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Photomultiplier tube

Photomultiplier tubes (photomultipliers or PMTs for short) are extremely sensitive detectors of light in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are members of the class of vacuum tubes, more specifically vacuum phototubes. These detectors multiply the current produced by incident light by as much as 100 million times or 108 (i.e., 160 dB), in multiple dynode stages, enabling (for example) individual photons to be detected when the incident flux of light is low.

The combination of high gain, low noise, high frequency response or, equivalently, ultra-fast response, and large area of collection has maintained photomultipliers an essential place in low light level spectroscopy, confocal microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, nuclear and particle physics, astronomy, medical diagnostics including blood tests, medical imaging, motion picture film scanning (telecine), radar jamming, and high-end image scanners known as drum scanners. Elements of photomultiplier technology, when integrated differently, are the basis of night vision devices. Research that analyzes light scattering, such as the study of polymers in solution, often uses a laser and a PMT to collect the scattered light data.

Semiconductor devices, particularly silicon photomultipliers and avalanche photodiodes, are alternatives to classical photomultipliers; however, photomultipliers are uniquely well-suited for applications requiring low-noise, high-sensitivity detection of light that is imperfectly collimated.

Structure and operating principles

Photomultipliers are typically constructed with an evacuated glass housing (using an extremely tight and durable glass-to-metal seal like other vacuum tubes), containing a photocathode, several dynodes, and an anode. Incident photons strike the photocathode material, which is usually a thin vapor-deposited conducting layer on the inside of the entry window of the device. Electrons are ejected from the surface as a consequence of the photoelectric effect. These electrons are directed by the focusing electrode toward the electron multiplier, where electrons are multiplied by the process of secondary emission. The electron multiplier consists of a number of electrodes called dynodes. Each dynode is held at a more positive potential, by ≈100 Volts, than the preceding one. A primary electron leaves the photocathode with the energy of the incoming photon, or about 3 eV for "blue" photons, minus the work function of the photocathode. A small group of primary electrons is created by the arrival of a group of initial photons. (In Fig. 1, the number of primary electrons in the initial group is proportional to the energy of the incident high energy gamma ray.) The primary electrons move toward the first dynode because they are accelerated by the electric field. They each arrive with ≈100 eV kinetic energy imparted by the potential difference. Upon striking the first dynode, more low energy electrons are emitted, and these electrons are in turn accelerated toward the second dynode. The geometry of the dynode chain is such that a cascade occurs with an exponentially-increasing number of electrons being produced at each stage. For example, if at each stage an average of 5 new electrons are produced for each incoming electron, and if there are 12 dynode stages, then at the last stage one expects for each primary electron about 512 ≈ 108 electrons. This last stage is called the anode. This large number of electrons reaching the anode results in a sharp current pulse that is easily detectable, for example on an oscilloscope, signaling the arrival of the photon(s) at the photocathode ≈50 nanoseconds earlier.

The necessary distribution of voltage along the series of dynodes is created by a voltage divider chain, as illustrated in Fig. 2. In the example, the photocathode is held at a negative high voltage on the order of 1000 V, while the anode is very close to ground potential. The capacitors across the final few dynodes act as local reservoirs of charge to help maintain the voltage on the dynodes while electron avalanches propagate through the tube. Many variations of design are used in practice; the design shown is merely illustrative. There are two common photomultiplier orientations, the head-on or end-on (transmission mode) design, as shown above, where light enters the flat, circular top of the tube and passes the photocathode, and the side-on design (reflection mode), where light enters at a particular spot on the side of the tube, and impacts on an opaque photocathode. The side-on design is used, for instance, in the type 931, the first mass-produced PMT. Besides the different photocathode materials, performance is also affected by the transmission of the window material that the light passes through, and by the arrangement of the dynodes. Many photomultiplier models are available having various combinations of these, and other, design variables. The manufacturers manuals provide the information needed to choose an appropriate design for a particular application.

History
The invention of the photomultiplier is predicated upon two prior achievements, the separate discoveries of the photoelectric effect and of secondary emission.

Photoelectric effect
The first demonstration of the photoelectric effect was carried out in 1887 by Heinrich Hertz using ultraviolet light. Significant for practical applications, Elster and Geitel two years later demonstrated the same effect using visible light striking alkali metals (potassium and sodium). The addition of caesium, another alkali metal, has permitted the range of sensitive wavelengths to be extended towards longer wavelengths in the red portion of the visible spectrum.

Historically, the photoelectric effect is associated with Albert Einstein, who relied upon the phenomenon to establish the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics in 1905, an accomplishment for which Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize. It is worthwhile to note that Heinrich Hertz, working 18 years earlier, had not recognized that the kinetic energy of the emitted electrons is proportional to the frequency but independent of the optical intensity. This fact implied a discrete nature of light, i.e. the existence of quanta, for the first time.

Secondary emission
The phenomenon of secondary emission (the ability of electrons in a vacuum tube to cause the emission of additional electrons by striking an electrode) was, at first, limited to purely electronic phenomena and devices (which lacked photosensitivity). In 1899 the effect was first reported by Villard. In 1902, Austin and Starke reported that the metal surfaces impacted by electron beams emitted a larger number of electrons than were incident. The application of the newly discovered secondary emission to the amplification of signals was only proposed after World War I by Westinghouse scientist Joseph Slepian in a 1919 patent.

The race towards a practical electronic television camera
The ingredients for inventing the photomultiplier were coming together during the 1920s as the pace of vacuum tube technology accelerated. The primary goal for many, if not most, workers was the need for a practical television camera technology. Television had been pursued with primitive prototypes for decades prior to the 1934 introduction of the first practical video camera (the iconoscope). Early prototype television cameras lacked sensitivity. Photomultiplier technology was pursued to enable television camera tubes, such as the iconoscope and (later) the orthicon, to be sensitive enough to be practical. So the stage was set to combine the dual phenomena of photoemission (i.e., the photoelectric effect) with secondary emission, both of which had already been studied and adequately understood, to create a practical photomultiplier.

First photomultiplier, single-stage (early 1934)
The first documented photomultiplier demonstration dates to the early 1934 accomplishments of an RCA group based in Harrison, NJ. Harley Iams and Bernard Salzberg were the first to integrate a photoelectric-effect cathode and single secondary emission amplification stage in a single vacuum envelope and the first to characterize its performance as a photomultiplier with electron amplification gain. These accomplishments were finalized prior to June 1934 as detailed in the manuscript submitted to Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (Proc. IRE). The device consisted of a semi-cylindrical photocathode, a secondary emitter mounted on the axis, and a collector grid surrounding the secondary emitter. The tube had a gain of about eight and operated at frequencies well above 10 kHz.

Magnetic photomultipliers (mid 1934–1937)
Higher gains were sought than those available from the early single-stage photomultipliers. However, it is an empirical fact that the yield of secondary electrons is limited in any given secondary emission process, regardless of acceleration voltage. Thus, any single-stage photomultiplier is limited in gain. At the time the maximum first-stage gain that could be achieved was approximately 10 (very significant developments in the 1960s permitted gains above 25 to be reached using negative electron affinity dynodes). For this reason, multiple-stage photomultipliers, in which the photoelectron yield could be multiplied successively in several stages, were an important goal. The challenge was to cause the photoelectrons to impinge on successively higher-voltage electrodes rather than to travel directly to the highest voltage electrode. Initially this challenge was overcome by using strong magnetic fields to bend the electrons' trajectories. Such a scheme had earlier been conceived by inventor J. Slepian by 1919 (see above). Accordingly, leading international research organizations turned their attention towards improving photomultipliers to achieve higher gain with multiple stages.

In the USSR, RCA-manufactured radio equipment was introduced on a large scale by Joseph Stalin to construct broadcast networks, and the newly formed All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Television was gearing up a research program in vacuum tubes that was advanced for its time and place. Numerous visits were made by RCA scientific personnel to the USSR in the 1930s, prior to the Cold War, to instruct the Soviet customers on the capabilities of RCA equipment and to investigate customer needs. During one of these visits, in September 1934, RCA's Vladimir Zworykin was shown the first multiple-dynode photomultiplier, or photoelectron multiplier. This pioneering device was proposed by Leonid A. Kubetsky in 1930 which he subsequently built in 1934. The device achieved gains of 1000x or more when demonstrated in June 1934. The work was submitted for print publication only two years later, in July 1936 as emphasized in a recent 2006 publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), which terms it "Kubetsky's Tube." The Soviet device used a magnetic field to confine the secondary electrons and relied on the Ag-O-Cs photocathode which had been demonstrated by General Electric in the 1920s.

By October 1935, Vladimir Zworykin, George Ashmun Morton, and Louis Malter of RCA in Camden, NJ submitted their manuscript describing the first comprehensive experimental and theoretical analysis of a multiple dynode tube — the device later called a photomultiplier — to Proc. IRE. The RCA prototype photomultipliers also used an Ag-O-Cs (silver oxide-caesium) photocathode. They exhibited a peak quantum efficiency of 0.4% at 800 nm.

Electrostatic photomultipliers (1937–present)
Whereas these early photomultipliers used the magnetic field principle, electrostatic photomultipliers (with no magnetic field) were demonstrated by Jan Rajchman of RCA Laboratories in Princeton, NJ in the late 1930s and became the standard for all future commercial photomultipliers. The first mass-produced photomultiplier, the Type 931, was of this design and is still commercially produced today.

Improved photocathodes
Also in 1936, a much improved photocathode, Cs3Sb (caesium-antimony), was reported by P. Görlich. The caesium-antimony photocathode had a dramatically improved quantum efficiency of 12% at 400 nm, and was used in the first commercially successful photomultipliers manufactured by RCA (i.e., the 931-type) both as a photocathode and as a secondary-emitting material for the dynodes. Different photocathodes provided differing spectral responses.

Spectral response of photocathodes
In the early 1940s, the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council), an industry committee on standardization, developed a system of designating spectral responses. The philosophy included the idea that the product's user need only be concerned about the response of the device rather than how the device may be fabricated. Various combinations of photocathode and window materials were assigned "S-numbers" (spectral numbers) ranging from S-1 through S-40, which are still in use today. For example, S-11 uses the caesium-antimony photocathode with a lime glass window, S-13 uses the same photocathode with a fused silica window, and S-25 uses a so-called "multialkali" photocathode (Na-K-Sb-Cs, or sodium-potassium-antimony-caesium) that provides extended response in the red portion of the visible light spectrum. No suitable photoemissive surfaces have yet been reported to detect wavelengths longer than approximately 1700 nanometers, which can be approached by a special (InP/InGaAs(Cs)) photocathode.

