Malcolm Cook MacPherson (August 23, 1943 – January 17, 2009) was an American national and foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine and the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books.

Biography
MacPherson was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on August 23, 1943, and spent his early childhood in Garden Grove in Orange County, California near Disneyland. After surviving a car crash that killed his parents when he was 11 years old, he headed back East and lived with relatives in Wallingford, Connecticut. Attending a high school program during the summer in New Delhi, he had the opportunity to interview Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, helping trigger an interest in journalism. He attended Trinity College in nearby Hartford, Connecticut, graduating in 1965.

MacPherson spent six years in the Marine Corps Reserves, starting in 1965. Working at Time magazine as a trainee, he was fired after throwing a drink in an editor's face while attending a holiday party. He started working for Newsweek magazine in 1968, first as a national correspondent, providing coverage from cities in the United States including Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. Five years later, he started taking on overseas assignments, including covering the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and "The Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa, Zaire in October 1974, with world Heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman facing former world champion Muhammad Ali, reporting from postings in London, Nairobi and Paris.

Turning down a position at its San Francisco office, MacPherson left Newsweek magazine. Moving into a treehouse in Kenya, he wrote his first novel, Protégé, about a group of former Nazis who try to take over Tanzania, which was published in 1980. The Lucifer Key, published the following year, told the story of a hacker who brings the United States and Soviet Union to the edge of nuclear war after he breaks into the Pentagon computer system. His 1984 non-fiction book The Blood of His Servants told of the search by Israeli journalist Lieber "Bibi" Krumholz for the man who killed his family during World War II. Time Bomb, published in 1986, was about the race to develop the atomic bomb. His 1994 comic novel In Cahoots was about real estate speculation in California.  A story about a real-life rancher from Colorado who adopts a baby elephant was the impetus for his 2001 book The Cowboy and His Elephant. Roberts Ridge, about Navy Seals operating in Afghanistan, was published in 2005. His 2007 book Hocus POTUS was a satiric novel about the search for weapons of mass destruction, based on his reporting in a freelance assignment for Time magazine in Iraq after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

MacPherson, a resident of Warrenton, Virginia, died of  a heart attack at age 65 on January 17, 2009, after collapsing while attending a pre-inauguration party for then-President-elect Barack Obama in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was survived by his wife, whom he married in 1988, two children and two sisters.

Books

See also

References

American male journalists
21st-century American novelists
American male novelists
Writers from Bridgeport, Connecticut
People from Wallingford, Connecticut
People from Warrenton, Virginia
Trinity College (Connecticut) alumni
United States Marines
1943 births
2009 deaths
20th-century American novelists
Journalists from Virginia
People from Garden Grove, California
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American male writers
Novelists from California
Novelists from Connecticut
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American journalists

Malcolm MacPherson (writer)


Derek Gordon Thomas (born 20 July 1972) is a British politician and former property developer serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for St Ives since the 2015 general election. He is a member of the Conservative Party.

Early life and career
Thomas was born in Cornwall to parents who were evangelical missionaries. He grew up in West Cornwall and went on to complete a traditional Cornish Mason Apprenticeship.

He studied in South London and then returned to West Cornwall to be a development manager for Mustard Seed, a voluntary organisation in Helston, Cornwall which helps in meeting of the needs of adults with learning disabilities on a day care basis, through provision of training in essential life skills with a view to greater integration within the community.  He later started his own small construction business as a property developer.

Political career
Thomas was first elected as a candidate for the Conservative Party at a by-election in November 2005 for Penzance Central ward on Penwith District Council. He narrowly beat the Liberal Democrat candidate and subsequently opposed the creation of a unitary Cornwall Council. In May 2009, he did not stand for the new Penzance Central ward on the amalgamated Cornwall Council and the seat was narrowly won by the Liberal Democrat candidate.

He unsuccessfully contested the parliamentary seat of St Ives for the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election, coming 1,719 votes behind the Liberal Democrat incumbent Andrew George. However, in the following general election in May 2015 he subsequently took the seat.

Thomas supported the Leave campaign in the 2016 European Union Referendum.

Thomas once again contested the St Ives seat in the 2017 general election, his campaign including a visit by Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Andrea Leadsom to his Penzance office. He went on to be re-elected with an increased vote share, but a diminished majority of 312.

In April 2019, Thomas was criticised for saying that Cornwall has a National Park on the Lizard Peninsula during a debate he secured to discuss 'Effect of the 25 Year Environment Plan on World Health', when in fact the area is a National Nature Reserve and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Despite this error the debate was positively received by MPs and led to Thomas being invited to apply to the Environmental Audit Committee by its Chair Mary Creagh MP.

In May 2019, Cornish MPs received local scrutiny following release of expenses figures for that year, Thomas claimed £184,937, therefore making him Cornwall's "second most expensive MP" after Steve Double. Thomas said: "Having run my own business before being elected an MP, I am acutely aware of the need to keep a close eye on what is being spent. I constantly look at ways of reducing my expenses but believe my claims are very reasonable for an MP representing a constituency in the extreme south west of the country".

In June 2019, Thomas supported the establishment of a Marine Conservation Zone west of Land's End, calling the move a "big step forward".

In the House of Commons, he sits on the Environmental Audit Committee and the Work and Pensions Select Committee having previously sat on both the Health and Social Care Select Committee and the Science and technology Select Committees.

Thomas is currently the Chair of the following All-Party Parliamentary Groups: Brain Tumours, Vascular and Venous Disease, and Axial Spondyloarthritis. As well as chairing those APPGs, Thomas is Vice Chair for the following APPG groups: Post Office Group, UK Islands Group and Home Electrical Safety Group (Vice Chair and Secretary). He is Secretary for the Healthy Homes and Buildings Group, and Treasurer for the Fuel Poverty and Energy Efficiency Group and also the South West Rail Group. He is a member of the Ocean Conservation Group, The Minimum Unit Pricing of Alcohol Group and the Great South West Alliance group.

In 2019, he was re-elected to Parliament, increasing his majority from 312 to 4,284.

His top areas of focus are tackling climate change and protecting biodiversity and the environment. This includes the development of the 'WR2020 Project' a woodland recovery project which has the aim of planting 20,000 trees in West Cornwall by the end of 2020. The project is set to improve air quality and create healthy environments for people to enjoy.

He backed Penny Mordaunt in the leadership contests in 2022.

Personal life
Derek Thomas lives in West Cornwall in the village of St Buryan with his wife Tamsin and their three young children.

References

External links

 Derek Thomas MP's website
 Derek Thomas UK Conservative Party website

1972 births
British Christians
Conservative Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Councillors in Cornwall
Living people
Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for St Ives
UK MPs 2015–2017
UK MPs 2017–2019
UK MPs 2019–present

Derek Thomas (politician)


The imperial and US customary measurement systems are both derived from an earlier English system of measurement which in turn can be traced back to Ancient Roman units of measurement, and Carolingian and Saxon units of measure.

The US Customary system of units was developed and used in the United States after the American Revolution, based on a subset of the English units used in the Thirteen Colonies; it is the predominant system of units in the United States and in U.S. territories (except Puerto Rico and Guam, where the metric system is also officially used and is predominant, which was introduced when both territories were Spanish colonies). The imperial system of units was developed and used in the United Kingdom and its empire beginning in 1826. The metric system has, to varying degrees, replaced the imperial system in the countries that once used it.

Most of the units of measure have been adapted in one way or another since the Norman Conquest (1066). The units of linear measure have changed the least – the yard (which replaced the ell) and the chain were measures derived in England. The foot used by craftsman supplanted the longer foot used in agriculture.  The agricultural foot was reduced to  of its former size, causing the rod, pole or perch to become  (rather than the older 15) agricultural feet.  The furlong and the acre, once it became a measure of the size of a piece of land rather than its value, remained relatively unchanged. In the last thousand years, three principal pounds were used in England. The troy pound (5760 grains) was used for precious metals, the apothecaries' pound, (also 5760 grains) was used by pharmacists and the avoirdupois pound (7000 grains) was used for general purposes. The apothecaries and troy pounds are divided into 12 ounces (of 480 grains) while the avoirdupois pound has 16 ounces (of 437.5 grains). The unit of volume, the gallon, has different values in the United States and in the United Kingdom – the US fluid gallon being about 0.83 imperial gallons and the US dry gallon being about 0.97 imperial gallons. The US fluid gallon was based on the wine gallon used in England prior to 1826.

After the United States Declaration of Independence the units of measurement in the United States developed into what is now known as customary units. The United Kingdom overhauled its system of measurement in 1826, when it introduced the imperial system of units. This resulted in the two countries having different gallons. Later in the century, efforts were made to align the definition of the pound and the yard in the two countries by using copies of the standards adopted by the British Parliament in 1855. However, these standards were of poor quality compared with those produced for the Convention of the Metre. In 1960 the two countries agreed to common definitions of the yard and the pound based on definitions of the metre and the kilogram. This change, which amounted to a few parts per million, had little effect in the United Kingdom, but resulted in the United States having two slightly different systems of linear measure – the international system, and the surveyors system.

English units of measure

English units of measure, were derived from a combination of Roman, Carolingian and Saxon units of measure.  They were a precursor to both the imperial system of units (first defined in 1824, to take effect in 1826) and United States customary units which evolved from English Units from 1776 onwards.

The earliest records of English units of measure involve the weight (and therefore the value) of Saxon coins.  The penny introduced by Offa was about 20 grains (1.296 g). Edward the Elder increased the weight of the English penny to 26 grains (1.685 g), thereby aligning it with the penny of Charlemagne.  By the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), it had decreased to 24 grains (1.555 g).  This value was subsequently called the pennyweight and formed the basis of the Troy units of weight—the troy ounce used to this day for weighting precious metals. Edward I (1272–1307) broke the link between a coin's value and its weight when he debased the English coinage by introducing a groat (four pence) which weighed of 89 grains rather than the expected 96 grains. The groat was further devalued in the 1350s when its weight was reduced to 72 grains.

