Stanislovas Svetkus Rapolionis (, ;  – May 13, 1545) was a Lutheran activist and Protestant reformer from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With patronage of Albert, Duke of Prussia, he obtained the doctorate of theology from the Protestant University of Wittenberg where he studied under Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. After graduation, he became the first professor of theology at the newly established University of Königsberg, also known as Albertina. As professor he began working on several Protestant publications and translations, including a Bible translation into Polish. It is believed that he also started the first translation of the Bible into Lithuanian. Together with Abraomas Kulvietis, Rapolionis was one of the first authors to write in the Lithuanian language. While Rapolionis and Kulvietis died early leaving their work unfinished, they laid the foundations for future Lithuanian writers and translators.

Early life and studies in Kraków
Very little is known about Rapolionis' life prior to his studies at the University of Wittenberg in 1542 and most of his early biography is a conjecture. He hailed from a petty Lithuanian noble family from the area of Eišiškės that possibly used the Działosza coat of arms (image similar to Działosza was added next to his name in a registry at the University of Königsberg). His date of birth is unknown. In 1726, Michael Lilienthal wrote that Rapolionis died at age 60 which would put his date of birth around 1485. However, newer publications usually list his date of birth as .

All early biographers of Rapolionis stated that he was a Franciscan friar in Vilnius before his conversion to Lutheranism possibly around 1525. He was an educated man and earned a living as a private tutor to the nobility. It is believed that Rapolionis gained support from Jonas Stanislovas Bilevičius, a Samogitian nobleman, and prepared a group of students for studies at the University of Kraków, the only university in the region at that time. He and his five students enrolled into the university on August 3, 1528. It is likely that Abraomas Kulvietis who matriculated on July 6 also belonged to the group. Rapolionis entered his name as Stanislovas, son of Jurgis of Raseiniai, Diocese of Samogitia (Stanislaus Georgy de Rozeny dioecesis Smodiensis) possibly to obscure his identity as he, a former monk, was joining a Catholic university. He graduated with a baccalaureate in 1532 or 1533.

There is no information available on Rapolionis' activities from 1532 to 1542. Possibly he was a tutor to the nobility or taught at a higher school established by Abraomas Kulvietis in Vilnius. Grand Duke Sigismund I the Old did not support the Reformation and in May 1542 issued an edict on heresy aimed at Kulvietis and other Protestants who could now be tried by the bishop. Many Protestant activists left the Grand Duchy and settled in the Lutheran Duchy of Prussia.

Studies in Wittenberg
Rapolionis received financial support from Duke Albert of Prussia and enrolled into the University of Wittenberg on March 22, 1542. A surviving advertisement from that time shows that Rapolionis offered private lessons in the Hebrew language. He received a doctorate in theology after publicly defending his 28 theses on May 23, 1544. The defense was chaired by Martin Luther (only 13 defenses were chaired by Luther himself during the last decade of his life) and likely Philip Melanchthon acted as a doctoral advisor. Rapolionis thesis Die poenitentia (On Repentance) about good deeds and their impact on the judgement was inspired by the Diet of Regensburg (1541). The defense protocol was written by  and spread in Lutheran centers (a copy is preserved by the Academic Library of the University of Latvia). On May 29, Rapolionis was awarded insignia of a doctor of theology (cap, ring, and Bible) and Caspar Creuziger delivered a speech De dono interpretationis in ecclesia which emphasized the importance of correctly explaining the word of God to lay people. The ceremony was concluded with a public procession through the city and a large feast.

Last year in Königsberg
Rapolionis departed to Königsberg where he participated in the foundation of the Collegium Albertinum, later University of Königsberg. He became the first head of the Faculty of Theology at the new university. His annual salary was 200 guldens which was the highest salary offered and reflected the importance of his position. He taught theology, Hebrew language, and psalms. While short and with a hump, Rapolionis became known for his rhetoric abilities and his lectures became popular and were attended by prominent members of the Prussian establishment, including Duke Albert.

Rapolionis was professionally active for less than a year. He wrote and published 42 Latin thesis De ecclesia et eius notis on some of the fundamental features of Lutheranism. Using Biblical arguments, he explained why the Reformed church was opposed to the cult of saints, celibacy of priests, evangelical counsels, the Sacrament of Penance, absolution from mortal sins, and other issues. The original edition, published by Hans Weinreich, has not survived but the text was republished by  in 1558 and 1562.

Rapolinis was also active in translation work. He evaluated the catechism translated by Jan Seklucjan into Polish and approved it for use in the Bishopric of Pomesania despite some criticism and resistance from the clergy. He worked on a translation of the Bible into Polish. Surviving letters show that Rapolionis corresponded with Bernard Wojewodka, a printer in Kraków, about setting up a shop in Königsberg for the purpose of printing the Polish Bible. Rapolinis translated at least one hymn into Lithuanian. It seems that he translated it from the original Latin Patris sapientia, veritas divina instead of using Polish or German translations. It has ten stanzas eight lines each. The hymn was published as Giesme ape kenteghima Jhesaus Christaus amszinoija Diewa sunaus in 1570 in the hymnal of Martynas Mažvydas and it is the only undisputed surviving text by Rapolionis in the Lithuanian language. Researchers believe that Rapolionis started translating the Bible into Lithuanian, though there is no direct evidence.

In November 1544, Rapolionis married Catherine, daughter of , the personal physician of the Duke of Prussia. The cost of the wedding was paid by the Duke. In May 1545, Rapolionis suddenly suffered an attack of apoplexy and paralysis. He died a few days later on May 13. Duke Albert blamed disagreements and intrigues at the university for his sudden death. Duke Albert personally attended the large funeral ceremony and ordered his body entombed in Königsberg Cathedral; the funeral sermon was delivered by ; his eulogy was written by Bernardus Holtorpius. His 8-line epitaph started with "Here lies a great man, the pride of the Lithuanian nation". The tomb has not survived.

References

Further reading

1480s births
1545 deaths
15th-century Lithuanian nobility
16th-century Lithuanian nobility
Lithuanian writers
Lithuanian theologians
Lutheran theologians
Lithuanian Lutherans
People from the Duchy of Prussia
Writers from Vilnius
Jagiellonian University alumni
University of Wittenberg alumni
Academic staff of the University of Königsberg
Converts to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism

Stanislovas Rapolionis


The Richards Medical Research Laboratories, located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, were designed by architect Louis Kahn and are considered to have been a breakthrough in his career. The building is configured as a group of laboratory towers with a central service tower. Brick shafts on the periphery hold stairwells and air ducts, producing an effect reminiscent of the ancient Italian towers that Kahn had painted several years earlier.

Rather than being supported by a hidden steel frame, the building has a structure of reinforced concrete that is clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight. Built with precisely-formed prefabricated concrete elements, the techniques used in its construction advanced the state of the art for reinforced concrete.

Despite observable shortcomings, this building helped set new directions for modern architecture with its clear expression of served and servant spaces and its evocation of the architecture of the past. The Richards Laboratories, along with the associated Goddard Laboratories, which were also designed by Kahn and are treated by architectural historians as the second phase of the Richards project, have been designated a National Historic Landmark.

History

When the University of Pennsylvania decided it needed a new medical research building, the dean of fine arts recommended Louis Kahn, a highly regarded professor of architecture on the faculty there who had been exploring new approaches for modern architecture. Kahn received the commission for the building in 1957, and it was completed in 1960.

It was named the Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Laboratories Building in honor of a Alfred Newton Richards, a researcher and former chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. It quickly received widespread acclaim from the architectural community but also criticism from the scientists who occupied it.

Completed when Kahn was almost 60, this was his first work to achieve international acclaim. In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art sponsored an exhibition devoted exclusively to it, describing it in the museum's brochure as "probably the single most consequential building constructed in the United States since the war." In 1962, Vincent Scully, an influential Yale University professor of architecture, called it "one of the greatest buildings of modern times."

The David Goddard Laboratories were also designed by Louis Kahn and were completed in 1965. Although considered to be separate buildings by the university, the Richards and Goddard Laboratories are physically connected and, with similar designs, have the appearance of being a single unit. The Goddard building is generally treated by architectural historians simply as the second phase of the Richards project. It was named in honor of David Rockwell Goddard, a professor of Botany who also served as university provost and who was the main force in planning and raising funds for it.

The Richards Medical Research Laboratories and the David Goddard Laboratories were together declared a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009. They are also contributing properties to the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District.

Architecture
In the Richards building, laboratories are housed in three towers attached in pinwheel formation to a central fourth tower that houses mechanical systems, research animals, stairs and elevators. Each laboratory tower has eight floors, each of which is a  square that is entirely free of stairs, elevators and internal support columns. Each tower is supported by eight external columns that are attached to the four edges of each floor at "third-point" locations, the two points on each side that divide it into three equal parts. That placement resulted in four column-free cantilevered corners on each floor, which Kahn filled with windows. The support structure of these towers consists of pre-stressed concrete elements that were fabricated off-site and assembled on-site with a crane.

Attached to the sides of the laboratory towers are large vertical shafts, some of which hold exhaust ducts and some of which hold stairwells. These shafts, the most striking aspect of the building's exterior, are made from cast-in-place concrete and clad with brick.

In contrast to the three laboratory towers, which have prominent windows and intricate structures that were assembled from prefabricated elements, the central tower of the Richards building, the one devoted to service functions, has few windows and a structure that is a single unit of cast-in-place concrete.  Attached to its wall farthest from the three laboratory towers are four large air intake shafts, each bringing air to one of four conditioning units on the tower's roof from a "nostril" near the ground, far away from the emissions at the tops of the exhaust shafts. Three of those conditioning units provide fresh air for the three laboratory towers and the fourth serves the central service tower itself.