RCA Corporation
For decades, RCA was responsible for performing the most important work in developing and refining photomultipliers. RCA was also largely responsible for the commercialization of photomultipliers. The company compiled and published an authoritative and widely used Photomultiplier Handbook. RCA provided printed copies free upon request. The handbook, which continues to be made available online at no cost by the successors to RCA, is considered to be an essential reference.

Following a corporate break-up in the late 1980s involving the acquisition of RCA by General Electric and disposition of the divisions of RCA to numerous third parties, RCA's photomultiplier business became an independent company.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania facility
The Lancaster, Pennsylvania facility was opened by the U.S. Navy in 1942 and operated by RCA for the manufacture of radio and microwave tubes. Following World War II, the naval facility was acquired by RCA. RCA Lancaster, as it became known, was the base for the development and the production of commercial television products. In subsequent years other products were added, such as "cathode-ray" tubes, photomultiplier tubes, motion-sensing light control switches, and closed-circuit television systems.

Burle Industries
Burle Industries, as a successor to the RCA Corporation, carried the RCA photomultiplier business forward after 1986, based in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania facility. The 1986 acquisition of RCA by General Electric resulted in the divestiture of the RCA Lancaster New Products Division. Hence, 45 years after being founded by the U.S. Navy, its management team, led by Erich Burlefinger, purchased the division and in 1987 founded Burle Industries.

In 2005, after eighteen years as an independent enterprise, Burle Industries and a key subsidiary were acquired by Photonis, a European holding company Photonis Group. Following the acquisition, Photonis was composed of Photonis Netherlands, Photonis France, Photonis USA, and Burle Industries. Photonis USA operates the former Galileo Corporation Scientific Detector Products Group (Sturbridge, Massachusetts), which had been purchased by Burle Industries in 1999. The group is known for microchannel plate detector (MCP) electron multipliers—an integrated micro-vacuum tube version of photomultipliers. MCPs are used for imaging and scientific applications, including night vision devices.

On 9 March 2009, Photonis announced that it would cease all production of photomultipliers at both the Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the Brive, France plants.

Hamamatsu
The Japan-based company Hamamatsu Photonics (also known as Hamamatsu) has emerged since the 1950s as a leader in the photomultiplier industry. Hamamatsu, in the tradition of RCA, has published its own handbook, which is available without cost on the company's website. Hamamatsu uses different designations for particular photocathode formulations and introduces modifications to these designations based on Hamamatsu's proprietary research and development.

Photocathode materials
The photocathodes can be made of a variety of materials, with different properties. Typically the materials have low work function and are therefore prone to thermionic emission, causing noise and dark current, especially the materials sensitive in infrared; cooling the photocathode lowers this thermal noise. The most common photocathode materials are Ag-O-Cs (also called S1) transmission-mode, sensitive from 300–1200 nm. High dark current; used mainly in near-infrared, with the photocathode cooled; GaAs:Cs, caesium-activated gallium arsenide, flat response from 300 to 850 nm, fading towards ultraviolet and to 930 nm; InGaAs:Cs, caesium-activated indium gallium arsenide, higher infrared sensitivity than GaAs:Cs, between 900–1000 nm much higher signal-to-noise ratio than Ag-O-Cs; Sb-Cs, (also called S11) caesium-activated antimony, used for reflective mode photocathodes; response range from ultraviolet to visible, widely used; bialkali (Sb-K-Cs, Sb-Rb-Cs), caesium-activated antimony-rubidium or antimony-potassium alloy, similar to Sb:Cs, with higher sensitivity and lower noise. can be used for transmission-mode; favorable response to a NaI:Tl scintillator flashes makes them widely used in gamma spectroscopy and radiation detection; high-temperature bialkali (Na-K-Sb), can operate up to 175 °C, used in well logging, low dark current at room temperature; multialkali (Na-K-Sb-Cs), (also called S20), wide spectral response from ultraviolet to near-infrared, special cathode processing can extend range to 930 nm, used in broadband spectrophotometers; solar-blind (Cs-Te, Cs-I), sensitive to vacuum-UV and ultraviolet, insensitive to visible light and infrared (Cs-Te has cutoff at 320 nm, Cs-I at 200 nm).

Window materials
The windows of the photomultipliers act as wavelength filters; this may be irrelevant if the cutoff wavelengths are outside of the application range or outside of the photocathode sensitivity range, but special care has to be taken for uncommon wavelengths. Borosilicate glass is commonly used for near-infrared to about 300 nm. High borate borosilicate glasses exist also in high UV transmission versions with high transmission also at 254 nm. Glass with very low content of potassium can be used with bialkali photocathodes to lower the background radiation from the potassium-40 isotope. Ultraviolet glass transmits visible and ultraviolet down to 185 nm. Used in spectroscopy. Synthetic silica transmits down to 160 nm, absorbs less UV than fused silica. Different thermal expansion than kovar (and than borosilicate glass that's expansion-matched to kovar), a graded seal needed between the window and the rest of the tube. The seal is vulnerable to mechanical shocks. Magnesium fluoride transmits ultraviolet down to 115 nm. Hygroscopic, though less than other alkali halides usable for UV windows.

Usage considerations
Photomultiplier tubes typically utilize 1000 to 2000 volts to accelerate electrons within the chain of dynodes. (See Figure near top of article.) The most negative voltage is connected to the cathode, and the most positive voltage is connected to the anode. Negative high-voltage supplies (with the positive terminal grounded) are often preferred, because this configuration enables the photocurrent to be measured at the low voltage side of the circuit for amplification by subsequent electronic circuits operating at low voltage. However, with the photocathode at high voltage, leakage currents sometimes result in unwanted "dark current" pulses that may affect the operation. Voltages are distributed to the dynodes by a resistive voltage divider, although variations such as active designs (with transistors or diodes) are possible. The divider design, which influences frequency response or rise time, can be selected to suit varying applications. Some instruments that use photomultipliers have provisions to vary the anode voltage to control the gain of the system.

While powered (energized), photomultipliers must be shielded from ambient light to prevent their destruction through overexcitation. In some applications this protection is accomplished mechanically by electrical interlocks or shutters that protect the tube when the photomultiplier compartment is opened. Another option is to add overcurrent protection in the external circuit, so that when the measured anode current exceeds a safe limit, the high voltage is reduced.

If used in a location with strong magnetic fields, which can curve electron paths, steer the electrons away from the dynodes and cause loss of gain, photomultipliers are usually magnetically shielded by a layer of soft iron or mu-metal. This magnetic shield is often maintained at cathode potential. When this is the case, the external shield must also be electrically insulated because of the high voltage on it. Photomultipliers with large distances between the photocathode and the first dynode are especially sensitive to magnetic fields.

Applications
Photomultipliers were the first electric eye devices, being used to measure interruptions in beams of light. Photomultipliers are used in conjunction with scintillators to detect Ionizing radiation by means of hand held and fixed radiation protection instruments, and particle radiation in physics experiments. Photomultipliers are used in research laboratories to measure the intensity and spectrum of light-emitting materials such as compound semiconductors and quantum dots. Photomultipliers are used as the detector in many spectrophotometers. This allows an instrument design that escapes the thermal noise limit on sensitivity, and which can therefore substantially increase the dynamic range of the instrument.

Photomultipliers are used in numerous medical equipment designs. For example, blood analysis devices used by clinical medical laboratories, such as flow cytometers, utilize photomultipliers to determine the relative concentration of various components in blood samples, in combination with optical filters and incandescent lamps. An array of photomultipliers is used in a gamma camera. Photomultipliers are typically used as the detectors in flying-spot scanners.

High-sensitivity applications
After 50 years, during which solid-state electronic components have largely displaced the vacuum tube, the photomultiplier remains a unique and important optoelectronic component. Perhaps its most useful quality is that it acts, electronically, as a nearly perfect current source, owing to the high voltage utilized in extracting the tiny currents associated with weak light signals. There is no Johnson noise associated with photomultiplier signal currents, even though they are greatly amplified, e.g., by 100 thousand times (i.e., 100 dB) or more. The photocurrent still contains shot noise.

Photomultiplier-amplified photocurrents can be electronically amplified by a high-input-impedance electronic amplifier (in the signal path subsequent to the photomultiplier), thus producing appreciable voltages even for nearly infinitesimally small photon fluxes. Photomultipliers offer the best possible opportunity to exceed the Johnson noise for many configurations. The aforementioned refers to measurement of light fluxes that, while small, nonetheless amount to a continuous stream of multiple photons.

For smaller photon fluxes, the photomultiplier can be operated in photon-counting, or Geiger, mode (see also Single-photon avalanche diode). In Geiger mode the photomultiplier gain is set so high (using high voltage) that a single photo-electron resulting from a single photon incident on the primary surface generates a very large current at the output circuit. However, owing to the avalanche of current, a reset of the photomultiplier is required. In either case, the photomultiplier can detect individual photons. The drawback, however, is that not every photon incident on the primary surface is counted either because of less-than-perfect efficiency of the photomultiplier, or because a second photon can arrive at the photomultiplier during the "dead time" associated with a first photon and never be noticed.

A photomultiplier will produce a small current even without incident photons; this is called the dark current. Photon-counting applications generally demand photomultipliers designed to minimise dark current.

Nonetheless, the ability to detect single photons striking the primary photosensitive surface itself reveals the quantization principle that Einstein put forth. Photon counting (as it is called) reveals that light, not only being a wave, consists of discrete particles (i.e., photons).

Temperature range
It is known that at cryogenic temperatures photo multipliers demonstrate increase in (bursting) electrons emission as temperature lowers. This phenomenon is still unexplained by any physics theory.

title: Photomultiplier tube


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Eternal Champion

The Eternal Champion is a fictional character created by British author Michael Moorcock and is a recurrent feature in many of his speculative fiction works.

General overview
Many of Moorcock's novels and short stories take place in a shared Multiverse: an array of interconnected parallel universes, many-layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, spanning from the Big Bang to the End of Time and from planet Earth to faraway galaxies. All these regions of spaces and parallel timelines are given shape by two metaphysical forces which are perpetually opposed to each other: Law and Chaos, which represent perpetual stasis and ever-changing disorder. Since a clear-cut prevalence of either Law or Chaos would erase all life from the Multiverse, a third force known as the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits on the powers of Law and Chaos, which in turn ensure the continued existence of the Multiverse. Law, Chaos, and the Balance are implied to be non-sentient, but they do manifest through god-like beings who express one facet or another of the three cosmic principles, and in turn, these deities can empower mortal creatures as their heralds and representatives.

