A Renaissance or Medieval fair (faire, or festival) is an outdoor gathering that aims to recreate a historical setting—most often the English Renaissance—for the amusement of its guests. Renaissance fairs generally include costumed entertainers or fair-goers, musical and theatrical acts, art and handicrafts for sale, and festival food. These fairs are open to the public and typically commercial. Some are permanent theme parks, while others are short-term events in a fairground, winery, or other large public or private spaces. Some offer campgrounds for those who wish to stay more than one day.

Many Renaissance fairs are set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Some are set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, or in other countries, such as France. Others are set outside the era of the Renaissance; these may include earlier medieval periods (including Vikings), or later periods, such as the Golden Age of Piracy. Some engage in deliberate "time travel" by encouraging participants to wear costumes representing several eras in a broad time period. This is also done by having garments for rent to participants. Renaissance fairs encourage visitors to engage with costumes and audience participation. Many welcome fantasy elements such as wizards and elves.

Characteristics

Most Renaissance fairs are arranged to represent an imagined village in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, as this period has been generally considered to correspond to the English Renaissance.

Within a modern Renaissance festival, there are stages or performance areas set up for scheduled shows, such as plays in Shakespearean or commedia dell'arte tradition, as well as anachronistic audience participation in comedy routines. Other performances include dancers, magicians, musicians, jugglers, and singers. Between the stages, the streets ("lanes") are lined with stores ("shoppes") and stalls where independent vendors sell medieval and Renaissance-themed handcrafts, clothing, books, and artwork. Typically, there are food and beverage vendors as well as game and ride areas.

Renaissance fairs typically feature a wide variety of foods inspired by both Medieval cuisine and typical American fair foods like corn dogs. Some foods like turkey legs, steak on a stick, and bread bowls have become iconic of renaissance festivals. Beer, mead, and wine are also sometimes present.

Games include typical fair events, such as archery or axe-throwing, as well as dunk tanks. Rides are typically not machine-powered; various animal rides and human-powered swings are common. Live animal displays and falconry exhibitions are also common. Larger Renaissance fairs often include a joust as a main attraction. PETA and Born Free USA have protested the use of elephants and camels at the Maryland Renaissance Festival and Arizona Renaissance Festival.

In addition to staged performances, a major attraction of Renaissance fairs are professional and amateur crowds of actors who play historical figures and roam the fair, interacting with visitors. Visitors are encouraged to wear costumes, contributing to the illusion of an actual Renaissance environment. Some allow suitable weapons peace-bonded, while others only allow fair employees to wear them. Many fair vendors sell or rent costumes for all ages and types. The Renaissance fair subculture's word for these costumed guests is "playtrons," a portmanteau of the words player and patron. This adds enjoyment to guests' experience by "getting into the act" as Renaissance Lords and Ladies, peasants, pirates, belly dancers, or fantasy characters. However, many Renaissance fairs discourage interaction between the official cast and so-called "playtrons."

Most fairs have an end-of-the-day ritual, a parade, dance, or concert where all employees gather and bid farewell to the patrons.

Renaissance fairs are staged around the world at different times of the year. Fair vendors, participants, and crew often work by going from event to event as one fair ends and another begins.

History in the United States

In post-World War II America, there was a resurgence of interest in medieval and Renaissance culture. In the 1950s, there was a very strong early music revival, and out of this came folk musician and traditionalist John Langstaff. In 1957, Langstaff held "A Christmas Masque of Traditional Revels" in New York City, and the following year another in Washington, D.C. A televised version was broadcast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1966 which included Dustin Hoffman playing the part of the dragon slain by Saint George, and, in 1971, Langstaff established a permanent Christmas Revels in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1963, Los Angeles schoolteacher Phyllis Patterson held a small Renaissance fair as a class activity, in the backyard of her Laurel Canyon home in the Hollywood Hills. On May 11th and 12th the same year, Patterson and her husband, Ron Patterson, presented the first "Renaissance Pleasure Faire" as a one-weekend fundraiser for a radio station KPFK which drew some eight thousand people. The Living History Center designed the fair to resemble a Spring market fair of the period.

Many original booths were free-of-charge reenactments of historical activities, including printing presses and blacksmiths. The first commercial vendors were artisans and food merchants, and had to demonstrate historical accuracy or plausibility for their wares. Volunteers were organized into "guilds" to focus on specific reenactment roles (musicians, military, Celtic clans, peasants, etc.). Both actors and vendors were required to stay "in character" while working by speaking with period language, accents, and mannerisms.

The original Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California (RPFS) was held in the Spring of 1966 at the Paramount Ranch located in Agoura, California, focusing on the practices of old English springtime markets and "Maying" customs. In 1967, the Pattersons created a Fall Renaissance fair, with a harvest festival theme, first at what is now China Camp State Park in San Rafael, California and in 1971 at the Black Point Forest in Novato, California. Both fairs developed into local traditions and began a movement that spread across the country.

Although historical reenactments are not exclusive to the United States, Renaissance fairs are largely an American variation on the idea of reenactments. European historical fairs, such as those held at Kentwell Hall in Suffolk, England, operate more on the living history museum model, in which an actual historic site is staffed by reenactors who explain historical life to modern visitors, rather than acting in a role.  Similarly, the Earl of Eglinton in Scotland sponsored a large tournament in 1839.

In recent years, American-style Renaissance fairs have made inroads in other countries. Germany has seen a very similar phenomenon since the 1980s (see :de:Mittelaltermarkt) and beginning in the mid-1990s, Renaissance fairs have spread into Canada and Australia.

Spinoffs of Renaissance fairs also include fairs set in other time periods, such as Christmas fairs set in Charles Dickens' London.

Names
Renaissance fairs have several variant names, many of which use old-fashioned spellings such as faire or fayre. These spellings originate from the Middle English feire (variant spellings include feyre, faire, and fayre), which comes from the Anglo-French word feire. They can also be referred to as Elizabethan, Medieval, or Tudor fairs or festivals.

A German Mittelaltermarkt (literally "medieval market") resembles a Renaissance fair. Many Catalan towns hold Mercats Medievals (literally "medieval markets") as part of their annual festivities.

Internal debates
Within the Renaissance fair community, there is a difference of opinion as to how authentic a fair ought to be. Some believe fairs should be as authentic an experience as possible, supplemented with educational aspects, as in European living history museums. Others believe that entertainment is the primary goal. Richard Shapiro, who founded what later became the Bristol Renaissance Faire outside Chicago in 1972, favored entertainment, saying "we were so authentic back then it was almost painful."

Renaissance fairs may try to bridge the gap between authentic and entertaining. In 1968, Phyllis Patterson, founder of the California Renaissance Pleasure Faires, also created the Living History Centre, a California-based educational and cultural foundation. The foundation's motto "we trick into learning with a laugh" reflects the belief of merging history and entertainment.

See also
 List of Renaissance and Medieval fairs
 Medieval reenactment
 Renaissance Magazine
 Society for Creative Anachronism

Notes

External links

 List of upcoming Renaissance Fairs (US)

Festivals in the United States
Historical reenactment events
History festivals by period

Renaissance fair


The Happiness Patrol is the second serial of the 25th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in three weekly parts on BBC1 from 2 to 16 November 1988.

The serial is set on the Earth colony world Terra Alpha. In the serial, the alien time traveller the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) starts a rebellion against the planet's ruler, Helen A (Sheila Hancock), a woman who seeks to eliminate all unhappiness on the planet.

Plot
The Seventh Doctor and Ace visit a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha, to investigate its strangely joyful facade. There, they discover that a secret police force known as the Happiness Patrol are roaming the streets, hunting down and killing so-called 'Killjoys'. Their leader is Helen A, who governs the colony and is fanatically obsessed with eliminating unhappiness. Also in her employment is the Kandy Man, a grotesque, sweet-based robot created by Gilbert M, one of Helen A's senior advisers. After discovering the Patrol painting the TARDIS pink, much to Ace's disgust, she and the Doctor are arrested by Patrol member Daisy K. The Doctor is suspected of being a spy while Ace is taken to be recruited to join the Happiness Patrol.

While in the Waiting Zone, The Doctor and Ace meet an unhappy guard, Susan Q, and Earl Sigma, a wandering harmonica player. They become allies to the Doctor and Ace after they escape, along with the native inhabitants of Terra Alpha, the Pipe People. They work together to overthrow the tyranny of Helen A by supporting public protests of unhappiness, encouraging the people to revolt, and attempting to expose Helen A's population control programme to Trevor Sigma, an official galactic census taker.

The first to be disposed of is Helen A's pet Stigorax, Fifi, a rat-dog creature used to hunt down the Pipe People, as it is crushed in the pipes below the city when Earl causes an avalanche of crystallised sugar with his harmonica. Then they destroy the Kandyman in a flow of his own "fondant surprise" which had previously been used to execute the Killjoys. Realising that she cannot defeat the Doctor, Helen A attempts to escape the planet in a rocket, only to discover that the rocket has already been commandeered by Gilbert M and Joseph C, her husband. Angry at their betrayal, she tries to flee, but is stopped by the Doctor. He tries to teach her about the true nature of happiness, as he believes that it can only be understood if counterbalanced by sadness. Helen A, refusing to listen to the man who helped topple her regime, sneers at him and says she'll do it all over again. But when she discovers a dying Fifi emerging from the sewers, she rushes over to it and collapses into tears. Knowing that she has finally felt some sadness of her own, the Doctor tells Ace, "'Tis done," and they leave Helen A to mourn.