The Goddard building has the same basic design as Richards. Its two laboratory towers and service tower (for stairs, elevators, etc.) are connected in a straight line to the westernmost tower of the Richards building. A research library is located in Goddard's upper floors with reading carrels that cantilever from the building's face.

Emily Cooperman, a specialist in historic preservation on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, authored the document that nominated the Richards and Goddard buildings together as a National Historic Landmark. In it she says that "observers immediately understood them to be a profound statement of American architectural style that provided a potent design alternative to International Modernism, chiefly as it was embodied in the work of Mies van der Rohe (and in particular as it was epitomized by his Seagram Building)".  This design alternative was provided, she notes, through their clear expression of served and servant spaces, their evocation of the architecture of the past, and their structure of reinforced concrete that is clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight, approaches that "countered the philosophy of International Modernism of undifferentiated, universal space and volume and of the minimization of the appearance of weight and load through such constructional devices as the glass curtain wall and the predominance of structural steel."

According to Thomas Leslie, author of Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science, "[T]he debates that it inspired and the legions of designers who sought to learn from its example made Richards—for all its well-documented flaws—among the most influential of Kahn's works."

Served and servant spaces
Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn, says, "A breakthrough building for Kahn, this design saw his first clear articulation of the concept of 'servant' and 'served' spaces". The served spaces are the laboratories themselves. The servant spaces are the independently structured shafts for ventilation and stairways that are attached to the outside of the laboratory towers and also the two service towers, which house elevators, animal quarters, mechanical systems, and other auxiliary areas. Kahn spoke critically of laboratories that were designed so that numbers on doors along a corridor are the only distinction between the scientists' main work areas and the areas for stairs, animal quarters and other services.

By placing service areas in separate structures, Kahn not only honored the services by giving them their own architectural presence but also enhanced the interior of the laboratory towers by removing obstructions from within. This concept has been an acknowledged influence on several younger architects, especially Richard Rogers, who took this idea even farther and designed or co-designed major buildings with service areas fully exposed on the exterior, such as the Lloyd's of London building and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Evoking the past

Carter Wiseman, author of Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, says the perfection of form achieved by Modern architecture at that time had seemingly led the profession to a creative dead end, a situation he summarized by noting that, "There was really nowhere to go from the elegantly reductive principles of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building."  Kahn, who up to this point had been an influential professor of architecture but not yet a major architect, had been teaching that part of the problem was that too many architects were turning their backs on the past.   With the Richards Medical Research Laboratories Kahn showed a way forward with a design that was clearly in the Modern style and yet evoked images from the past. The building's towers in particular reminded many observers of the centuries-old towers of San Gimignano, Italy, which Kahn had painted several years earlier. Wiseman says, "the Richards towers offered the tantalizing possibility that the 'heart' could be restored to the 'mind' of Modern architecture, largely through the acknowledgement that history—at least in abstracted form—still had something to offer."

While studying the classic architecture of Italy, Greece and Egypt during a visit in the early 1950s, a few years prior to his work on the Richards Laboratories, Kahn was so moved by the results that had been obtained in the past by thick and massive building materials that he decided to forego the thin and light-weight materials that were most typical of Modern architecture and instead base his work on concrete and masonry. The Richards building, with its structure of concrete, is accordingly reminiscent of the past not only in appearance but also in substance. Moreover, much of it is faced with red brick, a standard building material of earlier times, especially on college campuses, but one that was almost never used in important Modern buildings at that time.

Structure
In contrast to buildings in the style of International Modernism, which typically had structures of relatively light-weight steel frames that were often hidden behind glass walls, the laboratory towers have concrete structures that are clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight.  The structure was engineered by August Komendant, a pioneer in the use of pre-stressed concrete. This was the first of several outstanding buildings that Kahn and Komendant worked on together, two of which won the prestigious Twenty-five Year Award given by the American Institute of Architects.

The structure of the Richards building is composed of 1019 pre-stressed concrete columns, beams, trusses and related items that were trucked in from a factory, assembled with a crane like children's blocks, and locked into place with post-tensioning cables running in all three dimensions, something like an old-style toy that is floppy until its parts are pulled together tightly with a string. In line with his belief that structure should be made visible, Kahn exposed these structural parts on the building's exterior and in the laboratory ceilings. For the post-tensioning to be effective, the prefabricated concrete parts had to be precisely dimensioned and perfectly formed. Komendant worked closely with the manufacturer to ensure that outcome, with the result that the largest offset between any two elements in the finished structure was only .  The Architectural Record noted that the precision achieved seemed more typical of cabinet making than concrete construction.

The entryway for the Richards building is in the middle laboratory tower. Kahn left the entire ground floor of that tower open as an entry porch and exposed the structural elements in its ceiling so the public could see how the building was constructed. Particularly interesting are the Vierendeel trusses that support each floor and whose large rectangular openings allow ducts and pipes to be easily routed through the laboratory ceilings.

Shortcomings
Although widely recognized by the architectural community as embodying important new ideas, the Richards Laboratories had significant shortcomings from the viewpoint of the scientists who worked there. Part of the problem was Kahn's lack of experience with the design of research laboratories. Kahn hoped the scientists who were to occupy the new labs would provide him some direction during exploratory meetings, but he noted that they seemed more interested in asking him questions than in giving definite answers to the questions he asked them. Komendant recalled that Kahn's first question to him during this project was, "Doctor, what is a medical laboratory?  Have you had any experience in this field?"

Because the building was intended to serve several departments, Kahn found himself having to satisfy several department heads who did not always agree among themselves, and he had to do so without the benefit of a strong overall project leader.   Moreover, the university administrators realized very late in the design process that they had not set aside enough money to furnish the new building with the necessary scientific equipment, so they made up for it by making last-minute cuts in the budget for the building itself.  Significantly in light of later criticisms about excessive heat and sunlight in the labs, these last-minute cost-cutting changes included a reduction in insulation, the elimination of window blinds and the replacement of insulated glass with regular glass.

The best-known shortcoming is the glare of sunlight in many of the labs. Kahn fervently believed in the importance of natural light and strongly preferred to work by a window himself, "refusing to switch on an electric light even on the darkest of days." Although he designed the labs to have an abundance of natural light, he was aware of the potential of having too much sunlight and worked to prevent it. The screening material that he planned to use, however, was cut from the budget, and glare has been a persistent issue. The occupants have handled the problem in uncoordinated fashion by taping sheets of paper to the windows, hanging curtains and placing shelves and equipment in front of the windows. A major preoccupation of Kahn's subsequent career was finding ways of avoiding glare by providing natural light indirectly.

Another shortcoming stemmed from Kahn's belief that scientists would work better in an open studio setting if given the chance. He designed each floor of the laboratory towers potentially as one large room and trusted that the scientists would see the desirability of keeping it that way to encourage the interchange of ideas. Most scientists disliked that approach, however, preferring privacy and even secrecy, so partitions were put in place on almost all floors.  Kahn was so sure that his approach was the right one that he continued to speak of it afterwards as an important aspect of the design.

Kahn left the carefully organized pipes and ducts in the ceilings of each floor fully exposed to view, partly as an architectural statement and partly to make it easier to reconfigure laboratory equipment when necessary. Several departments installed dropped ceilings anyway; the microbiology labs, which require strict dust control, were especially in need of them.  The partitions and dropped ceilings together interfered with the planned air circulation patterns in the towers, a problem that was not resolved until a renovation in the 1980s.

Because of a reduced budget for the Goddard building, Kahn was forced to make some changes to its design that have reduced its interest to architectural historians, who have written much less about it than about the Richards building. Differences between the two buildings are especially noticeable in the cantilevered corners of the laboratory towers, which have a plainer aspect in the Goddard building. In addition, the administration required Kahn to work on the Goddard building in association with an engineering and construction firm, leaving him unable to assert his usual painstaking control over the construction process and resulting in a lower standard of finish detail.  Plywood was used to create the forms for poured concrete in the Goddard building, for example, whereas Kahn had used carefully selected planks for that purpose at Richards to create a more interesting concrete finish.   As a result, the Goddard building "employs a simplified and visually heavier precast structural system" than the Richards building and "does not possess the same elegant character".

See also

 List of National Historic Landmarks in Pennsylvania
 List of National Historic Landmarks in Philadelphia
 National Register of Historic Places listings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

References

External links

The Museum of Modern Art provides a model of the structure of one of the laboratory towers. In the center of the model is the laboratory tower itself, with its interlocked network of concrete structural elements. A stair shaft is in the rear and exhaust shafts are on the right and left.
The Philadelphia Architects and Buildings web site has several small-scale images of the building. Particularly helpful are the
20 photos of the building under construction (scroll down to see them) and
6 photos of the building both under construction and after completion (scroll down)
Floor plans of the building plus other images and information
Photos of the building under construction, including the Vierendeel trusses
More historic photos
A teacher's guide for architecture from the Museum of Modern Art.  Images 12 through 18 show models and photos of the building.
Poster of Richards Medical Research Lab (in PDF) by  Carlos DeMalchi
Several photos of the exterior
This master's thesis provides photos of the interior as it looks today. Image 32 shows a laboratory with a cramped and shut-in atmosphere that is the opposite of the open, spacious and light-filled atmosphere that Kahn was aiming for.
An aerial view of the Richards Laboratories and Goddard Laboratories

School buildings completed in 1960
University of Pennsylvania campus
Louis Kahn buildings
Buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Philadelphia
University and college laboratories in the United States
Modernist architecture in Pennsylvania
1960 establishments in Pennsylvania
Individually listed contributing properties to historic districts on the National Register in Pennsylvania
National Historic Landmarks in Pennsylvania

Richards Medical Research Laboratories


The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was an agreement signed on 16 March 1921 to facilitate trade between the United Kingdom and the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. It was signed by Robert Horne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leonid Krasin,  Commissar of Foreign Trade. Lenin's New Economic Policy downplayed socialism and emphasized business dealings with capitalist countries in an effort to restart the sluggish Russian economy. Britain was the first country to accept Lenin's offer of a trade agreement. It ended the British blockade, and Russian ports now were open to British ships. Both sides agreed to refrain from hostile propaganda. It amounted to de facto diplomatic recognition and opened a period of extensive trade.