The Eternal Champion is an appointed paladin of Balance who is bound to exist in each and every world and age of the Multiverse, so that Law and Chaos are perpetually kept in check; however, he often does not know of his role or struggles against it, never to succeed. Since he must intervene whenever either Law or Chaos has gained an excess of power, requiring him to tip the scales accordingly, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet.

All the different Eternal Champions are implied to be different facets or "incarnations" of one semi-conscious being (a platonic archetype of a sort): most of them are peerless fighters and generals and have an unbreakable bond with a sentient Chaos-aligned weapon, the Black Sword, which in turns takes on a different form for each Champion. Likewise, many Champions are aided by an Eternal Companion and an Eternal Consort: a sidekick and a love interest who are themselves aspects of two semi-divine figures. This recursivity through the Multiverse is further underlined by the number of Champions, Companions, and mentor-figures to the Champions Moorcock has given the J and C initials, as a form of naming fil rouge; in the same vein, many Champions and Companions belong to one branch or another of the extensive von Bek dynasty.

Space- and time-travels through the Multiverse are in fact possible, to the point that one humanoid species called the Eldrens is spread among many different worlds and ages and interacts with many different Champions; however, cosmic laws establish that no two Eternal Champions can coexist in the same situation, or the very fabric of reality would be severely damaged. The only exceptions are cataclysmic events such as the end of a Cycle of Cycles of the Multiverse's progression, or an invasion by hostile entities from an entirely separate multiverse: in these cases, different incarnations of the Champion may join forces to thwart the impending threat, possibly by temporarily merging their individual bodies into a true demigod of immense power.

