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Interlaced video

Interlaced video (also known as interlaced scan) is a technique for doubling the perceived frame rate of a video display without consuming extra bandwidth. The interlaced signal contains two fields of a video frame captured consecutively. This enhances motion perception to the viewer, and reduces flicker by taking advantage of the characteristics of the human visual system.

This effectively doubles the time resolution (also called temporal resolution) as compared to non-interlaced footage (for frame rates equal to field rates). Interlaced signals require a display that is natively capable of showing the individual fields in a sequential order. CRT displays and ALiS plasma displays are made for displaying interlaced signals.

Interlaced scan refers to one of two common methods for "painting" a video image on an electronic display screen (the other being progressive scan) by scanning or displaying each line or row of pixels. This technique uses two fields to create a frame. One field contains all odd-numbered lines in the image; the other contains all even-numbered lines.

A Phase Alternating Line (PAL)-based television set display, for example, scans 50 fields every second (25 odd and 25 even). The two sets of 25 fields work together to create a full frame every 1/25 of a second (or 25 frames per second), but with interlacing create a new half frame every 1/50 of a second (or 50 fields per second). To display interlaced video on progressive scan displays, playback applies deinterlacing to the video signal (which adds input lag).

The European Broadcasting Union has argued against interlaced video in production and broadcasting. They recommend 720p 50 fps (frames per second) for the current production format—and are working with the industry to introduce 1080p 50 as a future-proof production standard. 1080p 50 offers higher vertical resolution, better quality at lower bitrates, and easier conversion to other formats, such as 720p 50 and 1080i 50. The main argument is that no matter how complex the deinterlacing algorithm may be, the artifacts in the interlaced signal cannot be completely eliminated because some information is lost between frames.

Despite arguments against it, television standards organizations continue to support interlacing. It is still included in digital video transmission formats such as DV, DVB, and ATSC. New video compression standards like High Efficiency Video Coding are optimized for progressive scan video, but sometimes do support interlaced video.

Description
Progressive scan captures, transmits, and displays an image in a path similar to text on a page—line by line, top to bottom. The interlaced scan pattern in a standard definition CRT display also completes such a scan, but in two passes (two fields). The first pass displays the first and all odd numbered lines, from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. The second pass displays the second and all even numbered lines, filling in the gaps in the first scan.

This scan of alternate lines is called interlacing. A field is an image that contains only half of the lines needed to make a complete picture. In the days of CRT displays, the afterglow of the display's phosphor aided this effect.

Interlacing provides full vertical detail with the same bandwidth that would be required for a full progressive scan, but with twice the perceived frame rate and refresh rate. To prevent flicker, all analog broadcast television systems used interlacing.

Format identifiers like 576i50 and 720p50 specify the frame rate for progressive scan formats, but for interlaced formats they typically specify the field rate (which is twice the frame rate). This can lead to confusion, because industry-standard SMPTE timecode formats always deal with frame rate, not field rate. To avoid confusion, SMPTE and EBU always use frame rate to specify interlaced formats, e.g., 480i60 is 480i/30, 576i50 is 576i/25, and 1080i50 is 1080i/25. This convention assumes that one complete frame in an interlaced signal consists of two fields in sequence.

Benefits of interlacing
One of the most important factors in analog television is signal bandwidth, measured in megahertz. The greater the bandwidth, the more expensive and complex the entire production and broadcasting chain. This includes cameras, storage systems, broadcast systems—and reception systems: terrestrial, cable, satellite, Internet, and end-user displays (TVs and computer monitors).

For a fixed bandwidth, interlace provides a video signal with twice the display refresh rate for a given line count (versus progressive scan video at a similar frame rate—for instance 1080i at 60 half-frames per second, vs. 1080p at 30 full frames per second). The higher refresh rate improves the appearance of an object in motion, because it updates its position on the display more often, and when an object is stationary, human vision combines information from multiple similar half-frames to produce the same perceived resolution as that provided by a progressive full frame. This technique is only useful, though, if source material is available in higher refresh rates. Cinema movies are typically recorded at 24fps, and therefore do not benefit from interlacing, a solution which reduces the maximum video bandwidth to 5 MHz without reducing the effective picture scan rate of 60 Hz.

Given a fixed bandwidth and high refresh rate, interlaced video can also provide a higher spatial resolution than progressive scan. For instance, 1920×1080 pixel resolution interlaced HDTV with a 60 Hz field rate (known as 1080i60 or 1080i/30) has a similar bandwidth to 1280×720 pixel progressive scan HDTV with a 60 Hz frame rate (720p60 or 720p/60), but achieves approximately twice the spatial resolution for low-motion scenes.

However, bandwidth benefits only apply to an analog or uncompressed digital video signal. With digital video compression, as used in all current digital TV standards, interlacing introduces additional inefficiencies. EBU has performed tests that show that the bandwidth savings of interlaced video over progressive video is minimal, even with twice the frame rate. I.e., 1080p50 signal produces roughly the same bit rate as 1080i50 (aka 1080i/25) signal, and 1080p50 actually requires less bandwidth to be perceived as subjectively better than its 1080i/25 (1080i50) equivalent when encoding a "sports-type" scene.

Interlacing can be exploited to produce 3D TV programming, especially with a CRT display and especially for color filtered glasses by transmitting the color keyed picture for each eye in the alternating fields. This does not require significant alterations to existing equipment. Shutter glasses can be adopted as well, obviously with the requirement of achieving synchronisation. If a progressive scan display is used to view such programming, any attempt to deinterlace the picture will render the effect useless. For color filtered glasses the picture has to be either buffered and shown as if it was progressive with alternating color keyed lines, or each field has to be line-doubled and displayed as discrete frames. The latter procedure is the only way to suit shutter glasses on a progressive display.

Interlacing problems
Interlaced video is designed to be captured, stored, transmitted, and displayed in the same interlaced format. Because each interlaced video frame is two fields captured at different moments in time, interlaced video frames can exhibit motion artifacts known as interlacing effects, or combing, if recorded objects move fast enough to be in different positions when each individual field is captured. These artifacts may be more visible when interlaced video is displayed at a slower speed than it was captured, or in still frames.

While there are simple methods to produce somewhat satisfactory progressive frames from the interlaced image, for example by doubling the lines of one field and omitting the other (halving vertical resolution), or anti-aliasing the image in the vertical axis to hide some of the combing, there are sometimes methods of producing results far superior to these. If there is only sideways (X axis) motion between the two fields and this motion is even throughout the full frame, it is possible to align the scanlines and crop the left and right ends that exceed the frame area to produce a visually satisfactory image. Minor Y axis motion can be corrected similarly by aligning the scanlines in a different sequence and cropping the excess at the top and bottom. Often the middle of the picture is the most necessary area to put into check, and whether there is only X or Y axis alignment correction, or both are applied, most artifacts will occur towards the edges of the picture. However, even these simple procedures require motion tracking between the fields, and a rotating or tilting object, or one that moves in the Z axis (away from or towards the camera) will still produce combing, possibly even looking worse than if the fields were joined in a simpler method. Some deinterlacing processes can analyze each frame individually and decide the best method. The best and only perfect conversion in these cases is to treat each frame as a separate image, but that may not always be possible. For framerate conversions and zooming it would mostly be ideal to line-double each field to produce a double rate of progressive frames, resample the frames to the desired resolution and then re-scan the stream at the desired rate, either in progressive or interlaced mode.

Interline twitter
Interlace introduces a potential problem called interline twitter, a form of moiré. This aliasing effect only shows up under certain circumstances—when the subject contains vertical detail that approaches the horizontal resolution of the video format. For instance, a finely striped jacket on a news anchor may produce a shimmering effect. This is twittering. Television professionals avoid wearing clothing with fine striped patterns for this reason. Professional video cameras or computer-generated imagery systems apply a low-pass filter to the vertical resolution of the signal to prevent interline twitter.

Interline twitter is the primary reason that interlacing is less suited for computer displays. Each scanline on a high-resolution computer monitor typically displays discrete pixels, each of which does not span the scanline above or below. When the overall interlaced framerate is 60 frames per second, a pixel (or more critically for e.g. windowing systems or underlined text, a horizontal line) that spans only one scanline in height is visible for the 1/60 of a second that would be expected of a 60 Hz progressive display - but is then followed by 1/60 of a second of darkness (whilst the opposite field is scanned), reducing the per-line/per-pixel refresh rate to 30 frames per second with quite obvious flicker.

