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The Dam Busters (film)

The Dam Busters is a 1955 British epic docudrama war film starring Richard Todd and Michael Redgrave, that was directed by Michael Anderson. Adapted by R. C. Sherriff from the books The Dam Busters (1951) by Paul Brickhill and Enemy Coast Ahead (1946) by Guy Gibson, the film depicts the true story of Operation Chastise when in 1943 the RAF's 617 Squadron attacked the Möhne, Eder, and Sorpe dams in Nazi Germany with Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb.

The Dam Busters was acclaimed by critics, who widely praised its acting (especially Todd and Redgrave's), Anderson's direction, its superlative special effects photography by Gilbert Taylor and soundtrack score by Eric Coates (especially the stirring The Dam Busters March theme tune). The film was Britain's biggest box-office success of 1955. A much-loved British classic, The Dam Busters has since been cited as one of the best British war films and one of the greatest films of the 20th century. In 1999, the British Film Institute voted The Dam Busters the 68th greatest British film of the 20th century. Its depiction of the raid, along with a similar sequence in the film 633 Squadron, provided the inspiration for the Death Star trench run in Star Wars.

A remake has been in development since 2008, but has yet to be produced.

Plot
The film is divided into two distinct sections. In the first and longer of the two, aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis is struggling to develop a means of attacking Germany's dams in the hope of crippling German heavy industry. Working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, as well as his own job at Vickers, he works feverishly to make practical his theory of a bouncing bomb which would skip over the water to avoid protective torpedo nets. When it hit the dam, backspin would make it sink whilst retaining contact with the wall, making the explosion far more destructive. Wallis calculates that the aircraft will have to fly extremely low (150 ft) to enable the bombs to skip over the water correctly, but when he takes his conclusions to the Ministry, he is told that lack of production capacity means they cannot go ahead with his proposals. Frustrated, Wallis secures an interview with Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command, who at first is reluctant to take the idea seriously. Eventually, however, he is convinced and takes the idea to the Prime Minister, who authorises the project.

Bomber Command forms a special squadron of Lancaster bombers, 617 Squadron, to be commanded by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, and tasked to fly the mission. He recruits experienced crews, especially those with low-altitude flight experience. While they train for the mission, Wallis continues his development of the bomb but has problems, such as the bomb breaking apart upon hitting the water. This requires the drop altitude to be reduced to 60 ft. With only a few weeks to go, and despite the fraught, he is ultimately successful in fixing the problems as the dateline for the mission approaches.

In the second and pacier section, the bombers attack the Ruhr Dams. Eight Lancasters and their crews are lost, but the Möhne and Edersee dams are breached, causing catastrophic flooding. Wallis is deeply affected by the loss of the crewmen, but Gibson stresses the squadron knew the risks they were facing but they went in regardless. Wallis asks if Gibson will get some sleep; Gibson says that he has to write letters first to the dead airmen's next of kin.

Cast
In credits order.

 * Richard Todd as Wing Commander Guy Gibson, CO of 617 Squadron and pilot of "George"
 * Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis, assistant chief designer, Aviation Section, Vickers-Armstrong Ltd
 * Ursula Jeans as Mrs Molly Wallis
 * Basil Sydney as Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, GOC-in-C, RAF Bomber Command
 * Patrick Barr as Captain Joseph "Mutt" Summers, Chief Test Pilot, Vickers-Armstrong Ltd
 * Ernest Clark as Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane, AOC, No. 5 Group RAF
 * Derek Farr as Group Captain John Whitworth, station commander, RAF Scampton
 * Charles Carson as Doctor
 * Stanley Van Beers as David Pye, director of scientific research, Air Ministry
 * Colin Tapley as Dr William Glanville, director of Road Research, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
 * Frederick Leister as committee member
 * Eric Messiter as committee member
 * Laidman Browne as committee member
 * Raymond Huntley as National Physical Laboratory Official
 * Hugh Manning as Ministry of Aircraft Production Official
 * Edwin Styles as Observer at Trials
 * Hugh Moxey as Observer at Trials
 * Anthony Shaw as RAF Officer at Trials
 * Laurence Naismith as Farmer
 * Harold Siddons as Group Signals Officer
 * Frank Phillips as BBC Announcer
 * Brewster Mason as Flight Lieutenant Richard Trevor-Roper, rear gunner of "George"
 * Anthony Doonan as Flight Lieutenant Robert Hutchison, wireless operator of "George"
 * Nigel Stock as Flying Officer Frederick Spafford, bomb aimer of "George"
 * Brian Nissen as Flight Lieutenant Torger Taerum, navigator of "George"
 * Robert Shaw as Flight Sergeant John Pulford, flight engineer of "George"
 * Peter Assinder as Pilot Officer Andrew Deering, front gunner of "George"
 * Richard Leech as Squadron Leader Melvin "Dinghy" Young, pilot of "Apple"
 * Richard Thorp as Squadron Leader Henry Maudslay, pilot of "Zebra"
 * John Fraser as Flight Lieutenant John Hopgood, pilot of "Mother"
 * David Morrell as Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell, pilot of "Baker"
 * Bill Kerr as Flight Lieutenant H. B. "Micky" Martin, pilot of "Popsie"
 * George Baker as Flight Lieutenant David Maltby, pilot of "Johnny"
 * Ronald Wilson as Flight Lieutenant Dave Shannon, pilot of "Leather"
 * Denys Graham as Flying Officer Les Knight, pilot of "Nancy"
 * Basil Appleby as Flight Lieutenant Bob Hay, bomb aimer of "Popsie"
 * Tim Turner as Flight Lieutenant Jack Leggo, navigator of "Popsie"
 * Ewen Solon as Flight Sergeant G. E. Powell, crew chief
 * Harold Goodwin as Gibson's batman
 * Peter Arne (uncredited) as Staff Officer to Air-Vice Marshal Cochrane
 * Edward Cast (uncredited) as Crew Member
 * Richard Coleman (uncredited) as RAF Officer
 * Brenda de Banzie (uncredited) as Waitress
 * Peter Diamond (uncredited) as Tail Gunner
 * Gerald Harper (uncredited) as RAF Officer
 * Arthur Howard (uncredited) as RAF Pay Clerk in NAAFI
 * Lloyd Lamble (uncredited) as Collins
 * Philip Latham (uncredited) as Flight Sergeant
 * Patrick McGoohan (uncredited) as RAF Security Guard
 * Edwin Richfield (uncredited) as RAF Officer

Cast notes:
 * Sydney Hobday (28 January 1912 - 24 February 2000), the navigator of AJ-N, was involved with the casting
 * Elisabeth Gaunt, Barnes Wallis's daughter in real life, appears as a photographer in the test tank
 * The film featured several actors who would go on to be stars of cinema and TV. Robert Shaw was featured as Gibson's engineer Flt Sgt Pulford. Anderson was struggling to find an actor who psychically resembled Pulford until he went to lunch with Redgrave and Shaw, who was one of his theatre friends; Anderson was impressed by the resemblance and Redgrave confirmed to Anderson that Shaw was an actor. The film was Shaw's first major film role. George Baker played Flt Lt Maltby. Charles Foster, nephew of Dambuster pilot David Maltby, said his family formed a bond with Baker. Patrick McGoohan had a bit part as a security guard, standing guard outside the briefing room. He delivered the line—"Sorry, old boy, it's secret—you can't go in. Now, c'mon, hop it!", which was cut from some prints of the film. McGoohan and Nigel Stock, a co-star in the film, both played Number Six in The Prisoner (1967–1968). Richard Thorp played Sqn Ldr Maudslay.

Development
Director Howard Hawks had wanted to make a film about the raid and had hired Roald Dahl to write the script. Bomber command and Barnes Wallis were reluctant to reveal secrets to a Hollywood studio and the script was disliked by them. By the late 1940s, rumours were that Hollywood were developing a project on the Dam Busters raid and Sir Michael Balcon was in discussion to make a film of the raid with Earling studios; neither project came to fuition., Following the success of the 1951 book The Dam Busters (a RAF-approved history of 617 Squadron), Robert Clark the head of production at Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) approached its author Paul Brickhill about acquiring the film rights as a vehicle for Richard Todd. The company's production manager was, however, of the opinion that, due to its numerous personnel and raids, it would not be able to film the book in its entirety. As a result, Clark requested that Brickhill provide a film treatment which described his vision for the film. Brickhill agreed to do it without payment in the hope of selling the film rights. To assist him, Clark teamed him up with Walter Mycroft who was the company's director of production. Brickhill decided to concentrate the film treatment on Operation Chastise and ignore the later raids. The film also took inspiration from the account Enemy Coast Ahead by Guy Gibson.

After the Air Ministry agreed to make available four Lancaster bombers at a cheap price which helped make the production viable, Associated British decided to proceed with the film and agreed with Brickhill on the film rights in December 1952 for what is believed to have been £5,000. After considering C.S. Forester, Terence Rattigan, as well as Emlyn Williams and Leslie Arliss, R. C. Sherriff was selected as the screenwriter with planned August delivery of the screenplay. Sherriff agreed with Brickhill's opinion that the film needed to concentrate on Operation Chastise and exclude the later operations covered in the book.

In preparation for writing the script, Sherriff met with Barnes Wallis at his home, later returning accompanied by Brickhill, Walter Mycroft and production supervisor W.A. "Bill" Whittaker on 22 March 1952 to witness Wallis demonstrating his original home experiment. To Wallis's embarrassment he couldn't get it to work, no matter how many times he tried.