Background
David Lloyd George first raised the proposal to drop the blockade on Russia, following the October Revolution at a meeting of the Allied Supreme Council, held on 14 January 1920, four days after the Treaty of Versailles had been ratified. Originally trade was to be restricted to being with the "Russian people", through Centrosoyuz, the All-Russian Union of Consumer Co-operative Societies. However, by the end of May 1920, Leonid Krasin had arrived in London and the terms of the agreement had shifted. Also, although originally an Allied proposal, the French declined Lord Curzon's invitation to participate, and the Italians sent a chargé d'affaires who only participated in one session.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks, upon hearing of the Supreme Council's intention of lifting of the blockade and developing trade with the Co-operatives, responded by taking Centrosoyuz over. Initially the Bolsheviks had been hesitant to enter diplomacy with Western countries out of an ideological belief that they would soon be overturned in a world revolution against capitalism. However, by 1920 this belief was beginning to wane. Lenin wrote the executive decree promulgated by the Council of People's Commissars on 27 January which put this into effect. Krasin and his fellow delegates were nominally co-opted on to the board of Centrosoyuz,
maintaining the fiction that negotiations were being carried out with the Co-operatives Union.

First phase of negotiations: from 31 May to 7 July 1920
Krasin was accompanied by Viktor Nogin to London to engage in the negotiations. The British Cabinet discussed the proposed agreement at 10 Downing Street on 28 May 1920. Lord Curzon had previously briefed the meeting:
'We know from a great variety of sources that the Russian Government is threatened with complete economic disaster, and that it is ready to pay almost any price for the assistance which we - more than anyone else - are in a position to give. We can hardly contemplate coming to its rescue without exacting our price for it, and it seems to me that price can far better be paid in a cessation of Bolshevik hostility in parts of the world important to us, than the ostensible exchange of commodities, the existence of which on any considerable scale in Russia there is grave reason to doubt.'

There were four meetings held on 31 May, 7 June, 16 June, and 29 June. The first two were more formal, but the third meeting consisted only of Lloyd George, Krasin, Sir Robert Horne, Philip Kerr and Fridtjof Nansen. However, the last meeting was to prove crucial. Both Krasin and Lloyd George agreed that there were two principal issues:
 Hostile propaganda and subversion
 pre-1917 debts to British creditors

Faced with an impending meeting with Britain's allies, Lloyd George drew up a four-point plan:
 An armistice and end to hostile propaganda
 The exchange of prisoners
 Mutual recognition of outstanding debts for goods and services
 Exchange of trade missions
Krasin was given 7 days in which to reply and provided passage on board HMS Vimiera to Tallinn(Reval). Georgy Chicherin responded on 7 July agreeing to these terms in principle. However, negotiations were delayed by the Polish–Soviet War and by the hesitance of many Conservative Cabinet members, including Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill, to negotiate with Soviet Russia.

Second phase of negotiations: from 8 July to 11 September 1920
Lev Kamenev was appointed the head of the new negotiating team at Chicherin's insistence over Lenin's objections.

Third phase of negotiations: from 12 September 1920 to 16 March 1921

Negotiations were long and protracted. Lenin remarked at the 8th All Russian Congress of Soviets on 21 December 1920:
The treaty, the trade agreement with Britain is not signed yet. At this very moment Krasin is conducting urgent talks on it in London. The British government has handed us its draft, we have given our counterdraft, but it is still obvious that the British government is dragging its feet over the agreement because the reactionary war party is still hard at work there; it has had the upper hand so far and is hindering the conclusion of a trade agreement. It is in our direct interest, and it is our direct duty to give all our support to whatever can help to fortify those parties and groupings who are striving for the signature of this treaty with us.

Ivan Maisky was to underline the importance of the agreement thus:
This diplomatic document, though modest in scope, is of truly historic significance. The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was not an ordinary trade treaty with the mere object of regulating commercial operations between two countries; it was an agreement of politico-commercial character: it gave the RSFSR de facto recognition by the most powerful capitalist power in Europe, a power which in those days still successfully contended with the USA for the role of the foremost capitalist country in the world.

See also

 Anglo-Soviet Agreement of 1941
Anglo-Soviet relations
 Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942
Triple Entente

References
 Full text (accessed 28 July 2009)

Further reading
 White, Christine A. British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918-1924 (U of North Carolina Press, 1992). online

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
Economic history of Russia
Russia–United Kingdom relations
Treaties of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union–United Kingdom relations
Foreign trade of the Soviet Union
1921 in the United Kingdom
Treaties concluded in 1921
1921 in Russia
Trade in the United Kingdom
Trade in Russia

Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement


This Film is Not Yet Rated is a documentary movie. It is about discrepancies in the MPAA rating systems. This movie was originally rated NC-17 (no children 17 and under admitted) because of "some graphic sexual content". However, it was released without a rating.

One discrepancy covered in this movie is between the way violence and sexual behaviors are treated. Another is between how homosexual and heterosexual materials are treated in independent movies vs. Hollywood movies. According to some interviewed in this movie, the MPAA often treats homosexual issues in movies much harder than heterosexual content.

2006 documentary movies
American documentary movies
2000s English-language movies

This Film Is Not Yet Rated


Mercury(I) chloride, also known as calomel and mercurous chloride, is a chemical compound. Its chemical formula is Hg2Cl2. It has mercury and chloride ions in it. The mercury is in its +1 oxidation state.

Properties
It is a white to pale yellow crystalline solid. It is toxic, but not as toxic as mercury(II) chloride because it does not dissolve in water. It turns back into mercury and mercury(II) chloride when reacted with ammonia or exposed to ultraviolet light. The black color that came from the reaction with ammonia gave its name "calomel" (beautiful black). It is a weak reducing agent. It is the most common mercury(I) compound.

Occurrence

Calomel is sometimes found as a mineral, but it is quite rare.

Preparation
It is made by reacting mercury with mercury(II) chloride. It can also be made by reacting mercury(I) nitrate with sources of chloride, such as sodium chloride.

Uses
It is used in electrochemistry as a reference electrode. Reference electrodes are used to find the electrode potentials (ability to be oxidized and reduced) of other chemical substances. Since it decomposes when light is shined on it, it is used to see how many photons are in a light beam. It was used as medicine in the past, although it was toxic.

Related pages
Chlorine
Electrolysis
Mercury(II) oxide
Mercury(I) bromide

Mercury compounds
Chlorine compounds

Mercury(I) chloride


Adolph Gottlieb (March 14, 1903 – March 4, 1974) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker.

Early life and education
Adolph Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York City in 1903 to Jewish parents.  From 1920–1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which, having determined to become an artist he left high school at the age of 17 and worked his passage to Europe on a merchant ship. He traveled in France and Germany for a year. He lived in Paris for 6 months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He spent the next year traveling in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of Central Europe, visiting museums and art galleries. When he returned, he was one of the most traveled New York Artists. After his return to New York, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, and the Educational Alliance.

1920s and 1930s

Gottlieb had his first solo exhibition at the Dudensing Galleries in New York City in 1930. During the 1920s and early 1930s he formed lifelong friendships with other artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Milton Avery, and John Graham.  In 1935 he and a group of artists including Ben-Zion, Joseph Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Harris, Mark Rothko, and Louis Schanker, known as "The Ten", exhibited their works together until 1940.

During that period Gottlieb made a living with a variety of part-time jobs, and he worked on the Federal Art Project in 1936. From September 1937 to June 1938, Gottlieb lived in the Arizona desert, outside of Tucson. In those nine months, he radically changed his approach to painting. He moved from an expressionist-realist style to an approach that combined elements of surrealism and formalist abstraction, using objects and scenes from the local environment as symbols to remove temporality from his work. He transitioned from this into more Surrealist works like the Sea Chest, which displays mysterious incongruities on an otherwise normal landscape. It is then that he conveys to the viewer the expansiveness he must have felt looking at Arizona desert sky, although he distills this expansiveness into a more basic abstract form. "I think the emotional feeling I had was that it was like being at sea …Then there's the tremendous clarity – out in Arizona there's a tremendous clarity of light and at night the clouds seem very close." When these Arizona works were exhibited in New York after Gottlieb's return they created a break with Gottlieb's former circle of colleagues, several of whom condemned his new work for being "too abstract".

1940s–1950s

Gottlieb and a small circle of friends valued the work of the Surrealist group that they saw exhibited in New York in the 1930s. They also exchanged copies of the magazine "Cahiers d'art" and were quite familiar with current ideas about automatic writing and subconscious imagery. Gottlieb painted a few works in a Surrealist style in 1940 and 1941. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series "Pictographs" which spanned from 1941–1950. In his painting Voyager's Return , he juxtaposes these images in compartmentalized spaces. His images appear similar to those of indigenous populations of North America and the Ancient Near East. If he found out one of his symbols was not original, he no longer used it. He wanted his art to have the same impact on all his viewers, striking a chord not because they had seen it before, but because it was so basic and elemental that it resounded within them.