To avoid this, standard interlaced television sets typically do not display sharp detail. When computer graphics appear on a standard television set, the screen is either treated as if it were half the resolution of what it actually is (or even lower), or rendered at full resolution and then subjected to a low-pass filter in the vertical direction (e.g. a "motion blur" type with a 1-pixel distance, which blends each line 50% with the next, maintaining a degree of the full positional resolution and preventing the obvious "blockiness" of simple line doubling whilst actually reducing flicker to less than what the simpler approach would achieve). If text is displayed, it is large enough so that any horizontal lines are at least two scanlines high. Most fonts for television programming have wide, fat strokes, and do not include fine-detail serifs that would make the twittering more visible; in addition, modern character generators apply a degree of anti-aliasing that has a similar line-spanning effect to the aforementioned full-frame low-pass filter.

Deinterlacing
ALiS plasma panels and the old CRTs can display interlaced video directly, but modern computer video displays and TV sets are mostly based on LCD technology, which mostly use progressive scanning.

Displaying interlaced video on a progressive scan display requires a process called deinterlacing. This is an imperfect technique, and generally lowers resolution and causes various artifacts—particularly in areas with objects in motion. Providing the best picture quality for interlaced video signals requires expensive and complex devices and algorithms. For television displays, deinterlacing systems are integrated into progressive scan TV sets that accept interlaced signal, such as broadcast SDTV signal.

Most modern computer monitors do not support interlaced video, besides some legacy medium-resolution modes (and possibly 1080i as an adjunct to 1080p), and support for standard-definition video (480/576i or 240/288p) is particularly rare given its much lower line-scanning frequency vs typical "VGA"-or-higher analog computer video modes. Playing back interlaced video from a DVD, digital file or analog capture card on a computer display instead requires some form of deinterlacing in the player software and/or graphics hardware, which often uses very simple methods to deinterlace. This means that interlaced video often has visible artifacts on computer systems. Computer systems may be used to edit interlaced video, but the disparity between computer video display systems and interlaced television signal formats means that the video content being edited cannot be viewed properly without separate video display hardware.

Current manufacture TV sets employ a system of intelligently extrapolating the extra information that would be present in a progressive signal entirely from an interlaced original. In theory: this should simply be a problem of applying the appropriate algorithms to the interlaced signal, as all information should be present in that signal. In practice, results are currently variable, and depend on the quality of the input signal and amount of processing power applied to the conversion. The biggest impediment, at present, is artifacts in the lower quality interlaced signals (generally broadcast video), as these are not consistent from field to field. On the other hand, high bit rate interlaced signals such as from HD camcorders operating in their highest bit rate mode work well.

Deinterlacing algorithms temporarily store a few frames of interlaced images and then extrapolate extra frame data to make a smooth flicker-free image. This frame storage and processing results in a slight display lag that is visible in business showrooms with a large number of different models on display. Unlike the old unprocessed NTSC signal, the screens do not all follow motion in perfect synchrony. Some models appear to update slightly faster or slower than others. Similarly, the audio can have an echo effect due to different processing delays.

History
When motion picture film was developed, the movie screen had to be illuminated at a high rate to prevent visible flicker. The exact rate necessary varies by brightness — 50 Hz is (barely) acceptable for small, low brightness displays in dimly lit rooms, whilst 80 Hz or more may be necessary for bright displays that extend into peripheral vision. The film solution was to project each frame of film three times using a three-bladed shutter: a movie shot at 16 frames per second illuminated the screen 48 times per second. Later, when sound film became available, the higher projection speed of 24 frames per second enabled a two-bladed shutter to produce 48 times per second illumination—but only in projectors incapable of projecting at the lower speed.

This solution could not be used for television. To store a full video frame and display it twice requires a frame buffer—electronic memory (RAM)—sufficient to store a video frame. This method did not become feasible until the late 1980s and with digital technology. In addition, avoiding on-screen interference patterns caused by studio lighting and the limits of vacuum tube technology required that CRTs for TV be scanned at AC line frequency. (This was 60 Hz in the US, 50 Hz Europe.)

Several different interlacing patents have been proposed since 1914 in the context of still or moving image transmission, but few of them were practicable. In 1926, Ulises Armand Sanabria demonstrated television to 200,000 people attending Chicago Radio World’s Fair. Sanabria’s system was mechanically scanned using a 'triple interlace' Nipkow disc with three offset spirals and was thus a 3:1 scheme rather than the usual 2:1. It worked with 45 line 15 frames per second images being transmitted. With 15 frames per second and a 3:1 interlace the field rate was 45 fields per second yielding (for the time) a very steady image. He did not apply for a patent for his interlaced scanning until May 1931.

In 1930, German Telefunken engineer Fritz Schröter first formulated and patented the concept of breaking a single image frame into successive interlaced lines, based on his earlier experiments with phototelegraphy. In the USA, RCA engineer Randall C. Ballard patented the same idea in 1932, initially for the purpose of reformatting sound film to television rather than for the transmission of live images. Commercial implementation began in 1934 as cathode-ray tube screens became brighter, increasing the level of flicker caused by progressive (sequential) scanning.

In 1936, when the UK was setting analog standards, early thermionic valve based CRT drive electronics could only scan at around 200 lines in 1/50 of a second (i.e. approximately a 10 kHz repetition rate for the sawtooth horizontal deflection waveform). Using interlace, a pair of 202.5-line fields could be superimposed to become a sharper 405 line frame (with around 377 used for the actual image, and yet fewer visible within the screen bezel; in modern parlance, the standard would be "377i"). The vertical scan frequency remained 50 Hz, but visible detail was noticeably improved. As a result, this system supplanted John Logie Baird's 240 line mechanical progressive scan system that was also being trialled at the time.

From the 1940s onward, improvements in technology allowed the US and the rest of Europe to adopt systems using progressively higher line-scan frequencies and more radio signal bandwidth to produce higher line counts at the same frame rate, thus achieving better picture quality. However the fundamentals of interlaced scanning were at the heart of all of these systems. The US adopted the 525 line system, later incorporating the composite color standard known as NTSC, Europe adopted the 625 line system, and the UK switched from its idiosyncratic 405 line system to (the much more US-like) 625 to avoid having to develop a (wholly) unique method of color TV. France switched from its similarly unique 819 line monochrome system to the more European standard of 625. Europe in general, including the UK, then adopted the PAL color encoding standard, which was essentially based on NTSC, but inverted the color carrier phase with each line (and frame) in order to cancel out the hue-distorting phase shifts that dogged NTSC broadcasts. France instead adopted its own unique, twin-FM-carrier based SECAM system, which offered improved quality at the cost of greater electronic complexity, and was also used by some other countries, notably Russia and its satellite states. Though the color standards are often used as synonyms for the underlying video standard - NTSC for 525i/60, PAL/SECAM for 625i/50 - there are several cases of inversions or other modifications; e.g. PAL color is used on otherwise "NTSC" (that is, 525i/60) broadcasts in Brazil, as well as vice versa elsewhere, along with cases of PAL bandwidth being squeezed to 3.58 MHz to fit in the broadcast waveband allocation of NTSC, or NTSC being expanded to take up PAL's 4.43 MHz.

Interlacing was ubiquitous in displays until the 1970s, when the needs of computer monitors resulted in the reintroduction of progressive scan, including on regular TVs or simple monitors based on the same circuitry; most CRT based displays are entirely capable of displaying both progressive and interlace regardless of their original intended use, so long as the horizontal and vertical frequencies match, as the technical difference is simply that of either starting/ending the vertical sync cycle halfway along a scanline every other frame (interlace), or always synchronising right at the start/end of a line (progressive). Interlace is still used for most standard definition TVs, and the 1080i HDTV broadcast standard, but not for LCD, micromirror (DLP), or most plasma displays; these displays do not use a raster scan to create an image (their panels may still be updated in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom scanning fashion, but always in a progressive fashion, and not necessarily at the same rate as the input signal), and so cannot benefit from interlacing (where older LCDs use a "dual scan" system to provide higher resolution with slower-updating technology, the panel is instead divided into two adjacent halves that are updated simultaneously): in practice, they have to be driven with a progressive scan signal. The deinterlacing circuitry to get progressive scan from a normal interlaced broadcast television signal can add to the cost of a television set using such displays. Currently, progressive displays dominate the HDTV market.

Interlace and computers
In the 1970s, computers and home video game systems began using TV sets as display devices. At that point, a 480-line NTSC signal was well beyond the graphics abilities of low cost computers, so these systems used a simplified video signal that made each video field scan directly on top of the previous one, rather than each line between two lines of the previous field, along with relatively low horizontal pixel counts. This marked the return of progressive scanning not seen since the 1920s. Since each field became a complete frame on its own, modern terminology would call this 240p on NTSC sets, and 288p on PAL. While consumer devices were permitted to create such signals, broadcast regulations prohibited TV stations from transmitting video like this. Computer monitor standards such as the TTL-RGB mode available on the CGA and e.g. BBC Micro were further simplifications to NTSC, which improved picture quality by omitting modulation of color, and allowing a more direct connection between the computer's graphics system and the CRT.