Incarnations
The following list presents all known Champions in alphabetical order, mentions their respective Swords, Companions, and Consorts, and briefly summarizes their individual plotlines and publishing history:
 * Alerik
 * Alivale
 * Konrad Arflane: the hero of the postapocalyptic novel The Ice Schooner (1969), Arflane lives during a new ice age that has engulfed most of Earth and forced the surviving humans to revert to a hunting-gathering economy; he sets sails on the eponymous ice schooner to reach the fabled settlement of New York and scavenge all ancestral knowledge that could help restore human civilization.
 * Artos the Celt
 * Asquiol of Pompeii: the main character of the science-fiction novella "The Blood Red Game" (1963), Asquiol is leading a human colonizing force into a parallel universe and has to fight for supremacy against a hostile native species. "The Blood Red Game" was eventually combined with the earlier novella "The Sundered Worlds" (1962) into the full-length novel The Sundered Worlds (1965), making Asquiol somehow of a guest character into the Von Bek saga.
 * Aubec, Earl of Malador: Aubec debuted in a 1964 short story titled either "The Dream of Earl Aubec" or "Master of Chaos" depending on the collection: he lives in the same world as Elric of Melniboné many generations before that character's birth, serves as a national champion of the human kingdom of Lormyria and is the paramour of the Lormyrian monarch, Queen Eloarde. Moorcock planned a whole series about Aubec's wars against Melniboné in order to ensure human independence, eventually reconnecting to Elric's saga as a direct prequel, but the project was eventually aborted; consequently, "The Dream of Earl Aubec" was reincorporated into Elric's series as a prologue.
 * Captain Oswald Bastable: the main character and narrator of the Nomad of Time trilogy (1971–1981), Captain Bastable is an officer of the British Imperial Army stationed in the Raj in the early 20th Century, until a series of time-travel incidents transports him into three different uchronias: a 1973 where the World Wars have not been fought and the British Empire is now encroached by decolonizing movements; a 1904 where Europe has been left in tatters by a precocious and even more devastating Great War; a 1941 where the British and German Empires are firmly allied. Bastable's misadventures in these alternative timelines are constructed as a biography and literary historians regard them as the prototypes of the steampunk subgenre.
 * Brian
 * Jherek Carnelian: one of the last humans to be alive on Earth as the Multiverse is nearing the End of Time, Carnelian is a creature of semi-divine power, hedonistic interests, and obnoxious morality (not unlike his fellow End-Timers), but his lifestyle changes forever once he falls in love with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the Nineteenth Century; the couple's courtship, relationship and shared adventures across time and space are the subject of a trilogy called The Dancers at the End of Time (1972-1976); this series is complemented by the Legends at the End of Time: five semi-autonomous short stories and novelettes taking place at the End of Time, themselves composed in the late Seventies (with an additional sixth one being published in 2008). This series is characterized by a high number of cameos from other leading and supporting characters of the Eternal Champion mythos.
 * Jerry Cornelius: an adventurer and dimensional traveler Moorcock created in the mid-1960s and developed for the following forty years, resulting in an early tetralogy of novels, The Cornelius Quartet (1968–1977), a ponderous collection of short fiction, The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976), and a later hexalogy of novels, The Cornelius Calendar (composed in two stages, 1976–1981 and 2002–2008), with more tales in the working. Cornelius' saga consists of a wide array of surreal situations kept together by the character's uniquely fluid identity and it represents an influential form of experimental literature in the wider context of psychedelic counterculture. This series also includes two spin-off works, a Doctor Who licensed novel titled The Coming of the Terraphiles (2010), whose Captain Cornelius is, in fact, Jerry's incarnation in the Whoniverse; and The Distant Suns (1975), a late example of pulp space opera Moorcock co-authored with James Cawthorn, depicting Jerry as an air force Colonel and a space explorer. Moreover, it is implied that Lord Jagged of Canaria from Jherek Carnelian's series, Jaspar Colinadous from one of Elric's adventures, Dorian Hawkmoon's Jehamia Cohnahlias, Corum's Jhary-a-Conel, and John Daker's Jermays the Crooked are Jerry's counterparts in their respective dimensions. Jerry's version of the Black Sword is a Needle Gun (later morphed into a Vibragun), his Consort is his own sister Catherine (depicted as his wife in The Distant Suns, to avoid any incestuous undertones), and he has a conflictual bond with fellow dimensional adventurer Una Persson.
 * Jerry Cornell: in 1966 Moorcock edited (and in fact ghost-wrote) a sizeable section of the spy novel The LSD Dossier by Roger Harris and eventually authored two novels starring Harris's original main character, secret agent Nick Allard; later on Moorcock revised his solo works into a stand-alone series centered upon Agent Jerry Cornell (1970–1980), an overt parody of character tropes and clichés from Ian Fleming's James Bond series.
 * John Daker: a human implied to come from 20th Century Earth, he is forced by Balance to reincarnate into various aspects of the Champion while staying fully aware of all his identities after every transmigration. Through his own series, he takes on four different personas:
 * Lord Erekosë: a warrior from an unspecified age of Earth's history and the only human capable of holding the radioactive sword Kunajana. At the beginning of the novella "The Eternal Champion" (1962; expanded into a novel of the same title in 1970) Erekosë has been dead for generations, but a necromantic ritual resurrects him as a new existence for John Daker; the reborn Erekosë consequently gets entangled into a world war between humans and Eldrens and into a love triangle between the two factions' princesses, Eldren Ermizhad and human Iolinda.
 * Count Ulrik Skarlsol: once his missions as Erekosë are resolved, Daker is forcibly transferred into Count Ulrik Skarlsol, Lord of the Frozen Keep, a hybernated hero native to an ice-bound planet. During the novel Phoenix in Obsidian (1970) Count Ulrik embarks on a quest for the mysterious "Chalice" (possibly a counterpart of the Holy Grail) and is forced to wield the Cold Sword, an extremely powerful and malevolent form of the Black Sword.
 * Clen of Clen-Gar: Daker assumes this identity during The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell (1979), a graphic novel co-authored by Moorcock and Howard Chaykin which bridges the time gap between the second and third prose novel. Clen is a human lord of a prosperous bucolic territory called "Heaven", whose "Angel" denizens are responsible for the abysmal state of their neighboring land of "Hell"; as the two countries clash in war, Clen gets romantically involved with Lady Gradesmor from Heaven.
 * Prince Flamadin: Flamadin is the ruler of a dimension called Draachenheem and owns both the Dragon Sword (a Black Sword comparable in power to Ulrik Skarlson's Cold Sword) and the Actoris Stone, an enchanted gem that would later become Elric of Melniboné's family heirloom. In The Dragon in the Sword (1986) Daker as Flamadin and his Companion from 20th Century Germany, Ulrich von Bek, travel across many interconnected dimensions to prevent a major cataclysm.
 * Elric of Melniboné: Moorcock's breakthrough character, Elric lives in a prehistorical age of Earth and is the sorcerer-emperor of the Melnibonéans, a pre-human species of Chaos-aligned feys (later retconned into being a branch of the Eldren); he wields the soul-eating sword Stormbringer, on which he is co-dependent due to his frail health, and spends his life trying to thwart the Chaos God Arioch, who is also his undesired personal patron due to an ancestral Melnibonéan tradition; the first and last novels in this series also feature Mournblade, Stormbringer's twin sword, which is wielded by Elric's kinsmen. In the early stages of his saga, Elric is enamored of his cousin Princess Cymoril and gets one-time help from Oone the Dreamthief, an enchantress, and Count Smiorgan, a well-known reaver; later on, he falls in love with the human aristocrat Zarozinia and casts his lot with Moonglum of Elwher, a sybaritic sellsword, and Rackhir the Red Archer, a powerful paladin of Balance. Elric's series represents a major milestone in sword & sorcery fiction and, unlike Moorcock's later works, was composed anachronically: it originally consisted of seven short stories and a serialized conclusive novel written from 1961 to 1967, but it was later expanded with three additional novels in the 1970s, two in the 1990s, and some more peripheral contents during the early 21st century.
 * Franik
 * Professor Faustaff: the leading character in The Wrecks of Time (1965), he is a physicist fighting the space-faring marauders known as the D-Squads in order to protect a cluster of fifteen different Earths that exist in parallel to Faustaff's own planet. The 1996 revision of The Wrecks of Time renamed Faustaff's ally Gordon Ogg into "Gordon Begg", in order to retcon him into a Von Bek and underline those character's respective status as an Eternal Champion and Companion, but this change was eventually dropped in the 2014 reprint.
 * Goldberg
 * Duke Dorian Hawkmoon von Köln: a German soldier in a post-nuclear Europe where magic and ancient technology coexist, Duke Hawkmoon embarks on a quest together with his retainer Oladahn to recover the fabled Runestaff (a magical talisman akin to the Holy Grail) and protect the world from the warmongering Dark Empire of Granbretan, which is ruled by the ruthless half-human half-machine King Huon; as this enterprise progresses, Hawkmoon is forced to bear the enchanted Black Jewel, a manifestation of the Black Sword, and falls in love with Yisselda of Brass, heiress of a fiefdom in the land of Kamarg. Dorian's war against Granbretan is central in the Runestaff tetralogy (1967–1969) while his family life with Yisselda serves as a backdrop to the Chronicles of Castle Brass/Count Brass trilogy (1973-1975), which culminates into a crossover with Elric's, Daker's, and Corum's respective series.
 * Ilanth
 * Queen Ilian of Garathorm: one of the very few female Championesses, she teams up with Duke Hawkmoon once he travels to her own world during his sixth novel, The Champion of Garathorm.
 * Karl Glogauer: a hedonist and a hippie with a countercultural background, Glogauer debuts in the novella "Behold the Man" (1966; expanded into a novel of the same title in 1969), in which he time-travels to Roman Palestine so that he can meet Jesus Christ; the later novel Breakfast in the Ruins (1972) details the character's gay romances and hallucinatory experiences in contemporary London. He also cameos in Jerry Cornelius's adventures.
 * Corum Jhaelen Irsei: a prince of the Vadhagh, a Law-aligned branch of the Eldren people, Corum effectively becomes the last of his kin after a disastrous war against the Mabden, a species created by Chaos of which Homo sapiens is the Terran variant. After a period of thralldom, the mutilation of his left hand and right eye, and their replacement with magical prosthetics (hence his alias as Corum Llaw Ereint, "Corum of the Silver Hand"), the former prince rises in rebellion against his captors and wages a veritable crusade against Chaos, which takes place both in Corum's own age during the Swords trilogy (1971) and in a distant future during the Silver Hand trilogy (1973-1974). As his vendetta unfolds, Corum pursues troubled romances with two human women, Rhalina and Medhbh, and is reliably backed by Jhary-a-Conel, a well-versed dimensional traveler who occasionally supports Hawkmoon as well. Notice that Corum's name is an anagram of "Jeremiah Cornelius".
 * Jack Karaquazian: a leading character in the Second Ether trilogy (1995–1996), which depicts the power struggles between god-like beings (such as Karaquazian himself) of Lawful, Chaotic and neutral affiliation to take control of Balance and swing it their own respective way. Jack is involved in an entangled love affair with his Consort Colinda Dovero, his Companion Sam Oakenhurst and Sam's other love interest Rose von Bek.
 * Michael Kane of Old Mars: the hero of a 1965 trilogy of novels, Michael Kane is a human scientist from Earth transported to a fictional version of Mars, where he gets embroiled in swashbuckling adventures and court intrigues, including a romance with Martian queen Shizala. Kane is constructed as an explicit homage and throwback to the planetary romance subgenre and, more specifically, to John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; in turn, the biographical style of the trilogy represents a direct antecedent to Oswald Bastable's saga.
 * Clovis Marca: the leading character in The Shores of Death (1966), Marca is one of the last human denizens of a future Earth which stopped rotating and is now split between a daily and a nightly hemisphere; he embarks on a quest to cure humankind's severe sterility and grant his species a future. The 1996 revision of The Shores of Death renamed Marca into "Clovis Becker" in order to retcon him into a distant Von Bek, but this change was eventually dropped in the 2014 reprint.
 * Mejink-La-Kos
 * M'v Okom Sebpt O'Riley, Gunholder of the Qui Lors Ventures: another female Championess, she wields the Black Sword under the guise of a soul-eating pistol, the Banning Gun. She acts as a mentor to Eric Beck in Elric: The Balance Lost.
 * Oshbek-Uy
 * Pournachas
 * Alan Powys: the leading character in The Winds of Limbo (1965), Powys is a state functionary in a distant future where humankind has retreated underground under the stewardship of a despotic government; he strives to protect his home country from a space terrorist known as "The Fireclown". The 1996 revision of The Winds of Limbo renamed Powys into "Alain von Bek" in order to retcon him into a distant Von Bek, but this change was eventually dropped in the 2014 reprint.
 * Colonel Maxim Arturovitch "Pyat" Pyatnitski: possibly the only Champion whose adventures are fully mimetic rather than fantastical, Colonel Pyat is a long-lived Russian aristocrat and military man born on 1 January 1900. He spends his life traveling across the globe and getting entangled into all sorts of high-level political intrigues, effectively shaping the fates of Earth before, during, and after the World Wars, his only stable human connection being his lover Honoria Cornelius, Jerry's mother. Moorcock originally created Pyat as a supporting character in Jerry Cornelius's series and eventually fleshed him out in the Pyat Quartet (1981–2006); this series is structured it as a self-celebratory four-volume autobiography by the Colonel himself, with Moorcock acting as an editor.
 * Ryan: the lead character of The Black Corridor (1969), Ryan lives in a dystopian future of rampaging xenophobia, nuclear warfare and societal collapse; he commandeers the interstellar spaceship Hope Dempsy and tries to bring a rag-tag group of refugees to safety.
 * The "Scar-Faced Brooder" or "Cronarch": a character from Moorcock's juvenile novelettes The Time Dweller (1964) and Escape from Evening (1965), dealing with the state of human society in a dying Earth scenario.
 * Shaleen
 * Sojan the Swordsman: Moorcock's first original character and a prototype to the Eternal Champion concept, Sojan is a deceased Terran who reincarnates on the planet Zylor and embarks on a series of picaresque adventures; interestingly, while he does wield a sword and a pneumatic gun, his actual signature weapon is a shield (hence the moniker of "Sojan Shieldbearer"). Sojan's adventures first appeared around 1955 as a twenty-three parts serial on the Burroughsania fanzine, which Moorcock had been contributing to, were reprinted for profit in Tarzan Adventures between 1957 and 1958, and they were eventually fixed-up in book form in 1977; finally, the 2013 edition combined this serial together with other sword-and-planet short fiction focusing on Dek of Noothar, Klan the Spoiler, and Rens Karto Of Bersnol.
 * Umpata
 * Ghardas Valabasian, Conqueror of the Distant Suns
 * Graf Ulrich von Bek: a German soldier fighting in the Thirty Years' War, Graf Ulrich is the leading character of the historical fantasy novel The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), in which he strikes a deal with the Devil and takes upon his family the duty of locating and guarding the Holy Grail; his Companion and Consort in this adventure are Gurni Gurnisson and Sabrina. Graf Ulrich's actions reverberate through space and time by making the von Beks aware of the Multiverse, the designated owners of the sword Ravenbrand (which is, in fact, Mournblade from Elric's series) and uniquely attuned to magic and dimensional travel, so that different members of the bloodline are involved in many other sagas and stand-alone episodes of the Eternal Champion mythos. Ulrich von Bek and his descendants are a somewhat unusual family in Moorcock's works, as they function both as an aspect of the Eternal Champion and as a companion to him. The family is considered to be the current Keeper of the Holy Grail. The von Bek family motto is "Do you the Devil's work", a nod to the relationship that the family developed with Lucifer in The War Hound and the World's Pain.
 * Manfred von Bek: the main character of The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), a direct sequel to The War Hound and the World's Pain, Manfred carries on Graf Ulrich's quest for the Grail as Europe is engulfed by the French Revolution; he is aided by the Duchess of Crete, Libussa Cartagena y Mendoza-Chilperic. Due to their shared main plotline, The War Hound and the World's Pain and The City in the Autumn Stars are usually collected together as the core of the "Von Bek saga".
 * Renark von Bek: a citizen of humankind's stellar empire established in the aftermath of World War Three, Renark is tasked with traveling to a secluded dimension known as the Sundered Worlds so that he can stabilize the Multiverse and prevent its untimely collapse. He is the lead character in the novella "The Sundered Worlds" (1962), which was eventually combined with "The Blood Red Game" (1963) into the full-length novel The Sundered Worlds (1965).
 * Rose von Bek: the last survivor of a militant order devoted to Balance, she was originally known as "The Rose", but married into the von Bek family and kept the surname after her divorce. She is the titular coprotagonist in Elric's novel The Revenge of the Rose (1991) and a leading character in the Second Ether trilogy. While no Championess herself, her cosmic power is comparable to that of the various Champions. Her signature weapons are the sword Swift Thorn and the dagger Little Thorn.
 * Ulrich von Bek: a direct descendant of Graf Ulrich, he rebels against Adolf Hitler and escapes death by serving as an Eternal Companion to John Daker once the latter incarnates into Prince Flamadin during The Dragon in the Sword.
 * Ulric von Bek: a distinct character from the former (notice the h-less spelling of his name), he too opposes the Third Reich together with his wife Oona von Bek, a half-human half-Melnibonéan hybrid who has relocated to 20th Century Germany. Ulric and Oona are the leading characters of the Moonbeam Roads Trilogy (2001–2005), an explicit crossover between Elric's saga and the Von Beks'.
 * Count Ulrich Rudric Renark Otto von Bek-Krasny, also known as "Zenith the Albino": an Eternal Champion existing on 20th Century Earth and most likely a reincarnated Elric of Melniboné, since his Black Sword is Stormbringer itself; he is a criminal mastermind and is perpetually engaged into a cat-and-mouse game against his distant cousin Sir Seaton Begg, a British "metatemporal detective" belonging to the English branch of the dynasty. Zenith and Begg's shared adventure were composed anachronically and collected for the first time in The Metatemporal Detective (2007), while some of them had already appeared in the second volume of the Second Ether series, Fabulous Harbours (1995).
 * Eric Beck: the main character of the graphic novel Elric: The Balance Lost (2011-2012), he is an Eternal Champion living on 21st Century Earth and gets dragged into an ensemble adventure together with Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Oswald Bastable, and the cast of the Second Ether series. His Black Sword is a Japanese katana named Murakamo-No-Tsurugi ("Sword of the Gathering Clouds"). He is a collateral member of the Von Bek dynasty through the Begg lineage (originally, van Beek).
 * Karol von Bek: the melancholy Duke of Waldenstein (mentioned in "The Citadel of Forgotten Myths")

In addition to Moorcock's own creations, a number of references through his works have stated that Ulysses and Roland have been Earth's Eternal Champions as well.

