Uccle (French, ) or Ukkel (Dutch, ) is one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. Located in the southern part of the region, it is bordered by the City of Brussels, Forest, Ixelles, and Watermael-Boitsfort, as well as the Flemish municipalities of Drogenbos, Linkebeek and Sint-Genesius-Rode. In common with all of Brussels' municipalities, it is legally bilingual (French–Dutch).

, the municipality had a population of 85,099 inhabitants. The total area is , which gives a population density of , half the average of Brussels. It is generally considered an affluent area of the region, and is particularly noted for its community of French immigrants.

History

Origins and medieval times
According to legend, Uccle's Church of St. Peter was dedicated by Pope Leo III in the year 803, with Charlemagne and Gerbald, Bishop of Liège, attending the ceremony.  During the following centuries, several noble families built their manors and took residency there. The first mention of the name Woluesdal, now evolved into Wolvendael, dates from 1209. In 1467, Isabella of Portugal, wife of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, founded a Franciscan convent on Uccle's territory. Later, Uccle became the judiciary capital of the area including Brussels. Throughout the early stages of its history, however, the village of Uccle always had a predominantly rural character and lived mostly from the products of forestry and agriculture.

Lordship of Stalle
A large part of the territory of modern-day Uccle used to be part of the Lordship (seigneurie) of Stalle, in addition to the old village of Uccle and the barony of Carloo.

The first Lords of Stalle (High Justiciaries) were: Henri de Stalle, knight (died before 1357); Florent de Stalle, his son, alderman of Brussels in 1319 and knight. He married Lady Aleyde; and Florent de Stalle, knight and alderman of Brussels in 1357, member of the Seven Noble Houses of Brussels. It was he who, with his brother Daniel, founded the Stalle chapel and gave it lands.

Dependent fiefs of the Lordship of Stalle included the Fief of Overhem and the Fief of the Roetaert. The Fief of Overhem was located between the Dieweg and Stalle, it had a manor, a mill called Clipmolen, woods, and pasture. However, in 1465, Marguerite Hinckaert wife of Louis de Mailly, obtained from the sovereign the annexation of this fief to the Lordship of Stalle. The Fief of the Roetaert was located in Neerstalle, between the Kersbeek woods and the Ukkelbeek. Its surface amounted to 39.78 acres of land and meadows and it included the manor of Roetaert.

18th century until today

At the end of the 18th century, a few years after the French Revolution, Uccle merged with neighbouring territories to become a municipality, with its own burgomaster (mayor) and municipal assembly. It had to wait until 1828, however, for the Dutch authorities to allow the construction of the first Municipal Hall. This was a time of economic prosperity and growth, stimulated by the proximity to the two main roads linking Brussels to the industrial south. A newer and larger Municipal Hall was built between 1872 and 1882. Banker and philanthropist Georges Brugmann was instrumental in the urbanisation of the municipality just before the turn of the 20th century. In the early 20th century, Michel van Gelder introduced a new breed of chicken, the d'Uccle, named after the town. Despite the accelerated rate of construction that took place in the early 20th century, Uccle succeeded in keeping several of its green areas intact, which now attract many of the Brussels area's wealthier inhabitants.

Lying beyond Forest and Ixelles and skirting the Sonian Forest, Uccle is Brussel's largest and southernmost municipality. Large 19th- and 20th-century villas with generous gardens make this green and calm suburb a favourite with well-off expatriates, with the Art Deco area around the Royal Observatory of Belgium and the fringes of the Sonian Forest the two most desirable addresses.

Main sights
Uccle is mainly a residential area but has a lot of parks and forested areas, such as the Wolvendael Park and the Verrewinkel Woods. Wolvendael is the site of a 1763 castle, owned by a number of notable aristocrats from the 18th and 19th centuries. The municipality is also situated to the immediate west of the Bois de la Cambre/Ter Kamerenbos. The / and the area near St. Peter's Church and the Municipal Hall are two older parts of town, now filled with a happy mix of stores and pubs.

Uccle is the site of the Belgium national weather station, the Royal Meteorological Institute (IRM/KMI). Any information on Belgian weather, unless region-specific, is described by the statistics recorded there. Right next door is the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

Other points of interest include:
 Uccle Cemetery, also known as Dieweg Cemetery, created following a cholera epidemic in Brussels in 1866. Although burials ended in 1958, the grave of Hergé, the creator of Tintin who died in 1983, can be found there.
 The Villa Bloemenwerf, an Art Nouveau villa built in 1895 by the architect Henry Van de Velde as his first private residence.
 The Château de La Fougeraie, built in 1911 for the industrialist Paul Wittouck by the architects Louis Süe and Paul Huillard, and decorated by Gustave Louis Jaulmes.
 The Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, a former private house with extensive gardens, now a museum and park, built from 1924 to 1928 in Art Deco style for the banker and art collector David Van Buuren and his wife Alice.
 Nemo 33, the second deepest indoor swimming pool in the world.

Education

Most of Uccle pupils between the ages of 3 and 18 go to schools organised by the French-speaking Community or the Flemish Community. Other schools include:
 European School, Brussels I
 Lycée Français Jean Monnet
 Collège Saint-Pierre, founded in 1905 by Cardinal Pierre-Lambert Goossens

Notable inhabitants

 Armand Abel (1903–1973), academic and scholar of Islam
 Salvatore Adamo (b. 1943), singer, lyricist, poet and novelist
 Jean Améry (Hans Maier) (1912–1978), author and essayist
 Queen Mathilde of Belgium (b. 1973)
 Sandrine Blancke (b. 1978), actress
 Cédric Blanpain (b. 1970), academic, researcher
 Dedryck Boyata, football player
 Laetitia Darche (b. 1991), model
 Roger De Coster (b. 1944), professional motocross racer
 Maxime De Zeeuw (b. 1987), basketball player for Hapoel Holon of the Israeli Basketball Premier League
 Jaco van Dormael (b. 1957), film director
 Jef Dutilleux (1876–1960), impressionist painter
 M. C. Escher (1898–1972), Dutch graphic artist
 Lara Fabian (b. 1970), singer-songwriter
 Jean-Michel Folon (1934–2005), artist, illustrator, painter, and sculptor
 Isabelle Gatti de Gamond, educationalist, feminist, and politician (1839–1905)
 Martin Gray (1922–2016), Warsaw Ghetto and Holocaust survivor, writer
 Pierre Harmel (1911–2010), lawyer, politician, diplomat, and Prime Minister
 Hergé (1907–1983), comic book author, creator of The Adventures of Tintin
 Vincent Kompany (b. 1986), football defender and manager, former captain of the Belgium national team and current manager of Burnley
 Boris Johnson, Stanley Johnson, Jo Johnson, Rachel Johnson, Charlotte Johnson Wahl; British political and journalistic family, lived there in the 1970s.
 Joachim Lafosse (b. 1975), film director
 Prince Wenzeslaus of Liechtenstein and Prince Rudolf of Liechtenstein (b. 1974 and 1975, respectively)
 Marianne Merchez (b. 1960), doctor and astronaut
 Axel Merckx (b. 1972), professional road bicycle racer
 Philippe Moureaux (1939–2018), politician, senator, mayor of Molenbeek, and Professor of Economic History at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
 Erik Pevernagie (b. 1939), painter and writer
 Louis Pevernagie (1904–1970), painter
 Alizée Poulicek (b. 1987), Miss Universe Belgium 2008
 Joseph Raphael (1869–1950), impressionist painter
 Axelle Red (Fabienne Demal) (b. 1968), singer
 Sybille de Selys Longchamps (b. 1941), baroness and aristocrat
 Willy Sommers (b. 1952), crooner
 Olivier Strebelle (1927–2017), sculptor
 Jacques Tits (1930–2021), mathematician
 Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), painter, architect, and interior designer
 Angèle Van Laeken, better known as Angèle (b. 1995), singer-songwriter
  (b. 2001), singer-songwriter
 Princess Stephanie of Windisch-Graetz (1909–2005), died there.

Twin cities
 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

References

Notes

External links

 Official website

Municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region
Populated places in Belgium

Uccle


The Ford viscosity cup is a simple gravity device that permits the timed flow of a known volume of liquid passing through an orifice located at the bottom. Under ideal conditions, this rate of flow would be proportional to the kinematic viscosity (expressed in stokes and centistokes) that is dependent upon the specific gravity of the draining liquid. However, the conditions in a simple flow cup are seldom ideal for making true measurements of viscosity. It is important when using a Ford Cup and when retesting liquids that the temperature of the cup and the liquid is maintained, as ambient temperature makes a significant difference to viscosity and thus flow rate.

Many other types of flow cups are used, depending on the industry or region:
 Din Cup 4 mm, standard DIN 53211 (cancelled)
 ISO Cup 2–6, 8 mm, standard ISO 2431
 AFNOR Cup 2, 4–6, 8 mm, standard NF T30-014
 ASTM Cup 1–5, standard ASTM D1200

See also
 Flow measurement
 Viscometer
 Zahn cup
 Din cup
 Afnor cup
 Flow cups

References

Fluid dynamics
Viscosity meters

Ford viscosity cup


Antonio "Tony" Montana is a fictional character and the villain-protagonist of the 1983 film Scarface. This character is portrayed by Al Pacino in the film and is voiced by André Sogliuzzo in the 2006 video game Scarface: The World Is Yours. Embodying the possibility of a person rising from the bottom of society to the top, Tony Montana has become a cultural icon, as well as one of the most iconic film characters of all time.

