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Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard (Szilárd Leó, pronounced ; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian born physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. According to György Marx, he was one of the Hungarian scientists known as The Martians.

Together with Enrico Fermi, he applied for a nuclear reactor patent in 1944. In addition to the nuclear reactor, Szilard coined and submitted the earliest known patent applications and the first publications for the concept of the electron microscope (1928), the cyclotron (1929), and contributed to the development of the linear accelerator (1928) in Germany. Between 1926 and 1930, he worked with Einstein on the development of the Einstein refrigerator. His inventions, discoveries, and contributions related to biological science are also equally important, they include the discovery of feedback inhibition and the invention of the chemostat. According to Theodore Puck and Philip I. Marcus, Szilard gave essential advice which made the earliest cloning of the human cell a reality.

Szilard initially attended Palatine Joseph Technical University in Budapest, but his engineering studies were interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. He left Hungary for Germany in 1919, enrolling at Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Berlin-Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), but became bored with engineering and transferred to Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he studied physics. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Maxwell's demon, a long-standing puzzle in the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics. Szilard was the first scientist of note to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory.

After Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Szilard urged his family and friends to flee Europe while they still could. He moved to England, where he helped found the Academic Assistance Council, an organization dedicated to helping refugee scholars find new jobs. While in England he discovered a means of isotope separation known as the Szilard–Chalmers effect. Foreseeing another war in Europe, Szilard moved to the United States in 1938, where he worked with Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn on means of creating a nuclear chain reaction. He was present when this was achieved within the Chicago Pile-1 on December 2, 1942. He worked for the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on aspects of nuclear reactor design. He drafted the Szilard petition advocating a demonstration of the atomic bomb, but the Interim Committee chose to use them against cities without warning.

He publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, a new kind of nuclear weapon that might annihilate mankind. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, he underwent a cobalt-60 treatment that he had designed. He helped found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he became a resident fellow. Szilard founded Council for a Livable World in 1962 to deliver "the sweet voice of reason" about nuclear weapons to Congress, the White House, and the American public. He died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1964.

Early life
He was born as Leó Spitz in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, on February 11, 1898. His middle-class Jewish parents, Lajos (Louis) Spitz, a civil engineer, and Tekla Vidor, raised Leó on the Városligeti Fasor in Pest. He had two younger siblings, a brother, Béla, born in 1900, and a sister, Rózsi, born in 1901. On October 4, 1900, the family changed its surname from the German "Spitz" to the Hungarian "Szilárd", a name that means "solid" in Hungarian. Despite having a religious background, Szilard became an agnostic. From 1908 to 1916 he attended Föreáliskola (high school) in Budapest's 6th District. Showing an early interest in physics and a proficiency in mathematics, in 1916 he won the Eötvös Prize, a national prize for mathematics.

With World War I raging in Europe, Szilard received notice on January 22, 1916, that he had been drafted into the 5th Fortress Regiment, but he was able to continue his studies. He enrolled as an engineering student at the Palatine Joseph Technical University, which he entered in September 1916. The following year he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army's 4th Mountain Artillery Regiment, but immediately was sent to Budapest as an officer candidate. He rejoined his regiment in May 1918 but in September, before being sent to the front, he fell ill with Spanish Influenza and was returned home for hospitalization. Later he was informed that his regiment had been nearly annihilated in battle, so the illness probably saved his life. He was discharged honorably in November 1918, after the Armistice.

In January 1919, Szilard resumed his engineering studies, but Hungary was in a chaotic political situation with the rise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun. Szilard and his brother Béla founded their own political group, the Hungarian Association of Socialist Students, with a platform based on a scheme of Szilard's for taxation reform. He was convinced that socialism was the answer to Hungary's post-war problems, but not that of Kun's Hungarian Socialist Party, which had close ties to the Soviet Union. When Kun's government tottered, the brothers officially changed their religion from "Israelite" to "Calvinist", but when they attempted to re-enroll in what was now the Budapest University of Technology, they were prevented from doing so by nationalist students because they were Jews.

Time in Berlin
Convinced that there was no future for him in Hungary, Szilard left for Berlin via Austria on December 25, 1919, and enrolled at the Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He was soon joined by his brother Béla. Szilard became bored with engineering, and his attention turned to physics. This was not taught at the Technische Hochschule, so he transferred to Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he attended lectures given by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Walter Nernst, James Franck and Max von Laue. He also met fellow Hungarian students Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Dennis Gabor.

Szilard's doctoral dissertation on thermodynamics Über die thermodynamischen Schwankungserscheinungen (On The Manifestation of Thermodynamic Fluctuations), praised by Einstein, won top honors in 1922. It involved a long-standing puzzle in the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics known as Maxwell's demon, a thought experiment originated by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The problem was thought to be insoluble, but in tackling it Szilard recognized the connection between thermodynamics and information theory. Szilard was appointed as assistant to von Laue at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1924. In 1927 he finished his habilitation and became a Privatdozent (private lecturer) in physics. For his habilitation lecture, he produced a second paper on Maxwell's Demon, Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen (On the reduction of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings), that had actually been written soon after the first. This introduced the thought experiment now called the Szilard engine and became important in the history of attempts to understand Maxwell's demon. The paper is also the first equation of negative entropy and information. As such, it established Szilard as one of the founders of information theory, but he did not publish it until 1929, and did not pursue it further. Cybernetics, via the work of Norbert Wiener and Claude E. Shannon, would later develop the concept into a general theory in the 1940s and 1950s—though, during the time of the Cybernetics Meetings, John Von Neumann pointed out that Szilard first equated information with entropy in his review of Wiener's Cybernetics book.

Throughout his time in Berlin, Szilard worked on numerous technical inventions. In 1928 he submitted a patent application for the linear accelerator, not knowing of Gustav Ising's prior 1924 journal article and Rolf Widerøe's operational device, and in 1929 applied for one for the cyclotron. He was also the first person to conceive the idea of the electron microscope, and submitted the earliest patent for one in 1928. Between 1926 and 1930, he worked with Einstein to develop the Einstein refrigerator, notable because it had no moving parts. He did not build all of these devices, or publish these ideas in scientific journals, and so credit for them often went to others. As a result, Szilard never received the Nobel Prize, but Ernest Lawrence was awarded it for the cyclotron in 1939, and Ernst Ruska for the electron microscope in 1986.

Szilard received German citizenship in 1930, but was already uneasy about the political situation in Europe. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Szilard urged his family and friends to flee Europe while they still could. He moved to England, and transferred his savings of £1,595 (£ today) from his bank in Zürich to one in London. He lived in hotels where lodging and meals cost about £5.5 a week. For those less fortunate, he helped found the Academic Assistance Council, an organization dedicated to helping refugee scholars find new jobs, and persuaded the Royal Society to provide accommodation for it at Burlington House. He enlisted the help of academics such as Harald Bohr, G. H. Hardy, Archibald Hill and Frederick G. Donnan. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, it had helped to find places for over 2,500 refugee scholars.

Nuclear physics
On the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard read an article in The Times summarizing a speech given by Lord Rutherford in which Rutherford rejected the feasibility of using atomic energy for practical purposes. The speech remarked specifically on the recent 1932 work of his students, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in "splitting" lithium into alpha particles, by bombardment with protons from a particle accelerator they had constructed. Rutherford went on to say:

"We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine. But the subject was scientifically interesting because it gave insight into the atoms."

Szilard was so annoyed at Rutherford's dismissal that, on the same day, he conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction (analogous to a chemical chain reaction), using recently discovered neutrons. The idea did not use the mechanism of nuclear fission, which was not yet discovered, but Szilard realized that if neutrons could initiate any sort of energy-producing nuclear reaction, such as the one that had occurred in lithium, and could be produced themselves by the same reaction, energy might be obtained with little input, since the reaction would be self-sustaining. He wanted to carry out a systematic survey of all 92 then-known elements in order to find one that can allow the chain reaction, at an estimated cost of $8000, but he did not for lack of funds.

Szilard filed for a patent on the concept of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction in June 1934, which was granted in March 1936. Under section 30 of the Patents and Designs Act (1907, UK), Szilard was able to assign the patent to the British Admiralty to ensure its secrecy, which he did. Consequently, his patent was not published until 1949 when the relevant parts of the Patents and Designs Act (1907, UK) were repealed by the Patents and Designs Act (July 1949, UK). Richard Rhodes described Szilard's moment of inspiration:

"In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come."

Prior to conceiving the nuclear chain reaction, in 1932 Szilard had read H. G. Wells' The World Set Free, a book describing continuing explosives which Wells termed "atomic bombs"; Szilard wrote in his memoirs the book had made "a very great impression on me." When Szilard assigned his patent to the Admiralty to keep the news from reaching the notice of the wider scientific community, he wrote, "Knowing what this [a chain reaction] would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public."

