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Geneva (disambiguation)

Geneva is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland.

Geneva may also refer to:

Landforms

 * Lake Geneva, Switzerland (on which the city is situated)
 * Geneva Lake, Wisconsin
 * Geneva Spur, a ridge on Mount Everest

Regions

 * Canton of Geneva, of which the city of Geneva is the capital

Settlements in the United States

 * Geneva, Alabama
 * Geneva County, Alabama
 * Geneva, California
 * Geneva, Florida
 * Geneva, Georgia
 * Geneva, Idaho
 * Geneva, Illinois
 * Geneva Township, Kane County, Illinois
 * Geneva, Indiana
 * Geneva, Shelby County, Indiana
 * Geneva, Iowa
 * Geneva, Kansas
 * Geneva Township, Midland County, Michigan
 * Geneva Township, Van Buren County, Michigan
 * Geneva, Minnesota
 * Geneva Township, Minnesota
 * Geneva, Nebraska
 * Geneva Township, Fillmore County, Nebraska
 * Geneva (city), New York
 * Geneva (town), New York
 * Geneva, Ohio, a city in Ashtabula County
 * Geneva, Fairfield County, Ohio, an unincorporated community
 * Geneva Township, Ashtabula County, Ohio
 * Geneva, Oregon
 * Geneva, Pennsylvania
 * Geneva, Washington
 * Geneva, Wisconsin

Structures

 * Geneva (Alexandria, Louisiana), historic house
 * Geneva camp, a refugee camp in Bangladesh
 * Geneva College, a private liberal arts college in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Arts and entertainment

 * Geneva (band), a mid-1990s Scottish rock group
 * Geneva (Love of Life Orchestra album), 1980
 * Geneva (play), a 1938 satire by George Bernard Shaw
 * Geneva (Russian Circles album), 2009
 * Geneva (singer) (Ioana Oegar-Toderaș; born 1987), Romanian-American rapper

Technology

 * Boule de Genève (Geneva ball), a type of pendant watch in the shape of a small ball
 * Geneva ERS, IBM's enterprise reporting system software
 * Geneva (typeface), a typeface commonly used in Macintosh computers
 * Geneva Steel, a World War II-era steel factory in Vineyard, Utah

Other uses

 * Geneva (given name), a feminine given name
 * Geneva, an obsolete name for gin

title: Geneva (disambiguation)


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Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.

Early life and education
Spencer was born in Derby, England, on 27 April 1820, the son of William George Spencer (generally called George). Spencer's father was a religious dissenter who drifted from Methodism to Quakerism, and who seems to have transmitted to his son an opposition to all forms of authority. He ran a school founded on the progressive teaching methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and also served as Secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a scientific society which had been founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

Spencer was educated in empirical science by his father, while the members of the Derby Philosophical Society introduced him to pre-Darwinian concepts of biological evolution, particularly those of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, vicar of Hinton Charterhouse near Bath, completed Spencer's limited formal education by teaching him some mathematics and physics, and enough Latin to enable him to translate some easy texts. Thomas Spencer also imprinted on his nephew his own firm free-trade and anti-statist political views. Otherwise, Spencer was an autodidact who acquired most of his knowledge from narrowly focused readings and conversations with his friends and acquaintances.

Career
Both as an adolescent and as a young man, Spencer found it difficult to settle to any intellectual or professional discipline. He worked as a civil engineer during the railway boom of the late 1830s, while also devoting much of his time to writing for provincial journals that were nonconformist in their religion and radical in their politics.

Writing
Spencer published his first book, Social Statics (1851), whilst working as sub-editor on the free-trade journal The Economist from 1848 to 1853. He predicted that humanity would eventually become completely adapted to the requirements of living in society with the consequential withering away of the state. Its publisher, John Chapman, introduced Spencer to his salon which was attended by many of the leading radical and progressive thinkers of the capital, including John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), with whom he was briefly romantically linked. Spencer himself introduced the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who would later win fame as 'Darwin's Bulldog' and who remained Spencer's lifelong friend. However, it was the friendship of Evans and Lewes that acquainted him with John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic and with Auguste Comte's positivism and which set him on the road to his life's work. He strongly disagreed with Comte.

Spencer's second book, Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, explored a physiological basis for psychology, and was the fruit of his friendship with Evans and Lewes. The book was founded on the fundamental assumption that the human mind was subject to natural laws and that these could be discovered within the framework of general biology. This permitted the adoption of a developmental perspective not merely in terms of the individual (as in traditional psychology), but also of the species and the race. Through this paradigm, Spencer aimed to reconcile the associationist psychology of Mill's Logic, the notion that the human mind was constructed from atomic sensations held together by the laws of the association of ideas, with the apparently more 'scientific' theory of phrenology, which located specific mental functions in specific parts of the brain.

Spencer argued that both these theories were partial accounts of the truth: repeated associations of ideas were embodied in the formation of specific strands of brain tissue, and these could be passed from one generation to the next by means of the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance. The Psychology, he believed, would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter. However, the book was not initially successful and the last of the 251 copies of its first edition were not sold until June 1861.

Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern which was to establish the universality of natural law. In common with others of his generation, including the members of Chapman's salon, he was possessed with the idea of demonstrating that it was possible to show that everything in the universe – including human culture, language, and morality – could be explained by laws of universal validity. This was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human soul, were beyond the realm of scientific investigation. Comte's Système de Philosophie Positive had been written with the ambition of demonstrating the universality of natural law, and Spencer was to follow Comte in the scale of his ambition. However, Spencer differed from Comte in believing it was possible to discover a single law of universal application which he identified with progressive development and was to call the principle of evolution.

In 1858, Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applied in biology, psychology, sociology (Spencer appropriated Comte's term for the new discipline) and morality. Spencer envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to complete; in the end, it took him twice as long and consumed almost all the rest of his long life.

Despite Spencer's early struggles to establish himself as a writer, by the 1870s he had become the most famous philosopher of the age. His works were widely read during his lifetime, and by 1869 he was able to support himself solely on the profit of book sales and on income from his regular contributions to Victorian periodicals which were collected as three volumes of Essays. His works were translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and into many other languages and he was offered honours and awards all over Europe and North America. He also became a member of the Athenaeum, an exclusive Gentleman's Club in London open only to those distinguished in the arts and sciences, and the X Club, a dining club of nine founded by T.H. Huxley that met every month and included some of the most prominent thinkers of the Victorian age (three of whom would become presidents of the Royal Society).

Members included physicist-philosopher John Tyndall and Darwin's cousin, the banker and biologist Sir John Lubbock. There were also some quite significant satellites such as liberal clergyman Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster; and guests such as Charles Darwin and Hermann von Helmholtz were entertained from time to time. Through such associations, Spencer had a strong presence in the heart of the scientific community and was able to secure an influential audience for his views.

Later life
The last decades of Spencer's life were characterised by growing disillusionment and loneliness. He never married, and after 1855 was a life-long hypochondriac who complained endlessly of pains and maladies that no physician could diagnose at that time. His excitability and sensitivity to disagreement handicapped his social life:"His nervous sensibility was extreme. A game of billiards was enough to deprive him of his night's rest. He had been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with Huxley; but he gave it up because there was a difference on some scientific question between them, and this might have given rise to an argument, which Spencer's nerves could not bear." By the 1890s his readership had begun to desert him while many of his closest friends died and he had come to doubt the confident faith in progress that he had made the centre-piece of his philosophical system. His later years were also ones in which his political views became increasingly conservative. Whereas Social Statics had been the work of a radical democrat who believed in votes for women (and even for children) and in the nationalisation of the land to break the power of the aristocracy, by the 1880s he had become a staunch opponent of female suffrage and made common cause with the landowners of the Liberty and Property Defence League against what they saw as the drift towards 'socialism' of elements (such as Sir William Harcourt) within the administration of William Ewart Gladstone – largely against the opinions of Gladstone himself. Spencer's political views from this period were expressed in what has become his most famous work, The Man Versus the State.

The exception to Spencer's growing conservatism was that he remained throughout his life an ardent opponent of imperialism and militarism. His critique of the Boer War was especially scathing, and it contributed to his declining popularity in Britain.

He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1883.