As the TARDIS is being repainted its natural blue color, the Doctor and Ace bid farewell to Susan Q and Earl, who plans to repair the damage caused by Helen A by singing the blues. The Patrol finishes painting just as they leave. Before leaving Terra Alpha and the colony behind them, the Doctor says to Ace, "Happiness will prevail," hoping that the people and Helen A will now understand what it's like to be truly happy.

Production

Working titles for this story included The Crooked Smile. The production team considered transmitting this story in black and white to fit with its intended film noir atmosphere. A fan myth holds that the third episode was supposed to be animated, but this was never the case. The entire serial was shot in studio in July and August 1988.

Helen A was intended to be a caricature of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Hancock stated that she "hate[d] Mrs Thatcher with a deep and venomous passion". In 2010, Sylvester McCoy told the Sunday Times: "Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered". The Doctor's calls on the drones to down their tools and revolt was intended as an allusion to the UK miners' strike (1984–1985). Most of this element was eventually toned down.

In the story, the Doctor sings "As Time Goes By", sung by Dooley Wilson in Casablanca. John Normington played Morgus in The Caves of Androzani, and later appeared in "Ghost Machine", an episode of Torchwood. Lesley Dunlop previously played Norna in 1984's Frontios and Harold Innocent would go on to appear in the 1993 radio serial The Paradise of Death.

Broadcast and reception

Bassett's complained over the similarity between the Kandy Man in this story and their trademark character. The BBC agreed not to use the Kandy Man again.

Radio Times reviewer Patrick Mulkern awarded The Happiness Patrol a full five stars and described it as a "clever and funny satire" and praised the acting and political commentary. DVD Talk's John Sinnott gave The Happiness Patrol five out of five stars, calling it a "minor masterpiece". He commended the irony, social commentary, and McCoy's acting. Authors Graeme Burk and Robert Smith included The Happiness Patrol in their 2013 book Who's 50: The 50 Doctor Who Stories to Watch Before You Die. For GamesRadar+ in 2015, Will Salmon included The Happiness Patrol among "The strangest Doctor Who stories", describing it as an "infamous Sylvester McCoy story" that "is actually rather good, but there's no denying its peculiarity [...] There's lots of interesting stuff going on beneath the surface of this story: anti-war speeches, Orwellian oppression and protests against Section 28. There's little doubt that, nearly 30 years later, it's still one of the most iconoclastic Doctor Who stories ever. And one of the oddest."

In his book Doctor Who: A British Alien?, which explores the series' use of science fiction allegory and metaphor, Danny Nicol questioned the serial's claimed anti-Thatcherism agenda, stating, "The part of Helen A was played by Sheila Hancock in a way which served to remind the viewer of Margaret Thatcher, leading to the serial being seen as a satire on the Thatcher governments. Yet Helen A's policies—death squads, executions and the extensive state establishment of sugar factories—bear no relation to Thatcher's, making claims of a Thatcher metaphor less convincing." In The Discontinuity Guide, Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping identify a gay subtext to the story: "there's entrapment over cottaging, the TARDIS is painted pink, and the victim of the fondant surprise is every inch the proud gay man, wearing, as he does, a pink triangle." The story ends with Helen A's husband abandoning her and leaving with another man.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to this story in his 2011 Easter sermon, on the subject of happiness and joy. Marc Sidwell has described it as an expression of national unease at rave culture.

Commercial releases

In print

A novelisation of this serial, written by scriptwriter Graeme Curry, was published by Target Books in February 1990. Adapting his scripts rather than the televised version, Curry's book includes scenes cut during editing and his original envisioning of the Kandy Man with a human appearance, albeit with powdery white skin and edible candy-cane glasses. An unabridged reading of the novelisation by Rula Lenska was released by BBC Audiobooks in July 2009.

Home media
The Happiness Patrol was released on VHS on 4 August 1997, by BBC Worldwide. It was then released on DVD on 7 May 2012 alongside Dragonfire as part of the "Ace Adventures" box set. This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files in Issue 119 on 24 July 2013.

References

External links

Script to Screen: The Happiness Patrol, by Jon Preddle (Time Space Visualiser issue 42, January 1995)

Target novelisation

Seventh Doctor serials
1988 British television episodes

The Happiness Patrol


The theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia claims that early Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight Australia between 1521 and 1524, well before the arrival of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 on board the  who is generally considered to be the first European discoverer. While lacking generally accepted evidence, this theory is based on the following:
 The Dieppe maps, a group of 16th-century French world maps, depict a large landmass between Indonesia and Antarctica. Labelled as Java la Grande, this landmass carries French, Portuguese, and Gallicized Portuguese placenames, and has been interpreted by some as corresponding to Australia's northwestern and eastern coasts.
 The proximity of Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia from , particularly Portuguese Timor which is approximately  from the Australian coast.
 Various antiquities found on Australian coastlines, claimed by some to be relics of early Portuguese voyages to Australia but which are generally regarded as evidence of Makassan visit to Northern Australia.
Precedence for earliest non-Aboriginal visits to Australia has also been claimed for China (Admiral Zheng), France, Spain, and even Phoenicia, also all without generally accepted evidence.

Historiography

Development of the theory in the 19th century
Although Scotsman Alexander Dalrymple wrote on this topic in 1786, it was Richard Henry Major, Keeper of Maps at the British Museum, who in 1859 first made significant efforts to prove the Portuguese visited Australia before the Dutch. A group of mid-16th-century French maps, the Dieppe maps, formed his main evidence. However, there is widespread agreement today that his approach to historical research was flawed and his claims often exaggerated. Writing in an academic journal in 1861, Major announced the discovery of a map by Manuel Godinho de Eredia, claiming it proved a Portuguese visit to North Western Australia, possibly dated to 1601. In fact, this map's origins are from 1630. On finally locating and examining Erédia's writings, Major realised the planned voyage to lands south of Sumba in Indonesia had never taken place. Major published a retraction in 1873, but his reputation was destroyed. Major's interpretation was examined critically by the Portuguese historian Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, who concluded that neither the patalie regiã on the 1521 world map of Antoine de La Sale nor the Jave la Grande on the Dieppe Maps was evidence of Australia having been visited by Portuguese visitors in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but that this feature had found its way on to the maps from descriptions of islands of the Sunda archipelago beyond Java collected from native informants by the Portuguese.

In 1895, George Collingridge produced his The Discovery of Australia, an attempt to trace all European efforts to find the Great Southern Land to the time of Cook, and also introducing his interpretation of the theory of Portuguese visitation of Australia, using the Dieppe maps. Fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, Collingridge was inspired by the publicity surrounding the arrival in Australia of copies of several Dieppe maps, which had been purchased by libraries in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. Despite a number of errors regarding place names, and "untenable" theories to explain misplacement on the Dieppe maps, his book was a remarkable effort considering it was written at a time when many maps and documents were inaccessible and document photography was still in its infancy. Collingridge's theory did not find public approval, however, and Professors G. Arnold Wood and Ernest Scott publicly criticised much of what he had written. Collingridge produced a shorter version of this book for use in New South Wales schools; The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea. It was not used.

Professor Edward Heawood also provided early criticism of the theory. In 1899 he noted that the argument for the coasts of Australia having been reached early in the 16th century rested almost entirely on the supposition that at that time, "a certain unknown map-maker drew a large land, with indications of definite knowledge of its coasts, in the quarter of the globe in which Australia is placed". He pointed out that "a difficulty arises from the necessity of supposing at least two separate voyages of discovery, one on each coast, though absolutely no record of any such exists". He added: "The difficulty, of course, has been to account for this map in any other way". The delineation of Japan in the Dieppe maps, the insertion in them of an Isle des Géants in the southern Indian Ocean, and of Catigara on the west coast of South America, and in their later versions the depiction of a fictitious coastline of a southern continent with numerous bays and rivers, showed the slight reliance to be placed on them with respect to outlying parts of the world and the influence still exercised on their makers by the old writers". He concluded: "This should surely make us hesitate to base so important assumption as that of a discovery of Australia in the sixteenth century on their unsupported testimony".

Kenneth McIntyre and development of the theory in the 20th century

The development of the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia owes much to Melbourne lawyer Kenneth McIntyre's 1977 book, The Secret Discovery of Australia; Portuguese ventures 200 years before Cook. McIntyre's book was reprinted in an abridged paperback edition in 1982 and again in 1987 and it was found on school history reading lists by the mid-1980s. According to Dr. Tony Disney, McIntyre's theory influenced a generation of history teachers in Australian schools. A TV documentary was made of the book in the 1980s by Michael Thornhill and McIntyre and the theory featured in many positive newspaper reviews and articles over the next twenty years. Australian history school textbooks also reflect the evolution of acceptance of his theories. The support of Dr. Helen Wallis, Curator of Maps at the British Library during her visits to Australia in the 1980s seemed to add academic weight to McIntyre's theory. In 1987, the Australian Minister for Science, Barry Jones, launching the Second Mahogany Ship Symposium in Warrnambool, said "I read Kenneth McIntyre's important book... as soon as it appeared in 1977. I found its central argument... persuasive, if not conclusive." The appearance of variant but essentially supporting theories in the late 1970s and early 1980s by other writers, including Ian McKiggan and Lawrence Fitzgerald also added credence to the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia. In 1994, McIntyre expressed pleasure that his theory was gaining acceptance in Australia: "It is gradually seeping through. The important thing is that... it has been on the school syllabus, and therefore students have... read about it. They in due course become teachers and... they will then tell their students and so on".