In 2008, Montana was named the 27th Greatest Movie Character by Empire magazine. The character is partly based on Tony Camonte, the protagonist of the 1932 film; Camonte was, in turn, an adaptation of Tony Guarino from the 1929 novel, which in turn was a loose fictionalization of real-life Italian-American gangster Al Capone, who was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899. In contrast to Guarino and Camonte, who were Italian immigrants, Montana is a Cuban immigrant. According to Oliver Stone, Tony's last name was inspired by then-NFL quarterback Joe Montana, Stone's favorite player. A prequel novel, Scarface: The Beginning, written by L. A. Banks, was published in 2006. Montana has a large scar on his face, which explains why he is known as Scarface. This is the same type of scar that Al Capone received from a bar fight in 1917 at the Harvard Inn.

Casting
Pacino insisted on taking the lead role in Scarface. Pacino worked with various trainers for the role, including experts in knife combat and boxer Roberto Durán. Durán also helped inspire the character, who had "a certain lion in him", according to Pacino. Meryl Streep's immigrant character in Sophie's Choice (1982) also influenced Pacino's portrayal of Tony Montana. His co-star Steven Bauer, and a dialect coach, helped him learn aspects of the Cuban dialect and pronunciation.

Fictional character biography
Before the events of the film, Tony grew up in a poor Havana neighborhood of Spanish immigrants, his grandparents having been Isleños. He obtained his signature scar fighting a Cuban army officer, whom he killed with a shotgun when he was 13. After being arrested as a young man, Tony joined the Cuban army and served in Angola, where he went AWOL and boarded a cargo ship to France. There, he was arrested for shoplifting and deported back to Cuba in the late 1970s, where he was imprisoned.

In May 1980, Tony is among the 125,000 Cubans on the Mariel boatlift to Miami. When he arrives, he is questioned by U.S. officials and says that he is a "political prisoner". Tony claims that because he has an American father, he has the right to a green card. However, his request is denied because of a trident-style tattoo on his right hand, which indicates that he was an assassin in prison.

Tony and his friend Manolo "Manny" Ribera are sent to "Freedom town", a refugee camp that holds Cuban immigrants without green cards. After one month in the camp, Frank Lopez, head of a Miami drug cartel, offers to obtain green cards in return for murdering Emilio Rebenga, a one-time Cuban official who had tortured people to death (Lopez's brother among them), only to have Castro turn on him. Soon after Rebenga arrives at the camp, a riot breaks out in Freedom town on August 11, 1980. Manny and Angel Fernandez take advantage of the bedlam to stalk Rebenga, who leaves his tent. Tony is waiting outside and stabs Rebenga in the stomach. Tony and Manny are reconsidered and granted green cards, later being released. The two get jobs as dishwashers for a small food stand in Little Havana. Sometime later, Frank sends his right-hand man, Omar Suarez, to offer them a job that pays $500 each for a few hours of work unloading smuggled marijuana from a boat. While Manny is impressed with the offer, Tony is angered about being offered less than the minimal pay for such a job, and he and Omar quarrel. On the advice of his companion, Omar then offers Tony and Manny $5,000 to buy cocaine from a new supplier, which is riskier than the marijuana deal, as it requires dealing with Colombians who are notorious for being violent.

A few days later, Tony and Manny, and their associates Angel and Chi Chi, drive to a hotel in Miami Beach to make a deal with the group of Colombians. The deal goes badly. A couple of Colombian enforcers handcuff Tony and Angel to a shower pole at gunpoint, threatening to kill them with a chainsaw if Tony doesn't reveal the location of the drug money. Tony refuses to talk, causing Hector, the enforcers' leader, to dismember Angel. Before Hector can do the same to Tony, Manny bursts into the room, shooting a machine pistol. A short gunfight ensues, in which Manny is shot in the arm, and Tony kills the Colombians. Tony, Manny, and Chi Chi escape with the cocaine and the money. Tony, who no longer trusts Omar, takes it to Frank personally. Frank is impressed by this act and offers Tony and Manny the opportunity to work for him. During this time, Tony becomes interested in Frank's girlfriend, Elvira Hancock.

Three months later, Tony pays a visit to his mother, Georgina, and younger sister, Gina, neither of whom has seen him for five years. Gina is excited to see Tony, but his mother is ashamed of him, having been aware of his life of crime. When he gives his mother $1,000, she angrily rejects the gift and throws him out. Tony leaves, but Gina runs after him and hugs him, telling him that she has been going to hairdressing school and helping out Mama. Tony says a poor girl like Gina deserves a little fun. He secretly slips her the $1,000 and orders her not to tell Mama about it, only that Mama gets a little bit of it occasionally, through using some of it for grocery shopping or paying a utility bill. Manny, who had been waiting for Tony in the car, is taken with Gina, only for Tony to tell Manny to stay away from her.

Later, while in Bolivia, Tony and Omar go on Frank's behalf to see a drug cartel lord, Alejandro Sosa. Sosa kills Omar for being a police informant, and makes Tony his business partner. At The Babylon nightclub, Tony is shaken down by corrupt narcotics detective Mel Bernstein, who informs him that he has evidence linking Tony to the murders of Rebenga and the Colombian drug dealers. Bernstein proposes to "tax" Tony on his transactions in return for police protection and information. Tony is convinced that Frank sent Bernstein, because only Frank would know details about the murders. While talking to Bernstein, Tony sees Gina dancing with a low-level drug dealer. Enraged, Tony beats the dealer and slaps Gina, stopping only after Manny calms him down. Manny drives Gina home and tells her she can do better than those lowlifes and that Tony is only looking out for her. However, when Gina admits an interest in Manny, he freezes, remembering Tony's tirade.

Later that night, two men attempt to kill Tony. He escapes and becomes convinced that Frank ordered his death. Tony and Manny track Frank down to his car dealership and kill him and Bernstein with silenced pistols. Afterward, Tony goes to Frank's house, telling Elvira that her lover is dead and that he wants her. Over the next year and a half, Tony makes $75 million from the 2,000 kilograms of cocaine he brings to America. He soon makes $10–15 million monthly in profits from his business relationship with Sosa. He marries Elvira and takes over Frank's empire, purchasing a large mansion and other luxuries, such as a pet tiger. Tony also creates many legal businesses as fronts, including a hair salon managed by Gina. Cracks in Tony's "American dream" begin to form, however, as he and Elvira become addicted to cocaine. His banker demands more money, warning that it is getting increasingly more difficult to hide drug money. Meanwhile, Manny and Gina begin dating behind her brother's back, being afraid of Tony's wrath should he find out.

When Tony finds a new banker, he turns out to be an undercover policeman who arrests Tony for money laundering and tax evasion. Tony's lawyer, George Sheffield, tells Tony that although he can plea bargain away most of the time he's facing, he'll still end up serving at least three years in prison. Sosa calls Tony down to Bolivia and asks him to help assassinate a Bolivian anti-government activist who threatens to expose Sosa's dealings with Bolivian leaders. In exchange, Sosa will use his contacts in the U.S. Justice Department, in Washington, D.C., to keep Tony out of prison. After returning to Miami, Tony does not tell Manny about the hit. However, Manny tries to talk Tony out of going to New York City, simply citing having a bad premonition about it. When Tony makes a scene at a fancy restaurant by insulting Elvira's inability to bear children, let alone do anything else with her life, she lashes out and leaves him.

Tony and Sosa's associate Alberto travel to New York to assassinate the activist. Alberto plants a bomb under the activist's car. He is ordered to detonate it before the activist can implicate Sosa's criminal network in a speech at the United Nations Building. On the day set for the assassination, a woman and two children are unexpectedly seen getting into the target's car. Tony objects to carrying out the hit, not wanting to kill anyone other than the intended victim. Alberto reminds Tony of Sosa's demands, and Tony reluctantly begins to tail the target. However, Tony's disgust at possibly killing an innocent woman with her two kids grows while Alberto concentrates on activating the explosive. Before Alberto can detonate the car bomb, Tony angrily shoots and kills Alberto, thus double-crossing Sosa.

Tony returns to Florida and receives a telephone call from a furious Sosa, who chastises him for the failed hit. He says the bomb was found, and the whistleblower is under heavy guard, making it almost impossible for them to try another hit. Tony's mother then says she cannot find Gina and accuses him of corrupting her. Tony attempts to locate Gina and finds her with Manny. When he sees them wearing bathrobes, Tony thinks they must be having sexual intercourse. An enraged Tony shoots and kills Manny in a cocaine-fueled rage before Gina reveals that they were just married and would announce it to Tony when he returned home. Tony and his henchmen take a distraught Gina back to his mansion.

Meanwhile, a large group of assassins sent by Sosa surrounds the mansion. While a distraught Tony sits in his office, snorting vast quantities of cocaine, the shooters begin killing his guards outside. At the same time, Tony is oblivious to his closed-circuit cameras (ironically boasting to Manny in an earlier scene that he spent top dollar on the cameras to prevent such an incident). Gina enters Tony's office wielding a Smith & Wesson Model 36, accusing him of his selfishness towards her before shooting him in the leg. This startles one assassin who was lying in the wait. He approaches the room out of nowhere and opens fire on Gina, killing her. Tony then shoots the assassin dead.

Deprived of the element of surprise, Sosa's shooters attack Tony's mansion directly. Tony bursts from his office, wielding an M16 rifle with an M203 grenade launcher attachment. He yells, "Say hello to my little friend!" and opens fire on the henchmen, killing many of them, and is badly wounded by return fire. The carnage continues until Sosa's top assassin ("The Skull") sneaks behind Tony and fatally shoots him with a shotgun. Tony falls from his balcony into a fountain in the lobby below and floats dead in his bloodied pool beneath a statue of the globe carrying the inscription enlightened in pink neon, "The World Is Yours".

Comic book
In 2003, a one-time comic book was published for the film's 20th anniversary, as a pseudo-sequel. Its narrative begins from the end of the film: authorities are assessing the damage done to the Montana mansion, only to discover Tony still alive in the fountain, his apparent lifelessness having been from being heavily drugged. After months in the hospital, Tony is greeted by corrupt cops who say that the federal government seized everything. The book also has Sosa continuing his revenge against Tony and provides some of Sosa's backstory, in which he employed poor villagers to make drugs in exchange for financially supporting them, à la Pablo Escobar.

