title: Telegraphy

text: The earliest true telegraph put into widespread use was the optical telegraph of Claude Chappe, invented in the late 18th century. The system was used extensively in France, and European nations occupied by France, during the Napoleonic era. The electric telegraph started to replace the optical telegraph in the mid-19th century. It was first taken up in Britain in the form of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, initially used mostly as an aid to railway signalling. This was quickly followed by a different system developed in the United States by Samuel Morse. The electric telegraph was slower to develop in France due to the established optical telegraph system, but an electrical telegraph was put into use with a code compatible with the Chappe optical telegraph. The Morse system was adopted as the international standard in 1865, using a modified Morse code developed in Germany in 1848.


title: Telegraphy

text: The heliograph is a telegraph system using reflected sunlight for signalling. It was mainly used in areas where the electrical telegraph had not been established and generally used the same code. The most extensive heliograph network established was in Arizona and New Mexico during the Apache Wars. The heliograph was standard military equipment as late as World War II. Wireless telegraphy developed in the early 20th century became important for maritime use, and was a competitor to electrical telegraphy using submarine telegraph cables in international communications.


title: Telegraphy

text: Telegrams became a popular means of sending messages once telegraph prices had fallen sufficiently. Traffic became high enough to spur the development of automated systems—teleprinters and punched tape transmission. These systems led to new telegraph codes, starting with the Baudot code. However, telegrams were never able to compete with the letter post on price, and competition from the telephone, which removed their speed advantage, drove the telegraph into decline from 1920 onwards. The few remaining telegraph applications were largely taken over by alternatives on the internet towards the end of the 20th century.


title: Telegraphy

text: The word "telegraph" (from Ancient Greek: () 'at a distance' and () 'to write') was first coined by the French inventor of the semaphore telegraph, Claude Chappe, who also coined the word "semaphore".


title: Telegraphy

text: A telegraph is a device for transmitting and receiving messages over long distances, i.e., for telegraphy. The word "telegraph" alone now generally refers to an electrical telegraph. Wireless telegraphy is transmission of messages over radio with telegraphic codes.


title: Telegraphy

text: Contrary to the extensive definition used by Chappe, Morse argued that the term "telegraph" can strictly be applied only to systems that transmit "and" record messages at a distance. This is to be distinguished from "semaphore", which merely transmits messages. Smoke signals, for instance, are to be considered semaphore, not telegraph. According to Morse, telegraph dates only from 1832 when Pavel Schilling invented one of the earliest electrical telegraphs.


title: Telegraphy

text: A telegraph message sent by an electrical telegraph operator or telegrapher using Morse code (or a printing telegraph operator using plain text) was known as a telegram. A cablegram was a message sent by a submarine telegraph cable, often shortened to "cable" or "wire". The suffix -gram is derived from ancient Greek: (), meaning something written, i.e. telegram means something written at a distance and cablegram means something written via a cable, whereas telegraph implies the process of writing at a distance.


title: Telegraphy

text: Later, a Telex was a message sent by a Telex network, a switched network of teleprinters similar to a telephone network.


title: Telegraphy

text: A wirephoto or wire picture was a newspaper picture that was sent from a remote location by a facsimile telegraph. A diplomatic telegram, also known as a diplomatic cable, is a confidential communication between a diplomatic mission and the foreign ministry of its parent country. These continue to be called telegrams or cables regardless of the method used for transmission.


title: Telegraphy

text: Passing messages by signalling over distance is an ancient practice. One of the oldest examples is the signal towers of the Great Wall of China. In , signals could be sent by beacon fires or drum beats. By complex flag signalling had developed, and by the Han dynasty (200 BC – 220 AD) signallers had a choice of lights, flags, or gunshots to send signals. By the Tang dynasty (618–907) a message could be sent in 24 hours. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) added artillery to the possible signals. While the signalling was complex (for instance, different-coloured flags could be used to indicate enemy strength), only predetermined messages could be sent. The Chinese signalling system extended well beyond the Great Wall. Signal towers away from the wall were used to give early warning of an attack. Others were built even further out as part of the protection of trade routes, especially the Silk Road.


title: Telegraphy

text: Signal fires were widely used in Europe and elsewhere for military purposes. The Roman army made frequent use of them, as did their enemies, and the remains of some of the stations still exist. Few details have been recorded of European/Mediterranean signalling systems and the possible messages. One of the few for which details are known is a system invented by Aeneas Tacticus (4th century BC). Tacticus's system had water filled pots at the two signal stations which were drained in synchronisation. Annotation on a floating scale indicated which message was being sent or received. Signals sent by means of torches indicated when to start and stop draining to keep the synchronisation.


title: Telegraphy

text: None of the signalling systems discussed above are true telegraphs in the sense of a system that can transmit arbitrary messages over arbitrary distances. Lines of signalling relay stations can send messages to any required distance, but all these systems are limited to one extent or another in the range of messages that they can send. A system like flag semaphore, with an alphabetic code, can certainly send any given message, but the system is designed for short-range communication between two persons. An engine order telegraph, used to send instructions from the bridge of a ship to the engine room, fails to meet both criteria; it has a limited distance and very simple message set. There was only one ancient signalling system described that "does" meet these criteria. That was a system using the Polybius square to encode an alphabet. Polybius (2nd century BC) suggested using two successive groups of torches to identify the coordinates of the letter of the alphabet being transmitted. The number of said torches held up signalled the grid square that contained the letter. There is no definite record of the system ever being used, but there are several passages in ancient texts that some think are suggestive. Holzmann and Pehrson, for instance, suggest that Livy is describing its use by Philip V of Macedon in 207 BC during the First Macedonian War. Nothing else that could be described as a true telegraph existed until the 17th century. Possibly the first alphabetic telegraph code in the modern era is due to Franz Kessler who published his work in 1616. Kessler used a lamp placed inside a barrel with a moveable shutter operated by the signaller. The signals were observed at a distance with the newly invented telescope.


title: Telegraphy

text: In several places around the world, a system of passing messages from village to village using drum beats was used, particularly highly developed in Africa. At the time Europeans discovered "talking drums", the speed of message transmission was faster than any existing European system using optical telegraphs. The African drum system was not alphabetical. Rather, the drum beats followed the tones of the language. This made messages highly ambiguous and context was important for their correct interpretation.


title: Telegraphy

text: An optical telegraph is a telegraph consisting of a line of stations in towers or natural high points which signal to each other by means of shutters or paddles. Signalling by means of indicator pointers was called "semaphore". Early proposals for an optical telegraph system were made to the Royal Society by Robert Hooke in 1684 and were first implemented on an experimental level by Sir Richard Lovell Edgeworth in 1767. The first successful optical telegraph network was invented by Claude Chappe and operated in France from 1793. The two most extensive systems were Chappe's in France, with branches into neighbouring countries, and the system of Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz in Sweden.


title: Telegraphy

text: During 1790–1795, at the height of the French Revolution, France needed a swift and reliable communication system to thwart the war efforts of its enemies. In 1790, the Chappe brothers set about devising a system of communication that would allow the central government to receive intelligence and to transmit orders in the shortest possible time. On 2 March 1791, at 11 am, they sent the message "si vous réussissez, vous serez bientôt couverts de gloire" (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory) between Brulon and Parce, a distance of . The first means used a combination of black and white panels, clocks, telescopes, and codebooks to send their message.


title: Telegraphy

text: In 1792, Claude was appointed "Ingénieur-Télégraphiste" and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of . It was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria. In 1794, it brought news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred. A decision to replace the system with an electric telegraph was made in 1846, but it took a decade before it was fully taken out of service. The fall of Sebastopol was reported by Chappe telegraph in 1855.


title: Telegraphy

text: The Prussian system was put into effect in the 1830s. However, they were highly dependent on good weather and daylight to work and even then could accommodate only about two words per minute. The last commercial semaphore link ceased operation in Sweden in 1880. As of 1895, France still operated coastal commercial semaphore telegraph stations, for ship-to-shore communication.


title: Telegraphy

text: The early ideas for an electric telegraph included in 1753 using electrostatic deflections of pith balls, proposals for electrochemical bubbles in acid by Campillo in 1804 and von Sömmering in 1809. The first experimental system over a substantial distance was by Ronalds in 1816 using an electrostatic generator. Ronalds offered his invention to the British Admiralty, but it was rejected as unnecessary, the existing optical telegraph connecting the Admiralty in London to their main fleet base in Portsmouth being deemed adequate for their purposes. As late as 1844, after the electrical telegraph had come into use, the Admiralty's optical telegraph was still used, although it was accepted that poor weather ruled it out on many days of the year. France had an extensive optical telegraph dating from Napoleonic times and was even slower to take up electrical systems.


title: Telegraphy

text: Eventually, electrostatic telegraphs were abandoned in favour of electromagnetic systems. An early experimental system (Schilling, 1832) led to a proposal to establish a telegraph between St Petersburg and Kronstadt, but it was never completed. The first operative electric telegraph (Gauss and Weber, 1833) connected Göttingen Observatory to the Institute of Physics about 1 km away during experimental investigations of the geomagnetic field.


title: Telegraphy

text: The first commercial telegraph was by Cooke and Wheatstone following their English patent of 10 June 1837. It was demonstrated on the London and Birmingham Railway in July of the same year. In July 1839, a five-needle, five-wire system was installed to provide signalling over a record distance of 21 km on a section of the Great Western Railway between London Paddington station and West Drayton. However, in trying to get railway companies to take up his telegraph more widely for railway signalling, Cooke was rejected several times in favour of the more familiar, but shorter range, steam-powered pneumatic signalling. Even when his telegraph was taken up, it was considered experimental and the company backed out of a plan to finance extending the telegraph line out to Slough. However, this led to a breakthrough for the electric telegraph, as up to this point the Great Western had insisted on exclusive use and refused Cooke permission to open public telegraph offices. Cooke extended the line at his own expense and agreed that the railway could have free use of it in exchange for the right to open it up to the public.