Invention of paper-clip
Spencer also invented a precursor to the modern paper clip, though it looked more like a modern cotter pin. This "binding-pin" was distributed by Ackermann & Company. Spencer shows drawings of the pin in Appendix I (following Appendix H) of his autobiography along with published descriptions of its uses.

Death and legacy
In 1902, shortly before his death, Spencer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, which was assigned to the German Theodor Mommsen. He continued writing all his life, in later years often by dictation, until he succumbed to poor health at the age of 83. His ashes are interred in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery facing Karl Marx's grave. At Spencer's funeral, the Indian nationalist leader Shyamji Krishna Varma announced a donation of £1,000 to establish a lectureship at Oxford University in tribute to Spencer and his work.

Synthetic philosophy
The basis for Spencer's appeal to many of his generation was that he appeared to offer a ready-made system of belief which could substitute for conventional religious faith at a time when orthodox creeds were crumbling under the advances of modern science. Spencer's philosophical system seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to believe in the ultimate perfection of humanity on the basis of advanced scientific conceptions such as the first law of thermodynamics and biological evolution.

In essence, Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and positivism. On the one hand, he had imbibed something of eighteenth-century deism from his father and other members of the Derby Philosophical Society and from books like George Combe's immensely popular The Constitution of Man (1828). This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural laws were thus the statutes of a well-governed universe that had been decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness. Although Spencer lost his Christian faith as a teenager and later rejected any 'anthropomorphic' conception of the Deity, he nonetheless held fast to this conception at an almost subconscious level. At the same time, however, he owed far more than he would ever acknowledge to positivism, in particular in its conception of a philosophical system as the unification of the various branches of scientific knowledge. He also followed positivism in his insistence that it was only possible to have genuine knowledge of phenomena and hence that it was idle to speculate about the nature of the ultimate reality. The tension between positivism and his residual deism ran through the entire System of Synthetic Philosophy.

Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the unification of scientific truth; it was in this sense that his philosophy aimed to be 'synthetic.' Like Comte, he was committed to the universality of natural law, the idea that the laws of nature applied without exception, to the organic realm as much as to the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as to the rest of creation. The first objective of Synthetic Philosophy was thus to demonstrate that there were no exceptions to being able to discover scientific explanations, in the form of natural laws, of all the phenomena of the universe. Spencer's volumes on biology, psychology, and sociology were all intended to demonstrate the existence of natural laws in these specific disciplines. Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover 'laws' of morality that had the status of laws of nature while still having normative content, a conception which can be traced to George Combe's Constitution of Man.

The second objective of the Synthetic Philosophy was to show that these same laws led inexorably to progress. In contrast to Comte, who stressed only the unity of the scientific method, Spencer sought the unification of scientific knowledge in the form of the reduction of all natural laws to one fundamental law, the law of evolution. In this respect, he followed the model laid down by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although often dismissed as a lightweight forerunner of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Chambers' book was, in reality, a programme for the unification of science which aimed to show that Laplace's nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system and Lamarck's theory of species transformation were both instances of 'one magnificent generalisation of progressive development' (Lewes' phrase). Chambers was associated with Chapman's salon and his work served as the unacknowledged template for the Synthetic Philosophy.

Evolution
Spencer first articulated his evolutionary perspective in his essay, 'Progress: Its Law and Cause', published in Chapman's Westminster Review in 1857, and which later formed the basis of the First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In it he expounded a theory of evolution which combined insights from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay 'The Theory of Life' – itself derivative from Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie – with a generalisation of von Baer's law of embryological development. Spencer posited that all structures in the universe develop from a simple, undifferentiated, homogeneity to a complex, differentiated, heterogeneity while undergoing increasing integration of the differentiated parts. This evolutionary process could be observed, Spencer believed, throughout the cosmos. It was a universal law, applying to the stars and galaxies and to biological organisms, and to human social organisation and to the human mind. It differed from other scientific laws only in its greater generality, and the laws of the special sciences could be shown to be illustrations of this principle.

The principles described by Herbert Spencer received a variety of interpretations. Bertrand Russell stated in a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1923: 'I don't know whether [Spencer] was ever made to realize the implications of the second law of thermodynamics; if so, he may well be upset. The law says that everything tends to uniformity and a dead level, diminishing (not increasing) heterogeneity'.

Spencer's attempt to explain the evolution of complexity was radically different from that of Darwin's Origin of Species which was published two years later. Spencer is often, quite erroneously, believed to have merely appropriated and generalised Darwin's work on natural selection. But although after reading Darwin's work he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as his own term for Darwin's concept, and is often misrepresented as a thinker who merely applied the Darwinian theory to society, he only grudgingly incorporated natural selection into his preexisting overall system. The primary mechanism of species transformation that he recognised was Lamarckian use-inheritance which posited that organs are developed or are diminished by use or disuse and that the resulting changes may be transmitted to future generations. Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism was also necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity. Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, he held that evolution had a direction and an end-point, the attainment of a final state of equilibrium. He tried to apply the theory of biological evolution to sociology. He proposed that society was the product of change from lower to higher forms, just as in the theory of biological evolution, the lowest forms of life are said to be evolving into higher forms. Spencer claimed that man's mind had evolved in the same way from the simple automatic responses of lower animals to the process of reasoning in the thinking man. Spencer believed in two kinds of knowledge: knowledge gained by the individual and knowledge gained by the race. Intuition, or knowledge learned unconsciously, was the inherited experience of the race.

Spencer in his book Principles of Biology (1864), proposed a pangenesis theory that involved "physiological units" assumed to be related to specific body parts and responsible for the transmission of characteristics to offspring. These hypothetical hereditary units were similar to Darwin's gemmules.

Sociology
Spencer read with excitement the original positivist sociology of Auguste Comte. A philosopher of science, Comte had proposed a theory of sociocultural evolution that society progresses by a general law of three stages. Writing after various developments in biology, however, Spencer rejected what he regarded as the ideological aspects of Comte's positivism, attempting to reformulate social science in terms of his principle of evolution, which he applied to the biological, psychological and sociological aspects of the universe. Spencer is also generally credited as the first to use the term 'social structure.'

Given the primacy which Spencer placed on evolution, his sociology might be described as social Darwinism mixed with Lamarckism. However, despite its popularity, this view of Spencer's sociology is mistaken. While his political and ethical writings had themes consistent with social Darwinism, such themes are absent in Spencer's sociological works, which focus on how processes of societal growth and differentiation lead to changing degrees of complexity in social organization

The evolutionary progression from simple, undifferentiated homogeneity to complex, differentiated heterogeneity was exemplified, Spencer argued, by the development of society. He developed a theory of two types of society, the militant and the industrial, which corresponded to this evolutionary progression. Militant society, structured around relationships of hierarchy and obedience, was simple and undifferentiated; industrial society, based on voluntary, contractually assumed social obligations, was complex and differentiated. Society, which Spencer conceptualised as a 'social organism' evolved from the simpler state to the more complex according to the universal law of evolution. Moreover, industrial society was the direct descendant of the ideal society developed in Social Statics, although Spencer now equivocated over whether the evolution of society would result in anarchism (as he had first believed) or whether it pointed to a continued role for the state, albeit one reduced to the minimal functions of the enforcement of contracts and external defence.

Though Spencer made some valuable contributions to early sociology, not least in his influence on structural functionalism, his attempt to introduce Lamarckian or Darwinian ideas into the realm of sociology was unsuccessful. It was considered by many, furthermore, to be actively dangerous. Hermeneuticians of the period, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, would pioneer the distinction between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). In the United States, the sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who would be elected as the first president of the American Sociological Association, launched a relentless attack on Spencer's theories of laissez-faire and political ethics. Although Ward admired much of Spencer's work he believed that Spencer's prior political biases had distorted his thought and had led him astray. In the 1890s, Émile Durkheim established formal academic sociology with a firm emphasis on practical social research. By the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists, most notably Max Weber, had presented methodological antipositivism. However, Spencer's theories of laissez-faire, survival-of-the-fittest and minimal human interference in the processes of natural law had an enduring and even increasing appeal in the social science fields of economics and political science, and one writer has recently made the case for Spencer's importance for a sociology that must learn to take energy in society seriously.