During Saxon times land was measured both in terms of its economic value and in terms of its size. The Domesday Book used the hide, an economic unit of measure. In other references the furlong and the rood appear to be units related to ploughing procedures. Of particular interest was the rood which was 15 North German feet in length, the North German foot being equivalent to 335 mm (13.2 inches). Craftsmen, on the other hand used a shorter Roman foot.

Standardization of weights and measures was a recurring issue for monarchs. In 965 AD, King Edgar decreed "that only one weight and one measure should pass throughout the King's dominion".
In 1197 Richard I decreed that the measures of corn and pulse, and of wine and ale should be the same throughout all England. The Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 extended this to include cloth. Some time between 1266 and 1303 the weights and measures of England were radically revised by a law known as the Composition of Yards and Perches (Compositio ulnarum et perticarum) often known as the Compositio for short. This law, attributed to either Henry III or his successor Edward I, instituted a new foot that was exactly  the length of the old foot, with corresponding reductions in the size of the yard, ell, inch, and barleycorn. (Furlongs remained the same, but the rod changed from 15 old feet to 16 new feet.)

In 1324 Edward II systematized units of length by defining the inch as 3 barleycorns, the foot as 12 inches, the yard as 3 feet, the perch as 5 yards, and the acre as an area 4 by 40 perches. Apart from the ell (45 inches or 114.3 cm, which continued to be used in the cloth trade) and the chain (introduced by Edmund Gunter in 1620, and used in land surveying), these units formed the basis of the units of length of the English system of measurement. The units were however redefined many times – during Henry VIII's time standard yards and ells made of brass were manufactured, during Elizabeth I's time these were replaced with standards made of bronze and in 1742, after scientific comparisons showed a variation of up to 0.2% from the mean, a definitive standard yard was proposed (but not manufactured).

During the medieval era, agricultural products other than wool were mostly sold by volume, with various bushels and gallons being introduced over the years for different commodities. In the early fourteenth century the wool trade traditionally used the avoirdupois system of weights, a process that was formalized by Edward III in 1340. At the same time, the stone, when used to weigh wool, was formalized as being 14 pounds.

During the Tudor period, numerous reforms were made to English weights and measures. In 1496 Henry VII ordered that reference copies of the yard, pound and gallon should be made of brass and distributed to specified towns and cities throughout the kingdom. Many weights and measures that had crept into use were banned: in 1527 Henry VIII banned the Tower pound (5400 grains against the 5760 grains of the apothecaries and troy pounds) and the mercantile pound (6750 grains against the 7000 grains of the pound avoirdupois) and in 1592 Elizabeth I ordered the use of the "statute mile" (5280 feet against the 5000 feet of the London or Old English mile).

Under the Act of Union of 1707, Scotland, which had developed its own system of weights and measures independently of England, abandoned them in favour of English weights and measures. The Acts of Union 1800 which united Ireland with Great Britain had less of an effect on weights and measures—Irish weights and measures having been based on the English foot and pound avoirdupois since 1351, though the Irish acre and mile were based on a perch of 7 yards, not  yards as in England.

By the early nineteenth century many commodities had their own set of units, the units of measure for the wool and cloth industries had units of measure specific to those commodities, albeit derived on the pound avoirdupois or the foot while wine and beer used units with the same names but different sizes – the wine gallon being 231 cubic inches and the beer or ale gallon being 282 cubic inches. Agricultural produce was sold by the bushel which was based on yet another gallon – the dry gallon of 268.8 cubic inches. Even though not explicitly permitted by statute, many markets used bushels based on weight rather than volume when selling wheat and barley.

Imperial units

The British Weights and Measures Act of 1824 repealed all existing British weights and measures legislation, some dating back to the 1300s, and redefined existing units of measure. In particular, a new standard yard and troy pound were manufactured as the standards for length and weight respectively. A new measure, the imperial gallon, which replaced the many gallons in use, was defined as being the volume of 10 pounds of water at  which, after the authorized experiments, was found to be 277.274 cubic inches. The bushel, which like the gallon, had definitions reflecting the various gallons, was defined as 8 imperial gallons.

The 1824 Act also introduced some changes to the administration of the standards of weights and measures: previously Parliament had been given the custody of the standards but the act passed this responsibility on to the Exchequer. The act also set up an inspectorate for weights and measures.

The standard yard and pound were lost in 1834 when a fire partially destroyed the Palace of Westminster. Following a report published in 1841 by a commission new standard yard and pound were manufactured using the best available secondary sources. Unlike the previous standard, the new pound standard was a pound avoirdupois. They were accepted by an Act of Parliament as the standards for length and weight in 1855. Following the debacle over the different gallons that had been adopted by the United States and the United Kingdom thirty years earlier, one of the copies of the standard yard was offered to and accepted by the United States Government.

The 1835 Weights and Measures Act tidied up a number of shortcomings in the 1825 Act. In response to representations from traders, the stone and the hundredweight were formally defined as being 14 pounds and 112 pounds respectively and the experiment of defining a "heaped" measure as outlined in the 1824 Act was abandoned. Not all trades followed the use of the 14 stone—Britten, in 1880 for example, catalogued a number of different values of the stone in various British towns and cities ranging from 4 lb to 26 lb The 1835 Act also restricted the use of Troy measure to precious metals and required that coal be sold by weight and not by volume.

The Weights and Measures Act of 1878 overhauled the inspection regime of weights and measures used in trade. The act also reaffirmed the use of the brass standard yard and platinum standard pound as the standards for use in the United Kingdom, reaffirmed the use of apothecaries measures in the pharmaceutical industry, reaffirmed the 1824 definition of the gallon, removed the Troy pound from the list of legal units of measure, added the fathom to the list of legal units and fixed the ratio of metric to imperial units at one metre being equal to 39.3708 inches and one kilogram being equal to 15432.3487 grains (1 lb = 0.453592654 kg). Subsequent to the passing of the act, the volume of the gallon which had been defined as being the volume of 10 lb distilled water at  was remeasured and set at 277.42 cubic inches though HM Customs and Excise continued to use the 1824 definition for excise purposes.

The Weights and Measures Act of 1878 effectively prohibited the use of metric weights for trade, the United Kingdom having declined to sign the Convention of the Metre three years previously. The standard imperial yard was not stable – in 1947 its rate of shrinkage was quantified and found to be one part per million every 23 years. In April 1884 HJ Chaney, Warden of Standards in London unofficially contacted the BIPM (custodians of the standard metre) inquiring whether the BIPM would calibrate some metre standards that had been manufactured in the United Kingdom. Broch, director of the BIPM replied that he was not authorised to perform any such calibrations for non-member states. On 17 September 1884, the British Government signed the convention on behalf of the United Kingdom. The Weights and Measures Act of 1897 authorized the use of metric units for trade; a list of metric to imperial equivalents being published the following year.

Under the Weights and Measures Act of 1824 custody of the standard yard and pound and custody of the administration of weights and measures was entrusted to the Exchequer but verification was administered locally. The 1835 Act formally described the office and duties of Inspectors of Weights and Measures and required every borough to appoint such officers and the 1866 Act passed responsibility for weights and measures to the Board of Trade. In 1900 the Board of Trade established the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to provide laboratory facilities for weights and measures.

After the passage of the 1897 Act, weights and measures in the United Kingdom remained relatively unchanged until after the Second World War. By the middle of the century the difference of 2 parts per million between the British and US standard yards was causing problems—in 1900 a tolerance of 10 parts per million was adequate for science, but by 1950 this tolerance had shrunk to 0.25 parts per million. In 1960 representatives from the NPL and other national laboratories from the United States and Commonwealth agreed to redefine the yard as being exactly 0.9144 metres, an action that was ratified by the British Government as part of the 1963 Weights and Measures Act.

Metrication in the United Kingdom began in the mid-1960s. Initially this metrication was voluntary and by 1985 many traditional and imperial units of measure had been voluntarily removed from use in the retail trade. The Weights and Measures Act of 1985 formalized their removal for use in trade, though imperial units were retained for use on road signs and the most common imperial weights such as the foot, inch, pound, ounce, gallon and pint continued to be used in the retail trade for the sale of loose goods or goods measured or weighed in front of the customer. Since 1 January 2000 it has been unlawful to use imperial units for weights and measures in retail trade in the United Kingdom except as supplementary units or for the sale of draught beer and cider by the pint or milk that is sold in returnable containers.

British Empire
When colonies attained dominion status, they also attained the right to control their own systems of weights and measures. Many adopted the imperial system of units with local variations. India and Hong Kong supplemented the imperial system of units with their own indigenous units of measure, parts of Canada and South Africa included land survey units of measure from earlier colonial masters in their systems of measure while many territories used only a subset of the units used in the United Kingdom—in particular the stone, quarter and cental were not catalogued in, amongst others, Australian, Canadian and Indian legislation. Furthermore, Canada aligned her ton with US measures by cataloguing the ton of 2000 lb as being legal for trade, but kept the imperial gallon.

The standardization of the yard in 1960 required not only agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom, but also of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, all of whom had their own standards laboratories.

United States customary units

Prior to the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Thirteen Colonies that were to become the United States used the English system of measurement. The Articles of Confederation, which predated the Constitution, gave the central government "the sole and exclusive right and power of...fixing the Standard of Weights and Measures throughout the United States." Subsequent to the formation of the United States, the Constitution reaffirmed the right of Congress to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" but reserved the right to regulate commerce and weights and measures to the individual states.