The Tale of the Eternal Champion
Between 1992 and 1993 Moorcock partnered with British publisher Millenium (later absorbed into the Orion Publishing Group) to print a multi-volume collection of all novels and short stories belonging to the Eternal Champion sequence, under the moniker of "The Tale of the Eternal Champion"; starting from 1994 and up to 2000, a parallel project simply called "The Eternal Champion" was undertaken by White Wolf Publishing for the North American market, but each of the two series ended up including some contents left out of its counterpart due to licensing issues, while certain works could not make into the collection whatsoever. This publishing operation represented Moorcock's first attempt to systematize his magnum opus both in terms of editorial uniformity and textual revisions.

The following table and paragraph list the full contents of both the European and North American versions of the collection. It should be noticed that the Orion collection was arranged according to Moorcock's then-preferred reading order, which was altered in the White Wolf version. Both versions of the collection included Elric's saga, Corum's hexalogy, Hawkmoon's heptalogy, and the End of Time series as two-volumes sets and devoted one volume each to John Daker's trilogy, Captain Bastable's trilogy, and the von Bek duology (which was complemented by the detective short story "The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius"); Sailing to Utopia was a thematical anthology combining The Ice Schooner, The Distant Suns, The Black Corridor and the novella "Flux", and likewise Earl Aubec and Other Stories collected thirty-three works of short fiction from across Moorcock's production, among them the two short stories focussing on the Scared-Face Brooder and the short novels The Golden Barge and My Experiences in the Third World War.

As for region-exclusive contents, the European-only The New Nature of the Catastrophe was an anthology of short fiction centered upon Jerry Cornelius, expanding upon the earlier collection The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, whereas the North American-only Kane of Old Mars collected Michael Kane's trilogy. Moreover, White Wolf Publishing did secure the rights over the stand-alone science fiction novels The Sundered World, The Wrecks of Time, The Winds of Limbo, and The Shores of Death, but their inclusion came at the expense of Moorcock's preferred reading order: The Sundered World was inserted into John Daker's volume as an interlude between that character's first and second novel; Daker's third novel was moved into the von Bek volume as a coda; and The Wrecks of Time, The Winds of Limbo, and The Shores of Death were collected into the thematical anthology The Roads Between the Worlds, which interconnected the three novels through an original framing device.

It is also worth mentioning that the first edition of the Second Ether trilogy was published by Millenium itself right after "The Tale of the Eternal Champion" was completed, and that while Jerry Cornelius's and Karl Glogauer's novels were not formally included in the series, nonetheless they were still being distributed in the UK by Orion under its Phoenix House imprint, together with Moorcock's non-Champion novels Gloriana; or, the Unfulfill'd Queen and The Brothel in Rosenstrasse. As a result, Jerry Cornell's duology was the only series in the Eternal Champion mythos not to be included in either collection, nor officially nor informally.

The Michael Moorcock Collection
Moorcock's second attempt to systematize the Eternal Champion corpus took place between 2013 and 2015, once Victor Gollancz Ltd (another imprint of the Orion conglomerate) secured the rights for all of his fantasy and science-fiction works and consequently reprinted them in a cohesive series, labeled as "The Michael Moorcock Collection"; as of 2021, these Gollancz editions represent the most updated versions of Moorcock's opus, due to their contents having been jointly revised by the author and his bibliographer John Davey into a definitive textual rendition. This publication included both all of the author's full-length novels and a selection of short fiction and was eventually complemented by two stand-alone series collecting the author's non-Champion sagas, the London Sequence and The Sanctuary of the White Friars.

The following table and paragraph list the full contents of the collection. The Collection was further complemented by five digital-only releases: As of 2021, Gollancz has not yet acquired the rights for the Pyat Quartet, consisting of:
 * Jerry Cornell's series:
 * The Chinese Agent (1970)
 * The Russian Intelligence (1980)
 * The Golden Barge (1979, but originally composed in 1958)
 * Sojan the Swordsman (1977, but originally composed in 1954–1958)
 * The Distant Suns (1975, but originally composed in 1969)
 * 1) Byzantium Endures (1981)
 * 2) The Laughter of Carthage (1984)
 * 3) Jerusalem Commands (1992)
 * 4) The Vengeance of Rome (2006)

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

title: Eternal Champion


text:
Ducks Deluxe

Ducks Deluxe are an English pub rock band of the 1970s, who continue to tour and record new material. Usually called "The Ducks" by their fans, they were known for up-tempo, energetic performances, and the successful careers of their members, after they disbanded.

History
The band formed in February 1972, with ex Brinsley Schwarz roadie Martin Belmont on guitar, former Help Yourself collaborator Sean Tyla, also on guitar, ex Help Yourself bassist Ken Whaley, and Magic Michael (Michael Cousins) on percussion. They named themselves after a slot machine at the Severn Bridge Service Station. Cousins was soon replaced by drummer Tim Roper and former Flamin' Groovies roadie, Nick Garvey, also joined. Playing more energetic music than most others on the London pub-rock circuit, the Ducks soon had a twice weekly booking at the Tally Ho in Kentish Town, and a manager, Dai Davies.

Whaley left, and later rejoined Help Yourself, and in December 1972, the Ducks recorded two tracks at Man's Christmas party, one of which,"Boogaloo Babe", was released on a double 10" album Christmas at the Patti, their first appearance on a record.

In 1973, the band signed to RCA and released their first single, "Coast to Coast", written by Sean Tyla and Nick Garvey, though Tyla is not credited on the track, because he was trying to untangle himself from a previous publishing deal. They also appeared in BBC TV Play for Today called Blooming Youth. Their eponymous debut album Ducks Deluxe was released in early 1974, and "captures something of the fire and excitement that the Ducks' live act generated". Keyboard and bass player Andy McMaster joined from The Sabres, to record a second album, Taxi To The Terminal Zone, but this was regarded as disappointing and McMaster left. The band recorded its first Peel Session in April 1974, after which Garvey left and bassist Micky Groome joined. Despite recording a second Peel Session in March 1975, RCA dropped the band, so they were reduced to issuing an EP, Jumpin on the French label Skydog. Tim Roper left so former Brinsley Schwarz members Brinsley Schwarz and Billy Rankin played on the final tour, with the final gig being at the 100 Club in London on 1 July 1975.

In 1978, RCA Victor released the compilation album Don't Mind Rockin' Tonite, featuring six songs from the band's debut LP, three from Taxi to the Terminal Zone (unavailable in the US at the time), and a few non-album singles. Reviewing the compilation in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau wrote: "The music is pure rock and roll, maybe too pure, combining the Rumour's spirited intensity and the Motors' cheerful manipulation at a more primitive stage. Fans of the Tyla Gang will dig it."

Later careers
Nick Garvey and Andy McMaster formed The Motors, with Rob Hendry (later replaced by Bram Tchaikovsky) and drummer Ricky Slaughter.

Sean Tyla formed "The Tyla Gang", which would later include Ken Whaley, who had joined Man after Help Yourself broke up. The Tyla Gang featured Canadian Bruce Irvinere and the former Winkies rhythm section of Brian Turrington on bass and Mike Desmarais on drums. They released two albums, Yachtless and Moonproof on the US-based, Beserkley label before the label's UK operation went bankrupt in 1978 and the band disbanded. Tyla embarked on a solo career and released three albums, Just Popped Out, Redneck In Babylon and Rhythm Of The Swing, the first of which produced Tyla's first Top ten single, "Breakfast In Marin", in Germany in 1980. Tyla and Micky Groome along with drummer, Paul Simmons then joined Man's Deke Leonard to form "The Force", until Tyla decided to retire from the music business completely, due to ill health. Groome stayed with Leonard to reform "Deke Leonard's Iceberg".

Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont joined Brinsley's former keyboard player Bob Andrews to support Graham Parker as Graham Parker & the Rumour, as well as appearing without Parker, as "The Rumour". Belmont later played in Carlene Carter's CC Riders and Nick Lowe's Cowboy Outfit.

Roper, the original drummer, moved to Norwich, where he became a well-known figure in local bands. He died in February 2003 from alcohol-related symptoms, following a nervous breakdown.

The first album, Ducks Deluxe, achieved moderate commercial success after the band broke up, because the members had gone on to greater fame in Graham Parker & the Rumour, The Tyla Gang and The Motors.

Reunion
The band reformed to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their original formation. This was at the 100 Club in London on 9 October 2007. The line-up was Martin Belmont, Sean Tyla, Micky Groome and Billy Rankin. A further gig took place on 9 November at The Musician in Leicester. On 26 January 2008, they played Centre Culturel de Paul Baillart, Massy, near Paris, France. On 20 September 2008, they played the PopXiria Festival in Carballo, near A Coruña in Spain, headlining the final night of the event.

In 2009, Ducks Deluxe toured Sweden from 29 March to 13 April. The band consisted of Sean Tyla, vocals and guitar; Martin Belmont, guitar and vocals; Kevin Foster (of Hank Wangford & the Lost Cowboys and Los Pisteleros fame) bass guitar and backing vocals; and Jim Russell, (ex Stretch, Wild Angels, and The Inmates) on drums. They released their first new material, a mini CD Box Of Shorts on 18 May 2009, comprising six new studio tracks, produced by Paul 'Bassman' Riley.

A new full album, Side Tracks And Smokers, was released in June 2010 with artwork by famous Stiff Records designer Tobbe Stuhre, and tracks including some recently found and remastered raw mixes of tracks from the early albums, and also some brand new Ducks Deluxe recordings. It was followed in 2011 by a lo-fi live recording, Riviera Shuffle on Jungle Records which was only available through mail order.

The band completed a 40th Anniversary Tour in early 2012, featuring Brinsley Schwarz back in the line-up after a 37-year absence. Later that year the group recorded a live album in London, Rockin' at the Moon, which was released in 2013.