By the mid-1980s, computers had outgrown these video systems and needed better displays. Most home and basic office computers suffered from the use of the old scanning method, with the highest display resolution being around 640x200 (or sometimes 640x256 in 625-line/50 Hz regions), resulting in a severely distorted tall narrow pixel shape, making the display of high resolution text alongside realistic proportioned images difficult (logical "square pixel" modes were possible but only at low resolutions of 320x200 or less). Solutions from various companies varied widely. Because PC monitor signals did not need to be broadcast, they could consume far more than the 6, 7 and 8 MHz of bandwidth that NTSC and PAL signals were confined to. IBM's Monochrome Display Adapter and Enhanced Graphics Adapter as well as the Hercules Graphics Card and the original Macintosh computer generated video signals of 342 to 350p, at 50 to 60 Hz, with approximately 16 MHz of bandwidth, some enhanced PC clones such as the AT&T 6300 (aka Olivetti M24) as well as computers made for the Japanese home market managed 400p instead at around 24 MHz, and the Atari ST pushed that to 71 Hz with 32 MHz bandwidth - all of which required dedicated high-frequency (and usually single-mode, i.e. not "video"-compatible) monitors due to their increased line rates. The Commodore Amiga instead created a true interlaced 480i60/576i50 RGB signal at broadcast video rates (and with a 7 or 14 MHz bandwidth), suitable for NTSC/PAL encoding (where it was smoothly decimated to 3.5~4.5 MHz). This ability (plus built-in genlocking) resulted in the Amiga dominating the video production field until the mid-1990s, but the interlaced display mode caused flicker problems for more traditional PC applications where single-pixel detail is required, with "flicker-fixer" scan-doubler peripherals plus high-frequency RGB monitors (or Commodore's own specialist scan-conversion A2024 monitor) being popular, if expensive, purchases amongst power users. 1987 saw the introduction of VGA, on which PCs soon standardized, as well as Apple's Macintosh II range which offered displays of similar, then superior resolution and color depth, with rivalry between the two standards (and later PC quasi-standards such as XGA and SVGA) rapidly pushing up the quality of display available to both professional and home users.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, monitor and graphics card manufacturers introduced newer high resolution standards that once again included interlace. These monitors ran at higher scanning frequencies, typically allowing a 75 to 90 Hz field rate (i.e. 37.5 to 45 Hz frame rate), and tended to use longer-persistence phosphors in their CRTs, all of which was intended to alleviate flicker and shimmer problems. Such monitors proved generally unpopular, outside of specialist ultra-high-resolution applications such as CAD and DTP which demanded as many pixels as possible, with interlace being a necessary evil and better than trying to use the progressive-scan equivalents. Whilst flicker was often not immediately obvious on these displays, eyestrain and lack of focus nevertheless became a serious problem, and the trade-off for a longer afterglow was reduced brightness and poor response to moving images, leaving visible and often off-colored trails behind. These colored trails were a minor annoyance for monochrome displays, and the generally slower-updating screens used for design or database-query purposes, but much more troublesome for color displays and the faster motions inherent in the increasingly popular window-based operating systems, as well as the full-screen scrolling in WYSIWYG word-processors, spreadsheets, and of course for high-action games. Additionally, the regular, thin horizontal lines common to early GUIs, combined with low color depth that meant window elements were generally high-contrast (indeed, frequently stark black-and-white), made shimmer even more obvious than with otherwise lower fieldrate video applications. As rapid technological advancement made it practical and affordable, barely a decade after the first ultra-high-resolution interlaced upgrades appeared for the IBM PC, to provide sufficiently high pixel clocks and horizontal scan rates for hi-rez progressive-scan modes in first professional and then consumer-grade displays, the practice was soon abandoned. For the rest of the 1990s, monitors and graphics cards instead made great play of their highest stated resolutions being "non-interlaced", even where the overall framerate was barely any higher than what it had been for the interlaced modes (e.g. SVGA at 56p versus 43i to 47i), and usually including a top mode technically exceeding the CRT's actual resolution (number of color-phosphor triads) which meant there was no additional image clarity to be gained through interlacing and/or increasing the signal bandwidth still further. This experience is why the PC industry today remains against interlace in HDTV, and lobbied for the 720p standard, and continues to push for the adoption of 1080p (at 60 Hz for NTSC legacy countries, and 50 Hz for PAL); however, 1080i remains the most common HD broadcast resolution, if only for reasons of backward compatibility with older HDTV hardware that cannot support 1080p - and sometimes not even 720p - without the addition of an external scaler, similar to how and why most SD-focussed digital broadcasting still relies on the otherwise obsolete MPEG2 standard embedded into e.g. DVB-T.

title: Interlaced video


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Fifth Estate (periodical)

Fifth Estate is a U.S. periodical, based in Detroit, Michigan, begun in 1965.

History
Fifth Estate was started by Harvey Ovshinsky, a seventeen-year-old youth from Detroit. He was inspired by a 1965 summer trip to California where he worked on the Los Angeles Free Press, the first underground paper in the United States; Harvey's father, inventor Stan Ovshinsky, knew the editor of the Free Press, Art Kunkin, from their years as comrades in the Socialist Party. The first issue was published on November 19, 1965.

The spirit of the paper during the first ten years of its existence was summed up in a Feb. 1, 1969, staff editorial:

"We believe that people who are serious in their criticism of this society and their desire to change it must involve themselves in serious revolutionary struggle. We do not believe that music is revolution. We do not believe that dope is revolution. We do not believe that poetry is revolution. We see these as part of a burgeoning revolutionary culture. They cannot replace political struggle as the main means by which the capitalist system will be destroyed. The Man will not allow his social and economic order to be taken from him by Marshall amps and clashing cymbals. Ask the Cubans, the Vietnamese or urban American blacks what lengths the system is willing to go to, to preserve itself."

By 1972 the optimism of the sixties had worn off and the tone of the paper became more concerned with struggle than fun. Ovshinsky had left in 1969, leaving a group of young people (teenagers or people in their early twenties) to run the paper. Peter Werbe, a 29-year-old Michigan State University dropout who had been with the paper since March 1966, took over as editor. The staff sent delegations to Vietnam, Cambodia and Cuba. The massive defeat of George McGovern and the election of Richard Nixon for a second term with an increased vote damaged the movement — many underground papers ceased publication and alternative news agencies such as the Liberation News Service, and the Underground Press Syndicate were beginning to collapse. The Fifth Estate was mentioned in the national press when one of its reporters, Pat Halley, threw a shaving cream pie at Guru Maharaj Ji in 1973. Though the guru forgave him publicly, two of his followers attacked Halley a week later and fractured his skull.

In 2002, the center of the magazine shifted from Detroit, Michigan to Liberty, Tennessee when long-time contributor Andrew Smith (who wrote under the name Andy Sunfrog) took over the main editorial duties of the magazine, although long-time Detroit staffers like Peter Werbe remained involved.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Fifth Estate (periodical)


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Memorial Day

Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is one of the federal holidays in the United States for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It is observed on the last Monday of May. Memorial Day is also considered the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States.

It is a day for visiting cemeteries and memorials to mourn the military personnel who died in the line of duty. Volunteers will place American flags on the graves of those military personnel in national cemeteries. Others such as family and friends will also come to lay flowers and grieve on the graves of those who died in the US military.

The first national observance of Memorial Day occurred on May 30, 1868. Then known as Decoration Day and observed on May 30, the holiday was proclaimed by Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic to honor the Union soldiers who had died in the American Civil War. This national observance followed many local observances which were inaugurated between the end of the Civil War and Logan's declaration. Many cities and people have claimed to be the first to observe it. However, the National Cemetery Administration, a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs, credits Mary Ann Williams with originating the "idea of strewing the graves of Civil War soldiers—Union and Confederate" with flowers.

Official recognition as a holiday spread among the states, beginning with New York in 1873. By 1890, every Union state had adopted it. The world wars turned it into a day of remembrance for all members of the U.S. military who fought and died in service. In 1971, Congress standardized the holiday as "Memorial Day" and changed its observance to the last Monday in May.

Two other days celebrate those who have served or are serving in the U.S. military: Armed Forces Day, which is earlier in May, an unofficial U.S. holiday for honoring those currently serving in the armed forces, and Veterans Day on November 11, which honors all those who have served in the United States Armed Forces.