title: Telegraphy

text: Most of the early electrical systems required multiple wires (Ronalds' system was an exception), but the system developed in the United States by Morse and Vail was a single-wire system. This was the system that first used the soon-to-become-ubiquitous Morse code. By 1844, the Morse system connected Baltimore to Washington, and by 1861 the west coast of the continent was connected to the east coast. The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, in a series of improvements, also ended up with a one-wire system, but still using their own code and needle displays.


title: Telegraphy

text: The electric telegraph quickly became a means of more general communication. The Morse system was officially adopted as the standard for continental European telegraphy in 1851 with a revised code, which later became the basis of International Morse Code. However, Great Britain and the British Empire continued to use the Cooke and Wheatstone system, in some places as late as the 1930s. Likewise, the United States continued to use American Morse code internally, requiring translation operators skilled in both codes for international messages.


title: Telegraphy

text: Railway signal telegraphy was developed in Britain from the 1840s onward. It was used to manage railway traffic and to prevent accidents as part of the railway signalling system. On 12 June 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone were awarded a patent for an electric telegraph. This was demonstrated between Euston railway station—where Wheatstone was located—and the engine house at Camden Town—where Cooke was stationed, together with Robert Stephenson, the London and Birmingham Railway line's chief engineer. The messages were for the operation of the rope-haulage system for pulling trains up the 1 in 77 bank. The world's first permanent railway telegraph was completed in July 1839 between London Paddington and West Drayton on the Great Western Railway with an electric telegraph using a four-needle system.


title: Telegraphy

text: The concept of a signalling "block" system was proposed by Cooke in 1842. Railway signal telegraphy did not change in essence from Cooke's initial concept for more than a century. In this system each line of railway was divided into sections or blocks of varying length. Entry to and exit from the block was to be authorised by electric telegraph and signalled by the line-side semaphore signals, so that only a single train could occupy the rails. In Cooke's original system, a single-needle telegraph was adapted to indicate just two messages: "Line Clear" and "Line Blocked". The signaller would adjust his line-side signals accordingly. As first implemented in 1844 each station had as many needles as there were stations on the line, giving a complete picture of the traffic. As lines expanded, a sequence of pairs of single-needle instruments were adopted, one pair for each block in each direction.


title: Telegraphy

text: Wigwag is a form of flag signalling using a single flag. Unlike most forms of flag signalling, which are used over relatively short distances, wigwag is designed to maximise the distance covered—up to in some cases. Wigwag achieved this by using a large flag—a single flag can be held with both hands unlike flag semaphore which has a flag in each hand—and using motions rather than positions as its symbols since motions are more easily seen. It was invented by US Army surgeon Albert J. Myer in the 1850s who later became the first head of the Signal Corps. Wigwag was used extensively during the American Civil War where it filled a gap left by the electrical telegraph. Although the electrical telegraph had been in use for more than a decade, the network did not yet reach everywhere and portable, ruggedized equipment suitable for military use was not immediately available. Permanent or semi-permanent stations were established during the war, some of them towers of enormous height and the system was extensive enough to be described as a communications network.


title: Telegraphy

text: A heliograph is a telegraph that transmits messages by flashing sunlight with a mirror, usually using Morse code. The idea for a telegraph of this type was first proposed as a modification of surveying equipment (Gauss, 1821). Various uses of mirrors were made for communication in the following years, mostly for military purposes, but the first device to become widely used was a heliograph with a moveable mirror (Mance, 1869). The system was used by the French during the 1870–71 siege of Paris, with night-time signalling using kerosene lamps as the source of light. An improved version (Begbie, 1870) was used by British military in many colonial wars, including the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). At some point, a morse key was added to the apparatus to give the operator the same degree of control as in the electric telegraph.


title: Telegraphy

text: Another type of heliograph was the heliostat or heliotrope fitted with a Colomb shutter. The heliostat was essentially a surveying instrument with a fixed mirror and so could not transmit a code by itself. The term "heliostat" is sometimes used as a synonym for "heliograph" because of this origin. The Colomb shutter (Bolton and Colomb, 1862) was originally invented to enable the transmission of morse code by signal lamp between Royal Navy ships at sea.


title: Telegraphy

text: The heliograph was heavily used by Nelson A. Miles in Arizona and New Mexico after he took over command (1886) of the fight against Geronimo and other Apache bands in the Apache Wars. Miles had previously set up the first heliograph line in the US between Fort Keogh and Fort Custer in Montana. He used the heliograph to fill in vast, thinly populated areas that were not covered by the electric telegraph. Twenty-six stations covered an area . In a test of the system, a message was relayed in four hours. Miles' enemies used smoke signals and flashes of sunlight from metal, but lacked a sophisticated telegraph code. The heliograph was ideal for use in the American Southwest due to its clear air and mountainous terrain on which stations could be located. It was found necessary to lengthen the morse dash (which is much shorter in American Morse code than in the modern International Morse code) to aid differentiating from the morse dot.


title: Telegraphy

text: Use of the heliograph declined from 1915 onwards, but remained in service in Britain and British Commonwealth countries for some time. Australian forces used the heliograph as late as 1942 in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. Some form of heliograph was used by the mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989).


title: Telegraphy

text: A teleprinter is a telegraph machine that can send messages from a typewriter-like keyboard and print incoming messages in readable text with no need for the operators to be trained in the telegraph code used on the line. It developed from various earlier printing telegraphs and resulted in improved transmission speeds. The Morse telegraph (1837) was originally conceived as a system marking indentations on paper tape. A chemical telegraph making blue marks improved the speed of recording (Bain, 1846), but was delayed by a patent challenge from Morse. The first true printing telegraph (that is printing in plain text) used a spinning wheel of types in the manner of a daisy wheel printer (House, 1846, improved by Hughes, 1855). The system was adopted by Western Union.


title: Telegraphy

text: Early teleprinters used the Baudot code, a five-bit sequential binary code. This was a telegraph code developed for use on the French telegraph using a five-key keyboard (Baudot, 1874). Teleprinters generated the same code from a full alphanumeric keyboard. A feature of the Baudot code, and subsequent telegraph codes, was that, unlike Morse code, every character has a code of the same length making it more machine friendly. The Baudot code was used on the earliest ticker tape machines (Calahan, 1867), a system for mass distributing stock price information.


title: Telegraphy

text: In a punched-tape system, the message is first typed onto punched tape using the code of the telegraph system—Morse code for instance. It is then, either immediately or at some later time, run through a transmission machine which sends the message to the telegraph network. Multiple messages can be sequentially recorded on the same run of tape. The advantage of doing this is that messages can be sent at a steady, fast rate making maximum use of the available telegraph lines. The economic advantage of doing this is greatest on long, busy routes where the cost of the extra step of preparing the tape is outweighed by the cost of providing more telegraph lines. The first machine to use punched tape was Bain's teleprinter (Bain, 1843), but the system saw only limited use. Later versions of Bain's system achieved speeds up to 1000 words per minute, far faster than a human operator could achieve.


title: Telegraphy

text: The first widely used system (Wheatstone, 1858) was first put into service with the British General Post Office in 1867. A novel feature of the Wheatstone system was the use of bipolar encoding. That is, both positive and negative polarity voltages were used. Bipolar encoding has several advantages, one of which is that it permits duplex communication. The Wheatstone tape reader was capable of a speed of 400 words per minute.


title: Telegraphy

text: A worldwide communication network meant that telegraph cables would have to be laid across oceans. On land cables could be run uninsulated suspended from poles. Underwater, a good insulator that was both flexible and capable of resisting the ingress of seawater was required. A solution presented itself with gutta-percha, a natural rubber from the "Palaquium gutta" tree, after William Montgomerie sent samples to London from Singapore in 1843. The new material was tested by Michael Faraday and in 1845 Wheatstone suggested that it should be used on the cable planned between Dover and Calais by John Watkins Brett. The idea was proved viable when the South Eastern Railway company successfully tested a gutta-percha insulated cable with telegraph messages to a ship off the coast of Folkestone. The cable to France was laid in 1850 but was almost immediately severed by a French fishing vessel. It was relaid the next year and connections to Ireland and the Low Countries soon followed.


title: Telegraphy

text: Getting a cable across the Atlantic Ocean proved much more difficult. The Atlantic Telegraph Company, formed in London in 1856, had several failed attempts. A cable laid in 1858 worked poorly for a few days (sometimes taking all day to send a message despite the use of the highly sensitive mirror galvanometer developed by William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin) before being destroyed by applying too high a voltage. Its failure and slow speed of transmission prompted Thomson and Oliver Heaviside to find better mathematical descriptions of long transmission lines. The company finally succeeded in 1866 with an improved cable laid by SS "Great Eastern", the largest ship of its day, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.


title: Telegraphy

text: An overland telegraph from Britain to India was first connected in 1866 but was unreliable so a submarine telegraph cable was connected in 1870. Several telegraph companies were combined to form the "Eastern Telegraph Company" in 1872. Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin.


title: Telegraphy

text: From the 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line. In 1896, there were thirty cable-laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies. In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 percent. During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide.


title: Telegraphy

text: In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain invented a device that could be considered the first facsimile machine. He called his invention a "recording telegraph". Bain's telegraph was able to transmit images by electrical wires. Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated a telefax machine. In 1855, an Italian abbot, Giovanni Caselli, also created an electric telegraph that could transmit images. Caselli called his invention "Pantelegraph". Pantelegraph was successfully tested and approved for a telegraph line between Paris and Lyon.


title: Telegraphy

text: In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the "scanning phototelegraph" that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing. Around 1900, German physicist Arthur Korn invented the "" widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908 used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the "Bélinographe" by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s, the "Hellschreiber", invented in 1929 by German inventor Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission.


