out that the correlation between the calculated distances of galaxies and their redshifts had a discrepancy too large to fit in the distance's error margins. He proposed that the reddening effect was not due to motions of the galaxy, but to an unknown phenomenon that caused photons to lose energy as they traveled through space. He considered the most likely candidate process to be a drag effect in which photons transfer momentum to surrounding masses through gravitational interactions; and proposed that an attempt be made to put this effect on a sound theoretical footing with general relativity. He also considered and rejected explanations involving interactions with free electrons, or the expansion of space.  Zwicky was skeptical of the expansion of space in 1929, because the rates measured at that time seemed too large. It was not until 1956 that Walter Baade corrected the distance scale based on Cepheid variable stars, and ushered in the first accurate measures of the expansion rate. Cosmological redshift is now conventionally understood to be a consequence of the expansion of space; a feature of Big Bang cosmology.

Morphological analysis.

Zwicky developed a generalised form of morphological analysis, which is a method for systematically structuring and investigating the total set of relationships contained in multi-dimensional, usually non-quantifiable, problem complexes. He wrote a book on the subject in 1969, and claimed that he made many of his discoveries using this method.

"Catalog of Galaxies and Clusters".

Zwicky devoted considerable time to the search for galaxies and the production of catalogs. From 1961 to 1968 he and his colleagues published a comprehensive six volume "Catalogue of galaxies and of clusters of galaxies". They were all published in Pasadena, by the California Institute of Technology.  Galaxies in the original catalog are called "Zwicky galaxies", and the catalog is still maintained and updated today. Zwicky with his wife Margaritha also produced an important catalog of compact galaxies, sometimes called simply "The Red Book".

Original thinker.

Zwicky was an original thinker, and his contemporaries frequently had no way of knowing which of his ideas would work out and which would not. In a retrospective look at Zwicky's life and work, Stephen Maurer said: He is celebrated for the discovery of neutron stars. He also went on to consider "nuclear goblins", which he proposed as ""a body of nuclear density... only stable under sufficient external pressure within a massive and dense star"". He considered that goblins could move within a star, and explode violently as they reach less dense regions towards the star's surface, and serve to explain eruptive phenomena, such as flare stars. This idea has never caught on.  An anecdote often told of Zwicky concerns an informal experiment to see if he could reduce problems with turbulence hindering an observation session one night at Mount Wilson observatory. He told his assistant to fire a gun out through the telescope slit, in the hope it would help to smooth out the turbulence. No effect was noticed, but the event shows the kind of lateral thinking for which Zwicky was famous.  In a talk to a Caltech PhD student Frank Malina, who experienced some difficulties working on a dissertation regarding characteristics of oxygen-gasoline rocket engine, Fritz Zwicky claimed the engineer "must realize that a rocket could not operate in space as it required the atmosphere to push against to provide thrust". Zwicky later admitted that he had been mistaken.  He was also very proud of his work in producing the first artificial meteors. He placed explosive charges in the nose cone of a V2 rocket, to be detonated at high altitude and fire high velocity pellets of metal through the atmosphere. The first attempts appeared to be failures, and Zwicky sought to try again with the Aerobee rocket. His requests were denied, until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Twelve days later, on October 16, 1957, Zwicky launched his experiment on the Aerobee, and successfully fired pellets visible from the Mount Palomar observatory. It is thought that one of these pellets may have escaped the gravitational pull of the Earth and become the first object launched into a solar orbit.  Zwicky also considered the possibility of rearranging the universe to our own liking. In a lecture in 1948 he spoke of changing planets, or relocating them within the solar system. In the 1960s he even considered how the whole solar system might be moved like a giant spaceship to travel to other stars. He considered this might be achieved by firing pellets into the Sun to produce asymmetrical fusion explosions, and by this means he thought that the star Alpha Centauri might be reached within 2500 years.

Humanitarian.

Zwicky was a generous humanitarian with a great concern for wider society. These two sides of his nature came together in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Zwicky worked hard to collect tons of books on astronomy and other topics, and shipped them to war-ravaged scientific libraries in Europe and Asia.  He also had a longstanding involvement with the charitable Pestalozzi Foundation of America, supporting orphanages. Zwicky received their gold medal in 1955, in recognition of his services.  Zwicky loved the mountains, and was an accomplished alpine climber.  He was critical of political posturing by all sides in the Middle East, and of the use of nuclear weapons in World War II. He considered that hope for the world lay with free people of good will who work together as needed, without institutions or permanent organizations.

Publications.

Zwicky produced hundreds of publications over a long career, covering a great breadth of topics. This brief selection, with comments, gives a taste of his work.

Fritz Zwicky (; ; February 14, 1898 – February 8, 1974) was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to infer the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as """".

Fritz Zwicky (* 14. Februar 1898 in Warna, Fürstentum Bulgarien; † 8. Februar 1974 in Pasadena, Kalifornien) war ein Schweizer Physiker und Astronom, der vorwiegend am California Institute of Technology (Caltech) wirkte.


Etymology.