Claimed origins
A variety of cities and people have claimed origination of Memorial Day. In some such cases, the claims relate to documented events, occurring before or after the Civil War. Others may stem from general traditions of decorating soldiers' graves with flowers, rather than specific events leading to the national proclamation. Soldiers' graves were decorated in the U.S. before and during the American Civil War. Other claims may be less respectable, appearing to some researchers as taking credit without evidence, while erasing better-evidenced events or connections.

Virginia
On June 3, 1861, Warrenton, Virginia was the location of the first Civil War soldier's grave to be decorated, according to an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1906. This decoration was for the funeral of the first soldier killed during the Civil War, John Quincy Marr, who died on June 1, 1861, during a skirmish at the Battle of Fairfax Courthouse in Virginia.

Jackson, Mississippi
On April 26, 1865, in Jackson, Mississippi, Sue Landon Vaughan decorated the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers according to her account. The first reference to this event however did not appear until many years later. Mention of the observance is inscribed on the southeast panel of the Confederate Monument in Jackson, erected in 1891. Vaughan's account is contradicted by contemporary sources.

Charleston, South Carolina
On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, the recently freed Black population held a parade of 10,000 people to honor 257 dead Union soldiers. The soldiers had been buried in a mass grave at the Washington Race Course, having died at the Confederate prison camp located there. After the city fell, the freed Black population unearthed and properly buried the soldiers, placing flowers at their graves. The event was reported contemporaneously in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New-York Tribune. Historian David Blight has called this commemoration the first Memorial Day. However, no direct link has been established between this event and General John Logan's 1868 proclamation for a national holiday.

Columbus, Georgia
The National Cemetery Administration, a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and scholars attribute the beginning of a Memorial Day practice in the South to a group of women of Columbus, Georgia. The women were the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus. They were represented by Mary Ann Williams (Mrs. Charles J. Williams) who as association secretary wrote an open letter to the press on March 11, 1866 asking for assistance in establishing an annual holiday to decorate the graves of soldiers throughout the South. The letter was reprinted in several southern states and the plans were noted in newspapers in the North. The date of April 26 was chosen, which corresponded with the end date of the war with the surrender agreement between Generals Johnston and Sherman in 1865.

The holiday was observed in Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, Columbus and elsewhere in Georgia as well as Montgomery, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi, and across the South. In some cities, mostly in Virginia, other dates in May and June were observed. General John Logan commented on the observances in a speech to veterans on July 4, 1866, in Salem, Illinois. After General Logan's General Order No. 11 to the Grand Army of the Republic to observe May 30, 1868, the earlier version of the holiday began to be referred to as Confederate Memorial Day.

Columbus, Mississippi
Following Mary William's call for assistance, four women of Columbus, Mississippi a day early on April 25, 1866, gathered together at Friendship Cemetery to decorate the graves of the Confederate soldiers. They also felt moved to honor the Union soldiers buried there, and to note the grief of their families, by decorating their graves as well. The story of their gesture of humanity and reconciliation is held by some writers as the inspiration of the original Memorial Day.

Other Southern precedents
According to the United States Library of Congress, "Southern women decorated the graves of soldiers even before the Civil War’s end. Records show that by 1865, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina all had precedents for Memorial Day." The earliest Southern Memorial Day celebrations were simple, somber occasions for veterans and their families to honor the dead and tend to local cemeteries. In following years, the Ladies' Memorial Association and other groups increasingly focused rituals on preserving Confederate culture and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy narrative.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
The 1863 cemetery dedication at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, included a ceremony of commemoration at the graves of dead soldiers. Some have therefore claimed that President Abraham Lincoln was the founder of Memorial Day. However, Chicago journalist Lloyd Lewis tried to make the case that it was Lincoln's funeral that spurred the soldiers' grave decorating that followed.

Boalsburg, Pennsylvania
On July 4, 1864, ladies decorated soldiers' graves according to local historians in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. Boalsburg promotes itself as the birthplace of Memorial Day. However, no published reference to this event has been found earlier than the printing of the History of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers in 1904. In a footnote to a story about her brother, Mrs. Sophie (Keller) Hall described how she and Emma Hunter decorated the grave of Emma's father, Reuben Hunter, and then the graves of all soldiers in the cemetery. The original story did not account for Reuben Hunter's death occurring two months later on September 19, 1864. It also did not mention Mrs. Elizabeth Myers as one of the original participants. A bronze statue of all three women gazing upon Reuben Hunter's grave now stands near the entrance to the Boalsburg Cemetery. Although July 4, 1864, was a Monday, the town now claims that the original decoration was on one of the Sundays in October 1864.

National Decoration Day
On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan issued a proclamation calling for "Decoration Day" to be observed annually and nationwide; he was commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), an organization of and for Union Civil War veterans founded in Decatur, Illinois. With his proclamation, Logan adopted the Memorial Day practice that had begun in the Southern states two years earlier. The northern states quickly adopted the holiday. In 1868, memorial events were held in 183 cemeteries in 27 states, and 336 in 1869. One author claims that the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of any particular battle. Logan's wife noted that the date was chosen because it was the optimal date for flowers to be in bloom in the North.

State holiday
In 1873, New York made Decoration Day an official state holiday and by 1890, every northern state had followed suit. There was no standard program for the ceremonies, but they were typically sponsored by the Women's Relief Corps, the women's auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), which had 100,000 members. By 1870, the remains of nearly 300,000 Union dead had been reinterred in 73 national cemeteries, located near major battlefields and thus mainly in the South. The most famous are Gettysburg National Cemetery in Pennsylvania and Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.

Waterloo proclamation
On May 26, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson designated an "official" birthplace of the holiday by signing the presidential proclamation naming Waterloo, New York, as the holder of the title. This action followed House Concurrent Resolution 587, in which the 89th Congress had officially recognized that the patriotic tradition of observing Memorial Day had begun one hundred years prior in Waterloo, New York. The legitimacy of this claim has been called into question by several scholars.

Early national history
In April 1865, following Lincoln's assassination, commemorations were extensive. The more than 600,000 soldiers of both sides who fought and died in the Civil War meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance. Under the leadership of women during the war, an increasingly formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape. In 1865, the federal government also began creating the United States National Cemetery System for the Union war dead. By the 1880s, ceremonies were becoming more consistent across geography as the GAR provided handbooks that presented specific procedures, poems, and Bible verses for local post commanders to utilize in planning the local event. Historian Stuart McConnell reports:

"on the day itself, the post assembled and marched to the local cemetery to decorate the graves of the fallen, an enterprise meticulously organized months in advance to assure that none were missed. Finally came a simple and subdued graveyard service involving prayers, short patriotic speeches, and music ... and at the end perhaps a rifle salute."

Confederate Memorial Day

In 1868, some Southern public figures began adding the label "Confederate" to their commemorations and claimed that Northerners had appropriated the holiday. The first official celebration of Confederate Memorial Day as a public holiday occurred in 1874, following a proclamation by the Georgia legislature. By 1916, ten states celebrated it, on June 3, the birthday of CSA President Jefferson Davis. Other states chose late April dates, or May 10, commemorating Davis' capture.

The Ladies' Memorial Association played a key role in using Memorial Day rituals to preserve Confederate culture. Various dates ranging from April 25 to mid-June were adopted in different Southern states. Across the South, associations were founded, many by women, to establish and care for permanent cemeteries for the Confederate dead, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor appropriate monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate dead. The most important of these was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew throughout the South. Changes in the ceremony's hymns and speeches reflect an evolution of the ritual into a symbol of cultural renewal and conservatism in the South. By 1913, David Blight argues, the theme of American nationalism shared equal time with the Confederate.

Renaming
By the 20th century, various Union memorial traditions, celebrated on different days, merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who fought and died while in the U.S. military service. Indiana from the 1860s to the 1920s saw numerous debates on how to expand the celebration. It was a favorite lobbying activity of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). An 1884 GAR handbook explained that Memorial Day was "the day of all days in the G.A.R. Calendar" in terms of mobilizing public support for pensions. It advised family members to "exercise great care" in keeping the veterans sober.

Memorial Day speeches became an occasion for veterans, politicians, and ministers to commemorate the Civil War and, at first, to rehash the "atrocities" of the enemy. They mixed religion and celebratory nationalism, allowing Americans to make sense of their history in terms of sacrifice for a better nation. People of all religious beliefs joined, made that German and Irish soldiers – ethnic minorities that Anti-Irish sentiment#19th century faced Anti-German sentiment#United States – had become true Americans in the "baptism of blood" on the battlefield.