Video games
The 2006 video game Scarface: The World Is Yours is a pseudo-sequel to the film, which features an alternate ending wherein Tony kills the Skull and manages to escape from his mansion before Sosa's men and the police overrun it. However, he loses all his money and drugs. Presumed dead, he goes into hiding in a small shack near Virginia Key Beach, where he laments the death of Manny, curses himself for not listening, due to his stubbornness, to the advice of others, determines to quit cocaine, and plots his revenge against Sosa. Three months later, Tony comes out of hiding to rebuild his criminal empire and makes $10,000 in a single day of selling drugs, which he uses to bribe several undercover police officers, who have seized his mansion, which allows him to move back. He goes on to expand his empire and eliminate multiple rivals who are eager to take over. He still faces opposition from Sosa and Gaspar Gomez, who have teamed up to form a drug monopoly and set their prices unreasonably high. Tony is also betrayed by his lawyer, George Sheffield, who is in a secret alliance with Sosa and Gomez, and who leads Tony into a trap, which he barely escapes. Eventually, Tony eliminates all his competition in Miami and re-establishes his empire before traveling to the Caribbean to help a cocaine producer called "The Sandman", who sells him his plantation. During this time, Tony also meets The Sandman's ex-girlfriend Venus, with whom he has a relationship. Now the most powerful drug lord in Miami, Tony sets out to exact his revenge on Sosa, Gomez, and Sheffield and attacks Sosa's mansion, killing all three of them. On his way out, he stumbles upon one of Sosa's surviving goons, whom he spares and hires as his butler. The game ends with Tony married to Venus and living in luxury, and feeling that he finally got what was coming to him: the world.

Tony also appears in the 2006 video game, Scarface: Money. Power. Respect.

Tony appears in the video game Payday 2, as a playable character named "Scarface" included in the Scarface Character Pack released in 2016. He is voiced by André Sogliuzzo, who previously portrayed him in Scarface: The World Is Yours. The DLC also included a heist at Tony's mansion in Miami. In 2020, due to a legal arrangement with Universal Pictures, the Scarface DLC could no longer be purchased by new players.

References

External links

 Rotten Tomatoes Scarface Movie Quotes

Crime film characters
Fictional Angolan Civil War veterans
Fictional characters from Miami
Film characters introduced in 1983
Fictional characters with disfigurements
Fictional contract killers
Fictional crime bosses
Fictional criminals in films
Fictional cocaine users
Fictional Cuban-American people
Fictional drug dealers
Fictional gangsters
Fictional gunfighters in films
Fictional murdered people
Fictional immigrants to the United States
Fictional mass murderers
Fictional military personnel in films
Fictional money launderers
Fictional smugglers
Fictional soldiers
Scarface (1983 film)
Male film villains
Fictional Hispanic and Latino American people in video games

Tony Montana


The 'doorway effect' or 'location updating effect', is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place. It claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary and is often experienced by forgetting what one was thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room. Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at literal boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphorical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).

Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a continuous stream interrupted by sleep. This organization is called episodic memory, which involves receiving and storing information about events that are temporarily dated, along with their time and place relationships.

Numerous psychological studies have indicated that the external context, including the location where events occur, plays a significant role in how memories are separated. This context helps establish distinctions between different remembered events. Memories of events that happen in the environment we're currently in are easier to access compared to those from different places. As a result, when we experience spatial changes and move to a different location, it can act as a boundary marker that separates and categorizes our continuous flow of memories into distinct segments.

Studies
Research on the doorway effect involves having people navigate virtual environments while picking up and putting down various objects. During these experiments, participants were given the names of these objects either (1) as they moved across a large room or (2) when they entered a new room (a spatial change). They then had to indicate whether the named object matched the one they had carried and eventually placed down. Findings indicating doorways act as event boundaries contribute towards wider understanding of memory construction and retention. They indicate the significance of structures of the surrounding environment in how memories are objectively recalled, alongside how it is subjectively recalled: the valence of emotions, specific emotion felt, its intensity and duration.

 In 2006, Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland performed the first experiments that demonstrated that successful recall of objects became less accessible with a spatial shift and dissociation from the person. This was measured by the moving of associated or dissociated objects through virtual rooms. Radvansky and Copeland had participants engage with short narratives where objects were either associated or dissociated from the participant. For example, a person might wear a sweatshirt (associated), take it off (dissociated), and go for a run. The researchers measured explicit factors like memory probes and comprehension, as well as implicit factors like reading times. The results showed that information about an object became less available when it was dissociated from the person, compared to when it was associated. These patterns aligned with previous research demonstrating how spatial shifts disrupt cognitive processing. However, it remained unclear to what extent the observed spatial effect was due to the association/dissociation of objects with the participant or the actual spatial change. Hence, Radvansky and Copeland aimed to separate and study these two components independently. To achieve this, they introduced rooms of varying sizes that virtually eliminated walls and doorways while maintaining consistent distance. This allowed them to assess the individual impacts of object association/dissociation and spatial shifts. Their conclusion was twofold: the effect related to object association/dissociation persisted, and there was clear evidence that moving through a doorway made highly available information less accessible. Experiment 1 aimed to investigate if information availability about objects changed based on their association/dissociation with a person after spatial shifts. The Standard Associated/Dissociated Effect refers to the impact of relationships between objects and individuals within a dynamic situation in text comprehension. In simpler terms, how people react or feel when reading a story changes based on the relationships and changes over time. The researchers wanted to see if the patterns seen in text comprehension studies would apply in a virtual reality context, as predicted by situation model theory. Alternatively, traditional memory models might predict that spatial changes wouldn't affect memory. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that after spatial shifts, participants responded more accurately and quickly when objects remained associated with a person rather than being dissociated. This indicated that people actively monitor the spatial and relational aspects of a situation, affecting how information is stored in memory. This finding challenged memory theories that ignored environmental interactions. Even explicit rehearsal of object names experienced disruption. Thus, memory involves active interaction with context. While the effect was clear, it was uncertain what caused it—whether participants monitored what they carried or the spatial shift itself.
 Participants: They got 41 people (15 were female) from the University of Notre Dame. They got some extra participants, but had to remove data from 10 of them for different reasons.
 Materials and Setup: They used a program to create a virtual environment with 66 rooms. All the rooms were the same size, and each had a table with an object to pick up. There was also an empty spot on the table where the object from the previous room was supposed to be placed. The rooms had different wall patterns to show they were different. The doors in each room were never on the same wall.
 Objects: The objects were made by mixing colors and shapes. Colors included red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, gray, brown, and black. Shapes were cube, wedge, pole, disk, cross (X), and cone.
 Display: They used a large screen and a computer to show everything.
 Procedure: Participants sat in front of the big screen and were told to move objects from room to room. When they picked up an object, it disappeared, and when they placed it down, it reappeared on the table. The order they did these actions didn't matter. The doors to the next rooms only opened when they did both actions with the objects.
 Memory Probe Trials: There were 51 trials where they checked participants' memory. When they entered a room, a color and shape name showed up on the screen. They had to say "yes" if it matched the object they were carrying or the one they just put down. If it didn't match, they said "no." They used mouse buttons for "yes" and "no" and arrow keys to move in the virtual space. Some trials tested the associated object, some tested the dissociated object, and some were not related at all. The experiment took about 10 to 15 minutes. Experiment 2 aimed to understand the contribution of object association/dissociation and spatial changes in the effect observed in Experiment 1. The researchers introduced rooms of different sizes, virtually eliminating walls and doorways to maintain consistent distance. This allowed them to analyze the independent impact of these factors.
 Participants: They got 54 people (26 were women) from the University of Notre Dame to take part. They had to exclude data from 11 participants for different reasons.
 Materials and Procedure: They used the same tools and methods as in Experiment 1 to create virtual environments. They made two types of rooms - some were big, and some were small. Essentially, they removed walls and doorways to change how the rooms looked, but the distance traveled remained the same. This change affected whether there was a change in the space.
 No-Shift Trials: In these trials, when someone entered a large room, part of it was darkened, and there was an invisible barrier to stop them from going to the wrong part of the room with the wrong table. The barrier disappeared after they put the object on the correct table and picked up the next one. A memory question came up when they entered the second half of the room.
 Shift Trials: In these trials, they made a space change. But not every time there was a change did they ask a memory question.
 Results: Experiment 2 found that the effect they saw in Experiment 1, where the connection between objects and a person affected memory, was seen again. This effect persisted even when there was no space change. Additionally, making a space change had its own effect. Passing through a doorway made information that's usually easy to remember harder to access. However, less important information was less affected. This shows that different things, like how things are connected and the space context, impact how people understand situations. Overall, this research provides insights into how memory is influenced by our interactions with our environment. It demonstrates that the doorway effect disrupts memory due to the need to update our mental representation when transitioning to a new room. This updating process demands cognitive effort and coordination, affecting processing and leading to errors. While more research is needed, this study sheds light on the interplay between physical experiences and mental understanding.