In 1941, disappointed with the art around him, he developed the approach he called Pictographs. Gottlieb's Pictographs, which he created from 1941 to 1954, are the first coherent body of mature painting by an American of his generation. Gottlieb spoke of his concerns in a 1947 statement:

"The role of artist has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time".

In May 1942, his first "pictograph" was displayed at the second annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, located at the Wildenstein Galleries in New York  In his Pictographs, Gottlieb introduced a new way of approaching abstraction that included imagery drawn from his subconscious but which notably departed from the idea of narrative. To meet this goal Gottlieb presented images inserted into sections of a loosely drawn grid. Each image existed independently of the others, yet their arrangement on the same plane, along with relationships of color, texture, and shape, force the viewer to associate them. Meaning, then, is intensely personal – another innovation of Gottlieb's paintings Surrealist biomorphism was one source for his Pictographs. For Gottlieb, biomorphism was a way to freely express his unconscious, in which he had become fascinated via [John] Graham, Freud, and Surrealism. Gottlieb also incorporated automatism – the painterly technique for Freudian free-association – was the method Gottlieb used to generate biomorphic shapes, which were forms spontaneously conceived in his unconscious .  These biomorphic shapes were separated by the all over grid pattern, which served as the overall structure of the "pictograph" series.

Gottlieb once said, "If I made a wriggly line or a serpentine line it was because I wanted a serpentine line. Afterwards it would suggest a snake but when I made it, it did not suggest anything. It was purely shape... ".  These lines and shapes that Gottlieb used were easily interpreted to mean different things by different people.

By 1950 Gottlieb observed that the "all-over painting" approach had become a cliché for American abstract painting. He began his new series Imaginary Landscapes he retained his usage of a 'pseudo-language,' but added the new element of space. He was not painting landscapes in the traditional sense, rather he modified that genre to match his own style of painting.Imaginary Landscapes are horizontal canvasses divided into 2 registers, one very active below a more contemplative upper one, set up a different approach to abstraction at mid-century. In 1955 Gottlieb remarked:
I frequently hear the question, "What do these images mean?" This is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to conform to either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be "Do these images convey any emotional truth?"

Late in 1956 Gottlieb formulated the image that has become known as the "Burst" and spent most of the next 2 years working on this approach. He simplifies his representation down to two disc shapes and winding masses. His paintings are variations with these elements arranged in different ways. This series, unlike the Imaginary Landscape series, suggests a basic landscape with a sun and a ground. On another level, the shapes are so rudimentary; they are not limited to this one interpretation. Gottlieb was a masterful colorist as well and in the Burst series his use of color is particularly crucial. He is considered one of the first color field painters and is one of the forerunners of Lyrical Abstraction. Gottlieb's career was marked by the evolution of space and universality.

1960s–1970s
By 1960 Gottlieb's efforts on his "Burst" series, allowed him to greatly simplify his use of imagery. Gottlieb created "Burst" and "Imaginary Landscape" type paintings for the remainder of his career but, unlike some of his colleagues, he did not limit himself to one or two images.Discussion of Gottlieb's art is usually limited to mentions of "Bursts" or "Imaginary Landscapes", which detracts from the broad range of ideas this artist examined. Gottlieb summarized his aims in a 1967 interview:

But to me everything is nature, including any feelings that I have – or dreams.  Everything is part of nature.  Even painting has become part of nature.  To clarify further: I don't have an ideological approach or a doctrinaire approach to my work.  I just paint from my personal feelings, and my reflexes and instincts.  I have to trust these.

A representative painting from this period is included in The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.

In 1967 while Gottlieb was preparing for the Whitney and Guggenheim Museum exhibition he began to make small models for sculptures out of cut and painted cardboard that, he said, made him feel like "a young sculptor, just beginning".  These small sculptures evolved into larger works in cut, welded, and painted steel and aluminum. Gottlieb's foray into sculpture lasted only about a year and a half, but in that brief time he created a body of work that challenged the delineation between painting and sculpture. In ways similar to his friend the sculptor David Smith, Gottlieb's background as a painter made it impossible for him to visualize objects without color. Once he accepted this, Gottlieb was compelled to use all the tools he had developed in his long painting career – touch, visual balance, surface quality, and more – to make his sculptures, like his paintings, become "a vehicle for the expression of feeling… I feel a necessity for making the particular colors that I use, or the particular shapes, carry the burden of everything that I want to express, and all has to be concentrated within these few elements." In all Gottlieb created 42 sculptures, including three large, outdoor pieces that are currently in the collections of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Gottlieb remained active throughout the 1960s. In 1963 he became the first American artist to be awarded the Gran Premio of the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil. In 1965, he received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award. In 1968, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York collaborated on a retrospective exhibition of his art that filled both museums. This remains, to date, the only collaborative project between these two major institutions.

Career highlights
Throughout his career Adolph Gottlieb had 56 solo exhibitions and was included in over 200 group exhibitions. His works of art are in the collections of more than 140 major museums around the world. Gottlieb was accomplished as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He designed and oversaw construction of a 1500 square-foot stained glass façade for the Milton Steinberg Center in New York City in 1954, and he designed a suite of 18 stained glass windows for the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn. He was the first of his generation to have his art collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1946) and the Guggenheim Museum (1948).

Gottlieb's work is included in the permanent holdings of numerous museum institutions in the US, for instance, his work Altar from 1947, is included in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

Death and legacy

Gottlieb suffered a major stroke in 1970 that left him paralyzed except for his right arm and hand. He continued to paint and to exhibit his art until his death in March 1974. His funeral service was held on Wednesday, March 6, 1974 at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, and he was buried at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Hawthorne, NY. He was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972.

In addition to his contributions as an artist, Gottlieb advocated for professional status for artists throughout his life. He helped to organize "Forum 49" and other artist-led events and symposia in New York and Provincetown in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1950 he was the primary organizer of the protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art that resulted in him and his colleagues gaining recognition as "The Irascibles".
Following directions Gottlieb left in his Will, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was formed in 1976, offering grants to visual artists.

See also
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation

References

Sources
 Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) . pp. 142–145
 Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) . p. 32; p. 37; pp. 158–161
ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness; Vol. 1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963.), pp. 118–121.

Further reading
The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, essays by Lawrence Alloway et al. New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 1994.
 " Adolph Gottlieb : una retrospectiva = a survey exhibition." Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, Educació i Ciència, 2001. In Association with Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation and IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez

External links

 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
 The Pace Gallery
Gottlieb's work at the Guggenheim Museum

1903 births
1974 deaths
20th-century American painters
American male painters
Abstract painters
American printmakers
Jewish painters
Jewish American artists
Art Students League of New York alumni
Alumni of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Parsons School of Design alumni
Painters from New York City
Cooper Union alumni
American Expressionist painters
Section of Painting and Sculpture artists
Federal Art Project artists
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Adolph Gottlieb


Metamorphism, in geology, is the change of the structure, texture, or composition of rocks. (an aggregation of solid matter composed of one or more of the minerals forming the earth's crust).

The scientific study of rocks is called petrology.

Rocks are commonly divided, according to their origin, into three major classes—Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.  They are caused by the effects of heat, deforming pressure, shearing stress, hot/chemically active fluids, or a combination of these.  All of these changes occur while the rock remains essentially in the solid state. In theory, rocks are formed when the things surrounding them are in equilibrium with ambient physical conditions. If the conditions are changed by movements in the earth's crust or by igneous activity, metamorphism occurs to reestablish equilibrium and changes the physical character of the rock mass.

Geology

Metamorphism


Reşat Nuri Güntekin () (25 November 1889 – 7 December 1956) was a Turkish novelist, storywriter, and playwright. His best known novel, Çalıkuşu ("The Wren", 1922) is about the destiny of a young Turkish female teacher in Anatolia. This work is translated into Persian by Seyyed Borhan Ghandili. His other significant novels include Dudaktan Kalbe ("From the Lips to the Heart", 1925), and Yaprak Dökümü ("The Fall of Leaves", 1930). Many of his novels have been adapted to cinema and television. Because he visited Anatolia with his duty as an inspector, he knew Anatolian people closely. In his works he dealt with life and social problems in Anatolia; reflects people in the human-environment relationship.

Biography
His father was a medical doctor Doktor Nuri Bey. Reşat Nuri attended primary school in Çanakkale, the Çanakkale Secondary School and the İzmir School of Freres. He graduated from Istanbul University, Faculty of Literature in 1912. He worked as a teacher and administrator at high schools in Bursa and Istanbul, he taught literature, French and philosophy; then he worked as an inspector at the Ministry of National Education (1931). He served as the deputy of Çanakkale between 1933 and 1943 in the Turkish Parliament, the chief inspector at the Ministry of National Education (1947), and a cultural attaché to Paris (1950), when he was also the Turkish representative to UNESCO.

After his retirement, he served at the literary board of the Istanbul Municipal Theatres. Reşat Nuri Güntekin died in London, where he had gone to be treated for his lung cancer. He is buried at the Karacaahmet Cemetery in Istanbul.