Members

 * Sean Tyla - Vocals, guitar
 * Martin Belmont - Guitar, vocals
 * Brinsley Schwarz - Guitar, vocals
 * Kevin Foster - Bass guitar, vocals
 * Jim Russell - Drums

Previous members:

 * Ken Whaley - Bass, vocals
 * Nick Garvey - Guitars, Bass, vocals
 * Tim Roper - Drums
 * Andy McMaster - Keyboards, vocals
 * Micky Groome - Bass, vocals
 * Billy Rankin - Drums
 * Brinsley Schwarz - Guitar, vocals, saxophone

Singles

 * "Coast To Coast" / "Bring Back That Packard Car" (1973) RCA 2438
 * "Please, Please, Please" / "Please, Please, Please" (1974) RCA DJH0-0297
 * "Fireball" / "Saratoga Suzie" (1974) RCA LPBO 5019
 * "Love's Melody" / "Two Time Twister" (1974) RCA 2477
 * "I Fought The Law" / "Cherry Pie" (1975) RCA 2531

EP

 * Jumpin' EP (1975) Skydog EP-005

Albums

 * Ducks Deluxe LP (1974) RCA LPLI 5008: 8-track cassette (1974) RCA LPSI 5008
 * Taxi To The Terminal Zone LP (1975) RCA SF 8402
 * Don't Mind Rockin' Tonite (Compilation & Bonus tracks) (1978) - RCA NL 71153
 * Last Night Of A Pub Rock Band LP (Holland) (1979) Dynamite - BMLP 001 (bootleg)
 * Last Performance Dynamite - TAKE DYR 3505 (UK bootleg of Last Night Of A Pub Rock Band)
 * All Too Much - Teichiku TECP-25358
 * Ducks Deluxe / Taxi To The Terminal Zone CD (1992) BMG/Demon/MAU MAU CD 610 and BGO BGOCD539
 * Bonesteak Á La Carte - Ten Dollar TDR 065 (bootleg)
 * The John Peel Sessions - Hux Records HUX086 (3 BBC Radio 1 Sessions from 1973, 1974 and 1975)
 * All Too Much / Blow You Out - Jungle (combines a Ducks Deluxe and a Tyla Gang album)
 * Live at the 100 Club - 9 October 2007 (bootleg)
 * Christmas At The Patti (only one Ducks Deluxe track) LP (1973) United Artists: CD (1997) Point PNTVP110CD: CD Re-mix (2007) Esoteric ECLEC 2018
 * Box Of Shorts Mini CD (released on 18 May 2009)
 * Side Tracks And Smokers (released on 5 April 2010)
 * Riviera Shuffle (released on 7 May 2011)
 * Rockin' At the Moon (2013) Mystic Records MYS CD 214

title: Ducks Deluxe


text:
Industrial Light & Magic

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the original Star Wars, now the fourth episode of the Skywalker Saga.

ILM originated in Van Nuys, California, then later moved to San Rafael in 1978, and since 2005 it has been based at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco. In 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired ILM as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm. As of 2024, Industrial Light & Magic has won 15 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects.

History
Lucas wanted his 1977 film Star Wars to include visual effects that had never been seen on film before. After discovering that the in-house effects department at 20th Century Fox was no longer operational, Lucas approached Douglas Trumbull, best known for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Silent Running (1972). Trumbull declined as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but suggested his assistant John Dykstra to Lucas. Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists, and engineers and set them up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. After seeing the map for the location was zoned as light industrial, Lucas named the group Industrial Light and Magic, which became the Special Visual Effects department on Star Wars. Alongside Dykstra, other leading members of the original ILM team were Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Robert Blalack, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson, and Paul Huston.

In late 1978, when in pre-production for The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas reformed most of the team into Industrial Light & Magic in Marin County, California. From here on, the company expanded and has since gone on to produce special effects for over three hundred films, including the entire Star Wars saga, the Indiana Jones series, and the Jurassic Park series.

After the success of the first Star Wars movie, Lucas became interested in using computer graphics on the sequel. He contacted Triple-I, known for their early computer effects in movies like Westworld (1973), Futureworld (1976), Tron (1982), and The Last Starfighter which ended up making a computer-generated test of five X-wing fighters flying in formation. He found it to be too expensive and returned to handmade models. Nevertheless, the test had showed him it was possible, and he decided he would create his own computer graphics department instead. As a result, they started investing in Apple and SGI computers. One of Lucas' employees was given the task to find the right people to hire. His search would lead him to NYIT, where he found Edwin Catmull and his colleagues. Catmull and others accepted Lucas' job offer, and a new computer division at Lucasfilm was created in 1979, which technically belonged to another division than ILM, with the hiring of Ed Catmull as the first NYIT employee who joined the company. Lucas' list for them was a digital film editing system, a digital sound editing system, a laser film printer, and further exploration of computer graphics. John Lasseter, who was hired a few years later, worked on computer-animation as part of ILM's contribution to Young Sherlock Holmes. The Graphics Group was later sold to Steve Jobs, named Pixar Animation Studios, and created the first CGI-animated feature, Toy Story. In 2000, ILM created the OpenEXR format for high-dynamic-range imaging.

ILM operated from an inconspicuous property in San Rafael, California until 2005. The company was known to locals as The Kerner Company, a name that did not draw any attention, allowing the company to operate in secret, thus preventing the compromise of sensitive information on its productions to the media or fans. In 2005, when Lucas decided to move locations to the Presidio of San Francisco and focus on digital effects, a management-led team bought the five physical and practical effects divisions and formed a new company that included the George Lucas Theater, retained the "Kerner" name as Kerner Technologies, Inc. and provided physical effects for major motion pictures, often working with ILM, until its Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011.

In 2005, ILM extended its operations to Lucasfilm Singapore, which also includes the Singapore arm of Lucasfilm Animation. In 2006, ILM invented IMoCap (Image Based Motion Capture Technology). By 2007, ILM was one of the largest visual effects vendors in the motion picture industry and had one of the largest render farms (named Death Star). In 2011, it was announced the company was considering a project-based facility in Vancouver. ILM first opened a temporary facility in Vancouver before relocating to a new 30,000-square-foot studio on Water Street in the Gastown district in 2014.

In October 2012, Disney bought ILM's parent company, Lucasfilm, acquiring ILM, Skywalker Sound, and LucasArts in the process. Disney stated that it had no immediate plans to change ILM's operations, but began to lay off employees by April of the next year. Following the restructuring of LucasArts in April 2013, ILM was left overstaffed and the faculty was reduced to serve only ILM's visual effects department. ILM opened a London studio headquartered in the city's Soho district on October 15, 2014.

On November 7, 2018, ILM opened a new division targeted at television series called ILM TV. It will be based in ILM's new 47,000-square-foot London studio with support from the company's locations in San Francisco, Vancouver and Singapore. In July 2019, ILM announced the opening of a new facility in Sydney, Australia. In the same year, ILM introduced StageCraft. Also known as "The Volume", it uses high-definition LED video walls to generate virtual sceneries and was first used in The Mandalorian. Following Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Fox VFX Lab was folded into ILM, including the Technoprops division. In October 2022, ILM opened a new studio in Mumbai. In May 2023, ILMxLAB was rebranded as ILM Immersive.

In August 2023, Lucasfilm announced it would close the ILM studio in Singapore due to economic factors affecting the industry and the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes. The closure affected 340 Singapore-based jobs. Employees continued working until the end of the year. Disney confirmed that it would be helping employees to either find work with local companies with similar skills requirements or relocate to ILM's other studios in London, Vancouver, Sydney and Mumbai. An ILM Singapore employee confirmed that the closure of the Singaporean studio was linked to the strike.

Milestones

 * 1975: Resurrected the use of VistaVision; first use of a motion control camera (Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope)
 * 1980: First use of Go motion to animate the Tauntaun creatures of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
 * 1982: First in-house completely computer-generated sequence — the "Genesis sequence" in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (Previous computer graphics in Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope were done outside of ILM.)
 * 1985: First completely computer-generated character, the "stained glass man" in Young Sherlock Holmes
 * 1988: First morphing sequence, in Willow
 * 1989: First digital compositing of a full-screen live action image during the final sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
 * 1989: First computer-generated 3-D character to show emotion, the pseudopod creature in The Abyss
 * 1991: First dimensional matte painting – where a traditional matte painting was mapped onto 3-D geometry, allowing for camera parallax, in Hook.
 * 1991: First partially computer-generated main character, the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
 * 1992: First time the texture of human skin was computer generated, in Death Becomes Her
 * 1993: First time digital technology used to create a complete and detailed living creature, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which earned ILM its thirteenth Oscar
 * 1994: First extensive use of digital manipulation of historical and stock footage to integrate characters in Forrest Gump.
 * 1995: First fully synthetic speaking computer-generated character, with a distinct personality and emotion, to take a leading role in Casper
 * 1995: First computer-generated photo-realistic hair and fur (used for the digital lion and monkeys) in Jumanji
 * 1996: First completely computer-generated main character, Draco in Dragonheart
 * 1999: First computer generated character to have a full human anatomy, Imhotep in The Mummy
 * 1999: The first fully computer-generated character in a live-action film using motion capture, Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
 * 2000: Creates OpenEXR imaging format.
 * 2006: Develops iMocap system, which uses computer vision techniques to track live-action performers on set. Used in the creation of Davy Jones and ship's crew in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
 * 2011: First animated feature produced by ILM, Rango
 * 2019: First use of real time rendering (with Unreal Engine) and digital LED displays as a virtual set (known as StageCraft or The Volume), The Mandalorian

Notable employees and clients
Photoshop was first used at Industrial Light & Magic as an image-processing program. Photoshop was created by ILM Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll and his brother Thomas as a summer project. It was used on The Abyss. The Knoll brothers sold the program to Adobe in 1989. Thomas Knoll continues to work on Photoshop at Adobe and is featured in the billing on the Photoshop splash screen. John Knoll continues to be ILM's top visual effects supervisor, and was one of the executive producers and writers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

In addition to their work for George Lucas, ILM also collaborates with Steven Spielberg on many films that he directs and produces. Dennis Muren has acted as Computer Animation Supervisor on many of these films. For Jurassic Park in 1993, ILM used the program Viewpaint, which allowed the visual effects artists to paint color and texture directly onto the surface of the computer models. Former ILM CG Animator Steve "Spaz" Williams said that it took nearly a year for the shots that involved computer-generated dinosaurs to be completed. The film is noted for its groundbreaking use of computer-generated imagery,  and is regarded as a landmark for visual effects. The company also works on more subtle special effects—such as widening streets, digitally adding more extras to a shot, and inserting the film's actors into preexisting footage—in films such as in Forrest Gump in 1994.

Adam Savage, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci of MythBusters fame have all worked at ILM.

ILM is also famous for their commercial work. Their clients include Energizer, and Oldsmobile. They also animated Yoda for a series of 2012 commercials for Vodafone, which were broadcast in the UK.

Actor Masi Oka worked on several major ILM productions as a programmer, including Revenge of the Sith, before joining the cast of the NBC show Heroes as Hiro Nakamura.

American film director David Fincher worked at ILM for four years in the early 1980s.

Film director Joe Johnston was a Visual effects artist and an Art Director.

Film Director Mark A.Z. Dippé was a Visual Effects animator who directed Spawn which was released in 1997.