During the First Congress of the United States in 1789, Thomas Jefferson was detailed to draw up a plan for the currency and weights of measures that would be used in the new republic. In his 1790 response he noted that the existing system of measure was sound but that control of the base artefact was not under the control of the United States. His report suggested a means of manufacturing a local standard and also left the way open for an adoption of a decimal-based system should this be appropriate. In the event, the existing standards were retained.

For many years no action was taken at the federal level to ensure harmony in units of measure – the units acquired by the early colonists appeared to serve their purpose. Congress did nothing, but Ferdinand Hassler, Superintendent of the East Coast survey, who in 1790 had met using contacts in his native Switzerland acquired a copy of the [French] mètre des Archives.
In 1810 Ferdinand Hassler was dispatched to Europe by the Treasury to acquire measuring instruments and standards.

In 1827 Albert Gallatin, United States minister at London acquired an "exact copy" of the troy pound held by the British Government which in 1828 was adopted as the reference copy of weight in the United States.

In 1821 John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State submitted a report based on research commissioned by the Senate in 1817 which recommended against adoption of the metric system. Congress did nothing and in 1832 the Treasury adopted the yard of 36 inches as the unit of length for customs purposes, the avoirdupois pound of 7000 grains as the unit of weight and the gallon of 231 cubic inches (the "Queen Anne gallon") and the bushel of 2150.42 cubic inches as the units of volume. Congress did little to promote standards across the United States other than fixing the size of the yard and the gallon.

Throughout the nineteenth century individual states developed their own standards and in particular a variety of bushels based on weight (mass) rather than volume emerged, dependent on both commodity and state.  This lack of uniformity crippled inter-state trade and in 1905 the National Bureau of Standards called a meeting of the states to discuss the lack of uniform standards and in many cases, a means of regulatory oversight. A meeting was held the following year and subsequently became an annual gathering known as the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM).  In 1915 the conference published its first model standards. The bushel was not fully standardized and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange still (May 2013) uses different bushels for different commodities—a bushel of corn being 56 lb, a bushel of oats 38 lb and a bushel of soybeans 60 lb and a bushel of red winter wheat (both hard and soft) also 60 lb.  Other commodities at the exchange are reckoned in pounds, in short tons or in metric tons.

One of the actions taken by Congress was to permit the use of the metric system in trade (1866), made at the height of the metrication process in Latin America. Other actions were to ratify the Metre Convention in 1875 and under the Mendenhall Order of 1897, to redefine the pound and the yard in terms of the international prototype of the kilogram and the international prototype of the metre respectively.

In 1901 the administration of weights and measures was handed to a federal agency, the National Bureau of Standards, which in 1988 became the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Inactivity by Congress and the lack of uniformity of weights and measures which were crippling US economic growth in the nineteenth century led to the National Bureau of Standards to call a meeting of states in 1905 which resulted in the setting up of the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM). This organisation is the de facto controlling body for weights and measures in the United States, though in respect of international relations such as membership of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (an intergovernmental organization) the US Government itself has to take the lead.

During the twentieth century the principal change in the customary system of weights and measures was an agreement between NIST and the corresponding bodies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, signed in 1960, that redefined the yard and the pound in terms of the metre and the kilogram respectively.  These new units became known as the international yard and pound. Congress has neither endorsed nor repudiated this action. (See ).

Energy, power, and temperature

Imperial and US customary units have long been used in many branches of engineering.
Two of the earliest such units of measure to come into use were the horsepower and the degree Fahrenheit. The horsepower was defined by James Watt in 1782 as the power required to raise 33,000 pounds of water through a height of one foot in one minute and the degree Fahrenheit was first defined by Daniel Fahrenheit in about 1713 as being a temperature scale having its lower calibration point (0 °F) at temperature where a supersaturated salt/ice mixture froze and its upper calibration point at body temperature (96 °F). In 1777 the Royal Society, under the chairmanship of Henry Cavendish, proposed the definition of the Fahrenheit scale be modified such that the temperature corresponding to the melting point of ice be  and the boiling point of water under standard atmospheric conditions be .

The British thermal unit (Btu) is defined as the heat needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It was in use before 1859 as a unit of heat based on imperial units rather than the metric units used by the French—Clément-Desormes having defined the calorie in terms of the kilogram and degrees Celsius ('centigrade') in 1824.

In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science under the chairmanship of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) introduced the concept of coherence into units of measure and proposed the names dyne and erg as the units of force and work in the CGS system of units. Two years later James Thomson, older brother of William Thomson, introduced the term poundal as a coherent unit of force in the Foot–pound–second system (FPS) of measurement. The FPS unit of work is the foot-poundal.

Other systems for the measurement of dynamic quantities that used imperial and US customary units are the British Gravitational System (BG) proposed by Arthur Mason Worthington and the English Engineering System (EE). Both systems depend on the gravitational acceleration, and use the pound-force as the unit of force but use different approaches when applying Newton's laws of motion. In the BG system, force, rather than mass has a base unit while the slug is a derived unit of inertia (rather than mass). On the other hand, the EE system uses a different approach and introduces the acceleration due to gravity (g) into its equations.  Both these approaches led to slight variations in the meaning of the pound-force (and also of the kilogram-force) in different parts of the world.  Various countries published standard values that should be used for g, and in 1901 the CGPM published a standard value for g that should be used in the "International Service of Weights and Measures", namely , which is equal to the value of g at 45° latitude.

Newton's second law in these systems becomes:
BG: Force (lbf) = inertia (slugs) × acceleration (ft/s2)
EE: Force (lbf) = mass (lb) × acceleration (ft/s2) ÷ g
AE: Force (poundals) = mass (lb) × acceleration (ft/s2)

AE is ignored in many engineering courses and textbooks while some, such as Darby only uses EE (alongside SI), having described the BG and EE systems as "archaic".

Metric equivalents

The standard yard and [Troy] pound were lost in 1834 when a fire partially destroyed the Palace of Westminster. Following a report published in 1841 by a commission, a new standard yard and pound were manufactured using the best available secondary sources. Unlike the previous standard, the new pound standard, made of platinum, was a pound avoirdupois. The new yard, slightly longer than a yard to prevent wear as was experienced with the , was made of brass and had two gold plugs close to its end. Scratch marks on the plugs denoted the length of the yard. They were accepted by an Act of Parliament as the standards for length and weight in 1855. Following the debacle over the different gallons that had been adopted by the United States and the United Kingdom thirty years earlier, one of the copies of the standard yard and avoirdupois pound (known in the United States as the "Mint pound") was offered to and accepted by the United States government.

In the years that followed the passing of the 1878 act, the standard imperial yard was found to be shrinking at a rate, confirmed in 1950, to be nearly one part per million every 30 years. On the other hand, the international prototype metre, manufactured from a platinum-iridium alloy rather than brass by a British firm, which in 1889 replaced the  as the standard for the metre, was found to be more stable than the standard yard. Both the United States and the United Kingdom, as signatories of the Metre Convention, took delivery of copies of both the standard metre and the standard kilogram. The "Mint pound" was also found to be of poor workmanship.

In 1866 the United States government legalised use of metric units in contract law, defining them in terms of the equivalent customary units to five significant figures, which was sufficient for purposes of trade. In 1893, under the Mendenhall Order the United States abandoned the 1855 yard as a standard of length and the "Mint pound" as a standard of mass, redefining them in terms of the metre and kilogram using the values of the 1866 legislation. In the United Kingdom fresh comparisons of the imperial and metric standards of length and mass were made and were used in the Weights and Measures Act 1897 to redefine the yard and pound in terms of the metre and kilogram respectively. In addition, the definitions of both the yard and the pound in terms of the artifacts held by the British government was reaffirmed giving both the yard and the pound two different definitions. The differences between the British and the US yard and pound was of the order of a few parts per million.

By the end of the Second World War, the standards laboratories of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa also had their own copies of the pound and the yard.  These legal and technical discrepancies, described by McGreevy (pg 290) as being "unsound" led to the Commonwealth Science Conference of 1946. proposing that the Commonwealth countries and the United States should all redefine the yard and the pound in terms of an agreed fraction of the metre and kilogram respectively. Agreement was reached by the standards laboratories in 1960 to redefine the yard and the pound as
1 international yard =
1 international pound =
The final digit of the value chosen for the pound was chosen so as to make the number divisible by 7 without a repeating decimal, making the grain exactly .

This agreement was ratified by the United Kingdom in 1963 while Canada pre-empted the decision by adopting these values in 1951, nine years ahead of the full international agreement.  The United States Congress has neither ratified nor repudiated the agreement.

Comparison of imperial and US customary systems

Prior to 1960 the imperial and customary yard and the pound were sufficiently close to each other that for most practical purposes the differences in the sizes of units of length, area, volume and mass could be disregarded, though there were differences in usage - for example, in the United States short road distances are specified in feet while in the United Kingdom they are specified in yards The introduction of the international yard in 1960 caused small but noticeable effects in surveying in the United States which resulted in some states retaining the original definitions of the customary units of measure which are now known as the survey mile, foot, while other states adopted the international foot. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the survey foot will be obsolete as of January 1, 2023, and its use discouraged.

The definition of units of weight above a pound differed between the customary and the imperial system - the imperial system employed the stone of 14 pounds, the hundredweight of 8 stone and the ton of 2240 pounds (20 hundredweight), while the customary system of units did not employ the stone but has a hundredweight of 100 pounds and a ton of 2000 pounds. In international trade, the ton of 2240 pounds was often referred to as the "long ton" and the ton of 2000 pounds as the "short ton".  When using customary units, it is usual to express body weight in pounds, but when using imperial units, to use stones and pounds.

In his Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, identified 14 different gallons in English statutes varying in size from 224 to 282 cubic inches (3.67 to 4.62 litres).