Purported evidence and arguments

Interpretation of the Dieppe Maps

The central plank of the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia suggests the continent called Jave la Grande, which uniquely appears on a series of 16th-century French world maps, the Dieppe school of maps, represents Australia. Speaking in 1982, Kenneth McIntyre described the Dieppe maps as "the only evidence of Portuguese discovery of Eastern Australia". He stressed this to point out "that the Mahogany Ship, and the Geelong Keys, and other things of that sort, are not part of the proof that the Portuguese discovered Australia. It is the other way around. The Dieppe maps prove (sic) that the Portuguese discovered Australia, and this throws a fierce bright light on our mysteries such as the Mahogany Ship". Later writers on the same topic take the same approach of concentrating primarily on "Jave la Grande" as it appears in the Dieppe maps, including Fitzgerald, McKiggan and most recently, Peter Trickett.
Critics of the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia, including A. Ariel, M. Pearson, W. A. R. Richardson, Gayle K. Brunelle and Robert J. King also concentrate on the "Jave la Grande" landmass of the Dieppe maps (see below).

W. A. R. Richardson argues that Jave la Grande as it appears on the Dieppe world maps is at least partly based on Portuguese sources that no longer exist. McIntyre attributed discrepancies between the Jave la Grande coastline and Australia's to the difficulties of accurately recording positions without a reliable method of determining longitude, and the techniques used to convert maps to different projections.

In the late 1970s, mathematician Ian McKiggan developed his theory of exponential longitude error theory to explain discrepancies, although he modified this position after a public exchange of opinion with W. A. R. Richardson. McIntyre's own theory about distortion of the maps and the calculations used to correct the maps has also been challenged. Both Lawrence Fitzgerald and Peter Trickett argue Jave la Grande is based on Portuguese sea charts, now lost, which the mapmakers of Dieppe misaligned. Both these writers try to compare the coastal features of Jave la Grande with modern Australia's, by realigning them.

In 1994, McIntyre suggested that the writings of Pedro Nunes supported his interpretation of the distortion that occurred on the Dieppe Maps.

Helen Wallis, Keeper of Maps at the British Museum, referred in 1988 to the interpretation "explosion" on the subject of the Dieppe maps. She herself argued the case for discovery of Australia by "a local Portuguese voyage otherwise unknown" seventy years before the Dutch, a chart of which was "presumably" brought back to Dieppe by the survivors of a French voyage to Sumatra led by Jean Parmentier in 1529–30.

Cristóvão de Mendonça's role

Cristóvão de Mendonça is known from a small number of Portuguese sources, notably the famous Portuguese historian João de Barros in Décadas da Ásia (Decades of Asia), a history of the growth of the Portuguese Empire in India and Asia, published between 1552–1615. Mendonça appears in Barros' account with instructions to search for the legendary Isles of Gold. However, Mendonça and other Portuguese sailors are then described as assisting with the construction of a fort at Pedir (Sumatra) and Barros does not mention the expedition again.

McIntyre nominated Cristóvão de Mendonça as the commander of a voyage to Australia c. 1521–1524, one he argued had to be kept secret because of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the undiscovered world into two-halves for Portugal and Spain. Barros and other Portuguese sources do not mention a discovery of land that could be Australia, but McIntyre conjectured this was because original documents were lost in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, or the official policy of silence.

Most proponents of the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia have supported McIntyre's hypothesis that it was Mendonça who sailed down the eastern Australian coast and provided charts which found their way onto the Dieppe maps, to be included as "Jave la Grande" in the 1540, 1550s and 1560s. McIntyre claimed the maps indicated Mendonça went as far south as Port Fairy, Victoria; Fitzgerald claims they show he went as far as Tasmania; Trickett states as far as Spencer Gulf in South Australia, and New Zealand's North Island.

Claims of Portuguese words in Aboriginal Australian languages
In the 1970s and 1980s, linguist Carl Georg von Brandenstein, approaching the theory from another perspective, claimed that 60 words used by Aboriginal people of the Australian north-west had Portuguese origins. According to Peter Mühlhäusler of the University of Adelaide:

Von Brandenstein also claimed the Portuguese had established a "secret colony... and cut a road as far as the present day town of Broome" and that "stone housing in the east Kimberley could not have been made without outside influence". However, according to Nicholas Thieberger, modern linguistic and archaeological research has not corroborated his arguments. Mühlhäusler agrees, stating that "von Brandenstein's evidence is quite unconvincing: his historical data is speculative – the colonisation being clandestine, there are no written records of it and his claims are not supported by the linguistic evidence he cites."

Other purported textual and cartographic evidence

In contemporary Australia, reports of textual and cartographic evidence, of varying significance, and occasionally artifacts are sometimes cited as likely to "rewrite" Australian History because they suggest a foreign presence in Australia. In January 2014, a New York Gallery listed a sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscript for sale, one page of which contained marginalia of an unidentified animal that the Gallery suggested might be a kangaroo. Dr. Martin Woods of the National Library of Australia commented: "The likeness of the animal to a kangaroo or wallaby is clear enough, but then it could be another animal in south-east Asia, like any number of deer species....  For now, unfortunately the appearance of a long-eared big-footed animal in a manuscript doesn't really add much." Dr. Peter Pridmore of La Trobe University has suggested the marginalia depicts an aardvark.

Speculum Orbis Terrae

Other texts originating from the same era represent a land to the south of New Guinea, with a variety of flora and fauna. Part of a map in Cornelis de Jode's 1593 atlas Speculum Orbis Terrae depicts New Guinea and a hypothetical land to the south inhabited by dragons. Kenneth McIntyre suggested that although Cornelis de Jode was Dutch, the title page of Speculum Orbis Terrae may provide evidence of early Portuguese knowledge of Australia. The page depicts four animals: a horse, representing Europe, a camel, to represent Asia, a lion, for Africa, and another animal that resembles a kangaroo, to represent a fourth continent. The latter creature features a marsupial pouch containing two offspring, and the characteristically bent hind legs of a kangaroo or another member of the macropod family. However, as macropods (including the dusky pademelon, agile wallaby, and black dorcopsis) are found in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, this may have no relevance to a possible Portuguese discovery of Australia. Another explanation is that the animal is based on a North American opossum.

James Cook and Cooktown harbour
On 11 June 1770, James Cook's Endeavour struck a coral reef (now known as Endeavour Reef) off the coast of what is now Queensland. It was a potentially catastrophic event and the ship immediately began to take water. However, over the next four days the ship managed to limp along, searching for safety. In 1976, McIntyre suggested that Cook had been able to find a large harbour (Cooktown harbour) because he had access to a copy of one of the Dieppe maps. McIntyre felt Cook's comment in his Journal, which at the 1982 Mahogany ship Symposium he cited as "this harbour will do excellently for our purposes, although it's not as large as I had been told", indicated he carried a copy of or had seen a copy of the Dauphin Map, and by implication was using it to chart his way along the eastern Australian coast. McIntyre acknowledged in his book that Cook may have been told this by the lookout or boat crew, but added it was a "peculiar remark to make." Reference to this remained in subsequent editions of The Secret Discovery of Australia.

In 1997, Ray Parkin edited a definitive account of Cook's voyage of 1768–1771, transcribing the Endeavour's original log, Cook's Journal and accounts by other members of the crew. Parkin transcribed the relevant Journal entry as "...anchored in 4 fathom about a mile from the shore and then made a signal for the boats to come onboard, after which I went myself and buoy'd the channel which I found very narrow and the harbour much smaller than I had been told but very convenient for our purpose." The log for 14 June also mentions the ship's boats sounding the way for the crippled Endeavour. Nevertheless, the influence of McIntyre's interpretation can still be seen in contemporary Australian school curriculum materials.

Purported evidence from relics

Mahogany Ship

According to McIntyre, the remains of one of Cristóvão de Mendonça's caravels was discovered in 1836 by a group of shipwrecked whalers while they were walking along the sand dunes to the nearest settlement, Port Fairy. The men came across the wreck of a ship made of wood that appeared to be mahogany. Between 1836 and 1880, 40 people recorded that they had seen an "ancient" or "Spanish" wreck. Whatever it was, the wreck has not been seen since 1880, despite extensive searches in recent times. McIntyre's accuracy in transcribing original documents to support his argument has been criticized by some recent writers. Dr. Murray Johns' 2005 survey of 19th-century accounts of the Mahogany Ship suggests that the eyewitness accounts actually relate to more than one shipwreck in the area. Johns concludes these wrecks were of early 19th-century Australian construction and are unrelated to Portuguese maritime activity.