In early 1934, Szilard began working at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Working with a young physicist on the hospital staff, Thomas A. Chalmers, he began studying radioactive isotopes for medical purposes. It was known that bombarding elements with neutrons could produce either heavier isotopes of an element, or a heavier element, a phenomenon known as the Fermi Effect after its discoverer, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. When they bombarded ethyl iodide with neutrons produced by a radon–beryllium source, they found that the heavier radioactive isotopes of iodine separated from the compound. Thus, they had discovered a means of isotope separation. This method became known as the Szilard–Chalmers effect, and was widely used in the preparation of medical isotopes. He also attempted unsuccessfully to create a nuclear chain reaction using beryllium by bombarding it with X-rays.

Columbia University
Szilard visited Béla and Rose and her husband Roland (Lorand) Detre, in Switzerland in September 1937. After a rainstorm, he and his siblings spent an afternoon in an unsuccessful attempt to build a prototype collapsible umbrella. One reason for the visit was that he had decided to emigrate to the United States, as he believed that another war in Europe was inevitable and imminent. He reached New York on the liner RMS Franconia (1922) on January 2, 1938. Over the next few months, he moved from place to place, conducting research with Maurice Goldhaber at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and then the University of Chicago, University of Michigan and the University of Rochester, where he undertook experiments with indium but again failed to initiate a chain reaction.

In early 1938, Szilard would settle down at "what would become a haven for much of the rest of his life" when he took a room at the King's Crown Hotel in New York City, being near Columbia University were he now conducted research without a formal title or position. He encountered John R. Dunning, who invited him to speak about his research at an afternoon seminar in January 1939. That same month, Niels Bohr brought news with him to New York that nuclear fission had accidentally been observed by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin on 19 December 1938. Hahn and Strassman's misunderstanding of their observation would be corrected theoretically and thus explained by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, as Meitner had known of Szilard's theory back in 1933 and after re-conducting the experiment themselves, confirmed Szilard's theory to have been correct all along. When Szilard found out about it on a visit to Wigner at Princeton University, he immediately realized that uranium might be the element capable of sustaining a chain reaction.

Unable to convince Fermi that this was the case, Szilard set out on his own. He obtained permission from the head of the physics department at Columbia, George B. Pegram, to use a laboratory for three months. To fund his experiment, he borrowed $2,000 from a fellow inventor, Benjamin Liebowitz. He wired Frederick Lindemann at Oxford and asked him to send a beryllium cylinder. He persuaded Walter Zinn to become his collaborator and hired Semyon Krewer to investigate processes for manufacturing pure uranium and graphite.

Szilard and Zinn conducted a simple experiment on the seventh floor of Pupin Hall at Columbia, using a radium–beryllium source to bombard uranium with neutrons. Initially nothing registered on the oscilloscope, but then Zinn realized that it was not plugged in. On doing so, they discovered significant neutron multiplication in natural uranium, proving that a chain reaction might be possible. Szilard later described the event: "We turned the switch and saw the flashes. We watched them for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home." He understood the implications and consequences of this discovery, though. "That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief".

While they had demonstrated that the fission of uranium produced more neutrons than it consumed, this was still not a chain reaction. Szilard persuaded Fermi and Herbert L. Anderson to try a larger experiment using 500 lb of uranium. To maximize the chance of fission, they needed a neutron moderator to slow the neutrons down. Hydrogen was a known moderator, so they used water. The results were disappointing. It became apparent that hydrogen slowed neutrons down, but also absorbed them, leaving fewer for the chain reaction. Szilard then suggested Fermi use carbon, in the form of graphite. He felt he would need about 50 t (50.8 metric ton) of graphite and 5 t of uranium. As a back-up plan, Szilard also considered where he might find a few tons of heavy water; deuterium would not absorb neutrons like ordinary hydrogen but would have the similar value as a moderator. Such quantities of material would require a lot of money.

Szilard drafted a confidential letter to the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, explaining the possibility of nuclear weapons, warning of the German nuclear weapon project, and encouraging the development of a program that could result in their creation. With the help of Wigner and Edward Teller, he approached his old friend and collaborator Einstein in August 1939, and persuaded him to sign the letter, lending his fame to the proposal. The Einstein–Szilárd letter resulted in the establishment of research into nuclear fission by the US government, and ultimately to the creation of the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt gave the letter to his aide, Brigadier General Edwin M. "Pa" Watson with the instruction: "Pa, this requires action!"

An Advisory Committee on Uranium was formed under Lyman J. Briggs, a scientist and the director of the National Bureau of Standards. Its first meeting on October 21, 1939, was attended by Szilard, Teller, and Wigner, who persuaded the Army and Navy to provide $6,000 for Szilard to purchase supplies for experiments—in particular, more graphite. A 1940 Army intelligence report on Fermi and Szilard, prepared when the United States had not yet entered World War II, expressed reservations about both. While it contained some errors of fact about Szilard, it correctly noted his dire prediction that Germany would win the war.

Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister of the National Carbon Company, who manufactured graphite, and Szilard made another important discovery. He asked about impurities in graphite and learned from MacPherson that it usually contained boron, a neutron absorber. He then had special boron-free graphite produced. Had he not done so, they might have concluded, as the German nuclear researchers did, that graphite was unsuitable for use as a neutron moderator. Like the German researchers, Fermi and Szilard still believed that enormous quantities of uranium would be required for an atomic bomb, and therefore concentrated on producing a controlled chain reaction. Fermi determined that a fissioning uranium atom produced 1.73 neutrons on average. It was enough, but a careful design was called for to minimize losses. Szilard worked up various designs for a nuclear reactor. "If the uranium project could have been run on ideas alone," Wigner later remarked, "no one but Leo Szilard would have been needed."

Metallurgical Laboratory
At its December 6, 1941, meeting, the National Defense Research Committee resolved to proceed with an all-out effort to produce atomic bombs. This decision was given urgency by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following day that brought the United States into World War II. It was formally approved by Roosevelt in January 1942. Arthur H. Compton from the University of Chicago was appointed head of research and development. Against Szilard's wishes, Compton concentrated all the groups working on reactors and plutonium at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Compton laid out an ambitious plan to achieve a chain reaction by January 1943, start manufacturing plutonium in nuclear reactors by January 1944, and produce an atomic bomb by January 1945.

In January 1942, Szilard joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago as a research associate, and later the chief physicist. Alvin Weinberg noted that Szilard served as the project "gadfly", asking all the embarrassing questions. Szilard provided important insights. While uranium-238 did not fission readily with slow, moderated neutrons, it might still fission with the fast neutrons produced by fission. This effect was small but crucial. Szilard made suggestions that improved the uranium canning process, and worked with David Gurinsky and Ed Creutz on a method for recovering uranium from its salts.

A vexing question at the time was how a production reactor should be cooled. Taking a conservative view that every possible neutron must be preserved, the majority opinion initially favored cooling with helium, which would absorb very few neutrons. Szilard argued that if this was a concern, then liquid bismuth would be a better choice. He supervised experiments with it, but the practical difficulties turned out to be too great. In the end, Wigner's plan to use ordinary water as a coolant won out. When the coolant issue became too heated, Compton and the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., moved to dismiss Szilard, who was still a German citizen, but the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, refused to do so. Szilard was therefore present on December 2, 1942, when the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was achieved in the first nuclear reactor under viewing stands of Stagg Field and shook Fermi's hand.

Szilard started to acquire high-quality graphite and uranium, which were the necessary materials for building a large-scale chain reaction experiment. The success of this demonstration and technological breakthrough at the University of Chicago were partially due to Szilard's new atomic theories, his uranium lattice design, and the identification and mitigation of a key graphite impurity (boron) through a joint collaboration with graphite suppliers.

Szilard became a naturalized citizen of the United States in March 1943. The Army offered Szilard $25,000 for his inventions before November 1940, when he officially joined the project. He refused. He was the co-holder, with Fermi, of the patent on the nuclear reactor. In the end he sold his patent to the government for reimbursement of his expenses, some $15,416, plus the standard $1 fee. He continued to work with Fermi and Wigner on nuclear reactor design and is credited with coining the term "breeder reactor".

With an enduring passion for the preservation of human life and political freedom, Szilard hoped that the US government would not use nuclear weapons, but that the mere threat of such weapons would force Germany and Japan to surrender. He also worried about the long-term implications of nuclear weapons, predicting that their use by the United States would start a nuclear arms race with the USSR. He drafted the Szilárd petition advocating that the atomic bomb be demonstrated to the enemy, and used only if the enemy did not then surrender. The Interim Committee instead chose to use atomic bombs against cities over the protests of Szilard and other scientists. Afterwards, he lobbied for amendments to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that placed nuclear energy under civilian control.

After the war
In 1946, Szilard secured a research professorship at the University of Chicago that allowed him to research in biology and the social sciences. He teamed up with Aaron Novick, a chemist who had worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory during the war. The two men saw biology as a field that had not been explored as much as physics and was ready for scientific breakthroughs. It was a field that Szilard had been working on in 1933 before he had become subsumed in the quest for a nuclear chain reaction. The duo made considerable advances. They invented the chemostat, a device for regulating the growth rate of the microorganisms in a bioreactor, and developed methods for measuring the growth rate of bacteria. They discovered feedback inhibition, an important factor in processes such as growth and metabolism. Szilard gave essential advice to Theodore Puck and Philip I. Marcus for their first cloning of a human cell in 1955.