 2011, Gabriel A. Radvansky, Sabine A. Krawietz, and Andrea K. Tamplin from the Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame Experiment 1 aimed to understand how reducing the level of immersion impacts the location-updating effect. If this effect requires high immersion because event updating demands direct experience and structural environment influences, reducing screen size might diminish immersion and the effect. Alternatively, if the effect results from tracking information across events, regardless of immersion, the location-updating effect should still be observable. In this experiment, we used standard 17'' diagonal monitors instead of larger ones (66'') to reduce immersion.
 Participants: Fifty-five participants (31 female) were recruited from the University of Notre Dame participant pool and received partial course credit for their participation.
 Materials and Setup: The virtual environment was created using the Valve Hammer program. Standard 17'' diagonal monitors were used for display. The environment had 55 rooms, varying in two sizes with equated travel distance in shift and no-shift conditions. Each room contained one or two rectangular tables with objects to be picked up. Doorways were not on the same wall to prevent repetition.
 Objects: Objects were combinations of colors and shapes, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, grey, brown, and black. Shapes included cube, wedge, pole, disc, cross (X), and cone.
 Procedure: Participants were seated about 0.67 meters from the display and instructed to pick up objects, move to the next table by walking across a large room (no shift) or through a doorway (shift), place the object on the table, pick up the next object, and so on. Picking up and placing objects was done by touching the table. Progression through rooms was controlled by closing doors behind participants and opening them after objects were placed on the table. Probe trials involved participants responding "yes" if the probe matched the carried or set-down object and "no" otherwise. Positive and negative probes were presented in both shift and no-shift conditions. The procedure lasted around 15 to 20 minutes. This experiment investigated the impact of reduced immersion on the location-updating effect, shedding light on whether immersion level affects event updating or if tracking information across events is the primary factor influencing this effect. In summary, even with a less immersive setup, there was still a location-updating effect. Memory performance was worse after a change in location, indicating that updating the mental representation of an event can disrupt memory. However, when looking at the error rate data, the absence of an event updating effect in the response time data is unclear. This outcome cannot be interpreted as reduced forgetfulness since the pattern of error rates remains the same. A plausible explanation is that the smaller display size decreased the portion of the visual angle (248 vs. 808) that needs active monitoring, resulting in overall faster response times (358 ms faster on average in this study) and potentially masking the observation of a response time difference. Experiment 2 aimed to determine if the location-updating effect could be observed in a real environment with maximal immersion compared to mediated experiences on a computer screen. Real experiences are considered nonmediated, while virtual environments might lack cues that real settings offer for accurate performance. Previous evidence suggests that virtual environments can lead to cognitive deficits tied to their impoverished nature relative to real environments. The study speculated that the scarcity of spatial cues in virtual environments might explain why location shifts are more disruptive. However, according to an event cognition perspective, the need to monitor and update an event model should apply to real situations as well. To adapt the experiment's principles to real-world constraints, three larger rooms were used from the laboratory. The study included three location shifts where participants moved between rooms. Within each room, a no-shift condition involved performing a task at one table and then crossing the room to perform the next task. For practicality, half of the participants concluded their last trial by returning to the original room. To ensure sufficient observations, six objects were moved during each trial. This approach allowed the study to explore the location-updating effect within a real-world context while addressing logistical challenges. Sixty participants (28 female) from the University of Notre Dame took part in Experiment 2, earning partial course credit. The study aimed to assess the location-updating effect in a maximally immersive real-world environment, contrasting with virtual settings. Participants navigated a three-room environment, with varying room sizes and movement conditions. Colored blocks were used in trials where participants picked up objects and then completed a recognition test, preceded by a distractor task. Each trial comprised 12 recognition probes, and the procedure lasted around 15 to 20 minutes. Experiment 2 confirmed a location-updating effect in a real-world setting, paralleling findings from virtual environments. Memory decline was evident after spatial shifts compared to simple room crossings, aligning with an event cognition perspective. Updating event models upon location change led to memory costs, causing previously relevant information to become less accessible. In Experiment 3, an alternative explanation for the location-updating effect was explored. This explanation suggested that forgetting might arise due to differences in environmental context during retrieval compared to encoding. Different rooms could serve as distinct contexts, potentially leading to poorer memory retrieval when the context differs. To investigate this, Experiment 3 introduced a return condition, where participants went back to the original location after a spatial shift. Additionally, a double shift condition involved two spatial shifts without returning to the original room. The results aimed to differentiate between an event horizon model and encoding specificity accounts of memory disruption. Forty-eight participants (28 female) from the University of Notre Dame were involved. Virtual environments were displayed on a 66'' diagonal Smartboard, enhancing immersion. The virtual space comprised 88 rooms of varying sizes. Objects were placed on rectangular tables in each room. The procedure included memory probe trials after spatial shifts, with 64 trials in total. The experiment lasted around 15 to 20 minutes. The findings aimed to shed light on whether memory disruption is influenced by the number of rooms traversed or the change in contextual cues during retrieval. In general, the response time data closely mirrored the findings from the analysis of error rates. Notably, the absence of improvement when returning to the original context is a crucial observation. This robustly dismisses the possibility of a context-based explanation for the location-updating effect.
 In 2016, Kyle A. Pettijohn and Gabriel A. Radvansky from the Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame
 In 2021, Jessica McFadyen, Christopher Nolan , Ellen Pinocy, David Buteri and Oliver Baumann at Bond University

In a 2021 study, researchers at Bond University tried to replicate the doorway effect in four experiments: in both physical rooms and virtual rooms, and both with and without the participants doing a "distractor task" (counting backwards). In one experiment -- in virtual rooms, and with a distractor task -- doorways caused a statistically significant increase in false positives (i.e., false memories), but not false negatives (i.e., forgetting). In the other three experiments, doorways had no effect. The researchers suggested that this was consistent with real life, in which "we might occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually happens when we have other things on our mind . . . ."

One of the study authors, psychologist Oliver Baumann, speculated that it might be "possible to 'immunise' yourself against forgetting. '"If we are single-minded in what we want to do, nothing will stop us remembering. But if we have multiple things going on, forgetfulness becomes noticeable.'"

Real World Effects
Separate studies on the presence of a doorway effect elicited incongruences with typical rhythms of life. Some suggest it may be reasonable to expect that humans should instead be rather facile with dealing with movement from one location to another, and its effects on memory recall – especially with objects one was recently carrying. It has been separately proposed that the doorway effect might be attributed to self-preservation behaviours, evoking alertness towards the lurking of predators on the edge of openings when crossing such thresholds. Hence, guiding one's attention from an internal to external perspective. Implications extend to realms of verbal learning and comprehension, whereby the presence of the effect even on small, short-term memory loads, demonstrates the importance of one's environment on subsequent performance especially for more complex tasks (recalling exam material, interpersonal details, human engagement etc.).

Implications of physical environment with memory extend its role in eliciting revealed behaviours including notions of cognitive empathy gaps, which are underlined by deviations in mentalising processes of one's emotive states. Examples of how broader contributions to the relations between environment, memory, and behaviour were demonstrated by London-based behavioural consultancy, Cowry Consulting's "Preventing falls with pink walls" project that aimed to reduce unsafe behaviour at construction sites. Changes to the physical environment were made by painting break room walls Baker-Miller pink, restructuring with plants, softer lighting, and communal tables to differentially segment the space were seen "to reduce anxiety, stress and aggression".

Alternative Theories

Further Research

References

Memory biases

Doorway effect


Surviving Death is a docu-series directed by Ricki Stern about near-death experiences and beliefs in life after death, and psychic mediumship. Its first season of six episodes was released on Netflix on 6 January 2021. The series is based on the 2017 book Surviving Death by journalist and paranormal enthusiast Leslie Kean.

While some reviewers described the show as providing a balanced treatment of a difficult topic, others have been highly critical, noting that the show takes a non-critical view of the scientific value of anecdotal subjective personal reports. The show has also been criticized for presenting pseudoscientific parapsychology as science and has been accused of exploiting the plight of fearful and grieving vulnerable people.

Episodes

Reception

In The Independent 'State of the Arts', column writer Micha Frazer-Carroll described the series as appealing to those who are coping with anxieties about death.  She adds that its coverage of near death experiences includes pop culture clichés and superstitions but offers persuasive personal accounts and that it incorporated dominant psychological theories like oxygen deprivation to explain some of the experience.  The coverage of mediumship includes accounts of fraudulent exploitation.  Frazer-Caroll wrote that skeptics may not become convinced and that the people involved often embraced hope in the afterlife with interest in these experiences to cope with the loss of a loved one.  She mentioned Stern's presentation that focused on being open to people's experiences.

Culture writer and film critic Radheyan Simonpillai wrote for The Guardian that the series "has no shortage of paranormal activity. Mediums call on the dead. Seances try to manifest them. People claim to be reincarnated actors, pilots or murder victims while others describe feeling a heavenly embrace during near-death experiences."  He adds that the show also welcomes skepticism.  Simonpillai mentions that the show "tries to find the tricky balance between that Sherlock skepticism and Doyle's openness to spiritualism" and that "you have to be willing to accept that a visit from a persistent cardinal or flickering lights can be signs from the dead."  He quotes Kean: "Everybody has to decide for themselves whether something has that meaning for them or not ... with signs, it's not really objective."  He adds that unlike Kean's book, the series focuses more on testimonials of people who believed to have witnessed the afterlife.

Live Science contributor Stephanie Pappas argued that while religious faith is untestable, outside of what science does, the series attempts to portray it as something that could be proven or discredited scientifically and that "it confuses its own narrative by offering the same credulity to outright scams as it does to outstanding questions about the process of death".  She adds that while patients may still sometimes have experiences when doctors don't expect them to because their heart stopped, it is not an indication that they are supernatural or don't originate from the brain; that brain-endogenous DMT could possibly also be responsible for such vivid experiences.  Some experiences also result from the gradual awakening from sedation at the end of ICU medical procedures.  Pappas mentions Parnia who was invited to participate in the show but who declined, reportedly "because the show made no distinction between scientific research on topics such as the recalled experience of death and the pseudoscience of ghosts and mediums."  She adds that despite these problems, strong personal experiences can be meaningful to those who live them and potentially transformative.  In relation to mediumship, Pappas wrote that people who hire mediums already want to believe and that the show's treatment of the topic was less plausible than that about near death experiences.  She concludes that Surviving Death "tells a compelling tale of people's desire for meaning in the universe — and of their deep, unrelenting love for deceased family and friends."