ILM Commercial

 * General Cinema (1986, 1993, 1996)
 * THX (1988, 1993)
 * Merrill Lynch "Desert Skies" and "Bullseye" (1990)
 * Nike (1992, 1999)
 * BP (1993)
 * Perrier (1993)
 * Intel (1993)
 * 3M "Imagine" (1994)
 * Ford Mercury "Launch" (1995)
 * TGI Fridays (1995)
 * Supercuts "Stylin'" (1995)
 * Coca-Cola Classic (1995)
 * BMW (1996)
 * Snapple "Mikey" (1996)
 * Canada Dry, "Domino" (1996)
 * General Motors EV1 "Appliances" (1996)
 * DreamWorks Pictures (1997)
 * Pontiac "Coyote" (1998, with Warner Bros. Classic Animation)
 * Armor All (1998)
 * First Union Bank (1998)
 * GoodHome.com (1999)
 * Honey Comb, "Crazy Craving" (2000–3)
 * Gatorade, "Raptor" (2000)
 * California Raisin Marketing Board (print ads; 2000)
 * Budweiser "Come Home" (2001)
 * Alcatel, "MLK" (2001)
 * Vodafone commercials featuring Yoda
 * Reese's Pieces, "E.T." (2002)
 * Walt Disney Pictures (2022)

title: Industrial Light & Magic


text:
Jimmy Cliff

James Chambers, OM (born 30 July 1944), known professionally as Jimmy Cliff, is a Jamaican ska, rocksteady, reggae and soul musician, multi-instrumentalist, singer, and actor. He is the only living reggae musician to hold the Order of Merit, the highest honour that can be granted by the Jamaican government for achievements in the arts and sciences.

Cliff is best known among mainstream audiences for songs such as "Many Rivers to Cross", "You Can Get It If You Really Want", "The Harder They Come", "Reggae Night", and "Hakuna Matata", and his covers of Cat Stevens's "Wild World" and Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" from the film Cool Runnings. He starred in the film The Harder They Come, which helped popularize reggae around the world, and Club Paradise. Cliff was one of five performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

Early life and education
Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers on 30 July 1944 in Saint James, Colony of Jamaica. He began writing songs while still at primary school in St. James, listening to a neighbour's sound system. When Chambers was 14, his father took him to Kingston, where he would take up the stage name Jimmy Cliff.

1960s and 1970s
Cliff sought out many producers while still going to school, trying to get his songs recorded without success. He also entered talent contests. "One night I was walking past a record store and restaurant as they were closing, pushed myself in and convinced one of them, Leslie Kong, to go into the recording business, starting with me," he writes in his own website biography. After two singles that failed to make much impression, his career took off when "Hurricane Hattie" became a hit while he was aged 17. It was produced by Kong, with whom Cliff remained until Kong's death from a heart attack in 1971.

Cliff's later local hit singles included "King of Kings", "Dearest Beverley", "Miss Jamaica", and "Pride and Passion". In 1964, Cliff was chosen as one of Jamaica's representatives at the World's Fair in New York; and in the same year Cliff was featured in a program called "This is Ska!" alongside Prince Buster, Toots and the Maytals, and Byron Lee and the Dragonaires.

He soon signed to Island Records and moved to the United Kingdom. Island Records initially (and unsuccessfully) tried to sell Cliff to the rock audience, but his career took off in the late 1960s. His international debut album was Hard Road to Travel, released in 1967. It received excellent reviews and included "Waterfall" (composed by Nirvana's Alex Spyropoulos and Patrick Campbell-Lyons), which became a hit in Brazil and won the International Song Festival.

"Waterfall" was followed in 1969 by "Wonderful World, Beautiful People" and "Vietnam" in 1970, both popular throughout most of the world. Bob Dylan called "Vietnam" the best protest song he had ever heard. Also during this period, Cliff released a cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" as a single, but it was not included on his Wonderful World, Beautiful People album.

In 1972, Cliff starred as Ivanhoe "Ivan" Martin in the classic reggae film, The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell. As the film tells Martin's story, he is a young man without funds. Arriving in Kingston from the country, he tries to make it in the recording business, but without success. Eventually, he turns to a life of crime. The soundtrack album of the film was a huge success that sold well around the world, bringing reggae to an international audience for the first time. It remains one of the most internationally significant films to have come out of Jamaica since independence. The film made its debut at London's Gaumont cinema in Notting Hill on 1 September 1972.

In 1975, Cliff sang on the first season of Saturday Night Live, episode 12, hosted by Dick Cavett. After a series of albums, Cliff took a break and traveled to Africa (the Nigeria-based Jamaican writer Lindsay Barrett was instrumental in Cliff's first trip there), and subsequently converted to Islam, taking the name of El Hadj Naïm Bachir. In a 2021 interview, Cliff expressed a strong affinity with the religious and intellectual knowledge of ancient egypt, scepticism of government handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and denied his earlier conversion to islam, claiming it "didn't satisfy my soul."

1980s and 1990s
Cliff quickly returned to music, touring for several years before he recorded with Kool & the Gang. In 1984, Cliff appeared at the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf, Netherlands. During The River Tour, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band added Cliff's previously little-known song "Trapped" to their live set; it achieved great prominence when included on 1985's We Are the World benefit album. The follow-up, Cliff Hanger (1985), won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album, though it was his last major success in the United States until 1993. Also in 1985, Cliff contributed to the song "Sun City", a protest song written and composed by Steven Van Zandt and recorded by Artists United Against Apartheid to convey opposition to the South African policy of apartheid.

Cliff then provided backing vocals on The Rolling Stones' 1986 album Dirty Work, and appeared in the comedy Club Paradise, co-starring with Robin Williams and Peter O'Toole, and contributed several songs to the soundtrack, including "Seven Day Weekend", which he sang with Elvis Costello. In 1988, his song "Shelter of Your Love" was featured in the 1988 film Cocktail.

Cliff appeared in the film Marked for Death in 1990, performing "John Crow" with the Jimmy Cliff Band. His recording of "You Can Get It If You Really Want" was used as a campaign anthem by the Sandinista National Liberation Front in the 1990 election in Nicaragua. In 1991, he performed at the second Rock in Rio festival in Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He continued to sell well in Jamaica and, to a lesser extent, the UK, returning to the mainstream pop charts in the U.S. and elsewhere (#1 in France) with a version of Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" on the Cool Runnings film soundtrack in 1993. In 1995, Cliff released the single "Hakuna Matata", a collaboration with Lebo M, a song from the soundtrack of the film The Lion King. In 1997, Cliff was a guest star in an episode of the Cartoon Network talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

2000 to present
In 2001, Cliff became an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists. In 2002, Cliff released the album Fantastic Plastic People in Europe, after first providing free downloads using p2p software. This album featured collaborations with Joe Strummer, Annie Lennox, and Sting as well as new songs that were very reminiscent of Cliff's original hits. In 2004, Cliff completely reworked the songs, dropping the traditional reggae in favour of an electronic sound, for inclusion in Black Magic. The album also included a recording of "Over the Border" with Joe Strummer. Cliff performed at the closing ceremony to the 2002 Commonwealth Games and in 2003, his song "You Can Get It If You Really Want" was included in the soundtrack to the film, Something's Gotta Give. He also appeared in July 2003 at the Paléo Festival in Nyon, Switzerland. The Jamaican government under P. J. Patterson honoured Cliff on 20 October 2003, by awarding him The Order of Merit, the nation's fourth-highest honour, in recognition of his contributions to the film and music of Jamaica. Cliff and Mervyn Morris are the only currently living figures from the arts to hold this distinction and Cliff is the only living musician to do so.

In 2007, Cliff performed at the opening ceremony at cricket's World Cup. In the spring and summer of 2010, Cliff embarked on an extensive tour of the U.S. and Canada. In 2007, "You Can Get It If You Really Want" was adopted by the British Conservative Party during their annual conference. He was quoted in The Independent as saying, "One of my band mates called me this morning to tell me the news. I can't stop them using the song, but I'm not a supporter of politics. I have heard of Cameron, but I'm not a supporter. I don't support any politician. I just believe in right or wrong."

In September 2009, he was nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, following a campaign on his behalf by the American Charles Earle. Cliff reacted to the news by saying, "This is good for Cliff, good for Jamaican music and good for my country." On 15 December 2009, he was officially announced as an inductee and was inducted on 15 March 2010 by Wyclef Jean. Cliff appeared in the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals which was featured on BBC and described as "The untold story of one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Jamaica".

In 2011, Cliff worked with producer Tim Armstrong, lead singer of American punk band Rancid, on the EP The Sacred Fire and the full-length album Rebirth. Rebirth won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. The album was listed at #12 on Rolling Stone's list of the top 50 albums of 2012, saying "There's ska, rock steady, roots reggae, a revelatory cover of The Clash's "Guns of Brixton" delivered in Cliff's trademark soulful tenor, grittier but still lovely more than 40 years after his debut."

In December 2012, Cliff was named Artist of the Year by digital newspaper the Caribbean Journal, citing his work on Rebirth.

In August 2022, Cliff released the album Refugees.

Personal life
Cliff was briefly a member of the Rastafari movement before converting to Islam from Christianity. He now describes himself as having a "universal outlook on life", and does not align himself with any particular movement or religion, saying, "now I believe in science". He is married and has a daughter, Lilty Cliff, and a son, Aken Cliff. He is also the father of the actress/singer Nabiyah Be.

Albums
Notes
 * A. Hard Road to Travel was released as Can't Get Enough of It in Jamaica in 1968 with minor changes in track listing.
 * B. Jimmy Cliff in Brazil consisted of new recordings as well as songs from Hard Road to Travel and Can't Get Enough of It.
 * C. Jimmy Cliff was released as Wonderful World, Beautiful People in the US in 1970.
 * D. Goodbye Yesterday was released as Two Worlds in Jamaica with minor changes in track listing.
 * E. Unlimited was re-released as The King of Reggae in 1976.
 * F. Struggling Man consisted of new recordings as well as songs from Wild World.
 * G. Music Maker was released as House of Exile in some territories.
 * H. Breakout was re-released as Samba Reggae in some territories in 1999 with minor changes in track listing.
 * I. Higher & Higher consists of new recordings as well as previously released material.

Compilations and live albums

 * Notes
 * J. Best of Jimmy Cliff and The Very Best of Jimmy Cliff & Peter Tosh charted in French Compilations Chart, at number 1 and 5 respectively.

title: Jimmy Cliff


text:
Luzon Strait

The Luzon Strait (Tagalog: Kipot ng Luzon, ) is the strait between Luzon and Taiwan. The strait thereby connects the Philippine Sea to the South China Sea in the western Pacific Ocean.