In 1832, in the absence of any direction by Congress, the United States Treasury chose the second smallest gallon, the "Queen Anne gallon" of 231 cubic inches (3.785 litres), to be the official gallon in the United States for fiscal purposes. Sixteen US fluid ounces make a US pint (8 pints equals 1 gallon in both customary and imperial systems).

During the reform of weights and measures legislation in the United Kingdom in 1824, old gallons were replaced by the new imperial gallon, which was defined to be the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62 °F (17 °C), and was determined experimentally to be 277.42 cubic inches (4.54609 litres).  Twenty imperial fluid ounces make an imperial pint, the imperial fluid ounce being 0.96 US fluid ounces.

The US Customary system of units makes use of set of dry units of capacity that have a similar set of names to those of liquid capacity, though different volumes: the dry pint having a volume of 33.6 cubic inches (550 ml) against the US fluid pint's volume of 28.875 cubic inches (473 ml) and the imperial pint of 34.68 cubic inches (568 ml). The imperial system of measure does not have an equivalent to the US customary system of "dry measure".

In the international commodities markets, the barrel (, ≈159 litres) is used in both London and New York/Chicago for trading in crude oil and the troy ounce (≈31.10 grams) for trading in precious metals, except the London markets use metric units and the Chicago Board of Trade uses customary units.

Units in use
The tables below catalogue the imperial units of measure that were permitted for use in trade in the United Kingdom on the eve of metrication (1976) and the customary "units of measurement that have traditionally been used in the United States". In addition, named units of measure that are used in the engineering industry are also catalogued. Prior to metrication, the units of measure used in Ireland were the same as those used in the United Kingdom while those used in the British Commonwealth and in South Africa were in most cases a subset of those used in the United Kingdom with, in certain cases, local differences.

Unless otherwise specified, the units of measure quoted below were used in both the United States, the United Kingdom. The SI equivalents are quoted to four significant figures.

Units of length
In 1893 the United States fixed the yard at  metres, making the yard 0.9144018 metres and 1896 the British authorities fixed the yard as being 0.9143993 metres. At the time the discrepancy of about two parts per million was considered to be insignificant. In 1960, the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa standardised their units of length by defining the "international yard" as being 0.9144 metres exactly. This change affected land surveyors in the United States and led to the old units being renamed "survey feet", "survey miles" etc.  However the introduction of the metric-based Ordnance Survey National Grid in the United Kingdom in 1938 meant that British surveyors were unaffected by the change.

Notes

Notes

Units of area
The introduction of the international yard in 1960 had no effect on British measurements of area, however US measurements of land area, as opposed to other measurements of area (such as pounds per square inch) continued to be based on the US statute yard.

Notes

Notes

Volume of dry goods

Notes

Notes

Volume of liquids

Several of the units of liquid volume have similar names, but have different volumes – and in the case of fluid ounces and pints, different relations. In addition the definitions of the imperial and US gallons are based on different concepts – the imperial gallon is defined in terms of the volume occupied by a specified mass of water, while the US gallon is specified in terms of cubic linear measurement.

Notes

Notes

Units of mass

Units of mass in both the imperial and US customary system have always used the same standard, though differences in multiples of the avoirdupois pound developed in the nineteenth century. Both systems used three scales – avoirdupois for general use, troy for precious metals, and apothecaries for medicine.

Avoirdupois

Notes

Troy

Notes

Apothecary

Apothecary mass were used in the pharmaceutical industry and have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages – the apothecary pound and ounce being the same as the troy pound and ounce, but each system having different divisions. In the United Kingdom, they were replaced by metric units in 1970.

Energy, power, and temperature
The names of most derived units of measure in the imperial and US customary systems are concatenations of the constituent parts of the unit of measure, for example the unit of pressure is the pounds [force] per square inch. Apart from the poundal, most of the named units of measure are non-coherent, but were adopted due to traditional working practice.

Other units
In addition to those catalogued above, there are hundreds of other units of measurement in both the imperial and the US customary system of measurement – many are specific to a particular industry of application. Such units could, in theory, be replaced by general units of the same dimension, for example the barrel (42 US gallons, 34.97 imperial gallons or 159.0 litres) used in the oil industry has the dimension of volume and could be replaced by the cubic metre or litre.

The definitions of potential difference (volt), electric current (ampere), electrical resistance (ohm) were defined in terms of metric units, international agreement having been reached at a series of IEC Congress in Chicago between 1881 and 1906 when the electrical industry started. At that time, the metric system had become established in continental Europe while an issue in the United Kingdom. Similarly, the radiological units of measurement were defined in terms of metric units, agreement first having been reached at the second International Congress of Radiology at Stockholm (1928).

Current status

In the 1960s a metrication program was initiated in most English-speaking countries, resulting in either the partial or total displacement of the imperial system or the US customary system of measure in those countries. The current status of imperial and US customary units, as summarised by NIST, is that "the SI metric system is now the official system of units in the United Kingdom, while the customary units are still predominantly used in the United States".

The situation is however not as clear-cut as this. In the United States, for example, the metric system is the predominant system of measure in certain fields such as automobile manufacture even though customary units are used in aircraft manufacture. In the United Kingdom, metric units are required for almost all regulated  use of units of measure except for a few specifically exempt areas such as road signs, speedometers and draught beer. Metrication is also all but complete in the Commonwealth countries of Australia, India, New Zealand and South Africa; metrication in Canada has displaced the imperial system in many areas.

The imperial and US customary systems of measurement use the SI for their formal definitions, the yard being defined as 0.9144 metres exactly, the pound avoirdupois as  exactly while both systems of measure share the definition of the second.

See also
 Conversion of units

Notes

References

Customary units of measurement

Systems of units
Units of measurement by country

Imperial and US customary measurement systems


is the president of Fuji Speedway from . He was the chairman of Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG, ex-Toyota Team Europe) and team principal of Toyota F1, the Formula One racing branch of Toyota, until June 2007.

Career
Born and raised in Japan, Tomita first joined Toyota Motor Corporation in 1969 as an engine development engineer. He continually worked his way up the corporate ladder, becoming the executive in charge of all Toyota racing engines by 1987. In 1996, he became a member of the board of directors, responsible for all of Toyota's international motorsport activities.

Many credit Tomita as being the driving force behind Toyota's decision to enter Formula One in 2002. He did not want Toyota to enter F1 as merely an engine supplier; instead, his vision was for the Japanese automobile giant to form its own "works" team. Toyota has now joined Ferrari and Renault as the only teams producing F1 cars completely from scratch, including the engine, chassis, brakes, suspension and electronics.

During the 2003 Formula One season, Tomita relocated to the Toyota Motorsport factory in Cologne, Germany to personally oversee the team's F1 activities. In January 2004, Tomita was elevated to the role of team principal, managing every aspect of Toyota's F1 endeavors. Tomita has recently expanded Toyota's influence in Formula One, announcing that rebadged Toyota engines would be powering Jordan cars in 2005. This deal carried through to 2006, when the team was renamed Midland F1 and then  Spyker F1. During the 2006 Formula One season, Tomita announced that the Toyota F1 team would supply the Williams F1 team with engines from 2007 to at least 2008.

In April 2007, Tomita announced he would be leaving his post as Toyota F1 team principal to return to work for the company in Japan. Tadashi Yamashina was announced as the person taking over the role. Tomita's exit took place in June.

References
GrandPrix.com biography

Formula One team principals
Toyota people
Living people
1943 births
Japanese motorsport people

Tsutomu Tomita


The Monasterium Magnificat is a monastery of the Annunciade Order, located in Westmalle, Belgium. It is the only monastery of this order in Belgium. It was created from the merger of three monasteries which existed in 1965: Tienen (1629), Geel (1853), and Merksem (1898). The new monastery was built between 1966 and 1970 in the midst of a quiet forest belonging to Westmalle Abbey. Marc Dessauvage (1931-1984) was the architect of the building.

See also
 Saint Joan of France

Sources
Monastérium Magnificat
Annuntiaten

External links
 Annonciade

Servite Order
Christian monasteries in Antwerp Province
Malle

Monasterium Magnificat


Cut glass or cut-glass is a technique and a style of decorating glass.  For some time the style has often been produced by other techniques such as the use of moulding, but the original technique of cutting glass on an abrasive wheel is still used in luxury products.  On glassware vessels, the style typically consists of furrowed faces at angles to each other in complicated patterns, while for lighting fixtures, the style consists of flat or curved facets on small hanging pieces, often all over. Historically, cut glass was shaped using "coldwork" techniques of grinding or drilling, applied as a secondary stage to a piece of glass made by conventional processes such as glassblowing.

Today, the glass is often mostly or entirely shaped in the initial process by using a mould (pressed glass), or imitated in clear plastic. Traditional hand-cutting continues, but gives a much more expensive product.  Lead glass has long been misleadingly called "crystal" by the industry, evoking the glamour and expense of rock crystal, or carved transparent quartz, and most manufacturers now describe their product as cut crystal glass.

There are two main types of object made using cut glass: firstly drinking glasses and their accompanying decanters and jugs, and secondly chandeliers and other light fittings. Both began to be made using the cut glass style in England around 1730, following the development there of a reliable process for making very clear lead glass with a high refractive index.  Cut glass requires relatively thick glass, as the cutting removes much of the depth, and earlier clear glass would mostly have appeared rather cloudy if made thick enough to cut.  For both types of object, some pieces are still made in traditional styles, broadly similar to those of the 18th century, but other glassmakers have applied modern design styles.

Expensive drinking glasses had previously mostly concentrated on elegant shapes of extreme thinness. If there was decoration it was mostly either internal, with hollow bubble or coloured spirals within the stem ("twists"), or surface decoration in enamelled glass or glass engraving. Outside Venice and Spain, lighting fittings had not previously made much use of glass in Europe; the enamelled mosque lamp of Islamic art was a different matter.  But cut glass "drops", faceted in a style derived from gem cutting in jewellery, refracted and spread the light in way that was new, and were enthusiastically embraced by makers and their customers.  The main skeleton of the chandelier was very often metal, but this was often all but hidden by a profusion of faceted glass pieces, held in place by metal wire.