Personal life
Before his relationship with his later wife Gertrud "Trude" Weiss, Leo Szilard's life partner in the period 1927–1934 was the kindergarten teacher and opera singer Gerda Philipsborn, who also worked as a volunteer in a Berlin asylum organization for refugee children and in 1932 moved to India to continue this work. Szilard married Trude Weiss, a physician, in a civil ceremony in New York on October 13, 1951. They had known each other since 1929 and had frequently corresponded and visited each other ever since. Weiss took up a teaching position at the University of Colorado in April 1950, and Szilard began staying with her in Denver for weeks at a time when they had never been together for more than a few days before. Single people living together was frowned upon in the conservative United States at the time and, after they were discovered by one of her students, Szilard began to worry that she might lose her job. Their relationship remained a long-distance one, and they kept news of their marriage quiet. Many of his friends were shocked, having considered Szilard a born bachelor.

Writings
In 1949 Szilard wrote a short story titled "My Trial as a War Criminal" in which he imagined himself on trial for crimes against humanity after the United States lost a war with the Soviet Union. He publicly sounded the alarm against the possible development of salted thermonuclear bombs, explaining in a University of Chicago Round Table radio program on February 26, 1950, that a sufficiently big thermonuclear bomb rigged with specific but common materials, might annihilate mankind. His comments, as well as those of Hans Bethe, Harrison Brown, and Frederick Seitz (the three other scientists who participated in the program), were attacked by the Atomic Energy Commission's former Chairman David Lilienthal, and the criticisms plus a response from Szilard were published. Time compared Szilard to Chicken Little while the AEC dismissed his ideas, but scientists debated whether it was feasible or not; the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists commissioned a study by James R. Arnold, who concluded that it was. Physicist W. H. Clark suggested that a 50 megaton cobalt bomb did have the potential to produce sufficient long-lasting radiation to be a doomsday weapon, in theory, but was of the view that, even then, "enough people might find refuge to wait out the radioactivity and emerge to begin again."

In 1961 he proposed the idea of "Mined Cities", an early example of mutually assured destruction.

Szilard published a book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins (1961), in which he dealt with the moral and ethical issues raised by the Cold War and his own role in the development of atomic weapons. The title story described an international biology research laboratory in Central Europe. This became reality after a meeting in 1962 with Victor F. Weisskopf, James Watson and John Kendrew. When the European Molecular Biology Laboratory was established, the library was named The Szilard Library and the library stamp features dolphins. Other honors that he received included the Atoms for Peace Award in 1959, and the Humanist of the Year in 1960. A lunar crater on the far side of the Moon was named after him in 1970. The Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, established in 1974, is given in his honor by the American Physical Society.

Cancer diagnosis and treatment
In 1960, Szilard was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He underwent cobalt therapy at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital using a cobalt 60 treatment regimen that his doctors gave him a high degree of control over. A second round of treatment with an increased dose followed in 1962. The higher dose did its job and his cancer never returned.

Last years
Szilard spent his last years as a fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, which he had helped create. Szilard founded Council for a Livable World in 1962 to deliver "the sweet voice of reason" about nuclear weapons to Congress, the White House, and the American public. He was appointed a non-resident fellow there in July 1963, and became a resident fellow on April 1, 1964, after moving to San Diego in February. With Trude, he lived in a bungalow on the property of the Hotel del Charro. On May 30, 1964, he died there in his sleep of a heart attack; when Trude awoke, she was unable to revive him. His remains were cremated.

His papers are in the library at the University of California, San Diego. In February 2014, the library announced that it received funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize its collection of his papers, extending from 1938 to 1998.

Patents

 * —Improvements in or relating to the transmutation of chemical elements—L. Szilard, filed June 28, 1934, issued March 30, 1936
 * —Neutronic reactor—E. Fermi, L. Szilard, filed December 19, 1944, issued May 17, 1955
 * —Einstein Refrigerator—co-developed with Albert Einstein filed in 1926, issued November 11, 1930

Recognition and remembrance

 * Atoms for Peace Award, 1959
 * Albert Einstein Award, 1960
 * American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year, 1960
 * Szilard (crater) on the far side of the Moon, named in 1970
 * Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, since 1974
 * Asteroid 38442 Szilárd discovered in 1999
 * Leószilárdite, mineral, reported in 2016

In media
Szilard was portrayed in the 2023 Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer by Máté Haumann. Szilard was also the subject of a musical entitled Atomic.

title: Leo Szilard


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Sorbitol

Sorbitol, less commonly known as glucitol , is a sugar alcohol with a sweet taste which the human body metabolizes slowly. It can be obtained by reduction of glucose, which changes the converted aldehyde group (−CHO) to a primary alcohol group (−CH2OH). Most sorbitol is made from potato starch, but it is also found in nature, for example in apples, pears, peaches, and prunes. It is converted to fructose by sorbitol-6-phosphate 2-dehydrogenase. Sorbitol is an isomer of mannitol, another sugar alcohol; the two differ only in the orientation of the hydroxyl group on carbon 2. While similar, the two sugar alcohols have very different sources in nature, melting points, and uses.

As an over-the-counter drug, sorbitol is used as a laxative to treat constipation.

Synthesis
Sorbitol may be synthesised via a glucose reduction reaction in which the converted aldehyde group is converted into a hydroxyl group. The reaction requires NADH and is catalyzed by aldose reductase. Glucose reduction is the first step of the polyol pathway of glucose metabolism, and is implicated in multiple diabetic complications.

The mechanism involves a tyrosine residue in the active site of aldehyde reductase. The hydrogen atom on NADH is transferred to the electrophilic aldehyde carbon atom; electrons on the aldehyde carbon-oxygen double bond are transferred to the oxygen that abstracts the proton on tyrosine side chain to form the hydroxyl group. The role of aldehyde reductase tyrosine phenol group is to serve as a general acid to provide proton to the reduced aldehyde oxygen on glucose.

Glucose reduction is not the major glucose metabolism pathway in a normal human body, where the glucose level is in the normal range. However, in diabetic patients whose blood glucose level is high, up to 1/3 of their glucose could go through the glucose reduction pathway. This will consume NADH and eventually leads to cell damage.

Sweetener
Sorbitol is a sugar substitute, and when used in food it has the INS number and E number 420. Sorbitol is about 60% as sweet as sucrose (table sugar).

Sorbitol is referred to as a nutritive sweetener because it provides some dietary energy. It is partly absorbed from the small intestine and metabolized in the body, and partly fermented in the large intestine. The fermentation produces short-chain fatty acids, acetic acid, propionic acid, and butyric acid, which are mostly absorbed and provide energy, but also carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen which do not provide energy. Even though the heat of combustion of sorbitol is higher than that of glucose (having two extra hydrogen atoms), the net energy contribution is between 2.5 and 3.4 kilocalories per gram, versus the approximately 4 kilocalories (17 kilojoules) for carbohydrates. It is often used in diet foods (including diet drinks and ice cream), mints, cough syrups, and sugar-free chewing gum. Most bacteria cannot use sorbitol for energy, but it can be slowly fermented in the mouth by Streptococcus mutans, a bacterium that causes tooth decay. In contrast, many other sugar alcohols such as isomalt and xylitol are considered non-acidogenic.

It also occurs naturally in many stone fruits and berries from trees of the genus Sorbus.

Laxative
As is the case with other sugar alcohols, foods containing sorbitol can cause gastrointestinal distress. Sorbitol can be used as a laxative when taken orally or as an enema. Sorbitol works as a laxative by drawing water into the large intestine, stimulating bowel movements. Sorbitol has been determined safe for use by the elderly, although it is not recommended without the advice of a physician.

Sorbitol is commonly used orally as a one-time dose of 30 - 150 ml 70% solution. It may also be used as a one-time rectal enema.

Other medical applications
Sorbitol is used in bacterial culture media to distinguish the pathogenic Escherichia coli O157:H7 from most other strains of E. coli, because it is usually unable to ferment sorbitol, unlike 93% of known E. coli strains.

A treatment for hyperkalaemia (elevated blood potassium) uses sorbitol and the ion-exchange resin sodium polystyrene sulfonate (tradename Kayexalate). The resin exchanges sodium ions for potassium ions in the bowel, while sorbitol helps to eliminate it. In 2010, the U.S. FDA issued a warning of increased risk for gastrointestinal necrosis with this combination.

Sorbitol is also used in the manufacture of softgel capsules to store single doses of liquid medicines.

Health care, food, and cosmetic uses
Sorbitol often is used in modern cosmetics as a humectant and thickener. It is also used in mouthwash and toothpaste. Some transparent gels can be made only with sorbitol, because of its high refractive index.

Sorbitol is used as a cryoprotectant additive (mixed with sucrose and sodium polyphosphates) in the manufacture of surimi, a processed fish paste. It is also used as a humectant in some cigarettes.