In the national capital in 1913 the four-day "Blue-Gray Reunion" featured parades, re-enactments, and speeches from a host of dignitaries, including President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected to the White House since the War. James Heflin of Alabama gave the main address. Heflin was a noted orator; his choice as Memorial Day speaker was criticized, as he was opposed for his support of segregation; however, his speech was moderate in tone and stressed national unity and goodwill, gaining him praise from newspapers.

The name "Memorial Day", which was first attested in 1882, gradually became more common than "Decoration Day" after World War II but was not declared the official name by federal law until 1967. On June 28, 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved four holidays, including Memorial Day, from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971.

In 1913, an Indiana veteran complained that younger people born since the war had a "tendency ... to forget the purpose of Memorial Day and make it a day for games, races, and revelry, instead of a day of memory and tears". In 1911 the scheduling of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway car race, later named the Indianapolis 500, was vehemently opposed by the increasingly elderly GAR. The state legislature in 1923 rejected holding the race on the holiday. But the new American Legion and local officials wanted the big race to continue, so Governor Warren McCray vetoed the bill and the race went on.

Civil religious holiday

Memorial Day endures as a holiday which most businesses observe because it marks the unofficial beginning of summer. (Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer.) The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) advocated returning to the original date. The VFW stated in 2002:

"Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed a lot to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day."

In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 pm. On Memorial Day, the flag of the United States is raised briskly to the top of the staff and then solemnly lowered to the half-staff position, where it remains only until noon. It is then raised to full-staff for the remainder of the day. The National Memorial Day Concert takes place on the west lawn of the United States Capitol.

Scholars,   following the lead of sociologist Robert Bellah, often make the argument that the United States has a secular "civil religion"—one with no association with any religious denomination or viewpoint—that has incorporated Memorial Day as a sacred event. With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the civil religion. Memorial Day gave ritual expression to these themes, integrating the local community into a sense of nationalism. The American civil religion, in contrast to that of France, was never anticlerical or militantly secular; in contrast to Britain, it was not tied to a specific denomination, such as the Church of England. The Americans borrowed from different religious traditions so that the average American saw no conflict between the two, and deep levels of personal motivation were aligned with attaining national goals.

Parades
Since 1867, Brooklyn, New York, has held an annual Memorial Day parade which it claims to be the nation's oldest. Grafton, West Virginia, and Ironton, Ohio have also had an ongoing parade since 1868. However, the Memorial Day parade in Rochester, Wisconsin, predates both the Doylestown and the Grafton parades by one year (1867).

Poppies
In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers' graves in Flanders. Inspired by the poem, YWCA worker Moina Michael attended a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries' conference three years later wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed over two dozen more to others present. The National American Legion adopted in 1920 the poppy as its official symbol of remembrance.

Decoration Day (tradition)
Decoration Days in Southern Appalachia and Liberia are a tradition which arose by the 19th century. Decoration practices are localized and unique to individual families, cemeteries, and communities, but common elements that unify the various Decoration Day practices are thought to represent syncretism of predominantly Christian cultures in 19th century Southern Appalachia with pre-Christian influences from Scotland, Ireland, and African cultures. Appalachian and Liberian cemetery decoration traditions are thought to have more in common with one another than with United States Memorial Day traditions which are focused on honoring the military dead. Appalachian and Liberian cemetery decoration traditions pre-date the United States Memorial Day holiday.

According to scholars Alan and Karen Jabbour, "the geographic spread ... from the Smokies to northeastern Texas and Liberia, offer strong evidence that the southern Decoration Day originated well back in the nineteenth century. The presence of the same cultural tradition throughout the Upland South argues for the age of the tradition, which was carried westward (and eastward to Africa) by nineteenth-century migration and has survived in essentially the same form till the present."

While these customs may have inspired in part rituals to honor military dead like Memorial Day, numerous differences exist between Decoration Day customs and Memorial Day, including that the date is set differently by each family or church for each cemetery to coordinate the maintenance, social, and spiritual aspects of decoration.

Films

 * In Memorial Day, a 2012 war film starring James Cromwell, Jonathan Bennett, and John Cromwell, a character recalls and relives memories of World War II.

Music

 * American rock band Drive-By Truckers released a Jason Isbell–penned song titled "Decoration Day" on their 2003 album of the same title.
 * American composer Charles Ives titled the second movement of his A Symphony: New England Holidays, "Decoration Day".

Poetry
Poems commemorating Memorial Day include:
 * Francis M. Finch's "The Blue and the Gray" (1867)
 * Michael Anania's "Memorial Day" (1994)
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Decoration Day" (1882)

United States

 * Remembrance Day at the Gettysburg Battlefield, an annual honoring of Civil War dead held near the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address
 * A Great Jubilee Day, first held the last Monday in May 1783 (American Revolutionary War)
 * Armed Forces Day, third Saturday in May, a more narrowly observed remembrance honoring those currently serving in the U.S. military
 * Armistice Day, November 11, the original name of Veterans Day in the United States
 * Confederate Memorial Day, observed on various dates in many states in the South in memory of those killed fighting for the Confederacy during the American Civil War
 * Memorial Day massacre of 1937, May 30, held to remember demonstrators shot by police in Chicago
 * Nora Fontaine Davidson, credited with the first Memorial Day ceremony in Petersburg, Virginia
 * Patriot Day, September 11, in memory of people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks
 * United States military casualties of war
 * Veterans Day, November 11, honoring American military veterans, both alive and deceased.

Other countries

 * ANZAC Day, April 25, an analogous observance in Australia and New Zealand
 * Armistice Day, November 11, the original name of Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other Commonwealth nations
 * Heroes' Day, various dates in various countries recognizing national heroes
 * International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, May 29, international observance recognizing United Nations peacekeepers
 * Remembrance Day, November 11, a similar observance in Canada, the United Kingdom, and many other Commonwealth nations originally marking the end of World War I
 * Remembrance of the Dead ("Dodenherdenking"), May 4, a similar observance in the Netherlands
 * Volkstrauertag ("People's Mourning Day"), a similar observance in Germany usually in November
 * Yom Hazikaron (Israeli memorial day), the day before Independence Day (Israel), around Iyar 4
 * Decoration Day (Canada), a Canadian holiday that recognizes veterans of Canada's military which has largely been eclipsed by the similar Remembrance Day
 * Memorial Day (South Korea), June 6, the day to commemorate the men and women who died while in military service during the Korean War and other significant wars or battles
 * Victoria Day, a Canadian holiday on the last Monday before May 25 each year, lacks the military memorial aspects of Memorial Day but serves a similar function as marking the start of cultural summer

title: Memorial Day


text:
Parnall

Parnall was a British aircraft manufacturer that evolved from a wood-working company before the First World War to a significant designer of military and civil aircraft into the 1940s. It was based in the west of England and was originally known as George Parnall & Co. Ltd.

History

In 1916, the Bristol based Parnall & Sons shopfitters started to manufacture aircraft at the Colliseum Works at Park Row in Bristol. During the First World War, the skilled staff were moved to sites around the city and in neighbouring South Gloucestershire producing planes to their own designs and, under contract, those of other companies.

In 1919, the aircraft business was split from the parent company Parnall & Sons as George Parnall and Company. In the 1920s, aircraft manufacture was centralised at a factory in Yate close to an airfield used by the Royal Flying Corps. In the 1930s, gun turrets for bomber aircraft were produced. The site was a strategic target for Luftwaffe bombing and during 1941, over fifty people were killed during the raids.

In 1935, Parnall Aircraft Limited was formed when George Parnall and Company amalgamated with the Hendy Aircraft Company and Nash and Thompson Limited. After the Second World War as aircraft component manufacture reduced, domestic appliances were built at the site. To reflect this move away from aviation the company changed its name to Parnall (Yate) Limited in 1946. This was acquired by Radiation Ltd. in 1958 and TI Group in 1967.

Aircraft
The Parnall Scout was a prototype single-seat anti-airship wooden biplane fighter aircraft developed in the 1910s. It was too heavy and slow and never went into production.

The Parnall Panther was a carrier-based wooden, single-bay biplane spotter and reconnaissance aircraft designed by Harold Bolas, who had joined Parnall and Sons after leaving the Admiralty's Air Department. It had a 230 hp Bentley BR2 rotary engine. Following contractual disputes production was transferred to the Bristol Aeroplane Company.

The Parnall Puffin was an experimental amphibious fighter-reconnaissance biplane.