The Geelong Keys

In 1847, at Limeburners Point, near Geelong, Victoria, Charles La Trobe, a keen amateur geologist, was examining shells and other marine deposits revealed by excavations associated with lime production in the area. A worker showed him a set of five keys he claimed to have found the day before. La Trobe concluded that the keys had been dropped onto what had been the beach around 100–150 years before. Kenneth McIntyre hypothesised they were dropped in 1522 by Mendonça or one of his sailors. Since the keys have been lost, however, their origin cannot be verified.

A more likely explanation is that the "much decayed" keys were dropped by one of the limeburners shortly before being found, as the layer of dirt and shells they were found below was dated as around 2300–2800 years old, making La Trobe's dating implausible. According to geologist Edmund Gill, and engineer and historian Peter Alsop, the error by La Trobe is quite understandable, given that in 1847 most Europeans thought the world was only 6000 years old.

Cannon

In 1916, two bronze cannon were found on a small island in Napier Broome Bay, on the Kimberly coast of Western Australia. Since the guns were erroneously thought to be carronades, the small island was named Carronade Island.

Kenneth McIntyre believed the cannons gave weight to the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia. However, scientists at the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle made a detailed analysis of the weapons, and determined that they are swivel guns, and almost certainly of late 18th-century Makassan, rather than European, origin. The claim that one of the guns displays a Portuguese "coat of arms" is incorrect.

In January 2012, a swivel gun found two years before at Dundee Beach near Darwin was widely reported by web news sources and the Australian press to be of Portuguese origin. However, later analysis by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory indicated it was also of Southeast Asian origin. Further analysis suggests that the lead in the gun most closely resembles that from Andalusia in Spain, although it may have been recycled in Indonesia. The museum holds seven guns of Southeast Asian manufacture in its collection. Another swivel gun of Southeast Asian manufacture, found in Darwin in 1908, is held by the Museum of South Australia. In 2014, it was revealed that sand inside the Dundee beach gun was dated to 1750.

Bittangabee Bay

Kenneth McIntyre first suggested in 1977 that the stone ruins at Bittangabee Bay, in Beowa National Park near Eden on the south coast of New South Wales, were of Portuguese origin.

The ruins are the foundations of a building, surrounded by stone rubble that McIntyre argued may have once formed a defensive wall. McIntyre also identified the date 15?4 carved into a stone. McIntyre hypothesized the crew of a Portuguese caravel may have built a stone blockhouse and defensive wall while wintering on a voyage of discovery down Australia's east coast.

Since McIntyre advanced his theory in 1977, significant research on the site has been conducted by Michael Pearson, former Historian for the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service. Pearson identified the Bittangabee Bay ruins as having been built as a store house by the Imlay brothers, early European inhabitants, who had whaling and pastoral interests in the Eden area. The local Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, wrote about the commencement of the building in July 1844. The building was left unfinished at the time of the death of two of the three brothers in 1846 and 1847.

Other visitors and writers, including Lawrence Fitzgerald, have been unable to find the 15?4 date. Writing in Beyond Capricorn in 2007, Peter Trickett suggests the date McIntyre saw may be random pick marks in the stonework.

Trickett accepts Pearson's work, but hypothesizes that the Imlays may have started their building on top of a ruined Portuguese structure, thus explaining the surrounding rocks and partly dressed stones. Trickett also suggests the Indigenous Australian name for the area may have Portuguese origins.

Kilwa Sultanate coins
In 1944, nine coins were found on Marchinbar Island by RAAF radar operator Maurie Isenberg. Four coins were identified as Dutch duits dating from 1690 to the 1780s, while five with Arabic inscriptions were identified as being from the Kilwa Sultanate of east Africa. The coins are now held by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. In 2018 another coin, also thought to be from Kilwa, was found on a beach on Elcho Island, another of the Wessel Islands, by archaeologist and member of the Past Masters group, Mike Hermes. Hermes speculated that this may indicate trade between indigenous Australians and Kilwa, or that they coins had arrived as a result of Makassan contact with Australia. Ian S McIntosh's view is also that the coins were "probably introduced by sailors from Makassar... in the first wave of trepanging and exploration in the 1780s."

Criticisms and alternative views of the Dieppe Maps
Possibly because of the degree of conjecture involved in the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia, there have been a number of critics. Matthew Flinders cast a sceptical eye over the "Great Java" of the Dieppe maps in A Voyage to Terra Australis, published in 1814, and concluded: "it should appear to have been partly formed from vague information, collected, probably, by the early Portuguese navigators, from the eastern nations; and that conjecture has done the rest. It may, at the same time, be admitted, that a part of the west and north-west coasts, where the coincidence of form is most striking, might have been seen by the Portuguese themselves, before the year 1540, in their voyages to, and from, India".

In the last chapter of The Secret Discovery of Australia, Kenneth McIntyre threw down a challenge, stating: "Every critic who seeks to deny the Portuguese discovery of Australia is faced with the problem of providing an alternative theory to explain away the existence of the Dieppe maps. If the Dauphin is not the record of real exploration, then what is it?"

By far the most prolific writer on this theory, and also its most consistent critic, has been Flinders University Associate Professor W.A.R. (Bill) Richardson, who has written 20 articles relating to the topic since 1983. Richardson, an academic fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, first approached the Dieppe maps in an effort to prove they did relate to Portuguese discovery of Australia. His criticisms are therefore all the more interesting. He suggests that he quickly realised that there was no connection between the Dieppe maps and modern Australia's coastline:
The case for an early Portuguese discovery of Australia rests entirely on imagined resemblances between the "continent" of Jave La Grande on the Dieppe maps and Australia. There are no surviving Portuguese 16th-century charts showing any trace of land in that area, and there are no records whatsoever of any voyage along any part of the Australian coastline before 1606. Advocates of the Portuguese discovery theory endeavour to explain away this embarrassing lack of direct supporting evidence as being due to two factors: the Portuguese official secrets policy, which must have been applied with a degree of efficiency that is hard to credit, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake which, they claim, must have destroyed all the relevant archival material.
He dismisses the claim that Cristóvão de Mendonça sailed down the east coast of Australia as sheer speculation, based on voyages about which no details have survived. In the same way, the re-assembling of sections of the "Jave La Grande" coastline so that it fits the straitjacket of the real outline of Australia relies upon a second set of assumptions. He argues taking that approach, "Jave La Grande" could be re-assembled to look like anything.

Another dimension of the argument Richardson advances against the theory relates to methodology. Richardson argues that McIntyre's practice of re-drawing sections of maps in his book was misleading because, in an effort to clarify, he actually omitted crucial features and names that did not support the Portuguese discovery theory.

Richardson's own view is that a study of placenames on "Jave La Grande" identifies it as unmistakably connected to the coasts of southern Java and Indochina. Emeritus Professor Victor Prescott has claimed Richardson "brilliantly demolished the argument that Java la Grande show(s) the east coast of Australia." However, Australian historian Alan Frost has recently written that Richardson's argument that the east coast of Java la Grande was in fact the coast of Vietnam is "so speculative and convoluted as not to be credible".

In 1984, criticism of The Secret Discovery of Australia also came from master mariner Captain A. Ariel, who argued McIntyre had made serious errors in his explanation and measurement of "erration" in longitude. Ariel concluded that McIntyre erred on "all navigational ... counts" and that The Secret Discovery of Australia was a "monumental piece of misinterpretation."

French cartographic historian Sarah Toulouse concluded, in 1998, that it seemed most reasonable to see in la Grande Jave, in the present state of the available sources, the pure product of imagination of a Norman cartographer who formed a school with his compatriots.

In 2005, historian Michael Pearson made the following comment on the Dieppe maps as evidence of a Portuguese discovery of Australia:
If the Portuguese did in fact map the northern, western and eastern coasts, this information was hidden from general knowledge ... The Dieppe maps had no claimed sources, no "discoverer" of the land shown ... and the iconography on the various maps is based on Sumatran animals and ethnography, not the reality of Australia. In this sense the maps did not really expand European knowledge of Australia, the portrayal of "Jave La Grande" having no greater status that any other conjectural portrayal of Terra Australis.

In a recent interpretation of the Dieppe maps, Professor Gayle K. Brunelle of California State University, Fullerton argued that the Dieppe school of cartographers should be seen as acting as propagandists for French geographic knowledge and territorial claims. The decades from about 1535 to 1562 (when the Dieppe school of cartographers flourished) were also the period in which French trade with the New World was at its 16th-century height, in terms of the North Atlantic fish trade, the fur trade, and, most important for the cartographers, the rivalry with the Portuguese for control of the coasts of Brazil and the supplies of lucrative brazilwood. The bright red dye produced from brazilwood replaced woad as the primary dyestuff in the cloth industry in France and the Low Countries. The Dieppe cartographers used the skills and geographic knowledge of Portuguese mariners, pilots and geographers working in France to produce maps meant to emphasize French interests in and dominion over territory in the New World that the Portuguese also claimed, both in Newfoundland and in Brazil. Brunelle noted that, in design and decorative style the Dieppe maps represented a blending of the latest knowledge circulating in Europe with older visions of world geography deriving from Ptolemy and mediaeval cartographers and explorers such as Marco Polo. Renaissance mapmakers such as those based in Dieppe relied heavily on each other's work, as well as on maps from previous generations, and thus their maps represented a mixture of old and new information often coexisting uneasily in the same map.