Beyond its use as a sugar substitute in reduced-sugar foods, sorbitol is also used as a humectant in cookies and low-moisture foods like peanut butter and fruit preserves. In baking, it is also valuable because it acts as a plasticizer, and slows down the staling process.

Miscellaneous uses
A mixture of sorbitol and potassium nitrate has found some success as an amateur solid rocket fuel. It has similar performance to sucrose-based rocket candy, but is easier to cast, less hygroscopic and does not caramelize.

Sorbitol is identified as a potential key chemical intermediate for production of fuels from biomass resources. Carbohydrate fractions in biomass such as cellulose undergo sequential hydrolysis and hydrogenation in the presence of metal catalysts to produce sorbitol. Complete reduction of sorbitol opens the way to alkanes, such as hexane, which can be used as a biofuel. Hydrogen required for this reaction can be produced by aqueous phase catalytic reforming of sorbitol.

 * 19 C6H14O6 → 13 C6H14 + 36 CO2 + 42 H2O

The above chemical reaction is exothermic, and 1.5 moles of sorbitol generate approximately 1 mole of hexane. When hydrogen is co-fed, no carbon dioxide is produced.

Sorbitol based polyols are used in the production of polyurethane foam for the construction industry.

It is also added after electroporation of yeasts in transformation protocols, allowing the cells to recover by raising the osmolarity of the medium.

Medical importance
Aldose reductase is the first enzyme in the sorbitol-aldose reductase pathway responsible for the reduction of glucose to sorbitol, as well as the reduction of galactose to galactitol. Too much sorbitol trapped in retinal cells, the cells of the lens, and the Schwann cells that myelinate peripheral nerves, is a frequent result of long-term hyperglycemia that accompanies poorly controlled diabetes. This can damage these cells, leading to retinopathy, cataracts and peripheral neuropathy, respectively.

Sorbitol is fermented in the colon and produces short-chain fatty acids, which are beneficial to overall colon health.

Potential adverse effects
Sorbitol may cause allergic reactions in some people. Common side effects from use as a laxative are stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea or rectal bleeding.

Compendial status

 * Food Chemicals Codex
 * European Pharmacopoeia 6.1
 * British Pharmacopoeia 2009
 * Japanese Pharmacopoeia 17

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

title: Sorbitol


text:
Freeflying

Freeflying is a skydiving discipline which began in the late 1980s, involving freefalling in various vertical orientations, as opposed to the traditional "belly-to-earth" orientation. The discipline is known to have originated when Olav Zipser began experimenting with non-traditional forms of bodyflight. Zipser founded the FreeFly Clowns as a two-person competitive team with Mike Vail in 1992. He was joined by Omar Alhegelan (1st ever FAI Freestyle World Cup & World Champion), Charles Bryan, and Stefania Martinengo in 1994. The FreeFly Clowns are also credited with opening the first school to teach freeflying, The First School of Modern SkyFlying.

Freeflying entered the public awareness in 1996 when the SSI Pro Tour added freeflying as a three-person competitive discipline at the second televised event (with Skysurfing), part of ESPN's Destination Extreme series. One-hundred and fifty countries watched the FreeFly Clowns (Olav Zipser, Charles Bryan and Omar Alhegelan) as they took 1st place in all four international competitions along with other teams including: the Flyboyz (Eli Thompson, Mike Ortiz, Knut Krecker, Fritz Pfnür), Team AirTime (Tony Urugallo, Jim O'Reilly, Peter Raymond, Brian Germain), and many other pioneers of freeflying. From 1996 to 1997, the SSI Pro Tour staged eight televised events in both North America and Europe with $36,000 in cash prizes awarded to free-fly teams. SSI invited the 1997 Pro World Champions, the Flyboyz, to participate in the 1998 ESPN X Games as an unofficial exhibition. The resulting global television exposure attracted considerable attention to the FreeFly Clowns, the Flyboyz, and Freeflying as a discipline. A once fledgling offshoot of the mainstream, freeflying now comprises one-half of the overall skydiving community.

Zipser's Space Games used a "space ball" as research and measuring device to provide a constant speed and direction from which individual athletes could be trained, judged, and allow individuals to race each other. In 1998, the Space Games accelerated in popularity and brought publicity to the sport FreeFlying.

In 2000, FreeFly was accepted as an aviation discipline by the International Parachute Commission (IPC) and the first official FreeFly National Championships were held worldwide.

Technique
Freeflying is a variation of traditional skydiving that comprises the typical belly-to-earth positions as well as vertical flight in which the flyer is either upright (falling feet-first) or inverted (falling head-first). These locations allow for novel formations and routines while also accelerating freefall.

A freeflyer, to fully understand the aerodynamic power of his/her body in freefall, needs to first learn to control all of the skydiving forms: box position (belly-to-earth, traditional skydiving position), back flying (back-to-earth), head-up flying, head-down flying, and side flying. These positions are not held for the duration of a skydive. Freeflying can, and usually does, involve constant transitions in position and speeds, with vertical and horizontal orientations. This can involve constantly flowing skydives, with all positions explored, or more static skydives where flyers are concentrating on building a large formation while flying in one of these freefly positions.

Due to the increased freefall speed and potentially faster horizontal speeds, freeflying has dangers beyond that of a normal skydive. Extra care must be taken for freefall skydive groups to stay away from belly-to-earth skydivers to avoid collisions. Since most parachutes are not designed to be opened at speeds higher than that of normal belly flying, freeflyers must transition back to the "belly to earth" position and slow down their descent for several seconds before deploying their parachute.

While freeflying is a younger and more extreme addition to skydiving, it is becoming a popular event in competitions and world records.

Back flying
Back flying is the ability to fly on the back in a stable and controlled fashion. This skill is critical, so that when the flyer flips out of some of the more advanced positions, he or she stays in control and does not endanger themselves or other skydivers.

Sit flying
Sit flying is called such because it looks similar to the position taken while sitting in a chair.

For flying a sit, the feet are oriented toward the relative wind and 90-degree bends are maintained at the knees, hips, and shoulders. To move around, the flyer redirects the airflow in the opposite direction the jumper wants to go. Newtonian mechanics then push the flyer in the desired direction. Fall rate changes (descending faster or slower) can also be made.

Head down
A person falling in the head down position has less cross-sectional area exposed to the air while falling, which results in much faster fall rates. Average speeds while flying head down are around 260 km/h. Due to the increased speed, every movement made can cause the skydiver to become unstable or disoriented; thus increasing the risk involved in skydiving.

Vertical Formation Skydiving
Vertical formation skydiving (VFS) is a subcategory of formation skydiving using high-speed body positions normally associated with freeflying. Competitors build pre-selected formations in free-fall with multiple people gripping each other's limbs or specially built "grippers" on their jumpsuits.

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) world record for the largest VFS free-fall formation is a 164-way, set on July 31, 2015 over Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Project Horizon, the Lodi Sequentials, VFS Arizona, and several other yearly invitational skydiving events are centered on pushing the boundaries of VFS.

Competition
There is only one category of official VFS competition, that being VFS 4-way, which is part of the United States Parachute Association Skydiving Nationals. The first official VFS 4-Way US Nationals Competition was held on October 27, 2006, in Eloy, Arizona. Nine teams (45 skydivers) competed.

VFS 4-way has been adopted as an addition to future FAI world competitions (as VFS 4-way), the first being the FAI World Cup in Eloy, AZ, in October 2008.

Records
The world's largest vertical (head down) formation took place on Friday, 31 July 2015, when a multinational team of 164 skydivers, some traveling at speeds of over 200 mph, linked over Skydive Chicago, in Ottawa, Illinois, United States. This broke the previous record of 138 linked skydivers set on Saturday, 4 August 2012 also at Skydive Chicago.

Marc Hauser set the world record for the fastest horizontal free fall at 304 km/h in Empuriabrava, Spain without specialized equipment, in October 2012.