Ethics
The endpoint of the evolutionary process would be the creation of 'the perfect man in the perfect society' with human beings becoming completely adapted to social life, as predicted in Spencer's first book. The chief difference between Spencer's earlier and later conceptions of this process was the evolutionary timescale involved. The psychological – and hence also the moral – constitution which had been bequeathed to the present generation by our ancestors, and which we in turn would hand on to future generations, was in the process of gradual adaptation to the requirements of living in society. For example, aggression was a survival instinct which had been necessary in the primitive conditions of life, but was maladaptive in advanced societies. Because human instincts had a specific location in strands of brain tissue, they were subject to the Lamarckian mechanism of use-inheritance so that gradual modifications could be transmitted to future generations. Over the course of many generations, the evolutionary process would ensure that human beings would become less aggressive and increasingly altruistic, leading eventually to a perfect society in which no one would cause another person pain.

However, for evolution to produce the perfect individual it was necessary for present and future generations to experience the 'natural' consequences of their conduct. Only in this way would individuals have the incentives required to work on self-improvement and thus to hand an improved moral constitution to their descendants. Hence anything that interfered with the 'natural' relationship of conduct and consequence was to be resisted and this included the use of the coercive power of the state to relieve poverty, to provide public education, or to require compulsory vaccination. Although charitable giving was to be encouraged even it had to be limited by the consideration that suffering was frequently the result of individuals receiving the consequences of their actions. Hence too much individual benevolence directed to the 'undeserving poor' would break the link between conduct and consequence that Spencer considered fundamental to ensuring that humanity continued to evolve to a higher level of development.

Spencer adopted a utilitarian standard of ultimate value – the greatest happiness of the greatest number – and the culmination of the evolutionary process would be the maximization of utility. In the perfect society, individuals would not only derive pleasure from the exercise of altruism ('positive beneficence') but would aim to avoid inflicting pain on others ('negative beneficence'). They would also instinctively respect the rights of others, leading to the universal observance of the principle of justice – each person had the right to a maximum amount of liberty that was compatible with a like liberty in others. 'Liberty' was interpreted to mean the absence of coercion, and was closely connected to the right to private property. Spencer termed this code of conduct 'Absolute Ethics' which provided a scientifically grounded moral system that could substitute for the supernaturally-based ethical systems of the past. However, he recognized that our inherited moral constitution does not currently permit us to behave in full compliance with the code of Absolute Ethics, and for this reason, we need a code of 'Relative Ethics' which takes into account the distorting factors of our present imperfections.

Spencer's distinctive view of musicology was also related to his ethics. Spencer thought that the origin of music is to be found in impassioned oratory. Speakers have persuasive effect not only by the reasoning of their words, but by their cadence and tone – the musical qualities of their voice serve as "the commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of the intellect," as Spencer put it. Music, conceived as the heightened development of this characteristic of speech, makes a contribution to the ethical education and progress of the species. "The strange capacity which we have for being affected by melody and harmony, may be taken to imply both that it is within the possibilities of our nature to realize those intenser delights they dimly suggest, and that they are in some way concerned in the realization of them. If so the power and the meaning of music become comprehensible; but otherwise they are a mystery."

Spencer's last years were characterized by a collapse of his initial optimism, replaced instead by a pessimism regarding the future of mankind. Nevertheless, he devoted much of his efforts in reinforcing his arguments and preventing the misinterpretation of his monumental theory of non-interference.

Agnosticism
Spencer's reputation among the Victorians owed a great deal to his agnosticism. He rejected theology as representing the 'impiety of the pious.' He was to gain much notoriety from his repudiation of traditional religion, and was frequently condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and materialism. Nonetheless, unlike Thomas Henry Huxley, whose agnosticism was a militant creed directed at 'the unpardonable sin of faith' (in Adrian Desmond's phrase), Spencer insisted that he was not concerned with undermining religion in the name of science, but to bring about a reconciliation of the two. The following argument is a summary of Part 1 of his First Principles (2nd ed. 1867).

Starting either from religious belief or from science, Spencer argued, we are ultimately driven to accept certain indispensable but literally inconceivable notions. Whether we are concerned with a Creator or the substratum which underlies our experience of phenomena, we can frame no conception of it. Therefore, Spencer concluded, that religion and science agree in the supreme truth that human understanding is only capable of 'relative' knowledge. This is the case since, owing to the inherent limitations of the human mind, it is only possible to obtain knowledge of phenomena, not of the reality ('the absolute') underlying phenomena. Hence both science and religion must come to recognise as the 'most certain of all facts that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' He called this awareness of 'the Unknowable' and he presented worship of the Unknowable as capable of being a positive faith which could substitute for conventional religion. Indeed, he thought that the Unknowable represented the ultimate stage in the evolution of religion, the final elimination of its last anthropomorphic vestiges.

Political views
Spencerian views in 21st-century circulation derive from his political theories and memorable attacks on the reform movements of the late 19th century. He has been claimed as a precursor by right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard called Social Statics "the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written." Spencer argued that the state was not an "essential" institution and that it would "decay" as a voluntary market organisation would replace the coercive aspects of the state. He also argued that the individual had a "right to ignore the state." As a result of this perspective, Spencer was harshly critical of patriotism. In response to being told that British troops were in danger during the Second Afghan War (1878–1880) he replied: "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."

Politics in late Victorian Britain moved in directions that Spencer disliked, and his arguments provided so much ammunition for conservatives and individualists in Europe and America that they are still in use in the 21st century. The expression "There is no alternative" (TINA), made famous by prime minister Margaret Thatcher, may be traced to its emphatic use by Spencer. By the 1880s, he was denouncing "the new Toryism", that is, the "social reformist wing" of the Liberal Party, the wing to some extent hostile to prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, this faction of the Liberal Party Spencer compared to the interventionist "Toryism" of such people as the former Conservative Party prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. In The Man Versus the State (1884), he attacked Gladstone and the Liberal Party for losing its proper mission (they should be defending personal liberty, he said) and instead promoting paternalist social legislation (what Gladstone himself called "Construction", an element in the modern Liberal party that he opposed). Spencer denounced Irish land reform, compulsory education, laws to regulate safety at work, prohibition and temperance laws, tax-funded libraries, and welfare reforms. His main objections were threefold: the use of the coercive powers of the government, the discouragement given to voluntary self-improvement, and the disregard of the "laws of life". The reforms, he said, were tantamount to "socialism", which he said was about the same as "slavery" in terms of limiting human freedom. Spencer vehemently attacked the widespread enthusiasm for the annexation of colonies and imperial expansion, which subverted all he had predicted about evolutionary progress from 'militant' to 'industrial' societies and states.

Spencer anticipated many of the analytical standpoints of later right-libertarian theorists such as Friedrich Hayek, especially in his "law of equal liberty", his insistence on the limits to predictive knowledge, his model of spontaneous social order, and his warnings about the "unintended consequences" of collectivist social reforms. While often caricatured as ultra-conservative, Spencer had been more radical, or left-libertarian, earlier in his career, opposing private property in land and claiming that each person has a latent claim to participate in the use of the earth (views that influenced Georgism), calling himself "a radical feminist" and advocating the organisation of trade unions as a bulwark against "exploitation by bosses", and favoured an economy organised primarily in free worker co-operatives as a replacement for wage-labor. Although he retained support for unions, his views on the other issues had changed by the 1880s. He came to predict that social welfare programmes would eventually lead to the socialisation of the means of production, saying "all socialism is slavery." Spencer defined a slave as a person who "labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires" and believed that under socialism or communism the individual would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to a particular master, and "it means not whether his master is a single person or society."

Social Darwinism
For many, the name of Herbert Spencer is virtually synonymous with Social Darwinism, a social theory that applies the law of the survival of the fittest to society and is integrally related to the nineteenth-century rise in scientific racism. In his famed work Social Statics (1850), he argued that imperialism had served civilization by clearing the inferior races off the earth: "The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. … Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of." Yet, in the same work, Spencer goes on to say that the incidental evolutionary benefits derived from such barbarous practices do not serve as justifications for them going forward.

Spencer's association with social Darwinism might have its origin in a specific interpretation of his support for competition. Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or firms improve the well-being of the rest of society. Spencer viewed private charity positively, encouraging both voluntary association and informal care to aid those in need, rather than relying on government bureaucracy or force. He further recommended that private charitable efforts would be wise to avoid encouraging the formation of new dependent families by those unable to support themselves without charity. Focusing on the form as well as the content of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy", one writer has identified it as the paradigmatic case of "social Darwinism", understood as a politically motivated metaphysic very different in both form and motivation from Darwinist science.