Academic debate about the Dieppe maps continues into the twenty-first century. In 2019, Professor Brian Lees and Associate Professor Shawn Laffan presented a paper arguing the Jean Rotz 1542 world map is a good "first approximation" of the Australian continent.

Cartographic historian Robert J. King has also written extensively on the subject, arguing that Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps reflects 16th-century cosmography. In 2010, King received the Australasian Hydrographic Society's Literary Achievement Award for 2010 in recognition of his work on the origins of the Dieppe Maps. In an article published in 2022, based on a presentation made to an international workshop at the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, King said that there was no evidence in Portuguese records and charts of the early 16th century that their navigators discovered Australia. He said that the large southern land, called Jave la Grande, or Terre de Lucac , on the world maps of the Dieppe school of marine cartography, which proponents of an early Portuguese discovery adduced in support, could be explained by setting those maps in the context of the development of cosmographic theory and its cartographic expression from Henricus Martellus to Gerard Mercator, 1491-1569. The southern continent of the Dieppe cartographers, like Mercator's southern continent with its promontory of Beach (Locach), were the product not of actual discovery by French or Portuguese navigators but of imaginative extrapolation from a few mis-identified or misplaced coasts in the southern hemisphere. Following Magellan's expedition of 1519-1522, mis-identification of Marco Polo's Java Minor (Sumatra) with the island of Madura allowed the southern coast of Java Major (Java) to remain undefined, despite the survivors of Magellan's expedition having made their return voyage to Spain by the south of Java (Java Major) rather than through the strait between Madura and Java as was understood from Antonio Pigafetta's account of the voyage. This permitted cartographers to identify Java Major as a promontory of Terra Australis and with Marco Polo's Locach. An adaptation of Oronce Fine's map of 1531 formed the basis of the world maps of Gerardus Mercator and the Dieppe cartographers. With them, the Regio Patalis, shown as a promontory of the Terra Australis on Fine's map, was identified with Marco Polo's Java Major, or Locach (also known as Beach). The ysles de magna and ye. de saill, shown off the east coast of Jave la Grande on the Harleian map, which appear as I. de Mague and I. de Sally on André Thevet's Quarte Partie du Monde, represent the two islands discovered by Magellan during his voyage across the Pacific in 1522, which he called the Desventuradas, or Islas Infortunatos (Unfortunate Isles). The Jave la Grande and Terre de Lucac of the Dieppe maps represented Marco Polo's Java Major and Locach, displaced by the map-makers who misconstrued the information on Southeast Asia and America brought back by Portuguese and Spanish navigators. In a subsequent article, he argues that the Dieppe mapmakers identified Java Major (Jave la Grande) or, in the case of Guillaume Brouscon Locach (Terre de lucac), with Oronce Fine's Regio Patalis.

See also

History of Australia
Timeline of Australian history
Marchinbar Island, location of an early deposit of coins in Australia
Makassan contact with Australia
Baijini, a legendary people interpreted by some researchers as pre-Macassan visitors to Arnhem Land

Notes

References

External links

Academic and library links

Desceliers map (1550) at the British Library
Flinders University Portal – Links to published and online works by Professor W.A.R. Richardson
Government of Goa Archives.(The Archive includes Portuguese documents dating to 1498)
Images of the Vallard atlas (1547) at the Huntington Library
Pearson, M. Great Southern Land; The Maritime Exploration of Terra Australis Australian Government Department of Environment and Heritage, 2005.  at
Desliens map (1566) reproduction at the National Library of Australia
Asia in the Eyes of Europe, by Donald F.Lach. University of Chicago Library, 1991
The National Library of Australia's Gateway site on exploration of Australia
 King, «JAVE LA GRANDE, A PART OF TERRA AUSTRALIS?», presented at Mapping Our World: Discovery Day, National Library of Australia, 10 November 2013.]

Newspapers and Journals

Other web sources

16th century in Australia
European exploration of Australia
Portuguese discovery of Australia
Portuguese exploration in the Age of Discovery
Pre-1606 contact with Australia
Maritime history of Portugal

he:היסטוריה של אוסטרליה#תאוריית גילוי אוסטרליה בידי הפורטוגזים

Theory of the Portuguese discovery of Australia


Slowdown is an entertainment venue located in the NoDo neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska. A combination of a live music venue, shops, restaurants, and apartments, the venue was developed by Saddle Creek Records as a direct competitor to the Sokol Auditorium in Little Bohemia. Slowdown is said to be "unlike anything in Omaha - or the Midwest" because of its comprehensive, mixed-use design. The venue is named after the influential 1990s-era group Slowdown Virginia, who had a strong influence on the "Omaha Sound". Slowdown has shows three to four nights each week, as well as a weekly pub quiz. The venue is open one hour before each event and stays open until around 2am, often offering a post-show Happy Hour. Slowdown's shows are usually all ages unless otherwise specified, but on nights with no event, the venue functions as a bar. Slowdown bills itself as a place for "[r]ock shows, socializing, dancing, going to the bathroom, sitting, standing, walking, pool, video games, board games, some light reading, etc."

History
Slowdown began in 2000 as an idea to start a rock club. Jason Kulbel and Robb Nansel started with the idea to renovate a space somewhere in the downtown area and give Omaha the permanent music venue they felt it was lacking. As it became apparent that the perfect space for renovation was just not out there, Robb and Jason spent most of their time working on the expansion of Saddle Creek Records. In 2004, they decided that the renovation of an old space was never going to be ideal and started looking around for some land to buy. The intention now was to build a permanent home for both Slowdown and Saddle Creek.

Fortuitously, the "perfect" spot was found on Saddle Creek Road in midtown Omaha.  However, there was strong opposition to the development from local residents, and those plans were scrapped. Jason and Robb were approached by the City of Omaha to find the right place to build Slowdown. A few different options were considered, and the one that seemed to make the most sense was on a plot of land the city offered just south of Omaha's Near North Side and a few blocks west of the Qwest Center. Slowdown is surrounded by a Zipline Brewing Co., Saddle Creek Records, Film Streams, Rally Coffee Co., and apartments along with some other local businesses.

The city proposed kick-starting the rebuilding of the north downtown area, and with the help of J Development and Alley Poyner Machietto Architecture, the Saddle Creek/Slowdown building quickly became a part of a "development".

References

External links
Slowdown official website.
Saddle Creek records official website.
Crawdaddy! article on Slowdown (venue) "Saddle Creek Slowdown"

Music venues in Omaha, Nebraska

Slowdown (venue)


Marshall Colt (born October 26, 1948) is an American management consultant and combat-decorated, former captain in the United States Navy in San Diego, who was an actor in film and television from 1976 to 1995.

He co-starred in the films North Dallas Forty (1979) and Jagged Edge (1985) as well as in the 1981–82 James Arness NBC police procedural McClain's Law.

Acting career
A native of New Orleans, Colt graduated from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics. In 1976, he made his acting debut as Nick in the Berkeley Repertory Theatre production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and as Inspector William Holmer in the episode "Castle of Fear" of ABC's police drama The Streets of San Francisco.

In 1978, Colt appeared as Sam Pray in "Great Expectations," the fourth episode of the short-lived CBS legal drama The Paper Chase, starring John Houseman. In 1979, he appeared on the ABC drama Family and in two episodes of Buddy Ebsen's CBS crime drama Barnaby Jones. He also played the role of Art Hartman in the Nick Nolte film North Dallas Forty.

Colt received second billing in the two-hour made-for-TV film McClain's Law, broadcast in November 1981 as a pilot for the same-named police series in which Colt played young detective Harry Gates of the San Pedro, California, Police Department, whose use of modern criminology methods placed him in contrast to his older partner, Jim McClain, played by James Arness, who employed the more traditional approach. McClain's Law premiered some six years after the ending of Arness's former Gunsmoke western series. Colt's other regular series role was in the 1983–84 ABC drama Lottery in which he co-starred as IRS agent Eric Rush, alongside lottery winnings distributor Patrick Sean Flaherty, played by Ben Murphy.

In 1988, Colt was cast as Jack Wheeler, the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, in the television film To Heal a Nation, based on the establishment of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Other roles in television films were as Steven Beck in Beverly Hills Madam, Charles McLean in Maggie, Kelly Hancock in Mercy or Murder?, Andrew Winkler in Guilty of Innocence: The Lenell Geter Story, and Douglas Erickson in Deceptions.

Colt was cast as Bobby Slade in Jagged Edge (1985), as Christopher Dollanganger in Flowers in the Attic (1987), and as Donald Cleary in Illegally Yours (1988).

His last roles in series television were in 1991 as Ross Corman in the episode "Tainted Lady" of Angela Lansbury's CBS drama, Murder, She Wrote and in 1995 in Chuck Norris's Walker, Texas Ranger, in the role of Lieutenant Lee Corbin in the episode "Whitewater, Part I."

Psychology career
Colt obtained his Master of Science in clinical psychology, with an emphasis in marriage and family therapy, from Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He also holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with a concentration in health psychology, accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA) from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. After an APA-accredited, adult neuropsychology internship at the VA Hospital, Denver, he served a six-month post-doctoral residency in pediatric neuropsychology in Salt Lake City. Colt has been in private practice since 1994.

Colt was formerly based in Denver, where he frequently appeared on radio and television as an expert on psychological topics, including PTSD. He also wrote the syndicated "Ethics" column for the Denver Business Journal. He subsequently relocated to San Diego, and then Orange County, California, where he operates Corporate Psychological Management, a consultancy he founded in 1996.