Technique

The technique changed very little between the description by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD and the end of the 19th century.  It has always used a small rotating wheel of, or coated with, some abrasive substance, and usually with a liquid lubricant such as water, perhaps mixed with sand, falling onto the area being worked and then being collected below.  The wheels were originally powered by treadles, but by the mid-19th century workshops had several stations linked to steam power.  Today electric power is used.  For cutting flat facets a turntable device called a "lap", already used in gem-cutting, was adopted.

Typically the design is marked with paint on the glass before cutting – in England red is usually used.  One advantage of cut glass for the manufacturer is that it can very often be arranged for the small flaws such as bubbles that are inevitable in a proportion of glass pieces, and would lead to a clear piece being rejected, to be placed in the areas to be cut away.  Conversely, if imitation cut glass using moulds is made, the complexity of the mould shapes greatly increases the number of faults and rejects.

A second operation polishes the cut glass, traditionally using a wooden or cork wheel "fed with putty powder and water".  At the end of the 19th century an alternative method using acid was introduced, which "gives a dull finish and tends to round off the edges of the cuts".

Labour was the main cost in making cut glass.  Arguing against the reduction of tariffs in 1888, a leading figure in the American industry claimed that "We take a piece of glass .... costing 20 cents and .... in many cases put $36 of labor on it".

History

Technically, the decorative "cutting" of glass is very ancient, although the term "cut glass" generally refers to pieces from the 18th century onwards. The Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization made glass beads that were engraved with simple shapes.  Ancient Roman glass used a variety of techniques, but mostly large amounts of drilling, often followed by polishing, to produce the deeply under-cut cage cups, objects of extreme luxury, cameo glass in two colours, and objects cut in relief, of which the Lycurgus Cup is the outstanding survivor.

Islamic art, especially that of the Fatimid court in Egypt, valued bowls and other objects in "carved", that is, cut rock crystal (quartz, a clear mineral), and this style was also produced in glass, which was cheaper and easier to work.  Cameo glass was also produced.  Similar relief effects were also achieved even more cheaply in mould-blown glass.  The 13 or 14 surviving examples of the so-called Hedwig glasses were probably made by Islamic artists, but perhaps for the European market.  Perhaps from the 12th century, they are either very late examples of Islamic glass-cutting, or isolated ones of medieval European use of the technique.

Very shallowly scratched or cut engraved glass was revived by at least the Renaissance, but there was very little use of deeper cutting which, however, continued to be used in rock crystal and other forms of hardstone cutting.  In Germany in the late 17th and early 18th centuries there was a revival, for "two generations", of cut relief decoration, water-powered and imitating rock crystal.  Typical pieces were cups and goblets with coats of arms surrounded by rich Baroque ornament, with the background cut away to leave the reliefs raised.  This is called the Hochschnitt ("high cut") style.

In the later 17th century George Ravenscroft developed a cheap and reliable lead "crystal" glass with a high refractive index in England, which various other glassmakers adopted.  After some time, the potential of cut glass using this basic material began to be realized; a high lead content also made the glass easier to cut.

Chandeliers

In the early 18th century, bevelled edges to large mirrors became fashionable in England, achieved by rubbing with abrasives, but also by "cutting".  The making of "looking glasses" was a different branch of glassmaking from the makers of drinking glasses, and it seems to have been in the former that "the craft of cutting was born", and the mirrormakers were the workshops who expanded into chandeliers.

A London glassmaker advertised in 1727 that he sold "Looking Glasses, Coach Glasses and Glass Shandeliers".  The earliest examples, like that given to the chapel in  Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1732, were glass versions of the standard brass designs long used in England, imported or locally-made versions of a Netherlandish and north French design style that had been developed since the 15th century.  Around the mid-century, designs took up the use of multiple faceted pendants, which had been used in the enormously expensive chandeliers of the French court, where instead of glass carved clear rock crystal (quartz) had been used.

Over the rest of the 18th century, and the early part of the next the number of drops increased, and the main stem of the chandelier, typically in metal, tended to disappear behind long chains of them. By the Regency period there might be "some thirty drops in perhaps six or eight graded sizes, and each drop might have 32 facets on each side.  Costs soared."  The dominance of cut glass in other lighting devices such as candlesticks, sconces, girandoles, and lamps was never as complete, but all were often made in it.

By 1800 it was already common to dismantle chandeliers and reconfigure them into a more fashionable shape, and subsequently most old chandeliers have been converted from candles to electricity, often after a period as gasoliers using lamp oil.

Vessels

Starting out by decorating mainly wine glasses, decanters and other drinkware, by the 19th century cut glass was used for a variety of tableware shapes, mostly those associated with desserts ("sweetmeat glass" is a term used by collectors), and for bowls and trays either for use at the table or in the drawing room.  These larger shapes allowed the room for cutters to produce many of the most interesting and characteristic cut designs, which experts can often date rather precisely, as they passed through several different styles.  Starting with the Rococo, there were Neoclassical and Regency styles, and finally one with "Gothic" arches by about 1840.  The Regency style added to the 18th-century diamond shapes zones with many parallel bands, furrows, or flutes, either vertical or horizontal, initially rather narrow, but later wider, in the "broad flute" style. From about 1800 to 1840 "almost all British luxury table glass was cut", and the style spread to Europe and North America.  English cutters were instructing French workers at the Saint-Louis glass factory by 1781, and later Belgian cutters at Val Saint Lambert by 1826.

On wine glasses and similar shapes, the rim where the drinker's mouth would touch was left smooth, but the bowl, especially the lower part, the stem, and the foot might be cut. A starburst on the underside of the foot was common.  On jugs, cups for eating desserts from, and bowls the rim was often cut with zig-zags or other ornament.  Especially in the 18th century, cutting was often combined with glass engraving above, and by the 1840s it was popular to have areas of "frosting", rubbing the glass with abrasives to reduce its transparency.

Competition from cheaper, but lower quality pressed glass in the cut glass style began as early as the 1820s, and grew greatly in the 1830s, but the British cut glass industry continued to expand.  In 1845 a commentator stated "cut-glass is now comparatively cheap".  The ability of British glass designers to patent their designs after 1842 was a help;   the mould makers (often called "die-sinkers" in the trade) were apparently often independent of the glass factories.   At least in America, where the cut glass industry was growing rapidly, "cutting shops" were also often, or usually in the 19th century, independent operations buying glass blanks from the glassmakers.  In the 1870s Bohemian cutters began to arrive in Corning, New York, one of the centres of the industry, supplementing English immigrants.

1850 onwards

The centrepiece at the crossing of the Crystal Palace holding the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was a huge glass fountain (8.25 metres or 27 feet high), including much cut glass, by the leading Birmingham firm of F. & C. Ostler.  Cut glass had dominated both its main market niches for several decades, but a number of factors were about to challenge it, at least as far as vessels were concerned.  The Victorian taste for over-ornamentation was beginning to take over, and some of the cut glass displayed at the Great Exhibition was described as "prickly monstrosities".  In the year of the exhibition, the hugely influential critic John Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, denounced the whole technique, writing "We ought to be ashamed of it" and "all cut glass is barbarous, for the cutting conceals its ductility and confuses it with [rock] crystal".

At the same time, and further stimulated by the Great Exhibition itself, the British style was spreading across the Western world, and in particular cut American and Bohemian glass was attacking the British market.  The previous excise duty long charged on glass was abolished in 1845, which both encouraged the development of exciting new styles of decorating glass, and also made glass cheaper, leading to a flood of pressed glass imitations of cut glass style that tended to devalue the prestige of the style.  Nonetheless, cut glass remained a staple in most prosperous British households, and was still widely exported.

In the 1870s the "brilliant", "brilliant cut" or "American Brilliant" style emerged, perhaps first seen in America in glass exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centenary Exhibition: "its most complex brilliant cutting involved covering the glass surface with intersecting cuts that created innumerable, often fragmentary shapes making up larger patterns.  Basic motifs used were stars, hobnail or polygonal diamonds, strawberry diamonds and fan scallops...".

Decline

The last decades of the 19th century saw exciting new developments in glass design, with much use of colour, the Victorian version of cameo glass using glass etching, opaline glass in France, and other innovations. Cut glass, especially in the brilliant style, did not mix well with these – the great majority of it has always used clear glass.  An exception is the distinct Japanese style of Satsuma kiriko, which adds a thin layer of coloured flashed glass which is then cut through, giving a colour contrast.  Similar effects were sometimes used in the West, especially in continental Europe.  Cut glass vessels remained popular, but an increasingly conventional and conservative taste, little used for art glass, a new term for decorative glass with artistic aspirations.  This was even more the case with Art Nouveau glass and that of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which both took on board Ruskin's criticisms, and preferred sinuous curving forms that emphasized the flowing, frozen liquid nature of glass.

At the end of the century the market for expensive decorative glass appears to have slumped, perhaps because so much was now being made and traded internationally.  Corning's cut glass industry peaked in 1905, when a directory recorded 490 cutters there, and 33 engravers, though the quality of some work was falling; by 1909 the number of cutters had fallen to 340.

The arrival of Modernism in the early 20th century did not do much to change this, and in 1923 an English expert complained that "to the aesthetic soul [cut glass] is still a thing accursed ... a striking testimony to the persistence of Ruskin's influence".  He tried to do a survey of likely owners of 18th-century cut glass such as historic houses, Oxbridge colleges and London livery companies, but found very few would admit to owning any.