title: Telegraphy

text: The late 1880s through to the 1890s saw the discovery and then development of a newly understood phenomenon into a form of wireless telegraphy, called "Hertzian wave" wireless telegraphy, radiotelegraphy, or (later) simply "radio". Between 1886 and 1888, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz published the results of his experiments where he was able to transmit electromagnetic waves (radio waves) through the air, proving James Clerk Maxwell's 1873 theory of electromagnetic radiation. Many scientists and inventors experimented with this new phenomenon but the consensus was that these new waves (similar to light) would be just as short range as light, and, therefore, useless for long range communication.


title: Telegraphy

text: At the end of 1894, the young Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began working on the idea of building a commercial wireless telegraphy system based on the use of Hertzian waves (radio waves), a line of inquiry that he noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing. Building on the ideas of previous scientists and inventors Marconi re-engineered their apparatus by trial and error attempting to build a radio-based wireless telegraphic system that would function the same as wired telegraphy. He would work on the system through 1895 in his lab and then in field tests making improvements to extend its range. After many breakthroughs, including applying the wired telegraphy concept of grounding the transmitter and receiver, Marconi was able, by early 1896, to transmit radio far beyond the short ranges that had been predicted. Having failed to interest the Italian government, the 22-year-old inventor brought his telegraphy system to Britain in 1896 and met William Preece, a Welshman, who was a major figure in the field and Chief Engineer of the General Post Office. A series of demonstrations for the British government followed—by March 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about across Salisbury Plain.


title: Telegraphy

text: On 13 May 1897, Marconi, assisted by George Kemp, a Cardiff Post Office engineer, transmitted the first wireless signals over water to Lavernock (near Penarth in Wales) from Flat Holm. His star rising, he was soon sending signals across the English Channel (1899), from shore to ship (1899) and finally across the Atlantic (1901). A study of these demonstrations of radio, with scientists trying to work out how a phenomenon predicted to have a short range could transmit "over the horizon", led to the discovery of a radio reflecting layer in the Earth's atmosphere in 1902, later called the ionosphere.


title: Telegraphy

text: Radiotelegraphy proved effective for rescue work in sea disasters by enabling effective communication between ships and from ship to shore. In 1904, Marconi began the first commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907. Notably, Marconi's apparatus was used to help rescue efforts after the sinking of . Britain's postmaster-general summed up, referring to the "Titanic" disaster, "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi...and his marvellous invention."


title: Telegraphy

text: A telegram service is a company or public entity that delivers telegraphed messages directly to the recipient. Telegram services were not inaugurated until electric telegraphy became available. Earlier optical systems were largely limited to official government and military purposes.


title: Telegraphy

text: Historically, telegrams were sent between a network of interconnected telegraph offices. A person visiting a local telegraph office paid by the word to have a message telegraphed to another office and delivered to the addressee on a paper form. Messages sent by telegraph could be delivered by telegram messenger faster than mail, and even in the telephone age, the telegram remained popular for social and business correspondence. At their peak in 1929, an estimated 200 million telegrams were sent.


title: Telegraphy

text: In 1919, the Central Bureau for Registered Addresses was established in the financial district of New York City. The bureau was created to ease the growing problem of messages being delivered to the wrong recipients. To combat this issue, the bureau offered telegraph customers the option to register unique code names for their telegraph addresses. Customers were charged $2.50 per year per code. By 1934, 28,000 codes had been registered.


title: Telegraphy

text: Telegram services still operate in much of the world (see worldwide use of telegrams by country), but e-mail and text messaging have rendered telegrams obsolete in many countries, and the number of telegrams sent annually has been declining rapidly since the 1980s. Where telegram services still exist, the transmission method between offices is no longer by telegraph, but by telex or IP link.


title: Telegraphy

text: As telegrams have been traditionally charged by the word, messages were often abbreviated to pack information into the smallest possible number of words, in what came to be called "telegram style".


title: Telegraphy

text: The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer. According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters. For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters. At the end of the 19th century, the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.


title: Telegraphy

text: Telex (TELegraph EXchange) was a public switched network of teleprinters. It used rotary-telephone-style pulse dialling for automatic routing through the network. It initially used the Baudot code for messages. Telex development began in Germany in 1926, becoming an operational service in 1933 run by the Reichspost (Reich postal service). It had a speed of 50 baud—approximately 66 words per minute. Up to 25 telex channels could share a single long-distance telephone channel by using voice frequency telegraphy multiplexing, making telex the least expensive method of reliable long-distance communication. Telex was introduced into Canada in July 1957, and the United States in 1958. A new code, ASCII, was introduced in 1963 by the American Standards Association. ASCII was a 7-bit code and could thus support a larger number of characters than Baudot. In particular, ASCII supported upper and lower case whereas Baudot was upper case only.


title: Telegraphy

text: Telegraph use began to permanently decline around 1920. The decline began with the growth of the use of the telephone. Ironically, the invention of the telephone grew out of the development of the harmonic telegraph, a device which was supposed to increase the efficiency of telegraph transmission and improve the profits of telegraph companies. Western Union gave up its patent battle with Alexander Graham Bell because it believed the telephone was not a threat to its telegraph business. The Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1877 and had 230 subscribers which grew to 30,000 by 1880. By 1886 there were a quarter of a million phones worldwide, and nearly 2 million by 1900. The decline was briefly postponed by the rise of special occasion congratulatory telegrams. Traffic continued to grow between 1867 and 1893 despite the introduction of the telephone in this period, but by 1900 the telegraph was definitely in decline.


title: Telegraphy

text: There was a brief resurgence in telegraphy during World War I but the decline continued as the world entered the Great Depression years of the 1930s. After the Second World War new technology improved communication in the telegraph industry. Telegraph lines continued to be an important means of distributing news feeds from news agencies by teleprinter machine until the rise of the internet in the 1990s. For Western Union, one service remained highly profitable—the wire transfer of money. This service kept Western Union in business long after the telegraph had ceased to be important. In the modern era, the telegraph that began in 1837 has been gradually replaced by digital data transmission based on computer information systems.


title: Telegraphy

text: Optical telegraph lines were installed by governments, often for a military purpose, and reserved for official use only. In many countries, this situation continued after the introduction of the electric telegraph. Starting in Germany and the UK, electric telegraph lines were installed by railway companies. Railway use quickly led to private telegraph companies in the UK and the US offering a telegraph service to the public using telegraph along railway lines. The availability of this new form of communication brought on widespread social and economic changes.


title: Telegraphy

text: The electric telegraph freed communication from the time constraints of postal mail and revolutionized the global economy and society. By the end of the 19th century, the telegraph was becoming an increasingly common medium of communication for ordinary people. The telegraph isolated the message (information) from the physical movement of objects or the process.


title: Telegraphy

text: There was some fear of the new technology. According to author Allan J. Kimmel, some people "feared that the telegraph would erode the quality of public discourse through the transmission of irrelevant, context-free information." Henry David Thoreau thought of the Transatlantic cable "...perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Kimmel says these fears anticipate many of the characteristics of the modern internet age.


title: Telegraphy

text: Initially, the telegraph was expensive, but it had an enormous effect on three industries: finance, newspapers, and railways. Telegraphy facilitated the growth of organizations "in the railroads, consolidated financial and commodity markets, and reduced information costs within and between firms". In the US, there were 200 to 300 stock exchanges before the telegraph, but most of these were unnecessary and unprofitable once the telegraph made financial transactions at a distance easy and drove down transaction costs. This immense growth in the business sectors influenced society to embrace the use of telegrams once the cost had fallen.


title: Telegraphy

text: Worldwide telegraphy changed the gathering of information for news reporting. Journalists were using the telegraph for war reporting as early as 1846 when the Mexican–American War broke out. News agencies were formed, such as the Associated Press, for the purpose of reporting news by telegraph. Messages and information would now travel far and wide, and the telegraph demanded a language "stripped of the local, the regional; and colloquial", to better facilitate a worldwide media language. Media language had to be standardized, which led to the gradual disappearance of different forms of speech and styles of journalism and storytelling.


title: Telegraphy

text: The spread of the railways created a need for an accurate standard time to replace local arbitrary standards based on local noon. The means of achieving this synchronisation was the telegraph. This emphasis on precise time has led to major societal changes such as the concept of the time value of money.


title: Telegraphy

text: During the telegraph era there was widespread employment of women in telegraphy. The shortage of men to work as telegraph operators in the American Civil War opened up the opportunity for women of a well-paid skilled job. In the UK, there was widespread employment of women as telegraph operators even earlier – from the 1850s by all the major companies. The attraction of women for the telegraph companies was that they could pay them less than men. Nevertheless, the jobs were popular with women for the same reason as in the US; most other work available for women was very poorly paid.


title: Telegraphy

text: The economic impact of the telegraph was not much studied by economic historians until parallels started to be drawn with the rise of the internet. In fact, the electric telegraph was as important as the invention of printing in this respect. According to economist Ronnie J. Phillips, the reason for this may be that institutional economists paid more attention to advances that required greater capital investment. The investment required to build railways, for instance, is orders of magnitude greater than that for the telegraph.


title: Telegraphy

text: The optical telegraph was quickly forgotten once it went out of service. While it was in operation, it was very familiar to the public across Europe. Examples appear in many paintings of the period. Poems include "Le Telégraphe", by Victor Hugo, and the collection "Telegrafen: Optisk kalender för 1858" by is dedicated to the telegraph. In novels, the telegraph is a major component in "Lucien Leuwen" by Stendhal, and it features in "The Count of Monte Cristo", by Alexandre Dumas. Joseph Chudy's 1796 opera, "Der Telegraph oder die Fernschreibmaschine", was written to publicise Chudy's telegraph (a binary code with five lamps) when it became clear that Chappe's design was being taken up.