Works

Stories
 Recm, Gençlik ve Güzellik (1919)
 Roçild Bey (1919)
 Eski Ahbab (Without known time)
 Tanrı Misafiri (1927)
 Sönmüş Yıldızlar (1928)
 Leylâ ile Mecnun (1928)
 Olağan İşler (1930)

Novels
 Çalıkuşu (1922) (The Wren - translated as: "The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl")
 Gizli El (1924)
 Damga (1924)
 Dudaktan Kalbe (1923) (From the Lip to the Heart)
 Akşam Güneşi (1926) (Afternoon Sun)
 Bir Kadın Düşmanı (1927)
 Yeşil Gece (1928) (The Green Night)
 Acımak (1928) (To Pity)
 Yaprak Dökümü (1930) (The Fall of Leaves)
 Eski Hastalık (1938) (That Old Sickness)
 Değirmen (1944) (The Mill)
 Kızılcık Dalları (1944)
 Miskinler Tekkesi (1946)
 Harabelerin Çiçeği (1953)
 Kavak Yelleri (1961)
 Son Sığınak (1961) (The Last Shelter)
 Kan Davası (1962)
 Ateş Gecesi (1953) (The Night of Fire)

Theatre
 Hançer (1920)
 Eski Rüya (1922) (The Old Dream)
 Ümidin Güneşi (1924) (Hope's Sun)
 Gazeteci Düşmanı, Şemsiye Hırsızı (The Umbrella Thief), İhtiyar Serseri (1925, three works)
 Taş Parçası (1926)
 Bir Köy Hocası (1928)
 İstiklâl (1933) (Independence)
 Hülleci (1933)
 Yaprak Dökümü (1971)
 Eski Şarkı(1971) (The Old Song)
 Balıkesir Muhasebecisi (1971) (The Accountant Of Balıkesir)
 Tanrıdağı Ziyafeti (1971)

See also
List of Turkish diplomats

References

 Biyografi.info - Biography of Reşat Nuri Güntekin
 Biyografi.net - Biography and Bibliography of Reşat Nuri Güntekin
 Turkishculture.org - Resat Nuri Güntekin

Burials at Karacaahmet Cemetery
Turkish novelists
Turkish male short story writers
Turkish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Turkish diplomats
Writers from Istanbul
Istanbul University alumni
1889 births
1956 deaths
Deaths from lung cancer in England
Novelists from the Ottoman Empire
Akbaba (periodical) people
20th-century novelists
20th-century dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Turkish short story writers
20th-century male writers
Members of the 5th Parliament of Turkey
Members of the 8th Parliament of Turkey

Reşat Nuri Güntekin


Chien-Ming Wang (born March 31, 1980) is a Taiwanese Major League Baseball player. He plays for the Cincinnati Reds.  He is a pitcher.  Before he played for the Nationals, Wang played for the New York Yankees. He got 19 wins in the year of 2006 and 2007 and became the first Asian to be the win champion.

However, after his injury in 2008, he started to pitch horribly as he attained an era of 9.64 along with 1 win and 6 losses in the 2009 season. He then got injured again and the New York Yankees did not renew his contract after. He became a free agent.

In 2010, the Washington Nationals signed Wang and helped him recover from his injuries. He did not attend any games in this season.

Wang pitched his first game on July 29, 2011 and ended the season with 11 starts, recorded 4–3 with a 4.04 ERA.

On March 15, 2012, Wang was once again injured. When he recovered, his starting position has been replaced by Ross Detwiler and he pitched as a relief pitcher and sometimes a starter pitcher. But he still did not do well this season.

1980 births
Living people
New York Yankees players
Taiwanese sportspeople
Washington Nationals players

Chien-Ming Wang


George Peter Nissen (1914 – 2010) was an American gymnast and inventor who developed the modern trampoline and made trampolining a worldwide sport and recreation.

Background
Born on February 3, 1914, in Blairstown, Iowa, to Franklin C. Nissen and Catherine M. (Jensen) Nissen, George became a keen gymnast in high school and won three NCAA gymnastics championships while a student at the University of Iowa. Nissen went to high school at Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Nissen was also an initiated member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity while he was in school. He had seen circus trapeze artists use their safety nets as an elastic bed to rebound and perform additional tricks. He thought that this would be  useful training tool for his tumbling. In 1934, Nissen and his coach, Larry Griswold, built the prototype trampoline from angle iron with a canvas bed and rubber springs. Nissen used it to help with his training and to entertain children at a summer camp.

After he had graduated in Business Studies in 1937, Nissen and two friends toured the United States of America and Mexico performing at fairs and carnivals. While in Mexico, he heard the word trampolín, springboard in Spanish, and decided to use it for his bouncing apparatus. He trademarked the word in an anglicised form. He built a few trampolines and promoted the sale of his trampolines by touring performances, which did gradually increase sales. In 1941, he and Griswold set up the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Career

During World War II, the trampoline was used to train pilots by getting them used to orienting themselves in the air. After the war Nissen continued to promote the trampoline and began touring in Europe and later the Soviet Union promoting both the sport of "rebound tumbling" and his trampoline equipment. Nissen set up a manufacturing plant for his company in England in 1956 headed up by Ted Blake an English trampoline pioneer, first in Hainault then Romford and finally Brentwood, Essex by the mid-1960s, and manufactured trampolines there for many years. Brentwood still has a thriving trampolining community but no longer a local factory. But by the late 1970s other manufacturers had started to make similar equipment and eventually, although the word trampoline was originally trademarked by Nissen, it became a generic trademark for rebound apparatus. Soon after, Nissen's company ceased operations in the 1980s.

Nissen continued to have an influence on gymnastics and trampolining. In 1971, with Larry Griswold, he founded the United States Tumbling & Trampoline Association (USTA). He has been honored by the sports of both trampolining and gymnastics. The USTA has the Griswold-Nissen Cup for an outstanding trampolinist. There is an international trampolining competition held in Switzerland called the Nissen Cup. In the United States, the Nissen-Emery Award is given to the best male senior gymnast in the college gymnastics system.
He sponsored the 1st. World Trampoline Championship at the Albert Hall, London in March 1964, which was commemorated by a stamp featuring Judy Wills, who became the first woman's champion and defended that title a further 7 times. Spaceball, which he invented, was his pet love and he sponsored the Nissen trophy for the first UK National champion, won by Nick Proctor in 1963. At the championship the USA team narrowly beat the GB team 7–6, 6–7, 7–6 in a demonstration international. "The History of World Trampolining" by Rob Walker.

Later years
Nissen remained involved in a trampoline manufacturing business making trampolines for exercise and for space ball, a game similar to volleyball but played on a trampoline surface.

Nissen had always wanted to have trampolining included in the Olympic Games. This finally happened in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. At 86 years old, Nissen attended the 2000 Olympics accompanied by his daughter Dian Nissen. Nissen was also able to travel to Beijing, China for the 2008 Summer Olympics with Dian and his grandson. He was given the honor of testing out the Olympic trampoline before the event.

He died in San Diego, California on April 7, 2010, at the age of 96 from complications from pneumonia.

References

 Biography of George Nissen

See also

1914 births
2010 deaths
American male artistic gymnasts
American male trampolinists
20th-century American inventors
Iowa Hawkeyes men's gymnasts
People from Benton County, Iowa
Deaths from pneumonia in California

George Nissen


Stavrovouni Monastery () is a Greek Orthodox monastery which stands on the top of a hill called Stavrovouni (Greek: Σταυροβούνι) in Cyprus; it is sometimes simply known as Stavrovouni. The monastery is one of the few places where one can see a piece of the Holy Cross. Stavrovouni Monastery was founded by Saint Helena and Saint Constantine .

Location

The monastery is located on the peak of the mountain of the same name (Stavrovouni) in the District of Larnaca. The mountain in earlier times had been known under the name of Olympus, but nowadays the highest point of the Troodos Mountains further to the west bears that name. Stavrovouni, as the name already indicates, is dedicated to the Holy Cross; it can be derived from two words 'stavros' (Greek: Σταυρός) for cross and 'vouno' (βουνό) for mountain, so that it basically means "the mountain of the Cross".

Establishment

According to religious tradition, the monastery was founded by St. Helena and Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. According to the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Makhairas, after the end of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea (325), Helena went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when she discovered the three crosses on which Jesus and the two thieves had been crucified. She had them excavated and wanted to bring them to Constantinople, but she is said to have left one of these crosses in Cyprus during an involuntary visit caused by shipwreck. Religious history says that the Holy Cross was transferred by a miracle to the peak of a high hill overnight and that a strong light was coming out of that peak. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the Holy Cross out of that mountain, Helena decided to leave a piece there, and built a small chapel to accompany it.

Stavrovouni is therefore considered to be one of the oldest monasteries in the world; other ancient monasteries include Saint Athanasius (344), Saint Anthony (356), Saint Macarius (360), Saint Gabriel (Mor Gabriel) (397), Saint Euthymius (460), Saint Sabbas (Mar Saba) (483) and Saint Catherine, Sinai (565).

Relics

The most significant relic that Stavrovouni Monastery possesses is a piece of the Holy Cross, left at the monastery by Saint Helena. There are references which report that the Holy Cross used to stand in the air unsupported. Today, the remaining piece of the Cross is kept within a large, silver, cross-shaped reliquary. Other relics left at the monastery by Helena include the Cross of the Good Thief, one of the Holy Nails, and what is believed to be part of the rope that had bound Jesus to the Cross.

In addition, visitors will find two small chains which were worn by Saint Panaretos, Bishop of Paphos, during his life, and which were in direct contact with his body.

