title: Pediatrics

text: Even though some pediatric works existed during this time, they were scarce and rarely published due to a lack of knowledge in pediatric medicine. "Sushruta Samhita" an ayurvedic text, composed during the sixth century BC contains the text about pediatrics. Another ayurvedic text from this period is "Kashyapa Samhita". A second century AD manuscript by the Greek physician and gynecologist Soranus of Ephesus dealt with neonatal pediatrics. Byzantine physicians Oribasius, Aëtius of Amida, Alexander Trallianus, and Paulus Aegineta contributed to the field. The Byzantines also built "brephotrophia" (crêches). Islamic Golden Age writers served as a bridge for Greco-Roman and Byzantine medicine and added ideas of their own, especially Haly Abbas, Yahya Serapion, Abulcasis, Avicenna, and Averroes. The Persian philosopher and physician al-Razi (865–925), sometimes called the father of pediatrics, published a monograph on pediatrics titled "Diseases in Children". Also among the first books about pediatrics was "Libellus [Opusculum] de aegritudinibus et remediis infantium" 1472 ("Little Book on Children Diseases and Treatment"), by the Italian pediatrician Paolo Bagellardo. In sequence came Bartholomäus Metlinger's "Ein Regiment der Jungerkinder" 1473, Cornelius Roelans (1450–1525) no title Buchlein, or Latin compendium, 1483, and Heinrich von Louffenburg (1391–1460) "Versehung des Leibs" written in 1429 (published 1491), together form the "Pediatric Incunabula", four great medical treatises on children's physiology and pathology.


title: Pediatrics

text: While more information about childhood diseases became available, there was little evidence that children received the same kind of medical care that adults did. It was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that medical experts started offering specialized care for children. The Swedish physician Nils Rosén von Rosenstein (1706–1773) is considered to be the founder of modern pediatrics as a medical specialty, while his work "The diseases of children, and their remedies" (1764) is considered to be "the first modern textbook on the subject". However, it was not until the nineteenth century that medical professionals acknowledged pediatrics as a separate field of medicine. The first pediatric-specific publications appeared between the 1790s and the 1920s. The term pediatrics was first introduced in English in 1859 by Dr. Abraham Jacobi. In 1860, he became "the first dedicated professor of pediatrics in the world." Pediatrics as a specialized field of medicine continued to develop in the mid-19th century; German physician Abraham Jacobi (1830–1919) is known as the "father of American pediatrics" because of his many contributions to the field. He received his medical training in Germany and later practiced in New York City.


title: Pediatrics

text: The first generally accepted pediatric hospital is the "Hôpital des Enfants Malades" (), which opened in Paris in June 1802 on the site of a previous orphanage. From its beginning, this famous hospital accepted patients up to the age of fifteen years, and it continues to this day as the pediatric division of the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, created in 1920 by merging with the physically contiguous "Necker Hospital", founded in 1778.


title: Pediatrics

text: In other European countries, the Charité (a hospital founded in 1710) in Berlin established a separate Pediatric Pavilion in 1830, followed by similar institutions at Saint Petersburg in 1834, and at Vienna and Breslau (now Wrocław), both in 1837. In 1852 Britain's first pediatric hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street was founded by Charles West. The first Children's hospital in Scotland opened in 1860 in Edinburgh. In the US, the first similar institutions were the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which opened in 1855, and then Boston Children's Hospital (1869). Subspecialties in pediatrics were created at the Harriet Lane Home at Johns Hopkins by Edwards A. Park.


title: Pediatrics

text: The body size differences are paralleled by maturation changes. The smaller body of an infant or neonate is substantially different physiologically from that of an adult. Congenital defects, genetic variance, and developmental issues are of greater concern to pediatricians than they often are to adult physicians. A common adage is that children are not simply "little adults". The clinician must take into account the immature physiology of the infant or child when considering symptoms, prescribing medications, and diagnosing illnesses.


title: Pediatrics

text: Pediatric physiology directly impacts the pharmacokinetic properties of drugs that enter the body. The absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination of medications differ between developing children and grown adults. Despite completed studies and reviews, continual research is needed to better understand how these factors should affect the decisions of healthcare providers when prescribing and administering medications to the pediatric population.


title: Pediatrics

text: Many drug absorption differences between pediatric and adult populations revolve around the stomach. Neonates and young infants have increased stomach pH due to decreased acid secretion, thereby creating a more basic environment for drugs that are taken by mouth. Acid is essential to degrading certain oral drugs before systemic absorption. Therefore, the absorption of these drugs in children is greater than in adults due to decreased breakdown and increased preservation in a less acidic gastric space.


title: Pediatrics

text: Drug absorption also depends on specific enzymes that come in contact with the oral drug as it travels through the body. Supply of these enzymes increase as children continue to develop their gastrointestinal tract. Pediatric patients have underdeveloped proteins, which leads to decreased metabolism and increased serum concentrations of specific drugs. However, prodrugs experience the opposite effect because enzymes are necessary for allowing their active form to enter systemic circulation.


title: Pediatrics

text: Percentage of total body water and extracellular fluid volume both decrease as children grow and develop with time. Pediatric patients thus have a larger volume of distribution than adults, which directly affects the dosing of hydrophilic drugs such as beta-lactam antibiotics like ampicillin. Thus, these drugs are administered at greater weight-based doses or with adjusted dosing intervals in children to account for this key difference in body composition.


title: Pediatrics

text: Infants and neonates also have fewer plasma proteins. Thus, highly protein-bound drugs have fewer opportunities for protein binding, leading to increased distribution.


title: Pediatrics

text: Drug metabolism primarily occurs via enzymes in the liver and can vary according to which specific enzymes are affected in a specific stage of development. Phase I and Phase II enzymes have different rates of maturation and development, depending on their specific mechanism of action (i.e. oxidation, hydrolysis, acetylation, methylation, etc.). Enzyme capacity, clearance, and half-life are all factors that contribute to metabolism differences between children and adults. Drug metabolism can even differ within the pediatric population, separating neonates and infants from young children.


title: Pediatrics

text: Drug elimination is primarily facilitated via the liver and kidneys. In infants and young children, the larger relative size of their kidneys leads to increased renal clearance of medications that are eliminated through urine. In preterm neonates and infants, their kidneys are slower to mature and thus are unable to clear as much drug as fully developed kidneys. This can cause unwanted drug build-up, which is why it is important to consider lower doses and greater dosing intervals for this population. Diseases that negatively affect kidney function can also have the same effect and thus warrant similar considerations.


title: Pediatrics

text: A major difference between the practice of pediatric and adult medicine is that children, in most jurisdictions and with certain exceptions, cannot make decisions for themselves. The issues of guardianship, privacy, legal responsibility, and informed consent must always be considered in every pediatric procedure. Pediatricians often have to treat the parents and sometimes, the family, rather than just the child. Adolescents are in their own legal class, having rights to their own health care decisions in certain circumstances. The concept of legal consent combined with the non-legal consent (assent) of the child when considering treatment options, especially in the face of conditions with poor prognosis or complicated and painful procedures/surgeries, means the pediatrician must take into account the desires of many people, in addition to those of the patient.


title: Pediatrics

text: The term autonomy is traceable to ethical theory and law, where it states that autonomous individuals can make decisions based on their own logic. Hippocrates was the first to use the term in a medical setting. He created a code of ethics for doctors called the "Hippocratic Oath" that highlighted the importance of putting patients' interests first, making autonomy for patients a top priority in health care.


title: Pediatrics

text: In ancient times, society did not view pediatric medicine as essential or scientific. Experts considered professional medicine unsuitable for treating children. Children also had no rights. Fathers regarded their children as property, so their children's health decisions were entrusted to them. As a result, mothers, midwives, "wise women," and general practitioners treated the children instead of doctors. Since mothers could not rely on professional medicine to take care of their children, they developed their own methods, such as using alkaline soda ash to remove the vernix at birth and treating teething pain with opium or wine. The absence of proper pediatric care, rights, and laws in health care to prioritize children's health led to many of their deaths. Ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes even killed healthy female babies and infants with deformities since they had no adequate medical treatment and no laws prohibiting infanticide.


title: Pediatrics

text: In the twentieth century, medical experts began to put more emphasis on children's rights. In 1989, in the United Nations Rights of the Child Convention, medical experts developed the Best Interest Standard of Child to prioritize children's rights and best interests. This event marked the onset of pediatric autonomy. In 1995, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) finally acknowledged the Best Interest Standard of a Child as an ethical principle for pediatric decision-making, and it is still being used today.