title: Telegraphy

text: Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem in praise of submarine telegraph cables; "And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'" Kipling's poem represented a widespread idea in the late nineteenth century that international telegraphy (and new technology in general) would bring peace and mutual understanding to the world. When a submarine telegraph cable first connected America and Britain, the "Post" declared;


title: Telegraphy

text: Numerous newspapers and news outlets in various countries, such as "The Daily Telegraph" in Britain, "The Telegraph" in India, "De Telegraaf" in the Netherlands, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the US, were given names which include the word "telegraph" due to their having received news by means of electric telegraphy. Some of these names are retained even though different means of news acquisition are now used.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Jessica Pegula (born February 24, 1994) is an American professional tennis player. She has a career-high WTA rankings in singles and doubles of world No. 3, both achieved on October 24, 2022. She has won two singles titles and five doubles titles on the WTA Tour, one WTA Challenger doubles title, and seven ITF doubles titles. She is a four-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist in singles, having reached this stage twice at the Australian Open, in 2021 and 2022, once at the 2022 French Open, and once at the 2022 US Open. She is also a major finalist in doubles, achieving this feat at the 2022 French Open with teammate Coco Gauff.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula was born on February 24, 1994 in Buffalo, New York. She is the daughter of Terry and Kim Pegula, who are the owners of the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League and the Buffalo Sabres of the National Hockey League. She is half-Korean, as her mother was born in Seoul before being adopted at age 5. She has four siblings: Kelly, Matthew, Michael, and Laura (the latter two from her father's first marriage).


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In 2021, Pegula married Taylor Gahagen, a corporate executive for Pegula Sports and Entertainment and an animal philanthropist.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In August 2016, it was announced that Pegula and her sister would be opening a quick serve restaurant called Healthy Scratch in LECOM Harborcenter, an ice hockey-themed mixed-use development owned by her parents in Buffalo, New York. The Healthy Scratch business was to be expanded to food truck service in 2017. In 2017, Pegula introduced her own skincare line called Ready 24.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: On August 30, 2011, Pegula was granted a wildcard into the main draw of the US Open doubles tournament where she was paired with Taylor Townsend. They eventually lost in the third round to the third-seeded team of Vania King and Yaroslava Shvedova.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In March 2012, Pegula was handed a wildcard to the qualifying draw in Indian Wells, and surprised higher ranked players Bojana Jovanovski and Paula Ormaechea to qualify for the main draw where she lost to Magdaléna Rybáriková in three sets.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula made her major singles debut at the US Open as a qualifier. She defeated Shuko Aoyama, Margarita Gasparyan and Melanie Oudin to reach the main draw where she beat Alison Van Uytvanck in the first round. In the second, Pegula was defeated by Dominika Cibulková, in three sets.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In 2018, Pegula reached her first WTA singles final at the Tournoi de Québec in September as a qualifier. She beat Kristýna Plíšková, Ons Jabeur, second seed Petra Martić and fifth seed Sofia Kenin en route to the final, where she lost to eighth seed Pauline Parmentier in straight sets. This brought her ranking back inside the top 200 and helped her finish the year inside the top 125.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula began the year primarily playing on the ITF Circuit, before cracking inside the top 100 in February for the first time in her career. This allowed her to enter several larger WTA Tour events, including in Indian Wells and Miami. Her best result during the early clay court season came in Charleston, where she upset world No. 12, Anastasija Sevastova, en-route to the third round. This helped her break inside the top 75 for the first time. She also competed in the main draw of a Grand Slam tournament other than the US Open for the first time. She was defeated in the first round of the French Open by eventual champion Ashleigh Barty before falling in the same stage at Wimbledon to Mihaela Buzărnescu.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula achieved the best result of her career at the start of the North American hardcourt season when she won her first WTA career singles title at the Washington Open, defeating Camila Giorgi in the final. This took her to a new career-high ranking of world no. 55. Despite failing to win another main draw match the rest of the season, Pegula finished the year ranked inside the top 100 for the first time, at No. 76.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Jessica started her 2020 tennis season at the Auckland Open where she defeated CiCi Bellis in the first round. She followed this up with two more straight set victories over Tamara Zidanšek and Alizé Cornet to reach the semifinals. There she beat Caroline Wozniacki in three sets to advance to her third career WTA singles final. Facing off against 23-time Grand Slam singles winner Serena Williams for the first time, Pegula lost in straight sets. She then competed at the Australian Open for the first time, where she was defeated by another American, Taylor Townsend, in straight sets in the first round.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula's next big triumph came at the Cicinnati Open, a Premier 5 tournament. Having already beaten two Russians to qualify for the main draw, she opened her campaign with a straight sets win over American Jennifer Brady followed by a win over another countrywoman, 2019 French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova. She then caused a huge upset by defeating fifth seed and world No. 11, Aryna Sabalenka, in the third round, thus advancing to her first quarterfinal at any WTA Premier level event. Her run came to an end with a straight-sets loss to 14th seed Elise Mertens. This took her ranking back inside the top 65.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the US Open, Pegula recovered from a set down to record her first Grand Slam main-draw win since the 2015 US Open, defeating Marie Bouzková in a third-set tiebreak. She then beat Kirsten Flipkens to advance to the third round of a Grand Slam event for the first time, where she lost to sixth seed and former world No. 2, Petra Kvitová.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula attained major success at the Australian Open, defeating former Australian Open champion and 12th seed Victoria Azarenka, Kristina Mladenovic, former US Open champion Samantha Stosur and fifth seed Elina Svitolina to reach her first Grand Slam quarterfinal where she lost to eventual runner-up, Jennifer Brady, despite winning the first set. This strong showing allowed Pegula to enter top 50 for the first time, and took her to a new career-high ranking of world No. 43.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Later in April, she achieved another career-high of world No. 32, after reaching the semifinals at the Qatar Open as a qualifier where she lost to the eventual champion, Petra Kvitová and a fourth-round run as a seeded player at the Miami Open, losing to Maria Sakkari in a tight three-set match. Her third-round win over Karolína Plíšková in Miami was the third win in a row in three tournaments over the same player.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In May, at the Italian Open, where she participated for the first time, she recorded the biggest victory of her career over world No. 2, Naomi Osaka, in the second round. This was her fifth top-ten win in 2021 and in her career. She next prevailed over Ekaterina Alexandrova to set up a quarterfinal with Petra Martić. Thanks to this great showing at her second WTA 1000 quarterfinal in 2021, after the one at Dubai, she entered top 30 for the first time.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the French Open, she reached the third round for the first time in her career where she lost to fourth seed Sofia Kenin. At the German Open in Berlin, Pegula reached the quarterfinals defeating for the fourth time Karolína Plíšková in their fourth in a row meeting in 2021. As a result, she entered the top 25 on June 21, 2021.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: She reached her third WTA 1000 quarterfinal of 2021 at the Canadian Open edition in Montreal, defeating compatriot Danielle Collins in a close three set match needing six match points to win in a thrilling finish. She then went on to reach her first WTA 1000 semifinal and second semifinal for the season, defeating 13th seed Ons Jabeur in 88 minutes.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the US Open, she reached the third round for a second consecutive year. At Indian Wells, she reached her fourth WTA 1000 quarterfinal, defeating world No. 7 (her 7th top-ten win for the season) and fourth seed, Elina Svitolina, before she lost to former two-time champion Victoria Azarenka.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula started her season in Melbourne, where she lost to Irina-Camelia Begu in the first round of the singles tournament but won her first career WTA doubles title with Asia Muhammad, beating former doubles world No. 1, Sara Errani, and Jasmine Paolini, in the final. In Sydney, she lost to Caroline Garcia in the first round.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the Australian Open, she defeated Anhelina Kalinina, Bernarda Pera, Nuria Párrizas Díaz and fifth seed Maria Sakkari to reach her second consecutive quarterfinal at this major. She lost the quarterfinal match to world No. 1 and eventual champion, Ash Barty, but moved to highest rankings in singles (No. 16) and doubles (No. 41) on January 31, 2022.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: In Doha, she won her second doubles title (and first at the WTA 1000 level) with Coco Gauff, defeating third seeds Elise Mertens and Veronika Kudermetova in the final. As a result, she reached the top 30 in doubles at No. 29 on 28 February 2022.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the Miami Open, she reached her second WTA 1000 semifinal of her career after two back-to-back retirements, Kalinina in round of 16 and Paula Badosa in the first set of the quarterfinal. In the semifinals, she lost to the eventual champion and upcoming No. 1, Iga Świątek in straight sets.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: She reached her seventh WTA 1000 quarterfinal at the Madrid Open defeating Bianca Andreescu, in straight sets. She reached her third semifinal at the WTA 1000-level and second straight for the season defeating first time Madrid quarterfinalist Sara Sorribes Tormo. Next she defeated Jil Teichmann to reach her first WTA 1000 final and become the third American to do so after Venus Williams (2010) and Serena Williams (2012 and 2013) in Madrid, where she lost to Ons Jabeur in three sets. As a result, she improved her career-high ranking to world No. 11 on 9 May 2022. Pegula reached the third round of the Italian Open as well, but lost to Aryna Sabalenka in straight sets.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Seeded 11th at the French Open, Pegula reached the quarterfinals for the first time at this major, defeating former world No. 12 Wang Qiang, Anhelina Kalinina, 2021 French Open semifinalist and 24th seed Tamara Zidansek, and Irina-Camelia Begu. She lost to top seed and eventual champion Iga Światek in the quarterfinals. As a result, she broke into the top 10 in the singles rankings for the first time, at world No. 8 on 6 June 2022. She also reached her first major final in doubles, partnering with Gauff. As a result, she reached top 15 in the doubles rankings. Seeded eighth at Wimbledon, she advanced to the third round for the first time, before losing to Petra Martić in straight sets. Following Wimbledon, she reached a new career-high ranking of world No. 7 on 18 July 2022 becoming the American No. 1 player, one spot ahead of Danielle Collins.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: As a top-seeded pair, partnering Erin Routliffe, she won her third doubles title at the Washington Open defeating fourth seeds Caty McNally and Anna Kalinskaya.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Seeded seventh at the Canadian Open, she reached back-to-back semifinals in singles, for the fourth time at the WTA 1000 level in her career and third for the season, defeating defending champion Camila Giorgi and Yulia Putintseva before losing to Simona Halep. Seeded third in doubles at the same tournament, she also reached the semifinals with Gauff defeating fifth seeds Desirae Krawczyk and Demi Schuurs. Next they defeated Madison Keys / Sania Mirza in the semifinals and Nicole Melichar / Ellen Perez in the final to win their second WTA 1000 title together. As a result, Pegula reached top 10 in the doubles rankings, at world No. 8.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the Cincinnati Open, she reached back-to-back quarterfinals defeating tenth seed Emma Raducanu, her fourth WTA 1000 quarterfinal of the season.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Seeded eighth at the US Open, she reached the fourth round, defeating Viktorija Golubic, Aliaksandra Sasnovich, and qualifier Yue Yuan. Next she defeated 21st seed Petra Kvitová to reach her first quarterfinal at her home Grand Slam championship and the third major quarterfinal of the season, where she lost to world No. 1 Światek for the third time this year. Despite the result, she moved to world No. 5, on 12 September 2022. On 13 and 14 October 2022, she qualified for the 2022 WTA Finals in singles and doubles with Gauff respectively, becoming the first American to qualify for the WTA Finals since Sloane Stephens in 2018 and the first American to qualify in both singles in doubles since Serena and Venus Williams in 2009. At the San Diego Open, Pegula lost to Światek in a US Open rematch in the semifinals, but won the doubles title with Gauff, their third title of the season together and Pegula's fifth doubles title overall. As a result, she reached a new career-high doubles ranking of world No. 4, on 17 October 2022.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the Guadalajara Open, she reached her second final at the WTA 1000 level defeating four former Grand Slam champions Elena Rybakina, Bianca Andreescu, and Sloane Stephens in the quarterfinals, and Victoria Azarenka in the semifinals. She defeated fourth seed Maria Sakkari in straight sets to win her second and biggest singles title of her career, becoming the first American woman to win a WTA 1000 title since Madison Keys in 2019. At the same tournament, she also reached quarterfinals in doubles with Gauff. As a result, she achieved new career-high rankings of world No. 3, in singles and in doubles, on 24 October 2022.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: At the WTA Finals, Pegula lost all her matches of the group stage, winning only one set in three matches. At the same tournament, she and partner Gauff surprisingly failed to win a single match and also finished last in the round-robin stage of doubles.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula made her World TeamTennis debut in 2020 joining the Orlando Storm at the start of the season, which was played at The Greenbrier.