But some glassmakers, for example in Art Deco, were sympathetic to linear and geometric decoration and made use of the technique, often as one of a number of techniques used in a single piece.  This continues to be the case in the recent studio glass movement.  In mid-20th-century England there was a revival in engraved glass, which was often accompanied by some cutting; the work of Keith Murray includes examples.  Traditional cut glass designs are still used, for example in what Americans call the Old fashioned glass, a whisky or cocktail tumbler.  In chandeliers, however, the clear cut glass style has been adapted successfully to modern styles and still holds its own, especially for large public spaces such as hotel lobbies.

Cut-glass accent
In British English, a "cut-glass accent" is an especially clipped version of British upper-class Received Pronunciation, where "words are pronounced very clearly and carefully".  The accent is agreed to be less common now than it was several decades ago, with even leading exponents such as Queen Elizabeth II having softened their pronunciation over the years.

Notes

References
Battie, David and Cottle, Simon, eds., Sotheby's Concise Encyclopedia of Glass, 1991, Conran Octopus,
Davison, Sandra and Newton, R.G., Conservation and Restoration of Glass, 2008, Taylor & Francis,  google books
Farr, Michael, Design in British Industry: A Mid-century Survey, 1955, Cambridge University Press, google books
"History": "A History of the Chandelier"
Osborne, Harold (ed), The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts, 1975, OUP,
Powell, Harry J., Glass-making in England, 1923, Cambridge University Press, google books
Sinclaire, Estelle F., Complete Cut and Engraved Glass of Corning (New York State Series), 1997, Syracuse University Press, google books
Sparke, Penny, "At the Margins of Modernism: The Cut – Crystal Object in the Twentieth Century", 1995, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester,  1995 , 77 ( 1 ) : 31–38, PDF

Further reading

Fisher, Graham, Jewels on the Cut: An Exploration of the Stourbridge Canal and the Local Glass Industry, 2010, Sparrow Books
Spillman, Jane Shadel, The American Cut Glass Industry: T.G.Hawkes and His Competitors, 1999, ACC Art Books
Swan, Martha Louise, American Cut and Engraved Glass of the Brilliant Period in Historical Perspective, 1986, Gazelle Book Services
Warren, Phelps, Irish Glass: Waterford, Cork, Belfast in the Age of Exuberance (Faber monographs on glass), 1981, Faber & Faber

Glass
Drinkware
Chandeliers
History of glass

Cut glass


The Vietnamese famine of 1945 ( – famine of the Ất Dậu Year or Nạn đói năm 45 – the 1945 famine) was a famine that occurred in northern Vietnam in French Indochina during World War II from October 1944 to late 1945, which at the time was under Japanese occupation from  1940 with Vichy France as an ally of Nazi Germany in Western Europe. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.

According to a 2018 study, the primary cause of the famine were typhoons that reduced the availability of food, Japanese occupation, American attacks and bombardment on the Vietnamese transport system, and French colonial administration hindering an effective famine alleviation response.

Causes

A cause of the famine was the effects of World War II on French Indochina. The involvement of France and Japan in Vietnam caused detrimental effects to the economic activities of the Vietnamese. In 1944, after US bombing had cut off supplies of coal from the north to Saigon, the French and Japanese used rice and maize as fuel for power stations. According to the diplomat Bui Minh Dung, "the Japanese occupation of Vietnam was the direct cause, in the final analysis, of several other factors, in turn affecting the famine, but their military efforts together with their economic policy for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere per se seem to have systematically played a role considerably greater than any other factors in the Vietnamese starvation."

The mismanagement of the French administration in Vietnam was another cause. The French reformed the economy to serve the administration and to meet the needs of war, including the Japanese occupation. They imposed a compulsory system of government rice purchases with a price ceiling of 1.40 piastres for every 10 kilograms, which they continued paying even as the market rates soared from 2.50 to 3 piastres in 1943 to 6 to 7 in June 1944. It ballooned tenfold to 60-70 piastres the following year. This meant farmers could no longer afford to repurchase rice needed for new harvests or to feed themselves.

Natural causes included natural disasters such as droughts and floods, which destroyed northern crops.

The crop failures of 1943–1945 were compounded by lack of dike maintenance after the US bombing of the north and the catastrophic rainfall of August–September 1944, causing flooding and loss of rice plants.

French colonial administration
After the Great Depression in the 1930s, France returned to its policy of economic protectorate and monopolized the exploitation of natural resources of French Indochina. The people in French Indochina had to increase the economic value of the area by growing cash crops in place of lower-value agricultural produce, but only the French, a small minority of Vietnamese and the Hoa and some people in the cities benefited.

World War II

When the war started, France was weakened. In East Asia, Japan began to expand and viewed French Indochina as a bridge into Southeast Asia and a means to isolate and further weaken the Nationalist government of China. In mid-1940, Metropolitan France was occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan increased pressure on France and entered French Indochina that September. Vietnam was pulled into a wartime economy, with France and Japan competing in administration. Japanese troops forced farmers to grow jute, instead of rice, thus depriving them of needed food, but France had already started the same policy to a smaller degree. The land set aside for growing staple crops such as maize and potatoes was decreased to make land for growing cotton, jute and other industrial plants. Because of the decreased land available for growing, harvests of staple crops decreased considerably. Crops were also exported to Japan.

The militaries of both France and Japan forcibly seized food from farmers to feed their troops. By 1941, there were 140,000 Japanese troops in French Indochina in addition to the Vichy French forces. During the occupation, the Allies made frequent air strikes against roads, warehouse and transportation facilities, which made the transport of rice from the south to the north extremely difficult. In the meantime, the Vichy civilian administration was dysfunctional and unable to distribute remaining food stocks to areas where needed.

In March 1945, the Japanese ousted the Vichy administration and replaced it with the Japanese-backed government of the Empire of Vietnam, headed by Trần Trọng Kim. While this new government increased efforts to alleviate the famine, the inadequate food supply and the hoarding of food by the Imperial Japanese Army made their efforts futile.

Natural disasters
In northern Vietnam, drought and pests caused the winter-to-spring harvest of 1944 to decrease by 20%. Then, a flood during the harvest season caused the crisis to occur, which led to famine in 1945.

Consequences

By early 1945, many were forced to walk from town to town in search of food. The exact number of deaths caused by the 1944–1945 famine is unknown and is a matter of controversy. Various sources estimate between 400,000 and 2 million people starved in northern Vietnam during this time. In May 1945, the envoy at Hanoi asked the northern provinces to report their casualties. Twenty provinces reported that a total of 380,000 people starved to death and 20,000 more died because of disease. In October, a report from a French military official estimated half-a-million deaths. Governor General Jean Decoux wrote in his memoirs A la barre de l'Indochine that about a million northerners had starved to death.

The Viet Minh successfully directed public resentment and encouraged the peasants to seize the rice granaries of the occupation powers. In response, the Japanese imposed harsh punishment upon the transgressors and sometimes even mutilated them physically, which further inflamed popular anger. In the process, the Viet Minh transformed itself from a guerilla organization into a mass movement. Ho Chi Minh, in his Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945, would refer to the famine and quote a figure of 2 million deaths. Modern Vietnamese historians estimate between 1 and 2 million deaths.

According to the Việt Minh, 1 to 2 million Vietnamese starved to death in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam because of the Japanese since they seized Vietnamese rice and failed to pay. In Phat Diem, the Vietnamese farmer Di Ho was one of the few survivors who saw the Japanese steal grain. The North Vietnamese government accused both France and Japan of the famine and said that 1–2 million Vietnamese had died. Võ An Ninh took photographs of dead and dying Vietnamese during the great famine. Starving Vietnamese died throughout northern Vietnam in 1945 from the Japanese seizure of their crops when the Chinese came to disarm the Japanese, and Vietnamese corpses were all throughout the streets of Hanoi and had to be cleaned up by students.

See also
Holodomor
Vietnam in World War II

References

Further reading

External links
Vietnam famine's living legacy
Images of the famine (in Vietnamese)
Famine fed farmers' fight for freedom

Famines in Asia
History of Vietnam (1945–present)
Military history of Vietnam during World War II
Health disasters in Vietnam
1944 in Vietnam
1945 in Vietnam
20th century in Vietnam
20th-century famines
Crimes against humanity
Japanese war crimes
French war crimes

Vietnamese famine of 1945


Optimal virulence is a concept relating to the ecology of hosts and parasites. One definition of virulence is the host's parasite-induced loss of fitness. The parasite's fitness is determined by its success in transmitting offspring to other hosts. For about 100 years, the consensus was that virulence decreased and parasitic relationships evolved toward symbiosis. This was even called the law of declining virulence despite being a hypothesis, not even a theory. It has been challenged since the 1980s and has been disproved.

A pathogen that is too restrained will lose out in competition to a more aggressive strain that diverts more host resources to its own reproduction.  However, the host, being the parasite's resource and habitat in a way, suffers from this higher virulence. This might induce faster host death, and act against the parasite's fitness by reducing probability to encounter another host (killing the host too fast to allow for transmission). Thus, there is a natural force providing pressure on the parasite to "self-limit" virulence.
The idea is, then, that there exists an equilibrium point of virulence, where parasite's fitness is highest. Any movement on the virulence axis, towards higher or lower virulence, will result in lower fitness for the parasite, and thus will be selected against.

Mode of transmission

Paul W. Ewald  has explored the relationship between virulence and mode of transmission. He came to the conclusion that virulence tends to remain especially high in waterborne and vector-borne infections, such as cholera and dengue. Cholera is spread through sewage and dengue through mosquitos. In the case of respiratory infections, the pathogen depends on an ambulatory host to survive. It must spare the host long enough to find a new host. Water- or vector-borne transmission circumvents the need for a mobile host.   Ewald is convinced that the crowding of field hospitals and trench warfare provided an easy route to transmission that evolved the virulence of the 1918 influenza pandemic. In such immobilized, crowded conditions pathogens can make individuals very sick and still jump to healthy individuals.