In 2022, skydivers from twenty-two different countries set a new all-female head-down world record with 80 freeflyers in formation over Eloy USA. The first attempt at the record jump was scheduled to happen in 2020, the 100th anniversary of women being granted the right to vote, but was postponed due to the covid pandemic.

title: Freeflying


text:
User:JAKAL

JAKAL: Just Another Krummy A-License - a reference to skydiving license.

title: User:JAKAL


text:
Talk:Sword and sorcery

Closely related to sword-and-sandal?
One only has to read the sword-and-sandal page to realize that it is vastly overstating the case to say that it is "closely related" to sword-and-sorcery. I changed the reference to a more correct description of the nearly nonexistent relationship. 71.161.82.63 (talk) 11:17, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Merge with Heroic Fantasy
Encyclopedia reference should expand not diminish. Deleting an already existing entry goes totally against the nature of encyclopedias, and knowledge in general. Unless two entries everlap 100%, of course, which is not the case. Heroic fantasy could mean a lot more than just Sword&Sorcery, the latter being a fairly specific and recent genre, while the former could also be link with traditional folk epic themes. So, the two entries are not the same and should not be merged. Stanislav

 * Note that above comment was entered after the comments below.
 * Deleting useless entries from an encyclopedia, so far from going against their natures, supports it by making them more useful.
 * Finally, it does not matter what they could mean; it matters what they do, in fact, mean. Goldfritha 21:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Is there any difference between the S&S genre and HF? I can't see any. If there are, they probably should be listed in the article(s).--SidiLemine 12:00, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

 * "Heroic fantasy" is often regarded as a high-falutin' way to say "sword and sorcery." Heroic fantasy should be merged with this, really.  Goldfritha 00:12, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

 * I would argue that "Sword and Sorcery" is, perhaps, a subgenre of "Heroic Fantasy," a larger category that could easily include Epic and High Fantasy. In tone and feel, S&S is "gritter" than other works that could be considered "Heroic Fantasy." In addition, much Heroic Fantasy includes moral themes of "Good and Evil" (often "Good vs. Evil"), whereas questions of morality are far less a concern in S&S; rather, the characters in S&S have their own individualistic codes of behavior that they adhere to, though these may vary from what is conventionally considered "Good" or "Evil." In fact, many S&S characters find employment with patrons who are not much more "moral" than the protagonists' foes. Finally, I would argue that while Heroic Fantasy might include epic battles and grand, world-changing events, S&S rarely does; events in S&S tend to be on a smaller scale, and have more to do with the protagonists' self-centered goals and needs, typically their own survival or filling their money pouch. These S&S protagonists rarely set out with the conscious desires to become great heroes that will change their worlds; they just want to make a buck to fill their stomachs, they may be out for vengeance, or they may simply have a wanderlust that leads them into adventures. EpicReader 11:10, 6 November 2006

 * Nevermind "could." The question is whether, as used, the term does include Epic and High Fantasy.  In fact, your description seems to argue that epic and heroic fantasy are synonyms.  If the term can mean either or both, it's not a useful term.  Goldfritha 02:27, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
 * If you can't see a difference between high fantasy and sword and sorcery, you've no business in this discussion.
 * Its Game of Thrones vs Lord of the Rings. Gritty realism concerning frontier battles with lusty sexual depictions and graphically violent horror for adult readers are onlt scratching the suface of the obvious differences. Supernaut72 (talk) 21:22, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * As a Robert E. Howard' fan, I agree concerning the gritty, lusty, and violent nature of sword and sorcery. But high fantasy is typically defined by its depiction of alternate worlds, not by J. R. R. Tolkien's sensibilities. High fantasy can include much darker tales than The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion by Tolkien himself features darker tales than LTR. Dimadick (talk) 21:42, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 'Darker tales' still doesn't cover the obvious distinctions necessary for edification. Tolkiens stories do not involve graphic depictions of horror and torture, they do not involve sex or graphic violence, and they do not involve themes of frontier struggles for basic survival by barbarians vs civilised societies. High fantasy is characterized by very black and white concepts of good and evil, and it's characters not developed beyond their utility to the plot. Supernaut72 (talk) 07:02, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The List of high fantasy fiction currently lists the likes of The Mists of Avalon, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Elric of Melniboné, which can not be described as typical good versus evil narratives. And I am far from certain that frontier struggles are essential to sword and sorcery. The supposedly "barbarian" Conan the Barbarian is actually literate in the original Howard stories, he has advanced knowledge of various spoken and written languages, and he tends to adapt cultural elements from various cultures which he has encountered. In his very first story, Conan is described as very different from the other Cimmerians: "You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges." Dimadick (talk) 21:54, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
 * 'barbarian' has nothing to do with ones literacy. Howard uses the term barbarian to describe anti-civilization philosophy. Ghenghis Khans Mongols were considered barbaric, as were Vikings. But they were highly literate.
 * You lack even a fundamental understanding of these matters and should disengage. Supernaut72 (talk) 15:16, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Really? I have been reading Robert E. Howard's tales and their pastiches for nearly 30 years. And I have also read several biographies of both Howard and Tolkien. I do not see much of a difference here. Dimadick (talk) 19:20, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to think there is a difference, but as with many terms of genre, people decide upon one interpretation and stick to it. From what I have been taught, Sword and Sorcery is a genre that depicts generally average non-fantastic figures moving through a fantastic world - i.e. a hero who, while being strong, fierce, etc, has no mystical powers, yet still must fight in a world filled with magic. Heroic Fantasy, on the other hand, has no such restrictions - and often features magical characters in lead (non-villian) roles. Conan is best described as Sword and Sorcery, while Record of Lodoss War is a Heroic Fantasy. I think the articles need work, not a merge. ParticularlyEvil 21:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

 * The question is -- is what you have been taught the standard usage? Goldfritha 23:12, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

 * Well, I'd tend to agree with ParticularlyEvil. It's true that S&S implies there"s going to be swords, whereas HF doesn't, and is thus freer in style. I'd like to see articles on both, if only we could find a reference to define both separately...--SidiLemine 10:26, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Rather, the Heroic Fantasy article should be deleted. The difference between the two subjects is very subtle, and the quality of the Heroic Fantasy article is very poor. It reflects poor education on the history of the subject, defines and describes Heroic Fantasy poorly (and innaccurately), and focuses far too much on obscure or unimportant writers. Martin is the exception, but his contributions to fantasy are not specifically associated with 'Heroic fantasy.' The Sword and Sorcery article covers the subject tolerably well. The low quality of the article on 'Heroic Fantasy,' its redundancy with the other, and significant lack of consensus for the meaning of the term 'Heroic Fantasy' are all arguments for removing it, or else making it a stub reference that defines itself by its relation to Sword and Sorcery.

Otherwise, it should be completely rewritten.

 * I agree with Epic Reader whose comment I saw after writing this. He/She was dead on. The Sword and Sorcery genre is derived from Tolkien and Lewis so why should either author define themselves by their relation to Sword and Sorcery. It should be the genre that identifies with them. Also Tolkien and Lewis and possibly the other authors in the Heroic Fantasy article (who I am unfamiliar with) listed did not predominantly write "Sword and Sorcery." Just because their more popular works might have helped spawn the genre doesn't mean that they should be identified with a genre that might have connotations that are not reflected in their work (in my opinion). My longer argument follows below:

 * My main objection is that it is arguable that Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings spawned the genre at least in D&D's case. And as much as I love the D&D novels, I think that Tolkien and many of the other author's works are written in a much more literary-based tradition whereas the Sword and Sorcery genre which is deeply written in the pulp traditions. Thats not to take away from the pulp genre. It has great merits and traditions and is a formidable genre by itself.

 * I would find it slightly offensive to see Tolkien and Lewis labeled as Sword and Sorcery authors. Sword and Sorcery does not reflect even a small portion of either author's body of work but just their more "popular pieces". Also their "Sword and Sorcery" work was far more allegorical (Sorry JRR) than the pulp tradition that followed. They do more than tell a quest or swashbuckling tale, they tell us very real things about the nature of life and existence. The creature Gollum was an essay on addiction whether to technology or substances. Authors that transcend the sub-genre should not be listed with ones that don't. Also it might be helpful to read "The Demarcation of Sword and Sorcery" by Joseph A. McCullough V which can be found on the Sword and Sorcery E-Zine that is linked on the S&S page. The E-Zine does states the similarities of the two genres but does not believe that they are one entity and I agree with them at least in the case of the LOTR Blueskelton 11:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)Blue Skelton

 * you are way out of line and should exit the discussion. The term Sword and Sorcery was coined explicitly to describe Howard's recipe for fantasy, steeped in American frontier conflict and pre-historic development of Indo European races blended with mysticism, occultism, and cosmic horror - no elements of which are to be found in tradional fantasy, or heroic fanstasy.
 * please leave the conversation to people with a vested interest in preserving this fantast genre. Supernaut72 (talk) 15:21, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I strongly urge that heroic fiction not be merged with sword and sorcery. Heroic fiction is a broader umbrella -- sword and sorcery is particularly specific. Look here, at www.swordandsorcery.org:

http://www.swordandsorcery.org/defining-sword-and-sorcery.htm

And here, another article from the same site. Both are annotated and well-researched and seemingly argue against combining heroic fiction and sword and sorcery. Clearly they state that LOTR is NOT, strictly speaking, sword and sorcery.

http://www.swordandsorcery.org/demarcation-of-sword-and-sorcery.htm

As the author of the first of these articles, and the primary writer of an article for the forthcoming Greenwood genre encyclopedia that defines sword and sorcery, I'd like to vote firmly that there's a difference and that they should not be merted. Given time, I'll update this entry myself. (Howard A. Jones74.137.230.69 19:16, 6 February 2007 (UTC))

 * Keep 'em separate. Sword and sorcery refers to a specific flavor of storytelling, usually but not always heroic fantasy. HF, on the other hand, refers to a wide range of stories, some of which qualify as S&S. There is overlap, and a good many stories which belong to both groups, but they're still two different terms with different implications. Heroic fantasy is more about the story structure, while Sword & Sorcery generally refers to the style of storytelling. Noclevername 01:04, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Gender
I object to "muscular heroes in violent conflict with a variety of villains" -- especially n the "Chicks in Chain Mail" series, and other female and feminist authors, there are many, many, many female protaganists in the genre, and many of them avoid violent conflict altogether. -- Zoe

Why objectionable? The text to which you seem to object ("muscular heroes in violent conflict with a variety of villains") says nothing about the gender of the hero. I think that it refers to muscular heroes of both genders. I suppose you could instead say "muscular heroes and heroines in violent conflict" but why use the sexist "heroine"? Even "muscular heroines and heroes in violent conflict" is less satisfactory to me than the original.