title: Pediatrics

text: The majority of the time, parents have the authority to decide what happens to their child. Philosopher John Locke argued that it is the responsibility of parents to raise their children and that God gave them this authority. In modern society, Jeffrey Blustein, modern philosopher and author of the book "Parents and Children: The Ethics of Family", argues that parental authority is granted because the child requires parents to satisfy their needs. He believes that parental autonomy is more about parents providing good care for their children and treating them with respect than parents having rights. The researcher Kyriakos Martakis, MD, MSc, explains that research shows parental influence negatively affects children's ability to form autonomy. However, involving children in the decision-making process allows children to develop their cognitive skills and create their own opinions and, thus, decisions about their health. Parental authority affects the degree of autonomy the child patient has. As a result, in Argentina, the new National Civil and Commercial Code has enacted various changes to the healthcare system to encourage children and adolescents to develop autonomy. It has become more crucial to let children take accountability for their own health decisions.


title: Pediatrics

text: In most cases, the pediatrician, parent, and child work as a team to make the best possible medical decision. The pediatrician has the right to intervene for the child's welfare and seek advice from an ethics committee. However, in recent studies, authors have denied that complete autonomy is present in pediatric healthcare. The same moral standards should apply to children as they do to adults. In support of this idea is the concept of paternalism, which negates autonomy when it is in the patient's interests. This concept aims to keep the child's best interests in mind regarding autonomy. Pediatricians can interact with patients and help them make decisions that will benefit them, thus enhancing their autonomy. However, radical theories that question a child's moral worth continue to be debated today. Authors often question whether the treatment and equality of a child and an adult should be the same. Author Tamar Schapiro notes that children need nurturing and cannot exercise the same level of authority as adults. Hence, continuing the discussion on whether children are capable of making important health decisions until this day.


title: Pediatrics

text: According to the Subcommittee of Clinical Ethics of the Argentinean Pediatric Society (SAP), children can understand moral feelings at all ages and can make reasonable decisions based on those feelings. Therefore, children and teens are deemed capable of making their own health decisions when they reach the age of 13. Recently, studies made on the decision-making of children have challenged that age to be 12.


title: Pediatrics

text: Technology has made several modern advancements that contribute to the future development of child autonomy, for example, unsolicited findings (U.F.s) of pediatric exome sequencing. They are findings based on pediatric exome sequencing that explain in greater detail the intellectual disability of a child and predict to what extent it will affect the child in the future. Genetic and intellectual disorders in children make them incapable of making moral decisions, so people look down upon this kind of testing because the child's future autonomy is at risk. It is still in question whether parents should request these types of testing for their children. Medical experts argue that it could endanger the autonomous rights the child will possess in the future. However, the parents contend that genetic testing would benefit the welfare of their children since it would allow them to make better health care decisions. Exome sequencing for children and the decision to grant parents the right to request them is a medically ethical issue that many still debate today.


title: Pediatrics

text: Aspiring medical students will need 4 years of undergraduate courses at a college or university, which will get them a BS, BA or other bachelor's degree. After completing college, future pediatricians will need to attend 4 years of medical school (MD/DO/MBBS) and later do 3 more years of residency training, the first year of which is called "internship." After completing the 3 years of residency, physicians are eligible to become certified in pediatrics by passing a rigorous test that deals with medical conditions related to young children.


title: Pediatrics

text: In high school, future pediatricians are required to take basic science classes such as biology, chemistry, physics, algebra, geometry, and calculus. It is also advisable to learn a foreign language (preferably Spanish in the United States) and be involved in high school organizations and extracurricular activities. After high school, college students simply need to fulfill the basic science course requirements that most medical schools recommend and will need to prepare to take the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) in their junior or early senior year in college. Once attending medical school, student courses will focus on basic medical sciences like human anatomy, physiology, chemistry, etc., for the first three years, the second year of which is when medical students start to get hands-on experience with actual patients.


title: Pediatrics

text: The training of pediatricians varies considerably across the world. Depending on jurisdiction and university, a medical degree course may be either undergraduate-entry or graduate-entry. The former commonly takes five or six years and has been usual in the Commonwealth. Entrants to graduate-entry courses (as in the US), usually lasting four or five years, have previously completed a three- or four-year university degree, commonly but by no means always in sciences. Medical graduates hold a degree specific to the country and university in and from which they graduated. This degree qualifies that medical practitioner to become licensed or registered under the laws of that particular country, and sometimes of several countries, subject to requirements for "internship" or "conditional registration".


title: Pediatrics

text: Pediatricians must undertake further training in their chosen field. This may take from four to eleven or more years depending on jurisdiction and the degree of specialization.


title: Pediatrics

text: In the United States, a medical school graduate wishing to specialize in pediatrics must undergo a three-year residency composed of outpatient, inpatient, and critical care rotations. Subspecialties within pediatrics require further training in the form of 3-year fellowships. Subspecialties include critical care, gastroenterology, neurology, infectious disease, hematology/oncology, rheumatology, pulmonology, child abuse, emergency medicine, endocrinology, neonatology, and others.


title: Pediatrics

text: In most jurisdictions, entry-level degrees are common to all branches of the medical profession, but in some jurisdictions, specialization in pediatrics may begin before completion of this degree. In some jurisdictions, pediatric training is begun immediately following the completion of entry-level training. In other jurisdictions, junior medical doctors must undertake generalist (unstreamed) training for a number of years before commencing pediatric (or any other) specialization. Specialist training is often largely under the control of "'pediatric organizations" (see below) rather than universities and depends on the jurisdiction.


title: The Planets

text: The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character.


title: The Planets

text: The premiere of "The Planets" was at the Queen's Hall, London, on 29 September 1918, conducted by Holst's friend Adrian Boult before an invited audience of about 250 people. Three concerts at which movements from the suite were played were given in 1919 and early 1920. The first complete performance at a public concert was given at the Queen's Hall on 15 November 1920 by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates.


title: The Planets

text: The innovative nature of Holst's music caused some initial hostility among a minority of critics, but the suite quickly became and has remained popular, influential and widely performed. The composer conducted two recordings of the work, and it has been recorded at least 80 times subsequently by conductors, choirs and orchestras from the UK and internationally.


title: The Planets

text: "The Planets" was composed over nearly three years, between 1914 and 1917. The work had its origins in March and April 1913, when Gustav Holst and his friend and benefactor Balfour Gardiner holidayed in Spain with the composer Arnold Bax and his brother, the author Clifford Bax. A discussion about astrology piqued Holst's interest in the subject. Clifford Bax later commented that Holst became "a remarkably skilled interpreter of horoscopes". Shortly after the holiday Holst wrote to a friend: "I only study things that suggest music to me. That's why I worried at Sanskrit. Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely". He told Clifford Bax in 1926 that "The Planets":


title: The Planets

text: Imogen Holst, the composer's daughter, wrote that her father had difficulty with large-scale orchestral structures such as symphonies, and the idea of a suite with a separate character for each movement was an inspiration to him. Holst's biographer Michael Short and the musicologist Richard Greene both think it likely that another inspiration for the composer to write a suite for large orchestra was the example of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra. That suite had been performed in London in 1912 and again in 1914; Holst was at one of the performances, and he is known to have owned a copy of the score.


title: The Planets

text: Holst described "The Planets" as "a series of mood pictures", acting as "foils to one another", with "very little contrast in any one of them". Short writes that some of the characteristics the composer attributed to the planets may have been suggested by Alan Leo's booklet "What is a Horoscope?", which he was reading at the time. Holst took the title of two movements – "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" and "Neptune, the Mystic" – from Leo's books. But although astrology was Holst's starting point, he arranged the planets to suit his own plan:


title: The Planets

text: In an early sketch for the suite Holst listed Mercury as "no. 1", which Greene suggests raises the possibility that the composer's first idea was simply to depict the planets in the obvious order, from nearest the sun to the farthest. "However, opening with the more disturbing character of Mars allows a more dramatic and compelling working out of the musical material".


title: The Planets

text: Holst had a heavy workload as head of music at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, and director of music at Morley College, and had limited time for composing. Imogen Holst wrote, "Weekends and holidays were the only times when he could really get on with his own work, which is why it took him over two years to finish "The Planets"". She added that Holst's chronic neuritis in his right arm was troubling him considerably and he would have found it impossible to complete the 198 pages of the large full score without the help of two colleagues at St Paul's, Vally Lasker and Nora Day, whom he called his "scribes".


title: The Planets

text: The first movement to be written was Mars in mid-1914, followed by Venus and Jupiter in the latter part of the year, Saturn and Uranus in mid-1915, Neptune later in 1915 and Mercury in early 1916. Holst completed the orchestration during 1917.