Film critic and pop-culture writer Nick Schager wrote for The Daily Beast that Surviving Death'''s evidence "is of a pseudo-scientific, anecdotal, and/or outright fanciful sort."  He criticized the show for ignoring natural explanations, cultural narratives and human tendencies for these experiences and interpretations, but suggesting instead that the afterlife is real.  He added: "To the series, anyone who doesn't accept these spiritual concepts and experiences is a 'skeptic' driven by 'hubris and arrogance.' It assumes a perspective in which the veracity of its claims is the norm, and those who view them with suspicion are close-minded cynics."  Shager notes that while the series projects a type of skeptical dialogue, it is staged and loaded by believers to suggest conclusions.  He adds that while the show does highlight how people cling to such experiences and beliefs for comfort, the repeated suggestions are that of a universal conclusion that lost loved ones are well ("affirmation-by-numbers").  He describes the show's view of afterlife as simplistic, "one in which all ghosts communicate in the same indirect-clue fashion, and have the same unrevealing things to say ... that our paths are irreversibly set in stone, and thus that we have no free will, and that a higher power with a divine plan governs everything and everyone."  He noted the use of flawed justifications to avoid evaluating the reliability of claims, like that of ectoplasm generation: that it's averse to light, so cannot be filmed.  He concluded by criticizing the recipe used to conclude the series, disguising faith into psychologist statements presenting a false equivalence without resolving anything.

A review in the Explica magazine described Surviving Death as "one of the biggest nonsense of this incipient movie season", "a regrettable attempt to legitimize magical thinking", presenting a collection of pseudoscientific parapsychology as science.  It points out that no proper laboratory experiment ever demonstrated evidence of the paranormal, but that advances in neurology conversely demonstrated human experiences and brains to be notoriously unreliable, adding "we can resort to reasonable explanations, without being delirious with the fantasies of Surviving Death, because of our neuropsychological knowledge."  It criticized the show for presenting flawed narratives about "materialistic science" like pretending that other methods of knowledge acquisition exist that rival the scientific method, with clichés like "there are things that science cannot prove, but that does not mean they do not happen."  It adds that the show promotes delusions as justifications, ignoring that the absence of evidence should imply caution and scientific skepticism instead of jumping to fantastic conclusions.  It notes that the various testimonies have been selected and presented by the producers to push their own conclusions and that discredited hoaxes like Franek Kluski's "materialisations" using paraffin are claimed to be genuine.  It accuses Surviving Death'' of "taking advantage of desperate people", as Stern's supporting narratives reiterates the conclusions and "uses the terrible grief of his interviewees to support his fallacies ... He uses vulnerable people who have lost a loved one, are broken in pain and admit to being desperate to support his irrational thesis."

References

External links

2020s American documentary television series
2021 American television series debuts
2021 American television series endings
English-language Netflix original programming
Netflix original documentary television series
Television shows about death

Surviving Death


Suzanne Strudwick (born 4 July 1965 in Cheshire, England) is an English professional golfer. She turned professional in 1983 and joined the Women Professional Golfers' European Tour (now the Ladies European Tour) the same year. In 1993 she joined the U.S.-based LPGA Tour and was rookie of the year in her first season. She made the top 100 on the LPGA Tour money list nine times, but never rose higher than 68th.

Strudwick played a full tournament schedule until 2004, and now runs her own golf academy based in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States.

Strudwick is now a full-time golf coach at Carson–Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee.

Ladies European Tour wins
1989 Open de France Dames
1991 AGF Ladies' Open

External links

English female golfers
Ladies European Tour golfers
LPGA Tour golfers
College golf coaches in the United States
Sportspeople from Cheshire
1965 births
Living people

Suzanne Strudwick


Marie-Jeanne [Rose] Bertin (2 July 1747, Abbeville, Picardy, France – 22 September 1813, Épinay-sur-Seine) was a French fashion merchant, known in English as a milliner and in French as a marchande de modes. She was particularly noted for her work with Queen Marie Antoinette. Bertin was the first celebrated French fashion designer and is widely credited with having brought fashion and haute couture to the forefront of popular culture.

Biography
Marie-Jeanne Bertin was the daughter of Nicolas Bertin (d. 1754) and Marie-Marguerite Méquignon, and spent her childhood in St Gilles in Picardie. She was the sixth of seven children born to the couple. Bertin's family was of small means; her mother worked as a nurse, which at the time was a profession with very low salary and status, and the financial situation became even worse after the death of her father, who had worked in the local constabulary.

Early career
Bertin's home town of Abbeville had a tradition of textile manufacture, reaching back to 1665 when Louis XIV's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert established a manufacture of fine cloth in the Spanish and Dutch style in the area. Bertin probably acquired knowledge of textiles from a young age. When she was nine years old, Bertin was apprenticed to a fashion merchant in Abbeville, Victoire Barbier, who appears to have been a distant aunt.

In the mid-1760s Bertin moved to Paris, where she became apprenticed to a successful fashion merchant, Mademoiselle Pagelle, with clients among the aristocracy. Bertin's early success can be attributed to her good relations with the Princesse de Conti, the Duchesse de Chartres and the Princesse de Lamballe, who would one day arrange her meeting with Marie Antoinette.

In 1770, Bertin opened her own shop, Le Grand Mogol, on the Rue Saint-Honoré with the support of the Duchesse de Chartres (it moved to 26 Rue de Richelieu in 1789). She quickly found customers among influential noble ladies at Versailles, many of whom followed her from Mademoiselle Pagelle's, including many ladies-in-waiting to the new Dauphine, Marie Antoinette.

Fashion merchant to Marie Antoinette

Before Marie Antoinette arrived in France from Austria, she had been schooled in the nuances of galant spoken French and French fashions.  She was introduced to Bertin in the summer of 1774. Marie Antoinette commissioned Bertin to make her robes for the coronation of Louis XVI, which were reportedly so heavy that they had to be carried to Rheims from Paris on a stretcher.

Marie Antoinette was so enamoured of her fashion merchant that she abolished the historic custom of dressing in public in a formal levée ceremony, choosing instead to be dressed in private by Bertin. Twice a week, Bertin would present her newest creations to the queen and spend hours discussing them. The queen adored her wardrobe and was passionate about every detail, and Bertin, as her milliner, became her confidante and friend. Her position as the designer to the queen also secured her role as the leading fashion designer of the French aristocracy and, as French fashion was the leader in Europe, the central figure of European fashion.

Called "Minister of Fashion" by her detractors, Bertin was the brains behind almost every new dress commissioned by the queen.  Dresses and hair became Marie Antoinette's personal vehicles of expression, and Bertin clothed the queen from 1770 until her deposition in 1792.  Bertin became a powerful figure at court, and she witnessed—and sometimes effected—profound changes in French society.  Her large, ostentatious gowns ensured that their wearer occupied at least three times as much space as their male counterpart, thus making the woman a more imposing presence.  Her creations also established France as the center of the fashion industry, and from then on, dresses made in Paris were sent to London, Venice, Vienna, Saint Petersburg and Constantinople. This inimitable Parisian elegance established the worldwide reputation of French couture.

In the mid-18th century, French women had begun to "pouf" (raise) their hair with pads and pomade and wore oversized luxurious gowns. Bertin used and exaggerated the leading modes of the day, and created poufs for Marie Antoinette with heights up to three feet.  The pouf fashion reached such extremes that it became a period trademark, along with decorating the hair with ornaments and objects which showcased current events. Working with Léonard Autié, the queen's hairdresser, Bertin created a coiffure that became the rage all over Europe: hair would be accessorized, stylized, cut into defining scenes, and modeled into shapes and objects—ranging from recent gossip to nativities to husbands' infidelities, to French naval vessels such as the Belle Poule, to the pouf aux insurgents in honor of the American Revolutionary War.  The queen's most famous coif was the "inoculation" pouf that she wore to publicize her success in persuading the king to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Clothing had long served in France as one of the most visible markers of social privilege and aristocratic status. Antoinette was known for wearing many of the new groundbreaking fashions. Bertin came up with the idea of the chemise à la Reine or robe "en Gaulle", a more free-flowing gown, which was initially created for Marie-Antoinette and was one of her favorite silhouettes. The dress sparked a mini-revolution and became very popular from 1781 onwards. It was a gown made to be worn in private spaces and made of white cotton, gauze, or silk. It was straight, very low cut and it was fastened with a belt around the waist, lightly accentuating the female figure. Antoinette and Bertin popularized English-inspired, sporty fashion, inspired by equestrian fashion. All the dresses were made of expensive fabrics such as silk, velvet, and very rarely cotton. It took hard work and dedication to create such masterpieces.

Marie Antoinette also asked Bertin to dress dolls in the latest fashions as gifts for her sisters and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Bertin's fashion dolls were called "Pandores," and were made of wax over jointed wood armatures or porcelain.  There were small ones the size of a common toy doll, or large ones as big or half as big as a real person, petites Pandores and grandes Pandores. Fashion dolls as couriers of modes remained in vogue until the appearance of Fashion magazines.

With the queen's patronage, Bertin's name became synonymous with the sartorial elegance and excess of Versailles. Bertin's close relationship with the queen provided valuable background into the social and political significance of fashion at the French court.  The frequent meetings between the queen and her couturière were met, however, with hostility from the poorer classes, given Bertin's high prices: her gowns and headdresses could easily cost twenty times what a skilled worker of the time earned in a year.

During Marie Antoinette's imprisonment, Bertin continued to receive orders from her former prized customer, for much smaller, almost negligible ribbons and simple alterations.  She was to provide the former queen's mourning outfit following the execution of Louis XVI, recalling a dream that Marie Antoinette had had years before of her favorite milliner handing her ribbons that all turned to black.

French Revolution

The French Revolution did not immediately diminish her business despite the emigration of many of her clients abroad, and she continued to be in favor of the queen, though the bills were significantly lower.