The Parnall Plover single-seat naval fighter aircraft of the 1920s for use off the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, was ordered into small-scale production, but after extensive evaluation, the Fairey Flycatcher was preferred for large-scale service.

The Parnall Possum was an experimental triplane, with a single, central engine driving wing-mounted propellers via shafts and gears. Two of these aircraft were built in the mid-1920s.

The Parnall Pixie was a low-powered single-seat monoplane light aircraft originally designed to compete in the Lympne trials for motor-gliders in 1923, where it was flown successfully by Norman Macmillan. It had two sets of wings, one for cross-country flights and the other for speed; it later appeared as a biplane which could be converted into a monoplane. Parnall Pixie IIIa G-EBJG is still in existence with the Midland Air Museum, Coventry, England. The remains are in deep store and are not generally on view to the public without prior arrangement.

The Parnall Perch was a single-engined, side-by-side-seat aircraft designed as a general-purpose trainer. No contract on this specification was awarded and only one Perch was built.

The Parnall Peto was a small seaplane with folding wings for use as a submarine-carried reconnaissance aircraft.

The Parnall Pike was a two/three-seat biplane reconnaissance aircraft, capable of operating off carrier decks or from water, built in 1927. Only one was constructed.

The Parnall Pipit was a single-engine, single-seat naval fighter designed to an Air Ministry specification in 1927. Two prototypes were built but both were destroyed by tail flutter.

The Parnall Imp was an unusual single-engine, two-seat biplane built in 1927. It had a straight cantilever lower wing which supported the markedly swept upper wing. Only one was built.

The Parnall Elf was a two-seat light touring biplane, three being built at Yate between 1928 and 1932. The Elf was the last aircraft designed by Harold Bolas before he left the company to go to the United States.

The Parnall Prawn was an experimental flying boat built in 1930. Its single engine was fitted on a tilting mounting in the nose, so that the propeller could be kept clear of the water on takeoff and landing. Only one was built and it is not known whether it was ever flown.

The Parnall Parasol was an experimental parasol winged aircraft design to measure the aerodynamic forces on wings in flight. Two were built and flown in the early 1930s.

The Parnall G.4/31 was a 1930s general purpose aircraft which could operate as a day and night bomber as well as the reconnaissance, torpedo and dive-bombing roles. It was a large angular biplane powered by a 690 hp (515 kW) Bristol Pegasus IM3 with a Townend ring.

The Parnall Heck was designed by Basil B. Henderson as a single-engined, conventional low-wing cabin monoplane, built of spruce with a plywood covering, initially a two-seater in tandem layout. The prototype was originally flown as the Hendy Heck but by the time of its first public demonstration in July 1935, the companies had merged and the aircraft was renamed as the Parnall Heck.

The Parnall 382 (also known as the Heck III), was a single-engined wooden monoplane trainer aircraft with two open cockpits. It first flew in 1939.

title: Parnall


text:
Talk:Jurij Vega

Untitled

 * he fought French Revolutionary under the command of General Wurmser

It's hard to tell from this quote what side Vega and Wurmser were fighting for.
 * Agree. I'll correct this. They both fought on French side. --XJam [2002.07.22]] 1 Monday (0).

 * Wrong. Wurmser was really some period in French Army but at this time he was fighting with European coalition on Austrian side against French revolutionary forces. --XJam [2002.07.23]] 2 Tuesday (0).

A question about wikistyles for persons

Can someone please show me one wikistyle about persons because I am pretty tired correcting articles from one form to another and again back forth. I guess the 'correct' or the most common form here should be an encyclopedian style. And that is we first say for every person when and where is born. Not in the end or somewhere in the middle. I've found at least 5 to 6 styles. Also - should URLs be in a full form or not for printing purposes? Best regard. --XJamRastafire 16:23 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 20:45, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

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Circular reference
Under the subheading "Mathematical accomplishments", the link Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus is circular, returning to itself. I'm not sure how to correct this... Wendigo Lake (talk) 02:07, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I've removed the link per WP:SELFRED. Doremo (talk) 03:54, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Jurij Vega


text:
Obi-Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan Kenobi is a character in the Star Wars franchise. In the original film trilogy, he is a Jedi Master who trains Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force. In the prequel trilogy, he mentors Luke's father, Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan is portrayed by Alec Guinness in the original trilogy and by Ewan McGregor in the prequel films. McGregor also plays the character in the television series Obi-Wan Kenobi. Guinness' performance in Star Wars (1977) earned him the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Creation and development
Various claims have been made about the origins of the character Obi-Wan Kenobi. In his book about the Star Wars franchise, Chris Taylor asserted that Obi-Wan was inspired by the J.R.R. Tolkien character Gandalf. Ben Sherlock of ScreenRant, meanwhile, claimed that the Jedi Master was based on General Makabe Rokurōta, a character from Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress.

Lucas created Obi-Wan Kenobi as a mentor for Luke, and originally planned for him to continue training Luke in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the first sequel to Star Wars. Although Obi-Wan's death was not in the final version of the Star Wars script, Lucas decided during filming that Obi-Wan should die. Alec Guinness said he begged Lucas to kill off his character because he hated Obi-Wan's dialogue. Lucas, however, claimed he added Obi-Wan's death because the character served no purpose after his duel with Vader. Lucas later reflected: "It would be much more powerful, satisfying and interesting if Darth Vader were to kill him and he were to go on to a different form."

When outlining The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas decided he wanted Obi-Wan to return as a spirit to continue training Luke. Partly due to Guinness' failing health, Lucas realized that he would also need another mentor character. This new mentor would eventually take the form of Yoda.

Lucas described Obi-Wan's character development in The Phantom Menace: "In the beginning, Obi-Wan is at odds with, who rebels against the Jedi rules. But by the end of the film, he has become by taking on his rebellious personality and his responsibilities."

Portrayal
When casting Star Wars, Lucas sought an established star for the role of Obi-Wan. He considered Peter Cushing for the part, but decided the actor's lean features would be better employed as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin. The film's producer, Gary Kurtz, felt a strong character actor was required to convey the "stability and gravitas" of Obi-Wan. Before Guinness was cast, the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune—who plays Makabe Rokurōta in The Hidden Fortress—was considered for the role. Mifune's daughter, Mika Kitagawa, said her father "had a lot of samurai pride" and turned down the roles of both Obi-Wan and Darth Vader because he thought Star Wars would employ cheap special effects and would therefore "cheapen the image of samurai". Once Guinness was selected and production was underway, Lucas credited the English actor with inspiring the cast and crew to work harder, which contributed significantly to the completion of filming. Harrison Ford, who plays Han Solo in the film, said he admired Guinness' preparation, professionalism and kindness towards the other actors.

Ewan McGregor portrays Obi-Wan in the prequel trilogy and in the 2022 miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi. His performance in the first prequel film, The Phantom Menace (1999), earned him a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actor.

Original trilogy
Obi-Wan is introduced in Star Wars (1977) as an elderly hermit living on Tatooine. When Luke and C-3PO travel the desert in search of the runaway droid R2-D2, Obi-Wan rescues them from Tusken Raiders. At Obi-Wan's home, R2-D2 plays a recording of Princess Leia explaining that R2-D2 contains architectural plans for the Galactic Empire's battle station, the Death Star. Leia asks Obi-Wan to deliver R2-D2 and the plans to Alderaan to aid the Rebel Alliance. Obi-Wan reveals to Luke that he is a Jedi, a peacekeeper from the days of the Republic. He explains that Luke's father was also a Jedi, and was killed by Darth Vader. Obi-Wan gives Luke his father's lightsaber and invites him to come to Alderaan and begin Jedi training. At first Luke declines, but changes his mind after finding that his aunt and uncle have been killed by Imperial stormtroopers.

As Obi-Wan and Luke approach Mos Eisley, Obi-Wan uses a Jedi mind trick to compel Imperial troops to let them through a checkpoint. Obi-Wan and Luke hire the smugglers Han Solo and Chewbacca to take them to Alderaan aboard Han's ship, the Millennium Falcon. During the journey, Obi-Wan instructs Luke in lightsaber combat. Obi-Wan suddenly feels "a great disturbance in the Force"; soon after, he and the others find that the Empire has obliterated Alderaan. The Falcon gets caught in the Death Star's tractor beam, but the group is able to avoid detection and infiltrate the station. Obi-Wan disables the tractor beam, then encounters Vader. They engage in a lightsaber duel as Luke, Leia, Han and Chewbacca escape. Obi-Wan allows Vader to strike him down, then vanishes into the Force. Later, Obi-Wan contacts Luke through the Force and helps him destroy the Death Star.