title: Jessica Pegula

text: Pegula emerged as one of the top players in the WTT 2020 season. After the dismissal of Danielle Collins, Pegula went on to play women's singles, women's doubles with Darija Jurak, and mixed doubles with Ken Skupski and Tennys Sandgren. She posted a strong 9–2 record in singles to help the Storm earn a No. 3 seed in the WTT Playoffs. The Storm would ultimately fall to the Chicago Smash in the semifinals.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: The All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen () ( AIMIM) is an Indian political party based primarily in the city of Hyderabad. It is also a significant political party in the Indian States of Telangana and Maharashtra. It is the second largest party in Telangana Legislative Assembly and in Telangana Legislative Council. Its aim is to promote the social, economical, and educational development and effective representation of Indian Muslims and Dalits.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM has held the Lok Sabha seat for the Hyderabad constituency since 1984. In the 2014 Telangana Legislative Assembly elections, the party won seven seats and received recognition as a 'state party' by the Election Commission of India.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: For much of its existence, it had little presence beyond Hyderabad. However, in more recent years, it has begun expanding into other states. It now has a significant presence in Maharashtra, with Imtiyaz Jaleel winning the Aurangabad constituency and with multiple members elected to the Legislative Assembly. It has also made inroads in Bihar, winning five Legislative Assembly seats in 2020.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: The party has roots back to the days of the princely State of Hyderabad. It was founded and shaped by Nawab Mahmood Nawaz Khan Qiledar of Hyderabad State in the presence of Ulma-e-Mashaeqeen in 1927 as a pro-Nizam party. Then it was only Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) and the first meeting was held in the house of Nawab Mahmood Nawaz Khan on 12 November 1927. The MIM shunned integration with India and instead, advocated to set up "Muslim dominion" in India. In 1938, Bahadur Yar Jung was elected president of the MIM which had a cultural and religious manifesto. It soon acquired political complexion and after the death of Bahadur Yar Jang in 1944, Qasim Rizvi was elected as the leader.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: The Razakars, led by Kasim Razvi, were an Islamist paramilitary organization of self-styled volunteers formed, ostensibly, to resist merger with India. Razvi and MIM wanted a Muslim country to be carved out of Hyderabad as South Pakistan. The Razakars operated as "storm troopers" for the MIM. The 150,000 Razakar "soldiers", mobilized to "fight against the Indian Union" for the independence of Hyderabad State. After the Indian annexation of Hyderabad State, the MIM was banned in 1948. Qasim Rizvi was jailed from 1948 to 1957, and was released on the condition that he would go to Pakistan where he was granted an asylum.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: Before leaving, Razvi handed over the responsibility of whatever remained of the MIM to Abdul Wahed Owaisi, a lawyer. Owaisi organised it into the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. Under his leadership, the AIMIM shifted from a hardline policy of independence to a pragmatic direction. After Abdul Wahed Owaisi, his son Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi took control of AIMIM in 1975 and was referred to as "Salar E Millat" (commander of the community).


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In 1960, AIMIM won the Mallepally ward of Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. In 1962, Salahuddin won from Patharghatti assembly seat as an independent candidate and later from Charminar constituency in 1967. In 1972, he won from Yakutpura and later in 1978, again from Charminar. In 1984 Salahuddin emerged victorious in the central seat of Hyderabad, which he represented the seat until 2004. Mohammad Majid Hussain of the AIMIM was unanimously elected as the Mayor of Greater Hyderabad on 2 January 2012.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In 1993, AIMIM suffered a split, with a faction led by Amanullah Khan creating the Majlis Bachao Tehreek. As a result, AIMIM was reduced to a single Assembly seat in Andhra Pradesh in 1994. They won 4 seats in 1999, and increased their total to 7 in 2009, where they have remained since then. They joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2008, but left it in 2012.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In 2018, AIMIM allied with Prakash Ambedkar's Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi. AIMIM and VBA contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra in alliance. Imtiyaz Jaleel won the Aurangabad seat, winning a seat for AIMIM outside Hyderabad for the first time ever. Owaisi's AIMIM big scores in Maharashtra Municipal Corporation Election. The Party won 25 seats in Aurangabad, 10 in Amravati, 9 in Solapur, 7 in Malegaon, 4 in Dhule, 2 in Mumbai, 2 in Thane , 2 in Kalyan and 1 in Pune. The AIMIM Party won Total 62 Municipal corporators , 40 Municipal Councilors , 102 Grampanchayat member & 1 Zilla Parishad member in Maharashtra.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: Former RJD and JD(U) leader and Kochadhaman MLA Akhtarul Iman joined AIMIM in 2015, he was made state president of the party in Bihar. Akhtarul Iman contested 2015 Bihar Assembly Elections from Kochadhaman seat on AIMIM ticket against seating JD(U) MLA and Mahagathbandhan Candidate Mujahid Alam. Iman's popularity in his home constituency could not win him election in 2015 due to strong favour of Muslims voters towards Mahagathbandhan candidates. State President Akhtarul Iman contested from Kishanganj Lok Sabha on AIMIM ticket in the 2019 Indian general election. In triangular contest among Akhtarul Iman, Congress candidate Dr. Jawaid Azad and JD(U) candidate Mahmood Ashraf, Dr. Jawaid Azad won the elections with a comfortable margin and Akhtarul Iman was at third position.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: Later that year, Qamrul Hoda won the bye election from Kishanganj Assembly Constituency on AIMIM ticket defeating Congress candidate Dr. Jawaid Azad's mother. The seat was left vacant after Dr. Jawaid Azad's victory in the Lok Sabha election. Qamrul Huda is the first elected MLA of AIMIM in Bihar. He lost his seat in 2020 Assembly Elections.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM contested the 2020 Bihar Legislative Assembly election as part of the Grand Democratic Secular Front. The party won 5 seats in the Seemanchal region, with Iman winning from Amour, Ruknuddin Ahmed from Baisi, Izhar Asfi from Kochdhaman, Anzar Nayeemi from Bahadurganj and Shahnawaz Alam from Jokihat.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: On 29 June 2022, four out of five AIMIM MLAs joined RJD in the presence of Lalu Prasad Yadav leaving behind Amour MLA Akhtarul Iman lone party MLA in Bihar.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In an exclusive interview with Main Media after party breakup, Akhtarul Iman blamed Jokihat MLA for their action. He also claimed that every MLA was given huge sum of money in exchange for joining RJD.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM win 32 seats in Uttar Pradesh Local body election in 2017. AIMIM contested on 100 seats in 2022 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly election but failed miserably. AIMIM lost election on all seats.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In many such constituencies, they have indirectly split the secular votes and made BJP win , hence been termed as "BJP Agent" by many opposition leaders.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM made impressive debut in Amdavad Municipal Corporation. They contested 21 seats and won 7. AIMIM panel won all seats in Jamalpur and Maktampura Wards. All 7 seats AIMIM won came at the cost of Congress, these seats belonged to Congress in 2015. After few days AIMIM likely contest to Gujarat Municipality election & he succeeded. Party won 9 seats in Modasa , 8 in Godhra & 2 seats in Bharuch. Later AIMIM won Bharuch municipality ward no 10 bye election by 1400 votes.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM won 4 Corporators seats in Karnataka Municipal Corporation. 3 in Hubli & 1 in Belgavi. In City Council election AIMIM won 4 Councillors in Bidar (2) & Kolar (2) Municipality.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM opened its account in Tamil Nadu by winning 2 seats of the 16 wards it contested in Vaniyambadi municipal elections 2022. Tamil Nadu is the fourth state in south India after Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to have its representation in municipal bodies.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: The main party office is located within Darussalam, where Deccan College of Engineering and Technology, Deccan School of Pharmacy, Deccan School of Planning and Architecture, and Deccan School of Management are also located. The Etemaad Press Office is also situated adjacent to the engineering college. The open grounds on the campus are also used from time to time to organize political gatherings (termed as "jalsa") where the party leaders deliver speeches to public and media alike.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM has occasionally fielded Hindus in various assembly and local body elections. The AIMIM selected Alampally Pochiah as its First Mayor in the City. MIM had three Hindu Hyderabad mayors- K. Prakash Rao, A. Satyanarayana and Alampalli Pochaiah. A Muralidhar Reddy, Hindu candidate being fielded for an assembly seat by Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen from Rajendranagar constituency.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In 2013 local elections the party fielded a woman candidate from Hindu OBC, V.Bhanumathi, who won election against Hajira Sultana from Congress by 1,282 votes.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: Aurangabad Municipal Corporation AIMIM fielded 12 non-Muslim candidates, mostly underprivileged Hindus referred to as Dalits. Of these 12, five non-Muslims — Sangeeta Waghule, Lata Nikhalge, Gangadhar Dhage, Sarita Borde and Vikas Edke won.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: AIMIM has announced 19 Hindus candidates in various assembly seats in 2022 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly election, with Pandit Manmohan Jha Gama being the first one.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: Multiple members of the party have been accused of inciting violence, fear mongering and hate speech.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In 2007, the floor leader of the party in the Telangana Assembly, Akbaruddin Owaisi, threatened to kill the writer Taslima Nasreen should she ever visit Hyderabad again. Nasreen was later attacked during a book launch for the Telugu translation of her novel "Shodh".