According to Léonard Autié, he, Bertin and Henriette Campan collectively contributed to the secret negotiations between the queen and Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau by informing her about political gossip and public opinion and the fear that Mirabeau would ally himself with the Duke of Orléans. Their information allegedly convinced the queen to meet Auguste Marie Raymond d'Arenberg in the rooms of her maid Marie-Élisabeth Thibault and ask him to meet with Mirabeau in the home of Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, resulting in contact between the queen and Mirabeau.

Bertin made several journeys abroad during the Revolution, which attracted attention.  She made a trip to England and Germany in 1791–92, leading to suspicions that she was acting as Marie Antoinette's agent.  According to these speculations, she secretly visited Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor to deliver a message from Marie Antoinette, as the latter's correspondence was scrutinized and an oral message through a loyal messenger was regarded as the safest method to deliver a sensitive message across borders. This is unconfirmed, but not improbable, as the queen is confirmed to have used her hairdresser Léonard Autié as a messenger during the Flight to Varennes, and it is noted that Henriette Campan claimed that the queen managed to get secret messages to her nephew the emperor during this period. Officially, these were business trips, and Bertin is confirmed to have been in Germany in July 1791, when her presence is noted at the French émigré court in the Castle Schoenbornhut in Koblenz, where she was said to have contributed to the extravagant fashion of the women attending the court.

Bertin was absent from France during the September Massacres, which resulted in her being placed in the list of émigrés.  She managed to have herself removed from the list and returned to France in December 1792 to attend to her business.  During this stay, popular legend says she destroyed her account books in order to spare the queen from having her bills used against her during her trial. However, this does not appear to be true: all the bills of the queen prior to August 1792 were already in the possession of the government through Henry, liquidator of the civil estate, and there was at that point not yet a trial planned against Marie Antoinette. It would therefore have been pointless for Bertin to destroy her account books for that reason, and the bills of Marie Antoinette were in fact inherited by her heirs, who would demand payment of them until 1830.

In February 1793, Bertin left France for London.  For a while, she was able to serve her old clients among the émigrés, and her fashion dolls continued to circulate among European capitals, as far away as Saint Petersburg.  During these years, her main income was through demanding payment of bills owed to her by her old foreign clients, such as the queen of Sweden, Sophia Magdalena of Denmark. Her business in Paris still operated, despite her absence, through representatives she appointed and money she sent to it from London, and she still delivered orders to Marie Antoinette.

Later career

In January 1795, Bertin managed to have her name struck from the list of émigrés through her lawyer, who claimed that she had been absent legally since she left the country for business purposes on a legal passport from July 1792 (omitting her stay in France December 1792-February 1793), and she was thus free to return and resume her business.  She is alleged to have acted as a secret messenger for émigrés during this trip, and it is known that she provided them with funds, but this could have been merely a sign of her well-known generosity.

Her business never fully recovered, but continued on a smaller scale. This was partially because of inflation and partially because fashions changed after the French Revolution ended. Joséphine de Beauharnais was among her clients, and she had foreign clients such as Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily (1799) and Maria Luisa of Parma (1808). She was eventually replaced as the leading fashion designer by Louis Hippolyte Leroy.

As the nineteenth century dawned, Bertin transferred her business to her nephews and retired to her estate in Épinay. She died in 1813 in Épinay-sur-Seine.

Acquisition of the nickname 'Rose'
As historian Michelle Sapori has noted, Bertin was not known as 'Rose' during her lifetime. The nickname Rose came to be associated with female fashion merchants in general after the publication of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret's 1769 novel Ainsi va le monde, which featured a heavily romanticised fashion merchant character called Rose. After Bertin's death, a memoir was published purporting to have been written by Bertin, which was in fact the work of Jacques Peuchet. Peuchet took several liberties in his account of Bertin's life, including inventing love affairs. He used the name Rose to associate the real figure of Bertin with the romanticized image of fashion merchants in the popular imagination.

Famous quote

Bertin is said to have remarked to Marie Antoinette in 1785, when presenting her with a remodelled dress, "Il n'y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié" ("There is nothing new except what has been forgotten").

See also
 Le Sieur Beaulard
 Mademoiselle Alexandre
 Madame Eloffe
 Marie Madeleine Duchapt

References

Bibliography
Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).
Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey (London: Phoenix Press, 2006).
Guennec, Catherine. La modiste de la reine (Paris: Éditions Jean Claude Lattes, 2004).
Haru Crowston, Clare. Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
Langlade, Émile. Rose Bertin: Creator of Fashion at the Court of Marie Antoinette (London: John Long, 1913).
Sapori, Michelle. Rose Bertin: ministre des modes de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Regard: Institut français de la mode, 2003).
Weber, Caroline. Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (London: Aurun, 2007).

French fashion designers
French milliners
People from Abbeville
1747 births
1813 deaths
18th-century French businesswomen
18th-century French businesspeople
Household of Marie Antoinette
French women fashion designers
Haute couture

Rose Bertin


Mandhara is a small village in Tehsil Dadahu, Sirmaur District, Himachal Pradesh. There are about 30 families in this small village with approx 400 population.  The nearby Villages are Birla, Baila, Kando Kansar, Dabriya, etc.  This village is becoming an example of collective development, cooperation, solar and organics through a special development drive by LD Sharma, an entrepreneur who was born and brought up in the same village and who is now guiding all villagers to develop collectively. This village is around 35 km from Paonta Sahib, a place which is known for Sikh Gurudwaras.

There is a temple of Devi Bhadhrakshi. The temple is being rebuilt by LD Sharma through a registered committee named Mehta Vikas Jan Main Smiti and the latest updates can be seen online.

Villages in Sirmaur district

Mandhara


The Department of the Army Civilian Police (DACP) are the civilian federal law enforcement bodies of the Department of the Army of the United States of America. There is no centralized DACP agency, with all civilian law enforcement agencies of the Army falling under the "DACP" title. The DACP are controlled jointly by the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense and as such, they are commonly referred to as DoD Police.

DACP personnel are responsible for law enforcement on U.S. Army–owned and –leased buildings, facilities, properties, as well as other U.S. military assets. DACP candidates with no previous law enforcement experience attend the U.S. Army Civilian Police Academy, located on Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. DACP officers may work uniformed or plainclothes assignments. Along with patrol work, DACP officers may serve in specialized roles, such as detectives, crash investigators, Special Reaction Team members, etc.

DACP personnel act as a force multiplier and complement the Military Police Corps (MPC) and the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Neither the MPC or CID fall under DACP, however.

In overseas locations or in areas of concurrent jurisdiction, DACP are responsible for the protection and policing of DOD-affiliated personnel, performing police liaison work with foreign police agencies, and investigating incidents involving personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces.

It is important to note that "Department of Defense Police" is a phrase that refers to any civil service employee engaged in police duties for the Department of Defense and its component branches of the US Armed Forces. There is no one unified agency that goes under the title "Department of Defense Police".

The Department of the Army also has Department of the Army Security Guards (DASG), who are uniformed and armed federal security officers.

Civil service series 0083 (Police)
A Department of the Army civilian police officer (DACP) is assigned the federal occupational series code "0083", the code reserved for federal police officers and detectives in the civil service. These detectives and police officers investigate crimes that are not pursued by the CID.

Civil service series 0085 (Guard)

A Department of the Army Guard (DASG) is an armed, uniformed, civilian guard that provides physical security and access control at US Army locations, in conjunction with DACP.

The uniform is almost identical to DACP, but with "GUARD" rather than "POLICE" on the shoulder patch and badge. The equipment and firearms are the same as DACP. The authority and jurisdiction are also identical to that of a DACP which is described in detail in the Jurisdiction and Authority section below.

Jurisdiction and Authority

According to the Department of the Army Army Regulation 190-56(2013 ), both the Department of the Army (DA) Civilian Police (CP) and Security Guards (SG) have the authority to apprehend individuals who are found to have committed felonies, misdemeanors, breaches of the peace, threats to property of welfare, or actions that are detrimental to good order and discipline.

The authority for AR 190-56 originates from the US Constitution, which provides Congress the power to impose rules and regulations over the property of the United States (U.S. Const. art. IV., § 3, clause 2 ). Congress then authorized the Secretary of Defense, military commanders, and other authorized military officers to create defense property security regulations such as AR 190-56 (Internal Security Act of 1950, 50 U.S.C. § 797 ).

Apprehension is the equivalent to arrest in civilian terminology (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2019, Rule 302 ). These apprehensions can only be conducted by military law enforcement officials. These individuals include security police, military police, master at arms, shore patrol, and other authorized persons (whose duties include investigative, guard, or police duties). Specifically listed in the following discussion paragraph are police, guards, civilian police, and civilian guards. The authorising regulations show no distinction between DACPs and DASGs regarding authority. As such, both DACPs and DASGs are listed as "military law enforcement officials".

DACPs and DASGs authority is subject to limitations imposed by AR 190-56 and the Posse Comitatus Act. Execution of their authority is restricted to the bounds of the installation when on duty (Department of the Army, 2013 ). DACPs and DASGs are also limited on aid to civilian law enforcement (Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S. Code § 1385 ).

Duties
At many installations, Department of Army Civilian Police officers augment military police personnel and are distributed throughout the chain of command of each installation's Directorate of Emergency Services.

Some installations have only civilian police (Fort McCoy) present while others work closely with military police. A newly hired officer can expect to perform a variety of law enforcement roles including patrol, crime-prevention, investigations, special reaction team, and police administrative functions.

Force Protection and Patrol
One major function of a Department of the Army Civilian Police officer is to conduct force protection duties.  Department of the Army Civilian Police officers conduct law enforcement patrols within the installation and, depending on local policy, in areas off of the installation where military affiliated personnel frequent.

Officers patrol the installation and check that physical security measures such as fences and lighting are in good working order.

Traffic
An officer can conduct traffic stops for motor vehicle violations. Each base adopts the surrounding state's motor vehicle laws under the Assimilative Crimes Act (see Federal Jurisdiction).