References

External links

Marshall Colt at the TCM Movie Database

Living people
American male film actors
American male television actors
21st-century American psychologists
Male actors from New Orleans
Male actors from Greater Los Angeles
Male actors from Denver
Male actors from San Diego
Tulane University alumni
Pepperdine University alumni
United States Navy officers
Fielding Graduate University alumni
1948 births
20th-century American psychologists

Marshall Colt


Mind the Gap is a 2004 American multi-story comedy-drama film, written and directed by Eric Schaeffer. The film moves back and forth between five separate stories that interconnect with each other by the end of the film. The film stars Elizabeth Reaser, Eric Schaeffer, Jill Sobule, Charles Parnell, John Heard, Vera Farmiga, and Alan King in his last film role.

Plot
Five New Yorkers come to terms with the bitter-sweet reality of life in this collection of intertwined stories. Single dad Sam (Eric Schaeffer) struggles to raise his son; elderly Herb (Alan King) honors a deceased friend with a perilous act; musician Jody (Jill Sobule) worries what heartache will do to her pacemaker; free-spirited Malissa (Elizabeth Reaser) cares for her sick mother; and John (Charles Parnell) reels from his failed marriage.

Cast
 Alan King as Herb Schweitzer
 Elizabeth Reaser as Malissa Zubach
 Charles Parnell as John McCabe
 Eric Schaeffer as Sam Blue
 Jill Sobule as Jody Buller
 John Heard as Henry Richards
 Todd Weeks as Dr. John Albertson
 Kim Raver as Vicki Walters
 Vera Farmiga as Allison Lee
 Deirdre Kingsbury as Mother Zubach
 Christopher Kovaleski as Rocky Blue
 Stan Berger as Morris
 Yolonda Ross as Deniese
 Malcolm-Ali Davis as William
 Mina Badie as Dana
 Noel Ashman as white man
 Wilhelm Lewis as Black Man

Production
The film was written and directed by Eric Schaeffer, who also stars in the film. It was produced by Terence Michael, Chip Hourihan, Bob Kravitz and Noel Ashman. The film was distributed by Sky Island Films, Showtime Networks and 111 Pictures, and was premiered at South by Southwest on March 13, 2004. It was later released in New York on September 24, 2004. Most of the film was shot in Vermont, including the North Carolina scenes and most of the interiors. Exterior shots were also filmed in New York City and Tucson, Arizona.

Reception

Box office
The film made $5,503 in its opening weekend, after being released to one theater screen in New York City. Mind the Gap went on to gross a total of $10,637 domestically, from the limited release in the United States.

Critical response
The film received generally mixed reviews from film critics. Mind the Gap holds a 59% approval rating on aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 17 critical reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. On Metacritic the film scored a 46 out of 100 rating, based on 10 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Joe Leydon of Variety wrote: "Warm-hearted but clear-eyed indie effort richly repays audience patience during deliberately paced and provocatively allusive early scenes with a cumulative emotional impact that is immensely satisfying."

Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "An overly ambitious, overly complex and overly long opus that bites off more than it can chew." Ella Taylor of LA Weekly gave a positive review, writing: "You can see what's coming five minutes into the movie, but capable acting lends it a certain superficial charm." Anita Gates of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Schaeffer takes his time cryptically setting up his characters' situations in the film. When they finally start moving toward one another and revealing their secrets, the revelations flow like diet soda. The improbable ending is oddly satisfying. But don't ask moviegoers to believe that Sam and Malissa would both find parking spaces right in front of Lenox Hill Hospital."

References

External links

2004 films
2004 comedy-drama films
American comedy-drama films
Films directed by Eric Schaeffer
Films set in New York City
Films shot in New York City
Films shot in Tucson, Arizona
Films shot in Vermont
2004 comedy films
2004 drama films
2000s English-language films
2000s American films
English-language comedy-drama films

Mind the Gap (2004 film)


Vancouver Public Library (VPL) is the public library system for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2013, VPL had more than 6.9 million visits with patrons borrowing nearly 9.5 million items including: books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs, video games, newspapers and magazines. Across 22 locations and online, VPL serves nearly 428,000 active members and is the third-largest public library system in Canada.

Services
The Vancouver Public Library includes a large collection of books and digital content. The library provides community information, programs for children, youth, and adults, and delivery to homebound individuals. In addition, the library also provides access to information and reference services, text databases, interlibrary loan services.

One Book, One Vancouver
One Book, One Vancouver was a citywide book club sponsored by the Vancouver Public Library. Titles were selected by the library staff, who voted on one of four titles presented by the One Book, One Vancouver Organizing Committee. It was discontinued after 2010.
2002: The Jade Peony  – Wayson Choy
2003: Stanley Park – Timothy Taylor
2004: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power – Joel Bakan
2005: Obasan – Joy Kogawa
2006: There is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden – Patrick Lane
2007: My Year of Meats – Ruth Ozeki
2008: The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky – Aren X. Tulchinsky
2009: The Crazy Canucks: Canada's Legendary Ski Team – Janet Love Morrison
2009: The Farm Team – Linda Bailey
2010: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

History
In January 1869, the manager of the Hastings Mill, J.A. Raymur, started the New London Mechanics Institute, a meeting room and library for mill employees. In March 1869, it was renamed the Hastings Literary Institute, in honour of Rear Admiral the Honourable George Fowler Hastings. No official records of the Hastings Literary Institute have survived, but it is known that membership was by subscription.  The Hastings Literary Institute continued to exist until the Granville area was incorporated as part of the new City of Vancouver on 6 April 1886.

Following the Great Vancouver Fire on 13 June 1886, 400 books from the now-defunct Hastings Literary Institute were donated to the newly established Vancouver Reading Room. In December 1887, the Reading Room opened at 144 West Cordova Street, above the Thomas Dunn and Company hardware store. It was also known as the Vancouver Free Library and the Vancouver Free Reading Room and Library.

By the late 1890s, the Free Reading Room and Library in the YMCA Building on West Hastings had become overcrowded. During this period, the American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was giving money to cities and towns to build libraries. In 1901, the City of Vancouver approached Carnegie about donating money for a new library to replace the space in the YMCA Building.

In 1901, American steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie agreed to donate $50,000 to build a city library if Vancouver would provide free land and $5,000 annually to support its operation. A fight immediately developed between East and West side Vancouver as to who would get the new cultural institution. A public plebiscite fixed the site at Hastings and Westminster (now Main) Streets, next door to the first City Hall. The cornerstone was laid by the Grand Lodge of the Masonic Order on 29 March 1902 and under it were placed Masonic documents, a copy of the City's Act of Incorporation, lists of various officials and examples of the postage stamps and coins then in use. The building was designed by Vancouver architect George Grant and is in the style of Romanesque Renaissance, with a domed Ionic portico and French mansard roof. Granite for the foundation came from Indian Arm and sandstone for the 10" thick walls came from Gabriola Island. A fantastic marble, spiral staircase was built by Albion Iron Works of Victoria. It cost $2.279 million and 9,888 pounds of steel and iron were used. A large multi-panel stained glass window with 3 smaller windows below was designed and crafted by N.T. Lyon of Toronto. Depicted in the windows are John Milton, William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Thomas More, and Edmund Spenser. The 3 small windows were removed in 1958 when the library was converted into the museum. They were missing for many years but were located intact and returned to the building in 1985. Inside was hardwood panelled walls and ceilings and oak floors. The rooms were heated by eight fireplaces. There were special reading rooms for ladies and for children, a chess room, newspaper reading room, picture gallery, lecture hall, and on the third floor the Art, Historical and Scientific Association (now called the Vancouver Museum). The library opened in November 1903. This branch is now primarily used as a community centre for residents of the Downtown East Side neighbourhood.

The Vancouver Public Library continued to occupy the Hastings and Main site until the opening of a new central library at 750 Burrard Street in 1957. The move from the Carnegie site to the new location at 750 Burrard began in mid-October 1957, and the official opening of the new library was held on 1 November 1957. The library remained at the Burrard building until 22 April 1995, when it closed in preparation for the move to a new location at Library Square (350 West Georgia Street). The central branch opened in Downtown Vancouver on 26 May 1995 and cost CAD $106.8 million to build.

In September 2009, the library cancelled a room booking made by the group Exit International to hold a workshop by Philip Nitschke about assisted suicide. The cancellation came despite months of negotiation between Exit and library administration. The library stated that it had received a legal opinion stating the workshop as described could contravene Canada's Criminal Code, but would not make the opinion public. The workshop was held at Vancouver's Unitarian Church. "Whatever the reasons of the library were, it's obviously not affecting the decision by the Unitarian Church," Dr. Nitschke said. David Eby, executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, which failed to get the ban lifted, said "Usually, librarians are our closest allies in this free-speech debate."