In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Obi-Wan appears several times as a Force spirit. On the ice planet Hoth, he instructs Luke to travel to Dagobah to find the exiled Jedi Master Yoda. Yoda is reluctant to mentor Luke, but Obi-Wan convinces him to continue Luke's training. When Luke intends to leave Dagobah to rescue his friends in Cloud City, Obi-Wan beseeches him to stay, but Luke leaves anyway. In Return of the Jedi (1983), Obi-Wan appears to Luke after Yoda's death on Dagobah. Obi-Wan confirms that Vader is Luke's father, and reveals that Leia is Luke's twin sister. He urges Luke to confront and defeat Vader. After the Rebels destroy the second Death Star and defeat the Empire, Obi-Wan appears at the celebration on Endor alongside the Force spirits of Yoda and Anakin Skywalker.

Prequel trilogy
A younger Obi-Wan appears in The Phantom Menace (1999), which is set thirty-two years before Star Wars. He is the apprentice of the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, and accompanies him to negotiations with the Trade Federation, which is blockading the planet Naboo. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon rescue Naboo's fourteen-year-old queen Padmé Amidala with help from the Gungan Jar Jar Binks, then travel to Coruscant, the capital of the Republic. When they land on Tatooine for repairs, they encounter the nine-year-old slave Anakin Skywalker. Qui-Gon believes the boy is the "Chosen One" of Jedi prophecy, destined to bring balance to the Force. After securing his freedom, Anakin joins the group on their journey. While leaving Tatooine, they are attacked by the Sith Lord Darth Maul. Back on Naboo, they meet Maul again, and engage him in lightsaber combat. Maul mortally wounds Qui-Gon, then is killed by Obi-Wan. As Qui-Gon dies, he asks his apprentice to train Anakin as a Jedi, with or without the approval of the Jedi Council. Later, Yoda proclaims Obi-Wan a Jedi Knight and reluctantly allows Anakin to become his Padawan.

The second film of the trilogy, Attack of the Clones (2002), takes place ten years later. Anakin has grown powerful but arrogant, and believes that Obi-Wan is holding him back. After they save Padmé from an assassination attempt, Obi-Wan traces the assassins to the planet Kamino. He learns of a massive clone army that is being created for the Republic. The clones are derived from the bounty hunter Jango Fett, and Obi-Wan deduces that he was responsible for the attempt on Padmé's life. Fett escapes to the planet Geonosis with his clone son Boba, unaware that Obi-Wan is pursuing them. On Geonosis, Obi-Wan discovers that a confederacy of star systems is planning to revolt against the Republic. The confederacy is led by the Sith Lord Count Dooku, the former Jedi Master of. Obi-Wan is captured and sentenced to death by Dooku, but Yoda and Mace Windu arrive with an army and prevent the execution. Obi-Wan and Anakin confront Dooku, but he overpowers them both. Yoda saves their lives, but Dooku escapes.

Revenge of the Sith (2005) is set three years later. Obi-Wan is now a Jedi Master, a member of the Jedi Council, and a general. Obi-Wan and Anakin embark on a rescue mission to save the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine from the cyborg Separatist commander General Grievous. Dooku duels the Jedi once again, knocking Obi-Wan unconscious. Anakin then defeats Dooku and executes him on Palpatine's orders. After locating Grievous on the planet Utapau, Obi-Wan kills him. The Sith Lord Darth Sidious— who is revealed to be Palpatine—issues Order 66, which compels the clone troopers to murder the Jedi. Obi-Wan and Yoda find that all the Jedi in the Jedi Temple have been slaughtered, including the children. After Obi-Wan warns all surviving Jedi to go into exile, he discovers it was Anakin, now Sidious' apprentice Darth Vader, who led the massacre.

Obi-Wan visits Padmé to ascertain Anakin's whereabouts, and realizes that Anakin is her husband and the father of her unborn child. When Padmé travels to the volcanic planet Mustafar to confront her husband herself, Obi-Wan stows away aboard her ship. Once on Mustafar, Obi-Wan confronts Vader, who accuses him and Padmé of conspiring against him. After Vader uses the Force to strangle Padmé into unconsciousness, Obi-Wan engages him in a ferocious lightsaber duel, which ends with severing several of his limbs. Obi-Wan leaves Vader burning to death, unaware that he will be rescued by Sidious moments later and eventually turned into a cyborg. Obi-Wan takes Padmé to the asteroid Polis Massa, where she dies after giving birth to the twins Luke and Leia. He assists in hiding the children from the newly-created Empire: Leia is adopted by Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan, while Obi-Wan delivers Luke to Anakin's stepbrother Owen Lars and his wife Beru on Tatooine. Obi-Wan then goes into exile on Tatooine, where he can watch over Luke.

Sequel trilogy
In The Force Awakens (2015), Rey hears Obi-Wan's voice during a Force vision. During her battle against the resurrected Darth Sidious in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), she hears the voices of various deceased Jedi, including Obi-Wan. He says, "These are your final steps, Rey. Rise and take them." The voices of both McGregor and Guinness were used in both films.

The Clone Wars
Obi-Wan appears in the animated series The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020). He is a general during the Clone Wars, and he and Anakin have many adventures fighting the Separatists. During this time Obi-Wan's diplomatic skills earn him the appellation "The Negotiator" due to his reputation for preventing and stopping battles without the use of weapons. The series highlights his numerous confrontations with General Grievous, his adversarial relationship with the Dark Jedi Asajj Ventress, his romance with Duchess Satine Kryze, and the return of his old enemy Darth Maul.

Star Wars Rebels
The animated series Star Wars Rebels (2014–2018) takes place five years before Star Wars. In the season 3 episode "Visions and Voices", Ezra Bridger (voiced by Taylor Gray) discovers that Obi-Wan is alive on Tatooine; Obi-Wan's old nemesis Darth Maul finds him as well. In the episode "Twin Suns", Obi-Wan finds Ezra while he is lost in the desert while letting him know Maul was intending to use him. At that moment, Maul attacks them, and Obi-Wan ushers Ezra to retreat. Obi-Wan mortally wounds Maul during a final lightsaber duel; with his dying breath, Maul asks Obi-Wan if he is protecting the "Chosen One", and Obi-Wan replies that he is. After Maul's death, Obi-Wan is seen watching over Luke Skywalker from a distance.

In Rebels, Obi-Wan was voiced by Stephen Stanton, who replaced James Arnold Taylor. Rebels creator Dave Filoni, who worked with the character during the full duration of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, said he considered asking McGregor to reprise and voice the role. However, a voice recording of the late Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi was used in a 2018 episode.

Obi-Wan Kenobi
The 2022 live-action series Obi-Wan Kenobi takes place ten years after the events of ''Revenge of the Sith.  It was originally conceived as a standalone film, but was cancelled during pre-production following the box office disappointment of the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story''. At the beginning of the series, is living in hiding on Tatooine and watching over the ten-year-old Luke. He has lost his connection to the Force, cannot communicate with the spirit of Qui-Gon, and experiences nightmares from his past. Unbeknownst to, Anakin survived their duel on Mustafar and is now hunting Jedi as Darth Vader. Reva Sevander, one of the Empire's Inquisitors, is obsessed with finding, who is widely believed to be dead. In an attempt to lure him, she kidnaps Luke's twin sister, Princess Leia. agrees to rescue Leia after her adoptive father, Bail Organa, visits his home.

After tracking Leia's kidnappers to the planet Daiyu, encounters the con artist Haja Estree, who directs  to Leia's location. liberates the young princess, but is unable to flee the planet before the Inquisitors detect his presence. Reva locates him and Leia, and reveals that Anakin is still alive as Vader. When Reva's superior, the Grand Inquisitor, arrives to arrest, Reva stabs him with her lightsaber. and Leia then escape to the mining planet Mapuzo, where they are discovered by Imperial troops. They elude their enemies with help from Tala, an Imperial officer who is secretly a member of the Path, an organization that aids those hunted by the Empire. As she escorts them to a hidden passageway, Vader arrives and begins harming innocent bystanders, hoping to bait into revealing himself. duels with Vader, who overpowers him. Tala saves, but Leia is captured again by Reva.

and Tala rescue Leia from the Inquisitors' stronghold, escaping with the help of Tala's Path allies. Reva leads a siege on the Path facility, and speaks with her to stall for time. He deduces that she was a Jedi youngling who survived Vader's massacre at the Jedi Temple, and now wants to kill him for revenge. He suggests that she can attack him when he arrives. As the Path members evacuate, Reva tries to assault Vader but is quickly overpowered and left for dead. She manages to survive, however, and finds a message on 's transmitter that reveals Luke's location on Tatooine. Vader pursues the ship carrying the Path members and, who decides to lure Vader away and confront him on a nearby planet. As they duel, regains his connection to the Force and realizes Anakin has completely embraced his identity as Vader. wounds his former apprentice and leaves him incapacitated. On Tatooine, Reva pursues Luke into the desert. Remembering the massacre at the Temple, she is unable to kill the boy, and returns him to his family. arrives and congratulates her for overcoming her trauma and liberating herself. In the final moments of the series, finally manages to converse with.