By the way, I think the issue of gender in S&S is handled quite well at the end of the article. What do you think?

Zoe, I suggest you propose an alternative that would improve the entry -- or just change the entry. Thanks! -- User:Cayzle

Seconded. If you think that there is important information being left out of this article, then go ahead and add it! People can only write what they know, and the only real femininist S&S I was aware of is MZBs... I'm sure that there's more out there in this day and age, but I haven't come across it. ~ KJ

Ant: It's implicit in my source for this that the phrasing of this definition is due to Moorcock in 1961. But not explicit... Certainly, in the 1960s, the perception was that it was very much a "masculine" subgenre, written by men, about men, for men... well, adolescent boys mostly?

If the protagonists, male or female, "avoid violent conflict altogether", then it's not sword and sorcery, it's diplomacy and sorcery; still fantasy, and possibly heroic, but technically not covered by this article. Noclevername 20:49, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Why can't the word "heroes" refer to female heroes? "Heroines" sounds somewhat archaic. Noclevername

Red Sonjya
Red Sonja never appeared in a Howard Conan story, and the character is almost wholly a creation of Roy Thomas. I'm correcting the article as-such, but I wanted to let people know why I was doing it. 172.148.61.63 16:08, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

 * The above corrections were apparently not made, so I went ahead and did them. "Red Sonya" appeared in a non-Conan adventure story (not a fantasy story) by Howard called "The Shadow of the Vulture." The character created by Thomas and Windsor-Smith was called "Red Sonja" (note the 'j') and is only inspired by the 16th-century Spanish heroine of Howard’s tale. 24 July 2005

 * Should mention be made here of "The Eye of Argon", arguably the worst story ever written? I'm pretty sure it has its own article somewhere as well. 203.26.177.2 18:38, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

 * It certainly does! See The Eye of Argon, right here on wikipedia!
 * BPK 18:51, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Can we get some LOTR?
This article needs some references to Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. 129.21.109.54 02:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

 * Why? Lord of the Rings is just about the canonical example of high fantasy.  Goldfritha 23:57, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Fantasy series like LOTR and ASOIAF where you have magical swords with special names wielded in combat, and characters with magical sorcery powers that affect the plot, are not part of the swords and sorcery subgenre, clearly. 135.180.191.219 (talk) 04:46, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Elric
Does Elric count as sword-and-sorcery? It violates one of the central rules the article lays out, in that there are consistently kingdom- and world-changing events, up to the point of the entire universe being destroyed by the end of the series, IIRC. 69.225.161.57 04:21, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree, though I've heard of it referred to as S&S, it has all the hallmarks of high fantasy: fantastical magical feats that are hardly explained or even considered, fast pacing, end of the world story arc. I would be interested to know why people consider it to be S&S? 66.152.196.34 17:52, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Elric counts because the "rules" laid out aren't really rules, merely an observation of what most sword and sorcery is like. In other words they're descriptive, not prescriptive; the focus on personal ends rather than world changing events is a matter of emphasis, not exclusion.

 * The possibility (and sometimes actuality) of world changing events is quite common in sword and sorcery. Protagonists in selfish pursuit of their own ends are often at the same time the unwitting (and occasionally) witting champions of higher powers. For instance, Robert E. Howard portrays Conan, after he becomes king, as the chosen champion of the god Mitra against the forces of the dark god Set. (Though Conan isn't crazy about the idea and is more than a little creeped out by it.) In Andre Norton's Witch World, the witches of Estcarp finally defeat their enemies by literally changing the world with a great feat of magic (despite which Norton's focus remains on the mundane concerns of her protagonists). Thongor wars against the Dragon Kings because his personal success at climbing to the top of the heap makes him de facto leader of the human side in an age-old race war. One could go on and on.

 * As for Elric, the whole focus of his saga is on his his attempt to find a little personal happiness and escape his fate as a major player in the destiny of the universe. In his story, world changing events are a mark of his failure. The fact that they happen doesn't negate the fact that emphasis of the saga is on his personal story.

 * The ways in which S&S heroes affect their world tend to be small, but aren't always.

 * BPK 18:40, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Ouroboros Spoilers?
Don't know what wikipedia's rules are on spoilers, but this article contains a major spoiler for the book The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddison. Granted, it's topical, and I knew about the ending before I finished the book. But, some people hold this book in nearly religious regard, and I could see this spoiler really ruining someone's day. 66.152.196.34 17:57, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Anybody who decides to read about something runs the risk of actually finding out about it. Personally, I've never known a "spoiler" to have actually spoiled a particular story for me. People used to regularly put spoiler alerts in the material they posted to wikipedia. The policy now seems to be that they're unnecessary.
 * BPK 18:45, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Seminal S&S, and differentiating from Tolkien and high fantasy
Would it not be helpful to list the seminal works of the Swords and Sorcery genre in chronological order in which they were published?

This would help demonstrate that there is little relationship between S&S and Tolkien and other high fantasy writers, since the stories of R. E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Fritz Leiber actually pre-date many of the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Finally, it is largely inaccurate to refer to the protagonists of the S&S genre as "heroes" or "heroic." The protagonists of the genre are almost invariably anti-heroes. Any heroic deeds they accomplish are largely incidental to fulfilling their own agendas.

The excellent articles at swordsandsorcery.org elucidate these points rather well.

--CLSwiki (talk) 20:02, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

List of Sword and sorcery fiction
Would it be OK to make a separate list for Sword and sorcery works like we have it for high fantasy, gothic fiction and historical novels? HeadlessMaster (talk) 17:05, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Deleted paragraph in the Sword and sorcery heroines section
I deleted the paragraph an anon IP user added on Jennifer Roberson's Sword-Dancer series because: 1) I see no indication that it was as significant to the topic of "Sword and sorcery heroines" as the other two examples; and 2) the many mistakes in spelling and grammar make it almost incomprehensible. TresÁrboles (talk) 19:06, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

You as well, TresÁrboles? I deleted that paragraph about a month ago, and a second time just now (April 05, 2012). I'm guessing some zealous, misguided soul(s) out there shall pertinaciously continue to try to force the crotchet that Sword and Sorcery (S&S) genre is somehow sexist. As a long-time fan and connoisseur of the S&S genre (as well as a fan of feminism and egalitarianism in general), I do not think that S&S is even remotely sexist. Even if the genre were to lack admirable female characters (which it in fact does not), then it still would not fit the definition of sexist. As I understand it, sexism refers to unfair policies, behaviors, or practices which disenfranchise a gender; sexism does not pertain to viewers’ personal preference in fictional stories. If gender preference were to qualify as sexism, then any outlet which caters primarily to one gender rather than to both genders equally would qualify as sexist. This would include the LifeTime television network, Elle magazine, and Barbie toy stores – none of which have I ever considered sexist. But more fundamentally, the section was the only in this whole S&S Wiki which failed to cite a single expert opinion. For all we know, whoever keeps reposting the calumnious paragraph could be some person unfamiliar with S&S but with some misguided agenda to bring feministic polemic where it doesn’t belong. In short, if the language sounds highly opinionated and cannot be reinforced by expert opinion, then it probably doesn’t belong on Wiki. HappyEskimo (04/05/2012) 19:00 USA Central Time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HappyEskimo (talk • contribs) 00:01, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

 * As this material is in fact sourced now - and to a pair of notable authors/editors - you should have no problem with it. Also, three different editors have found problems with your blanking, which seems motivated by nothing other than your personal dislike of the section. Do find consensus before deleting again. Ergative rlt (talk) 03:06, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any editors objecting to my blanking, excluding yourself. And to clarify, my blanking is not motivated by any personal dislike, so much as it is by the prevention of fallacious slander against the S&S genre. If S&S were sexist, then I would allow it. But, S&S is not nor has it ever been sexist. As I stated earlier, I don't see that women are treated any differently than men in the stories. And again, even if they were, it would not be considered sexist. Barring women's suffrage, or conscripting only males is an example of sexism; I don't think that fictional stories glorifying one gender (which the S&S genre doesn't even do) for the sake of entertainment falls under that category. If it were, then the cited "Sword and Sorceress," an obviously feministic spin to the more gender-neutral "Sword and Sorcery" genre, would be considered sexist. Using a sexist source to falsely assert that a patently gender-neutral genre is sexist is stunningly ironic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HappyEskimo (talk • contribs) 23:30, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