There are two types of citations that may be issued: the DD Form 1408 Armed Forces Traffic Ticket, and the Central Violations Bureau Violation Notice (CVB).

 The type of citation(s) issued are authorized at the local command level. The DD Form 1408 does not have any monetary fines associated with it.
 The CVB does however establish fines and a hearing system through the U.S. Magistrate.

Calls for service
Department of the Army Civilian Police officers and military police personnel respond to all calls for law enforcement assistance that take place within the installation. If the crime is found to be a major felony, then the matter is generally referred to the special agents of the applicable military investigative agency (Army CID, Army Counterintelligence, NCIS, OSI, FBI, etc.) depending on the agency's purview.

There are increasing opportunities for participation in specialized roles. Department of the Army Civilian Police officers may serve as K-9 officers or members of a special reaction team (SRT).

Requirements of DACP Officers
A major requirement of any potential Department of the Army Civilian Police officer is to pass a medical exam. There is typically an uncorrected vision requirement, candidates must have normal color vision, depth perception, and sufficiently good corrected vision.

Department of the Army Civilian Police officers are required to obtain and maintain a "Secret" clearance. The background investigation must show the candidate to be free of substantial debt or foreign influence. Under the Lautenberg Amendment, officers cannot have any convictions for domestic violence. Some installations may require an interview with the candidate.

Candidates are currently required to take and pass a physical fitness test. This test is a modified version of the test that is required by military members. Army regulations require the officers pass this test annually, something not typically required of local city or town police officers (though they may take one in their respective academies).

As of 2014 the Department of the Army no longer grants waivers to any patrol level officer, all interested candidates must now attend a 9-week academy at Fort Leonard Wood, MO.

Training

Department of the Army Civilian Police officers must attend a (resident) police academy approved by the Office of the Provost Marshal General (OPMG). The U.S. Army sends their civilian officers to a police academy that is a minimum of nine weeks long. A waiver of training may no longer be given by the OPMG, unless reclassifying from an 1811 (Federal Agent) to 0083 (Federal Police). Or transferring from another 0083 (Federal Police) agency and have completed a DoD approved or VA approved course.

There is one academy in Missouri. They give an overview of topics such as IED detection, basic patrolling techniques, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, physical security concepts, and other police skills.

This academy is designed around the specific needs of the US Army, and do not resemble a state or FLETC run academy. However, the DACP Academy is accredited by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Accreditation (FLETA) organization. FLETA also accredits FLETC, the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI and numerous other federal law enforcement agencies.

The curriculum in these academies is based upon the same topics that a military member would learn in their advanced individual training schools after basic training. Annual in-service training for the DACP (sometimes called "annual sustainment training") normally totals about two hundred and forty hours a year. This refresher training is conducted in conjunction with the officer's military member counterparts.

Officers selected for a position on an installation's special reaction team (SRT) must attend the same training as their military counterparts. Training is held at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Department of the Army Civilian Police officers are highly trained and skilled professionals, many of whom have prior law enforcement and military experience. Post , Police Departments have tightened their professional standards. Both classroom training and physical training have been intensified in response to real world terrorist threats.

Rank Structure
DACP rank structure is similar to other police, federal police and DoD law-enforcement agencies. Rank insignia is very similar to the US Army's rank insignia.

Table
Rank structure of the Department of the Army Civilian Police

Uniform and Equipment

Uniform
Department of Army Civilian Police wear a dark blue style uniform, similar to other DOD Police, in two formats:

Standard - dark blue trousers, shirt, necktie, campaign hat, v-neck jumper, windbreaker jacket
Utility - similar to above, but metal is generally removed and the ball cap is worn, with no tie

 Some officers, on certain duties, may wear an overt equipment vest with "POLICE" or "DASG" markings and DACP/DASG insignia as appropriate.

There is a specific DACP shoulder patch, badge and the rank insignia is worn on both uniforms.

DACP officers who serve in a game warden capacity wear a tan-brown uniform, but keep the DACP patches and badges.

Firearms and Equipment
DACP Police Officers are armed with a Beretta 92, designated as M9 service pistol, or the Sig Sauer P320 designated M17 in Level 3 retention holster, spare magazines in pouches, as well as a Taser stun gun, baton, OC spray, handcuffs in pouch, radio, torch, first aid kit and notebook & pen.

Wet weather kit, traffic vests and cold weather kit is also issued when necessary.

DACP also may use flak vests (body armour), Kevlar helmets, protective masks and the such like.

Vehicles
DACP Police use the same vehicles as their active duty counterparts in the Military Police, such as the Chevrolet Impala and Ford Police Interceptor, with a wide variety of liveries, colours and decals. All are equipped with red, blue, white - or a combination of - flashing beacons.

Notable events
 Fort Bliss gunman.
 Land mine incident at Fort Gordon.
 The 2009 Fort Hood shooting.
 Fort Drum shooting in 2008.
 2007 Fort Dix attack plot
 Fort Bragg "Sniper" - William Kreutzer, Jr.

Officers killed in line of duty
Police Officer Harry S. White
Forest Ranger John Sidney Mott
Police Officer Albee V. Forney
Sergeant Dennis H. Marcotte
Police Officer Patrick Sirois. Cause of death: vehicle collision. End of watch: 23 November 2010.
Police Officer Jonathan M. Gumm. Cause of death: heart attack. End of watch: 29 July 2021.

See also

 List of United States federal law enforcement agencies
 Military Police Corps (United States)

References

External links
 Civilian employment information
 UCMJ
 U.S. Army Military Police School

Federal law enforcement agencies of the United States
United States Department of Defense agencies
United States Army organization
Civilian police forces of defense ministries
Agency-specific police departments of the United States

Department of the Army Civilian Police


Sindhi Mojari (or simply Mojari) is a type of handcrafted footwear produced in the Indian subcontinent. They are traditionally made by artisans mostly using tanned leather. The uppers are made of one piece of leather or textile embroidered and embellished with brass nails, cowry shells, mirrors, bells and ceramic beads. The bonding from the upper to the sole is done by cotton thread that is eco-friendly and enmeshes the leather fibers to strengthen the bonds. Some product range also uses bright and ornate threads.

As it evolved through the centuries and is being produced by individual artisans, products vary in designs and colours. It encapsules cultural diversity, local ethos and ethnicity.

History

It is believed that one of the earliest examples of footwear worn on the Indian subcontinent is a sandal of wood, datable to circa 200 BC. During the 3rd and 4th Centuries in the Buddhist period, it was quite common to wear strapped sandals, and Indian kings wore sandals ornamented with precious jewels. Jain literature shows that leather was used for the making of shoes, which protected the toes from getting injured. Hides of cows, buffaloes, goats, sheep and other wild animals were used.

Origin
The Mojari originated under the Muslim rule in the Mughal Empire where it was decorated with colours, gems, and other ornaments. They are said to have been popularized under the Mughal King Saleem Shah as a result. In Pakistan, they are also commonly worn with Pakistan's national dress Shalwar Kameez.

See also
 Jutti
 Kolhapuri chappal
 Multani Khussa
 Paduka

References

External links
 BBC Culture - Includes image of golden mojari of a 19th-century Nizam of Hyderabad
 Khussa Shop - One of the oldest Khussa Store

Folk footwear
Indian footwear
Pakistani footwear
Mughal art
Sindhi culture
Indian leather industry

Sindhi Mojari


Melaleuca suberosa, commonly known as corky-bark honey-myrtle or corky honeymyrtle, is a shrub in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, and is endemic to the south of Western Australia. It is a distinctive shrub, recognised by its tiny, crowded leaves, corky bark and pink flowers that appear along lengths of leafless parts of the branches.

Description
Melaleuca suberosa is a small shrub with grey, corky, furrowed bark and which grows to a height of . Its branches and leaves are glabrous except when very young. The leaves are arranged alternately,  long,  wide, crowded near the ends of the branches, very narrow oval in shape, oval in cross section and with small lumps or tubercles on the upper surface.

The flowers are a shade of deep pink to purple and are arranged on the sides of older branches and partly buried in them so that only the petals, style and stamens appear above the wood. The petals are  long and fall off as the flower ages. The stamens are arranged in five bundles around the flowers and each bundle contains 9 to 15 stamens. Flowering occurs between July and January and is followed by fruit which are woody capsules  long, roughly spherical in shape, arranged along the branches.

Taxonomy
Calothamnus suberosa was first formally described in 1844 by Johannes Conrad Schauer in Plantae Preissianae. It was placed in the present genus as Melaleuca suberosa in 1931 by Charles Austin Gardner in  Enumeratio Plantarum Australiae Occidentalis. The specific epithet (suberosa) is a Latin word meaning "corky" referring to the corky bark of this species.

Distribution and habitat
Melaleuca suberosa occurs between the Albany district and the Cocklebiddy district in the Esperance Plains, Jarrah Forest and Mallee biogeographic regions. It grows in sandy, stony or gravelly soils on plains, swampy flats and low ridges.

Conservation
This species is classified as "not threatened" by the Government of Western Australia Department of Parks and Wildlife.

Use in horticulture
Melaleuca suberosa is hardy in southern parts of Australia, preferring a sunny situation. It is frost hardy and tolerates a range of soils but is difficult to grow in tropical or sub-tropical climates.

References

suberosa
Plants described in 1944
Endemic flora of Western Australia
Taxa named by Johannes Conrad Schauer

Melaleuca suberosa


Sir Joseph Paxton (3 August 1803 – 8 June 1865) was an English gardener, architect, engineer and Member of Parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace and for cultivating the Cavendish banana, the most consumed banana in the Western world.