History

Stavrovouni is the earliest documented monastery on the island. The oldest written reference dates from the Byzantine period, and it proves that Stavrovouni had been an important religious centre since the 4th century. The relevant information can be found in the memoirs of a Russian traveler, Abbot Daniel, who stayed on Cyprus in 1106. He recorded that the Holy Cross was located on Mount Olympus with the objective of "warding off evil spirits and curing any illness", and he noted, "This cross is like a meteorite, it is not supported in the ground, because the Holy Ghost holds it in the empty space. I, unworthy man, knelt down before this holy, mysterious object and have seen with my own, sinful eyes the inherent holy grace present in this place."

After its foundation, Stavrovouni was occupied by Orthodox monks living according to the rule of St. Basil. We obtain further historical information from Western visitors to Cyprus in the 13th century. Willibrandi de Oldenburg, for example, visited Stavrovouni in 1211 and wrote, "The cross of the Good Thief is on the highest mountain in Cyprus" – which was incorrect, as Stavrovouni is not as high as the Troodos peak. Ludolph von Suchen noted in 1305, "The mountain is like the Mount Tabor on which the Benedictine monks live. From its peak one can see the Lebanon." This is true, but the weather must be very clear in order to verify this.

In its long history, Stavrovouni went through times of great poverty and hardship caused by the numerous invasions by foreigners on the island. Nowadays, the Holy Cross is no longer there and nobody knows what has happened to it. In 1598, the Bohemian nobleman Krystof Harant noted, "Nobody knows what the Turks have done with the Holy Cross." The walls, the church, the iconostasis, and the monks' cells in Stavrovouni were almost completely destroyed during a great fire in 1888. The only relic which has been preserved down to the present is a silver cross in which a minute piece of the Holy Cross is inserted, the only major reliquary which is still kept in Stavrovouni.

Recent history

The records suggest that the monastery had no monks for a period roughly between the 16th and the 19th century, a time when the Turks ruled the island. The monastery was abandoned from 1571; however, some hermits continued to live there. This fact was mentioned by Russian monk and pilgrim, Vasil Grigorovich-Barsky in the first half of the 18th century. At the end of the 19th century, Elder Dionysios A' moved to Stavrovouni from Mount Athos in 1889, and the monastery was in operation again. In 1890, three more Cypriot monks, again from Mount Athos, joined him at Stavrovouni: Fathers Varnavas – who would become the next Abbot – and his two brothers Kallinikos and Gregorios.

Following that, new monks entered the monastery, which grew larger and larger and soon became the spiritual center of the island of Cyprus. The monastery grew so much during the mid-20th century that it was in a position where it was able to send monks to other ruined monasteries to help their growth. For example, monks from Stavrovouni moved to the Monastery of Panagia Trooditissa in Troodos and created a new group.  Other monks attempted to move to, and revive, the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Mesa Potamos in Limassol.

Most recent Abbots

Elder Dionysios A' served as the first Abbot until 1902, and then Elder Varnavas took over. The most recent Abbots are:

 Elder Dionysios A' – 1889–1902
 Elder Varnavas     – 1902–1948
 Elder Dionysios B' – 1948–1952
 Elder Germanos     – 1952–1982
 Elder Athanasios   – 1982–2021
 Elder Dionysios C'    – 2021 -present

Known monks

Stavrouvouni Monastery has been a center of spirituality and worship in Cyprus over the last century, as many spiritual monks made their homes there.  Saint Filoumenos the Cypriot martyr, member of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, is one such important monk who started his monastic life at Stavrovouni. On the 16/29 November 1979, he died violently as a martyr at Jacob's Well, where he served as Superior. His twin brother Archimandrite Elpidios started his monastic life at Stavrovouni, as well.

The Hieromonk Kyprianos († 1955) is another significant figure who lived at Stavrovouni; he was known for his strict way of life and his helpful advice to the people of Cyprus. Archbishop Leontios of Cyprus (1896–1947) was staying at Stavrovouni for some period and was closely related with Hieromonk Kyprianos.

Today

Recently, the monastery underwent a complete renovation. Its small church was restored again with frescoes and icons by the well-known painter, Fr. Kallinikos, a monk from Stavrovouni. The legend of the foundation is recorded in these pictures: St. Helena in a brilliant red garment and the Finding of the True Cross in Jerusalem. (As an aside, the emperor's mother recognised that she had the true Holy Cross by the miraculous healing of a woman). Colourful, but also not without the skull painted beneath Christ's Cross for centuries is the Deposition. The majority of the frescoes in the church refer to the Cross and the life of St. Helena. In this manner, Stavrovouni is continuing the deeply rooted Byzantine painting tradition.

Services

Stavrovouni has a long tradition in icon painting and frescoes, and its most famous icon painter monk is Father Kallinikos. Even the first Abbot Dionysios A' was an icon painter, and there are several pieces of work by monks from Stavrovouni in the island. Apart from icon painting, the monks work in a number of other services, such as agriculture and production of aromatics for the church. Moreover, locals visit the monastery, especially on feast days, and follow the monks in their worship programme – in liturgy, vespers, etc.

Metochia

Metochia or Dependencies (Greek: Μετόχια) are small monasteries or chapels that belong to a main monastery. Stavrovouni has a number of metochia, of which the most well-known is Agia Varvara at the foot of Stavrovouni hill. Until some decades ago, most of the monks used to stay at this metochi as there was no water and electricity at the top of the hill, and only two or three monks would stay at the top. Other metochia are Panagia Stazousa and Agios Modestos, which are located between the villages of Pyrga and Klavdia. Today, monks at Agia Varvara work as icon painters and in agriculture, whereas monks at the other two metochia concentrate more on prayers and live more closely to a hermitic life.

At present, monks in Stavrovouni live a very strict form of monastic life, similar to that of the monks on Mount Athos. The rule of their first abbot, Dionysios I, forms the basis of this. Women are not allowed to enter the main part of the monastery, but they are allowed to visit the chapel out of it on the top of the hill. They are also allowed to visit the Metochi Agia Varvara at the foot of the hill only on Sundays. This rule is called avato (Greek: άβατο, meaning: entry is prohibited), and it is analogous to the strict life of monks in Mount Athos where women are not allowed to enter. This rule is applied in order to keep the monks isolated and living a stricter way of life.

Today, there are over 30 monks in Stavrovouni Monastery, and the current Abbot is Elder Dionysios.

See also
 List of oldest church buildings

References

External links
 Cyprus Monasteries – Stavrovouni Monastery
 Stavrovouni Monastery
 Σταυροβούνι
 Ιερά Μονή Σταυροβουνίου
 Stavrovouni Monastery surrounding photos

4th-century establishments in the Roman Empire
Cypriot Orthodox monasteries
Christian monasteries established in the 4th century
Greek Orthodox monasteries
Helena, mother of Constantine I
Constantine the Great and Christianity

Stavrovouni Monastery


Dome was an English post-punk band, formed in 1980 and consisting of Bruce Gilbert (guitar, vocals, synthesizer) and Graham Lewis (bass, vocals, synthesizer) of Wire.

Background

Gilbert and Lewis formed Dome during Wire's 1980–1984 hiatus. Over its first three albums, Wire's music had progressed from rapid-fire punk rock to moody, ambitious post-punk. Dome continued the experimentation, often abandoning traditional song structures in favor of found sounds, melodic fragments, and what critics Steven Grand and David Sheridan described as "lurching mechanical noises infrequently keeping a vague beat".

Between 1980 and 1981 Dome released three studio albums: Dome (1980), Dome 2 (1980) and Dome 3 (1981), on its own Dome Records label.

As well as releasing Dome band albums, Gilbert and Lewis produced and released records by Desmond Simmons (who played on Wire bandmate Colin Newman's solo albums A-Z and Not To) and A.C. Marias, on the band's label.

An album 3R4 was released in 1980 under the name B.C. Gilbert & G. Lewis as well as a single "Ends With the Sea" in 1981, followed by an EP Like This for Ages released as Cupol, all on the 4AD record label. In 1982 it released MZUI (Waterloo Gallery), an LP of recordings made at the Waterloo Gallery with Russell Mills.

In 1983 Gilbert and Lewis worked with Dome collaborator Angela Conway (aka A.C. Marias) to release Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie for Attention, an LP under the name P'O. The same year, they released an LP Or So It Seems under the name Duet Emmo—an anagram of "Dome" and "Mute"—with Daniel Miller, head of Mute Records, and released Will You Speak This Word a.k.a. Dome 4 on the Uniton label.

Wire reformed in 1984, although Dome continued to perform and record occasionally. Yclept, a collection of Dome's later work, was released on WMO in 1998.

Discography

 Studio albums

 Dome (1980)
 Dome 2 (1980)
 Dome 3 (1981)
 Will You Speak This Word (1982)
 Yclept (1999)

 as B.C. Gilbert & G. Lewis

 3R4 (1980)

 as bcGilbert, gLewis & russellMills

 MZUI (1982)

 as Cupol

 Like This for Ages (1980)

 as Duet Emmo

 Or So It Seems (1983)

 as P'O

 Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie for Attention (1983)

 Compilations and reissues

 1 + 2 (1992)
 3 + 4 (1992)
 1-4+5 (2011)

 Singles

 "Jasz" (1981)
 "Ends With the Sea" (1981) (as B.C. Gilbert & G. Lewis)

References

External links

English post-punk music groups
English experimental rock groups
English musical duos
Rock music duos
Wire (band)

Dome (band)


Contact is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on the 1985 U.S. bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film Contact starring Jodie Foster.

Plot

The Message
As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father Theodore ("Ted") dies. John Staughton, her new stepfather, does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and believes her mother only remarried out of weakness.