 * A glance at the article history shows that other editors have removed your blanking. Your description of the paragraph in question is also not based on what it actually says, but on what you apparently want it to say (this also evident in your first comment), and a misunderstanding of what "slander" is. As for the rest, your own personal feelings on S&S or what constitutes sexism aren't relevant here - what is relevant are what reliable sources say, and the two I have provided are indeed reliable. The claim that commenting on and attempting to mitigate possible sexism is itself sexist is an all-too-common bit of dissembling, and calling Sword and Sorceress sexist is simply silly. Again, find consensus before blanking again - you have not shown any, and the actions of other editors support consensus for the section remaining. Ergative rlt (talk) 00:42, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

I've added the section again, and have provided additional citations showing that Salmonson's and Bradley's contributions are indeed significant. I will also be adding information on more S&S heroines, as there is only one now in the article. Ergative rlt (talk) 02:41, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Continued blanking
This blanking without consensus or policy-based reasons is now becoming disruptive and tendentious. Read those sections, and also the ones on neutral point of view, verifiability, and if you still have a problem with the sourcing on content bring it up at the reliable sources noticeboard or a similar project page. Ergative rlt (talk) 13:39, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Women in swords and sorcery
I removed the section on women in swords and sorcery. This topic is about S&S itself, and not about gender issues. If someone wants a feminist rant about women in S&S, it should be in a separate article about women in fantasy. To put this section in this article is just an annoying imposition of opinions and ideas that the reader would usually not come to this article to read about. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.224.59.78 (talk) 22:14, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

 * I note that Ergative has undone the removal, and quite properly. The role of women in S&S is a issue of longstanding controversy in the reader/fan community. It makes perfect sense to address the issue in the article, and the section in question seems quite balanced, by no means a "rant." BPK (talk) 14:02, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

I completely agree with User_151.224.59.78. S&S has no more or and less gender issues than any other genre of entertainment, and even if it did, that has nothing to do with the topic of S&S itself. And yes, I would say the gender ramblings here did constitute a rant because they're both unfounded and off-topic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.231.32.89 (talk) 15:11, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Article illustration?
What does the painting "An island story; a child's history of England" have to with Swords & Sorcery? Wouldn't one of Frazetta's classic covers be more suitable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.224.0.254 (talk) 12:21, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I just took that picture off. I think you would have to find something in the public domain.PopSci (talk) 19:19, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Picture has been put back. I will not edit again for that.  However it seems to me that S&S has a more specific definition that would exclude the older King Arthur stories, as much as I love them, and as many swords and as much sorcery as they do indeed contain. PopSci (talk) 19:33, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Nature of magic
I can remember back in the 60s or 70s when I first read S&S stories, that shows my age! Anyway my understanding was that in earlier fantasies magic had a "spiritual" role, while in S&S it was more a kind of tool or technology substitute which some characters were able to use. A related aspect is that the theme of the story is not good v. evil as in the King Arthur stories or in Tolkien's, but a more modern or "realistic" view of life where people strive for their own self-interests. Am I right or is this just my impression? PopSci (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Who coined the phrase?
Right now, we have a self-contradictory paragraph: "The term "sword and sorcery" was coined in 1961 by the British author Michael Moorcock, who published a letter in the fanzine Amra, demanding a name for the sort of fantasy-adventure story written by Robert E. Howard.[3] He had initially proposed the term "epic fantasy". However, the celebrated American sword-and-sorcery author Fritz Leiber replied in the journal Ancalagon (6 April 1961), suggesting "sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field". "

As it reads, it seems Moorcock asked for a name and Leiber suggested it. Therefore shouldn't it say that the term was coined by Leiber, not Moorcock? Unless Moorcock's letter itself has the term "sword & sorcery" as a suggestion (which should be explicitly stated if that's the case). Since I can't see the letter, which has been printed as "Putting a Tag on It", I don't know. PatConolly (talk) 05:52, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Agreed, that struck me right away too. Will edit when I get to my desktop. D A Patriarche

✅ --D Anthony Patriarche (talk) 01:41, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Merge proposal
Heroic fantasy should be merged into Sword and sorcery as the terms are synonymous. Both sources cited on Heroic fantasy (de Camp’s quotation and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy) state this explicitly. (And I think most people seeing the term would think it meant high/epic fantasy, making it even worse.) CohenTheBohemian (talk) 12:10, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
 * @CohenTheBohemian Thinking. And pinging User:TompaDompa and User:Mike Christie from related discussion at Talk:Sword_and_planet, where I'd invite you to comment at too if you are interested in such topics. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:44, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd be OK with such a merge. Clute in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy says "There may be a useful distinction between heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery, but no one has yet made it". Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 01:59, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * That's actually pretty funny, though it may be worth noting that it was written back in 1997. Courtesy link for anybody who is interested. TompaDompa (talk) 02:05, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * It's somewhat amusing they nonetheless have separate entries for them: you linked heroic fantasy, here's their longer entry on sword and sorcery. Funny idea: should we email them and ask why they have no entry on "sword and planet"? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:09, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Weak support per Clute and me not having time right now to dig deeper. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:10, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Just to make things more complicated:
 * Here's a paper from 1978 using heroic fantasy and S&S to mean the same thing: - and here's one from 1969 describing them differently:
 * I'd prefer secondary scholarship that reflects general usage, rather than a single scholar's quirks... but Brian Stableford's A-Z of Fantasy Literature describes Heroic fantasy in much broader terms to include "high fantasy" and "epic fantasy".
 * Maybe a disambiguation page would be better? CohenTheBohemian (talk) 10:18, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Stableford actually has it right. BPK (talk) 19:50, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Also see this 2020 book which has a different POV: Joseph A. McCullough suggests the major distinction between 'Heroic Fantasy' and 'Sword and Sorcery' is one of scale. Olivaw-Daneel (talk) 15:33, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * In that case, we could change Heroic fantasy to a very short page stating that it's been used to mean both sword and sorcery and high fantasy, linking to both. Do you think that would be better? CohenTheBohemian (talk) 04:53, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * This lists several sources which equate S&S with heroic fantasy, and I think that's the general usage. Palmer-Patel seems to be using "Heroic epic fantasy" which I would guess is their own coinage, rather than "heroic fantasy"; just judging from the abstract and chapter titles. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:08, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Pending BPK's reply, I think you're right. We can mention the alternative use of Heroic fantasy on the S&S page. CohenTheBohemian (talk) 17:17, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * All synonyms can be red linked, redirected and mentioned somewhere. Generally a good practice. Heroic epic fantasy, hmmm. Epic fantasy redirects to high fantasy where it is mentioned as a synonym. Maybe disambig that one? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:07, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
 * No reply, so I take it to mean the merge is uncontested. I'll do it in a bit. CohenTheBohemian (talk) 11:26, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Excise citations and reference from Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp
these authors took Howards direction and characters to far away from their edifying characteristics to be cited as experts of the genre. De Camp excised the original unedited Howard stories from publication after he aquired rights to Howard's work through a copyright claim via a lawsuit of Gnome Press. The original unedited stories were never in publication again until 2002.

He also has gone on to challenge Howard's skills and story telling in well documented demeaning fashion.

This would be like citing Kathleen Kennedy for Star Wars edification. Pastiche work and edits of the original material disqualify them from being cited as valuable references. They had no love or respect for the original, historical stories.

We have people undermining the historocity of this genre and it needs to be corrected.

Supernaut72 (talk) 19:09, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Gertrude Hall and "Garden Deadly"
I've done a search for "Gertrude Hall", "Garden Deadly" and "sword and sorcery" online, and I haven't been able to find any references to Hall's story influencing the sword and sorcery sub-genre. In the books and articles I've consulted (David Pringle, Brian Murphy, Jeffrey Shanks etc.) there is no mention of Hall's story influencing the sub-genre, or any evidence that the key s&s writers (Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, etc.) knewn about Hall's work.

So I'm removing the paragraph about Hall from the article (reason: WP:NOCITE) until someone comes up with a reliable source for a connection between Gertrude Hall and the "sorcery and sorcery" subgenre. 193.203.134.113 (talk) 14:39, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Sword and sorcery


text:
Andrew Inglis Clark

Andrew Inglis Clark (24 February 1848 – 14 November 1907) was an Australian founding father and co-author of the Australian Constitution; he was also an engineer, barrister, politician, electoral reformer and jurist. He initially qualified as an engineer, but he re-trained as a barrister to effectively fight for social causes which deeply concerned him. After a long political career, mostly spent as Attorney-General and briefly as Opposition Leader, he was appointed a Senior Justice of the Supreme Court of Tasmania. Despite being acknowledged as the leading expert on the Australian Constitution, he was never appointed to the High Court of Australia.

He popularised the Hare-Clark voting system, and introduced it to Tasmania. In addition Clark was a prolific author, though most of his writings were never published, rather they were circulated privately. Clark was also Vice-Chancellor of the University of Tasmania. Throughout his life, Clark was a progressive. He championed the rights of workers to organise through trades unions, universal suffrage (including women's suffrage) and the rights to a fair trial – all issues which today we take for granted, but were so radical in the 1880s that he was described as a 'communist' by the Hobart Mercury.