Other epidemiologists have expanded on the idea of a tradeoff between costs and benefits of virulence. One factor is the time or distance between potential hosts. Airplane travel, crowded factory farms, and urbanization have all been suggested as possible sources of virulence. Another factor is the presence of multiple infections in a single host leading to increased competition among pathogens. In this scenario, the host can survive only as long as it resists the most virulent strains. The advantage of a low virulence strategy becomes moot.   Multiple infections can also result in gene swapping among pathogens, increasing the likelihood of lethal combinations.

Evolutionary hypotheses
There are three main hypotheses about why a pathogen evolves as it does. These three models help to explain the life history strategies of parasites, including reproduction, migration within the host, virulence, etc.  The three hypotheses are the trade-off hypothesis, the short-sighted evolution hypothesis, and the coincidental evolution hypothesis. All of these offer ultimate explanations for virulence in pathogens.

Trade-off hypothesis
At one time, some biologists argued that pathogens would tend to evolve toward ever decreasing virulence because the death of the host (or even serious disability) is ultimately harmful to the pathogen living inside. For example, if the host dies, the pathogen population inside may die out entirely. Therefore, it was believed that less virulent pathogens that allowed the host to move around and interact with other hosts should have greater success reproducing and dispersing.

But this is not necessarily the case. Pathogen strains that kill the host can increase in virulence as long as the pathogen can transmit itself to a new host, whether before or after the host dies. The evolution of virulence in pathogens is a balance between the costs and benefits of virulence to the pathogen. For example, studies of the malaria parasite using rodent and chicken models found that there was trade-off between transmission success and virulence as defined by host mortality.

Short-sighted evolution hypothesis
Short-sighted evolution suggests that the traits that increase reproduction rate and transmission to a new host will rise to high frequency within the pathogen population. These traits include the ability to reproduce sooner, reproduce faster, reproduce in higher numbers, live longer, survive against antibodies, or survive in parts of the body the pathogen does not normally infiltrate. These traits typically arise due to mutations, which occur more frequently in pathogen populations than in host populations, due to the pathogens' rapid generation time and immense numbers. After only a few generations, the mutations that enhance rapid reproduction or dispersal will increase in frequency. The same mutations that enhance the reproduction and dispersal of the pathogen also enhance its virulence in the host, causing much harm (disease and death). If the pathogen's virulence kills the host and interferes with its own transmission to a new host, virulence will be selected against. But as long as transmission continues despite the virulence, virulent pathogens will have the advantage. So, for example, virulence often increases within families, where transmission from one host to the next is likely, no matter how sick the host. Similarly, in crowded conditions such as refugee camps, virulence tends to increase over time since new hosts cannot escape the likelihood of infection.

Coincidental evolution hypothesis
Some forms of pathogenic virulence do not co-evolve with the host. For example, tetanus is caused by the soil bacterium Clostridium tetani. After C. tetani bacteria enter a human wound, the bacteria may grow and divide rapidly, even though the human body is not their normal habitat.  While dividing, C. tetani produce a neurotoxin that is lethal to humans. But it is selection in the bacterium's normal life cycle in the soil that leads it to produce this toxin, not any evolution with a human host. The bacterium finds itself inside a human instead of in the soil by mere happenstance. We can say that the neurotoxin is not directed at the human host.

More generally, the virulence of many pathogens in humans may not be a target of selection itself, but rather an accidental by-product of selection that operates on other traits, as is the case with antagonistic pleiotropy.

Expansion into new environments
A potential for virulence exists whenever a pathogen invades a new environment, host or tissue.  The new host is likely to be poorly adapted to the intruder, either because it has not built up an immunological defense or because of a fortuitous vulnerability.  In times of change, natural selection favors mutations that exploit the new host more effectively than the founder strain, providing an opportunity for virulence to erupt.

Host susceptibility
Host susceptibility contributes to virulence.  Once transmission occurs, the pathogen must establish an infection to continue. The more competent the host immune system, the less chance there is for the parasite to survive. It may require multiple transmission events to find a suitably vulnerable host. During this time, the invader is dependent upon the survival of its current host. The optimum conditions for high virulence would be a community with immune dysfunction (and/or poor hygiene and sanitation) that was in all other ways as healthy as possible (eg optimum nutrition).

See also

References

External links
Empirical Support for Optimal Virulence in a Castrating Parasite
Evolution of Virulence
Adaptive Dynamics of Infectious Diseases: In Pursuit of Virulence ...
 Integrating across levels Interesting discussion of the complexity of optimal virulence theory
`Small worlds' and the evolution of virulence: infection occurs ...
Pathogen Virulence: The Evolution of Sickness - A Review from the Science Creative Quarterly

Ecology
Pathology

Optimal virulence


Advocacy can be defined as "public support for or recommendation of a particular cause or policy". It is a political process by an individual or group which aims to influence decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions.

Advocacy can include many activities that a person or organization undertakes. These can include media campaigns, public speaking, commissioning and publishing research. It can include conducting exit polls or the filing of an amicus brief. Lobbying (often by lobby groups) is a form of advocacy. This is where a direct approach is made to legislators on an issue in modern politics. Professional lobbyists are employed by advocacy groups also called special interest groups.

There are any number of corporations, religious groups, citizen groups, think tanks and foundations who want to make sure their interests are heard by lawmakers. This is both in the United States and the European Union. Advocacy groups also use their influence in the election and appointing of judges.

References

Legal terms

Advocacy


Andrew Gross (born 1952) is an American author of thriller novels, including four New York Times bestsellers. He is best known for his collaborations with suspense writer James Patterson. Gross's books feature close family bonds, relationships characterized by loss or betrayal, and a large degree of emotional resonance which generally leads to wider crimes and cover-ups. The books have all been published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Early life and education
Andrew Gross was born in New York City in 1952. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the Barnard School for Boys. Both his father and his grandfather on his mother's side were successful clothing manufacturers; they ran the Leslie Fay Companies, named after his mother.

Gross received a degree in English from Middlebury College in 1974. In 1979, he met his wife, Lynn, on a blind date in New York City, and they married three years later. In 1982, he received a master's degree in Business Policy from Columbia University.

Business career
After a two-year stint in Denver, where he worked as a dress buyer, he opened a stew-and-soup fast food pilot named Ebeneezer's. He eventually went back to work for his family's publicly held apparel firm, the Leslie Fay Companies.

In 1984, Gross took over Head NV Sportswear, the struggling arm of the iconic ski and tennis brand, and by 1989, had repositioned it into the number one upscale producer of tennis and ski apparel in the United States and a thriving brand in Europe as well, before leaving for a larger role at Leslie Fay (which then had close to a billion dollars in annual sales and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange). As Gross describes it, "sometimes the toughest thing about being in a family company is that it's filled with your own family", and in 1991, he left to pursue his own opportunities at Le Coq Sportif, a boutique tennis/golf brand, and Sun Ice, Inc., a Canadian skiwear manufacturer, the latter, "ending poorly and abruptly", as Gross says, "and hastening my writing career".

Start in publishing
Gross attended the Writers Program at the University of Iowa.  He took three years to finish a draft of his first book, Hydra (1998), a political thriller. He recalls: "after dozens of rejections from agents and ultimately publishers, not knowing what my next step in life was, and sitting around my study, wondering what cliff I was going to drive our SUV off of, I received a phone call from someone who asked, 'Can you take a call from James Patterson?'"  Gross met with Patterson and discussed the early concepts for what ultimately became the Women's Murder Club series. Patterson explained that the head of his publishing house had forwarded Gross's unpublished manuscript to him with the words scratched on the cover: "This guy does women well!" Patterson and Gross formed a partnership in less than a week.

Gross worked with Patterson on several books in this series, including Second Chance and Third Degree, both of which went to Number One. Then, they branched out on different themes together, co-authoring the bestsellers The Jester, Lifeguard and Judge and Jury.

Solo career
In 2006, Gross left Patterson and pursued a solo writing career. In 2007, The Blue Zone debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list in the United States. A year later, it was followed up by The Dark Tide (2007), which the International Thriller Writers Association nominated Thriller of the Year. The Dark Tide featured the fictional detective Ty Hauck of Greenwich, Connecticut, who became the lead character in Gross's corruption and political conspiracy-based bestsellers Don't Look Twice and Reckless.

In 2011, Gross departed from Ty Hauck, writing Eyes Wide Open, which builds on two personal stories from his own past.

January 2014, Andrew decided to bring back Ty Hauck and started writing One Mile Under in 2015. He followed it with The One Man, a World War II thriller, in 2016. Kirkus called the book "Gross' best work yet".

Button Man is a 2018 novel about public corruption, extortion and labor racketeering menacing the New York City garment industry during the 1930s. The novel is partly based on the life of Gross's maternal grandfather, Fred P. Pomerantz (1901–86), a garment manufacturer who stood up to mobsters such as Lepke Buchalter, Jacob Shapiro and Emanuel Weiss.

Bibliography

Collaborative
 The Jester (2003)
 2nd Chance (2002)
 3rd Degree (2004)
 Lifeguard (2005)
 Judge and Jury (2006)

Solo
 The Blue Zone (2007) ()
 Eyes Wide Open (July 2011) (); titled Killing Hour in UK/Australia/NZ
 15 Seconds (April 2012) ()
 No Way Back (April 2013) ()
 Everything To Lose (March 2014) ()
 The One Man (August 2016) ()
 The Saboteur (August 2017) ()
Button Man/The Last Brother (September 2018) ()
The Fifth Column (September 2019) ()

Ty Hauck series
 The Dark Tide (2008) ()
 Don't Look Twice (2009) ()
 Reckless (2010) ()
 One Mile Under (2015) ()

References

External links
Personal website
MySpace page
Facebook page

1952 births
Living people
American thriller writers
Novelists from New York City
Middlebury College alumni
Columbia Business School alumni
American male novelists

Andrew Gross


Reverend Dr Andrew Clark (7 June 1856 – 24 March 1922) was a Church of England minister, a prodigious editor of literary and historical texts, and is now well known for his lengthy diary of the First World War.