In a letter to the Japanese government regarding intermarriage with Westerners, Spencer stated that "if you mix the constitution of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither – a constitution which will not work properly." He goes on to say that America has failed to limit the immigration of Chinese and restrict their contact, especially sexual, with the presumed European stock. He states "if they mix they must form a bad hybrid" regarding the issue of Chinese and (ethnically European) Americans. Spencer ends his letter with the following blanket statement against all immigration: "In either case, supposing the immigration to be large, immense social mischief must arise, and eventually social disorganization. The same thing will happen if there should be any considerable mixture of European or American races with the Japanese."

General influence
While most philosophers fail to achieve much of a following outside the academy of their professional peers, by the 1870s and 1880s Spencer had achieved an unparalleled popularity, as the sheer volume of his sales indicate. He was perhaps the only philosopher in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own lifetime. In the United States, where pirated editions were still commonplace, his authorised publisher, Appleton, sold 368,755 copies between 1860 and 1903. This figure did not differ much from his sales in his native Britain, and once editions in the rest of the world are added in the figure of a million copies seems like a conservative estimate. As William James remarked, Spencer "enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally." The aspect of his thought that emphasised individual self-improvement found a ready audience in the skilled working class.

Spencer's influence among leaders of thought was also immense, though it was most often expressed in terms of their reaction to, and repudiation of, his ideas. As his American follower John Fiske observed, Spencer's ideas were to be found "running like the weft through all the warp" of Victorian thought. Such varied thinkers as Henry Sidgwick, T.H. Green, G.E. Moore, William James, Henri Bergson, and Émile Durkheim defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a very large extent an extended debate with Spencer, from whose sociology, many commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively.

In post-1863-Uprising Poland, many of Spencer's ideas became integral to the dominant fin-de-siècle ideology, "Polish Positivism". The leading Polish writer of the period, Bolesław Prus, hailed Spencer as "the Aristotle of the nineteenth century" and adopted Spencer's metaphor of society-as-organism, giving it a striking poetic presentation in his 1884 micro-story, "Mold of the Earth", and highlighting the concept in the introduction to his most universal novel, Pharaoh (1895).

The early 20th century was hostile to Spencer. Soon after his death, his philosophical reputation went into a sharp decline. Half a century after his death, his work was dismissed as a "parody of philosophy", and the historian Richard Hofstadter called him "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic." Nonetheless, Spencer's thought had penetrated so deeply into the Victorian age that his influence did not disappear entirely.

In recent years, much more positive estimates have appeared, as well as a still highly negative estimate.

Political influence
Despite his reputation as a social Darwinist, Spencer's political thought has been open to multiple interpretations. His political philosophy could both provide inspiration to those who believed that individuals were masters of their fate, who should brook no interference from a meddling state, and those who believed that social development required a strong central authority. In Lochner v. New York, conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court could find inspiration in Spencer's writings for striking down a New York law limiting the number of hours a baker could work during the week, on the ground that this law restricted liberty of contract. Arguing against the majority's holding that a "right to free contract" is implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." Spencer has also been described as a quasi-anarchist, as well as an outright anarchist. Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov, in his 1909 book Anarchism and Socialism, labelled Spencer a "conservative Anarchist."

Spencer's work has frequently been seen as a model for later libertarian thinkers, such as Robert Nozick, and he continues to be read–and is often invoked–by libertarians on issues concerning the function of government and the fundamental character of individual rights.

Spencer's ideas also became very influential in China and Japan largely because he appealed to the reformers' desire to establish a strong nation-state with which to compete with the Western powers. His thought was introduced by the Chinese scholar Yen Fu, who saw his writings as a prescription for the reform of the Qing state. Spencerism was so influential in China that it was synthesized into the Chinese translation of the Origin of Species, in which Darwin's branching view of evolution was converted into a linear-progressive one. Spencer also influenced the Japanese Westernizer Tokutomi Soho, who believed that Japan was on the verge of transitioning from a "militant society" to an "industrial society," and needed to quickly jettison all things Japanese and take up Western ethics and learning. He also corresponded with Kaneko Kentaro, warning him of the dangers of imperialism. Savarkar writes in his Inside the Enemy Camp, about reading all of Spencer's works, of his great interest in them, of their translation into Marathi, and their influence on the likes of Tilak and Agarkar, and the affectionate sobriquet given to him in Maharashtra – Harbhat Pendse.

Influence on literature
Spencer greatly influenced literature and rhetoric. His 1852 essay, "The Philosophy of Style", explored a growing trend of formalist approaches to writing. Highly focused on the proper placement and ordering of the parts of an English sentence, he created a guide for effective composition. Spencer aimed to free prose writing from as much "friction and inertia" as possible, so that the reader would not be slowed by strenuous deliberations concerning the proper context and meaning of a sentence. Spencer argued that writers should aim "To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort" by the reader.

He argued that by making the meaning as readily accessible as possible, the writer would achieve the greatest possible communicative efficiency. This was accomplished, according to Spencer, by placing all the subordinate clauses, objects and phrases before the subject of a sentence so that, when readers reached the subject, they had all the information they needed to completely perceive its significance. While the overall influence that "The Philosophy of Style" had on the field of rhetoric was not as far-reaching as his contribution to other fields, Spencer's voice lent authoritative support to formalist views of rhetoric.

Spencer influenced literature inasmuch as many novelists and short story authors came to address his ideas in their work. Spencer was referenced by George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Machado de Assis, Thomas Hardy, Bolesław Prus, George Bernard Shaw, Abraham Cahan, Richard Austin Freeman, D. H. Lawrence, and Jorge Luis Borges. Arnold Bennett greatly praised First Principles, and the influence it had on Bennett may be seen in his many novels. Jack London went so far as to create a character, Martin Eden, a staunch Spencerian. It has also been suggested that the character of Vershinin in Anton Chekhov's play The Three Sisters is a dedicated Spencerian. H. G. Wells used Spencer's ideas as a theme in his novella, The Time Machine, employing them to explain the evolution of man into two species. It is perhaps the best testimony to the influence of Spencer's beliefs and writings that his reach was so diverse. He influenced not only the administrators who shaped their societies' inner workings, but also the artists who helped shape those societies' ideals and beliefs. In Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, the Anglophile Bengali spy Hurree Babu admires Herbert Spencer and quotes him to comic effect: "They are, of course, dematerialised phenomena. Spencer says." "I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know." "He thanked all the Gods of Hindustan, and Herbert Spencer, that there remained some valuables to steal." Upton Sinclair, in One Clear Call, 1948, quips that "Huxley said that Herbert Spencer's idea of a tragedy was a generalization killed by a fact; ..."

Philosophers' critiques

 * Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review (1904) by Josiah Royce.
 * Lectures on the Ethics of T.H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau (1902) by Henry Sidgwick.
 * Spencer-smashing at Washington (1894) by Lester F. Ward.
 * A Perplexed Philosopher (1892) by Henry George.
 * Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence (1878) by William James.

By Spencer

 * Duncan, David. The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (1908) online edition
 * Spencer, Herbert. Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) edited by John Offer (1993)
 * Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics: The Man Versus the State
 * Spencer, Herbert.  The Study of Sociology; full text online free
 * Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Psychology; full text online
 * Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics, Abridged and Revised: Together with the Man Versus the State (1896), highly influential among libertarians full text online free
 * Spencer, Herbert. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1891) 283pp full text online
 * Spencer, Herbert. An Autobiography (1905, 2 vol) full text online
 * Online writings of Spencer

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

title: Herbert Spencer


text:
Theodolite

A theodolite is a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. The traditional use has been for land surveying, but it is also used extensively for building and infrastructure construction, and some specialized applications such as meteorology and rocket launching.

It consists of a moveable telescope mounted so it can rotate around horizontal and vertical axes and provide angular readouts. These indicate the orientation of the telescope, and are used to relate the first point sighted through the telescope to subsequent sightings of other points from the same theodolite position. These angles can be measured with accuracies down to microradians or seconds of arc. From these readings a plan can be drawn, or objects can be positioned in accordance with an existing plan. The modern theodolite has evolved into what is known as a total station where angles and distances are measured electronically, and are read directly to computer memory.