In one summation, "Clark was an Australian Jefferson, who, like the great American Republican, fought for Australian independence; an autonomous judiciary; a wider franchise and lower property qualifications; fairer electoral boundaries; checks and balances between the judicature, legislature and executive; modern, liberal universities; and a Commonwealth that was federal, independent and based on natural rights." Less favourably, a contemporary, J.B. Walker, privately judged him an "eloquent, impressive, dignified ... doctrinaire politician ... wanting in practical ability".

Yet he also had a rich and warm home life. He is described as "never too busy to mend a toy for a child, and his wife once wrote on hearing of his imminent return from America: 'to celebrate your return I must do something or bust'".

The Australian federal Division of Clark is named after him.

Early life and marriage
Clark was born in Hobart, Tasmania, the son of a Scottish engineer, Alexander Clark. He was educated at Hobart High School. After leaving school, he was apprenticed to his family's engineering business, becoming a qualified engineer, and finally its business manager. His father had established a highly successful engineering business, based on an iron foundry. The business was also involved with industrial design and construction of flour mills, water mills, coal mines and other substantial undertaking.

He grew to manhood during the 1860s, when the major issue, even in remote Tasmania, was the American Civil War and emancipation. This last issue had an especial resonance in Tasmania where a form of slavery, transportation, had been abolished as recently as 1853. Convicts were still a common sight for years later. As late as 1902, Clark would publicly be moved to tears when discussing slavery. Clark became fascinated by all things American.

In 1872, Clark disappointed his father by leaving to study law, becoming an articled clerk with R. P. Adams. He was called to the bar in 1877.

Clark, as a child attended a Baptist Sabbatical School until 1872 when the chapel was dissolved on a motion put by Clark due to the "lack of discipline and proper order of government in worship." He then joined a Unitarian chapel, which led him into contact with leading American Unitarians, including Moncure Conway and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The friendship formed with the latter would strongly influence his views and the development of the Clarks' draft of the Australian Constitution.

Early in his life, Clark developed a passion for justice and liberty. He joined the Minerva Club where he participated in debate on contemporary social issues. In 1874, he edited its journal Quadrilateral. As a 'young ardent republican', he was also a member of the American Club, where at the 1876 annual dinner, he declared "We have met here tonight in the name of the principles which were proclaimed by the founders of the Anglo-American Republic... and we do so because we believe those principles to be permanently applicable to the politics of the world". He was inspired by Italian Risorgimento, especially by Joseph Mazzini of whom he had a picture in every room. He became a radical, a democrat and a republican.

In 1878 he married Grace Paterson (Ross) Clark, the daughter of local shipbuilder John Ross, with whom he had five sons and two daughters:
 * Esma (1878)
 * Alexander (1879) Marine engineer
 * Andrew (1882) Justice of the Supreme Court of Tasmania 1928–1953.
 * Conway (1883) Architect
 * Wendell (1885) Doctor
 * Melvyn (1886)
 * Carrel (1888) Clerk of Tasmanian Legislative Council
 * Ethel (1889)

One of the many mysteries of Clark's private life is the circumstances of his marriage. As the son of a prominent family, and a leading figure of his church who was marrying the daughter of a well-known businessman, his marriage might have been expected to be a major social event. Instead, they slipped away to Melbourne, where they were married in the presence of a few friends.

Political career
In 1878, Clark stood for election to the House of Assembly, despite his reputation as an extreme ultra-republican. He was attacked by the Hobart Mercury for "holding such very extreme ultra-republican, if not revolutionary, ideas" that his proper place should be among the 'Communists', and the Launceston Examiner as a "stranger from Hobart". He was elected, unopposed to the electorate of Norfolk Plains. His election was largely due to the influence of Thomas Reibey, a political power broker and a recent Premier.

Clark was the founder of the Southern Tasmania Political Reform Association, whose agenda included manhood suffrage, fixed term parliaments, and electoral reform. While a member of the House of Assembly, Clark was regarded as republican and ultra-progressive. He was one of the few members to legislate as a backbencher and introduce a private members bill. He failed to reform industrial law by amending the Master and Servant Act, but he succeeded with the Criminal Procedure Amendment Act in 1881. He also assisted with reframing the customs tariff.

In the 1882 election, Clark was defeated. He failed when he stood for election in 1884 (East Hobart) and 1886 (South Hobart). In 1887, Clark was re-elected, in a by-election as member for East Hobart. In 1888, he was re-elected as member for South Hobart and remained there until the seat was abolished in 1897. He was then the member for Hobart until he resigned upon his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1898.

In March 1888, he became Attorney General in the government of Sir Philip Fysh. Since the Premier was in the Legislative Council, Clark was responsible for introducing legislation into the Assembly. Over the next five years he shepherded through the lower house much progressive and humanitarian legislation. His goal was to break the power of property in Tasmanian politics. The legislation covered such diverse reforms as legalising trades unions, providing parliamentary salaries, preventing cruelty to animals, reforming laws on lunacy, trusteeship and companies, the custody of children and the protection of children from neglect and abuse. He also introduced laws to restrict the immigration of Chinese. Clark failed in his attempts to impose a land tax, introduce universal (including female) suffrage and centralise the police.

Clark was the most important 19th-century Attorney-General of Tasmania. His considerable drafting skills enabled him to modernise and simplify the law over a number of areas. He introduced a total of 228 bills into the Assembly. His best known achievement as Attorney-General was the introduction of proportional representation based on the Hare-Clark system of the single transferable vote.

One of the major political issues addressed by Clark during his career concerned the Tasmanian Main Line Railway – a railway which connected Tasmania's two main cites, Hobart and Launceston. In 1873, the Main Line Railway Company began the construction of the line, which opened in 1876. There were a series of disputes between the Company and the government over payments due to the Company under its Deed of Concession. Clark had spoken about the problem, advocating the acquisition of the Company by the government as early as 1878. With his dual qualifications as both an engineer and a lawyer, Clark was in a unique position to understand the issues involved. As Attorney-General, he was the government's chief negotiator.

In 1889, the Supreme Court awarded the Company arrears of interest. Clark urged the government to appeal, and in 1890 he went to England to argue the case before the Privy Council. Clark may have been a poor speaker in court, but he was a superb negotiator. It was his forte. With full powers, he settled the case out of court by arranging the purchase of the Company's property by the government.

In 1891, Clark returned to Tasmania from London by way of the United States. It was a fateful choice. He was introduced to a fellow Unitarian Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., with whom he corresponded for the rest of his life. The contacts and people he met in Boston were to profoundly inform his views about political constitutions. Not the least of the consequences was the introduction of the term "commonwealth" to describe the Australian polity. This term is used in two ways: the Commonwealth Government and the Commonwealth of Australia.

In 1892, the fall of the Fysh government ended Clark's term as Attorney-General. When Sir Edward Braddon formed a government in 1894, Clark again became Attorney-General, the same year he was given the title 'Honourable' for life. He resigned in 1897, when his colleagues failed to consult him over the lease of Crown land to private interests, after which he became Leader of the Opposition. Clark left politics to become a Justice of the Supreme Court of Tasmania in 1898.

Clark and Australian Federation
Clark positioned himself ambiguously with respect to the cause of Australian Federation. Clark was a delegate to the National Australasian Convention of 1891, and was a member of its committee which produced a draft constitution. However, he did not stand for the election of delegates to the Australian Federal Convention of 1897, and embarked on an overseas journey two days after it commenced. Instead of the Convention's proposal to compensate States' for their loss of tariff revenue subsequent to Federation by a guarantee of a share of Commonwealth revenue, he favoured the Commonwealth's assumption of States' debts. Despite the urgings of Federationists, Clark abstained from supporting the Federal cause in the subsequent campaign. A week before the 1898 referendum on Federation, he let it be known "It is not his intention to advise any elector on how to vote".

Hare–Clark electoral system
In 1896, after several failed attempts, Clark was able to get a system of proportional representation adopted by the Tasmanian Parliament, but it was to be only on a trial basis for both Hobart (to elect 6 MPs) and Launceston (to elect 4 MPs). The modified single transferable vote method, immediately known as the Hare–Clark system, was renewed annually until suspended in 1902. Clark died in 1907, just as permanent proportional representation struggled through Parliament and over a year before it was used for the first time throughout Tasmania at the general election in April 1909.

Early legal career
Clark was called to the bar in 1877. He soon gained a reputation as a criminal lawyer in a 'poisoning case', but went on to gain a large practice in civil and commercial law as well. He practised law both while in and out of parliament. During those periods when he was not serving as Attorney-General, he worked hard to build a successful practice. He failed to find his fortune in the law due to his generosity and refusal 'to accept anything beyond a reasonable and modest fee'. In 1887 he went into partnership with Matthew Wilkes Simmons.

His career in private practice gave him a broad grounding in the law which stood him in good stead once he was promoted to the bench. Clark was knowledgeable in all branches of the law, but pre-eminent as a constitutional lawyer and jurist.

Clark, never in robust health, in fact described as "small, spare, [and] nervous" by Alfred Deakin, died at his home 'Rosebank' in Battery Point on 14 November 1907. He is buried in the old Queenborough Cemetery at Sandy Bay.

title: Andrew Inglis Clark