Just prior to the film's scheduled release, Guy Gibson's widow Eve took legal action to prevent it, and Brickhill and Clark were mired in months of wrangling with her until references to her husband's book Enemy Coast Ahead were included.

Real life participants advised Anderson on the events; the RAF gave their blessing to the production and Group Captain Charles Whitworth became technical advisor and gave Anderson all the support he needed. Barnes Wallis read the script too and gave his full approval, wanting to ensure the film was as accurate as possible. Anderson cast actors who resembled their real life counterparts. Richard Todd had a striking physical resemblance to Guy Gibson. Makeup was used to make Michael Redgrave resemble Barnes Wallis. Baker stated that he was chosen for the part due to his physical similarity to Maltby.

Production
Anderson made the choice to shoot the film in black and white to allow the integration of original footage of the bomb trails, to boast a "gritty" documentary-style reality.

The flight sequences of the film were shot using real Avro Lancaster bombers supplied by the RAF. The aircraft, four of the final production B.VIIs, had to be taken out of storage and specially modified by removing the mid-upper gun turrets to mimic 617 Squadron's special aircraft, and cost £130 per hour to run, which amounted to a tenth of the film's costs. A number of Avro Lincoln bombers were also used as "set dressing". (An American cut was made more dramatic by depicting an aircraft flying into a hill and exploding. This version used stock footage from Warner Brothers of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, not a Lancaster.)

The German anti-aircraft personnel were played by the 247 (Ulster) LAA Regiment, part of the 3rd (Ulster) Searchlight Regiment, Royal Artillery, and was filmed at Stiffkey in north Norfolk.

Weybridge railway station was filmed for scenes, as Wallis had lived nearby.

Filming began at Scampton on Tuesday 27 April 1954 for ten days.

The Upper Derwent Valley in Derbyshire (the test area for the real raids) doubled as the Ruhr valley for the film. The scene where the Dutch coast is crossed was filmed between Boston, Lincolnshire, and King's Lynn, Norfolk, and other coastal scenes near Skegness.

Filming at Gibraltar Point began on Wednesday 21 April 1954, for four days. Appearing as an extra, on the beach, as an Air Commodore was Mr E Taylor, a teacher from Skegness Grammar School. Mr Taylor had been an intelligence officer at RAF Woodhall Spa. Other extras came from the Skegness Players.

The scene where they fly along a canal was filmed on the Dutch river (local nickname for the canal) on the way to Goole which is on the M62 to Hull. As the planes turn across country you can see Goole fully as they turn. This was used as the area around Goole is perfectly flat. Additional aerial footage was shot above Windermere, in the Lake District.

While RAF Scampton, where the real raid launched, was used for some scenes, the principal airfield used for ground location shooting was RAF Hemswell, a few miles north and still an operational RAF station at the time of filming. Guy Gibson had been based at Hemswell in his final posting and the airfield had been an operational Avro Lancaster base during the war. At the time filming took place it was then home to No. 109 Squadron and No. 139 Squadron RAF, which were both operating English Electric Canberras on electronic countermeasures and nuclear air sampling missions over hydrogen bomb test sites in the Pacific and Australia. However, part of the RAF's fleet of ageing Avro Lincolns had been mothballed at Hemswell prior to being broken up and several of these static aircraft appeared in background shots during filming, doubling for additional No 617 Squadron Lancasters. The station headquarters building still stands on what is now an industrial estate and is named Gibson House. The four wartime hangars also still stand, little changed in external appearance since the war.

The former operations briefing room at Scampton, where scenes were filmed, was now the NCO mess. On the set, a survivor of the raid, David Shannon, said 'I think altogether, too much has been made of this raid. To us, it was just another operation'

Serving RAF pilots from both squadrons based at Hemswell took turns flying the Lancasters during filming and found the close formation and low level flying around Derwentwater and Windermere exhilarating and a welcome change from their normal high level solo Canberra sorties. While filming on one of the first days with the Lancasters, a Lancaster's tail wheel caught the roof of a nearby hanger, to the chagrin of an control tower officer. The Mosquito in the film was flown by Flying Officer Leslie Brown of Verena Terrace in Perth; he had been at Dunkirk with the 51st (Highland) Division, then joined the RAF and was shot down in north Africa, being an Italian prisoner of war for three years. Two of the Lancaster pilots were Fl Lt KP Souter and Flt Lt WD Caldwell.

Three of the four Lancaster bombers used in the film had also appeared in the Dirk Bogarde film Appointment in London two years earlier.

The theatre scene showing the spotlights was filmed at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith. The dance troupe was The Television Toppers, on loan for one day filming, under contract from the BBC. The singer was June Powell, she sings the 1942 song "Sing Everybody Sing" by John P Long. Scenes were filmed at the Chelsea Palace on Sydney Street.

Richard Todd described filming the final scene with Michael Redgrave, where Gibson says he has to write letters, saying that as he walked away from the camera he was quietly weeping. He had his own experience of letter writing. He also said that the dog, also named Nigger, refused to go near the spot where the real Nigger was buried.

Five photographs of Labrador dogs from a site at Melton Mowbray were sent to the film studios, and a mine-tracking dog was chosen, looked after by handler Lance Corporal Peter Reid of Ainslie Gardens in Perth, Scotland.

The black Labrador had never lived in a house before, and Richard Todd took the dog back to the White Hart Hotel in Lincoln, where the dog slept in the bathroom. Richard wanted to keep the dog, but the RAF would not let him.

Soundtrack
The Dam Busters March, by Eric Coates, is for many synonymous with the film, as well as with the exploit itself, and remains a favourite military band item at flypasts and in the concert hall.

Other than the introduction and trio section theme, the majority of the march as performed is not featured in the film soundtrack. Coates himself avoided writing music for the cinema, remembering the experiences of his fellow composer Arthur Bliss. Coates only agreed to provide an overture for the film after he was persuaded by the film's producers it was of "national importance" and pressure was put on him via his publisher, Chappell. A march he had recently completed was found to fit well with the heroic subject and was thus submitted. The majority of the soundtrack including the theme played during the raid sequence in the film was composed by Leighton Lucas.

Philip Lane, who reconstructed parts of Leighton Lucas's orchestral score (which had been lost) notes that Lucas created his own main theme "which seems to play hide and seek with Coates's throughout the film, both vying for supremacy."

Historical accuracy
The film is largely historically accurate, with only a small number of changes made for reasons of dramatic licence. Some errors derive from Paul Brickhill's book, which was written when much detail about the raid was not yet in the public domain.
 * Barnes Wallis said that he never encountered any opposition from bureaucracy. In the film, when a reluctant official asks what he can possibly say to the RAF to persuade them to lend a Vickers Wellington bomber for flight testing the bomb, Wallis suggests: "Well, if you told them that I designed it, do you think that might help?" Barnes Wallis was heavily involved with the design of the Wellington, as it used his geodetic airframe construction method, though he was not actually its chief designer.
 * Instead of all of Gibson's tour-expired crew at 106 Squadron volunteering to follow him to his new command, only his wireless operator, Hutchinson, went with him to 617 Squadron.
 * Rather than the purpose as well as the method of the raid being Wallis's sole idea, the dams had already been identified as an important target by the Air Ministry before the war.
 * Gibson did not devise the spotlights altimeter after visiting a theatre; it was suggested by Benjamin Lockspeiser of the Ministry of Aircraft Production after Gibson requested they solve the problem. It was a proven method used by RAF Coastal Command aircraft for some time.
 * The wooden "coat hanger" bomb sight intended to enable crews to release the weapon at the right distance from the target was not wholly successful; some crews used it, but others came up with their own solutions, such as pieces of string in the bomb-aimer's position and/or markings on the blister.
 * Nigger is depicted being killed on the day of raid; it actually happened the day before.
 * No bomber flew into a hillside near a target on the actual raid. This scene, which is not in the original version, was included in the copy released on the North American market (see above). Three bombers are brought down by enemy fire and two crashed due to hitting power lines in the valleys.
 * Some of the sequences showing the testing of Upkeep—the code name for the weapon—in the film are of Mosquito fighter-bombers dropping the naval version of the bouncing bomb, code-named Highball, intended to be used against ships. This version of the weapon was never used operationally.
 * At the time the film was made, certain aspects of Upkeep were still held classified, so the actual test footage was censored to hide any details of the test bombs (a black dot was superimposed over the bomb on each frame), and the dummy bombs carried by the Lancasters were almost spherical but with flat sides rather than the true cylindrical shape.
 * The dummy bomb did not show the mechanism which created the back spin.
 * Ammunition shown being loaded into a Lancaster is .50 calibre for M2 Browning heavy machine guns, not that for the .303 calibre machine guns found on the Lancaster in 1943.
 * The scenes of the attack on the Eder Dam show a castle resembling Schloss Waldeck on the wrong side of the lake and dam. The position and angle of the lake in relation to the castle suggest that in reality the bombing-run would have needed a downhill approach to the west of the castle.
 * Wallis states that his idea came from Nelson's bouncing cannonballs into the sides of enemy ships. (He also states that Nelson sank one ship during the Battle of the Nile with a yorker, a cricket term for a ball that bounces under the bat, making it difficult to play.) There is no evidence for this claim. In a 1942 paper, Wallis mentioned the bouncing of cannonballs in the 16th and 17th centuries, but Nelson was not mentioned.
 * In the film Wallis (Redgrave) tells Gibson and Young that a mechanical problem with the release gear has been solved as the engineers had the correct oil in store. This is false; there was a technical problem which was solved by Sgt Charles Sackville-Bryant, who was awarded the BEM for this.

Release
Around twenty survivors of the raid, attended a dinner on Saturday 14 May at the Criterion Restaurant. Five Canadian survivors, had flown into RAF Langar, in Nottinghamshire, on the morning of Friday 13 May.

The Dambusters received a Royal world premiere at the Empire, Leicester Square on 16 May 1955, the twelfth anniversary of the raid. Princess Margaret attended along with Eve Gibson, Guy Gibson's widow and his father. Richard Todd, Barnes Wallis and his wife and the surviving members of 617 Squadron who had taken part in the mission were all guests of honour. Fifteen survivors attended the premiere, and eleven next of kin, of those who did not return. Of the survivors attending, the only prisoner of war of the raid, 33 year old Australian Flt Lt Tony Burcher, rear gunner of AJ-M, the second to attack, could re-witness his aircraft being hit by a Bofors gun between the two towers; he broke his back, when it caught the aircraft tailplane, on exit. He lay in a culvert for five days, and was caught when crawling across a road. He said 'we dropped our mine, and suddenly we were on fire'.

The premiere helped to raise money and awareness for various RAF charities.

The film was first shown on British television on 30 May 1971.

Critical
Reviews upon its release were positive. Variety described the film as having great attention to detail.

Over time, the film's reputation has grown and is now regarded as a beloved classic of British cinema. The British Film Institute placed The Dam Busters as the 68th greatest British film. In 2004, the magazine Total Film named The Dam Busters the 43rd greatest British film of all time. In a 2015 review, The Guardian stated that The Dam Busters remains very well made and entertaining. The film holds a 100% rating with an average rating of 7.9/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 11 reviews. David Parkinson of Empire gave the film three out of five, describing the film as "patriotic and spirit-lifting". A review commented, "It is testament to Anderson's authoritative, quiet guidance that the performances are largely realistic, and multi-dimensional."

Richard Todd considered the film as one of his favourites of all those that he appeared in, and went on to appear at many Dambusters themed events.

Awards
The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Special Effects, and was also nominated for BAFTA awards for Best British Film, Best Screenplay and Best Film From Any Source.

Box office
The film was the most successful film at the British box office in 1955 but performed poorly at the US box office, like most British war movies of this era.

According to Richard Todd in 1993, a resident of Little Ponton, the film was not a success in the US, as audiences were not informed that it was a true story. If audiences knew that it was a true story, Todd thought it would have been a great success. Audiences in the US in 1955, however, thought that to hit a dam with a bomb that bounced was total fiction.

Legacy
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters. The same may be said of 633 Squadron, in which a squadron of de Havilland Mosquitos must drop a bomb on a rock overhanging a key German factory at the end of a Norwegian fjord.

On 16 May 2008, a commemoration of the 65th anniversary was held at Derwent Reservoir, including a flypast by a Lancaster, Spitfire, and Hurricane. The event was attended by actor Richard Todd, representing the film crew and Les Munro, the last surviving pilot from the original raid, as well as Mary Stopes-Roe, the elder daughter of Sir Barnes Wallis.

On 17 May 2018, a commemoration of the 75th anniversary was held, in which a restored version of the film was broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall, and hosted by Dan Snow. The film was simulcast into over 300 cinemas nationwide.

Censorship
Gibson's black Labrador, Nigger, whose name was used as a single codeword whose transmission conveyed that the Möhne Dam had been breached, is portrayed in several scenes; his name and the codeword are mentioned fourteen times. Some of these scenes were sampled in the film Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982).

In 1999, British television network ITV broadcast a censored version of the film, removing all utterances of "Nigger". ITV blamed regional broadcaster London Weekend Television, which in turn alleged that a junior staff member had been responsible for the unauthorised cuts. When ITV again showed a censored version in June 2001, it was condemned by the Index on Censorship as "unnecessary and ridiculous" and because the edits introduced continuity errors. The code word "nigger" transmitted in Morse code upon the successful completion of the central mission was not censored.

Some edited American versions of the film have used dubbing to change Nigger's name to "Trigger". The British Channel 4 screened a censored American version in July 2007, this screening took place just after the planned remake was announced. In September 2007, as part of the BBC Summer of British Film series, The Dam Busters was shown at selected cinemas across the UK in its uncut format. In 2012, ITV3 showed the film uncut a few times, but with a warning at the start that it contains racial terms from the period which some people may find offensive. The original, uncensored, version was also shown on 1 and 5 January 2013, by Channel 5 without any warning. It was the version, distributed by StudioCanal, containing shots of the bomber flying into a hill. On 17 May 2018, an uncut version was shown on the UK channel Film4 with a warning explaining the film was historical and that some would find it to be racially offensive; "While we acknowledge some of the language used in The Dam Busters reflects historical attitudes which audiences may find offensive, for reasons of historical accuracy we have opted to present the film as it was originally screened". The film was also shown uncut in cinemas.

Since 2020, following the George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom, Film 4 has broadcast an edited version, re-dubbed in a few places, where the dog's name is removed, addressed as "old boy" or referred to as "my dog", although the warning is retained at the start.

In his book, journalist Sir Max Hastings said that he was repeatedly asked whether it is an embarrassment to acknowledge Nigger's name, and stated that "a historian's answer must be: no more than the fact that our ancestors hanged sheep-stealers, executed military deserters and imprisoned homosexuals. They did and said things differently then. It would be grotesque to omit Nigger from a factual narrative merely because the word is rightly repugnant to twenty-first-century ears."

Planned remake
Work on a remake of The Dam Busters, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Christian Rivers, began in 2008, based around a screenplay by Stephen Fry. Jackson said in the mid-1990s that he became interested in remaking the 1955 film, but found that the rights had been bought by Mel Gibson. In 2004, Jackson was contacted by his agent, who said Gibson had dropped the rights. In 2005, the rights were purchased by Sir David Frost, from the Brickhill family. Stephen Fry wrote the script.

In 2007, it was announced it would be distributed by Universal Pictures in North America, and StudioCanal, the corporate heir to ABPC, in the rest of the world. Filming was planned to commence in 2009, on a budget of US$40 million, although no project-specific filming began. The project was delayed because Jackson decided to make The Hobbit.

Weta Workshop was making the models and special effects for the film and had made 10 life-size Lancaster bombers. Fry said Wing Commander Guy Gibson's dog "Nigger" will be called "Digger" in the remake to avoid rekindled controversy over the original name. For the remake, Peter Jackson has said no decision has been made on the dog's name, but is in a "no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenario", as changing the name could be seen as too much political correctness, while not changing the name could offend people. Further, executive producer Sir David Frost was quoted in The Independent as stating: "Guy sometimes used to call his dog Nigsy, so I think that's what we will call it. Stephen has been coming up with other names, but this is the one I want." Les Munro, a pilot in the strike team, joined the production crew in Masterton as technical advisor. Jackson was also to use newly declassified War Office documents to ensure the authenticity of the film.

After Munro died in 2015, Phil Bonner of the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre said he still thought Jackson will eventually make the film, citing Jackson's passion for aviation. Jackson said, "There is only a limited span I can abide, of people driving me nuts asking me when I'm going to do that project. So I'll have to do it. I want to, actually, it's one of the truly great true stories of the Second World War, a wonderful, wonderful story."

In 2018, news emerged that Jackson was to begin production on the film once again. He intended for production to commence soon, as he only had the film rights for "another year or two".

In popular culture

 * In the 1982 film Pink Floyd The Wall, scenes from The Dam Busters can be seen and heard playing on a television set several times during the film. Particular emphasis is placed on scenes in the film where characters mention Nigger, Guy Gibson's Labrador. "The reason that The Dam Busters is in the film version of The Wall," explained the Floyd's Roger Waters, "is because I'm from that generation who grew up in postwar Britain, and all those movies were very important to us. The Dam Busters was my favourite of all of them. It's so stuffed with great characters." Waters had previously introduced the band's song 'Echoes' at live shows as 'March of the Dam Busters'.
 * The 1973 film The Goodies and the Beanstalk incorporates a scene where the eponymous heroes take cover and are attacked by geese dropping golden eggs. To the Dambusters March tune, one of the eggs bounces several times before exploding against the wall behind which they have hidden.
 * The 1984 video game The Dam Busters was partially based on the film.
 * Two television advertisements were made for a brand of beer, Carling Black Label, which played on the theme of The Dam Busters. Both were made before the English football team broke a 35-year losing streak against Germany. The first showed a German guard on top of a dam catching a number of bouncing bombs as if he were a goalkeeper. The second showed a British tourist throwing a Union Flag towel which skipped off the water like a bouncing bomb to reserve a pool-side seat before the German tourists could reserve them with their towels. Both actions were followed by the comment "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label". The adverts were criticised by the Independent Television Commission, although UK newspaper The Independent reported "a spokeswoman for the German embassy in London dismissed the idea that Germans might find the commercial offensive, adding: 'I find it very amusing'".

title: The Dam Busters (film)


text:
Talk:Lists of people by belief

Disclaimers
Some pages have a section like that below included:

 * In presenting this list, we do not mean to imply that the fact that these people are Pagans makes Paganism any more likely--that would be a clearly bogus argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad vericundiam (see logical fallacy). Please note that these people have been selected for this list because their notoriety was in some way due or connected to their Paganism.

 * Don't know, not sure: Martin
 * No, this is a bad idea: Hotlorp
 * It's a good idea, but the wording needs changing:

I can see the idea behind it: we don't want to have a massive list of everyone, everywhere, who has ever been christian/pagan/whatever. Also, we don't want to make people think we're taking sides by compiling such lists. But quite a few people don't like them, and surely it should be taken as read? Martin

The word "notoriety" is certainly biased and should be removed. I don't think the paragraph is anything but an attempt to undermine the particular belief, which in any case should go in the main page about that religion, correctly rephrased. A list of flat earth theorists would not need a disclaimer about is likelihood. Note that list of Christians does not have these words, perhaps revealing the bias of whoever wrote the paragraph. Hotlorp

 * What is clear is that the disclaimer should either go on all relevant or none - there's no justification for having a disclaimer on only some of the lists.

 * I was itching to rewrite the intro to list of pagans, so it's not there any more. -- Hotlorp

The disclaimer is still in List of atheists and List of agnostics. // Liftarn

 * Do I take it you think it's a bad idea? I guess we should delete/reword/change them, then?

 * All or none. Take your pick. I don't see the need for double standards. // Liftarn

Btw, I noticed that the list says "List of Buddhists" and "List of Christians", but "List of pagans". It also says "see Confucianism" and "see Islam", but "see paganism". I don't know, but I think those who call themself Pagans may object to it. // Liftarn

This entry is terrible. What possible question can a reader have that could be answered with a list of all Christians, or all Jews, or all XYZians throughout history? There is no such question. Do we really want to make an entry that will grow to include millions of people, who have absolutely nothing in common at all except for the fact that they profess to be Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, etc.)? There is no reasonable explanation for this entry to exist. Obviously, there are uses for meaningful lists, such as a list of Christian theologians, Christian philosophers, Jewish philosophers, etc. But what we have here is a joke. This is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a phone book. I vote for deletion. RK

 * Where do you get the word all from? There are no entries called list of all Jews. There is no reason to assume that these lists need to be comprehensive. Martin

 * Sorry, that was a little flippant. Have you seen list of Buddhists? That's been organised along the lines you suggest - seperate lists for celebrity Buddhists, historical Buddhist thinkers, and contemporary Buddhist thinkers. One could certainly look at organising list of Jews in a similar manner.

 * as it happens list of agnostics and list of pagans have already been listed on VfD - they weren't deleted (Eloquence made the decision). What I said at the time in diffence of agnostics was: "Example of uses: person wondering about key agnostic philosophers, or looking for common features in the lives of agnostics, or wanting not to be alone". I certainly agree that some of these pages need to be better organised, but I don't think they should be deleted. I also agree that these lists should not be considered exhaustive - I'll add a comment to that effect. Martin

Comment removed from article page
I removed the following from the article page, as it seems more like a comment on the page than a part of the content of the page:

 * These lists are not exhaustive: there is no encyclopedic benefit to listing every single member of each religion. People are selected on various criteria - ideally they should have articles of their own, and be in some way noteworthy for their belief.

-Rholton 21:02, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

What's the point?
Some of the people included in these lists, particularly political leaders, have been characterized as proponents of a belief simply because that belief is the preponderant one of their culture. Is listing Tojo as a Buddhist (for which I haven't seen any evidence in any case) somehow supposed to be representative or indicative of Buddhism? In what way? And then of course, before my edits just now, not even Emperor_Wu_of_Liang_China islisted, whose policies were actually informed by the teachings. Shouldn't these lists only apply when the religion had some bearing on the actual life or actions? --Reagle 11:49, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Split into two articles
If there is no objection, I'll split this article in two, with the second being Lists of people by ideology, which will be placed in Category:Lists of people by ideology.--Editor2020 (talk) 01:18, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

AfD
I've nominated List of former Jews, List of former Christians, and List of former Muslims together for deletion: Articles for deletion/List of former Jews.Kitfoxxe (talk) 16:19, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Truthers & Worldview + Libertarians + Other Parties
I'm working on a list of Truthers and I'm unsure which section it should go under. It's partly political, partly worldview. I've added a few more under Worldview. JasonCarswell (talk) 19:47, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

User:JayJasper reorganized the list nicely. He removed List of Truthers (coming soon) and List of social libertarians which I think should be a list of people who appreciate socialist/Marxist and libertarian/anarchist ideas (ie. Noam Chomsky is a self-proclaimed social-libertarian, preferred to the now pejorative term Marxist-anarchist). A List of conservative libertarians, or a more appropriate term if applicable, would apply to libertarian people who lean conservative (ie. Ron Paul is a perfect example. Alex Jones used to slam everyone equally and he's still libertarian but now leaning much further right promoting Donald Trump.  In Canada there's a Rebel Media channel on YouTube that might fit.  Also AMTV on YouTube might fit this description.  I don't know enough about it because I don't watch them.)

I added them but are there better terms for Workers' Party and Independent Party people or if they just generally fold into the "socialists against rulers" false paradigm?

I added the Green Party, Pirate party, and Cannabis political parties (more than I imagined) listed worldwide. I don't know if a Sex Party (politics) (less than I imagined) warrants listing because there's only the Australian Sex Party founded in 2009 and The Sex Party in British Columbia, Canada on Wikipedia. Also, there is a current comedic protest Rhinoceros Party based off the Rhinoceros Party of Canada (1963–93) and I suspect there are more like those around the world.

Maybe an alternative party section is required. JasonCarswell (talk) 10:56, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

==

Requested move 31 January 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved  (t · c)  buidhe  14:04, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

List of lists of people by belief → Lists of people by belief – Was previously at this title before being moved twice. "Lists of X" instead of "List of lists of X" is generally preferred in titles (like Lists of people by nationality, Lists of people by occupation). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 12:54, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

 * Strong support per nom. Should be uncontroversial. We tend to use "Lists of X" instead of "List of lists of X". Paintspot Infez (talk) 18:45, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:Lists of people by belief


text:
Rabbits in Australia

European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) were first introduced to Australia in the 18th century with the First Fleet, and later became widespread, because of Thomas Austin. Such wild rabbit populations are a serious mammalian pest and invasive species in Australia causing millions of dollars' worth of damage to crops. Their spread may have been enhanced through the emergence of strong crossbreeds.

Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the Australian rabbit population. Conventional methods include shooting rabbits and destroying their warrens, but these had only limited success. From 1901 to 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the rabbits. The myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population. However, the survivors have since adapted and partially recovered their previous numbers. Domesticated rabbits are banned as pets in the state of Queensland.

History

Rabbits were first introduced to Australia by the First Fleet in 1788. They were bred as food animals, probably in cages. In the first decades, they do not appear to have been numerous, judging from their absence from archaeological collections of early colonial food remains. However, by 1827 in Tasmania, a newspaper article noted "...the common rabbit is becoming so numerous throughout the colony, that they are running about on some large estates by thousands. We understand, that there are no rabbits whatever in the elder colony" i.e., New South Wales (NSW). This clearly shows a localised rabbit population explosion was underway in Tasmania in the early 19th century. At the same time in NSW, Cunningham noted, "... rabbits are bred around houses, but we have yet no wild ones in enclosures..." He also noted the scrubby, sandy rubble between Sydney and Botany Bay would be ideal for farming rabbits.

Enclosures appear to mean more extensive rabbit-farming warrens, rather than cages. The first of these, in Sydney at least, was one built by Alexander Macleay at Elizabeth Bay House, "a preserve or rabbit-warren, surrounded by a substantial stone wall, and well stocked with that choice game." In the 1840s, rabbit-keeping became even more common, with examples of the theft of rabbits from ordinary peoples' houses appearing in court records and rabbits entering the diets of ordinary people.

In 1857–1858, Alexander Buchanan, overseer for F. H. Dutton's Anlaby Estate in the Mid-North of South Australia, released a number of rabbits for hunting sport. Their population remained fairly stable until around 1866, presumed to have been kept in check by native carnivores and were protected by an Act of Parliament, but by 1867 was out of control. The population explosion was ascribed to the disappearance of native predators, but the emergence of a hardier breed by natural selection has subsequently been attributed to their spread.

The current infestation appears to have originated with the release of 24 wild rabbits by Thomas Austin for hunting purposes in October 1859, on his property, Barwon Park, near Winchelsea, Victoria and by 1866, the Geelong Advertiser reported 50,000 having been killed by hunters. While living in England, Austin had been an avid hunter, regularly dedicating his weekends to rabbit shooting. Upon arriving in Australia, which had no native rabbit population, Austin asked his nephew William Austin in England to send him 12 grey rabbits, five hares, 72 partridges, and some sparrows so he could continue his hobby in Australia by creating a local population of the species. At the time, he had stated, "The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting". William could not source enough grey rabbits to meet his uncle's order, so he topped it up by buying domestic rabbits. One theory as to why the Barwon Park rabbits adapted so well to Australia is that the hybrid rabbits that resulted from the interbreeding of the two distinct types were much more suited to Australian conditions. Many other farms released their rabbits into the wild after Austin.

The rabbits were extremely prolific and spread rapidly across the southern parts of the country. Australia had ideal conditions for a rabbit population explosion. With mild winters, rabbits were able to breed the entire year. With widespread farming, areas that might otherwise have been scrub or woodlands were, instead, turned into vast areas with low vegetation, creating ideal habitats for rabbits.

In a classic example of unintended consequences, rabbits had become so prevalent within 10 years of their introduction in 1859 that two million could be shot or trapped annually without having any noticeable effect on the population. It was the fastest spread ever recorded of any mammal anywhere in the world. Today, rabbits are entrenched in the southern and central areas of the country, with scattered populations in the northern deserts.

Although the rabbit is a notorious pest, it proved useful to many people during the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s and during wartime. Trapping rabbits helped farmers, stockmen, and stationhands by providing food and extra income, and in some cases helped pay off farming debts. Rabbits were fed to working dogs and boiled to be fed to poultry. Later, frozen rabbit carcasses were traded locally and exported. Pelts, too, were used in the fur trade and are still used in the felt-hat industry.

Effects on Australia's ecology
Since their introduction from Europe in the 19th century, the effect of rabbits on the ecology of Australia has been devastating. They are suspected of being the most significant known factor in species loss in Australia. Rabbits are believed to have had an immense impact on the abundance of natural resource availability, primarily concerning overgrazing. The rabbits would first deplete the natural pasture vegetation, and would then resort to consuming woody vegetation, which included small shrubs, and the leaves and bark of trees. The extent of plant species' loss is unknown at this time, though rabbits are known to often kill young trees in orchards, forests, and on properties by ringbarking them.

Rabbits are also responsible for serious erosion problems, as they eat native plants, leaving the topsoil exposed and vulnerable to sheet, gully, and wind erosion. The removal of this topsoil is devastating to the land, as it takes many hundreds of years to regenerate.

Control measures
By 1887, losses from rabbit damage compelled the New South Wales government to offer a £25,000 reward for "any method of success not previously known in the Colony for the effectual extermination of rabbits". The commission received 1,456 suggestions, including several schemes involving biological controls (see below), but none was found to be both safe and effective.

A Royal Commission was held to investigate the situation in 1901. Once the problem was understood, various control methods were tried to limit or reduce the population of rabbits in Australia. These methods had limited success until the introduction of biological control methods in the latter half of the 20th century.

Common control measures
Shooting rabbits is one of the most common control methods and can successfully be used to keep already low populations in check while providing food for people or pets, though it is ineffective for large-scale eradication.

Destroying warrens through ripping (a procedure wherein rabbits are dismembered or buried alive as a bulldozer dragging sharp tines is driven over their warrens or burrows), ploughing, blasting, and fumigating is widely used, especially on large farms (known as "stations"). The sandy soil in many parts of Australia makes ripping and ploughing a viable method of control, and both tractors and bulldozers are used for this operation.

Poisoning is probably the most widely used of the conventional techniques, as it requires the least effort and is capable of destroying a local population, though reinfestation given the mobility of the animal is almost inevitable. Laying baits of pollard laced with a phosphorus-based poison, such as "S.A.P." manufactured by Sayers, Allport & Potter, was an early method. The advantage of phosphorus is that in dry weather, assuming it has not been laid in clumps (obviated by use of a poison cart), it soon degrades to innocuous phosphoric acid and presents no further danger to livestock or pets. It does, however, present a real fire risk, and concentrated fumes can be toxic to operators. More modern poisons for rabbit control are sodium fluoroacetate ("1080") and pindone.

Another technique is hunting using ferrets, wherein ferrets are deployed to chase the rabbits out to be shot or into nets set over the burrows. Since the number of rabbits ferrets can kill is limited, this is more a hunting activity than a serious control method. Although ferrets and other mustelid species are used as control measures, Australia has significantly fewer wild mustelids to prey on the invasive rabbits while in their warrens or burrows compared to Europe and the United States.

Historically, trapping was also frequently used; steel-jawed leg-holding traps were banned in most states in the 1980s on animal-cruelty grounds, though trapping continues at a lower level using rubber-jawed traps. All of these techniques are limited to working only in settled areas and are quite labour-intensive.

Fences
Ring-fencing can be highly effective way of providing a rabbit-free area. In the 1880s, James Moseley ringed Coondambo Station with wire netting and fenced off the watercourses; at the first heatwave, the rabbits perished of thirst. Shortly after 1900, he fenced off the deserted Yardea, Paney, Pondana, Yarloo, and Thurlga stations in the Gawler Ranges with 150 miles of wire netting, turning them within a few years from degraded land overrun with rabbits into a profitable sheep run.

Well-known modern examples, which also exclude foxes, dogs, and cats are Warrawong and Yookamurra wildlife sanctuaries, pioneered by John Wamsley.

Two well-known examples of much more extensive fences are:

Queensland
In July 1884, Ernest James Stevens, a member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, proposed that the Queensland government erect a fence to prevent the infestation of rabbits in New South Wales from spreading into Queensland (his Logan electorate being very close to the New South Wales border). In 1893, a rabbit-proof fence was commenced in Queensland. It was progressively extended through the years. In 1997, a final segment was built connecting it to the Dingo Fence. It extends from Mount Gipps (near Rathdowney) to Goombi between Chinchilla and Miles.

Western Australia

From 1901 to 1907, the rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia between Cape Keraudren and Esperance to try to control the spread of the rabbit population from the east into Western Australian pastoral areas. Given that European rabbits can both jump very high and burrow underground, a perfectly intact fence stretching for hundreds of kilometres, and whose gates farmers or graziers did not leave open for livestock or machinery, was still unlikely to succeed. As such, the Number 1 Rabbit-Proof Fence, which was erected in 1901, failed to keep the rabbit population away from the protected area. Even after this large scale fence had failed, smaller scale fencing projects continued to make a successful appearance.

Biological measures
Releasing rabbit-borne diseases has proven somewhat successful in controlling the population of rabbits in Australia, but such success as has been achieved did not occur as quickly as was hoped.

An offer by the New South Wales government of a £25,000 reward for a biological control of rabbits attracted the attention of Louis Pasteur, who proposed using the chicken cholera bacillus (now known as Pasteurella multocida). Although that measure did not prove viable, the association with Pasteur accelerated the introduction of microbiology into Australia.

On 16 April 1888, the New South Wales government appointed a royal commission "to make a full and diligent inquiry as to whether or not the introduction of contagious diseases amongst rabbits by inoculation or otherwise, or the propagation of diseases natural to rabbits ... will be accompanied or followed by danger to human health or life, or to animal life other than rabbits, or to interfere injuriously with the profitable carrying on of agricultural or pastoral pursuits ..." Under the aegis of the commission, tests were conducted at Rodd Island, and although rabbits who were given food adulterated with chicken cholera bacillus were killed, no evidence was found of the contagion spreading to healthy rabbits.

In 1885, Professor Archibald Watson of the University of Adelaide suggested releasing rabbits inoculated with rabbit scab into an enclosed trial area. Limited trials suggested that the measure would be ineffective in the drier parts of the continent.

In September 1887, Dr Herbert Butcher (1854–1893) of Wilcannia found a number of dead, emaciated rabbits at Tintinallogy Station. Dr H. Ellis of Sydney and he concluded that the animals had died of a novel disease, which they dubbed Tintinallogy virus. They felt it could be an effective control measure, but whatever the rabbits died from was never proved to be infectious or contagious. It may have been simple starvation caused by natural elements.

In 1906 and 1907, Jean Danysz, of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, conducted trials on Broughton Island, New South Wales, of a strain of Pasteurella bacteria he had developed, which proved to be specific to rabbits, but it proved to be a less-than-satisfactory control measure. Dr Danysz felt that Broughton Island was a poor choice of test site, and that extensive experiments should be conducted on the mainland. Frank Tidswell, who was his chief Australian collaborator, continued Danysz's trials after he left in 1907, and also began trials of the Yalgogrin, Gundagai, and Picton microbes (named for the stations where infected rabbits were found), but financial support was lacking from the Federal government, or the collaboration of affected states, that would be necessary to prove that the measure safe and effective. The fact that these pathogens did not wipe out whole populations might have raised doubts as to their efficacy.

In 1950, following research conducted by Frank Fenner, myxoma virus was deliberately released into the rabbit population, causing it to drop from an estimated 600 million to around 100 million. Growing genetic resistance in the remaining rabbits had allowed the population to recover to 200–300 million by 1991.

To combat that trend, over three years from June 1991, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) comprehensively tested the potential of a Calicivirus, which causes rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD), for biological control of wild rabbits. The virus escaped from a quarantine compound on Wardang Island, South Australia, where the field tests were being carried out, and by late October 1995, it was recorded in rabbits at Yunta and Gum Creek, in north-eastern South Australia. By the winter of 1996, the virus was established in Victoria, New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The virus was discovered in these areas by analyzing livers of dead rabbits. The success of the virus was found to be higher in dry areas, because of a benign calicivirus found in the colder, wetter areas of Australia, which was immunising rabbits against the more virulent form.

A legal vaccine exists in Australia for RHD, but no cure is known for either myxomatosis or RHD, and many affected pets have to be euthanized. In Europe, where rabbits are farmed on a large scale, they are protected against myxomatosis and calicivirus with a genetically modified virus developed in Spain.

A team headed by virologist Francisco Parra, working with the University of Oviedo, in Asturias, northern Spain, identified a new variant of the virus in 2012. The pathogen, a new strain of K5 (RHDV1), is both extremely lethal and highly contagious. In 2017, it was released by Australian authorities at around 600 points on the continent. Owners of domestic rabbits were advised to vaccinate their animals.

In southern Europe, the scarcity of rabbits threatens the conservation of endangered predator species higher up the food chain, that depend on small game such as rabbits. These include the Iberian lynx and the Iberian imperial eagle. For this reason, biological warfare against rabbits in Australia is a serious concern for conservation activities in other parts of the world.

The cost of rabbit vaccination substantially raises the cost of rabbit meat in Australia; from 2004 to 2014, the number of farms dropped from 80 to 4, and the meat has become a rarity.

title: Rabbits in Australia


text:
Concerto grosso

The concerto grosso (Italian for big concert(o), plural concerti grossi ) is a form of baroque music in which the musical material is passed between a small group of soloists (the concertino) and full orchestra (the ripieno, tutti or concerto grosso). This is in contrast to the solo concerto which features a single solo instrument with the melody line, accompanied by the orchestra.

History
The form developed in the late seventeenth century, although the name was not used at first. Alessandro Stradella seems to have written the first music in which two groups of different sizes are combined in the characteristic way. The name was first used by Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori in a set of ten compositions published in Lucca in 1698.

The first major composer to use the term concerto grosso was Arcangelo Corelli. After Corelli's death, a collection of twelve of his concerti grossi was published. Not long after, composers such as Francesco Geminiani, Pietro Locatelli, Giovanni Benedetto Platti and Giuseppe Torelli wrote concertos in the style of Corelli. He also had a strong influence on Antonio Vivaldi.

Two distinct forms of the concerto grosso exist: The concerto da chiesa alternated slow and fast movements; the concerto da camera had the character of a suite, being introduced by a prelude and incorporating popular dance forms. (See also Sonata for a discussion about sonatas da camera and da chiesa.) These distinctions blurred over time. Corelli composed 48 trio sonatas, 12 violin and continuo sonatas, and 12 concerti grossi.
 * 1) the concerto da chiesa (church concert)
 * 2) the concerto da camera (chamber concert)

Six sets of twelve compositions, published between 1888 and 1891 by Friedrich Chrysander, are authentically ascribed to Corelli, together with a few other works. Corelli's concertino group consisted of two violins and a cello, with a string section as ripieno group. Both were accompanied by a basso continuo with some combination of harpsichord, organ, lute or theorbo. George Frideric Handel wrote several collections of concerti grossi (Op. 3 and Op. 6), and several of the Brandenburg Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach also loosely follow the concerto grosso form.
 * Opus 1: 12 sonate da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1681)
 * Opus 2: 12 sonate da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1685)
 * Opus 3: 12 sonate da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1689)
 * Opus 4: 12 sonate da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1694)
 * Opus 5: 12 Suonati a violino e violone o cimbalo (6 sonate da chiesa and 6 sonate da camera for violin and continuo) (Rome 1700) The last sonata is a set of variations on La Folia.
 * Opus 6: 12 concerti grossi (8 concerti da chiesa and 4 concerti da camera for concertino of 2 violins and cello, string ripieno, and continuo) (Amsterdam 1714)

The concerto grosso form was superseded by the solo concerto and the sinfonia concertante in the late eighteenth century, and new examples of the form did not appear for more than a century. In the twentieth century, the concerto grosso has been used by composers including Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Bloch, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Bohuslav Martinů, Malcolm Williamson, Henry Cowell, Alfred Schnittke, William Bolcom, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Andrei Eshpai, Eino Tamberg, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jean Françaix, Airat Ichmouratov, Philip Glass and Paul Ben-Haim. While Edward Elgar may be considered a modern composer, his romantic Introduction and Allegro strongly resembled the instrumentation setup of a concerto grosso.

Concertino
A concertino, literally "little ensemble", is the group of soloists in a concerto grosso. This is opposed to the ripieno and tutti which is the larger group contrasting with the concertino.

Though the concertino is the smaller of the two groups, its material is generally more virtuosic than that of the ripieno. Further, the concertino does not share thematic material with the ripieno, but presents unique ideas. This contrast of small group to large group and one thematic group against another is very characteristic of Baroque ideology—similar to terraced dynamics where the idea is significant contrast.

title: Concerto grosso


text:
Stepper motor

[[File:StepperMotor.gif|thumb|right|200px|Animation of a simplified stepper motor turned on, attracting the nearest teeth of the gear-shaped iron rotor. With the teeth aligned to electromagnet 1, they will be slightly offset from right electromagnet (2).

Frame 2: The top electromagnet (1) is turned off, and the right electromagnet (2) is energized, pulling the teeth into alignment with it. This results in a rotation of 3.6° in this example.

Frame 3: The bottom electromagnet (3) is energized; another 3.6° rotation occurs.

Frame 4: The left electromagnet (4) is energized, rotating again by 3.6°. When the top electromagnet (1) is again enabled, the rotor will have rotated by one tooth position; since there are 25 teeth, it will take 100 steps to make a full rotation in this example.]]

A stepper motor, also known as step motor or stepping motor, is an electric motor that rotates in a series of small angular steps, instead of continuously. Stepper motors can be set to any given step position without needing a position sensor for feedback. The step position can be rapidly increased or decreased, creating continuous rotation, or the motor can be ordered to actively hold its position at one given step. Motors vary in size, speed, step resolution, and torque.

Switched reluctance motors are very large stepping motors with a reduced pole count. They generally employ closed-loop commutators.

Mechanism
Brushed DC motors rotate continuously when DC voltage is applied to their terminals. The stepper motor is known for its property of converting a train of input pulses (typically square waves) into a precisely defined increment in the shaft’s rotational position. Each pulse rotates the shaft through a fixed angle.

Stepper motors effectively have multiple "toothed" electromagnets arranged as a stator around a central rotor, a gear-shaped piece of iron. The electromagnets are energized by an external driver circuit or a micro controller. To make the motor shaft turn, first, one electromagnet is given power, which magnetically attracts the gear's teeth. When the gear's teeth are aligned to the first electromagnet, they are slightly offset from the next electromagnet. This means that when the next electromagnet is turned on and the first is turned off, the gear rotates slightly to align with the next one. From there the process is repeated. Each of the partial rotations is called a "step", with an integer number of steps making a full rotation. In that way, the motor can be turned by a precise angle.

The circular arrangement of electromagnets is divided into groups, each group called a phase, and there is an equal number of electromagnets per group. The number of groups is chosen by the designer of the stepper motor. The electromagnets of each group are interleaved with the electromagnets of other groups to form a uniform pattern of arrangement. For example, if the stepper motor has two groups identified as A or B, and ten electromagnets in total, then the grouping pattern would be ABABABABAB. Electromagnets within the same group are all energized together. Because of this, stepper motors with more phases typically have more wires (or leads) to control the motor.

Types
There are three main types of stepper motors: permanent magnet, variable reluctance, and hybrid synchronous.

Permanent magnet motors use a permanent magnet (PM) in the rotor and operate on the attraction or repulsion between the rotor magnet and the stator electromagnets. Pulses move the rotor clockwise or anticlockwise in discrete steps. If left powered at a final step, a strong detent remains at that shaft location. This detent has a predictable spring rate and specified torque limit; slippage occurs if the limit is exceeded. If current is removed, a lesser detent still remains, holding shaft position against spring or other torque influences. Stepping can then be resumed while reliably being synchronized with control electronics.

Permanent magnet stepper motors have simple DC switching electronics, a power-off detent, and no position readout. These qualities are ideal for applications such as paper printers, 3D printers, and robotics. Such applications track position simply by counting the number of steps that each motor has been instructed to take.

Variable reluctance (VR) motors have a soft iron rotor and operate based on the principle that minimum reluctance occurs with minimum gap, so the rotor points are attracted toward the stator's magnetic poles. Variable reluctance motors have detents when powered on, but not when powered off.

Hybrid synchronous motors are a combination of the permanent magnet and variable reluctance types, to maximize power in a small size.

Two phase
There are two basic winding arrangements for the electromagnetic coils in a two phase stepper motor: bipolar and unipolar.

Unipolar motors
A unipolar stepper motor has one winding with center tap per phase. Each section of windings is switched on for each direction of magnetic field. Since in this arrangement a magnetic pole can be reversed without switching the polarity of the common wire, the commutation circuit can be simply a single switching transistor for each half winding. Typically, given a phase, the center tap of each winding is made common: three leads per phase and six leads for a typical two phase motor. Often, these two phase commons are internally joined, so the motor has only five leads.

A microcontroller or stepper motor controller can be used to activate the drive transistors in the right order, and this ease of operation makes unipolar motors popular with hobbyists; they are probably the cheapest way to get precise angular movements. For the experimenter, the windings can be identified by touching the terminal wires together in PM motors. If the terminals of a coil are connected, the shaft becomes harder to turn. One way to distinguish the center tap (common wire) from a coil-end wire is by measuring the resistance. Resistance between common wire and coil-end wire is always half of the resistance between coil-end wires. This is because there is twice the length of coil between the ends and only half from center (common wire) to the end. A quick way to determine if the stepper motor is working is to short circuit every two pairs and try turning the shaft. Whenever a higher-than-normal resistance is felt, it indicates that the circuit to the particular winding is closed and that the phase is working.

Bipolar motors
Bipolar motors have a pair of single winding connections per phase. The current in a winding needs to be reversed in order to reverse a magnetic pole, so the driving circuit must be more complicated, typically with an H-bridge arrangement (however there are several off-the-shelf driver chips available to make this a simple affair). There are two leads per phase, none is common.

A typical driving pattern for a two coil bipolar stepper motor would be: A+ B+ A− B−. I.e. drive coil A with positive current, then remove current from coil A; then drive coil B with positive current, then remove current from coil B; then drive coil A with negative current (flipping polarity by switching the wires e.g. with an H bridge), then remove current from coil A; then drive coil B with negative current (again flipping polarity same as coil A); the cycle is complete and begins anew.

Static friction effects using an H-bridge have been observed with certain drive topologies.

Dithering the stepper signal at a higher frequency than the motor can respond to will reduce this "static friction" effect. Because windings are better utilized, they are more powerful than a unipolar motor of the same weight. This is due to the physical space occupied by the windings. A unipolar motor has twice the amount of wire in the same space, but only half used at any point in time, hence is 50% efficient (or approximately 70% of the torque output available). Though a bipolar stepper motor is more complicated to drive, the abundance of driver chips means this is much less difficult to achieve.

An 8-lead stepper is like a unipolar stepper, but the leads are not joined to common internally to the motor. This kind of motor can be wired in several configurations:
 * Unipolar.
 * Bipolar with series windings. This gives higher inductance but lower current per winding.
 * Bipolar with parallel windings. This requires higher current but can perform better as the winding inductance is reduced.
 * Bipolar with a single winding per phase. This method will run the motor on only half the available windings, which will reduce the available low speed torque but require less current

Higher-phase count
Multi-phase stepper motors with many phases tend to have much lower levels of vibration. While they are more expensive, they do have a higher power density and with the appropriate drive electronics are often better suited to the application.

Driver circuits
Stepper motor performance is strongly dependent on the driver circuit. Torque curves may be extended to greater speeds if the stator poles can be reversed more quickly, the limiting factor being a combination of the winding inductance. To overcome the inductance and switch the windings quickly, one must increase the drive voltage. This leads further to the necessity of limiting the current that these high voltages may otherwise induce.

An additional limitation, often comparable to the effects of inductance, is the back-EMF of the motor. As the motor's rotor turns, a sinusoidal voltage is generated proportional to the speed (step rate). This AC voltage is subtracted from the voltage waveform available to induce a change in the current.

L/R driver circuits
L/R driver circuits are also referred to as constant voltage drives because a constant positive or negative voltage is applied to each winding to set the step positions. However, it is winding current, not voltage that applies torque to the stepper motor shaft. The current I in each winding is related to the applied voltage V by the winding inductance L and the winding resistance R. The resistance R determines the maximum current according to Ohm's law I=V/R. The inductance L determines the maximum rate of change of the current in the winding according to the formula for an inductor dI/dt = V/L. The resulting current for a voltage pulse is a quickly increasing current as a function of inductance. This reaches the V/R value and holds for the remainder of the pulse. Thus when controlled by a constant voltage drive, the maximum speed of a stepper motor is limited by its inductance since at some speed, the voltage U will be changing faster than the current I can keep up. In simple terms the rate of change of current is L / R (e.g. a 10 mH inductance with 2 ohms resistance will take 5 ms to reach approx 2/3 of maximum torque or around 24 ms to reach 99% of max torque). To obtain high torque at high speeds requires a large drive voltage with a low resistance and low inductance.

With an L/R drive it is possible to control a low voltage resistive motor with a higher voltage drive simply by adding an external resistor in series with each winding. This will waste power in the resistors, and generate heat. It is therefore considered a low performing option, albeit simple and cheap.

Modern voltage-mode drivers overcome some of these limitations by approximating a sinusoidal voltage waveform to the motor phases. The amplitude of the voltage waveform is set up to increase with step rate. If properly tuned, this compensates the effects of inductance and back-EMF, allowing decent performance relative to current-mode drivers, but at the expense of design effort (tuning procedures) that are simpler for current-mode drivers.

Chopper drive circuits
Chopper drive circuits are referred to as controlled current drives because they generate a controlled current in each winding rather than applying a constant voltage. Chopper drive circuits are most often used with two-winding bipolar motors, the two windings being driven independently to provide a specific motor torque CW or CCW. On each winding, a "supply" voltage is applied to the winding as a square wave voltage; example 8 kHz. The winding inductance smooths the current which reaches a level according to the square wave duty cycle. Most often bipolar supply (+ and - ) voltages are supplied to the controller relative to the winding return. So 50% duty cycle results in zero current. 0% results in full V/R current in one direction. 100% results in full current in the opposite direction. This current level is monitored by the controller by measuring the voltage across a small sense resistor in series with the winding. This requires additional electronics to sense winding currents, and control the switching, but it allows stepper motors to be driven with higher torque at higher speeds than L/R drives. It also allows the controller to output predetermined current levels rather than fixed. Integrated electronics for this purpose are widely available.

Phase current waveforms
A stepper motor is a polyphase AC synchronous motor (see Theory below), and it is ideally driven by sinusoidal current. A full-step waveform is a gross approximation of a sinusoid, and is the reason why the motor exhibits so much vibration. Various drive techniques have been developed to better approximate a sinusoidal drive waveform: these are half stepping and microstepping.

Wave drive (one phase on)
In this drive method only a single phase is activated at a time. It has the same number of steps as the full-step drive, but the motor will have significantly less torque than rated. It is rarely used. The animated figure shown above is a wave drive motor. In the animation, rotor has 25 teeth and it takes 4 steps to rotate by one tooth position. So there will be $25$ = 100 steps per full rotation and each step will be $360/100$ = $3.6 deg$.

Full-step drive (two phases on)
This is the usual method for full-step driving the motor. Two phases are always on so the motor will provide its maximum rated torque. As soon as one phase is turned off, another one is turned on. Wave drive and single phase full step are both one and the same, with same number of steps but difference in torque.

Half-stepping
When half-stepping, the drive alternates between two phases on and a single phase on. This increases the angular resolution. The motor also has less torque (approx 70%) at the full-step position (where only a single phase is on). This may be mitigated by increasing the current in the active winding to compensate. The advantage of half stepping is that the drive electronics need not change to support it. In animated figure shown above, if we change it to half-stepping, then it will take 8 steps to rotate by 1 tooth position. So there will be 25×8 = 200 steps per full rotation and each step will be 360/200 = 1.8°. Its angle per step is half of the full step.

Microstepping
What is commonly referred to as microstepping is often sine–cosine microstepping in which the winding current approximates a sinusoidal AC waveform. The common way to achieve sine-cosine current is with chopper-drive circuits. Sine–cosine microstepping is the most common form, but other waveforms can be used. Regardless of the waveform used, as the microsteps become smaller, motor operation becomes smoother, thereby greatly reducing resonance in any parts the motor may be connected to, as well as the motor itself. Resolution will be limited by the mechanical stiction, backlash, and other sources of error between the motor and the end device. Gear reducers may be used to increase resolution of positioning.

Step size reduction is an important step motor feature and a fundamental reason for their use in positioning.

Example: many modern hybrid step motors are rated such that the travel of every full step (example 1.8 degrees per full step or 200 full steps per revolution) will be within 3% or 5% of the travel of every other full step, as long as the motor is operated within its specified operating ranges. Several manufacturers show that their motors can easily maintain the 3% or 5% equality of step travel size as step size is reduced from full stepping down to 1/10 stepping. Then, as the microstepping divisor number grows, step size repeatability degrades. At large step size reductions it is possible to issue many microstep commands before any motion occurs at all and then the motion can be a "jump" to a new position. Some stepper controller ICs use increased current to minimise such missed steps, especially when the peak current pulses in one phase would otherwise be very brief.

Theory
A step motor can be viewed as a synchronous AC motor with the number of poles (on both rotor and stator) increased, taking care that they have no common denominator. Additionally, soft magnetic material with many teeth on the rotor and stator cheaply multiplies the number of poles (reluctance motor). Modern steppers are of hybrid design, having both permanent magnets and soft iron cores.

To achieve full rated torque, the coils in a stepper motor must reach their full rated current during each step. Winding inductance and counter-EMF generated by a moving rotor tend to resist changes in drive current, so that as the motor speeds up, less and less time is spent at full current—thus reducing motor torque. As speeds further increase, the current will not reach the rated value, and eventually the motor will cease to produce torque.

Pull-in torque
This is the measure of the torque produced by a stepper motor when it is operated without an acceleration state. At low speeds the stepper motor can synchronize itself with an applied step frequency, and this pull-in torque must overcome friction and inertia. It is important to make sure that the load on the motor is frictional rather than inertial as the friction reduces any unwanted oscillations.

The pull-in curve defines an area called the start/stop region. Into this region, the motor can be started/stopped instantaneously with a load applied and without loss of synchronism.

Pull-out torque
The stepper motor pull-out torque is measured by accelerating the motor to the desired speed and then increasing the torque loading until the motor stalls or misses steps. This measurement is taken across a wide range of speeds and the results are used to generate the stepper motor's dynamic performance curve. As noted below this curve is affected by drive voltage, drive current and current switching techniques. A designer may include a safety factor between the rated torque and the estimated full load torque required for the application.

Detent torque
Synchronous electric motors using permanent magnets have a resonant position holding torque (called detent torque or cogging, and sometimes included in the specifications) when not driven electrically. Soft iron reluctance cores do not exhibit this behavior.

Ringing and resonance
When the motor moves a single step it overshoots the final resting point and oscillates round this point as it comes to rest. This undesirable ringing is experienced as motor rotor vibration and is more pronounced in unloaded motors. An unloaded or under loaded motor may, and often will, stall if the vibration experienced is enough to cause loss of synchronisation.

Stepper motors have a natural frequency of operation. When the excitation frequency matches this resonance the ringing is more pronounced, steps may be missed, and stalling is more likely. Motor resonance frequency can be calculated from the formula:

 * $$f=\frac{100}{2\pi} \sqrt{\frac{2p M_h}{J_r} }$$

where $$M_h$$ is the holding torque in N·m, $$p$$ is the number of pole pairs, and $$J_r$$ is the rotor inertia in kg·m². The magnitude of the undesirable ringing is dependent on the back EMF resulting from rotor velocity. The resultant current promotes damping, so the drive circuit characteristics are important. The rotor ringing can be described in terms of damping factor.

Ratings and specifications
Stepper motors' nameplates typically give only the winding current and occasionally the voltage and winding resistance. The rated voltage will produce the rated winding current at DC: but this is mostly a meaningless rating, as all modern drivers are current limiting and the drive voltages greatly exceed the motor rated voltage.

Datasheets from the manufacturer often indicate Inductance. Back-EMF is equally relevant, but seldom listed (it is straightforward to measure with an oscilloscope). These figures can be helpful for more in-depth electronics design, when deviating from standard supply voltages, adapting third party driver electronics, or gaining insight when choosing between motor models with otherwise similar size, voltage, and torque specifications.

A stepper's low-speed torque will vary directly with current. How quickly the torque falls off at faster speeds depends on the winding inductance and the drive circuitry it is attached to, especially the driving voltage.

Steppers should be sized according to published torque curve, which is specified by the manufacturer at particular drive voltages or using their own drive circuitry. Dips in the torque curve suggest possible resonances, whose impact on the application should be understood by designers.

Step motors adapted to harsh environments are often referred to as IP65 rated.

NEMA stepper motors
The US National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) standardises various dimensions, marking and other aspects of stepper motors, in NEMA standard (NEMA ICS 16-2001). NEMA stepper motors are labeled by faceplate size, NEMA 17 being a stepper motor with a 1.7 x faceplate and dimensions given in inches. The standard also lists motors with faceplate dimensions given in metric units. These motors are typically referred with NEMA DD, where DD is the diameter of the faceplate in inches multiplied by 10 (e.g., NEMA 17 has a diameter of 1.7 inches). There are further specifiers to describe stepper motors, and such details may be found in the ICS 16-2001 standard.

Applications
Computer controlled stepper motors are a type of motion-control positioning system. They are typically digitally controlled as part of an open loop system for use in holding or positioning applications.

In the field of lasers and optics they are frequently used in precision positioning equipment such as linear actuators, linear stages, rotation stages, goniometers, and mirror mounts. Other uses are in packaging machinery, and positioning of valve pilot stages for fluid control systems.

Commercially, stepper motors are used in floppy disk drives, flatbed scanners, computer printers, plotters, slot machines, image scanners, compact disc drives, intelligent lighting, camera lenses, CNC machines, and 3D printers. Some programming hobbyists have used arrays of stepper motors as electronic musical instruments by programming the motors to rotate at the frequencies of different musical tones, in a sequence that imitates that found in a MIDI file.

Stepper motor system
A stepper motor system consists of three basic elements, often combined with some type of user interface (host computer, PLC or dumb terminal):
 * Indexers: The indexer (or controller) is a microprocessor capable of generating step pulses and direction signals for the driver. In addition, the indexer is typically required to perform many other sophisticated command functions.
 * Drivers: The driver (or amplifier) converts the indexer command signals into the power necessary to energize the motor windings. There are numerous types of drivers, with different voltage and current ratings and construction technology. Not all drivers are suitable to run all motors, so when designing a motion control system, the driver selection process is critical.
 * Stepper motors: The stepper motor is an electromagnetic device that converts digital pulses into mechanical shaft rotation.

Advantages

 * Low cost for control achieved
 * High torque at startup and low speeds
 * Ruggedness
 * Simplicity of construction
 * Can operate in an open loop control system
 * Low maintenance (high reliability)
 * Less likely to stall or slip
 * Will work in any environment
 * Can be used in robotics in a wide scale.
 * High reliability
 * The rotation angle of the motor is proportional to the input pulse.
 * The motor has full torque at standstill (if the windings are energized)
 * Precise positioning and repeatability of movement, since good stepper motors have an accuracy of 3–5% of a step and this error is non-cumulative from one step to the next.
 * Excellent response to starting/stopping/reversing.
 * Very reliable since there are no contact brushes in the motor. Therefore, the life of the motor is simply dependent on the life of the bearing.
 * The motor's response to digital input pulses provides open-loop control, making the motor simpler and less costly to control.
 * It is possible to achieve very low-speed synchronous rotation with a load that is directly coupled to the shaft.
 * A wide range of rotational speeds can be realized, as the speed is proportional to the frequency of the input pulses.

Disadvantages

 * Resonance effect often exhibited at low speeds and decreasing torque with increasing speed.

title: Stepper motor


text:
DC

DC most often refers to:
 * Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), the capital of the United States
 * DC Comics, an American comic book publisher
 * Direct current, electric current which flows in only one direction

DC, D.C., D/C, Dc, or dc may refer to:

Places

 * Bogotá, Distrito Capital, the capital city of Colombia
 * Dubai City

Science, technology and mathematics

 * dC, decicoulomb, a tenth of a Coulomb, the SI unit of electric charge
 * New Zealand DC class locomotive
 * Methylphosphonyl dichloride, a chemical weapons precursor
 * A don't care term, in digital logic

Biology and medicine

 * Dendritic cell, a class of immune cell
 * Doctor of Chiropractic, a qualification in alternative medicine

Computing

 * dc (computer program), a command-line based calculator on Unix-derived systems
 * DC coefficient, in a discrete cosine transform
 * Data center, a physical location housing computing-related gear
 * Device context, part of the legacy Microsoft Windows graphics API
 * Differential cryptanalysis
 * DigiCipher, a digital encoding scheme
 * Direct Connect (protocol), for file sharing
 * Domain Component, an attribute in LDAP
 * Domain controller, a server used to manage a Microsoft Windows domain
 * Dublin Core, a metadata standard
 * Dynamic contrast, an LCD technology

Mathematics

 * dc (elliptic function), in complex analysis
 * Axiom of dependent choice, in set theory
 * DC, 600 in Roman numerals
 * DC, 220 in hexadecimal

Arts, entertainment and media

 * D.C. (TV series)
 * Detective Comics, a comic book series published by DC Comics
 * DC Inside, a South Korean internet forum
 * "DC" (Succession), a television episode

Music

 * Da capo, a musical term
 * Destiny's Child, an American R&B group
 * Drum Connection, a German pop group

Video games

 * Da Capo (visual novel)
 * Desert Combat, a Battlefield 1942 mod
 * Dino Crisis, a survival horror game series

Companies and products

 * DC Recordings, a record label
 * DC Shoes, an American sports footwear company
 * Delta Clipper, a proposed rocketship series by McDonnell Douglas
 * DC (Douglas Commercial), a series of aircraft by the Douglas Aircraft Company (and later McDonnell Douglas)
 * Dyson vacuum cleaners, which use product code prefix DC
 * Golden Air, an airline (IATA code DC)

Government, law, and military

 * Christian Democracy (Italy), a political party
 * Christian Democracy (Brazil), a political party
 * District collector, an Indian Administrative Service position
 * Deputy commissioner, an administrative rank
 * Dossier criminal, in Indian policing

People

 * D/C, stage name of British singer-songwriter Dan Caplen
 * Daniel Cormier (born 1979) Olympic wrestler and heavyweight mixed martial artist
 * David Coulthard (born 1971) British racing driver, known as DC
 * DC., short form of the standard author abbreviation A.DC. for botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841)
 * Donald L. Cox (1936–2011), American leader of the Black Panther Party, known as Field Marshal DC

Religion

 * DC, a dominical letter indicating a leap year starting on Thursday
 * Christian Doctrine Fathers, a Catholic organization
 * Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Society of Apostolic Life for women within the Catholic Church
 * Deuterocanon, books of the Bible which are considered non-canonical by Protestant denominations

Schools

 * Delaware County Christian School, in Pennsylvania, US
 * Dhaka College, in Bangladesh
 * Dominican Convent High School, Bulawayo, a Catholic high school for girls in Zimbabwe
 * Dominican Convent Primary School, Bulawayo, a Catholic preparatory school for girls in Zimbabwe

Sports

 * Delhi Capitals, an Indian Premier League cricket franchise
 * Deccan Chargers, a former Indian Premier League cricket franchise

Other uses

 * Distribution center, a building stocked with goods for delivery
 * Dream character, an imaginary entity in a person's dreams

title: DC


text:
Snot

Snot may refer to:

 * Snot, slang for nasal mucus or dried nasal mucus
 * Snotter, Scottish slang for nasal mucus or dried nasal mucus
 * Snot, a character from the US television show American Dad!
 * Sid Snot, an ageing biker character performed by Kenny Everett
 * Snot, a character from the video game Earthworm Jim
 * Snots, a dog from the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
 * Snot (band), an American hardcore punk band
 * Snot (rapper), rapper from Florida
 * Snot, the Saxon chieftain for whom the city of Nottingham is originally named
 * Snot Dudley, American wrestler

title: Snot