Early life

Paxton was born in 1803, the seventh son of a farming family, in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire. Some references, incorrectly, list his birth year as 1801. This is, as he admitted in later life, a result of misinformation he provided in his teens, which enabled him to enrol at Chiswick Gardens. He became a garden boy at the age of fifteen for Sir Gregory Osborne Page-Turner at Battlesden Park, near Woburn. After several moves, he obtained a position in 1823 at the Horticultural Society's Chiswick Gardens.

Chatsworth

The Horticultural Society's gardens were close to the gardens of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, at Chiswick House. The duke met the young gardener as he strolled in his gardens and became impressed with his skill and enthusiasm. He offered the 20-year-old Paxton the position of head gardener at Chatsworth, which was considered one of the finest landscaped gardens of the time.

Although the duke was in Russia, Paxton set off for Chatsworth on the Chesterfield coach arriving at Chatsworth at half past four in the morning. By his own account he had explored the gardens after scaling the kitchen garden wall, set the staff to work, eaten breakfast with the housekeeper and met his future wife, Sarah Bown, the housekeeper's niece, completing his first morning's work before nine o'clock. He married Bown in 1827, and she proved capable of managing his affairs, leaving him free to pursue his ideas.

He enjoyed a friendly relationship with his employer who recognised his diverse talents and facilitated his rise to prominence.

One of Paxton's first projects was to redesign the garden around the new north wing of the house and expand Chatsworth's collection of conifers into a  arboretum which still exists. He became skilled at moving mature trees. The largest, weighing about eight tons, was moved from Kedleston Road in Derby. Among several other large projects at Chatsworth were the rock garden, the Emperor Fountain, and rebuilding Edensor village. The Emperor Fountain was built in 1844; it was twice the height of Nelson's Column and required the creation of a feeder lake on the hill above the gardens necessitating the excavation of  of earth.

Greenhouses

In 1832, Paxton developed an interest in greenhouses at Chatsworth where he designed a series of buildings with "forcing frames" for espalier trees and for the cultivation of exotic plants such as highly prized pineapples. At the time the use of glass houses was in its infancy and those at Chatsworth were dilapidated. After experimentation, he designed a glass house with a ridge and furrow roof that would be at right angles to the morning and evening sun and an ingenious frame design that would admit maximum light: the forerunner of the modern greenhouse.

The next great building at Chatsworth was built for the first seeds of the Victoria regia lily which had been sent to Kew from the Amazon in 1836. Although they had germinated and grown they had not flowered and in 1849 a seedling was given to Paxton to try out at Chatsworth. He entrusted it to Eduard Ortgies, a young gardener and within two months the leaves were  in diameter, and a month later it flowered. It continued growing and it became necessary to build a much larger house, the Victoria Regia House. Inspired by the waterlily's huge leaves – 'a natural feat of engineering' –  he found the structure for his conservatory which he tested by floating his daughter Annie on a leaf. The secret was in the rigidity provided by the radiating ribs connecting with flexible cross-ribs. Constant experimentation over a number of years led him to devise the glasshouse design that inspired the Crystal Palace.

With a cheap and light wooden frame, the conservatory design had a ridge-and-furrow roof to let in more light and drained rainwater away. He used hollow pillars doubling as drain pipes and designed a special rafter that acted as an internal and external gutter. All the elements were pre-fabricated and, like modular buildings, could be produced in vast numbers and assembled into buildings of varied design.

In 1836, Paxton began construction of the Great Conservatory, or Stove, a huge glasshouse  long and  wide that was designed by the 6th Duke's architect Decimus Burton. The columns and beams were made of cast iron, and the arched elements of laminated wood. At the time, the conservatory was the largest glass building in the world. The largest sheet glass available at that time, made by Robert Chance, was  long. Chance produced  sheets for Paxton's benefit. The structure was heated by eight boilers using  of iron pipe and cost more than £30,000. It had a central carriageway and when the Queen was driven through, it was lit with twelve thousand lamps. It was prohibitively expensive to maintain, and was not heated during the First World War. The plants died and it was demolished in the 1920s.

In 1848 Paxton created the Conservative Wall, a glass house  long by  wide.

Crystal Palace

The Great Conservatory was the test-bed for the prefabricated glass and iron structural techniques which Paxton pioneered and would employ for his masterpiece: The Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851. These techniques were made physically possible by recent technological advances in the manufacture of both glass and cast iron, and financially possible by the dropping of a tax on glass.

In 1850 the Royal Commission appointed to organise the Great Exhibition were in a quandary. An international competition to design a building to house the Exhibition had produced 245 designs, of which only two were remotely suitable, and all would take too long to build and would be too permanent. There was an outcry by the public and in Parliament against the desecration of Hyde Park.

Paxton was visiting London in his capacity as a director of the Midland Railway to meet the chairman John Ellis who was also a member of parliament. He happened to mention an idea he had for the hall, and Ellis promptly encouraged to produce some plans, provided they could be ready in nine days. Unfortunately he was committed for the next few days, but at a board meeting of the railway in Derby, it is said he appeared to be spending much of his time doodling on a sheet of blotting paper. At the end of the meeting he held up his first sketch of the Crystal Palace, inspired by the Victoria Regia House. The sketch is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

He completed the plans and presented them to the Commission, but there was opposition from some members, since another design was well into its planning stage. Paxton decided to by-pass the Commission and published the design in the Illustrated London News to universal acclaim.

Its novelty was its revolutionary modular, prefabricated design, and use of glass. Glazing was carried out from special trolleys, and was fast: one man managed to fix 108 panes in a single day. The Palace was  long,  wide and  high. It required 4,500 tons of iron,  of timber and needed over 293,000 panes of glass. Yet it took 2,000 men just eight months to build, and cost just £79,800. Quite unlike any other building, it was itself a demonstration of British technology in iron and glass. In its construction, Paxton was assisted by Charles Fox, also of Derby for the iron framework, and William Cubitt, Chairman of the Building Committee. All three were knighted. After the exhibition they were employed by the Crystal Palace Company to move it to Sydenham where it remained until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Publishing

In 1831, Paxton published a monthly magazine, The Horticultural Register. This was followed by the Magazine of Botany in 1834, the Pocket Botanical Dictionary in 1840, Paxton's Flower Garden (vols. I & II) in 1850 and the Calendar of Gardening Operations. In addition to these titles he also, in 1841, co-founded perhaps the most famous horticultural periodical, The Gardeners' Chronicle along with John Lindley, Charles Wentworth Dilke and William Bradbury and later became its editor.

List of selected publications

Political career

Paxton was a Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry from 1854 until his death in 1865.

In June 1855 he presented a scheme he called the Great Victorian Way to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications in which he envisaged the construction of an arcade, based on the structure of the Crystal Palace, in a ten-mile loop around the centre of London. It would have incorporated a roadway, an atmospheric railway, housing and shops.

Later life

Although he remained the Head Gardener at Chatsworth until 1858, he was also able to undertake outside work such as the Crystal Palace and his directorship of the Midland Railway. He worked on public parks in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Glasgow, Halifax (the People's Park) and the grounds of The Spa, Scarborough. In October 1845 he was invited to lay out one of the country's first municipal burial grounds in Coventry. This became the London Road Cemetery, where a memorial to Paxton by Joseph Goddard was erected in 1868.

Between 1835 and 1839, he organised plant-hunting expeditions one of which ended in tragedy when two gardeners from Chatsworth sent to California drowned. Tragedy also struck at home when his eldest son died.

In 1850, Paxton was commissioned by Baron Mayer de Rothschild to design Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire. This was to be one of the greatest country houses built during the Victorian Era. Following the completion of Mentmore, Baron James de Rothschild, one of Baron de Rothschild's French cousins, commissioned Château de Ferrières at Ferrières-en-Brie near Paris to be "Another Mentmore, but twice the size". Both buildings still stand today.

Paxton also designed another country house, a smaller version of Mentmore at Battlesden near Woburn in Bedfordshire. This house was bought by the Duke of Bedford thirty years after its completion, and demolished, because the Duke wanted no other mansion close to Woburn Abbey.

In 1860, he also designed Fairlawn, 89 Wimbledon Park Side for Sir Edwin Saunders, Queen Victoria's dentist.

Paxton was honoured by being a member of the Kew Commission which was to suggest improvements for Royal Botanic Gardens, and by being considered for the post of Head Gardener at Windsor Castle.

On 17 March 1860, during the enthusiasm for the Volunteer movement, Paxton raised and commanded the 11th (Matlock) Derbyshire Rifle Volunteer Corps.

He became affluent, not so much through his Chatsworth employment, but by successful speculation in the railway industry. He retired from Chatsworth when the Duke died in 1858 but carried on working at various projects such as the Thames Graving Dock. Paxton died at his home at Rockhills, Sydenham, in 1865 and was buried on the Chatsworth Estate in St Peter's Churchyard, Edensor. His wife Sarah remained at their house on the Chatsworth Estate until her death in 1871.

Notes

References

 Cooper, B., (1983) Transformation of a Valley: The Derbyshire Derwent Heinemann, republished 1991 Cromford: Scarthin Books

Further reading
 Kate Colquhoun – A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton (Fourth Estate, 2003)
 George F Chadwick – Works of Sir Joseph Paxton (Architectural Press, 1961)

External links

 John Kenworthy-Browne, Paxton, Sir Joseph, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 (subscription or British public library reader's card required)

 Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace on ArchDaily
 Joseph Paxton Joseph Paxton's work on orchids
 BBC Historic Figures
 Joseph Paxton – a biography from the landscape architecture and gardens guide
 Joseph Paxton his early work – London Road Cemetery Coventry
 Eddie Richardson's page on Sir Joseph Paxton – includes photographs and a family tree

1803 births
1865 deaths
People from Central Bedfordshire District
19th-century English architects
English landscape architects
19th-century gardeners
English gardeners
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
UK MPs 1852–1857
UK MPs 1857–1859
UK MPs 1859–1865
Knights Bachelor
Members of Parliament for Coventry
Architects from Bedfordshire

Joseph Paxton