In a transit theodolite, the telescope is short enough to rotate about the trunnion axis, turning the telescope through the vertical plane through the zenith; for non-transit instruments vertical rotation is restricted to a limited arc.

The optical level is sometimes mistaken for a theodolite, but it does not measure vertical angles, and is used only for leveling on a horizontal plane (though often combined with medium accuracy horizontal range and direction measurements).

Preparation for making sightings
Temporary adjustments are a set of operations necessary in order to make a theodolite ready for taking observations at a station. These include its setting up, centering, leveling up and elimination of parallax, and are achieved in four steps:

 * Setting up: fixing the theodolite onto a tripod along with approximate leveling and centering over the station mark.
 * Centering: bringing the vertical axis of theodolite immediately over station mark using a centering plate also known as a tribrach.
 * Leveling: leveling of the base of the instrument to make the vertical axis vertical usually with an in-built bubble-level.
 * Focusing: removing parallax error by proper focusing of objective and eye-piece. The eye-piece only requires adjustment once at a station. The objective will be re-focused for each subsequent sighting from this station because of the different distances to the target.

Sightings
Sightings are taken by the surveyor, who adjusts the telescope's vertical and horizontal angular orientation so the cross-hairs align with the desired sighting point. Both angles are read either from exposed or internal scales and recorded. The next object is then sighted and recorded without moving the position of the instrument and tripod.

The earliest angular readouts were from open vernier scales directly visible to the eye. Gradually these scales were enclosed for physical protection, and finally became an indirect optical readout, with convoluted light paths to bring them to a convenient place on the instrument for viewing. The modern digital theodolites have electronic displays.

Errors in measurement

 * Index error: The angles in the vertical axis should read 90° (100 grad) when the sight axis is horizontal, or 270° (300 grad) when the instrument is transited. Half of the difference between the two positions is called the index error. This can only be checked on transit instruments.
 * Horizontal axis error: The horizontal and vertical axes of a theodolite must be perpendicular; if not then a horizontal axis error exists. This can be tested by aligning the tubular spirit bubble parallel to a line between two footscrews and setting the bubble central. A horizontal axis error is present if the bubble runs off central when the tubular spirit bubble is reversed (turned through 180°). To adjust, the operator removes half the amount the bubble has run off using the adjusting screw, then re-level, test and refine the adjustment.
 * Collimation error: The optical axis of the telescope must also be perpendicular to the horizontal axis; if not, then a collimation error exists.

Index error, horizontal-axis error (trunnion-axis error) and collimation error are regularly determined by calibration and are removed by mechanical adjustment. Their existence is taken into account in the choice of measurement procedure in order to eliminate their effect on the measurement results of the theodolite.

Historical background
Prior to the theodolite, instruments such as the groma, geometric square and the dioptra, and various other graduated circles (see circumferentor) and semicircles (see graphometer) were used to obtain either vertical or horizontal angle measurements. Over time their functions were combined into a single instrument that could measure both angles simultaneously.

The first occurrence of the word "theodolite" is found in the surveying textbook A geometric practice named Pantometria (1571) by Leonard Digges. The origin of the word is unknown. The first part of the Neo-Latin theo-delitus might stem from the Greek θεᾶσθαι, "to behold or look attentively upon" The second part is often attributed to an unscholarly variation of the Greek word: δῆλος, meaning "evident" or "clear". Other Neo-Latin or Greek derivations have been suggested as well as an English origin from "the alidade".

The early forerunners of the theodolite were sometimes azimuth instruments for measuring horizontal angles, while others had an altazimuth mount for measuring horizontal and vertical angles. Gregorius Reisch illustrated an altazimuth instrument in the appendix of his 1512 book Margarita Philosophica. Martin Waldseemüller, a topographer and cartographer made the device in that year calling it the polimetrum. In Digges's book of 1571, the term "theodolite" was applied to an instrument for measuring horizontal angles only, but he also described an instrument that measured both altitude and azimuth which he called a topographicall instrument [sic]. Possibly the first instrument approximating to a true theodolite was the built by Josua Habemel in 1576, complete with compass and tripod. The 1728 Cyclopaedia compares "graphometer" to "half-theodolite". As late as the 19th century, the instrument for measuring horizontal angles only was called a simple theodolite and the altazimuth instrument, the plain theodolite.

The first instrument to combine the essential features of the modern theodolite was built in 1725 by Jonathan Sisson. This instrument had an altazimuth mount with a sighting telescope. The base plate had spirit levels, compass and adjusting screws. The circles were read with a vernier scale.

Development of the theodolite
The theodolite became a modern, accurate instrument in 1787, with the introduction of Jesse Ramsden's famous great theodolite, which he created using a very accurate dividing engine of his own design. Ramsden's instruments were used for the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain. At this time the highest precision instruments were made in England by such makers as Edward Troughton. Later the first practical German theodolites were made by Breithaupt together with Utzschneider, Reichenbach and Fraunhofer.

As technology progressed the vertical partial circle was replaced with a full circle, and both vertical and horizontal circles were finely graduated. This was the transit theodolite. This type of theodolite was developed from 18th century astronomical Transit instruments used to measure accurate star positions. The technology was transferred to theodolites in the early 19th century by instrument makers such as Edward Troughton and William Simms and became the standard theodolite design. Development of the theodolite was spurred on by specific needs. In the 1820s progress on national surveying projects such as the Ordnance Survey in Britain produced a requirement for theodolites capable of providing sufficient accuracy for large scale triangulation and mapping. The Survey of India at this time produced a requirement for more rugged and stable instruments such as the Everest pattern theodolite with its lower center of gravity.

Railway engineers working in the 1830s in Britain commonly referred to a theodolite as a "Transit". The 1840s was the start of a period of rapid railway building in many parts of the world which resulted in a high demand for theodolites wherever railways were being constructed. It was also popular with American railroad engineers pushing west, and it replaced the railroad compass, sextant and octant. Theodolites were later adapted to a wider variety of mountings and uses. In the 1870s, an interesting waterborne version of the theodolite (using a pendulum device to counteract wave movement) was invented by Edward Samuel Ritchie. It was used by the U.S. Navy to take the first precision surveys of American harbors on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

In the early 1920s a step change in theodolite design occurred with the introduction of the Wild T2 made by the Swiss Wild Heerbrugg company. Heinrich Wild designed a theodolite with divided glass circles with readings from both sides presented at a single eyepiece close to the telescope so the observer did not have to move to read them. The Wild instruments were not only smaller, easier to use and more accurate than contemporary rivals but also sealed from rain and dust. Canadian surveyors reported that while the Wild T2 with 3.75 inch circles was not able to provide the accuracy for primary triangulation it was the equal in accuracy to a 12 inch traditional design. The Wild T2, T3, and A1 instruments were made for many years.

In 1926 a conference was held at Tavistock in Devon, UK where Wild theodolites were compared with British ones. The Wild product outclassed the British theodolites so manufacturers such as Cooke, Troughton & Simms and Hilger & Watts set about improving the accuracy of their products to match their competition. Cooke, Troughton and Simms developed the Tavistock pattern theodolite and later the Vickers V. 22.

Wild went on to develop the DK1, DKM1, DM2, DKM2, and DKM3 for Kern Aarau company. With continuing refinements, instruments steadily evolved into the modern theodolite used by surveyors today. By 1977 Wild, Kern and Hewlett-Packard were all offering "Total stations" which combined angular measurements, electronic distance measurement and microchip functions in a single unit.

Operation in surveying

Triangulation, as invented by Gemma Frisius around 1533, consists of making such direction plots of the surrounding landscape from two separate standpoints. The two graphing papers are superimposed, providing a scale model of the landscape, or rather the targets in it. The true scale can be obtained by measuring one distance both in the real terrain and in the graphical representation.

Modern triangulation as, e.g., practiced by Snellius, is the same procedure executed by numerical means. Photogrammetric block adjustment of stereo pairs of aerial photographs is a modern, three-dimensional variant.

In the late 1780s, Jesse Ramsden, a Yorkshireman from Halifax, England who had developed the dividing engine for dividing angular scales accurately to within a second of arc (≈ 0.0048 mrad or 4.8 μrad), was commissioned to build a new instrument for the British Ordnance Survey. The Ramsden theodolite was used over the next few years to map the whole of southern Britain by triangulation.

In network measurement, the use of forced centering speeds up operations while maintaining the highest precision. The theodolite or the target can be rapidly removed from, or socketed into, the forced centering plate with sub-millimeter precision. Nowadays GPS antennas used for geodetic positioning use a similar mounting system. The height of the reference point of the theodolite—or the target—above the ground benchmark must be measured precisely.

Transit theodolite
The term transit theodolite, or transit for short, refers to a type of theodolite where the telescope is short enough to rotate in a full circle on its horizontal axis as well as around its vertical axis. It features a vertical circle which is graduated through the full 360 degrees and a telescope that could "flip over" ("transit the scope"). By reversing the telescope and at the same time rotating the instrument through 180 degrees about the vertical axis, the instrument can be used in 'plate-left' or 'plate-right' modes ('plate' refers to the vertical protractor circle). By measuring the same horizontal and vertical angles in these two modes and then averaging the results, centering and collimating errors in the instrument can be eliminated. Some transit instruments are capable of reading angles directly to thirty arc-seconds (≈ 0.15 mrad). Modern theodolites are usually of the transit-theodolite design, but engraved plates have been replaced with glass plates designed to be read with light-emitting diodes and computer circuitry, greatly improving accuracy up to arc-second (≈ 0.005 mrad) levels.

Use with weather balloons
There is a long history of theodolite use in measuring winds aloft, by using specially-manufactured theodolites to track the horizontal and vertical angles of special weather balloons called ceiling balloons or pilot balloons (pibal). Early attempts at this were made in the opening years of the nineteenth century, but the instruments and procedures weren't fully developed until a hundred years later. This method was extensively used in World War II and thereafter, and was gradually replaced by radio and GPS measuring systems from the 1980s onward.

The pibal theodolite uses a prism to bend the optical path by 90 degrees so the operator's eye position does not change as the elevation is changed through a complete 180 degrees. The theodolite is typically mounted on a rugged steel stand, set up so it is level and pointed north, with the altitude and azimuth scales reading zero degrees. A balloon is released in front of the theodolite, and its position is precisely tracked, usually once a minute. The balloons are carefully constructed and filled, so their rate of ascent can be known fairly accurately in advance. Mathematical calculations on time, rate of ascent, azimuth and angular altitude can produce good estimates of wind speed and direction at various altitudes.

Modern electronic theodolites

In modern electronic theodolites, the readout of the horizontal and vertical circles is usually done with a rotary encoder. These produce signals indicating the altitude and azimuth of the telescope which are fed to a microprocessor. CCD sensors have been added to the focal plane of the telescope allowing both auto-targeting and the automated measurement of residual target offset. All this is implemented in embedded software of the processor.

Many modern theodolites are equipped with integrated electro-optical distance measuring devices, generally infrared based, allowing the measurement in one step of complete three-dimensional vectors—albeit in instrument-defined polar coordinates, which can then be transformed to a preexisting coordinate system in the area by means of a sufficient number of control points. This technique is called a resection solution or free station position surveying and is widely used in mapping surveying.

Such instruments are "intelligent" theodolites called self-registering tacheometers or colloquially "total stations", and perform all the necessary angular and distance calculations, and the results or raw data can be downloaded to external processors, such as ruggedized laptops, PDAs or programmable calculators.

Gyrotheodolites
A gyrotheodolite is used when the north-south reference bearing of the meridian is required in the absence of astronomical star sights. This occurs mainly in the underground mining industry and in tunnel engineering. For example, where a conduit must pass under a river, a vertical shaft on each side of the river might be connected by a horizontal tunnel. A gyrotheodolite can be operated at the surface and then again at the foot of the shafts to identify the directions needed to tunnel between the base of the two shafts. Unlike an artificial horizon or inertial navigation system, a gyrotheodolite cannot be relocated while it is operating. It must be restarted again at each site.

The gyrotheodolite comprises a normal theodolite with an attachment that contains a gyrocompass, a device which senses the rotation of the Earth in order to find true north and thus, in conjunction with the direction of gravity, the plane of the meridian. The meridian is the plane that contains both the axis of the Earth's rotation and the observer. The intersection of the meridian plane with the horizontal defines the true north-south direction found in this way. Unlike magnetic compasses, gyrocompasses are able to find true north, the surface direction toward the north pole.

A gyrotheodolite will function at the equator and in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The meridian is undefined at the geographic poles. A gyrotheodolite cannot be used at the poles where the Earth's axis is precisely perpendicular to the horizontal axis of the spinner, indeed it is not normally used within about 15 degrees of the pole where the angle between the earth's rotation and the direction of gravity is too small for it to work reliably. When available, astronomical star sights are able to give the meridian bearing to better than one hundred times the accuracy of the gyrotheodolite. Where this extra precision is not required, the gyrotheodolite is able to produce a result quickly without the need for night observations.

title: Theodolite


text:
Gilman

Gilman may refer to:

United States

 * Gilman Ranch, California
 * Gilman, Colorado
 * Gilman, Illinois
 * Gilman, Iowa
 * Gilman, Minnesota
 * Gilman, Montana
 * Gilman, Vermont
 * Gilman, Washington, former name of Issaquah
 * Gilman, Pierce County, Wisconsin
 * Gilman, Taylor County, Wisconsin
 * Gilman Lake, a lake in South Dakota
 * Gilmanton, New Hampshire
 * Gilmanton, Buffalo County, Wisconsin
 * Gilmanton Township, Benton County, Minnesota

Other

 * Gilman, Federated States of Micronesia, an administrative division of the Federated States of Micronesia
 * Gilman Street, a street in Central, Hong Kong

Other uses

 * Gilman (name)
 * Gilman reagent, any of a group of reagents discovered by Henry Gilman
 * Gilman Paper Company, former paper producer
 * Gilman Paper Company collection, photo archive in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
 * Gilman School, a private boys school in Baltimore, Maryland
 * 924 Gilman Street, a collectively run music venue in Berkeley, California

title: Gilman


text:
Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie was a consumer electronics chain in the Northeastern United States. The chain was started in 1971 in Brooklyn, New York, by businessmen Eddie and Sam M. Antar, and was previously named ERS Electronics (ERS stood for Eddie, Rose and Sam; Rose and Sam were Eddie's parents). The chain rose to prominence throughout the Tri-State area (New York-New Jersey-Connecticut) as much for its prices as for its memorable radio and television commercials, featuring a frenetic, "crazy" character played by radio DJ Jerry Carroll (who copied most of his shtick from early TV commercial pioneer, used car and electronics salesman Earl "Madman" Muntz). At its peak, Crazy Eddie had 43 stores in four states and reported more than $300 million in sales.

Almost from the beginning, Crazy Eddie engaged in fraudulent business practices, including under-reporting income, skimming sales taxes, and paying employees off the books. These practices, in conjunction with aggressive sales tactics, enabled Crazy Eddie to significantly undercut competitors and grow rapidly. During the process of going public, Crazy Eddie continued to engage in fraud, over-reporting profits, inflating inventory and duping auditors. Unable to sustain his fraudulent business practices, co-founder Eddie Antar cashed in millions of dollars' worth of stock and resigned from the company in December 1986. Crazy Eddie's board of directors approved the sale of the company in November 1987. The entire Antar family was immediately removed from the business. The new owners quickly discovered the true extent of the Antar family's fraud, but were unable to turn around Crazy Eddie's quickly declining fortunes. In 1989, the company filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated.

In February 1987, the United States Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey commenced a federal grand jury investigation into the financial activities of Crazy Eddie. In September of that year, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission initiated an investigation into alleged violations of federal securities laws by certain Crazy Eddie officers and employees. Eddie Antar was eventually charged with a series of crimes. Antar fled to Israel in February 1990, but was returned to the United States in January 1993 to stand trial. His 1993 conviction on fraud charges was overturned, but he eventually pleaded guilty in 1996. In 1997, Antar was sentenced to eight years in prison and was subject to numerous fines. He was released from prison in 1999, and died in 2016.

Beginnings
Eddie Antar's grandparents, Murad and Tera Antar, who were Syrian Jews, relocated to Brooklyn, New York from Aleppo, Syria. Murad and Tera worked in their market stalls alongside Arabs, including Egyptians, other Syrians, as well as Turks. Eddie's father Sam Antar was a retailer, and it was no surprise to the family that Eddie also became a retailer.

The predecessor to Crazy Eddie was a consumer electronics shop called Sight And Sound. It was a property of ERS Electronics, a company owned by Sam M. Antar, his son Eddie Antar, and Eddie's cousin Ronnie Gindi. Sight And Sound, located on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, began operation in 1969 and offered electronics at regular prices. Due to his aggressive sales techniques, Eddie quickly became known as "Crazy Eddie", but within eighteen months the shop (as well as Eddie and Ronnie) was nearly bankrupt. Eddie bought out Gindi's one-third ownership stake of Sight And Sound, and Sam M. Antar retained his one-third stake but left the day-to-day operations to Eddie. In 1971, the Sight And Sound store on Kings Highway was renamed Crazy Eddie. Eddie continued his sales tactics with the renamed Crazy Eddie shop, but this time was successful. Eventually, Eddie closed that location and relocated the business to a bigger shop, just a few blocks from Sight And Sound's old location. In 1973, Antar opened the second Crazy Eddie location in Syosset, New York. A third followed during 1975, located in Greenwich Village. That year, Antar established a corporate main office on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. By 1977, two more stores had been opened, with one located on East Fordham Road in The Bronx and the other being the first Crazy Eddie location in New Jersey, located on the southbound side of Route 17 in Paramus. By 1981, Crazy Eddie was operating ten locations, one of which was a new flagship location located on East 57th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Advertising
Crazy Eddie stores were famous in the New York metro area for their advertisements, which featured Jerry Carroll as the star. The relationship between the two sides began in 1972, when Carroll was a radio disc jockey known as “Dr. Jerry” at WPIX-FM. Antar had paid for an on-air ad and Carroll read the chain's slogan “his prices are insane” in an exaggerated and frenetic manner. When Antar heard Carroll's delivery, he telephoned the radio station and told Carroll to say the line the same way every time he read it.

In 1975, Carroll began appearing in television commercials for Crazy Eddie. For most of the next fifteen years Carroll performed commercials in the same frenetic manner he had for radio. One of his more memorable promotions was for Crazy Eddie's annual "Christmas in August" sale, where he would dress in a Santa suit and do the commercial while stagehands threw fake snowballs at him. Carroll also had a trademark look in each commercial, wearing a blue suit with a lighter blue turtleneck shirt in almost all of his appearances (even during later years). Carroll even appeared in a Spanish-language Crazy Eddie advertisement, although he did not have a speaking role; instead, his appearance consisted of him holding a radio to his ear as he walked behind the commercial's spokesman, stopping only to wave at the camera several times.

During the 1980s, more than 7,500 unique radio and television ads were broadcast in the tri-state area. Carroll's acting became so identified with the company that many people thought he was actually Crazy Eddie; Crazy Eddie even made a commercial to this effect with Carroll as a Superman-styled superhero named Crazy Eddie. Warner Communications, the parent company of the distributor of the Superman movie series, found the commercial to be problematic and sued the chain trying to stop it. At the time, Warner also was the parent company of the Atari video game company, and its largest customer for systems and games was Crazy Eddie. Therefore, in retaliation for the lawsuit, Eddie said that if Warner was going to sue for the commercial, he would stop selling Atari products in his stores. The suit was eventually settled.

The commercials were so memorable that HBO's news parody series Not Necessarily the News created a parody television commercial featuring a caricature of Oliver North (from the infamous Iran–Contra affair), known as "Crazy Ollie", selling used weapons at bargain prices. An early Eddie's commercial parody appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live on January 22, 1977, in the Dan Aykroyd creation, "Crazy Ernie". Carroll and the commercials attained further cultural significance during the 1980s, with the commercials sometimes appearing in the background of contemporary motion pictures. An example is the frightening first sight of a television receiver with a typical Jerry Carroll commercial on screen by Daryl Hannah's mermaid character in Ron Howard's 1984 comedy Splash.

Carroll's presence was ubiquitous enough that the makers of Yoplait yogurt signed him to do a commercial for their product in 1985. Playing up his character and the Crazy Eddie chain, he was dressed in his usual blue sport coat and light blue turtleneck shirt and standing among racks of electronic equipment while sampling the company's product and then singing its praises in French.

Crazy Eddie also was known to have in-store appearances by notable rock acts, including all four members of Queen in their Manhattan location on Tuesday, July 27, 1982 (prior to their performance that evening at Madison Square Garden).

Fraud
Almost from the beginning, Crazy Eddie's management engaged in various forms of fraud. The Antars deliberately falsified their books to reduce (or eliminate) their taxable income. They also paid employees off the books, and regularly skimmed thousands of dollars (in cash) earned at the shops. For every $5 Crazy Eddie reported as income, $1 was taken by the Antars. In 1979, the Antars began depositing much of this money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—in Israeli bank accounts. The Antar family skimmed an estimated $3 to $4 million per year at the height of their fraud. In one offshore bank account, the family deposited more than $6 million between 1980 and 1983.

By 1983, it was becoming more and more difficult to hide the millions of illicit dollars. The Antars decided that the way to cover up their growing fraud was to take the company public. In preparation, Eddie initiated a scheme in 1979 to skim less each year. Since more income was actually being reported, this had the effect of showing drastically increasing profit margins. While the company's actual profits (taking into account skimmed profits) from 1980 to 1983 increased approximately 13%, reported profits increased nearly 171%.

Despite the misgivings of people closely associated with Crazy Eddie, the company held its initial public offering on September 13, 1984 (former symbol: CRZY). Shares of the company sold initially for $8. By early 1986, Crazy Eddie stock was trading at more than $75 per share.

Eddie recruited his cousin, Sam E. Antar (known as Sammy), to assist the company with its fraud. Sammy earned a degree in accounting in 1980, and served his apprenticeship with Penn and Horowitz, Crazy Eddie's auditor. In 1986, he was named chief financial officer of the company. Sammy was informed that there was a $3 million deficit from the previous year's inventory fraud that needed to be hidden. Additionally, he was instructed to find ways to show a 10% growth in sales. One of Sammy's major schemes was a money laundering operation later known as the Panama Pump—money that the Antars had deposited in Israeli banks was transferred to bank accounts in Panama. These accounts, opened using false names, then drafted payments to Crazy Eddie. This money was largely used to inflate same-store sales totals for the company.

As a public company, Eddie, Sammy, and others engaged in increasing amounts of inventory fraud to increase reported profits and inflate the value of Crazy Eddie stock. For the fiscal year ended March 1, 1985, Crazy Eddie falsified inventories by $3 million. The next fiscal year, that amount increased to between $10 and $12 million.

Eventual downfall
Only months after Crazy Eddie's IPO, Antar's marriage to his wife, Debbie, became unstable as a result of frequent arguments. He then commenced an affair with another, younger woman, also named Debbie. The trysting pair were caught by Eddie's wife and sister on New Year's Eve 1984. Crazy Eddie's troubles began almost immediately afterward; the scam had relied extensively on family members helping keep the appearance that it was an immensely successful company.

By 1987, Sammy Antar's goal was no longer to show greater profitability, but rather to disguise previous frauds. During fiscal year 1987, they falsified inventories between $22.5 and $28 million. In addition, Crazy Eddie booked $20 million in phony debit memos or charge backs to vendors that reduced accounts payable.

As the company's fraud became more difficult to disguise, the public perception of Crazy Eddie as a commercial success began to change. By October 1986, the company's stock value had decreased to $17.50 per share. During December, Eddie announced his resignation as president and CEO. In April 1987, it was announced that Eddie had in fact retained his role as president but had dismissed, among others, his father Sam M. Antar. But by then Eddie Antar had already cashed out his share of Crazy Eddie stock, worth between $25 million and $30 million.

By the spring of 1987, the company's stock cost less than $10 a share. Additionally, earnings decreased 20% from the previous year. The franchise did show a 34% sales increase, but this was mainly the result of 13 new store openings. In May 1987, Eddie began proceedings to make the company a privately held company again, seeking out Canadian investment banker Samuel Belzberg as a partner.

As this was going on, another electronics discounter entered the picture and started buying up shares in Crazy Eddie. This man was Elias Zinn, who was based in Houston and was running his own business across Texas. Zinn eventually partnered with management consultant Victor Palmieri's backing to purchase $17.5 million worth of Crazy Eddie stock, which represented 7.5% of the outstanding shares. This eventually resulted in Zinn and Palmieri ending up with the controlling interest in the company, which enabled them to initiate a hostile takeover.

Once rumors of a takeover started, financial analysts began to examine more closely Crazy Eddie's financial situation. What they discovered was that while most stockholders of the company had lost money since 1984, Eddie had sold 6.5 million shares worth $74 million (~$ in ). A flurry of stockholder lawsuits were filed against the Antar family.

Eddie and Sammy Antar briefly attempted to counter-offer Zinn's takeover, but Zinn quickly topped their funds. The Antars' bid was ended, and Zinn became the new owner of Crazy Eddie on November 6, 1987. He immediately dismissed the rest of the Antar family from any important jobs. When Palmieri's financial analysts completed their preliminary audit a few weeks after the takeover, they estimated that Crazy Eddie's inventory was short by $40 to $50 million. The final figure was $80 million.

By June 1988, Crazy Eddie's suppliers were demanding the liquidation of the company, so they could recover money owed to them; in 1989 they got their wish. The closing of Crazy Eddie began in March 1989, as the company shuttered 17 of its 43 stores. On June 6, 1989, Crazy Eddie was served with a petition by five of its creditors, who had not been paid a total of $860,000 they were owed, which sought to have the company forced into bankruptcy. The company originally planned to fight the petition and file for dismissal, but 15 days later Crazy Eddie voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Company president and CEO Peter Martosella cited problems created by the creditors' position (which he termed "ill-advised"), but said business would be conducted as usual at the remaining 26 stores and that Crazy Eddie was still a strong franchise. The company vowed to stay in business, but, despite Martosella's assertions, Crazy Eddie continued to falter. By the autumn of 1989, the chain was down to eighteen remaining locations and sales were continuing to decrease and stores were unable to keep items stocked due to lack of supplier interest in the company.

Finally, on October 2, 1989, Crazy Eddie’s bankruptcy was converted from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, and the company began a total liquidation immediately thereafter. By the end of November 1989, the last eighteen Crazy Eddie stores were shuttered and the chain, which only five years earlier had been one of the more lucrative retail chains in the United States, had ceased to exist.

Legal battles
In the meantime, a longtime Crazy Eddie associate named Arnie Spindler, who quit the company after Eddie dismissed his father Sam, brothers Allen and Mitchell and others after a family dispute, had provided investigators with information concerning Crazy Eddie's fraudulent business practices. Spindler implicated Eddie and Sammy, but stated the rest of the family was innocent, though subpoenas were served to the entire Antar family.

Based on information gathered during its investigation, the SEC charged Eddie Antar with securities fraud and illegal insider trading on September 6, 1989. In January 1990, a Federal district judge ordered Antar to repatriate more than $50 million (~$ in ) he had transferred illegally to Israel. He was also ordered to appear in court to explain what had happened with the money. When he failed to appear, an arrest warrant was issued. Eddie surrendered to U.S. Marshals a week later, but was released and ordered to appear at a second hearing. When he failed to appear at that hearing, a second arrest warrant was issued and his assets were frozen. Eddie fled to Israel using a fake passport and the alias David Jacob Levi Cohen, and purchased a townhouse in the city of Yavne. After Eddie fled the country, Sammy offered to testify for Federal prosecutors in exchange for immunity. Sammy pleaded guilty to three felonies. He avoided jail time in exchange for his testimony, however, and was instead sentenced to six months of house arrest, 1,200 hours of community service, three years of probation, and was levied more than $10,000 in fines. As of 2009, Sammy was an adviser for government agencies and businesses investigating fraud.

Eddie was arrested in June 1992 on federal racketeering conspiracy charges and was extradited to the United States in January 1993. He pleaded not guilty and his trial began in June 1993, and was prosecuted jointly by U.S. Attorneys Paul Weissman and Michael Chertoff. On July 20, Eddie was found guilty of seventeen counts of fraud. His brother, Mitchell, was found guilty of three counts, and acquitted on two. Eddie was sentenced to $12 1⁄2$ years in prison. The Antars' lawyers immediately filed an appeal, which succeeded in April 1995 when a federal appeals panel agreed with their contention that the judge presiding over their trial was biased toward their clients. Chertoff, calling Eddie "the Darth Vader of capitalism", vowed to begin a new trial.

Eddie Antar eventually pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in May 1996. In February 1997, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was also ordered to pay more than $150 million in fines, in addition to the more than $1 billion in judgments against him resulting from various civil suits. Efforts to recover additional money from the Antar family on behalf of defrauded stockholders were completed in 2012.

Aftermath
Soon after the chain closed in 1989, a New Jersey-based investment group led by Alex Adjmi bought the rights to the Crazy Eddie trademark and announced in January 1990 that it had purchased the leases on Crazy Eddie's original location in Brooklyn and another in East Brunswick, New Jersey. The intent of the Adjmi group was to reopen the chain, but nothing ever came of the attempt.

In 1998, the grandchildren of Eddie, Allen and Mitchell Antar, revived the chain with a shop in Wayne, New Jersey, and as an online Internet venture, crazyeddieonline.com. The revived company retained the slogan "His prices are insane" and re-hired Jerry Carroll, who by this time had founded his own advertising agency, as spokesman. Despite plans to expand the chain to a potential 10 stores, the new Crazy Eddie did not expand beyond the Wayne store and in 1999 the only shop of the revived chain closed.

Eddie returned to the company in 2001, which by this time had been doing business solely as an Internet and buy-by-telephone business for more than a year. He reinitiated the Web site as crazyeddie.com and once again hired Jerry Carroll to do its advertising. By 2004, crazyeddie.com had disappeared again, and after a brief attempt to revive the online retailer in 2005, Crazy Eddie ceased to exist once again. The Crazy Eddie trademark and associated intellectual property were then acquired by Texas-based company Trident Growth Fund. In July 2006, Trident attempted to auction the brand and the domain name crazyeddie.com on eBay, but the reserve price was not met.

On March 3, 2009, it was announced that Brooklyn-based businessman Jack Gemal had bought the rights to the Crazy Eddie name and quickly began a new online Crazy Eddie venture at pricesareinsane.com. Gemal was also reported to be scouting retail space for new Crazy Eddie retail locations, stating that he wanted to open 50 locations during the next two years. This online venture performed business in the same manner as Crazy Eddie's other online stores, selling appliances and other electronics through the Internet. However, Gemal was never able to find the retail space he sought to reinitiate the Crazy Eddie store chain, and in 2012, the online business ended. The pricesareinsane.com site no longer exists, and as of 2018, the Crazy Eddie trademark is listed as abandoned.

Jerry Carroll died in October 2020 after suffering from cardiac issues for many years. Writer Gary Weiss, in doing research for a book he was writing about the rise and fall of Crazy Eddie, learned that Carroll's death had not been publicized, despite how ubiquitous a presence he was while serving as spokesman for Crazy Eddie.

Death of Eddie Antar
On September 10, 2016, Eddie Antar died at the age of 68. A funeral home in Ocean Township, New Jersey confirmed the death. Although Antar had been suffering from liver cancer, an official cause was not given. CNBC Commentator and journalist Herb Greenberg remarked that Antar's death was the "end of an era".

2022 book
On August 23, 2022, a book detailing the rise and fall of Crazy Eddie was released. Titled Retail Gangster and written by journalist Gary Weiss, the book chronicles, in significant detail, how Eddie Antar was able to build his business into one of the most profitable in the country and the illicit means he employed.

Legacy
A Crazy Eddie store briefly appears in episode 3 of the Marvel Studios animated series X-Men '97

A Crazy Eddie store employee appears in Russian Doll season 2.

In the 2016 film The Accountant, Ben Affleck's character references Crazy Eddie Antar and the Panama Pump when describing an ongoing embezzlement case. A tax evasion scheme that Affleck's character is investigating is similar to one of Crazy Eddie's embezzlement operations.

The Futurama episode "Insane in the Mainframe" references Crazy Eddie with the character of Malfunctioning Eddie

The 1986 animated film "The Brave Little Toaster" references Crazy Eddie with Crazy Ernie.

title: Crazy Eddie