title: The Planets

text: The premiere of "The Planets", conducted at Holst's request by Adrian Boult, was held at short notice on 29 September 1918, during the last weeks of the First World War, in the Queen's Hall with the financial support of Gardiner. It was hastily rehearsed; the musicians of the Queen's Hall Orchestra first saw the complicated music only two hours before the performance, and the choir for Neptune was recruited from Holst's students at Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School. It was a comparatively intimate affair, attended by around 250 invited associates, but Holst regarded it as the public premiere, inscribing Boult's copy of the score, "This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused the Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst."


title: The Planets

text: At a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Queen's Hall on 27 February 1919 conducted by Boult, five of the seven movements were played in the order Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter. It was Boult's decision not to play all seven movements at this concert. Although Holst would have liked the suite to be played complete, Boult's view was that when the public were being presented with a completely new language of this kind, "half an hour of it was as much as they could take in". Imogen Holst recalled that her father "hated incomplete performances of "The Planets", though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen's Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a 'happy ending', for, as he himself said, 'in the real world the end is not happy at all'".


title: The Planets

text: At a Queen's Hall concert on 22 November 1919, Holst conducted Venus, Mercury and Jupiter. There was another incomplete public performance, in Birmingham, on 10 October 1920, with five movements (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter), conducted by the composer.


title: The Planets

text: The first complete performance of the suite at a public concert was on 15 November 1920; the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Albert Coates. The first complete performance conducted by the composer was on 13 October 1923, with the Queen's Hall Orchestra.


title: The Planets

text: The work is scored for a large orchestra. Holst's fellow composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote in 1920, "Holst uses a very large orchestra in the "Planets" not to make his score look impressive, but because he needs the extra tone colour and knows how to use it". The score calls for the following instrumentation. The movements vary in the combinations of instruments used.


title: The Planets

text: In Neptune, two three-part women's choruses (each comprising two soprano sections and one alto section) located in an adjoining room which is to be screened from the audience are added.


title: The Planets

text: Mars is marked allegro and is in a relentless ostinato for most of its duration. It opens quietly, the first two bars played by percussion, harp and "col legno" strings. The music builds to a quadruple-forte, dissonant climax. Although Mars is often thought to portray the horrors of mechanised warfare, it was completed before the First World War started. The composer Colin Matthews writes that for Holst, Mars would have been "an experiment in rhythm and clashing keys", and its violence in performance "may have surprised him as much as it galvanised its first audiences". Short comments, "harmonic dissonances abound, often resulting from clashes between moving chords and static pedal-points", which he compares to a similar effect at the end of Stravinsky’s "The Firebird", and adds that although battle music had been written before, notably by Richard Strauss in "Ein Heldenleben", "it had never expressed such violence and sheer terror".


title: The Planets

text: The second movement begins adagio in . According to Imogen Holst, Venus "has to try and bring the right answer to Mars". The movement opens with a solo horn theme answered quietly by the flutes and oboes. A second theme is given to solo violin. The music proceeds tranquilly with oscillating chords from flutes and harps, with decoration from the celesta. Between the opening adagio and the central largo there is a flowing andante section in with a violin melody (solo then tutti) accompanied by gentle syncopation in the woodwind. The oboe solo in the central largo is one of the last romantic melodies Holst allowed himself before turning to a more austere manner in later works. Leo called the planet "the most fortunate star under which to be born"; Short calls Holst's Venus "one of the most sublime evocations of peace in music".


title: The Planets

text: Mercury is in and is marked vivace throughout. The composer R. O. Morris thought it the nearest of the movements to "the domain of programme music pure and simple ... it is essentially pictorial in idea. Mercury is a mere activity whose character is not defined". This movement, the last of the seven to be written, contains Holst's first experiments with bitonality. He juxtaposes melodic fragments in B major and E major, in a fast-moving scherzo. Solo violin, high-pitched harp, flute and glockenspiel are prominently featured. It is the shortest of the seven movements, typically taking between and 4 minutes in performance.


title: The Planets

text: In this movement Holst portrays Jupiter's supposedly characteristic "abundance of life and vitality" with music that is buoyant and exuberant. Nobility and generosity are allegedly characteristics of those born under Jupiter, and in the slower middle section Holst provides a broad tune embodying those traits. In the view of Imogen Holst, it has been compromised by its later use as the melody for a solemn patriotic hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country"; the music writer Lewis Foreman comments that the composer did not think of it in those terms, as shown by his own recordings of the movement. The opening section of the movement is marked allegro giocoso, in time. The second theme, at the same tempo, is in time, as is the broad melody of the middle section, marked andante maestoso, which Holst marks to be taken at half the speed of the opening section. The opening section returns and after a reappearance of the maestoso tune – its expected final cadence unresolved, as in its first appearance – the movement ends with a triple forte quaver chord for the full orchestra.


title: The Planets

text: Saturn was Holst's favourite movement of the suite. Matthews describes it as "a slow processional which rises to a frightening climax before fading away as if into the outer reaches of space". The movement opens as a quiet adagio in and the basic pace remains slow throughout, with short bursts of animato in the first part and a switch to andante in in the later section. Apart from the timpani no percussion is used in this movement except for tubular bells at climactic points. At the beginning, flutes, bassoons and harps play a theme suggesting a ticking clock. A solemn melody is introduced by the trombones (Holst's own main instrument) and taken up by the full orchestra. A development of the ticking theme leads to a clangorous triple forte climax, after which the music dies away and ends quietly.


title: The Planets

text: Matthews describes the character of the movement as that of "a clumsy dance, which gradually gets more and more out of hand (not unlike Dukas's "Sorcerer's Apprentice") until, with what seems like a magic wand, all is abruptly swept away into the far distance". The movement, which begins with a what Short calls "a tremendous four-note brass motif", is marked allegro in . The music proceeds in "a series of merry pranks" with occasional interjections in , building to a quadruple forte climax with a prominent organ glissando, after which the music suddenly drops to a pianissimo lento before alternating quick and slow sections bring the movement to its pianissimo conclusion.


title: The Planets

text: The music of the last movement is quiet throughout, in a swaying, irregular metre, opening with flutes joined by piccolo and oboes, with harps and celesta prominent later. Holst makes much use of dissonance in this movement. Before the premiere his colleague Geoffrey Toye said that a bar where the brass play chords of E minor and G minor together was "going to sound frightful". Holst agreed, and said it had made him shudder when he wrote it down but, "What are you to do when they come like that?" As the movement develops, the orchestra is joined by an offstage female chorus singing a soft wordless line: this was unusual in orchestral works at the time, although Debussy had used the same device in his "Nocturnes" (1900). The orchestra falls silent and the unaccompanied voices bring the work to a pianissimo conclusion in an uncertain tonality, as a door between the singers and the auditorium is gradually closed.


title: The Planets

text: When the music was first introduced to the general public in February 1919, critical opinion was divided. Greene prints a summary of reviews of the first four public performances of the suite (or movements from it) in February and November 1919 and October and November 1920. Positive reviews are recorded in 28 of the 37 papers, magazines and journals cited. A small minority of reviewers were particularly hostile, among them those of "The Globe" ("Noisy and pretentious)"; "The Sunday Times" ("Pompous, noisy and unalluring"), and "The Times" ("a great disappointment … elaborately contrived and painful to hear"). The critic in "The Saturday Review" wrote that Holst evidently regarded the planets "as objectionable nuisances that he would oust from our orbit if he could".


title: The Planets

text: "The Times" rapidly changed its mind; in July 1919 it called Holst the most intriguing of his compeers and commented, ""The Planets" still leaves us gasping"; after hearing Holst conduct three of the movements in November 1919 the paper's critic declared the piece "the first music by an Englishman we have heard for some time which is neither conventional nor negligible", and by the time of Holst's death in 1934 the paper's assessment of the piece was "Holst's greatest work":


title: The Planets

text: "The Sunday Times", too, quickly changed its line. In 1920 its new music critic, Ernest Newman, said that Holst could do "easily, without a fuss" what some other composers could only do "with an effort and a smirk", and that in "The Planets" he showed "one of the subtlest and most original minds of our time. It begins working at a musical problem where most other minds would leave off". Newman compared Holst's harmonic innovations to those of Stravinsky, to the latter's disadvantage, and expressed none of the reservations that qualified his admiration of Schoenberg's "Five Pieces for Orchestra".


title: The Planets

text: There have been at least 80 commercial recordings of "The Planets". Holst conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first two recorded performances: the first was an acoustic recording made in sessions between September 1922 and November 1923; the second was made in 1926 using the new electrical recording process. Holst's tempi are in general faster than those of most of his successors on record. This may have been due to the need to fit the music on 78 rpm discs, although later 78 versions are slower. Holst's later recording is quicker than the acoustic version, possibly because the electrical process required wider grooves, reducing the available playing time. Other, slower, recordings from the 78 era include those conducted by Leopold Stokowski (1943) and Sir Adrian Boult (1945). Recordings from the LP age are also typically longer than the composer's, but from the digital era a 2010 recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski is quicker than Holst's acoustic version and comes close to matching his 1926 speeds, and in two movements (Venus and Uranus) surpasses them. There were no commercial recordings of the work in the 1930s; timings are given below of a recording representing each subsequent decade up to the 2010s:


title: The Planets

text: There have been many adaptations of the suite, and several attempts to add an eighth planet – Pluto – in the time between its discovery in 1930 and its downgrading to "dwarf planet" in 2006. The most prominent of these was Matthews's 2000 composition, "Pluto, the Renewer", commissioned by the Hallé Orchestra. Dedicated posthumously to Imogen Holst, it was first performed in Manchester on 11 May 2000, with Kent Nagano conducting. Matthews changed the ending of Neptune slightly so that the movement would segue into Pluto. Matthews's Pluto has been recorded, coupled with Holst's suite, on at least four occasions. Others who have produced versions of Pluto for "The Planets" include Leonard Bernstein and Jun Nagao.


title: The Planets

text: The suite has been adapted for numerous instruments and instrumental combinations, including organ, synthesiser, brass band, and jazz orchestra. Holst used the melody of the central section of "Jupiter" for a setting ("Thaxted") of the hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country" in 1921.


title: The Planets

text: "The Planets" has been taken as an influence by various rock bands, and for film scores such as those for the "Star Wars" series. There have been numerous references to the suite in popular culture, from films to television and computer games.


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides (; , ; , "southern isles") are an archipelago off the west coast of the Scottish mainland. The islands fall into two main groups, based on their proximity to the mainland: the Inner and Outer Hebrides.


title: Hebrides

text: These islands have a long history of occupation (dating back to the Mesolithic period), and the culture of the inhabitants has been successively influenced by the cultures of Celtic-speaking, Norse-speaking, and English-speaking peoples. This diversity is reflected in the various names given to the islands, which are derived from the different languages that have been spoken there at various points in their history.


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides are where much of Scottish Gaelic literature and Gaelic music has historically originated. Today, the economy of the islands is dependent on crofting, fishing, tourism, the oil industry, and renewable energy. The Hebrides have less biodiversity than mainland Scotland, but a significant number of seals and seabirds.


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides have a diverse geology, ranging in age from Precambrian strata that are amongst the oldest rocks in Europe, to Paleogene igneous intrusions. Raised shore platforms in the Hebrides have been identified as strandflats, possibly formed during the Pliocene period and later modified by the Quaternary glaciations.


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides can be divided into two main groups, separated from one another by the Minch to the north and the Sea of the Hebrides to the south. The Inner Hebrides lie closer to mainland Scotland and include Islay, Jura, Skye, Mull, Raasay, Staffa and the Small Isles. There are 36 inhabited islands in this group. The Outer Hebrides form a chain of more than 100 islands and small skerries located about west of mainland Scotland. Among them, 15 are inhabited. The main inhabited islands include Lewis and Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra.


title: Hebrides

text: A complication is that there are various descriptions of the scope of the Hebrides. The "Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland" describes the Inner Hebrides as lying "east of the Minch". This definition would encompass all offshore islands, including those that lie in the sea lochs, such as and , which might not ordinarily be described as "Hebridean". However, no formal definition exists.


title: Hebrides

text: In the past, the Outer Hebrides were often referred to as the "Long Isle" (). Today, they are also sometimes known as the "Western Isles", although this phrase can also be used to refer to the Hebrides in general.


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides have a cool, temperate climate that is remarkably mild and steady for such a northerly latitude, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. In the Outer Hebrides, the average temperature is 6 °C (44 °F) in January and 14 °C (57 °F) in the summer. The average annual rainfall in Lewis is , and there are between 1,100 and 1,200 hours of sunshine "per annum" (13%). The summer days are relatively long, and May through August is the driest period.


title: Hebrides

text: The earliest surviving written references to the islands were made circa 77 AD by Pliny the Elder in his "Natural History": He states that there are 30 ', and makes a separate reference to ', which Watson (1926) concluded refers unequivocally to the Outer Hebrides. About 80 years after Pliny the Elder, in 140–150 AD, Ptolemy (drawing on accounts of the naval expeditions of ) writes that there are five ' (possibly meaning the Inner Hebrides) and '. Later texts in classical Latin, by writers such as , use the forms ' and '.


title: Hebrides

text: The name ' (used by Ptolemy) may be pre-Celtic. Ptolemy calls Islay “”, and the use of the letter "p" suggests a Brythonic or Pictish tribal name, , because the root is not Gaelic. Woolf (2012) has suggested that ' may be "an Irish attempt to reproduce the word ' phonetically, rather than by translating it", and that the tribe's name may come from the root ', meaning "horse". Watson (1926) also notes a possible relationship between ', and the ancient Irish Ulaid tribal name ', and also the personal name of a king (recorded in the "Silva Gadelica").


title: Hebrides

text: The names of other individual islands reflect their complex linguistic history. The majority are Norse or Gaelic, but the roots of several other names for Hebrides islands may have a pre-Celtic origin. Adomnán, a 7th-century abbot of Iona, records Colonsay as "Colosus" and Tiree as "Ethica", and both of these may be pre-Celtic names. The etymology of Skye is complex and may also include a pre-Celtic root. Lewis is "" in Old Norse. Various suggestions have been made as to possible meanings of the name in Norse (for example, "song house"), but the name is not of Gaelic origin, and the Norse provenance is questionable.


title: Hebrides

text: The earliest comprehensive written list of Hebridean island names was compiled by Donald Monro in 1549. This list also provides the earliest written reference to the names of some of the islands.


title: Hebrides

text: The derivations of all the inhabited islands of the Hebrides and some of the larger uninhabited ones are listed below.


title: Hebrides

text: Lewis and Harris is the largest island in Scotland and the third largest of the British Isles, after Great Britain and Ireland. It incorporates Lewis in the north and Harris in the south, both of which are frequently referred to as individual islands, although they are joined by a land border. The island does not have a single common name in either English or Gaelic and is referred to as "Lewis and Harris", "Lewis with Harris", "Harris with Lewis" etc. For this reason it is treated as two separate islands below. The derivation of Lewis may be pre-Celtic (see above) and the origin of Harris is no less problematic. In the Ravenna Cosmography, "Erimon" may refer to Harris (or possibly the Outer Hebrides as a whole). This word may derive from the ( "desert". The origin of Uist () is similarly unclear.


title: Hebrides

text: There are various examples of earlier names for Inner Hebridean islands that were Gaelic, but these names have since been completely replaced. For example, Adomnán records "Sainea", "Elena", "Ommon" and "Oideacha" in the Inner Hebrides. These names presumably passed out of usage in the Norse era, and the locations of the islands they refer to are not clear. As an example of the complexity: Rona may originally have had a Celtic name, then later a similar-sounding Norse name, and then still later a name that was essentially Gaelic again, but with a Norse "øy" or "ey" ending. (See Rona, below.)


title: Hebrides

text: The names of uninhabited islands follow the same general patterns as the inhabited islands. (See the list, below, of the ten largest islands in the Hebrides and their outliers.)


title: Hebrides

text: The etymology of the name “St Kilda”, a small archipelago west of the Outer Hebrides, and the name of its main island, “Hirta,” is very complex. No saint is known by the name of Kilda, so various other theories have been proposed for the word's origin, which dates from the late 16th century. Haswell-Smith (2004) notes that the full name "St Kilda" first appears on a Dutch map dated 1666, and that it may derive from the Norse phrase ' ("sweet wellwater") or from a mistaken Dutch assumption that the spring ' was dedicated to a saint. (' is a tautological placename, consisting of the Gaelic and Norse words for "well", i.e., "well well"). Similarly unclear is the origin of the Gaelic for "Hirta", ', ', or ' a name for the island that long pre-dates the name "St Kilda". Watson (1926) suggests that it may derive from the Old Irish word ' ("death"), possibly a reference to the often lethally dangerous surrounding sea. Maclean (1977) notes that an Icelandic saga about an early 13th-century voyage to Ireland refers to “the islands of '”, which means "stags" in Norse, and suggests that the outline of the island of Hirta resembles the shape of a stag, speculating that therefore the name “Hirta” may be a reference to the island's shape.


title: Hebrides

text: The etymology of the names of small islands may be no less complex and elusive. In relation to , Robert Louis Stevenson believed that "black and dismal" was one translation of the name, noting that "as usual, in Gaelic, it is not the only one."


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides were settled during the Mesolithic era around 6500 BC or earlier, after the climatic conditions improved enough to sustain human settlement. Occupation at a site on is dated to 8590 ±95 uncorrected radiocarbon years BP, which is amongst the oldest evidence of occupation in Scotland. There are many examples of structures from the Neolithic period, the finest example being the standing stones at Callanish, dating to the 3rd millennium BC. Cladh Hallan, a Bronze Age settlement on South Uist is the only site in the UK where prehistoric mummies have been found.


title: Hebrides

text: In 55 BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that there was an island called "Hyperborea" (which means "beyond the North Wind"), where a round temple stood from which the moon appeared only a little distance above the earth every 19 years. This may have been a reference to the stone circle at Callanish.


title: Hebrides

text: A traveller called Demetrius of Tarsus related to Plutarch the tale of an expedition to the west coast of Scotland in or shortly before 83 AD. He stated it was a gloomy journey amongst uninhabited islands, but he had visited one which was the retreat of holy men. He mentioned neither the druids nor the name of the island.


title: Hebrides

text: The first written records of native life begin in the 6th century AD, when the founding of the kingdom of Dál Riata took place. This encompassed roughly what is now Argyll and Bute and Lochaber in Scotland and County Antrim in Ireland. The figure of Columba looms large in any history of Dál Riata, and his founding of a monastery on Iona ensured that the kingdom would be of great importance in the spread of Christianity in northern Britain. However, Iona was far from unique. Lismore in the territory of the Cenél Loairn, was sufficiently important for the death of its abbots to be recorded with some frequency and many smaller sites, such as on Eigg, Hinba, and Tiree, are known from the annals.


title: Hebrides

text: North of Dál Riata, the Inner and Outer Hebrides were nominally under Pictish control, although the historical record is sparse. Hunter (2000) states that in relation to King Bridei I of the Picts in the sixth century: "As for Shetland, Orkney, Skye and the Western Isles, their inhabitants, most of whom appear to have been Pictish in culture and speech at this time, are likely to have regarded Bridei as a fairly distant presence.”


title: Hebrides

text: Viking raids began on Scottish shores towards the end of the 8th century, and the Hebrides came under Norse control and settlement during the ensuing decades, especially following the success of Harald Fairhair at the Battle of in 872. In the Western Isles Ketill Flatnose may have been the dominant figure of the mid 9th century, by which time he had amassed a substantial island realm and made a variety of alliances with other Norse leaders. These princelings nominally owed allegiance to the Norwegian crown, although in practice the latter's control was fairly limited. Norse control of the Hebrides was formalised in 1098 when Edgar of Scotland formally signed the islands over to Magnus III of Norway. The Scottish acceptance of Magnus III as King of the Isles came after the Norwegian king had conquered Orkney, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man in a swift campaign earlier the same year, directed against the local Norwegian leaders of the various island petty kingdoms. By capturing the islands Magnus imposed a more direct royal control, although at a price. His skald Bjorn Cripplehand recorded that in Lewis "fire played high in the heaven" as "flame spouted from the houses" and that in the Uists "the king dyed his sword red in blood".


title: Hebrides

text: The Hebrides were now part of the Kingdom of the Isles, whose rulers were themselves vassals of the Kings of Norway. This situation lasted until the partitioning of the Western Isles in 1156, at which time the Outer Hebrides remained under Norwegian control while the Inner Hebrides broke out under Somerled, the Norse-Gael kinsman of the Manx royal house.


title: Hebrides

text: Following the ill-fated 1263 expedition of Haakon IV of Norway, the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man were yielded to the Kingdom of Scotland as a result of the 1266 Treaty of Perth. Although their contribution to the islands can still be found in personal and place names, the archaeological record of the Norse period is very limited. The best known find is the Lewis chessmen, which date from the mid 12th century.


title: Hebrides

text: As the Norse era drew to a close, the Norse-speaking princes were gradually replaced by Gaelic-speaking clan chiefs including the MacLeods of Lewis and Harris, Clan Donald and MacNeil of Barra. This transition did little to relieve the islands of internecine strife although by the early 14th century the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, based on Islay, were in theory these chiefs' feudal superiors and managed to exert some control.


title: Hebrides

text: The Lords of the Isles ruled the Inner Hebrides as well as part of the Western Highlands as subjects of the King of Scots until John MacDonald, fourth Lord of the Isles, squandered the family's powerful position. A rebellion by his nephew, Alexander of Lochalsh provoked an exasperated James IV to forfeit the family's lands in 1493.


title: Hebrides

text: In 1598, King James VI authorised some "Gentleman Adventurers" from Fife to civilise the "most barbarous Isle of Lewis". Initially successful, the colonists were driven out by local forces commanded by Murdoch and Neil MacLeod, who based their forces on in . The colonists tried again in 1605 with the same result, but a third attempt in 1607 was more successful and in due course Stornoway became a Burgh of Barony. By this time, Lewis was held by the Mackenzies of Kintail (later the Earls of Seaforth), who pursued a more enlightened approach, investing in fishing in particular. The Seaforths' royalist inclinations led to Lewis becoming garrisoned during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by Cromwell's troops, who destroyed the old castle in Stornoway.


title: Hebrides

text: With the implementation of the Treaty of Union in 1707, the Hebrides became part of the new Kingdom of Great Britain, but the clans' loyalties to a distant monarch were not strong. A considerable number of islesmen "came out" in support of the Jacobite Earl of Mar in the 1715 and again in the 1745 rising including Macleod of Dunvegan and MacLea of Lismore. The aftermath of the decisive Battle of Culloden, which effectively ended Jacobite hopes of a Stuart restoration, was widely felt. The British government's strategy was to estrange the clan chiefs from their kinsmen and turn their descendants into English-speaking landlords whose main concern was the revenues their estates brought rather than the welfare of those who lived on them. This may have brought peace to the islands, but in the following century it came at a terrible price. In the wake of the rebellion, the clan system was broken up and islands of the Hebrides became a series of landed estates.


title: Hebrides

text: The early 19th century was a time of improvement and population growth. Roads and quays were built; the slate industry became a significant employer on Easdale and surrounding islands; and the construction of the Crinan and Caledonian canals and other engineering works such as Clachan Bridge improved transport and access. However, in the mid-19th century, the inhabitants of many parts of the Hebrides were devastated by the Clearances, which destroyed communities throughout the Highlands and Islands as the human populations were evicted and replaced with sheep farms. The position was exacerbated by the failure of the islands' kelp industry that thrived from the 18th century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and large scale emigration became endemic.


title: Hebrides

text: As , a Gaelic poet from South Uist, wrote for his countrymen who were obliged to leave the Hebrides in the late 18th century, emigration was the only alternative to "sinking into slavery" as the Gaels had been unfairly dispossessed by rapacious landlords. In the 1880s, the "Battle of the Braes" involved a demonstration against unfair land regulation and eviction, stimulating the calling of the Napier Commission. Disturbances continued until the passing of the 1886 Crofters' Act.


title: Hebrides

text: The residents of the Hebrides have spoken a variety of different languages during the long period of human occupation.


title: Hebrides

text: It is assumed that Pictish must once have predominated in the northern Inner Hebrides and Outer Hebrides. The Scottish Gaelic language arrived from Ireland due to the growing influence of the kingdom of Dál Riata from the 6th century AD onwards, and became the dominant language of the southern Hebrides at that time. For a few centuries, the military might of the ' meant that Old Norse was prevalent in the Hebrides. North of , the place names that existed prior to the 9th century have been all but obliterated. The Old Norse name for the Hebrides during the Viking occupation was ', which means "Southern Isles"; in contrast to the ", or "Northern Isles" of Orkney and Shetland.


title: Hebrides

text: South of , Gaelic place names are more common, and after the 13th century, Gaelic became the main language of the entire Hebridean archipelago. Due to Scots and English being favoured in government and the educational system, the Hebrides have been in a state of diglossia since at least the 17th century. The Highland Clearances of the 19th century accelerated the language shift away from Scottish Gaelic, as did increased migration and the continuing lower status of Gaelic speakers. Nevertheless, as late as the end of the 19th century, there were significant populations of monolingual Gaelic speakers, and the Hebrides still contain the highest percentages of Gaelic speakers in Scotland. This is especially true of the Outer Hebrides, where a slim majority speak the language. The Scottish Gaelic college, , is based on Skye and Islay.


title: Hebrides

text: Ironically, given the status of the Western Isles as the last Gaelic-speaking stronghold in Scotland, the Gaelic language name for the islands – " – means "isles of the foreigners"; from the time when they were under Norse colonisation.


title: Hebrides

text: For those who remained, new economic opportunities emerged through the export of cattle, commercial fishing and tourism. Nonetheless, emigration and military service became the choice of many and the archipelago's populations continued to dwindle throughout the late 19th century and for much of the 20th century. Lengthy periods of continuous occupation notwithstanding, many of the smaller islands were abandoned.


title: Hebrides

text: There were, however, continuing gradual economic improvements, among the most visible of which was the replacement of the traditional thatched blackhouse with accommodation of a more modern design and with the assistance of Highlands and Islands Enterprise many of the islands' populations have begun to increase after decades of decline. The discovery of substantial deposits of North Sea oil in 1965 and the renewables sector have contributed to a degree of economic stability in recent decades. For example, the Arnish yard has had a chequered history but has been a significant employer in both the oil and renewables industries.


title: Hebrides

text: The widespread immigration of mainlanders, particularly non-Gaelic speakers, has been a subject of controversy.


title: Hebrides

text: Agriculture practised by crofters remained popular in the 21st century in the Hebrides; crofters own a small property but often share a large common grazing area. Various types of funding are available to crofters to help supplement their incomes, including the "Basic Payment Scheme, the suckler beef support scheme, the upland sheep support scheme and the Less Favoured Area support scheme". One reliable source discussed the Crofting Agricultural Grant Scheme (CAGS) in March 2020:the scheme "pays up to £25,000 per claim in any two-year period, covering 80% of investment costs for those who are under 41 and have had their croft less than five years. Older, more established crofters can get 60% grants".


title: Hebrides

text: Many contemporary Gaelic musicians have roots in the Hebrides, including Julie Fowlis (North Uist), Catherine-Ann MacPhee (Barra), Kathleen MacInnes (South Uist), and Ishbel MacAskill (Lewis). All of these singers have repertoire based on the Hebridean tradition, such as ' and ' (waulking songs). This tradition includes many songs composed by little-known or anonymous poets before 1800, such as "", "" and "". Several of Runrig's songs are inspired by the archipelago; Calum and were raised on North Uist and Donnie Munro on Skye.


title: Hebrides

text: The Gaelic poet spent much of his life in the Hebrides and often referred to them in his poetry, including in ' and '. The best known Gaelic poet of her era, (Mary MacPherson, 1821–98), embodied the spirit of the land agitation of the 1870s and 1880s. This, and her powerful evocation of the Hebrides—she was from Skye—has made her among the most enduring Gaelic poets. Allan MacDonald (1859–1905), who spent his adult life on Eriskay and South Uist, composed hymns and verse in honour of the Blessed Virgin, the Christ Child, and the Eucharist. In his secular poetry, MacDonald praised the beauty of Eriskay and its people. In his verse drama, ' ("The Old Wives' Parliament"), he lampooned the gossiping of his female parishioners and local marriage customs.


title: Hebrides

text: In the 20th century, Murdo Macfarlane of Lewis wrote ', a well-known poem about the Gaelic revival in the Outer Hebrides. Sorley MacLean, the most respected 20th-century Gaelic writer, was born and raised on Raasay, where he set his best known poem, ', about the devastating effect of the Highland Clearances. , raised on South Uist and described by MacLean as "one of the few really significant living poets in Scotland, writing in any language" (West Highland Free Press, October 1992) wrote the Scottish Gaelic-language novel "" which was voted in the Top Ten of the 100 Best-Ever Books from Scotland.


title: Hebrides

text: In some respects the Hebrides lack biodiversity in comparison to mainland Britain; for example, there are only half as many mammalian species. However, these islands provide breeding grounds for many important seabird species including the world's largest colony of northern gannets. Avian life includes the corncrake, red-throated diver, rock dove, kittiwake, tystie, Atlantic puffin, goldeneye, golden eagle and white-tailed sea eagle. The latter was re-introduced to Rùm in 1975 and has successfully spread to various neighbouring islands, including Mull. There is a small population of red-billed chough concentrated on the islands of Islay and Colonsay.


title: Hebrides

text: Red deer are common on the hills and the grey seal and common seal are present around the coasts of Scotland. Colonies of seals are found on Oronsay and the Treshnish Isles. The rich freshwater streams contain brown trout, Atlantic salmon and water shrew. Offshore, minke whales, orcas, basking sharks, porpoises and dolphins are among the sealife that can be seen.


title: Hebrides

text: Heather moor containing ling, bell heather, cross-leaved heath, bog myrtle and fescues is abundant and there is a diversity of Arctic and alpine plants including Alpine pearlwort and mossy cyphal.


title: Hebrides

text: Loch Druidibeg on South Uist is a national nature reserve owned and managed by Scottish Natural Heritage. The reserve covers 1,677 hectares across the whole range of local habitats. Over 200 species of flowering plants have been recorded on the reserve, some of which are nationally scarce. South Uist is considered the best place in the UK for the aquatic plant slender naiad, which is a European Protected Species.


title: Hebrides

text: Hedgehogs are not native to the Outer Hebrides—they were introduced in the 1970s to reduce garden pests—and their spread poses a threat to the eggs of ground nesting wading birds. In 2003, Scottish Natural Heritage undertook culls of hedgehogs in the area although these were halted in 2007 due to protests. Trapped animals were relocated to the mainland.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a scheduled flight from New York JFK to Miami. Shortly before midnight on December 29, 1972, the Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar crashed into the Florida Everglades, causing 101 total fatalities. Three of the 4 cockpit crew members, two of the 10 flight attendants, and 96 of the 163 passengers were killed; there were 75 survivors.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The crash occurred while the entire flight crew were preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light. They failed to notice that the autopilot had inadvertently been disconnected and, subsequently, the aircraft gradually lost altitude and crashed. This was the first fatal crash of a wide-body aircraft. It was also the first hull loss and fatal crash of a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 was a regularly scheduled flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, to Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida. On the day of the crash, Flight 401 was operated using a Lockheed L-1011-1 TriStar (registration N310EA), which had been delivered to the airline on August 18, 1972. The aircraft was fleet number 310, and the 10th TriStar delivered to the carrier.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The flight was under the command of Captain Robert Albin (Bob) Loft, age 55, a veteran pilot ranked 50th in seniority at Eastern Air Lines. Captain Loft had been with the airline for 32 years and had accumulated a total of 29,700 flight hours throughout his flying career. He had logged 280 hours in the L-1011. His flight crew included First Officer Albert John "Bert" Stockstill, 39, who had 5,800 hours of flying experience (with 306 of them in the L-1011), and Flight Engineer Donald Louis "Don" Repo, 51, who had 15,700 hours of flying experience, with 53 of them in the L-1011.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: A company employee—technical officer Angelo Donadeo, 47, returning to Miami from an assignment in New York—accompanied the flight crew for the journey, but was officially an off-duty, "nonrevenue passenger".


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Flight 401 departed JFK Airport in New York on Friday, December 29, 1972, at 21:20EST, with 163 passengers and 13 crew members on board.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The flight was routine until 23:32, when the plane began its approach into Miami International Airport. After lowering the gear, First Officer Stockstill noticed that the landing gear indicator, a green light identifying that the nose gear is properly locked in the "down" position, had not illuminated. This was later discovered to be due to a burned-out light bulb. The landing gear could have been manually lowered, nonetheless. The pilots cycled the landing gear, but still failed to get the confirmation light.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Loft, who was working the radio during this leg of the flight, told the tower that they would discontinue their approach to their airport and requested to enter a holding pattern. The approach controller cleared the flight to climb to , and then hold west over the Everglades.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The cockpit crew removed the light assembly, and Second Officer Repo was dispatched to the avionics bay beneath the flight deck to check via a small porthole whether the landing gear was indeed down. Fifty seconds after reaching their assigned altitude, Captain Loft instructed First Officer Stockstill to put the L-1011 on autopilot. For the next 80 seconds, the plane maintained level flight. Then, it dropped , and then again flew level for two more minutes, after which it began a descent so gradual it could not be perceived by the crew. In the next 70 seconds, the plane lost only , but this was enough to trigger the altitude warning C-chord chime located under the engineer's workstation. The engineer (Repo) had gone below, and no indication was heard of the pilots' voices recorded on the CVR that they heard the chime. In another 50 seconds, the plane was at half its assigned altitude.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: As Stockstill started another turn, onto 180°, he noticed the discrepancy. The following conversation was recovered from the flight voice recorder later:


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The location was west-northwest of Miami, from the end of runway 9L. The plane was traveling at when it hit the ground. With the aircraft in mid-turn, the left wingtip hit the surface first, then the left engine and the left landing gear, making three trails through the sawgrass, each wide and over long. When the main part of the fuselage hit the ground, it continued to move through the grass and water, breaking up as it went.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The TriStar's port outer wing structure struck the ground first, followed by the No.1 engine and the port main undercarriage. The disintegration of the aircraft that followed scattered wreckage over an area long and wide in a southwesterly direction. Only small fragments of metal marked the wingtip's first contact, followed further on by three massive swaths cut through the mud and sawgrass by the aircraft's extended undercarriage before two of the legs were sheared off. Then came scattered parts from the No. 1 (port) engine, and fragments from the port wing itself and the port tailplane. About from the wingtip's initial contact with the ground, the massive fuselage had begun to break up, scattering components from the underfloor galley, the cargo compartments, and the cabin interior. At along the wreckage trail, the outer section of the starboard wing tore off, gouging a crater in the soft ground as it did so. From this point on, the breakup of the fuselage became more extensive, scattering metal fragments, cabin fittings, and passenger seats widely.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The three major sections of the fuselage—the most intact of which was the tail assembly—lay in the mud towards the end of the wreckage trail. The fact that the tail assembly—rear fuselage, No.2 tail-mounted engine, and remains of the empennage—finally came to rest substantially further forward than other major sections, was probably the result of the No. 2 engine continuing to deliver thrust during the actual breakup of the aircraft. No complete cross-section of the passenger cabin remained, and both the port wing and tailplane were demolished to fragments. Incongruously, not far from the roofless fuselage center section with the inner portion of the starboard wing still attached, lay a large, undamaged and fully inflated rubber dinghy, one of a number carried on the TriStar in the event of an emergency water landing. The breakup of the fuselage had freed it from its stowage and activated its inflation mechanism.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Robert "Bud" Marquis (1929–2008), an airboat pilot, was out frog gigging with Ray Dickinsin (1929–1988) when they witnessed the crash. They rushed to rescue survivors. Marquis received burns to his face, arms, and legs—a result of spilled jet fuel from the crashed TriStar—but continued shuttling people in and out of the crash site that night and the next day. For his efforts, he received the Humanitarian Award from the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation and the "Alumitech – Airboat Hero Award", from the American Airboat Search and Rescue Association.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: In all, 75 survived the crash—67 of the 163 passengers and eight of the 10 flight attendants. Despite their own injuries, the surviving flight attendants were credited with helping other survivors and several quick-thinking actions such as warning survivors of the danger of striking matches due to jet fuel in the swamp water and singing Christmas carols to keep up hope and draw the rescue teams' attention, as flashlights were not part of the standard equipment on commercial airliners at the time. Of the cockpit crew, only flight engineer Repo survived the initial crash, along with technical officer Donadeo, who was down in the nose electronics bay with Repo at the moment of impact. Stockstill was killed on impact, while Captain Loft died in the wreckage of the flight deck before he could be transported to a hospital. Repo was evacuated to a hospital, but later died from his injuries. Donadeo, the lone survivor of the four flight-deck occupants, recovered from his injuries. Frank Borman, a former NASA astronaut and Eastern's senior vice president of operations, was awoken at home by a phone call explaining of a probable crash. He immediately drove to Eastern's Miami offices and decided to charter a helicopter to the crash site, as the swampy terrain made rescue difficult, and Eastern Airlines had not heard any news of progress in rescue efforts. There he was able to land in a swampy patch of grass and coordinate rescue efforts. He accompanied 3 survivors on the helicopter to the hospital including a flight attendant and passenger who lost her baby in the crash. James Hall, Flight Operations and Safety, Miami office, had the grueling task of notifying all the families of the crash victims.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Most of the dead were passengers in the aircraft's midsection. The swamp absorbed much of the energy of the crash, lessening the impact on the aircraft. The mud of the Everglades may have blocked wounds sustained by survivors, preventing them from bleeding to death. However, it also complicated the survivors' recuperation, as organisms in the swamp caused infection, with the potential for gas gangrene. Eight passengers became infected; doctors used hyperbaric chambers to treat the infections. All the survivors were injured; 60 received serious injuries and 17 suffered minor injuries that did not require hospitalization. The most common injuries were fractures of ribs, spines, pelvises, and lower extremities. Fourteen survivors had various degrees of burns.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation discovered that the autopilot had been inadvertently switched from altitude hold to control wheel steering (CWS) mode in pitch. In this mode, once the pilot releases pressure on the yoke (control column or wheel), the autopilot maintains the pitch attitude of the aircraft until the yoke is again moved. Investigators believe the autopilot switched modes when the captain accidentally leaned against the yoke while turning to speak to the flight engineer, who was sitting behind and to the right of him. The slight forward pressure on the stick would have caused the aircraft to enter a slow descent, maintained by the CWS system.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Investigation into the aircraft's autopilot showed that the force required to switch to CWS mode was different between the A and B channels (, respectively). Thus, the switching to CWS in channel A possibly did not occur in channel B, thus depriving the first officer of any indication the mode had changed (channel A provides the captain's instruments with data, while channel B provides the first officer's).


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: After the aircraft had descended from the selected altitude of , a C-chord sounded from the rear speaker. This altitude alert, designed to warn the pilots of an inadvertent deviation from the selected altitude, went unnoticed by the crew. Investigators believe this was due to the crew being distracted by the nose gear light, and because the flight engineer was not in his seat when it sounded, so would not have been able to hear it. Visually, since it was nighttime and the aircraft was flying over the darkened terrain of the Everglades, no ground lights or other visual signs indicated the TriStar was slowly descending.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Captain Loft was found during the autopsy to have an undetected brain tumor in an area that controls vision. However, the NTSB concluded that the captain's tumor did not contribute to the accident.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The final NTSB report cited the cause of the crash as pilot error, specifically: "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew's attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed."


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: In response to this and other accidents in the 1970s, many airlines started crew resource management training for their pilots. The training is designed to make problem solving in a cockpit much more efficient, thus causing less distraction for the crew. Flashlights are now standard equipment near jumpseats, and all jumpseats are outfitted with shoulder harnesses.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Over the following months and years, stories began circulating that employees of Eastern Air Lines, and numerous passengers, had reported sightings of the dead crew members, captain Robert Loft and second officer (flight engineer) Donald Repo, sitting on board other L-1011s (including, in particular, N318EA).


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: These stories speculated that parts of the crashed aircraft were salvaged after the investigation and refitted into other L-1011s. The reported hauntings were said to be seen only on the planes that used the spare parts. Gossip regarding the sighting of the spirits of Don Repo and Bob Loft spread throughout Eastern Air Lines to the point where Eastern's management warned employees that they could face dismissal if caught spreading ghost stories.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: While Eastern Air Lines publicly denied their planes were haunted, they reportedly removed all the salvaged parts from their L-1011 fleet. Over time, the reporting of ghost sightings stopped. An original floor board from Flight 401 remains in the archives at History Miami in South Florida. Pieces of Flight 401's wreckage can also be found in Ed and Lorraine Warren's Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The story of the crash and its aftermath were documented in John G. Fuller's 1976 book "The Ghost of Flight 401". Fuller recounts stories of paranormal events aboard other Eastern aircraft and the belief that these were caused by equipment salvaged from the wreckage of Flight 401. A television film, also titled "The Ghost of Flight 401", aired on NBC in February 1978. Based on Fuller's book, it focused on the ghost sightings surrounding the aftermath. On his 1979 album "Three Hearts", musician Bob Welch also recorded a song titled "The Ghost of Flight 401".


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Eastern Air Lines CEO (and former Apollo astronaut) Frank Borman called the ghost stories surrounding the crash "garbage". Eastern considered suing for libel, based on assertions of a cover-up by Eastern executives, but Borman opted not to, feeling a lawsuit would merely provide more publicity for the book. Loft's widow and children did sue Fuller, for infringement of Loft's right of publicity, for invasion of privacy, and for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: According to Robert J. Serling's 1980 book "From the Captain to the Colonel: An Informal History of Eastern Airlines", the claim that wreckage from Flight 401 was installed and later removed from other Eastern aircraft was false, and no Eastern employees had ever claimed to have seen or believed in the alleged ghost sightings. Skeptic Brian Dunning claims that the origin for the ghost sightings was a joke made by an Eastern Air Lines captain after an emergency landing in which he quipped that he "thought [Don] Repo's ghost was on the plane."


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The crash was documented in Rob and Sarah Elder's 1977 book "Crash". A television film of the same name was aired in October 1978. Based on the book, it dramatized the crash, rescue efforts, and NTSB investigation. Eddie Albert starred as "Dunn", a fictionalized version of Captain Robert Loft.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The television film "The Ghost of Flight 401", which aired on NBC in February 1978, offers a fictionalized depiction of the crash and alleged ghost sightings.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The flight is referenced as part of the Bob Welch song "The Ghost of Flight 401" on his 1979 album "Three Hearts".


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: Footage of the incident appeared in the film "Days of Fury" (1980), directed by Fred Warshofsky and hosted by Vincent Price.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The accident and the subsequent ghost story were mentioned by Dan Aykroyd during his appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" on June 6, 1984.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: The crash was featured in season five of the Discovery Channel Canada / National Geographic TV series "Mayday", in a 2009 episode called "Fatal Distraction".


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: It is featured in season1, episode3, of the TV show "Why Planes Crash", in an episode called "Human Error" (2010).


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: A similar situation appeared in the Thai film Dark Flight, directed by Kongkiat Khomsiri, produced in 2012.


title: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401

text: "The Ghosts of Flight 401", part of the Discovery+ series Shock Docs, focuses on the supernatural legacy of the crash.


title: Alternate history

text: Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternative history stories propose "What if?" scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Alternate history also is a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; as literature, alternate history uses the tropes of the genre to answer the "What if?" speculations of the story.


title: Alternate history

text: Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, and the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe, by the inhabitants of a given universe; and time travel that divides history into various timestreams. In the Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician languages, the terms "Uchronie", "ucronia", "ucronía", and "Uchronie" identify the alternate history genre, from which derives the English term "Uchronia", composed of the Greek prefix ("not", "not any", and "no") and the Greek word () "time", to describe a story that occurs "[in] no time"; analogous to a story that occurs in "utopia", "[in] no place". The term "Uchronia" also is the name of the list of alternate-history books, "". Moreover, "Allohistory" (other history) is another term for the genre of alternative history.


title: Alternate history

text: Alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome. An alternate history requires three conditions: (i) A point of divergence from the historical record, before the time in which the author is writing; (ii) A change that would alter known history; and (iii) An examination of the ramifications of that alteration to history. Occasionally, some types of genre fiction are misidentified as "alternative history", specifically science fiction stories set in a time that was the future for the writer, but now is the past for the reader, such as the novels "" (1968), by Arthur C. Clarke and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949), by George Orwell, because the authors did not alter the history of the past when they wrote the stories.


title: Alternate history

text: Moreover, the genre of the Secret History of an event, which can be either fictional or non-fictional, documents events that might have occurred in history, but which had no effect upon the recorded historical outcome. Alternative history also is thematically related to, but distinct from, Counterfactual History, which is a form of historiography that attempts to answer the "What if?" speculations that arise from counterfactual conditions in order to understand what did happen. As a method of historical research, counterfactual history explores historical events with an extrapolated timeline in which key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different from the historical record.


title: Alternate history

text: The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's "Ab Urbe Condita Libri" (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?" Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. An even earlier possibility is Herodotus's "Histories", which contains speculative material.


title: Alternate history

text: Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work "De Divina Omnipotentia", a long letter in which he discusses God's omnipotence, he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change the past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded:I see I must respond finally to what many people, on the basis of your holiness’s [own] judgment, raise as an objection on the topic of this dispute. For they say: If, as you assert, God is omnipotent in all things, can he manage this, that things that have been made were not made? He can certainly destroy all things that have been made, so that they do not exist now. But it cannot be seen how he can bring it about that things that have been made were not made. To be sure, it can come about that from now on and hereafter Rome does not exist; for it can be destroyed. But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it was not founded long ago...One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance "Tirant lo Blanch", which was written when the loss of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of . He saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered.


title: Alternate history

text: One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy's "Histoire de la Monarchie universelle : Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832)" (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.


title: Alternate history

text: In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive.


title: Alternate history

text: The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford's "Aristopia" (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy's "Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823", "Aristopia" is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In "Aristopia", the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America.


title: Alternate history

text: In 1905, H. G. Wells published "A Modern Utopia". As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly as a vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise geographical equivalent point in an alternate world in which history had gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the alternate world, and then are finally transported back to our world, again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, that has become a staple of the alternate history genre.


title: Alternate history

text: A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's "The Ifs of History" [1907] and Charles Petrie's "If: A Jacobite Fantasy" [1926]). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology "If It Had Happened Otherwise". In that work, scholars from major universities, as well as important non-academic authors, turned their attention to such questions as "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam, a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan. Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill.


title: Alternate history

text: One of the entries in Squire's volume was Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world in which the Confederacy had won the American Civil War. The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines a world more like the real one we live in, although it is not identical in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from the point of view of an alternate history is variously known as "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore's alternate history novel "Bring the Jubilee" in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg and paved the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this timeline). The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead.


title: Alternate history

text: The American humorist author James Thurber parodied alternate history stories about the American Civil War in his 1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he accompanied with this very brief introduction: ""Scribner's" magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth".


title: Alternate history

text: Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably the first that explicitly posited cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells' "Men Like Gods" (1923) in which the London-based journalist Mr. Barnstable, along with two cars and their passengers, is mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings" call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some 3000 years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes a multiverse of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that would later become popular with American pulp writers. However, since his hero experiences only a single alternate world, the story is not very different from conventional alternate history.


title: Alternate history

text: In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of "Astounding" published Nat Schachner's "Ancestral Voices", which was quickly followed by Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time". While earlier alternate histories examined reasonably-straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as they wander through analogues of worlds that followed a different history.


title: Alternate history

text: A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette "Elsewhen" in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines. He then hypnotizes his students so that they can explore more of them. Eventually, each settles into the reality that is most suitable for him or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some are very odd, and others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions.


title: Alternate history

text: World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.


title: Alternate history

text: The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths. De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making the work an alternate history.


title: Alternate history

text: In William Tenn's short story "Brooklyn Project" (1948), a tyrannical US Government brushes aside the warnings of scientists about the dangers of time travel and goes on with a planned experiment - with the result that minor changes to the prehistoric past cause Humanity to never have existed, its place taken by tentacled underwater intelligent creatures - who also have a tyrannical government which also insists on experimenting with time-travel.


title: Alternate history

text: Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time-travelling event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, the protagonist lives in an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the American Civil War. He travels backward through time and brings about a Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.


title: Alternate history

text: When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of the visited time's future, rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time patrol" is often used where guardians move through time to preserve the "correct" history.


title: Alternate history

text: A more recent example is "Making History" by Stephen Fry in which a time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. That ironically results in a more competent leader of Nazi Germany and results in the country's ascendancy and longevity in the altered timeline.


title: Alternate history

text: H.G. Wells' "cross-time" or "many universes" variant (see above) was fully developed by Murray Leinster in his 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time", in which sections of the Earth's surface begin changing places with their counterparts in alternate timelines.


title: Alternate history

text: Fredric Brown employed this subgenre to satirize the science fiction pulps and their adolescent readers—and fears of foreign invasion—in the classic "What Mad Universe" (1949). In Clifford D. Simak's "Ring Around the Sun" (1953), the hero ends up in an alternate earth of thick forests in which humanity never developed but a band of mutants is establishing a colony; the story line appears to frame the author's anxieties regarding McCarthyism and the Cold War.


title: Alternate history

text: While many justifications for alternate histories involve a multiverse, the "many world" theory would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with every quantum event, and even if the writer uses human decisions, every decision that could be made differently would result in a different timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in "Night Watch", Terry Pratchett depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When the writer explicitly maintains that "all" possible decisions are made in all possible ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave, nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as Larry Niven's story "All the Myriad Ways", where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral import.


title: Alternate history

text: In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if the total number of worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to assign a different measure to different infinite sets). The physicist David Deutsch, a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen." This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as Greg Egan in his short story "The Infinite Assassin", where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools" that form around users of a certain drug, and the agent is constantly trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences, he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of his other selves.


title: Alternate history

text: Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", a Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder, is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it, where the country "will" be overrun, but the book never depicts the slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the timeline where the country is saved.


title: Alternate history

text: The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by Keith Laumer in the first three volumes of his "Imperium" sequence, which would be completed in "Zone Yellow" (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by Michael Kurland and Jack Chalker in the 1980s; Chalker's "G.O.D. Inc" trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with the police procedural. Kurland's "Perchance" (1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech capsules to mutant powers. Harry Turtledove has launched the Crosstime Traffic series for teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire.


title: Alternate history

text: The concept of a cross-time version of a world war, involving rival paratime empires, was developed in Fritz Leiber's Change War series, starting with the Hugo Award winning "The Big Time" (1958); followed by Richard C. Meredith's "Timeliner" trilogy in the 1970s, Michael McCollum's "A Greater Infinity" (1982) and John Barnes' "Timeline Wars" trilogy in the 1990s.