Novels and comics
appears briefly in the 2015 novel Dark Disciple, which is based on unfinished episodes from The Clone Wars. It provides details about the friendship between and the rogue Jedi Quinlan Vos. In the 2015 Star Wars comic series, Luke goes to Obi-Wan's abandoned house on Tatooine and finds his diary, in which has written stories from his past. The 2016 Marvel Comics mini-series Obi-Wan and Anakin focuses on the two Jedi between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.

appears in the 2019 novel Master and Apprentice, which explores his relationship with prior to the events of The Phantom Menace. He is also featured in two 2022 novels: Brotherhood, which is set at the beginning of the Clone Wars, and Star Wars Padawan, which recounts his early years as an apprentice.

Star Wars Legends
Following the acquisition of Lucasfilm by The Walt Disney Company in 2012, most of the licensed Star Wars novels and comics produced between 1977 and 2014 were rebranded as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canon to the franchise. The Legends works comprise a separate narrative universe.

Novels
Obi-Wan's life prior to The Phantom Menace is portrayed mostly in Jude Watson's Jedi Apprentice series, which follows his adventures as Qui-Gon's apprentice. Notable events in the series include his battle with the Dark Jedi Xanatos and his first independent mission. Watson's Jedi Quest series details his adventures with Anakin in the years leading up to Attack of the Clones. His heroism just before and during the Clone Wars is portrayed in novels such as Outbound Flight, The Approaching Storm, and The Cestus Deception. Obi-Wan's life between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars is depicted in The Last of the Jedi series. Set roughly a year after the fall of the Republic, the series follows Obi-Wan as he seeks out possible survivors of the Great Jedi Purge, including Anakin's former rival, Ferus Olin. The novels also depict Obi-Wan adjusting to life as a hermit on Tatooine while watching over Luke. He discovers that Vader is still alive after seeing him on the Holonet, the galaxy's official news source.

Obi-Wan appears in the final chapter of Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, which takes place just after Revenge of the Sith. He learns with alarm that Vader survived their duel on Mustafar, but Qui-Gon assures him that Vader will not set foot on Tatooine for fear of reawakening Anakin Skywalker. Qui-Gon advises him not to reveal to Luke his true parentage until the time is right. In various novels set after Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan appears as a Force spirit. In The Truce at Bakura, he warns Luke about the ; in The Lost City of the Jedi, he guides him to the eponymous city on Yavin 4; in Heir to the Empire, he bids farewell to Luke, explaining that he must abandon his spiritual form and ascend to a higher plane of consciousness. Before parting, Luke says that Obi-Wan was like a father to him, and Obi-Wan replies that he loved Luke like a son. The novel Kenobi (2013) tells the story of Obi-Wan's first days of exile on Tatooine.

Comics
Issue #24 of Marvel's 1977 Star Wars comic follows during the Republic era. He is featured in various Dark Horse Comics publications, including several set during the Clone Wars. In Star Wars: Republic (1998–2006), Obi-Wan fights the Separatists, is tortured by Asajj Ventress before being rescued by Anakin, and apprehends the corrupt Jedi Master Quinlan Vos. Throughout the series, he grows increasingly wary of Palpatine's designs on the Republic and his influence on Anakin. In the Star Wars: Visionaries story "Old Wounds" (2005), confronts Darth Maul on Tatooine during Luke's childhood. Owen Lars shoots and kills Maul, then warns to stay away from Luke. Through the Force, Obi-Wan reassures Luke that he will be there for him when needed.

Clone Wars
Obi-Wan appears in the animated micro-series Clone Wars, which aired on Cartoon Network from 2003 to 2005. The series was removed from canon in 2014 and placed in the Legends universe.

Cultural impact
Guinness was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Obi-Wan in Star Wars. In 2003, the American Film Institute selected Obi-Wan Kenobi as the 37th greatest movie hero of all time. He was listed as the third greatest Star Wars character by IGN, and was chosen as one of UGO Networks' favorite heroes of all time.

In 2004, the Council of the Commune Lubicz in Poland passed a resolution giving the name "Obi-Wan Kenobi" to one of the streets in Grabowiec, a small village near Toruń. The street was named in 2005. The name of the street, Obi-Wana Kenobiego, translates from Polish as "the street of Obi-Wan Kenobi".

title: Obi-Wan Kenobi


text:
Warp Drive

Warp Drive is a short street in Sterling, Virginia, United States. Originally named Steeplechase Drive, it is located in an industrial park off Atlantic Boulevard, and primarily serves as the address for Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, an aerospace company. The street ends at a circle where an off-ramp from Virginia State Highway 28 joins from the opposite direction.

In 2011, employees of Orbital Sciences—later acquired by Northrop—asked the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to rename their street after the warp drive that allows ships in the Star Trek universe to travel faster than light. The supervisors voted unanimously to make it so (several of them using catchphrases associated with the franchise).

Street
Warp Drive's eastern terminus is a signalized three-way intersection with Atlantic Boulevard, roughly one half-mile (800 m) north of its southern terminus at Church Road (Virginia State Route 625) at Sterling. The area is developed in a pattern typical of eastern Loudoun County's edge-city suburban sprawl. On either side of Atlantic at the intersection are office buildings surrounded by parking lots, all facilities of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, with some newer residential subdivisions to the southeast and, across the Cabin Branch of Broad Run, the east. The Washington & Old Dominion Trail runs to the immediate southwest.

To the northeast is another office building with an artificial pond. The northwest corner of the intersection, and the entire north side of Warp Drive, is a large undeveloped parcel. From the intersection, the street runs 300 ft (100 m) west, divided by a grass median strip, to a small traffic circle that gives access to driveways into Orbital's facilities on the north and south. On the west side is the end of a one-way offramp that gives access to Warp from Sully Road (Virginia State Route 28), roughly 500 ft to the west.

History
Orbital Sciences Corporation was founded in 1982 to provide rocket engines and parts to aerospace and defense customers public and private. It has always been headquartered in Northern Virginia, like many other defense contractors. In 1993 it moved into its current complex in Sterling.

At that time the short street where Orbital was located was known as Steeplechase Drive. In 2011 the company's executives, who were fans of Star Trek, asked the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to formally rename the street Warp Drive, after the faster-than-light "warp drive" propulsion technology used by the franchise's starships. At the last meeting of the year, the board voted unanimously to grant the request.

Officially, the county said the change was made to "improve the identity and to better integrate the Orbital campus." But supervisors were less formal when discussing the issue, which had originally been on a consent agenda. Several cast their votes with catchphrases from the original Star Trek series. "To Orbital, live long and prosper," said Stevens Miller, who lived in Sterling. Board member Eugene Delgaudio asked, "Can you give me any speed, Scotty?", incorrectly using a Scottish accent as he did so.

One supervisor, Jim Burton of the Blue Ridge District, tried to be serious. He reminded the board that "warp" had other meanings. "You need to think about it before you vote on it" he warned. "Would you prefer 'Beam me up, Scotty?'", the board's chairman replied. In the end the vote was unanimous. "What more uplifting motion could there possibly be than something that will literally make law out of a Star Trek joke?" concluded Miller. "It's a great idea. I look forward to driving on Warp Drive myself." Orbital agreed to reimburse the county for the approximately $500 it would cost to replace the street sign.

The online Ashburn Patch noted how the name change reflected the changes to Loudoun County in the past two decades. While the western portion of the county has stayed largely rural and agricultural, as evoked by the street's original name of Steeplechase Drive, eastern Loudoun has grown tremendously during that same time as many businesses, in particular high-tech defense contractors like Orbital, have located in the area. "So Orbital's request to change the name of the road along its perimeter from Steeplechase Drive to Warp Drive brings to mind the county's dichotomy," it observed. "Out with the horse-racing theme and in with space."

On September 18, 2017, Northrop Grumman announced plans to purchase Orbital for $7.8 billion in cash plus assumption of $1.4 billion in debt. Orbital shareholders approved the buyout on November 29, 2017. The FTC approved the acquisition with conditions on June 5, 2018, and one day later, Orbital was absorbed and became Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems.

title: Warp Drive