After graduating from Harvard University, Ellie receives a doctorate from Caltech supervised by David Drumlin, a well-known radio astronomer. She becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radio telescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This puts her at odds with most of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who tries to have the funding to SETI cut off. The project eventually discovers a signal containing a series of prime numbers coming from the Vega system, 26 light years away. Further analysis reveals information in the polarization modulation of the signal: a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first television signal powerful enough to escape Earth's ionosphere.

The President of the United States meets with Ellie to discuss the implications of the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. With the help of her Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, Ellie manages to set up redundant monitoring of the signal so that a telescope remains pointed at Vega at all times. A third message is discovered describing plans for an advanced machine. With no way of decoding the 30,000 pages, SETI scientists surmise that there must be a primer that they have missed.

The Machine
At the President's insistence, Ellie agrees to meet with two religious leaders, Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A lifelong religious skeptic, Ellie tries to convince Joss of her faith in science by standing near a heavy Foucault pendulum and trusting that its amplitude will not increase. Although dismissing Rankin's outbursts, Ellie is intrigued by Joss' worldview. Shortly after, Ellie travels to Paris to discuss the Machine with a newly formed consortium. The participants agree that the Machine is a dodecahedron-shaped vehicle with five seats. At the conference, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who left India to marry the man she loved, only to lose him to illness a year later. The final piece of the message is discovered when S. R. Hadden, a billionaire in high-tech industries with an obsessive interest in the concept of immortality, suggests that Ellie check for phase modulation. This reveals the primer, thus allowing construction of the Machine to begin.

The American and Soviet governments enter a race to construct identical copies of the Machine. As errors in the Soviet project are discovered, the American Machine becomes the only option. Ellie applies to be one of the five passengers, but her spot is given to David Drumlin instead. Despite heavy security, a group of extremists manages to get a bomb into one of the fabrication plants in Wyoming. During a test of the machine, the bomb explodes, killing Drumlin and postponing completion of the Machine indefinitely. Ellie's family also suffers when her mother has a stroke, causing paralysis. John Staughton accuses Ellie of ignoring her own mother for years.

Ellie learns that S. R. Hadden has taken up residence aboard a private space station. While on board, he reveals that his company has been covertly building a third copy of the Machine in Hokkaido, Japan. The activation date is set for December 31, 1999, and Ellie, Vaygay and Devi are given three of the seats. The other two are given to Abonnema Eda, a Nigerian physicist credited with discovering the theory of everything, and Xi Qiaomu, a Chinese archaeologist and expert on the Qin dynasty. While in Japan, Ellie receives a medallion from Joss, which she carries aboard the Machine as it is activated.

The Galaxy
Once activated, the dodecahedron transports the group through various wormholes to a station near the center of the Milky Way. The station contains a surreal Earth-like beach where the five are split up. Ellie meets an extraterrestrial in a form indistinguishable from Ted Arroway, who explains his people's reasons for making contact, and tells her of their ongoing project to alter the properties of the universe by accumulating enough mass in Cygnus A to counter the effects of entropy. The wormhole system (spanning many galaxies) was built by unknown precursors, and he hints at the discovery of artificial messages encoded within transcendental numbers like π. Ellie is reunited with the other four travellers, who have also met simulations of their loved ones. She captures video evidence of the encounter before the dodecahedron takes them back to Earth.

Upon returning, the passengers discover that what seemed like more than a day took no time at all from Earth's perspective. All of their video footage and photos have been erased, presumably by magnetic fields in the wormholes. After seeing that Hadden is apparently dead and the transmission has somehow been stopped without a 26-year delay, government officials accuse the travellers of an international conspiracy. They blackmail Ellie and her fellow travellers into silence until more evidence can be found. Palmer Joss becomes one of the few people willing to believe her story, which she can only justify on faith. Hadden is revealed by the novel to have faked his death, instead launching himself out of the solar system on a single-man-mission with the use of advanced cryogenics, though this information is not revealed to any characters.

Acting on the suggestion of "Ted", Ellie works on a program to compute the digits of π to heretofore-unprecedented lengths. Ellie's mother dies before this project delivers its first result. A final letter from her informs Ellie that John Staughton, not Ted Arroway, is Ellie's biological father. When Ellie looks at what the computer has found, she sees a circle rasterized from 0s and 1s that appear after 1020 places in the base 11 representation of π. This provides evidence of her journey and suggests intelligence is behind the universe itself.

Publication history
Reading science fiction and fantasy as a child inspired Carl Sagan to become an astronomer. As an adult he preferred realistic stories that helped readers understand real science and history, like Robert Heinlein's "—And He Built a Crooked House—" and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. In 1978 Sagan predicted that because of science fiction, "I know many young people who would, of course, be interested, but in no way astounded, were we to receive a message tomorrow from an extraterrestrial civilization". In 1981, Simon & Schuster gave Sagan a $2 million advance on the novel. At the time, "the advance was the largest ever made for a book that had not yet been written." The first printing was 265,000 copies. In the first two years it sold 1,700,000 copies. It was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month-Club.

Sagan's friend physicist Kip Thorne gave Sagan ideas on the nature of wormholes when Sagan was developing the outline of the novel.

Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet. The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher Jill Tarter.

The novel won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 1986.

See also

 Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence
 Fermi paradox
 His Master's Voice
 Contact (1997 American film)

Notes

Citations

General sources
 Davidson, Keay.  Carl Sagan: A Life.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
 Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

External links
 Larry Klaes' in-depth analysis of the film and novel

1985 American novels
1985 debut novels
1985 science fiction novels
American novels adapted into films
American philosophical novels
Books critical of religion
Conceptions of God
Debut science fiction novels
Fiction about wormholes
Fiction set around Vega
Hard science fiction
Metaphysical fiction novels
Novels about mathematics
Novels about science
Novels set in New Mexico
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Simon & Schuster books
Works by Carl Sagan

Contact (novel)


The Hadean is the geological eon before the Archaean. It began at the Earth's formation about 4.6 billion years ago, and ended 4 billion years ago. The name "Hadean" comes from Hades, Greek for "Underworld", due to the conditions on the Earth at the time. The geologist Preston Cloud first used the term in 1972. Meteorite bombardment, volcanism and high temperatures were very widespread on the early Earth.

There are no sedimentary rocks from the Hadean at all. The earliest geological objects on Earth are some zircons, dated to about 4,400 million years ago (mya). Oceans would probably have formed as soon as the temperature allowed. It is thought that constant bombardment kept the Earth in a molten state until about the end of the eon.

Early in Earth history, the Moon was torn out by a massive collision with a proto-planet. The evidence for this giant impact hypothesis is:

the remarkable similarity between the Earth's crust and the Moon's composition,
the low iron concentration in the Moon's centre, and
the high angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system.

An explanation for the general lack of Hadean rocks (older than 3800 mya) is the large amount of rocky and icy debris present in the early Solar System. After the eight planets formed, large numbers of leftover protoplanets, asteroids, and comets pursued eccentric orbits throughout our system, bombarding the early Earth and the other planets and moons until approximately 3800 mya. This activity may have prevented any large crustal fragments from forming by literally shattering the early protocontinents. A barrage of particularly large impacts known as the Late Heavy Bombardment represents the climax of this violent era.

No life forms are known from this eon. The early atmosphere contained carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen, but almost no oxygen.

Related pages
 Life timeline

References

Hadean


Kapa haka is the term for Māori action songs and the groups who perform them. The phrase translates to 'group' () 'dance' (). Kapa haka is an important avenue for Māori people to express and showcase their heritage and cultural Polynesian identity through song and dance.

Modern kapa haka traces back to pre-European times where it developed from traditional forms of Māori performing art; haka,  (weaponry),  (ball attached to rope or string) and  (traditional Māori songs). There is a regular national kapa haka competition currently called Te Matatini that has been running since 1972.

A kapa haka performance involves choral singing, dance and movements associated with the hand-to-hand combat practised by Māori in mainly precolonial times, presented in a synchronisation of action, timing, posture, footwork and sound. The genre evolved out of a combination of European and Māori musical principles. The current form relates to kapa haka concert groups that first appeared in the 1860s especially in Rotorua to cater to tourists.

Performance
The work of a kapa haka consists of the group performance of a suite of songs and dances spanning several types of Māori music and dance, strung together into a coherent whole. Music and dance types that normally appear are  (warm-up song),  (entrance song),  (action song),  (challenge),  or  (old-style singing),  (coordinated swinging of balls attached to cords), and  (closing song). They may also include  (synchronised manipulation of thin sticks). In a full performance, which can last up to 40 minutes, each music or dance type may appear more than once.

Music for kapa haka is primarily vocal. All song types, with the notable exceptions of mōteatea and haka, are structured around European-style harmony, frequently with guitar accompaniment and acoustics. Spurts of haka-style declamation are woven into the songs, as are dance movements, facial expressions and other bodily and aural signals unique to Māori. Song poetry is completely in Māori and new material is continually being composed.

The sole musical instruments used in kapa haka performances are the guitar, the  conch shell, the sounds of  and  (see below) and body percussion, especially the stamping of feet.

Every two years, kapa haka performers from all parts of New Zealand compete in Te Matatini, New Zealand's annual, national Māori performing arts competition for adult groups. There is also a national secondary schools kapa haka competition Ngā Kapa Haka Kura Tuarua o Aotearoa that used to be part of Polyfest, where the level of performance is also very high.

Music and dance styles used by kapa haka

Kapa haka are mixed groups of anywhere between several and dozens of people, that may or may not wear a costume. These groups comprise individuals linked in some way, be it by extended family group,  (tribe), school, or some other association. Performers are largely synchronised, but with men sometimes doing some actions while women do others. A few performers have particular roles, such as the  (male and female leaders), often moving among the performers to urge them on. Composers, arrangers, choreographers and costume designers also play major roles.