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: In February 2020, Police from India's Kalaburagi, Karnataka region charged party leader Waris Pathan for alleged hate speech. In the speech Pathon allegedly expressed Anti-Hindu sentiment by positing, "To those saying we have only put our women at the forefront of the protest against the CAA, NRC and NPR, only our lionesses have come out till now and you are already sweating. Imagine what will happen if we all men came together. We are 15 crore, which can outweigh their 100 crore". Waris later apologised for the comments via Twitter while the party's president Asaduddin Owaisi advised him not to make provocative remarks in public.


title: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen

text: During the 2020 Delhi riots, AIMIM organized two medical relief camps in Delhi and donated medicines worth 40 Lakhs. Asaduddin Owaisi announced that all elected representatives of AIMIM will donate one month of their salary for those affected by the Delhi riots.


title: Rock dove

text: The rock dove, rock pigeon, or common pigeon ( also ; Columba livia) is a member of the bird family Columbidae (doves and pigeons). In common usage, it is often simply referred to as the "pigeon".


title: Rock dove

text: The domestic pigeon ("Columba livia domestica", which includes about 1,000 different breeds) descended from this species. Escaped domestic pigeons have increased the populations of feral pigeons around the world.


title: Rock dove

text: Wild rock doves are pale grey with two black bars on each wing, whereas domestic and feral pigeons vary in colour and pattern. Few differences are seen between males and females. The species is generally monogamous, with two squabs (young) per brood. Both parents care for the young for a time.


title: Rock dove

text: Habitats include various open and semi-open environments. Cliffs and rock ledges are used for roosting and breeding in the wild. Originally found wild in Europe, North Africa, and western Asia, pigeons have become established in cities around the world. The species is abundant, with an estimated population of 17 to 28 million feral and wild birds in Europe alone and up to 120 million worldwide.


title: Rock dove

text: The rock dove was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's "Systema Naturae". He placed it with all the other doves and pigeons in the genus "Columba" and coined the binomial name "Columba livia". The genus name "Columba" is the Latin word meaning "pigeon, dove", whose older etymology comes from the Ancient Greek κόλυμβος ("kolumbos"), "a diver", from "κολυμβάω" (kolumbao), "dive, plunge headlong, swim". Aristophanes (Birds, 304) and others use the word κολυμβίς ("kolumbis"), "diver", for the name of the bird, because of its swimming motion in the air. The specific epithet "livia" is a medieval Latin variant of "livida", "livid, bluish-gray"; this was Theodorus Gaza's translation of Greek "peleia", "dove", itself thought to be derived from "pellos", "dark-colored". Its closest relative in the genus "Columba" is the hill pigeon, followed by the other rock pigeons: the snow, speckled, and white-collared pigeons. Pigeon chicks are called "squabs".


title: Rock dove

text: Note that members of the lesser known pigeon genus "Petrophassa" and the speckled pigeon ("Columba guinea"), also have the common name “rock pigeon”.


title: Rock dove

text: The rock dove was first described by German naturalist Johann Gmelin in 1789. The rock dove was central to Charles Darwin's discovery of evolution, and featured in four of his works from 1859 to 1872. Darwin posited that, despite wide-ranging morphological differences, the many hundreds of breeds of domestic pigeon could all be traced back to the wild rock dove; in essence human selection of pigeon breeds was analogous to natural selection.


title: Rock dove

text: Centuries of domestication have greatly altered the rock dove. Feral pigeons, which have escaped domestication throughout history, have significant variations in plumage. When not specified, descriptions are for assumed wild type, though the wild type may be on the verge of extinction or already extinct.


title: Rock dove

text: The adult of the nominate subspecies of the rock dove is long with a wingspan. Weight for wild or feral rock doves ranges from , though overfed domestic and semidomestic individuals can exceed normal weights. It has a dark bluish-grey head, neck, and chest with glossy yellowish, greenish, and reddish-purple iridescence along its neck and wing feathers. The iris is orange, red, or golden with a paler inner ring, and the bare skin round the eye is bluish-grey. The bill is grey-black with a conspicuous off-white cere, and the feet are purplish-red. Among standard measurements, the wing chord is typically around , the tail is , the bill is around , and the tarsus is .


title: Rock dove

text: The adult female is almost identical in outward appearance to the male, but the iridescence on her neck is less intense and more restricted to the rear and sides, whereas that on the breast is often very obscure.


title: Rock dove

text: The white lower back of the pure rock dove is its best identification characteristic; the two black bars on its pale grey wings are also distinctive. The tail has a black band on the end, and the outer web of the tail feathers are margined with white. It is strong and quick on the wing, dashing out from sea caves, flying low over the water, its lighter grey rump showing well from above.


title: Rock dove

text: Young birds show little lustre and are duller. Eye colour of the pigeon is generally orange, but a few pigeons may have white-grey eyes. The eyelids are orange and encapsulated in a grey-white eye ring. The feet are red to pink.


title: Rock dove

text: When circling overhead, the white underwing of the bird becomes conspicuous. In its flight, behaviour, and voice, which is more of a dovecot "coo" than the phrase of the wood pigeon, it is a typical pigeon. Although it is a relatively strong flier, it also glides frequently, holding its wings in a very pronounced V shape as it does. As prey birds, they must keep their vigilance, and when disturbed a pigeon within a flock will take off with a noisy clapping sound that cues for other pigeons to take to flight. The noise of the take-off increases the faster a pigeon beats its wings, thus advertising the magnitude of a perceived threat to its flockmates.


title: Rock dove

text: Feral pigeons are essentially the same size and shape as the original wild rock dove, but often display far greater variation in colour and pattern compared to their wild ancestors. The blue-barred pattern which the original wild rock dove displays is generally less common in more urban areas. Urban pigeons tend to have darker plumage than those in more rural areas.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons feathers have two types of melanin (pigment) – eumelanin and pheomelanin. A study of melanin in the feathers of both wild rock and domestic pigeons, of different coloration types and known genetic background, measured the concentration, distribution and proportions of eumelanin and pheomelanin and found that gene mutations affecting the distribution, amounts and proportions of pigments accounted for the greater variation of coloration in domesticated birds than in their wild relations. Eumelanin generally causes grey or black colouration, while pheomelanin results in a reddish-brown colour. Other shades of brown may be produced through different combinations and concentrations of the two colours. As in other animals, white pigeons have little to no pigment. Darker birds may be better able to store trace metals in their feathers due to their higher concentrations of melanin, which may help mitigate the negative effects of the metals, the concentrations of which are typically higher in urban areas. Pigeons, especially homing or carrier breeds, are well known for their ability to find their way home from long distances. Despite these demonstrated abilities, wild rock doves are sedentary and rarely leave their local areas. It is hypothesized that in their natural, arid habitat, they rely on this sense to navigate back home after foraging as deserts rarely possess navigational landmarks that may be used.


title: Rock dove

text: A rock pigeon's lifespan ranges from 3–5 years in the wild to 15 years in captivity, though longer-lived specimens have been reported. The main causes of mortality in the wild are predators and persecution by humans. Some sources state the species was first introduced to North America in 1606 at Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Although other sources cite Plymouth and Jamestown settlements in the early 17th century as the first place for species introduction in North America.