City librarians

 George Pollay (1887–1890)
 James Edwin Machin (1892–1910)
 Alfred E. Goodman (1910)
 Robert Waite Douglas, city librarian (1911–1924)
 Edgar Stewart Robinson, director (1924–1957)
 Peter Grossman, director (1957–1969)
 Morton P. Jordan, director (1970–1978)
 George C. Wootton, director (1979–1983)
 Aileen Tufts, director (1984–1987)
 Madge Aalto, director (1988–2003)
 Paul Whitney, city librarian (2003–2010)
 Sandra Singh, chief librarian (2010–2018)
 Christina de Castell, chief librarian (2018–present)

Branches

In 1927 the first permanent branch was opened in Kitsilano (2375 West Fourth Avenue). Sixteen years later, in 1943, the second branch, Kerrisdale (Forty-second Avenue and West Boulevard), came into service. Other branches followed throughout the years, with the last branch, the Terry Salman Branch, opening in 2011. The Strathcona Branch, which shared its collection and facilities with Lord Strathcona Elementary School, was removed from the system in 2016, pending the opening of the nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch. The new branch opened in the same community in 2017.

The Vancouver Public Library system now consists of 22 branches situated throughout the city.  Since 2013, all branches are open at least Tuesday through Sunday. The administration centre, and also the largest branch, known as the Central Branch, is located at Library Square in downtown Vancouver.

The oldest existing branch, the Kitsilano branch, is the regional reference library for the North Area division of the Libraries. The largest non-Central branch in terms of volumes held, is the Renfrew Branch, with 325,000 volumes.  The Renfrew Branch is listed as having the largest square footage, at 16,000 square feet, while the Kensington branch at 7,100 square feet is one of the larger branch libraries.

The approximate number of volumes in each VPL branch are:

Central branch

Consolidating Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch, Federal Office Tower, and retail and service facilities, the Library Square occupies a city block in Downtown Vancouver. Centred on the block, the library is a nine-story rectangular box containing book stacks and services, surrounded by a free-standing, elliptical, colonnaded wall featuring reading and study areas that are accessed by bridges spanning skylit light wells. The building is located in the eastern portion of the Vancouver Central Business District. The address of the library is 350 West Georgia Street, and the Federal office tower is addressed at 300 West Georgia Street. Levels 8 and 9 were previously leased to the Provincial government. Their address was 360 West Georgia Street.

VPL Central branch internal glass facade overlooks an enclosed concourse formed by a second elliptical wall that defines the east side of the site. This glass-roofed concourse serves as an entry foyer to the library and the more lively pedestrian activities at ground level. Public spaces surrounding the library form a continuous piazza with parking located below grade. The building's exterior resembles the current appearance of the Colosseum in Rome.

Adjacent to the Central Branch is Library Square, a public square is bordered by Robson Street, Homer Street, West Georgia Street, and Hamilton Street. Across West Georgia Street is Canada Post. Across Hamilton Street is the CBC Regional Broadcast Centre Vancouver. Across Homer street is The Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, (formerly The Ford Centre for the Performing Arts) designed by Moshe Safdie as a complementary building to library square. The Library Square Project was the largest capital project ever undertaken by the City of Vancouver. The decision to build the project came after a favourable public referendum in November 1990. The City then held a design competition to choose a design for the new building. The design by Safdie and DA Architects was by far the most radical design and yet was the public favourite. 70% of the public liked the Safdie scheme as a "unique, imaginative, exciting, interesting building." The inclusion of the 21 story office tower in the design was required in order to pay for it and as part of a deal with the federal government to obtain the land; the federal government has a long term lease on the high rise office tower portion of the project. Construction began in early 1993 and was completed in 1995. In the year following the new library's opening, library visitors increased by 800,000.

In addition to its function as the central branch of the city's public library system, the one square block project includes an attached office high-rise, retail shops, restaurants, and underground public parking. The Library building has a rooftop garden designed by Vancouver landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander. The roof garden is accessible by the public. The new 8,000-sq-ft rooftop garden and the expansion to Level 9 were built at a cost of $15.5 million; they opened to the public in September 2018. The expansion is LEED Gold CIv1 certified, managed by Light House Sustainable Building Centre.

Statistics
Library building (including retail and parking)
 9 stories
 37,000 square metres (398,000 square feet)
 the 1.3 million books, periodicals, and other reference materials are moved through the building by vertical and horizontal conveyors
 51 km of cable are laid throughout the building, including a fibre optic backbone
 seating capacity: 1200+
 700+ parking stalls and a few bicycle racks
 top two floors were leased by the Government of British Columbia until 2015 and are now part of the library. They include meeting space, study space, roof garden and exhibition space.
 approximate cost: CAD $107 million

Image gallery

See also

List of Carnegie libraries in Canada

References

External links

Postmodern architecture in Canada
Public libraries in British Columbia
Buildings and structures in Vancouver
Culture of Vancouver
Tourist attractions in Vancouver
Education in Vancouver
Libraries established in 1869
1869 establishments in Canada

Vancouver Public Library


(English title: Star Watching Dog) is a 2011 Japanese film loosely based on the manga of the same name and directed by Tokiyuki Takimoto. It was released on 11 June 2011.

Cast
 Toshiyuki Nishida as "Daddy", the name Happie gives to the man of the family. His real name is never revealed.
 "Happie" as himself. A white Akita dog.
 Tetsuji Tamayama as Kyosuke Okutsu
 Umika Kawashima as Yuki Kawamura
 Kimiko Yo as the innkeeper
 Yoichi Nukumizu as Tomita
 Mari Hamada as Tomita's wife
 Sansei Shiomi as Nishitani, a manager
 Shido Nakamura as a Convenient Store Manager
 Kayoko Kishimoto as the mom
 Tatsuya Fuji as Kyosuke's grandfather
 Tomokazu Miura as the seaside restaurant owner

Synopsis
In the middle of a camping field, an unidentified male corpse is discovered inside an abandoned van, with a dead dog body resting at its feet. Kyosuke Okutsu, a social worker is assigned to locate the man's family and inform them about his death. As he investigates, Okutsu notes some similarities between the man's life and his own, so he decides not only to conduct his investigations the usual way, but also take the opportunity to travel across the country while reconstructing the man's life. In the middle of his journey, a teenage girl named Yuki asks him for a ride. The girl does not provide further information about herself, except that she attended an Idol audition, but after being rejected, she doesn't have enough money to continue traveling on her own. With her assistance, Okutsu continues looking for clues about "Daddy"'s past.

Using a few invoices and consume tickets found in the van, Okutsu and Yuki are able to locate some stores where Daddy and Happie spend some time before their death. As their investigation progresses, the couple discovers the deep relation Daddy had with his dog. The man was a common middle class wielding worker with an average family, but at some point his life gradually deteriorated. He had a heart condition, which caused him some trouble at his workplace for which he is eventually fired. Tired of a long life together without better expectations, his wife requests a divorce. Now jobless, homeless and with little money in his pockets, Daddy decides to put all the stuff he has left inside the van on a road trip to southern Japan, with Happie as only companion.

A convenience store manager gives Okutsu some additional information: the pair was at his convenience store, where Daddy spotted a dirty-looking young boy attempting to steal bread. He buys it for him instead, and the boy invites himself into Daddy's car. Daddy agrees to take him wherever he wants to go, but the boy is mostly silent. They sleep in the car, and the next morning Daddy discovers that the boy is gone and has taken his wallet.

Not long after, Happie experiences extreme pain while urinating and Daddy rushes him to a veterinarian, where he learns that Happie has kidney stones. They operate, and Daddy is forced to pawn almost everything he owns to pay the bill, leaving him almost penniless. In a final stop at a seaside restaurant, Daddy decides to leave Happie since his health is deteriorating rapidly, and talks to the restaurant owner, who also loves dogs, about adopting him, but the dog refuses to be separated from his owner. They continue on, eventually running out of gas near a campground. They live inside the van for a while, living off the food they can scrounge and catch and sleeping in the car, until one day Daddy dies in his car. Happie assumes he's just sleeping, and loyally stays at his side, and continues scouting for food for both. During one of his patrols, Happie mistakes a camping family for his own, and tries to steal food from their grill. The family man, taking him for a dangerous stray dog attacks him. Fatally wounded, Happie manages to return to Daddy's car to die at the feet of his owner.

Okutsu compares his own life with Daddy's, and finally remembers his own behavior with a lonely dog named Kuro he had when he was a child, bought by his grandpa after his wife died. This dog used to contemplate the stars at night in the sunflowers field for long periods of time, as if he would like to reach them. Eventually Okutsu understands Daddy and Happie's life is a parable of the way as goes the people live, and comes to the conclusion that in the end, we all are like a stargazing dog, always dreaming a way to reach the impossible. Unable to locate any relatives since Daddy intentionally destroyed all traces of his past, Okutsu decides to authorize the cremation of his remains as an unidentified person, and disperses his ashes around Happie's grave, so the couple can finally be together again. Yuki confesses she's a runaway girl, but after knowing the complete story of Daddy and Happy, she decides to return home.

Differences between the manga and the movie
The biggest difference between the original Stargazing Dog story and the movie is that in the manga Happie is the main character and narrator. The story is told from the point of view of the dog in proper chronological order, starting when the new born puppy is adopted and ends when he dies as an adult 9 years later. A second story in the serialized manga titled "Sunflowers" introduces Okutsu as a separated narration, told as a series of flashbacks as his relation with his own dog are gradually introduced to the audience. The movie inverses this plot, presenting Sunflowers as the main narration with Okutsu as the protagonist instead of Happie.