Not all Māori performance types are used by kapa haka. Below are brief descriptions of the ones that usually appear. See Māori music for a wider discussion of Māori music.

 are choral pieces used to warm up the vocal cords and introduce the group to the audience. Through a  the group announces its arrival in a manner that is generally light and positive.
 are also choral pieces. They are frequently used to comment on a social issue of the day or to commemorate an individual or some element of Māoridom. They may also simply be used as the entrance song to announce the group's arrival.
 are best described as challenges. They are used to make a point, honor someone/something, tell a story or express an emotion. They are performed by both men and women, with the focus on the men in the front and support from the women behind. They are vocal performances involving rhythmic declamation in triple metre and aggressive or challenging facial expressions (, literally "glaring"), body movements and demeanour. The men make heavy use of foot stamping, body percussion, and grimace in an attempt to appear as menacing as possible. Haka are often described as traditional war dances but in fact had many other uses as well in precolonial Māori society, and have many peaceful uses today.
 (literally "song of hands or arms") are "action songs", which means that they display the typical Polynesian practice of embellishing and reinforcing the sung poetry with arm and hand actions. They are performed by men and women with women in the front and men in the back. Some use melodies from common English-language songs with new lyrics in Māori, while others are newly composed, treating a wide variety of topics. They feature the  or trembling of the hands to indicate the interface between the mind and the body.
 are women's dances involving the swinging of balls, about the size of tennis balls, attached to cords. Poi's origins lie in the precolonial practice of training with poi to improve agility in battle, but today poi is used to showcase the beauty and gracefulness of the women. Poi were traditionally used by women on long  voyages as a means of keeping timing of the male paddlers, in the style of a coxswain. This is the reason for the emphasis of the sound of the poi striking the hand. Performers swing the balls in synchrony in a variety of figures and rhythms while simultaneously singing a song (a ) accompanied by guitar. They demonstrate great dexterity and coordination, particularly with "long poi", with cords up to a metre long, where four poi at once may be manipulated by each performer. Formerly the balls were made of  and the cords of flax but today they tend to be made of plastic shopping bag material and yarn. The sound of poi striking the hands is an important part of the musical accompaniment.
 are occasionally used by kapa haka.  are pairs of carved thin sticks about shoulder width manipulated with dextrous wrist and arm work, often simultaneously passed between performers. Like poi, tītī tōrea figures are performed in synchrony and to music (and like poi, their sounds, especially that of the ends hitting the floor together, form a percussive accompaniment); and, also like poi, arose out of a precolonial warrior training technique.
 or  are unison songs performed in a style reminiscent of precolonial Māori singing. They are an important genre within Maoridom because they tell stories in which historical, genealogical and cultural information is preserved and thus link Māori with their past.  come in a variety of forms including laments, lullabies, and songs about revenge, anger, and love.
 are choral pieces used to farewell the audience or make a final point before departing the stage. They may pick up on themes raised in the  or comment on the event at hand. Performers are often at the side or back of the stage.

References

External links

 Maori.org kapa haka page
Research in New Zealand Performing Arts - a free online research journal that discusses contemporary kapa haka and related Maori performing arts.
 New Zealand Post Kaumātua Kapa Haka Slideshow of images from the 2014 New Zealand Post Kaumātua Kapa Haka, Te Papa Channel

New Zealand styles of music
Māori words and phrases
Māori culture
Haka
Māori festivals

Kapa haka


Ross Gunn (May 12, 1897 – October 15, 1966) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. The New York Times described him as "one of the true fathers of the nuclear submarine program".

From 1927 to 1947, Gunn worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. He was the author of over 28 papers, and received 45 patents. He designed radio devices for controlling aircraft, which were used in the development of the first drones. He was one of the first to appreciate the possibility of using nuclear power for submarine propulsion. During World War II he was involved in the development of thermal diffusion technology for isotope separation.

After the war Gunn became director of the Weather Bureau's Physical Research Division, where he carried out a series of studies into atmospheric phenomena. In 1958 he became a professor of physics at American University, a position he held until his death in 1966.

Early life
Ross Gunn was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 12, 1897, the son of R. D. A. Gunn, a physician, and his wife Lora Conner Gunn. He was one of four children, with an older brother and sister and a younger brother. His parents also had a set of twins who died at birth. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where his father had a medical practice. He attended Oberlin High School, from which he graduated in 1915, and then attended Oberlin College for two years. As a teenager, he was interested in amateur radio, which in those days meant building as well as operating your own set. During summer vacations he worked as a radio operator on the SS Seeandbee, a passenger ship on the Great Lakes, and for the Glenn L. Martin Company. After two years at Oberlin, he transferred to the University of Michigan because it had a better electrical engineering program.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Gunn enlisted in the United States Army Signal Corps, but remained at the University of Michigan as a military radio instructor. He returned to his studies when the war ended, his income supplemented by work as an instructor, and  received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) degree from the University of Michigan in 1920. He then studied physics there, earning a Master of Science (MS) in 1921. He started work on his doctorate, but became bored, and accepted an offer from the Army to work at McCook Field as an aircraft radio research engineer. He developed various forms of aircraft instrumentation, participated in a number of cross-country instrument flights, and designed radio devices for controlling aircraft, for which he received the first of 45 patents that he would eventually accumulate. These were used in the development of the first drones, which were used as practice targets for antiaircraft gunnery.

In September 1923, Gunn married Gladys J. Rowley, an Oberlin College alumna. They had four sons: Ross Jr., Leigh, Charles and Robert Burns. The experience at McCook convinced him that he had been too hasty in abandoning his studies, so that year he quit to take a job as an instructor at Yale University, where he was placed in charge of the High Frequency laboratory at the physics department. He earned his doctorate there in 1926, writing his thesis on "Three New Methods in Electrical Measurements".

Naval Research Laboratory
In August 1927, Gunn accepted a position with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), becoming assistant superintendent of the Heat and Light Division in 1928. This was a prolific period for him. Between 1929 and 1933, he published 28 papers, including 13 in the Physical Review. He could choose his own topics of research, and chose to study natural phenomena such as cosmic rays and terrestrial and solar magnetism. In 1933, he became superintendent of the Mechanics and Electricity Division and technical adviser to the laboratory director.

The 1938 discovery of nuclear fission aroused great interest among physicists. On March 17, 1939, Enrico Fermi gave a presentation to the Navy on the state of nuclear research, and the possibility of the development of atomic bombs and nuclear power. Gunn was in attendance as the NRL representative. Gunn was impressed by the possibility of utilizing nuclear power to propel ships, particularly submarines, as nuclear power would not require oxygen. On March 20, Gunn and the director of the NRL, Captain Hollis M. Cooley, approached Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, Sr., the head of the Bureau of Engineering, which controlled funding for the NRL, with a request for $1,500 for research into uranium. This was approved; the Navy's program predated the Army's Manhattan Project by seven months.

Niels Bohr had theorized that only the uranium-235 isotope was fissile, so the first step was to determine a means of separating it from the more abundant uranium-238. The NRL placed contracts with universities to study four different methods of isotope separation: gaseous diffusion, ultra centrifuge, mass spectrograph, and thermal diffusion. Thermal diffusion was not initially regarded as very promising, but Gunn was impressed by Philip Abelson's efforts on it. He recruited Abelson, who became a Navy employee in June 1941, and the Navy pressed ahead with thermal diffusion, constructing a pilot plant at Anacostia in June 1941. Gunn was a member of the Uranium Committee that coordinated the early Army, Navy and civilian research efforts, but as the Manhattan Project ramped up in 1942, the NRL effort became dwarfed and sidelined, and the NRL was no longer informed of the Army's progress.

The thermal diffusion effort continued, however. In June 1944, the Manhattan Project decided to take it up, and constructed the S-50 thermal diffusion plant at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Although incapable of producing weapons grade uranium, S-50 was able to produce slightly enriched uranium, which was then fed into K-25 and Y-12 for further enrichment by gaseous diffusion or the electromagnetic process. S-50 was credited with shortening World War II by eight days.  Gunn was awarded the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, on September 4, 1945. His citation read:

Once the war was over, Gunn returned to the proposal to use nuclear energy to power submarines. He organized a symposium at NRL on November 19, 1945. Papers were presented that argued that nuclear powered submarines would be able to operate submerged for years without refueling. The possibility of firing ballistic missiles from submerged submarines was also raised. Bowen and Commodore Deak Parsons arranged for naval personnel, including Hyman Rickover, to be assigned to the Manhattan Project to learn about the new technology. This would lead to the nuclear navy that Gunn had envisioned.

Later life
Gunn left the NRL for the United States Weather Bureau in February 1947. Although he had only a small staff and limited funds, he carried out a series of studies into atmospheric phenomena. He was director of the United States Air Force-Weather Bureau Cloud Physics Project from 1947 to 1949, and was a member of the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board from 1948 to 1953. He was also a consultant for the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1958 to 1965. His interest in atmospheric physics continued after 1958, when he left the Weather Bureau to become a research professor in physics at the American University in Washington, DC.  He remained in this job until his death there on October 15, 1966.

Notes

References

1897 births
1966 deaths
Scientists from Cleveland
Oberlin College alumni
University of Michigan College of Engineering alumni
Yale University alumni
American University faculty and staff
20th-century American physicists
American nuclear physicists
Manhattan Project people
Weapons scientists and engineers
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Amateur radio people
Fellows of the American Physical Society

Ross Gunn