The term "Levant", which appeared in English in 1497, originally meant the East in general or "Mediterranean lands east of Italy". It is borrowed from the French "levant" "rising", referring to the rising of the sun in the east, or the point where the sun rises. The phrase is ultimately from the Latin word "levare," meaning 'lift, raise'. Similar etymologies are found in Greek Ἀνατολή ("Anatolē", "cf." Anatolia), in Germanic "Morgenland" (literally, "morning land"), in Italian (as in "Riviera di Levante", the portion of the Liguria coast east of Genoa), in Hungarian "Kelet", in Spanish and Catalan "Levante" and "Llevant", ("the place of rising"), and in Hebrew (, "mizrah", "east"). Most notably, "Orient" and its Latin source "oriens" meaning "east", is literally "rising", deriving from Latin "orior" "rise".  The notion of the Levant has undergone a dynamic process of historical evolution in usage, meaning, and understanding. While the term "Levantine" originally referred to the European residents of the eastern Mediterranean region, it later came to refer to regional "native" and "minority" groups.  The term became current in English in the 16th century, along with the first English merchant adventurers in the region; English ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the 1570s, and the English merchant company signed its agreement ("capitulations") with the Ottoman Sultan in 1579. The English Levant Company was founded in 1581 to trade with the Ottoman Empire, and in 1670 the French was founded for the same purpose. At this time, the Far East was known as the "Upper Levant".  In early 19th-century travel writing, the term sometimes incorporated certain Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman empire, as well as independent Greece (and especially the Greek islands). In 19th-century archaeology, it referred to overlapping cultures in this region during and after prehistoric times, intending to reference the place instead of any one culture. The French mandate of Syria and Lebanon (1920–1946) was called the Levant states.

Geography and modern-day use of the term.

Today, "Levant" is the term typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the history of the region. Scholars have adopted the term Levant to identify the region due to it being a "wider, yet relevant, cultural corpus" that does not have the "political overtones" of Syria-Palestine. The term is also used for modern events, peoples, states or parts of states in the same region, namely Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey are sometimes considered Levant countries (compare with Near East, Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia). Several researchers include the island of Cyprus in Levantine studies, including the Council for British Research in the Levant, the UCLA Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department, "Journal of Levantine Studies" and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, the last of which has dated the connection between Cyprus and mainland Levant to the early Iron Age. Archaeologists seeking a neutral orientation that is neither biblical nor national have used terms such as Levantine archaeology and archaeology of the Southern Levant.  While the usage of the term "Levant" in academia has been restricted to the fields of archeology and literature, there is a recent attempt to reclaim the notion of the Levant as a category of analysis in political and social sciences. Two academic journals were recently launched: "Journal of Levantine Studies", published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and "The Levantine Review", published by Boston College.  The word "Levant" has been used in some translations of the term "ash-Shām" as used by the organization known as ISIL, ISIS, and other names, though there is disagreement as to whether this translation is accurate.

Politics and religion.

The largest religious group in the Levant are the Muslims and the largest cultural-linguistic group are Arabs, due to the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century and subsequent Arabization of the region. Other large ethnic groups in the Levant include Jews, Kurds, Turks, Turkmens, Assyrians and Armenians.  The majority of Muslim Levantines are Sunni with Alawi and Shia minorities. There are also Jews, Christians, Yazidi Kurds, Druze, and other smaller sects.  Until the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, Jews lived throughout the Levant alongside Muslims and Christians; since then, almost all have been expelled from their homes and sought refuge in Israel.  There are many Levantine Christian groups such as Greek, Oriental Orthodox (mainly Syriac Orthodox, Coptic, Georgian, and Maronite), Roman Catholic, Nestorian, and Protestant. Armenians mostly belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. There are Levantines or Franco-Levantines who are mostly Roman Catholic. There are also Circassians, Turks, Samaritans, and Nawars. There are Assyrian peoples belonging to the Assyrian Church of the East (autonomous) and the Chaldean Catholic Church (Catholic).  In addition, this region has a number of sites that are of religious significance, such as Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Language.

Most populations in the Levant speak Levantine Arabic (, ), usually classified as the varieties North Levantine Arabic in Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Turkey, and South Levantine Arabic in Palestine and Jordan. Each of these encompasses a spectrum of regional or urban/rural variations. In addition to the varieties normally grouped together as "Levantine", a number of other varieties and dialects of Arabic are spoken in the Levant area, such as Levantine Bedawi Arabic and Mesopotamian Arabic.  Among the languages of Israel, the official language is Hebrew; Arabic was until July 19, 2018, also an official language. The Arab minority, in 2018 about 21% of the population of Israel, speaks a dialect of Levantine Arabic essentially indistinguishable from the forms spoken in the Palestinian territories.  Of the languages of Cyprus, the majority language is Greek, followed by Turkish (in the north). Two minority languages are recognized: Armenian, and Cypriot Maronite Arabic, a hybrid of mostly medieval Arabic vernaculars with strong influence from contact with Greek, spoken by approximately 1000 people.  Some communities and populations speak Aramaic, Greek, Armenian, Circassian, French, or English.

See also.

Overlapping regional designations  Subregional designations  Others  "Other places in the east of a larger region"

The Levant () is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, it is equivalent to the historical region of Syria, which included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey south-east of the middle Euphrates. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica in eastern Libya.

Levante (altitalienisch "levante", mittelfranzösisch "levant", „Osten“, „Morgenland“, abgeleitet vom Sonnenaufgang, von lat. "levare", „emporheben, aufgehen“) ist die historische geografische Bezeichnung für die Länder am östlichen Mittelmeer, die östlich von Italien liegen.