Several secondary characters are silent on the manga, but they play a bigger role in the movie, providing Okutsu relevant information to reconstruct Daddy's life.

Yuki is a new character created exclusively for the movie, so Okutsu may have someone to talk with about Daddy along his journey.

Reception
Richard Grey, reviewing the film ahead of the 2011 Japanese Film Festival in Australia, wrote that "this epic journey of one dog's devotions to his master is guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house."

References

External links

Japanese drama films
Live-action films based on manga

ja:星守る犬#映画
zh:星守犬#電影

Hoshi Mamoru Inu


Sir Francis Ronalds FRS (21 February 17888 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph over a substantial distance. In 1816 he laid an eight-mile length of iron wire between wooden frames in his mother's garden and sent pulses using electrostatic generators.

Upbringing and family
Born to Francis Ronalds and Jane (née Field), wholesale cheesemongers, at their business premises at 109 Upper Thames Street, London, he attended Unitarian minister Eliezer Cogan's school before being apprenticed to his father at the age of 14 through the Drapers' Company.  He ran the large business for some years.  The family later resided in Canonbury Place and Highbury Terrace, both in Islington, at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, Queen Square in Bloomsbury, at Croydon, and on Chiswick Lane.

Several of Ronalds' eleven brothers and sisters also led noteworthy lives.  His youngest brother Alfred Ronalds authored the classic book The Fly-fisher's Entomology (1836) with Ronalds' assistance before migrating to Australia. His brother Hugh was one of the founders of the city of Albion in the American Midwest, and sister Emily Ronalds epitomised the family's interest in social reform. Other sisters married Samuel Carter – a railway solicitor and MP – and sugar-refiner Peter Martineau, the son of Peter Finch Martineau.

Nurseryman Hugh Ronalds was his uncle, and his nephews included chemistry professor Edmund Ronalds, artist Hugh Carter, barrister John Corrie Carter and timber merchant and benefactor James Montgomrey. Thomas Field Gibson, a Royal Commissioner for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was one of his cousins.

Early electrical science and engineering
Ronalds was conducting electrical experiments by 1810: those on atmospheric electricity were outlined in George Singer's text Elements of Electricity and Electro-Chemistry (1814). He published his first papers in the Philosophical Magazine in 1814 on the properties of the dry pile, a form of battery that his mentor Jean-André Deluc helped to develop.  The next year he described the first electric clock.

Other inventions in this early period included an electrograph to record variations in atmospheric electricity through the day; an influence machine that generated electricity with minimal manual intervention; and new forms of electrical insulation, one of which was announced by Singer. He was also already creating what would become the renowned Ronalds Library of electrical books and managing his collection with perhaps the first practical card catalogue.

His theoretical contributions included an early delineation of the parameters now known as electromotive force and current; an appreciation of the mechanism by which dry piles generated electricity; and the first description of the effects of induction in retarding electric signal transmission in insulated cables.

Electric telegraph

Ronalds' most remembered work today is the electric telegraph he created at the age of 28.  He established that electrical signals could be transmitted over large distances with eight miles of iron wire strung on insulators on his mother's lawn in Hammersmith. He found that the signal travelled immeasurably fast from one end to the other (but still believed the speed was finite). Foreshadowing both a future electrical age and mass communication, he wrote:

electricity, may actually be employed for a more practically useful purpose than the gratification of the philosopher's inquisitive research… it may be compelled to travel... many hundred miles beneath our feet... and... be productive of... much public and private benefit... why... add to the torments of absence those dilatory tormentors, pens, ink, paper, and posts? Let us have electrical conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom.

He complemented his vision with a working telegraph system built in and under his mother's garden at Hammersmith. It was infamously rejected on 5 August 1816 by Sir John Barrow, Secretary at the Admiralty, as being "wholly unnecessary". Commercialisation of the telegraph only began two decades later in the UK, led by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, who both had links to Ronalds' earlier work.

Grand Tour

The period 1818–20 was Ronalds' "Grand Tour" to Europe and the Near East.  Embarking on his trip alone, he met up with numerous people along the way, including his friend Sir Frederick Henniker, archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni, artist Giovanni Battista Lusieri, merchant Walter Stevenson Davidson, Revd George Waddington, Italian numismatist Giulio Cordero di San Quintino and Spanish geologist Carlos de Gimbernat.   Ronalds' travel journal and sketches have been published on the web. On his return, he published his atmospheric electricity observations made in Palermo, Sicily, and near the erupting crater of Vesuvius.

Mechanical design and manufacture

Ronalds next focused on mechanical and civil engineering and design.  Two surveying tools he designed and used to aid the production of survey plans were a modified surveyor's wheel that recorded distances travelled in graphical form and a double-reflecting sector to draw the angular separation of distant objects.  He also invented a forerunner to the fire finder patented in 1915 to pinpoint the location of a fire and various accessories for the lathe.  Some of these devices were manufactured for sale by toolmaker Holtzapffel. There is some evidence to suggest that he assisted Charles Holtzapffel in the early stages of preparing the Holtzapffel family's renowned treatise on turning.

Perspective machines and tripod stand

On 23 March 1825, he patented two drawing instruments for producing perspective sketches; numerous engravings and lithographs survive that he made using the machines. The first instrument produced a perspective view of an object directly from drawings of the plan and elevations.  The second machine enabled a scene or person to be traced from life onto paper with considerable precision; he and Dr Alexander Blair used it to document the important Neolithic monuments at Carnac, France, with "almost photographic accuracy". He also created the ubiquitous portable tripod stand with three pairs of hinged legs to support his drawing board in the field.  He manufactured these instruments himself and several hundred of them were sold. One of his first customers was mining engineer John Taylor.

In 1840, he applied his understanding of perspective in developing more complex apparatus to aid the accurate depiction of cylindrical panoramas, which were a popular exhibition at that time.

Kew Observatory

Ronalds set up the Kew Observatory for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1842 and he remained Honorary Director of the facility until late 1853.  It was through the quality of his achievements there that the Kew Observatory survived its early years and it went on to become one of the most important meteorological and geomagnetic observatories in the world.  This was despite ongoing efforts by George Airy, Director of the Greenwich Observatory, to undermine the work at Kew.

Continuously recording camera

Ronalds' most noteworthy innovation at Kew, in 1845, was the first successful camera to make continuous recordings of an instrument 24 hours per day. The British Prime Minister Lord John Russell gave him a financial award in recognition of the importance of the invention for observational science.

He applied his technique in electrographs to observe atmospheric electricity, barographs and thermo-hygrographs to monitor the weather, and magnetographs to record the three components of geomagnetic force.  The magnetographs were used by Edward Sabine in his global geomagnetic survey while the barograph and thermo-hygrograph were employed by the new Met Office to assist its first weather forecasts.  Ronalds also supervised the manufacture of his instruments for other observatories around the world (the Radcliffe Observatory under Manuel John Johnson and the Colaba Observatory in India are two examples) and some continued in use until late in the 20th century.

Meteorological instruments and observations

Further instruments created at Kew included an improved version of Regnault's aspirated hygrometer that was employed for many years; an early meteorological kite; and the storm clock used to monitor rapid changes in meteorological parameters during extreme events.

To observe atmospheric electricity, Ronalds created a sophisticated collecting apparatus with a suite of electrometers; the equipment was later manufactured and sold by London instrument-makers.  A dataset of five years' duration was analysed and published by his observatory colleague William Radcliffe Birt.

The phenomenon now known as geomagnetically induced current was observed on telegraph lines in 1848 during the first sunspot peak after the network began to take shape.  Ronalds endeavoured to employ his atmospheric electricity equipment and magnetographs in a detailed study to understand the cause of the anomalies but had insufficient resources to complete his work.

Last years

Ronalds' final foreign sojourn in 1853–1862 was to northern Italy, Switzerland and France, where he assisted other observatories in building and installing his meteorological instruments and continued collecting books for his library.  Some of his ideas documented in this period concerned electric lighting and a combined rudder and propeller for ships that was honed in the 20th century.

He died at Battle, near Hastings, aged 85, and is buried in the cemetery there. The Ronalds Library was bequeathed to the newly formed Society of Telegraph Engineers (soon to become the Institution of Electrical Engineers and now the Institution of Engineering and Technology) and its accompanying bibliography was reprinted by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

Ronalds had a very modest and retiring nature and did little to publicise his work through his life. During his last years, however, his key accomplishments became well known and revered in the scientific community, aided in particular by his friends Josiah Latimer Clark and Edward Sabine and his brother-in-law Samuel Carter.  He was knighted at the age of 82.  Colleagues at the Society of Telegraph Engineers regarded him as "the father of electric telegraphy", while his continuously recording camera was noted to be "of extreme importance to meteorologists and physicists, and… employed in all first-rate observatories". His portrait was painted by Hugh Carter. Commemorative plaques have been installed on two of his former homes in Highbury and Hammersmith, and a road was named after him in Highbury. Ronalds Point in Antarctica is named after him.

References

1788 births
1873 deaths
English electrical engineers
English inventors
Experimental physicists
English meteorologists
19th-century English photographers
English archaeologists
Fellows of the Royal Society
Knights Bachelor
Scientists from London
Engineers from London
Photographers from London
British scientific instrument makers
English Unitarians

Francis Ronalds