title: Rock dove

text: The call is a soft, slightly wavering, coo. Ornithologist David Sibley describes the display call as a "whoo, hoo-witoo-hoo", whereas the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes it as a "Coo, roo-c'too-coo". Variations include an alarm call, a nest call, and noises made by juveniles. Sibley describes the nest call as a repeated "hu-hu-hurrr". When displaying, songs are partly sexual, partly threatening. They are accompanied by an inflated throat, tail fanning, strutting, and bowing. The alarm call, given at sight of predators, is a grunt-like "oorhh".


title: Rock dove

text: Non-vocal sounds include a loud flapping noise at take-off, feet stomping, hisses, and beak snapping. Wings may also be clapped during flights, usually during display fights or after copulation. Juveniles particularly snap their bills, usually to respond to nest invasion. The foot stomping appears deliberate, though for what purpose is unclear. Foot stomping is done with a certain foot first, showing that rock doves have "footedness", similar to human handedness.


title: Rock dove

text: Before the Columbian Exchange, rock doves were restricted to a natural resident range in western and southern Europe, North Africa, and extending into South Asia. They were carried into the New World aboard European ships between 1603 and 1607. The species (including ferals) has a large range, with an estimated global extent of occurrence of . It has a large global population, including an estimated 17 to 28 million individuals in Europe. Fossil evidence suggests the rock dove originated in southern Asia, and skeletal remains, unearthed in Israel, confirm its existence there for at least 300,000 years. However, this species has such a long history with humans that it is impossible to identify its original range exactly.


title: Rock dove

text: Wild pigeons reside in rock formations and cliff faces, settling in crevices to nest. They nest communally, often forming large colonies of many hundreds of individuals. Wild nesting sites include caves, canyons, and sea cliffs. They will even live in the Sahara so long as an area has rocks, water, and some plant matter. They prefer to avoid dense vegetation.


title: Rock dove

text: Rock doves have a commensal relationship with humans, gaining both ample access to food and nesting spots in civilized areas. Human structures provide an excellent imitation of cliff structures, making rock doves very common around human habitation. Skyscrapers, highway overpasses, farm buildings, abandoned buildings, and other human structures with ample crevices are conducive to rock dove nesting. Thus the modern range of the rock dove is due in large part to humans. Agricultural settlements are favored over forested ones. Ideal human nesting attributes combine areas with tall buildings, green spaces, ample access to human food, and schools. Conversely, suburban areas which are far from city centers and have high street density are the least conducive to pigeons. Their versatility among human structures is evidenced by a population living inside a deep well in Tunisia.


title: Rock dove

text: Feral pigeons are usually unable to find these accommodations, so they must nest on building ledges, walls or statues. They may damage these structures via their feces; starving birds can only excrete urates, which over time corrodes masonry and metal. In contrast, a well-fed bird passes mostly solid feces, containing only small amounts of uric acid.


title: Rock dove

text: The rock dove breeds at any time of the year, but peak times are spring and summer. Nesting sites are along coastal cliff faces, as well as the artificial cliff faces created by apartment buildings with accessible ledges or roof spaces. Pigeons can compete with native birds for nest sites. For some avian species, such as seabirds, it could be a conservation issue. Current evidence suggests that wild, domestic and feral pigeons mate for life, although their long-term bonds are not unbreakable. They are socially monogamous, but extra-pair matings do occur, often initiated by males. Due to their ability to produce crop milk, pigeons can breed at any time of year. Pigeons breed when the food supply is abundant enough to support embryonic egg development, which in cities, can be any time of the year. Laying of eggs can take place up to six times per year.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons are often found in pairs during the breeding season, but usually the pigeons are gregarious, living in flocks of 50 to 500 birds (dependent on the food supply).


title: Rock dove

text: Courtship rituals can be observed in urban parks at any time of the year. The male on the ground or rooftops puffs up the feathers on his neck to appear larger and thereby impress or attract attention. He approaches the female at a rapid walking pace while emitting repetitive quiet notes, often bowing and turning as he comes closer. At first, the female invariably walks or flies a short distance away and the male follows her until she stops. At this point, he continues the bowing motion and very often makes full- or half-pirouettes in front of the female. The male then proceeds to feed the female by regurgitating food, as they do when feeding the young. The male then mounts the female, rearing backwards to be able to join their cloacae. The mating is very brief, with the male flapping his wings to maintain balance on top of the female.


title: Rock dove

text: The nest is a flimsy platform of straw and sticks, laid on a ledge, under cover, often on the window ledges of buildings. Two white eggs are laid; incubation, shared by both parents, lasts 17 to 19 days. The newly hatched squab (nestling) has pale yellow down and a flesh-coloured bill with a dark band. For the first few days, the baby squabs are tended and fed (through regurgitation) exclusively on "crop milk" (also called "pigeon milk" or "pigeon's milk"). The pigeon milk is produced in the crops of both parents in all species of pigeon and dove. The fledging period is about 30 days.


title: Rock dove

text: Studies of pigeons in a semi-rural part of Kansas found that their diet includes the following: 92% maize, 3.2% oats, 3.7% cherry, along with small amounts of knotweed, elm, poison ivy and barley. Feral pigeons can be seen eating grass seeds and berries in parks and gardens in the spring, but plentiful sources exist throughout the year from scavenging (e.g., food remnants left inside of dropped fast food cartons, in the form of popcorn, cake, peanuts, bread and currants) and they also eat insects and spiders. Additional food is also usually available from waste bins, tourists or residents who feed bird seed to pigeons for reasons such as empathy, fun, tradition and as a means for social interaction. Pigeons tend to congregate in large, often thick flocks when feeding on discarded food, and may be observed flying skillfully around trees, buildings, telephone poles and cables and even through moving traffic just to reach a food source.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons feed on the ground in flocks or individually. Pigeons are naturally granivorous, eating seeds that fit down their gullet. They may sometimes consume small invertebrates such as worms or insect larvae as a protein supplement. As they do not possess an enlarged cecum as in European wood pigeons, they cannot digest adult plant tissue; the various seeds they eat containing the appropriate nutrients they require. While most birds take small sips and tilt their heads backwards when drinking, pigeons are able to dip their bills into the water and drink continuously, without having to tilt their heads back. In cities they typically resort to scavenging human garbage, as unprocessed grain may be impossible to find. Pigeon groups typically consist of producers, which locate and obtain food, and scroungers, which feed on food obtained by the producers. Generally, groups of pigeons contain a greater proportion of scroungers than producers.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons primarily use powder down feathers for preening, which gives a soft and silky feel to their plumage. They have no preen gland or at times have very rudimentary preen glands, so oil is not used for preening. Rather, powder down feathers are spread across the body. These have a tendency to disintegrate, and the powder, akin to talcum powder, helps maintain the plumage. Some varieties of domestic pigeon have modified feathers called "fat quills". These feathers contain yellow, oil-like fat that derives from the same cells as powder down. This is used while preening and helps reduce bacterial degradation of feathers by feather bacilli.


title: Rock dove

text: With only their flying abilities protecting them from predation, rock pigeons are a favourite almost around the world for a wide range of raptors. In fact, with feral pigeons existing in almost every city in the world, they may form the majority of prey for several raptor species that live in urban areas. Peregrine falcons and Eurasian sparrowhawks are natural predators of pigeons and quite adept at catching and feeding upon this species. Up to 80% of the diet of peregrine falcons in several cities that have breeding falcons is composed of feral pigeons. Some common predators of feral pigeons in North America are opossums, raccoons, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, eastern screech owls, and accipiters. The birds that prey on pigeons in North America can range in size from American kestrels to golden eagles and may even include gulls, crows and ravens. On the ground the adults, their young and their eggs are at risk from feral and domestic cats. Doves and pigeons are considered to be game birds, since many species are hunted and used for food in many of the countries in which they are native.


title: Rock dove

text: The body feathers have dense, fluffy bases and are loosely attached to the skin, hence they drop out easily. When a predator catches a pigeon large numbers of feathers come out in the attacker's mouth and the pigeon may use this temporary distraction to make an escape. It also tends to drop the tail feathers when preyed upon or under traumatic conditions, probably as a distraction mechanism.


title: Rock dove

text: They often host the intestinal helminths "Capillaria columbae" and "Ascaridia columbae". Their ectoparasites include the ischnoceran lice "Columbicola columbae", "Campanulotes bidentatus compar", the amblyceran lice "Bonomiella columbae", "Hohorstiella lata", "Colpocephalum turbinatum", the mites "Tinaminyssus melloi", "Dermanyssus gallinae", "Dermoglyphus columbae", "Falculifer rostratus" and "Diplaegidia columbae". The hippoboscid fly "Pseudolynchia canariensis" is a typical blood-sucking ectoparasite of pigeons in tropical and subtropical regions.


title: Rock dove

text: Rock doves have been domesticated for several thousand years, giving rise to the domestic pigeon ("Columba livia domestica"). They may have been domesticated as long as 5,000 years ago. Numerous breeds of fancy pigeons of all sizes, colours, and types have been bred. Domesticated pigeons are used as homing pigeons as well as food and pets. They were in the past also used as carrier pigeons.


title: Rock dove

text: So-called war pigeons have played significant roles during wartime, and many pigeons have received awards and medals for their services in saving hundreds of human lives.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons have notably been "employed" as medical imaging data sorters. They have been successfully trained under research conditions to examine data on a screen for the purposes of detecting breast cancer. They appear to use their innate visual navigation skills to do so.


title: Rock dove

text: Many domestic birds have got lost, escaped or been released over the years and have given rise to feral pigeons. These show a variety of plumages, although many have the blue-barred pattern as does the pure rock dove. Feral pigeons are found in cities and towns all over the world. The scarcity of the pure wild species is partly due to interbreeding with feral birds.


title: Rock dove

text: Contact with pigeon droppings poses a minor risk of contracting histoplasmosis, cryptococcosis and psittacosis, and long-term exposure to both droppings and feathers can induce an allergy known as bird fancier's lung.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons are not a major concern in the spread of West Nile virus: though they can contract it, they apparently do not transmit it.