Life
Born in Dollarfield, near Dollar, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, Clark was educated at the University of St Andrews, then at the University of Oxford. He matriculated from Balliol College but won a scholarship at Lincoln College in 1876. He read Greats and graduated with a First in 1879.

He was elected to a Fellowship at Lincoln College in 1880 and ordained in 1884. He was Chaplain of Lincoln and vicar of two Oxford churches, All Saints and St Michael at the North Gate. In 1894 he took up the position of parish priest in Great Leighs, Essex, held in the patronage of Lincoln College.

When in Oxford Clark began editing numerous works for the Oxford Historical Society, including four volumes of the Register of the University of Oxford (1887–89), three volumes of Anthony Wood's History of the City of Oxford (1889–99) and five volumes of the Life and Times of Anthony Wood (1891–1900); and then six volumes for the Early English Text Society, the English Register of Godstow Nunnery (1905–11), the English Register of Oseney Abbey (1907–13) and Lincoln Diocese Documents (1914). In 1893 he visited Shirburn Castle in order to study and transcribe the Shirburn Ballads, a folio of Elizabethan to early Stuart-era ballads that then resided in the collection of the Earls of Macclesfield, which eventually resulted in his 1907 publication The Shirburn ballads, 1585–1616. His two volumes of Aubrey's Brief Lives (1898) were a scholarly (but censored) edition.  It was, no doubt, his deep experience of the writings of Aubrey and Wood that led him to appreciate the importance of popular belief, gossip and hearsay, and prompted his greatest work in chronicling the sensation of living through the Great War in Essex.

Although he was absent in Oxford when war was declared in 1914, he decided to keep a detailed diary of "Echoes of the Great War" in his village. The diary records the sights and sounds of the war in rural Essex, the activities of Clark's friends, relatives and acquaintances, and rumours relating to the war. The full diary (extending beyond the end of the war) runs to 92 volumes, and is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: a condensed version was published by James Munson as Echoes of the Great War (OUP, 1985). Extracts from the diaries relating to those commemorated on the Great Leighs War Memorial are available via the external link below.

In addition to his diary, Clark kept clippings during the war under the title 'English Words in Wartime', which are also held (along with other records sent by Clark) in the Bodleian. In addition to his volumes of historical records he also published and some original books, such as The Colleges of Oxford (1891), Lincoln (College Histories, 1898), and A Bodleian Guide for Visitors (1906). Clark was a contributor to the Essex Review.

Works
 Memoirs of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe (1893)
Edited volumes of Wood's Antiquities of the City of Oxford (1889–99)

Edited works
 The Colleges of Oxford: their history and traditions (1891)
 Lincoln (1898)
 'Brief Lives', chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696 (1898)
 The Life and Times of Anthony Wood: Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695 (1900)
 The Shirburn ballads, 1585–1616 (1907)
 The English Register of Oseney Abbey (1907)

Contributions to the DNB
Clark's contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography included:
 Anthony Wood
 William Bright
 Drummond Percy Chase
 William Ince
 Robert Campbell Moberly
 Wentworth Webster

References

 James Munson (ed.) Echoes of the Great War: The Diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark, 1914–19 (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1985)

External links

 Bodleian Library catalogue entry for Clark's diaries
 Great Leighs War Memorial and related extracts from the Diaries of Reverend Dr Andrew Clark
'Brief Lives', chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696; edited by Andrew Clark
Volume I A-H at the Internet Archive
Volume II I-Y at the Internet Archive

1856 births
1922 deaths
20th-century English Anglican priests
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford
Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford
Scottish diarists
British people of World War I
People from Clackmannanshire
Contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography
People from Great Leighs

Andrew Clark (priest)


The Teahouse of the August Moon is a 1953 play written by John Patrick adapted from the 1951 novel by Vern Sneider. The play was later adapted for film in 1956, and the 1970 Broadway musical Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen.

The play opened on Broadway in October 1953. It was a Broadway hit, running for 1,027 performances and winning awards including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of the Year, the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and the Tony Award. The play, well regarded for several decades, came to seem old-fashioned with increased understanding and sensitivity of racial issues. The portrayals of the Okinawa characters in the play were seen as offensive, and the generational humor began to lose its impact in the 1970s.

Plot summary
In the aftermath of World War II, the island of Okinawa was occupied by the American military. Captain Fisby, a young army officer, is transferred to a tiny Okinawa island town called Tobiki by his commanding officer, Colonel Purdy. Fisby is tasked with the job of implementing "Plan B". The plan calls for teaching the natives all things American and the first step for Capt. Fisby is to establish a democratically elected mayor, chief of agriculture, chief of police, and president of the Ladies League for Democratic Action. Plan "B" also calls for the building of a schoolhouse (Pentagon shaped), democracy lessons, and establishing capitalism through means left up to the good captain's judgment. A local Tobiki native, Sakini by name, is assigned to act as Fisby's interpreter. Sakini, a Puck-like character, attempts to acquaint Fisby with the local customs as well as guide the audiences through the play, providing both historical and cultural framework through his asides and monologues.

After receiving many gifts from the villagers, including a geisha named Lotus Blossom, Fisby tries to find local products on which to build his capitalist endeavor. He is discouraged when the villagers can not find a market for their handmade products, items like geta (wooden sandals), lacquered bowls, cricket cages, and casas (straw hats). He is also frustrated when the newly elected democratic government votes to build a teahouse (ochaya) for Lotus Blossom with the building supplies designated for his Pentagon-shaped school. Through the villagers, Captain Fisby starts to see the beauty of preserving their culture and a slower way of life. He agrees to build the teahouse and even lands on a moneymaking product – sweet potato brandy. Soon the Cooperative Brewing Company of Tobiki is churning out liquor by the gallon and selling it to all the neighboring military bases.

The gala opening of the teahouse is the moment when Colonel Purdy decides to make his progress inspection and finds Captain Fisby serenading the villagers in his bathrobe with a rendition of "Deep in the Heart of Texas". He is in danger of court martial and reprimanded for misusing government supplies, selling liquor and "not turning the villagers into Americans fast enough". Col. Purdy orders the destruction of all the stills and the teahouse. Sakini and the villagers outsmart the colonel and only pretend to destroy everything, instead hiding everything "quick as the dickens". Their foresight proves fortuitous when Purdy learns that Congress is about to use Tobiki as a model for the success of Plan B. The villagers rebuild the teahouse on stage, and even offer a cup to Col. Purdy in a gesture of goodwill. Like all great comedies, in the end, all is forgiven. The village returns to the rich life they once knew (plus a teahouse, export industry, and geishas), Fisby is touted a hero, and Purdy, we hope will get a brigadier general's star for his wife Grace after all.

Set in the time-frame of the aftermath of World War II and U.S. occupation of the Japanese islands, Teahouse of the August Moon is a comedy whose laughs come from the inability of the American characters to understand Tobiki culture and tradition. However, it is not just a story of culture clash. Through the character of Fisby, we see acceptance and the beauty of making peace with oneself somewhere between ambition and limitations. We also learn, like Fisby, that sometimes the better life is had by taking a "step backward in the right direction".

Productions
The Teahouse of the August Moon premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 15, 1953 and closed on March 24, 1956 after 1,027 performances. Directed by Robert Lewis, the cast featured John Forsythe (Capt. Fisby), David Wayne (Sakini), Paul Ford (Col. Wainright Purdy III), Larry Gates (Capt. McLean), William Hansen (Mr. Oshira), and Mariko Niki (Lotus Blossom). Hawaiian-American composer Dai-Keong Lee created incidental music for the production, and actor Yuki Shimoda is credited with choreographing and providing "Japanese coaching."

The two touring productions were headed by Burgess Meredith and Larry Parks in the role of Sakini and Reiko Sato in the role of Lotus Blossom. In April 1954, The Teahouse of the August Moon was produced in Okinawa as a fundraiser to build schools, with members of the U.S. occupying forces and citizens of Okinawa in the cast. The play was produced in Vienna and Berlin as Das Kleine Teehaus and in Mexico City as La Casa de Té de la Luna de Agosto, translated by Mexican playwright Rodolfo Usigli.

New York's Pan Asian Rep revived Teahouse in 2000, directed by Ron Nakahara.

Awards and nominations
Sources: PlaybillVault
 1954 Tony Awards
Best Play—winner
Actor in a Play, David Wayne—winner
Author of a Play—winner
Producer of a Play—winner
Scenic Design of a Play, Peter Larkin—winner
1954 New York Drama Critics' Circle—Best American Play, winner
 1954 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Adaptations
John Patrick adapted his play for the 1956 film The Teahouse of the August Moon, starring Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert and Machiko Kyo. The play and screenplay were adapted for the 1970 Broadway musical Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen.

Further reading

References

External links

 John Patrick.  The Teahouse of the August Moon. Dramatists Play Service Inc. New York: 1952
 "The Teahouse of the August Moon: Introduction." Drama for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 4 May 2009. <http://www.enotes.com/teahouse-august/introduction>.

1953 plays
Broadway plays
Pulitzer Prize for Drama-winning works
Tony Award-winning plays
Japan in fiction
Japan in non-Japanese culture
Plays by John Patrick
American plays adapted into films

The Teahouse of the August Moon (play)