This body of water is an important strait for shipping and communications. Many ships from the Americas use this route to go to important East Asian ports. Many submarine communications cables pass through the Luzon Strait. These cables provide important data and telephony services to mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

Description
The Luzon Strait is approximately 250 km wide containing a number of islands belonging to the Philippines that are grouped into two: the islands comprising the province of Batanes and the Babuyan Islands, which are part of the province of Cagayan. The strait is divided into a number of smaller channels. The Babuyan Channel separates Luzon from the Babuyan Islands, which is separated from Batanes by the Balintang Channel. Batanes is separated from Taiwan by the Bashi Channel.

Some of the largest ocean waves in the world, at times over 170 meters in height and stemming from tides and ocean currents, are found in the north of the strait. These waves or currents are underwater and rarely break the surface, thus posing no danger to shipping but are sometimes visible to satellites. The oscillation is largely prompted by a long north–south ridge which covers almost all of the strait, then amplified in the northern section by a second parallel ridge. The depth of the strait reaches the 3,500 m and 4,000 contours in north–south trenches in the middle and south-western edge.

History
The Luzon Strait was part of the Japanese invasion route during the Second World War. On December 8, 1941 (the same day as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, due to the International Date Line), forces of the Empire of Japan landed on Batanes. By December 10, they had occupied Camiguin de Babuyanes in the Babuyan Islands (not to be confused with the island-province of Camiguin off northern Mindanao) in a soon-abandoned attempt to establish a seaplane base, and on the same day landed at Aparri, Cagayan on Luzon.

Subsequently, during the Second World War, many US submarines hunted Japanese convoys passing through the strait on their way from the East Indies to Japan.

title: Luzon Strait


text:
Bodyboarding

Bodyboarding is a water sport in which the surfer rides a bodyboard on the crest, face, and curl of a wave which is carrying the surfer towards the shore. Bodyboarding is also referred to as Boogieboarding due to the invention of the "Boogie Board" by Tom Morey in 1971. The average bodyboard consists of a short, rectangular piece of hydrodynamic foam. Bodyboarders typically use swim fins for additional propulsion and control while riding a breaking wave.

Origin
Bodyboarding originates from an ancient form of riding waves (surfing) on one's belly. Indigenous Polynesians rode "alaia" (pronounced ah-lie-ah) boards either on their belly, knees, or feet (in rare instances). Alaia boards were generally made from the wood of Acacia koa and varied in length and shape. They are distinct from the modern stand-up surfboards in that they had no ventral fins. Captain Cook recorded seeing Hawaiian villagers riding such boards when he came to Hawaii in 1778.

The boards he witnessed were about 3 to 6 ft and were ridden prone (on the belly) or on the knees. Alaia boards then evolved into the more modern "paipo" (pronounced pipe-oh) board. Paipo boards were either made of wood or fiberglass. Fiberglass boards usually had fins on the bottom. Tom Morey hybridized this form of riding waves on one's belly on a paipo to his craft of shaping stand-up surfboards.

Different Riding forms
Bodyboards are shaped to the rider's specific needs and preferences such as height, weight, and form of riding. Three basic forms of riding a bodyboard include prone, dropknee, and stand-up.

Prone
Riding prone refers to when one rides the wave on their stomach. When the bodyboarder goes left, they place their left hand on the upper left corner of the nose and place their right arm halfway down the rail of the right side of the board. The opposite is true of when the bodyboarder goes right.

Dropknee
Dropknee is when one places their preferred fin forward on the front of the deck with the opposing knee on the bottom end of the board with their fin dragging in the water. Dropknee was first pioneered in the late 1970s by Hawaii's Jack "The Ripper" Lindholm and sometimes referred to as "Jack Stance". Unlike fiberglass stand-up surfboards, the bodyboards dropknee riders use don't have fins underneath to help maintain a line on the face of a wave or to stop them sliding out so dropknee riders rely on weight transition from rail to rail to hold a line on a wave and turn/snap. On the other hand, the benefit of not having fins underneath the board is that a rider can spin 360 (forward and reverse).

Stand-up
Stand-up consists of standing upright on the board and performing tricks on the face as well as in the air. While it isn't quite as popular as the other two forms of riding a bodyboard, three notable figures that popularized it are Danny Kim, Cavin Yap, and Chris Won Taloa.

Materials
The bodyboard differs from a surfboard in that it is much shorter (typically 100 to 110 cm in length) and made out of different types of foam. The modern board consists of a foam 'core' encapsulated by a plastic bottom, a softer foam top known as the deck, and softer foam sides known as the rails. The core is made of dow/polyethylene, arcel, polystyrene, or Polypro/polypropylene. The bottom is made of Surlyn, HDPE or Bixby. The deck is made of 8LB or CrossLink. Each type of foam core, deck, or bottom material gives a bodyboard a different amount of flex and control. Speed from the bottom turn is increased when a bodyboarder bottom turns and the board flexes and recoils, releasing energy. If the board flexes too little or too easily, speed is lost. Dow (polyethylene) cores are best suited to cooler waters as they can be too flexible in warm water. Arcel and Polypro (polypropylene) cores are best suited for warmer waters due to their increased overall stiffness.

Most boards on the market today contain one, two, or three rods (usually of carbon or graphite), referred to as stringers, to strengthen the board, reduce deformation, add stiffness and recoil to the core, thus providing greater speed off bottom turns and transitions on the wave. If a single stringer is used, it is placed in the center of the board running parallel to the rails. If two are used, they are placed symmetrically about the y-axis. Triple stringers are a combination of the placement of both a single and double stringer.

Construction
Deck, rails, and bottom are bonded via various hot air lamination techniques to the core. Previous to the lamination technique, shapers accomplished this by using glue.

Features
The shape, or curve, of the board affects how it rides. If the wide point of the board is nearer to the nose, the board tends to be best suited to prone riding as the bodyboarder's weight rests further up on the board. Boards with more parallel rails or a narrow nose tend to be more ideal for drop-knee and stand-up riding as the rider's center of gravity tends to rest further back.

Most modern boards are equipped with channels that increase surface area in the critical parts of the board which, in turn, allow it to have varying hold and control on the wave. Originally, skegs were installed to decrease slippage on a wave face. However, progressive bodyboarding has rendered use of such skegs obsolete due to the looseness required for maneuverability on a wave. For such reasons, skegs are rarely used today and, even then, almost exclusively by dropknee or stand-up bodyboarders.

Tail shapes influence the way that boards perform in the line-up. Crescent tails provide the greatest amount of hold in steep waves. Crescent tails are generally preferred by drop-knee riders because the shape interferes less. Crescent tails are also preferred by beginners, due to being able to perform well in varying conditions. Bat tails provide looseness for rail to rail transitions. Prone riders tend to prefer bat tails more than dropknee riders.

Progression

From the conception of the modern bodyboard in 1971, bodyboarding has experienced spurts of rapid growth both as an industry and extreme sport. With its origins in America, over the past decade the industry has shifted from a primarily American to a global industry phenomena. The sport has grown into a worldwide industry with growing strongholds in Australia, South American countries like Peru and Chile, Japan, Canary Islands (Spain), South Africa, and so forth. The evolution of maneuvers and waves in which it is being done have rendered it one of the most extreme wave riding forms in the world.

Bodyboarders have been accredited with pioneering some of the world's heaviest, most renowned surf locations in the world: Teahupo'o, French Polynesia; Shark Island, Australia; El Fronton, Spain; Cyclops, Australia; Ours, Australia; Luna Park, Australia; etc. In addition, bodyboarders place strong emphasis on aerial maneuvers on bigger, heavier sections of waves. These include aerial 360s, ARS (Air Roll Spin), el rollos, inverts (tweaking the board with the momentum of the wave and then swinging it back), backflips, ATS (Aéreo Thiago Schmitd) and variations/hybrids of these maneuvers are also performed.

Male bodyboarders

 * Mike Stewart (Hawaii, USA) is considered the father of modern bodyboarding, acclaimed as one of the best wave riders of all time, and holds nine world titles. He is also the only bodyboarder to receive the Mr. Pipeline title.
 * Ben Severson (Hawaii, USA) is a pioneer of bodyboarding, world champion, and competitive rival of Mike Stewart for over fifteen years.
 * Guilherme Tamega (Brazil) is second only to Stewart for number of world titles, holding six. He has gained reputation and fame for his aggressive riding style and approach in both small and heavy surf.
 * Mike "Eppo" Eppulston is the first Australian and also the first non-Hawaiian to win the World Title (1993). He is also known for creating the ARS and backflip.
 * Jeff Hubbard (Hawaii, USA) is best known for his phenomenal aerial approach to bodyboarding. He currently holds three world titles.
 * Ryan Hardy (Australia) is influential in the progression of Australian and international bodyboarding. Known for his fluid yet powerful style of surfing.
 * Ben Player (Australia) is also considered one of the greatest influences in bodyboarding both Australia and the world. He holds three world titles.
 * Andre Botha (South Africa) is the youngest athlete to win the world title (1998). He then won a second world title the next tour season of 1999. Known for his extreme approach to wave riding in shorebreaks and heavy waves.
 * Alexandre de Pontes (Xandinho), was the first Brazilian to reach the finals in the Pipeline world bodyboarding championship. Six-time world champion Guilherme Tâmega considers Xandinho one of the greatest bodyboarders of all time.
 * Hugo Pinheiro was placed second at the ISA World Surfing Games in 2006.

Female bodyboarders
Phylis Dameron was the first person, man or woman, to ride big Waimea Bay on a bodyboard in the late 1970s. During the early 1990s in Brazil, Mariana Nogueira, Glenda Koslowski, and Stephanie Petterson set standards that pushed women's bodyboarding to a world class level. Stephanie Petterson won the first official World Championship of Women's Bodyboarding at Pipeline in 1990. It was the first women's event ever held there and initiated the longest running women's wave sport event in the world. 2009 marked the event's 20th anniversary.
 * Alexandra Rinder is the top ranked female bodyboarder in the world.
 * Sari Ohhara is the third ranked top female bodyboarder in the world.
 * Jessica Becker is the fourth ranked top female bodyboarder in the world.

World Champions
From 1982 to 1993, the winner of the International Morey Boogie Bodyboard Pro Championships at Pipeline, Hawaii was considered world champion. Since then a world tour has determined the sport's champion. The world tour has been administered by a variety of organisations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tour_(bodyboarding)

title: Bodyboarding