title: Rock dove

text: Some contagions are transmitted by pigeons; for example, the bacteria "Chlamydophila psittaci" is endemic among pigeons and causes psittacosis in humans. It is generally transmitted from handling pigeons or their droppings (more commonly the latter). Psittacosis is a serious disease but rarely fatal (less than 1%). Pigeons are also important vectors for various species of the bacteria "Salmonella", which causes diseases such as salmonellosis and paratyphoid fever.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons are also known to host avian mites, which can infest human habitation and bite humans, a condition known as gamasoidosis. However, infesting mammals is relatively rare.


title: Rock dove

text: Pigeons may, however, carry and spread avian influenza. One study has shown that adult pigeons are not clinically susceptible to the most dangerous strain of avian influenza, H5N1, and that they do not transmit the virus to poultry. Other studies have presented evidence of clinical signs and neurological lesions resulting from infection but found that the pigeons did not transmit the disease to poultry reared in direct contact with them. Pigeons were found to be "resistant or minimally susceptible" to other strains of avian influenza, such as the H7N7.


title: Rock dove

text: Research into whether pigeons play a part in spreading bird flu have shown pigeons do not carry the deadly H5N1 strain. Three studies have been done since the late 1990s by the US Agriculture Department's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia, according to the center's director, David Swayne. The lab has been working on bird flu since the 1970s. In one experiment, researchers squirted into pigeons' mouths liquid drops that contained the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus from a Hong Kong sample. The birds received 100 to 1,000 times the concentration that wild birds would encounter in nature. "We couldn't infect the pigeons," Swayne said. "So that's good news."


title: Glycine

text: Glycine (symbol Gly or G; ) is an amino acid that has a single hydrogen atom as its side chain. It is the simplest stable amino acid (carbamic acid is unstable), with the chemical formula NH‐CH‐COOH. Glycine is one of the proteinogenic amino acids. It is encoded by all the codons starting with GG (GGU, GGC, GGA, GGG). Glycine is integral to the formation of alpha-helices in secondary protein structure due to its compact form. For the same reason, it is the most abundant amino acid in collagen triple-helices. Glycine is also an inhibitory neurotransmitter – interference with its release within the spinal cord (such as during a "Clostridium tetani" infection) can cause spastic paralysis due to uninhibited muscle contraction.


title: Glycine

text: It is the only achiral proteinogenic amino acid. It can fit into hydrophilic or hydrophobic environments, due to its minimal side chain of only one hydrogen atom.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine was discovered in 1820 by the French chemist Henri Braconnot when he hydrolyzed gelatin by boiling it with sulfuric acid. He originally called it "sugar of gelatin", but the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault showed that it contained nitrogen. The American scientist Eben Norton Horsford, then a student of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, proposed the name "glycocoll"; however, the Swedish chemist Berzelius suggested the simpler name "glycine". The name comes from the Greek word γλυκύς "sweet tasting" (which is also related to the prefixes "glyco-" and "gluco-", as in "glycoprotein" and "glucose"). In 1858, the French chemist Auguste Cahours determined that glycine was an amine of acetic acid.


title: Glycine

text: Although glycine can be isolated from hydrolyzed protein, this route is not used for industrial production, as it can be manufactured more conveniently by chemical synthesis. The two main processes are amination of chloroacetic acid with ammonia, giving glycine and ammonium chloride, and the Strecker amino acid synthesis, which is the main synthetic method in the United States and Japan. About 15 thousand tonnes are produced annually in this way.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is also cogenerated as an impurity in the synthesis of EDTA, arising from reactions of the ammonia coproduct.<ref name="Ullmann/Roger"></ref>


title: Glycine

text: Its acid–base properties are most important. In aqueous solution, glycine is amphoteric: below pH = 2.4, it converts to the ammonium cation called glycinium. Above about 9.6, it converts to glycinate.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine functions as a bidentate ligand for many metal ions, forming amino acid complexes. A typical complex is Cu(glycinate), i.e. Cu(HNCHCO), which exists both in cis and trans isomers.


title: Glycine

text: With acid chlorides, glycine converts to the amidocarboxylic acid, such as hippuric acid and acetylglycine. With nitrous acid, one obtains glycolic acid (van Slyke determination). With methyl iodide, the amine becomes quaternized to give trimethylglycine, a natural product:


title: Glycine

text: It forms esters with alcohols. They are often isolated as their hydrochloride, e.g., glycine methyl ester hydrochloride. Otherwise the free ester tends to convert to diketopiperazine.


title: Glycine

text: As a bifunctional molecule, glycine reacts with many reagents. These can be classified into N-centered and carboxylate-center reactions.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is not essential to the human diet, as it is biosynthesized in the body from the amino acid serine, which is in turn derived from 3-phosphoglycerate, but the metabolic capacity for glycine biosynthesis does not satisfy the need for collagen synthesis. In most organisms, the enzyme serine hydroxymethyltransferase catalyses this transformation via the cofactor pyridoxal phosphate:


title: Glycine

text: In the liver of vertebrates, glycine synthesis is catalyzed by glycine synthase (also called glycine cleavage enzyme). This conversion is readily reversible:


title: Glycine

text: In addition to being synthesized from serine, glycine can also be derived from threonine, choline or hydroxyproline via inter-organ metabolism of the liver and kidneys.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is degraded via three pathways. The predominant pathway in animals and plants is the reverse of the glycine synthase pathway mentioned above. In this context, the enzyme system involved is usually called the glycine cleavage system:


title: Glycine

text: In the second pathway, glycine is degraded in two steps. The first step is the reverse of glycine biosynthesis from serine with serine hydroxymethyl transferase. Serine is then converted to pyruvate by serine dehydratase.


title: Glycine

text: In the third pathway of its degradation, glycine is converted to glyoxylate by D-amino acid oxidase. Glyoxylate is then oxidized by hepatic lactate dehydrogenase to oxalate in an NAD-dependent reaction.


title: Glycine

text: The half-life of glycine and its elimination from the body varies significantly based on dose. In one study, the half-life varied between 0.5 and 4.0 hours.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is extremely sensitive to antibiotics which target folate, and blood glycine levels drop severely within a minute of antibiotic injections. Some antibiotics can deplete more than 90% of glycine within a few minutes of being administered.


title: Glycine

text: The principal function of glycine is it acts as a precursor to proteins. Most proteins incorporate only small quantities of glycine, a notable exception being collagen, which contains about 35% glycine due to its periodically repeated role in the formation of collagen's helix structure in conjunction with hydroxyproline. In the genetic code, glycine is coded by all codons starting with GG, namely GGU, GGC, GGA and GGG.


title: Glycine

text: In higher eukaryotes, δ-aminolevulinic acid, the key precursor to porphyrins, is biosynthesized from glycine and succinyl-CoA by the enzyme ALA synthase. Glycine provides the central CN subunit of all purines.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, especially in the spinal cord, brainstem, and retina. When glycine receptors are activated, chloride enters the neuron via ionotropic receptors, causing an inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSP). Strychnine is a strong antagonist at ionotropic glycine receptors, whereas bicuculline is a weak one. Glycine is a required co-agonist along with glutamate for NMDA receptors. In contrast to the inhibitory role of glycine in the spinal cord, this behaviour is facilitated at the (NMDA) glutamatergic receptors which are excitatory. The of glycine is 7930 mg/kg in rats (oral), and it usually causes death by hyperexcitability.


title: Glycine

text: In the US, glycine is typically sold in two grades: United States Pharmacopeia (“USP”), and technical grade. USP grade sales account for approximately 80 to 85 percent of the U.S. market for glycine. If purity greater than the USP standard is needed, for example for intravenous injections, a more expensive pharmaceutical grade glycine can be used. Technical grade glycine, which may or may not meet USP grade standards, is sold at a lower price for use in industrial applications, e.g., as an agent in metal complexing and finishing.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is not widely used in foods for its nutritional value, except in infusions. Instead glycine's role in food chemistry is as a flavorant. It is mildly sweet, and it counters the aftertaste of saccharine. It also has preservative properties, perhaps owing to its complexation to metal ions. Metal glycinate complexes, e.g. copper(II) glycinate are used as supplements for animal feeds.


title: Glycine

text: The U.S. "Food and Drug Administration no longer regards glycine and its salts as generally recognized as safe for use in human food".


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is an intermediate in the synthesis of a variety of chemical products. It is used in the manufacture of the herbicides glyphosate, iprodione, glyphosine, imiprothrin, and eglinazine. It is used as an intermediate of the medicine such as thiamphenicol.


title: Glycine

text: Glycine is a significant component of some solutions used in the SDS-PAGE method of protein analysis. It serves as a buffering agent, maintaining pH and preventing sample damage during electrophoresis. Glycine is also used to remove protein-labeling antibodies from Western blot membranes to enable the probing of numerous proteins of interest from SDS-PAGE gel. This allows more data to be drawn from the same specimen, increasing the reliability of the data, reducing the amount of sample processing, and number of samples required. This process is known as stripping.


title: Glycine

text: The presence of glycine outside the earth was confirmed in 2009, based on the analysis of samples that had been taken in 2004 by the NASA spacecraft "Stardust" from comet Wild 2 and subsequently returned to earth. Glycine had previously been identified in the Murchison meteorite in 1970. The discovery of glycine in outer space bolstered the hypothesis of so called , which claims that the "building blocks" of life are widespread throughout the universe. In 2016, detection of glycine within Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by the "Rosetta" spacecraft was announced.


title: Glycine

text: The detection of glycine outside the Solar System in the interstellar medium has been debated. In 2008, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy discovered the spectral lines of a glycine precursor (aminoacetonitrile) in the Large Molecule Heimat, a giant gas cloud near the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius.