text:
Michel Roger Lafosse

Michel Roger Lafosse (born 21 April 1958 in Watermael-Boitsfort, Brussels, Belgium), subsequently known as Michael James Alexander Stewart of Albany, claims to be a descendant of Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") and to be the legitimate Jacobite claimant to the throne of the Kingdom of Scotland.

Since 1979 he has referred to himself as "HRH Prince Michael James Alexander Stewart, 7th Count of Albany", stating that an ancestor used the title "Count of Albany". Lafosse also says he has the right to other noble titles including Comte de Blois, Duc d'Aquitaine and Baron Lafosse de Chatry.

The House of Stuart and Lafosse's claims
The Royal House of Stuart became extinct in the male line with the death in 1807 of Henry Benedict Stuart, called "King Henry IX" by Jacobites, who succeeded his elder brother Charles Edward Stuart in 1788. Charles was survived only by an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany, and her own illegitimate son Charles Edward Stuart, Count Roehenstart and daughters. The Jacobite claim to the British throne then passed to members of various continental Catholic dynasties, most recently to Franz, Duke of Bavaria, head of the Wittelsbach dynasty.

Lafosse claims that this history is inaccurate and that the Stuart line did not end with the death of Henry Benedict Stuart. Instead, Lafosse says that Charles Edward Stuart secretly obtained a papal annulment of his marriage to Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern and, subsequently, in a secret ceremony, married a woman called Marguerite O'Dea d'Audibert de Lussan, Comtesse de Massillan. He says this union produced an heir in 1786, a son, Edward James Stuart, Count Stuarton, Count of Albany, from whom he says he is descended.

Lafosse says he is the son of "HRH Princess Renee Stewart, Lady Derneley" (according to Lafosse, the senior descendant in the female line of Edward James Stuart), and "Gustave Lafosse de Chatry, 5th Baron de Chatry". These individuals, as well as others, are listed in an extensive genealogy presented by Lafosse as evidence that he is descended from the last Stuart King of Scotland.

There is some disagreement over who Lafosse's parents and ancestors were. Lafosse says he was born on 21 April 1958 in the Ville de Bruxelles district, and that his parents were Baron Gustave Joseph Fernand Clément Lafosse and Princess Renée Julienne Stewart. In 2002, Brussels authorities stated that this certificate is a forgery, and that they have a birth certificate showing that Lafosse was born in Brussels on 21 April 1958, in the Watermael-Boitsfort district to Gustave Joseph Clément Fernand Lafosse, a shopkeeper, and Renée Julienne Dée, a business employee.

Peter Piniski, in The Stuarts' Last Secret, says of Lafosse's assertion:

"One recent, heroically unsubstantiated claim is that Prince Charles married in 1785 and fathered a legitimate child. This 'fact' (which has escaped the notice of every historian for over two hundred years!), is particularly imaginative considering the prince was married at the time, being only separated from Louise von Stolberg-Gedern, after April 3rd 1784, who remained under the protection of the Pope. Nor was eighteenth century Rome the best of cities for an internationally known Roman Catholic prince to commit bigamy. It also ignores Charles' wretchedly infirm condition from before that date until his death three years later. Likewise does it ignore the presence (and insult the memory) of Charles' daughter and sole heir, Charlotte, who was daily at her father's side, nursing him right up to the moment of his death despite her own cancer. Professing direct descent on the female line from this 'marriage' the same claimant equally fails to provide any evidence, proper references or verifiable source documents for his additional assertion of descent on the male line from not one, but both daughters of Charlotte Stuart. Professor Lenman describes all of this as: 'The industry of Stuart charlatanism'."

Lafosse has also stated that he was "President of the European Council of Princes", following Archduke Otto of Austria's tenure in that position. Archduke Otto later said that he had never been president of any such body, or a member of any such body, and that, in fact, he had never heard of it.

The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland
Written by Lafosse, The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland: The True Story of the Royal House of Stewart and the Hidden Lineage of the Kings and Queens of Scots is a book published in Shaftesbury, England, in 1998. The book claims to provide previously unknown accounts of the life of Charles Edward Stuart, the last head of the Royal House of Stuart, during his exile from Britain.

Lafosse, who claims descent from Charles, includes within the book various accounts of previously unknown marriages and births within the Royal House of Stuart, beginning with the secret annulment of the marriage of Charles Edward Stuart and Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, and his subsequent remarriage to Marguerite O'Dea d'Audibert de Lussan, Comtesse de Massillan.

Present activities
Although born in Belgium as Michel Roger Lafosse, he became a naturalized British citizen in the 1990s and has since used the name Michael James Alexander Stewart of Albany. His website stated that he was a diplomat of the self-styled Federation of Autonomous Priories of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta (not the Sovereign Military Order of Malta or one of the Protestant Alliance Orders), and a cultural attaché at the Knights of Malta's embassy in the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe in West Africa; and that he has been awarded the United Nations 2001 "Volunteer Service Medal" under the name "Albany".

Lafosse claimed to be the Fons Honorum and Grand Protector of The Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order in Britain and the English-speaking world.

On 18 June 2006 the Sunday Mail reported that Lafosse was to be deported after having lost British citizenship because, it is alleged, he submitted a forged birth certificate. Later, on 23 July 2006, the Sunday Mail reported that, in the wake of the publicity surrounding his claims and his loss of British citizenship, Lafosse had sold his house in Edinburgh and returned to Belgium to live with his mother.

His latest book, co-authored with Walid Amine Salhab, is The Knights Templar of the Middle East: The Hidden History of the Islamic Origins of Freemasonry (2006).

title: Michel Roger Lafosse


text:
Talk:The Five Keys

Untitled
I removed the album discography because I don't think it's very useful. A list of singles would be helpful, but not this. Tuf-Kat 03:22, Dec 15, 2003 (UTC)

Discography:
 * The Best Of The Five Keys (Aladdin 1956)
 * The Five Keys On The Town (Score 1957)
 * The Five Keys On Stage (Capitol 1957)
 * The Five Keys (King 1960)
 * Rhythm And Blues Hits Past And Present (King 1960)
 * The Fantastic Five Keys (Capitol 1962)

 * It belong in the article and it gives information. What's wrong with it? I've put it back. a list of singles would be useful, but a list of albums is still relevant.

Cleanup
This article needs serious cleanup. Wolf O'Donnel (talk) 00:27, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Aladdin 3119 Darling/Goin’ Downtown unreleased
Master tape to Aladdin 3119 is in Mountain Home Arkansas. Seven inch reel, tail out, monophonic, 7.5 inch per second. Plays and sounds great. Songs: Darling b/w Goin’ Downtown 148.170.202.50 (talk) 00:55, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Maryland Pierce
So, I found this obituary of a Maryland Pierce. Now, I'm not sure if it's this Maryland Pierce (this article does not mention anything what this guy did), but I do want to make note that his birth year is close to our birth year (which is not sourced by the way). I'm also looking at some videos from a Maryland Pierce-led Five Keys' concert, and the guy from the video does look like the guy from the obituary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8800:5A86:E800:25E1:AA6F:1D72:F6EB (talk) 23:17, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Hello. In his R&B Notebooks, Marv Goldberg also says he died on July 22, 2021 (same date as in obit). Regards, Xavier 90.6.108.127 (talk) 07:53, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * And according to Find a Grave, he is buried in Lower Surry Cemetery, Bacon's Castle, Virginia. Regards, Xavier 90.6.108.127 (talk) 08:08, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:The Five Keys


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List of Canadian electric utilities

This is a list of the electric utilities in Canada.

List of electric utilities by province or territory
This is a list of Canadian public and private electric utilities, by province.

[[undefined|Alberta]]
Electric Transmission:
 * AltaLink

Investor Owned:
 * FortisAlberta
 * ATCO Electric

Municipals:
 * City of Lethbridge Electric Utility
 * ENMAX (formerly City of Calgary Electric System)
 * EPCOR (formerly Edmonton Power Corporation)
 * City of Medicine Hat Electric Utility
 * Town of Ponoka
 * City of Red Deer Electric Light and Power
 * Town of Cardston

Rural Electrification Associations:
 * Battle River Power Cooperative
 * Beaver REA
 * Blue Mountain Power Corp.
 * Borradaile REA
 * Braes REA
 * Claysmore REA
 * Devonia REA
 * Drayton Valley REA
 * Duffield REA
 * EQUS
 * Ermineskin REA
 * Fenn REA
 * Heart River REA
 * Kneehill REA
 * Lindale REA
 * MaKenzie REA
 * Mayerthorpe and District REA
 * Niton REA
 * North Parkland Power
 * Sterling REA
 * Stony Plain REA
 * Tomahawk REA
 * West Liberty REA
 * Willingdon REA

Sold to FortisAlberta:
 * Town of Fort Macleod
 * Municipality of Crowsnest Pass

 * TransAlta Corporation
 * Direct Energy

[[undefined|British Columbia]]

 * BC Hydro
 * Columbia Power Corporation
 * FortisBC

Municipals:
 * Grand Forks Hydro
 * Nelson Hydro
 * New Westminster
 * Penticton
 * Summerland

[[undefined|Manitoba]]

 * Manitoba Hydro

[[undefined|New Brunswick]]

 * NB Power
 * Saint John Energy

Municipals:
 * Town of Perth Andover
 * Energie Edmunston Energy

[[undefined|Newfoundland and Labrador]]

 * Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro
 * Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corporation Limited
 * Lower Churchill Development Corporation Limited
 * Newfoundland Power

[[undefined|Northwest Territories]]

 * Northland Utilities
 * Northwest Territories Power Corporation

[[undefined|Nova Scotia]]

 * Nova Scotia Power
 * Antigonish Electric Utility
 * Berwick Electric Light Commission
 * Canso Electric Light Commission
 * Lunenburg Electric Utility
 * Mahone Bay Electric Utility
 * Riverport Electric Light Commission

[[undefined|Nunavut]]

 * Qulliq Energy Corporation

[[undefined|Ontario]]
Ontario’s electricity distribution consists of multiple local distribution companies (LDCs). Hydro One, a publicly-traded company owned in part by the provincial government, is the largest LDC in the province and services approximately 26 percent of all electricity customers in Ontario.

The other local distribution companies in Ontario may be municipally owned corporations or privately-operated entities, and include:
 * Alectra Utilities, serving: Aurora, Alliston, Barrie, Beeton, Bradford West Gwillimbury, Brampton, Guelph, Hamilton, Markham, Mississauga, Penetanguishene, Richmond Hill, Rockwood, St. Catharines, Thornton, Tottenham, and Vaughan
 * Algoma Power, serving: Algoma
 * Canadian Niagara Power, serving: Fort Erie and Port Colborne
 * Cornwall Electric, serving : Cornwall, South Glengarry, South Stormont, Akwesasne
 * Elexicon Energy, serving: Ajax, Pickering, Whitby, Belleville, Bowmanville, Gravenhurst, Uxbridge and Scugog
 * Energy+, serving: Cambridge, North Dumfries, and Brant
 * Enova Power, serving: Kitchener, Waterloo, Woolwich, Wilmot, and Wellesley
 * EPCOR Utilities, serving: Collingwood, Stayner, Creemore, and Thornbury
 * Festival Hydro, serving: Stratford, St. Mary's, Seaforth, Hensall, Brussels, Zurich and Dashwood
 * Greater Sudbury Hydro, serving: Sudbury and West Nipissing
 * Hydro Ottawa, serving: Ottawa and Casselman
 * London Hydro
 * Oakville Hydro
 * Oshawa Power
 * Synergy North, serving: Kenora and Thunder Bay
 * Toronto Hydro

[[undefined|Prince Edward Island]]

 * Maritime Electric
 * Summerside Electric

[[undefined|Quebec]]

 * Boralex
 * Cartier Wind Energy
 * Hydro-Jonquière
 * Hydro Magog
 * Hydro-Québec
 * Hydro-Sherbrooke
 * Hydro Westmount
 * Innergex Renewable Energy
 * Rio Tinto Alcan

[[undefined|Saskatchewan]]

 * SaskPower
 * Saskatoon Light & Power
 * Swift Current Light and Power

[[undefined|Yukon]]

 * ATCO Electric Yukon
 * Yukon Energy Corporation

title: List of Canadian electric utilities


text:
Biwako Line

The Biwako Line (琵琶湖線) is the nickname used by the operator of the West Japan Railway Company (JR West) to refer to the portion of the Tōkaidō Main Line (between Maibara Station and Kyoto Station) and the Hokuriku Main Line (between Maibara Station and Nagahama Station). The section, along with JR Kyoto Line and JR Kobe Line, forms a contiguous service that is the main trunk of JR West's "Urban Network" commuter rail network in the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto Metropolitan Area.

Overview
The line is named after Lake Biwa (琵琶湖), which the route runs along. Line nicknames were introduced when the newly privatized JR West intended to use "familiar" names over official line names, such as Tōkaidō Main Line and Fukuchiyama Line. Biwako Line did not appear on the first list, and instead The JR Kyoto Line was to be called up to Maibara. A move in Shiga Prefecture opposed the name, claiming that the name of Kyoto Line in Shiga sounds like an auxiliary, requiring its own name in the prefecture. Biwako Line was thus made to refer to the section between Maibara and Kyoto.

The section of the name was extended to Nagahama, on the alteration of electric supply from 20 kV AC to 1,500 V DC, which enabled through operation to Kyoto and Osaka.

Although the "Biwako Line" nickname is used by the operator JR West for passenger announcements, the official status of Tōkaidō Main Line has not been changed or discussed. The counterpart for the line, Central Japan Railway Company (JR Central) uses its official name "Tōkaidō Main Line" for the section of JR West, at the connections of Kyoto and Maibara. The "Biwako Line" nickname appears in some local newspapers and real estate advertisements. Frequent passengers understand that the Biwako, JR Kyoto, JR Kobe lines are in fact one line, however, public recognition of the name is still in question, especially among non-users along the line.

Trains

 * Special Rapid Service (新快速):
 * Trains terminate at Nagahama, Maibara and Yasu (some trains continue on Hokuriku Line to Omi-Shiotsu and Tsuruga). Stops at Nagahama, Tamura, Sakata, Maibara, Hikone, Notogawa, Omi-Hachiman, Yasu, Moriyama, Kusatsu, Minami-Kusatsu, Ishiyama, Otsu, Yamashina, and Kyoto. Continues on JR Kyoto Line to Osaka and beyond.
 * Local trains (普通)
 * Operated as rapid service trains when running in the west of Takatsuki (Kyoto in the morning) (3 doors par car)
 * These local trains are mainly operated on the Biwako Line and make every stop on the line. They terminate at Maibara and Yasu.
 * JR Kyoto Line local trains (4 doors par car)
 * JR Kyoto Line local service extends to Yasu during rush hour on weekdays.

Stations
Stations are listed from east to west. The distance of Tokyo – Maibara is 445.9 km, and that of Tokyo – Kyoto is 513.6 km. Historically, the Tōkaidō Main Line continued from Tokyo to Kyoto and beyond, through Maibara. In the Japanese timetable books, the distances from Tokyo are still shown in the table, although the Biwako Line's officially begins at Maibara.

 * ●: Trains stop.
 * ○: Limited stop, early morning and late night only
 * | : Trains pass.
 * Local (4-door Commuter trains): JR Kyoto Line local trains
 * Local (3-door Suburban trains): Operated as Rapid service trains west of Takatsuki (west of Kyoto in the morning)

Local

 * 113 series (Kusatsu – Kusatsu – Kyoto, through service with Kusatsu Line and Kosei Line)
 * 117 series (Kusatsu – Kusatsu – Kyoto, through service with Kusatsu Line and Kosei Line)
 * 125 series (Nagahama – Maibara, through service with Hokuriku Line)
 * 207 series (Yasu – Kusatsu – Kyoto, through service with Kosei Line)
 * 221 series (through service with Kosei Line)
 * 223-6000 series (through service with Kosei Line)
 * 321 series (Yasu – Kusatsu – Kyoto, through service with Kosei Line)
 * 521-0 series (Nagahama – Maibara, through service with Hokuriku Line)

Special Rapid and Local

 * 223–1000 series (through service with Kusatsu Line, Kosei Line, Hokuriku Line)
 * 223-2000 series (through service with Kusatsu Line, Kosei Line, Hokuriku Line)
 * 225-0 series (through service with Kusatsu Line, Kosei Line, Hokuriku Line)
 * 225-100 series (through service with Kusatsu Line, Kosei Line, Hokuriku Line)

Limited Express

 * 271 series (Haruka service, from Spring 2020)
 * 281 series (Haruka service)
 * 285 series (Sunrise Izumo/Sunrise Seto service, from 1998)
 * 681 series (Biwako Express service)
 * 683 series (Biwako Express service)
 * KiHa 189 series (Biwako Express service, from March 2014)
 * KiHa 85 series (JR Central) (Hida service)

Former

 * 485 series (Biwako Liner rapid service until June 2003)
 * 583 series (Express Kitaguni until January 2013)
 * 383 series (JR Central) (Limited Express Shinano until 26 March 2016)

title: Biwako Line


text:
Talk:Bass (sound)

Links: Music
A quick unscientific statistic based on an eyeball search survey of the What links here page tells me that this article is linked to by > 95% music related articles, and only a very very few seafood / outdoor-sports related articles. So I moved the stuff about the latter down to the 'base' of the article (sorry 'bout the pun(s), just couldn't help myself). :-) --Wernher 03:28, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

 * Sure. But we always put the disamb line at the top of the article, so readers who are in the wrong place can quickly move on. -- Tarquin 10:54, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC) OK, no problem. --Wernher 06:25, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Now redirects here, instead of Bass guitar. This is the more commonly used term, and is logical to point to the ambiguous version rather than such a specific item. Seeings Bass (disambiguation) was created as well, although I feel Bass should have stayed the disambig page. ∞ Who ? ¿ ? 18:34, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * changed Bass back to disambig page.  ∞ Who ? ¿ ?  18:47, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are trying to say, but I took care of the links to the disambiguaton page. --GuyPlasma 19:21, 16 April 2007 (UTC) tat —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.233.92.194 (talk) 08:04, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Bass
If you know about bass, talk to me and tell me all you know! I will give you a quiz! 😊 Wordmixer12 (talk) 20:19, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

title: Talk:Bass (sound)


text:
Joshua Lawrence

Joshua Lawrence (1778–1843), of Tarboro, North Carolina, was an influential Baptist minister in the eastern United States during the Baptist missions controversy in the early 19th century.

Joshua Lawrence was born September 10, 1778. Lawrence (or Lawrence's) in Edgecombe County, North Carolina was named for his family. He began preaching when he was about 23 years old. He quickly became an active and influential minister in the Kehukee Baptist Association. The Kehukee Association was organized in Halifax County, North Carolina in 1765 and is generally considered the fourth oldest Baptist association in the United States1. Lawrence was often called upon to represent them at other associational meetings, and was regularly chosen to preach before the body and to serve on its committees (both before and after the separation of 1827). He was a man of limited education, but possessed natural talents of oratory and logic. He was a popular preacher among his contemporaries.

In 1814, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions was formed, which set about a controversy that would divide the Baptists in the United States. On one side were those who promoted the use of foreign and home mission societies, theological seminaries, and various church auxiliaries, and on the other side were those who rejected them as not conforming to the Scriptures. Joshua Lawrence took the position that such auxiliaries and societies were without scriptural command or example, and became one of the leading voices on the east coast against them. Hassell credits Lawrence with saving the Kehukee Association from becoming part of the missionary movement. Through his influence, the growing missionary tide, led by Elder Martin Ross, was abated and in 1827 the Kehukee Association "agreed that we discard all Missionary Societies, Bible Societies and Theological Seminaries,...believing these societies and institutions to be inventions of men, and not warranted from the word of God." In the two years following, the Kehukee Association reaffirmed this stance against opposition, and afterward became one of the leading "anti-missionary" associations. It is today considered the oldest Primitive Baptist association in existence. In Lawrence's day, the terminology Primitive Baptist was not in common usage, and the preferred term was usually Old School Baptist, which still retains a strong usage among Primitive Baptists on the east coast.

Tarboro Church (now Primitive Baptist) was organized on February 7, 1819, by elders Joshua Lawrence, Martin Ross, Thomas Billings, and Thomas Meredith.

Some writings of Lawrence include Reminiscences, written in 1812, Declaration of Church Principles (1826), A Patriotic Discourse, preached on July 4, 1830, and later published, and Teeth to Teeth: Tom Thumb Tugging with the Wolves for the Sheepskin, written in 1837. Though not well known or widely read outside the Primitive Baptist movement, a few of Lawrence's writings are made available by the Primitive Baptist Library in Carthage, Illinois.

Joshua Lawrence married Mary Knight. He died in January 1843.

Sylvester Hassell summarized Lawrence's life in this way: "For more than forty years he advocated powerfully and fearlessly, both from pulpit and press, liberty of conscience, the specialty, spirituality and efficacy of God's salvation, and the unscripturalness and corruption of all the money based religious institutions of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding storms of slander and vituperation, and threats against his life, and during the latter part of his life, great physical debility and suffering." (Chapter 23, History of the Church of God)

Footnote

 * 1) Philadelphia (1707), Charleston (1751), Sandy Creek (1758), and Kehukee (1765), but the 5th oldest if the General Six-Principle Baptist Rhode Island Yearly Meeting (org. 1670) is counted.

title: Joshua Lawrence


text:
Visual inspection

Visual inspection is a common method of quality control, data acquisition, and data analysis. Visual Inspection, used in maintenance of facilities, mean inspection of equipment and structures using either or all of raw human senses such as vision, hearing, touch and smell and/or any non-specialized inspection equipment. Inspections requiring Ultrasonic, X-Ray equipment, Infra-red, etc. are not typically regarded as visual inspection as these Inspection methodologies require specialized equipment, training and certification.

Quality control
A study of the visual inspection of small integrated circuits found that the modal duration of eye fixations of trained inspectors was about 200 ms. The most accurate inspectors made the fewest eye fixations and were the fastest. When the same chip was judged more than once by an individual inspector the consistency of judgment was very high whereas the consistency between inspectors was somewhat less. Variation by a factor of six in inspection speed led to variation of less than a factor of two in inspection accuracy. Visual inspection had a false positive rate of 2% and a false negative rate of 23%.

Humorous terminology
To do an eyeball search is to look for something specific in a mass of code or data with one's own eyes, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like grep or any other automated search tool. Also known as vgrep or ogrep, i.e., "visual/optical grep". See also vdiff.

"Eyeballing" is the most common and readily available method of initial data assessment.

Experts in pattern recognition maintain that the "eyeball" technique is still the most effective procedure for searching arbitrary, possibly unknown structures in data.

In the military, applying this sort of search to real-world terrain is often referred to as "using the Mark I Eyeball" device (pronounced as Mark One Eyeball), the U.S. military adopting it in 1950s. The term is an allusion on military nomenclature, "Mark I" being the first version of a military vehicle or weapon.

title: Visual inspection


text:
Talk:Mer De Noms

Can you justify the change in release dates? I ask only because there is a user of this site who makes a habit of posting false release dates for music. Thank you. Pakaran 03:42, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

 * The original article had an incorrect release date, which was actually the release date of the newest "a perfect circle" albums. this album was released in 2000, which i double checked at amazon.com. Bonfire2k4 04:08, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:Mer De Noms


text:
Thyratron

A thyratron is a type of gas-filled tube used as a high-power electrical switch and controlled rectifier. Thyratrons can handle much greater currents than similar hard-vacuum tubes. Electron multiplication occurs when the gas becomes ionized, producing a phenomenon known as a Townsend discharge. Gases used include mercury vapor, xenon, neon, and (in special high-voltage applications or applications requiring very short switching times) hydrogen. Unlike a vacuum tube (valve), a thyratron cannot be used to amplify signals linearly.

In the 1920s, thyratrons were derived from early vacuum tubes such as the UV-200, which contained a small amount of argon gas to increase its sensitivity as a radio signal detector, and the German LRS relay tube, which also contained argon gas. Gas rectifiers, which predated vacuum tubes, such as the argon-filled General Electric "Tungar bulb" and the Cooper-Hewitt mercury-pool rectifier, also provided an influence. Irving Langmuir and G. S. Meikle of GE are usually cited as the first investigators to study controlled rectification in gas tubes, about 1914. The first commercial thyratrons appeared circa 1928.

The term "thyratron" is derived from Ancient Greek "θύρα" ("thyra"), meaning "door" or "valve". The term "thyristor" was further derived from a combination of "thyratron" and "transistor". Since the 1960s thyristors have replaced thyratrons in most low- and medium-power applications.

Description

Thyratrons resemble vacuum tubes both in appearance and construction but differ in behavior and operating principle. In a vacuum tube, conduction is dominated by free electrons because the distance between anode and cathode is small compared to the mean free path of electrons. A thyratron, on the other hand, is intentionally filled with gas so that the distance between anode and cathode is comparable with the mean free path of electrons. This causes conduction in a thyratron to be dominated by plasma conductivity. Due to the high conductivity of plasma, a thyratron is capable of switching higher currents than vacuum tubes which are limited by space charge. A vacuum tube has the advantage that conductivity may be modulated at any time whereas a thyratron becomes filled with plasma and continues to conduct as long as a voltage exists between the anode and cathode. A pseudospark switch operates in a similar regime of the Paschen curve as a thyratron and is sometimes called a cold cathode thyratron.

A thyratron consists of a hot cathode, an anode, and one or more control grids between the anode and cathode in an airtight glass or ceramic envelope that is filled with gas. The gas is typically hydrogen or deuterium at a pressure of 300 to 500 mTorr (40 to 70 Pa). Commercial thyratrons also contain a titanium hydride reservoir and a reservoir heater that together maintain gas pressure over long periods regardless of gas loss.

Conductivity of a thyratron remains low as long as the control grid is negative relative to the cathode because the grid repels electrons emitted by the cathode. Space charge limited electron current flows from the cathode through the control grid toward the anode if the grid is made positive relative to the cathode. Sufficiently high space charge limited current initiates Townsend discharge between anode and cathode. The resulting plasma provides high conductivity between anode and cathode and is not limited by space charge. Conductivity remains high until the current between anode and cathode drops to a small value for a sufficiently long time that the gas ceases to be ionized. This recovery process takes 25 to 75 μs and limits thyratron repetition rates to a few kHz.

Applications

Low-power thyratrons (relay tubes and trigger tubes) were manufactured for controlling incandescent lamps, electromechanical relays or solenoids, for bidirectional counters, to perform various functions in Dekatron calculators, for voltage threshold detectors in RC timers, etc. Glow thyratrons were optimized for high gas-discharge light output or even phosphorized and used as self-displaying shift registers in large-format, crawling-text dot-matrix displays.

Another use of the thyratron was in relaxation oscillators. Since the plate turn-on voltage is much higher than the turn-off voltage, the tube exhibits hysteresis and, with a capacitor across it, it can function as a sawtooth oscillator. The voltage on the grid controls the breakdown voltage and thus the period of oscillation. Thyratron relaxation oscillators were used in power inverters and oscilloscope sweep circuits.

One miniature thyratron, the triode 6D4, found an additional use as a potent noise source, when operated as a diode (grid tied to cathode) in a transverse magnetic field. Sufficiently filtered for "flatness" ("white noise") in a band of interest, such noise was used for testing radio receivers, servo systems and occasionally in analog computing as a random value source.

The miniature RK61/2 thyratron marketed in 1938 was designed specifically to operate like a vacuum triode below its ignition voltage, allowing it to amplify analog signals as a self-quenching superregenerative detector in radio control receivers, and was the major technical development which led to the wartime development of radio-controlled weapons and the parallel development of radio controlled modelling as a hobby.

Some early television sets, particularly British models, used thyratrons for vertical (frame) and horizontal (line) oscillators.

Medium-power thyratrons found applications in machine tool motor controllers, where thyratrons, operating as phase-controlled rectifiers, are utilized in the tool's armature regulator (zero to "base speed", "constant torque" mode) and in the tool's field regulator ("base speed" to about twice "base speed", "constant horsepower" mode). Examples include Monarch Machine Tool 10EE lathe, which used thyratrons from 1949 until solid-state devices replaced them in 1984.

High-power thyratrons are still manufactured, and are capable of operation up to tens of kiloamperes (kA) and tens of kilovolts (kV). Modern applications include pulse drivers for pulsed radar equipment, high-energy gas lasers, radiotherapy devices, particle accelerators and in Tesla coils and similar devices. Thyratrons are also used in high-power UHF television transmitters, to protect inductive output tubes from internal shorts, by grounding the incoming high-voltage supply during the time it takes for a circuit breaker to open and reactive components to drain their stored charges. This is commonly called a crowbar circuit.

Thyratrons have been replaced in most low and medium-power applications by corresponding semiconductor devices known as thyristors (sometimes called silicon-controlled rectifiers, or SCRs) and triacs. However, switching service requiring voltages above 20 kV and involving very short risetimes remains within the domain of the thyratron.

Variations of the thyratron idea are the krytron, the sprytron, the ignitron, and the triggered spark gap, all still used today in special applications, such as nuclear weapons (krytron) and AC/DC-AC power transmission (ignitron).

Example of a small thyratron
The 885 is a small thyratron tube, using argon gas. This device was used extensively in the timebase circuits of early oscilloscopes in the 1930s. It was employed in a circuit called a relaxation oscillator. During World War II, small thyratrons similar to the 885 were utilized in pairs to construct bistables, the "memory" cells used by early computers and code breaking machines. Thyratrons were also used for phase angle control of alternating current (AC) power sources in battery chargers and light dimmers, but these were usually of a larger current handling capacity than the 885. The 885 is a 2.5 volt, 5-pin based variant of the 884/6Q5.

title: Thyratron


text:
Nor'easter

A nor'easter (also northeaster; see below), is a large-scale extratropical cyclone in the western North Atlantic Ocean. The name derives from the direction of the winds that blow from the northeast. Typically, such storms originate as a low-pressure area that forms within 100 mi of the shore between North Carolina and Massachusetts. The precipitation pattern is similar to that of other extratropical storms, although nor'easters are usually accompanied by heavy rain or snow, and can cause severe coastal flooding, coastal erosion, hurricane-force winds, or blizzard conditions. They tend to develop most often and most powerfully between the months of November and March, because of the difference in temperature between the cold polar air mass coming down from central Canada and the warm ocean waters off the upper East Coast. The susceptible regions—the upper north Atlantic coast of the United States and the Atlantic Provinces of Canada—are generally impacted by nor'easters a few times each winter.

Etymology and usage
The term nor'easter came to American English by way of British English. Early recorded uses of the contraction nor (for north) in combinations such as nor'-east and nor-nor-west, as reported by the Oxford English Dictionary, date to the late 16th century, as in John Davis's 1594 The Seaman's Secrets: "Noreast by North raiseth a degree in sayling 24 leagues." The spelling appears, for instance, on a compass card published in 1607. Thus, the manner of pronouncing from memory the 32 points of the compass, known in maritime training as "boxing the compass", is described by Ansted with pronunciations "Nor'east (or west)," "Nor' Nor'-east (or west)," "Nor'east b' east (or west)," and so forth. According to the OED, the first recorded use of the term "nor'easter" occurs in 1836 in a translation of Aristophanes. The term "nor'easter" naturally developed from the historical spellings and pronunciations of the compass points and the direction of wind or sailing.

As noted in a January 2006 editorial by William Sisson, editor of Soundings magazine, use of "nor'easter" to describe the storm system is common along the U.S. East Coast. Yet it has been asserted by linguist Mark Liberman (see below) that "nor'easter" as a contraction for "northeaster" has no basis in regional New England dialect; the Boston accent would elide the "R": no'theastuh'. He describes nor'easter as a "fake" word. However, this view neglects the little-known etymology and the historical maritime usage described above.

19th-century Downeast mariners pronounced the compass point "north northeast" as "no'nuth-east", and so on. For decades, Edgar Comee, of Brunswick, Maine, waged a determined battle against use of the term "nor'easter" by the press, which usage he considered "a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation" and "the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself". His efforts, which included mailing hundreds of postcards, were profiled, just before his death in 2005 at the age of 88, in The New Yorker.

Despite the efforts of Comee and others, use of the term continues by the press. According to Boston Globe writer Jan Freeman, "from 1975 to 1980, journalists used the nor'easter spelling only once in five mentions of such storms; in the past year (2003), more than 80 percent of northeasters were spelled nor'easter".

University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman has pointed out that while the Oxford English Dictionary cites examples dating back to 1837, these examples represent the contributions of a handful of non-New England poets and writers. Liberman posits that "nor'easter" may have originally been a literary affectation, akin to "e'en" for "even" and "th'only" for "the only", which is an indication in spelling that two syllables count for only one position in metered verse, with no implications for actual pronunciation.

However, despite these assertions, the term can be found in the writings of New Englanders, and was frequently used by the press in the 19th century.
 * The Hartford Times reported on a storm striking New York in December 1839, and observed, "We Yankees had a share of this same "noreaster," but it was quite moderate in comparison to the one of the 15h inst."
 * Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in his semi-autobiographical work The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), wrote "We had had several slight flurries of hail and snow before, but this was a regular nor'easter".
 * In her story "In the Gray Goth" (1869) Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote "...and there was snow in the sky now, setting in for a regular nor'easter".
 * John H. Tice, in A new system of meteorology, designed for schools and private students (1878), wrote "During this battle, the dreaded, disagreeable and destructive Northeaster rages over the New England, the Middle States, and southward. No nor'easter ever occurs except when there is a high barometer headed off and driven down upon Nova Scotia and Lower Canada."

Usage existed into the 20th century in the form of:
 * Current event description, as the Publication Committee of the New York Charity Organization Society wrote in Charities and the commons: a weekly journal of philanthropy and social advance, Volume 19 (1908): "In spite of a heavy "nor'easter," the worst that has visited the New England coast in years, the hall was crowded."
 * Historical reference, as used by Mary Rogers Bangs in Old Cape Cod (1917): "In December of 1778, the Federal brig General Arnold, Magee master and twelve Barnstable men among the crew, drove ashore on the Plymouth flats during a furious nor'easter, the "Magee storm" that mariners, for years after, used as a date to reckon from."
 * A "common contraction for "northeaster"", as listed in Ralph E. Huschke's Glossary of Meteorology (1959).

The Pacific Northwest is also affected by a similar class of powerful extratropical cyclones, known as Pacific Northwest windstorms. While the storms on the East Coast are named "nor'easters", the Pacific Northwest windstorms are not called "nor'westers" because the cyclones' primary winds can blow from any direction, while the primary winds in nor'easters usually blow from the northeast.

Formation
Nor'easters develop in response to the sharp contrast in the warm Gulf Stream ocean current coming up from the tropical Atlantic and the cold air masses coming down from Canada. Very cold and dry air rushing southward and meeting up with the warm Gulf stream current, which is typically near 70 F even mid-winter, often causes low-pressure areas to develop and intensify.

In the upper atmosphere, the strong winds of the jet stream remove and replace rising air from the Atlantic more rapidly than the Atlantic air is replaced at lower levels; this and the Coriolis force help develop a strong storm. The storm tracks northeast along the East Coast, normally from North Carolina to Long Island, then tracks east toward the waters off Cape Cod. Counterclockwise winds around the low-pressure system blow the moist air over land. The relatively warm, moist air meets cold air coming southward from Canada. The low increases the surrounding pressure difference, which causes the very different air masses to collide at a faster speed. When the difference in temperature of the air masses is larger, so is the storm's instability, turbulence, and thus severity.

The nor'easters taking the East Coast track usually indicates the presence of a high-pressure area in the vicinity of Nova Scotia. Sometimes a nor'easter will move slightly inland and bring rain to the cities on the coastal plain (New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc.) and snow in New England (Boston northward). On occasion, nor'easters can pull cold air as far south as Virginia or North Carolina, bringing wet snow inland in those areas for a brief time. Such a storm will rapidly intensify, tracking northward and following the topography of the East Coast, sometimes continuing to grow stronger during its entire existence. A nor'easter usually reaches its peak intensity while off the Canadian coast. The storm then reaches Arctic areas, and can reach intensities equal to that of a weak hurricane. It then meanders throughout the North Atlantic and can last for several weeks.

Meteorologists use the Miller classification to determine the track and severity of a nor'easter. The technique is named after J.E. Miller, who created the system in 1946. The Miller classification classified storms into two categories: type A and type B. Type A storms form in the Gulf of Mexico or along the coast of Georgia or South Carolina, and cause heavy snow mainly to parts of the inland upper south, Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Atlantic Canada. Type B storms form from a parent low-pressure system over the Ohio Valley, which then undergoes a center reformation over Gulf Stream off North Carolina or Virginia. These storms can bring a swath of wintry precipitation from the Great Plains and the Ohio River Valley to the Middle Atlantic and New England.

Characteristics
Nor'easters are usually formed by an area of vorticity associated with an upper-level disturbance or from a kink in a frontal surface that causes a surface low-pressure area to develop. Such storms are very often formed from the merging of several weaker storms, a "parent storm", and a polar jet stream mixing with the tropical jet stream.

Temperatures usually fall significantly due to the presence of the cooler air from winds that typically come from a northeasterly direction. During a single storm, the precipitation can range from a torrential downpour to a fine mist. All precipitation types can occur in a nor'easter. High wind gusts, which can reach hurricane strength, are also associated with a nor'easter. On very rare occasions, such as in the nor'easter in 1978, North American blizzard of 2006, Early February 2013 North American blizzard, and January 2018 North American blizzard, the center of the storm can take on the circular shape more typical of a hurricane and have a small "dry slot" near the center, which can be mistaken for an eye, although it is not an eye.

Difference from tropical cyclones
Often, people mistake nor'easters for tropical cyclones and do not differentiate between the two weather systems. Nor'easters differ from tropical cyclones in that nor'easters are cold-core low-pressure systems, meaning that they thrive on drastic changes in temperature of Canadian air and warm Atlantic waters. Tropical cyclones are warm-core low-pressure systems, which means they thrive on purely warm temperatures. However, in rare cases, such as the 1991 Perfect Storm, a small tropical cyclone can develop inside the warm seclusion of an intense nor'easter if the sea surface temperatures are sufficiently warm. Nor'easters can rarely also turn into tropical or subtropical cyclones, such as Tropical Storm Wanda in 2021.

Difference from other extratropical storms
A nor'easter is a strong extratropical cyclone, often experiencing explosive cyclogenesis. While this formation occurs in many places around the world, nor'easters are unique for their combination of northeast winds and moisture content of the swirling clouds. Nearly similar conditions sometimes occur during winter in the Pacific Northeast (northern Japan and northwards) with winds from NNW. In Europe, similar weather systems with such severity are hardly possible; the moisture content of the clouds is usually not high enough to cause flooding or heavy snow, although northeasterly winds can be strong.

Geography
The eastern United States, from North Carolina to Maine, and Eastern Canada can experience nor'easters, though most often they affect the areas in the Atlantic Canada and New England. The effects of a nor'easter sometimes bring high surf, strong winds and rain as far south as coastal South Carolina. Nor'easters cause a significant amount of beach erosion in these areas, as well as flooding in the associated low-lying areas.

Biologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod have determined nor'easters are an environmental factor for red tides on the Atlantic coast.

List of notable nor'easters
A list of nor'easters with short description about the events.

title: Nor'easter


text:
Amyl nitrate

Amyl nitrate is the chemical compound with the formula CH3(CH2)4ONO2. This molecule consists of the 5-carbon amyl group attached to a nitrate functional group. It is the ester of amyl alcohol and nitric acid.

Applications
Alkyl nitrates are employed as reagents in organic synthesis. Amyl nitrate is used as an additive in diesel fuel, where it acts as an "ignition improver" (cetane improver) by accelerating the ignition of fuel.

title: Amyl nitrate


text:
Ammonium bicarbonate

Ammonium bicarbonate is an inorganic compound with formula (NH4)HCO3. The compound has many names, reflecting its long history. Chemically speaking, it is the bicarbonate salt of the ammonium ion. It is a colourless solid that degrades readily to carbon dioxide, water and ammonia.

Production
Ammonium bicarbonate is produced by combining carbon dioxide and ammonia:

Since ammonium bicarbonate is thermally unstable, the reaction solution is kept cold, which allows the precipitation of the product as white solid. About 100,000 tons were produced in this way in 1997.

Ammonia gas passed into a strong aqueous solution of the sesquicarbonate (a 2:1:1 mixture of (NH4)HCO3, (NH4)2CO3, and H2O) converts it into normal ammonium carbonate ((NH4)2CO3), which can be obtained in the crystalline condition from a solution prepared at about 30 °C. This compound on exposure to air gives off ammonia and reverts to ammonium bicarbonate.

Salt of hartshorn
Compositions containing ammonium carbonate have long been known. They were once produced commercially, formerly known as sal volatile or salt of hartshorn. It was obtained by the dry distillation of nitrogenous organic matter such as hair, horn, leather. In addition to ammonium bicarbonate, this material contains ammonium carbamate (NH4CO2NH2), and ammonium carbonate ((NH4)2CO3). It is sometimes called ammonium sesquicarbonate. It possesses a strong ammoniacal smell, and on digestion with alcohol, the carbamate is dissolved leaving a residue of ammonium bicarbonate.

A similar decomposition takes place when the sesquicarbonate is exposed to air.

Uses
Ammonium bicarbonate is used in the food industry as a leavening agent for flat baked goods, such as cookies and crackers. It was commonly used in the home before modern-day baking powder was made available. Many baking cookbooks, especially from Scandinavian countries, may still refer to it as hartshorn or hornsalt, while it is known as "hirvensarvisuola" in Finnish, "hjortetakksalt" in Norwegian, "hjortetakssalt" in Danish, "hjorthornssalt" in Swedish, and "Hirschhornsalz" in German (lit., "salt of hart's horn"). Although there is a slight smell of ammonia during baking, this quickly dissipates, leaving no taste. It is used in, for example, Swedish "drömmar" biscuits and Danish "brunkager" Christmas biscuits, and German Lebkuchen. In many cases it may be replaced with baking soda or baking powder, or a combination of both, depending on the recipe composition and leavening requirements. Compared to baking soda or potash, hartshorn has the advantage of producing more gas for the same amount of agent, and of not leaving any salty or soapy taste in the finished product, as it completely decomposes into water and gaseous products that evaporate during baking. It cannot be used for moist, bulky baked goods however, such as normal bread or cakes, since some ammonia will be trapped inside and will cause an unpleasant taste. It has been assigned E number E503 for use as a food additive in the European Union.

It is commonly used as an inexpensive nitrogen fertilizer in China, but is now being phased out in favor of urea for quality and stability. This compound is used as a component in the production of fire-extinguishing compounds, pharmaceuticals, dyes, pigments, and it is also a basic fertilizer, being a source of ammonia. Ammonium bicarbonate is still widely used in the plastics and rubber industry, in the manufacture of ceramics, in chrome leather tanning, and for the synthesis of catalysts.

It is also used for buffering solutions to make them slightly alkaline during chemical purification, such as high-performance liquid chromatography. Because it entirely decomposes to volatile compounds, this allows rapid recovery of the compound of interest by freeze-drying. Relatedly it is also useful as an alkaline buffering agent for analytical LC–MS as its volatility allows it to be rapidly removed automatically from the sample stream in the low pressure spray chambers used by many standard mass spectrometry detectors found at the end of typical LC-MS systems, such as electrospray ionization detectors. This is critical as most mass spectrometry detectors become signal saturated or even damaged with more than a trace amount of ions entering the detector proper at any one time. This issue limits buffering agents and other additives in LC-MS buffers to either extremely trace concentrations or to fairly volatile compounds. In pH ranges from about 7 to 9, ammonium bicarbonate is one of the only options available as the primary buffering agent for most LC-MS buffers.

Ammonium bicarbonate is also a key component of the expectorant cough syrup "Senega and Ammonia".

It's also used as an attractant for catching insect such as walnut husk fly (Rhagoletis completa).

Reactions
It dissolves in water to give a mildly alkaline solution. It is insoluble in acetone and alcohols.

Ammonium bicarbonate decomposes above about 36 °C into ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water in an endothermic process and so causes a drop in the temperature of the water:

When treated with acids, ammonium salts are also produced:

Reaction with base produces ammonia.

It reacts with sulfates of alkaline-earth metals precipitating their carbonates:

It also reacts with alkali metal halides, giving alkali metal bicarbonate and ammonium halide:

Natural occurrence
The compound occurs in nature as an exceedingly rare mineral teschemacherite. It can also be obtained from deer antlers.

Safety
Ammonium bicarbonate is an irritant to the skin, eyes and respiratory system. Short-term health effects may occur immediately or shortly after exposure to ammonium bicarbonate. Breathing ammonium bicarbonate can irritate the nose, throat and lungs causing coughing, wheezing and/or shortness of breath. Repeated exposure may cause bronchitis to develop with cough, and/or shortness of breath. Health effects can occur some time after exposure to ammonium bicarbonate and can last for months or years.

Where possible, operations should be enclosed and the use of local exhaust ventilation at the site of chemical release is recommended. If local exhaust ventilation or enclosure is not used, respirators are necessary. Wear protective work clothing and change clothes and wash thoroughly immediately after exposure to ammonium bicarbonate.

Ammonium bicarbonate from China used to make cookies was found to be contaminated with melamine, and imports were banned in Malaysia following the 2008 Chinese milk scandal.

title: Ammonium bicarbonate


text:
Talk:List of chief governors of Ireland

Untitled
What is the plural of Lord Lieutenant? Is it Lords Lieutenant, or Lord Lieutenants? john 03:50, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Definitely Lords Lieutenant. Mintguy 03:53, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)
 * I think it is definitely Lord Lieutenants. They were the Sovereign's Lieutenant in Ireland; "Lord" was just an honorary title shoved on the front. The article should be moved to List of Lord Lieutenants of Ireland. Donald, 00.46, 13th January 2005
 * I'm not so sure. It was, after all, originally "Lord Deputy of Ireland", which looks awfully like "Deputy Lord of Ireland" with the word order reversed. It wouldn't make an awful lot of sense to be a "Deputy of Ireland", whether lordly or not. It also may be significant that it's unhyphenated, unlike the Lord-Lieutenant of a County, which suggests that they may merely be different terms that happen to look similar. Proteus (Talk) 01:09, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The many names on this page need to be wikified for they all deserve articles. I removed the images because they are too wide for small resolution screes. Image:Dcastlemaindoor.jpg will be moved to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The other two were irrelevant (Image:Hofcent1.jpg already linked to where it belongs). This image needs a home: Chief Secretary's Office, Dublin Castle By the late 19th century, power had effectively shifted from the Lord Lieutenant across the courtyard of Dublin Castle to his number two, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. (Image:Chiefsecoffice.jpg). It should be added to Chief Secretary for Ireland when the article exists. --Jia ng 02:06, 11 Jan 2004 (UTC)
 * all resolved.--Jiang 23:59, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Earl of Surrey
Shouldn't this list Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (AKA the Earl of Surrey) for 1520-22? I'm almost certain he held this title, but I decided to check before doing anything. --Danfly (talk) 17:34, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I've linked the above to double check (probably triple check by now). MacStep (talk) 21:30, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

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title: Talk:List of chief governors of Ireland


text:
Rolex

Rolex SA is a Swiss watch brand and manufacturer based in Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1905 as Wilsdorf and Davis by German businessman Hans Wilsdorf and his brother-in-law Alfred Davis in London, the company registered Rolex as the brand name of its watches in 1908 and became Rolex Watch Co. Ltd. in 1915. After World War I, the company moved its base of operations to Geneva because of the unfavorable economy in the United Kingdom. In 1920, Hans Wilsdorf registered Montres Rolex SA in Geneva as the new company name (montre is French for watch); it later became Rolex SA. Since 1960, the company has been owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a private family trust.

Rolex SA and its subsidiary Montres Tudor SA design, make, distribute, and service wristwatches sold under the Rolex and Tudor brands. In 2023, Rolex agreed to acquire its longtime retail partner Bucherer, and in 2024, Rolex began construction of a new headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, near Billionaires' Row.

Early history
Alfred Davis and his brother-in-law Hans Wilsdorf founded Wilsdorf and Davis, the company that would eventually become Rolex SA, in London in 1905. Wilsdorf and Davis's main commercial activity at the time involved importing Hermann Aegler's Swiss movements to England and placing them in watch cases made by Dennison and others. These early wristwatches were sold to many jewellers, who then put their own names on the dial. The earliest watches from Wilsdorf and Davis were usually hallmarked "W&D" inside the caseback.

In 1908, Wilsdorf registered the trademark "Rolex", which became the brand name of watches from Wilsdorf and Davis. He opened an office in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Wilsdorf wanted the brand name to be easily pronounceable in any language, and short enough to fit on the face of a watch. He also thought that the name "Rolex" was onomatopoeic, sounding like a watch being wound.

During World War I, Rolex manufactured trench watches. In November 1915, the company changed its name to Rolex Watch Co. Ltd. In 1919, Hans Wilsdorf moved the company from England to Geneva, Switzerland, because of heavy post-war taxes levied on luxury imports and high export duties on the silver and gold used for the watch cases. In 1919 the company's name was officially changed to Montres Rolex SA and later in 1920 to Rolex SA. ''

With administrative worries attended to, Wilsdorf turned the company's attention to a marketing challenge: the infiltration of dust and moisture under the dial and crown, which damaged the movement. To address this problem, in 1926 a third-party casemaker produced a waterproof and dustproof wristwatch for Rolex, giving it the name "Oyster". The original patent attributed to Paul Perregaux and Georges Peret, that allowed the watch to be adjusted while maintaining protection from water ingress was purchased by Rolex and heavily marketed. The watch featured a hermetically sealed case which provided optimal protection for the movement.

As a demonstration, Rolex submerged Oyster models in aquariums, which it displayed in the windows of its main points of sale. In 1927, British swimmer Mercedes Gleitze swam the English Channel with an Oyster on her necklace, becoming the first Rolex ambassador. To celebrate the feat, Rolex published a full-page advertisement on the front page of the Daily Mail for every issue for a whole month proclaiming the watch's success during the ten-hour-plus swim.

In 1931, Rolex patented a self-winding mechanism called a Perpetual rotor, a semi-circular plate that relies on gravity to move freely. In turn, the Oyster watch became known as the Oyster Perpetual.

Upon the death of his wife in 1944, Wilsdorf established the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, a private trust, in which he left all of his Rolex shares, ensuring that some of the company's income would go to charity. Wilsdorf died in 1960, and since then the trust has owned and run Rolex SA.

Charitable status
The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, which privately owns Rolex SA, is a registered Swiss charitable foundation and pays a lower tax rate. In 2011, a spokesman for Rolex declined to provide evidence regarding the amount of charitable donations made by the Wilsdorf Foundation, which brought up several scandals due to the lack of transparency. In Geneva where the company is based, it is said to have gifted, among many things, two housing buildings to social institutions of Geneva.

Subsidiaries

Rolex SA offers products under the Rolex and Tudor brands. Montres Tudor SA has designed, manufactured and marketed Tudor watches since 6 March 1946. Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf conceived Tudor to create a product for authorized Rolex dealers to sell that offered the reliability and dependability of a Rolex, but at a lower price. The number of Rolex watches was limited by the rate that they could produce in-house Rolex movements, thus Tudor watches were originally equipped with third-party standard movements supplied by ETA SA while using Rolex-quality cases and bracelets. Since 2015, Tudor has begun to manufacture watches with in-house movements. The first model introduced with an in-house movement was the Tudor North Flag. Following this, updated versions of the Tudor Pelagos and Tudor Heritage Black Bay have also been fitted with an in-house caliber.

Tudor watches are marketed and sold in most countries around the world. Montres Tudor SA discontinued sales of Tudor-branded watches in the United States in 2004, but Tudor returned to the United States market in the summer of 2013, and to the UK in 2014.

Production
Each Rolex comes with a unique serial number, which can help indicate its approximate production period. Serial numbers were first introduced in 1926 and were issued sequentially, until 1954, when Rolex restarted from #999,999 to #0. In 1987, there was an addition of one letter to a 6-digit serial number and in 2010, to the present date Rolex introduced random serial numbers.

Quartz movements

While Rolex mostly produces mechanical watches, it also participated in development of the original quartz watch movements. Although Rolex has made very few quartz models for its Oyster line, the company's engineers were instrumental in design and implementation of the technology during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, Rolex collaborated with a consortium of 16 Swiss watch manufacturers to develop the Beta 21 quartz movement used in their Rolex Quartz Date 5100 alongside other manufactures including the Omega Electroquartz watches. Within about five years of research, design and development, Rolex created the "clean-slate" 5035/5055 movement that would eventually power the Rolex Oysterquartz.

Materials
Material-wise, Rolex first used its "Cerachrom" ceramic bezel on the GMT-Master II in 2005, and has since then implemented ceramic bezel inserts across the range of professional sports watches. They are available on the Submariner, Sea Dweller, Deepsea, GMT Master II and Daytona models. In contrast to the aluminum bezel which it replaced, the ceramic bezel color does not wear out from exposure to UV-light and is scratch resistant.

Rolex uses 904L grade stainless steel; in contrast, most Swiss watches are made with 316L grade steel. Rolex uses the higher grade, as it is more resistant to corrosion and when polished, leaves a more attractive lustre.

Notable models
In general, Rolex has three watch lines: Oyster Perpetual, Professional and Cellini (the Cellini line is Rolex's line of "dress" watches). The primary bracelets for the Oyster line are named Jubilee, Oyster, President, and Pearlmaster. The watch straps on the models are usually either stainless steel, yellow gold, white gold, or rose gold. In the United Kingdom, the retail price for the stainless steel 'Pilots' range (such as the GMT Master II) starts from £5,600. Diamond inlay watches are more expensive. The book Vintage Wristwatches by Antiques Roadshow's Reyne Haines listed a price estimate of vintage Rolex watches that ranged between US$650 and US$75,000, while listing vintage Tudors between US$250 and US$9,000.

Air-Kings
Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf created the Air-Prince line to honor RAF pilots of the Battle of Britain, releasing the first model in 1958. By 2007, the 1142XX iteration of the Air-King featured a COSC-certified movement in a 34mm case, considered by some a miniaturized variant of the 39mm Rolex Explorer as both watches featured very similar styling cues; the 34mm Air-King lineup was the least expensive series of Oyster Perpetual. In 2014 the Air-King was dropped, making the Oyster Perpetual 26/31/34/36/39 the entry-level Rolex line. In 2016 Rolex reintroduced the Air-King, available as a single model (number 116900), largely similar to its predecessors but with a larger 40mm case, and a magnetic shield found on the Rolex Milgauss; indeed the new 40mm Air-King is slightly cheaper than the 39mm Explorer (the Explorer lacks the magnetic shield but its movement has Paraflex shock absorbers that are not found in the Air-King's movement).

Oyster Perpetual
The name of the watch line in catalogs is often "Rolex Oyster ______" or "Rolex Oyster Perpetual ______"; Rolex Oyster and Oyster Perpetual are generic names and not specific product lines, except for the Oyster Perpetual 26/31/34/36/39/41 and Oyster Perpetual Date 34. The Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch is a direct descendant of the original watertight Rolex Oyster watch created in 1926.

Within the Oyster Perpetual lineup, there are three different movements; the 39 features the Calibre 3132 movement with the Parachrom hairspring and Paraflex shock absorbers (the Oyster Perpetual 39 is a variant of the Rolex Explorer 39mm, sharing the same case, bracelet and clasp, bezel, and movement, with a different dial and different hands), while the 34 and 36 models have the Caliber 3130 featuring the Parachrom hairspring, and the smallest 28 and 31 models have Calibre 2231. The Oyster Perpetual Date 34 (or simply Date 34) adds a date display and date movement, plus the options of a white gold fluted bezel and diamonds on the dial.

Certain models from the Date and Datejust ranges are almost identical, however the Datejust have 36 mm and 41 mm cases paired with a 20 mm bracelet, compared with the Date's 34 mm case and 19 mm bracelet. Modern versions of the Oyster Perpetual Date and Datejust models share Rolex's 3135 movement, with the most recent change to the 3135 movement being introduction of Rolex's "parachrom bleu" hairspring, which provides increased accuracy. As the Date and Datejust share a movement, both have the ability to adjust the date forward one day at a time without adjusting the time; this feature is not confined to the Datejust. Compared with the Date, the Datejust has a much wider range of customization options, including other metals beyond stainless steel, various materials for the dial, and optional diamonds on the dial and bezel. The Datejust II, which was released in 2009, has a bigger case (41mm diameter) than the standard Datejust and features an updated movement, being only available in steel with white, yellow or rose gold on an Oyster bracelet. In 2016, Rolex released the Datejust 41, which has the same 41mm diameter case as the Datejust II, however the Datejust 41 has smaller indexes and a thinner bezel compared to the Datejust II

Professional collections

Rolex produced specific models suitable for the extremes of deep-sea diving, caving, mountain climbing, polar exploration, and aviation. Early professional models included the Rolex Submariner (1953) and the Rolex Sea Dweller (1967). The latter watch has a helium release valve to release helium gas build-up during decompression, which, according to Urs Alois Eschle, a former Director of Doxa, was patented by Rolex in cooperation with Doxa.

The Explorer (1953) and Explorer II (1971) were developed specifically for explorers who would navigate rough terrain, such as the world-famous Mount Everest expeditions. Indeed, the Rolex Explorer was launched to celebrate the successful ascent of Everest in 1953 by the expeditionary team led by Sir John Hunt. (That expedition was supplied with watches from both Rolex and Smiths; it was a Smiths watch, rather than a Rolex, which Sir Edmund wore to the summit.)

The 39 mm Rolex Explorer was designed as a "tool watch" for rugged use, hence its movement has Paraflex shock absorbers which give them higher shock resistance than other Rolex watches. The 42mm Rolex Explorer II has some significant differences from the 39mm Explorer; the Explorer II adds a date function, and an orange 24-hour hand which is paired with the fixed bezel's black 24-hour markers for situations underground or around the poles where day cannot be distinguished from night.

Another iconic model is the Rolex GMT Master (1955), originally developed at the request of Pan Am Airways to provide its crews with a dual-time watch that could be used to display local time and GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), which was the international time standard for aviation at that time (and still is in its modern variant of Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) or Zulu Time) and was needed for astronavigation (celestial navigation) during longer flights.

Most expensive pieces

 * On 26 October 2017....., a Rolex Daytona (Ref. 6239) wristwatch, manufactured in 1968, was sold by Phillips in its New York auction for US$17.75 million. The watch was originally purchased by Joanne Woodward in 1968 and was given by Joanne to her husband Paul Newman as a gift. The auction price set a record at $15.5 million, plus buyer's premium of 12.5%, for a final price of $17,752,500 in New York City. As of 2018, it is the most expensive wristwatch and the second most expensive watch ever sold at auction.  Notably, "[a]t the time that Newman gave the watch to James Cox [as a gift], the watch was selling for about $200."
 * On 28 May 2018, a Rolex Daytona "Unicorn" Ref. 6265 was sold in auction by Phillips for US$5.937 million in Geneva, making it the second most expensive Rolex timepiece ever sold at auction (as of 2018).
 * The most expensive Rolex (in terms of retail price) ever produced by the Rolex factory was the GMT Ice reference 116769TBR with a retail price of US$485,350.

Sponsorship
Since 1976, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise of 100,000 Swiss francs has been awarded; a Young Laureates award of 50,000 was added in 2010. The biennial Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative with a grant of about $41,000 was launched in 2002.

Rolex has been the official timekeeper to the Le Mans 24 Hours motor race since 2001. Former Formula 1 driver Jackie Stewart has advertised Rolex since 1968. Others who have done so for some years include Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Roger Penske, Jean-Claude Killy, and Kiri Te Kanawa. It is also the sponsor of the Rolex International Jumping Riders Club Top 10 Final competition.

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh had a specially designed experimental Rolex Oyster Perpetual Deep-Sea Special strapped to the outside of their bathyscaphe during the 1960 Challenger Deep dive to a world-record depth of 10916 m. When James Cameron conducted a similar dive in 2012, a specially designed and manufactured Rolex Oyster Perpetual Sea-Dweller Deep Sea Challenge watch was being "worn" by his submarine's robotic arm.

Mercedes Gleitze was the first British woman to swim the English Channel on 7 October 1927. However, as John E. Brozek (author of The Rolex Report: An Unauthorized Reference Book for the Rolex Enthusiast) points out in his article "The Vindication Swim, Mercedes Gleitze and Rolex take the plunge", some doubts were cast on her achievement when a hoaxer claimed to have made a faster swim only four days later. Hence Gleitze attempted a repeat swim with extensive publicity on 21 October, dubbed the "Vindication Swim". For promotional purposes, Wilsdorf offered her one of the earliest Rolex Oysters if she would wear it during the attempt. After more than 10 hours, in water that was much colder than during her first swim, she was pulled from the sea semi-conscious seven miles short of her goal. Although she did not complete the second crossing, a journalist for The Times wrote, "Having regard to the general conditions, the endurance of Miss Gleitze surprised the doctors, journalists and experts who were present, for it seemed unlikely that she would be able to withstand the cold for so long. It was a good performance." As she sat in the boat, the same journalist made a discovery and reported it as follows: "Hanging round her neck by a ribbon on this swim, Miss Gleitze carried a small gold watch, which was found this evening to have kept good time throughout." When examined closely, the watch was found to be dry inside and in perfect condition. One month later, on 24 November 1927, Wilsdorf launched the Rolex Oyster watch in the United Kingdom with a full front page Rolex advertisement in the Daily Mail.

Achievements
Among the company's notable improvements and innovations are:

 * In 1926, Rolex produced the Oyster case. While they claim this was the first reliable waterproof wristwatch case based on a screw-down crown it was not; Depollier's case was patented 8 years earlier. To this end, Rolex acquired the Perragaux-Perret screw-down patent, added a clutch and combined the screw-down crown with a threaded case back and bezel. Wilsdorf even had a specially made Rolex watch (the watch was called the "DeepSea") attached to the side of Trieste, which went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The watch survived and tested as having kept perfect time during its descent and ascent. This was confirmed by a telegram sent to Rolex the following day saying "Am happy to confirm that even at 11,000 metres your watch is as precise as on the surface. Best regards, Jacques Piccard". Earlier waterproof watches such as the "Submarine Watch" by Tavannes used other means to seal the case.
 * In 1910, the first watchmaker to earn chronometer certification for a small lady wristwatch.
 * In 1931, released a wristwatch winding mechanism featuring a rotor, a full 360 degrees rotating weight to power the watch by the movement of the wearer's arm. As well as making watch winding unnecessary, it also kept the power from the mainspring more consistent, resulting in more reliable timekeeping. Fully rotating weights later became part of the standard winding mechanism of self-winding wristwatches. A preceding self-winding mechanism by Harwood instead used a weight that moved in a 270 degrees arc hitting buffer springs on both sides.
 * In 1945, introduced the first chronometer wristwatch with an automatically changing date on the dial (Rolex Datejust Ref. 4467). An earlier wristwatch with a date changing mechanism by Mimo was not chronometer certified.
 * In 1953, released a case waterproof to 100 m (330 ft) in the Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner Ref. 6204. Although this has been commonly publicized as the first diving watch, in 1932 Omega had released the Marine, which could stand 135mts, 35mts more than the 1953 Rolex Submariner. Blancpain produced their Fifty Fathoms watch in 1953, 10 months before the Rolex Submariner.
 * In 1954, produced a wristwatch which showed two time zones at once in the Rolex GMT Master ref. 6542. Yet again, it was not the first company to do so, as the Longines DualTime preceded the GMT by a full quarter of a century.
 * In 1956, Rolex made a wristwatch with an automatically changing day and date on the dial in the Rolex Day-Date.

Cultural impact
By the start of World War II, Royal Air Force pilots were buying Rolex watches to replace their inferior standard-issue watches; however, when captured and sent to prisoner of war (POW) camps, their watches were confiscated. When Hans Wilsdorf heard of this, he offered to replace all watches that had been confiscated and not require payment until the end of the war, if the officers would write to Rolex and explain the circumstances of their loss and where they were being held. Wilsdorf was in personal charge of the scheme. As a result of this, an estimated 3,000 Rolex watches were ordered by British officers in the officer camp Oflag VII-B in Bavaria alone. This had the effect of raising the morale among the allied POWs because it indicated that Wilsdorf did not believe that the Axis powers would win the war. American servicemen heard about this when stationed in Europe during WWII and this helped open up the American market to Rolex after the war.

On 10 March 1943, while still a prisoner of war, Corporal Clive James Nutting, one of the organizers of the Great Escape, ordered a stainless steel Rolex Oyster 3525 Chronograph (valued at a current equivalent of £1,200) by mail directly from Hans Wilsdorf in Geneva, intending to pay for it with money he saved working as a shoemaker at the camp. The watch (Rolex watch no. 185983) was delivered to Stalag Luft III on 10 July that year along with a note from Wilsdorf apologising for any delay in processing the order and explaining that an English gentleman such as Corporal Nutting "should not even think" about paying for the watch before the end of the war. Wilsdorf is reported to have been impressed with Nutting because, although not an officer, he had ordered the expensive Rolex 3525 Oyster chronograph while most other prisoners ordered the much cheaper Rolex Speed King model which was popular because of its small size. The watch is believed to have been ordered specifically to be used in the Great Escape when, as a chronograph, it could have been used to time patrols of prison guards or time the 76 ill-fated escapees through tunnel 'Harry' on 24 March 1944. Eventually, after the war, Nutting was sent an invoice of only £15 for the watch, because of currency export controls in England at the time. The watch and associated correspondence between Wilsdorf and Nutting were sold at an auction for £66,000 in May 2007, while at an earlier auction in September 2006 the same watch fetched A$54,000. Nutting served as a consultant for both the 1950 film The Wooden Horse and the 1963 film The Great Escape.

In a famous murder case, the Rolex on Ronald Platt's wrist eventually led to the arrest of his murderer, Albert Johnson Walker: a financial planner who had fled from Canada when he was charged with 18 counts of fraud, theft and money laundering. When a body was found in the English Channel in 1996 by a fisherman named John Coprik, a Rolex wristwatch was the only identifiable object on the body. Since the Rolex movement had a serial number and was engraved with special markings every time it was serviced, British police traced the service records from Rolex and identified the owner of the watch as Ronald Platt. In addition, police were able to determine the date of death by examining the date on the watch calendar. Since the Rolex movement was fully waterproof and had a reserve of two days of operation when inactive, police were able to reasonably infer the time of death.

In Singapore on 20 April 1998, a 23-year-old Malaysian named Jonaris Badlishah bludgeoned a 42-year-old beautician Sally Poh Bee Eng to death in order to steal her Rolex and later give it to his girlfriend as a birthday present. The case became known as the "Rolex watch murder". Jonaris was arrested, sentenced to death and executed.

O. J. Simpson wore a counterfeit Rolex during his 1994 murder trial.

According to the 2017 Brand Z report, the brand value is estimated at $8.053 billion. Rolex watches continue to have a reputation as status symbols. The company produces more than 1,000,000 timepieces each year.

Literature

 * Pierre-Yves Donzé: La fabrique de l’excellence. Histoire de Rolex. Livreo Alphil, 2024, ISBN 978-2-88950-241-7.

title: Rolex


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Bomarzo

Bomarzo is a town and comune of the province of Viterbo (Lazio, Central Italy), in the lower valley of the Tiber. It is located 14.5 km east-northeast of Viterbo and 68 km north-northwest of Rome.

History
The city's current name is a derivation of Polymartium, first mentioned in the Historia Langobardorum by Paulus Diaconus. The etymology "polis martium", city of Mars, suggests a Roman origin. However, archeological evidence for a Roman city has not been found so far. However, a Roman brickmaking factory established nearby may have been owned by Domitia Calvilla, the mother of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

It was a historical fiefdom of the Orsini family, whose castle is at the edge of the densely built town, until it was sold to Ippolito Lante Montefeltro della Rovere in 1645. Lante was elevated to the title of Duke of Bomarzo.

Main sights
Bomarzo's main attraction is a garden, usually referred to as the Bosco Sacro (Sacred grove) or, locally, Bosco dei Mostri ("Monsters' Grove"), named after the many larger-than-life sculptures, some sculpted in the bedrock, which populate this predominantly barren landscape.

It is the work of Pier Francesco Orsini, called Vicino (1528–1588), a condottiero or mercenary and a patron of the arts. He was greatly devoted to his wife Giulia Farnese, daughter of Galeazzo Farnese, Duke of Latera, (not to be confused with her maternal great-aunt Giulia Farnese) and when she died, he created the gardens. The design has been attributed to Pirro Ligorio, a well known architect and antiquarian of the time.

The park of Bomarzo was intended not to please, but to astonish, and like many Mannerist works of art, its symbolism is arcane; for example, one large sculpture is of one of Hannibal's war elephants, which mangles a Roman legionary, and another is a statue of Ceres lounging on the bare ground, with a vase of "fruits of the earth" perched on her head.

The many monstrous statues appear to be unconnected to any rational plan and appear to have been strewn almost randomly about the area, sol per sfogare il Core ("just to set the heart free") as one inscription on an obelisk says.

Enigmatic verses in Italian by Annibale Caro, Bitussi and Cristoforo Madruzzo, some of them now eroded, were inscribed onto stone beside the sculptures.

The reason for the layout and design of the garden is largely unknown: perhaps they were meant as a foil to the perfect symmetry and layout of the great Renaissance gardens nearby at Villa Farnese at Caprarola and Villa Lante at Bagnaia. Next to a formal exedra is a tilting building, the so-called Casa Storta or Twisted House.

A small octagonal temple was added about twenty years later to honor Orsini's wife, Giulia Farnese.

During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the garden became overgrown and neglected but in the 1970s a program of restoration was implemented by the Bettini family, and today the garden, which remains private property, is a major tourist attraction. In recent years, a number of the stone sculptures have had fences put around them.

The surreal nature of the Parco dei Mostri appealed to Jean Cocteau and the great surrealist Salvador Dalí, who discussed it at great length. The poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues wrote an essay devoted to Bomarzo. Niki de Saint Phalle was inspired by Bomarzo when she created her Tarot Garden in Tuscany. The story behind Bomarzo and the life of Pier Francesco Orsini are the subject of a novel by the Argentinian writer Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910–1984), Bomarzo (1962). Mujica Láinez himself wrote a libretto based on his novel, which was set to music by Alberto Ginastera (1967). The opera Bomarzo premièred in Washington in 1967 but in Argentina it was banned by the military dictatorship. The Dutch magic-surrealist painter Carel Willink used several of the park's statue groups in his paintings, including The Eternal Cry and Balance of Forces. A mystery novel by Linda Lappin, Signatures in Stone (2013), investigates the symbolism of the Sacred Grove, its relation to the myth of Persephone, and recent theories concerning the designer of the park.

title: Bomarzo


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Izanagi

Izanagi (イザナギ/伊邪那岐/伊弉諾) or Izanaki (イザナキ), formally referred to with a divine honorific as Izanagi-no-Mikoto (伊邪那岐命/伊弉諾尊), is the creator deity (kami) of both creation and life in Japanese mythology. He and his sister-wife Izanami are the last of the seven generations of primordial deities that manifested after the formation of heaven and earth. Izanagi and Izanami are held to be the creators of the Japanese archipelago and the progenitors of many deities, which include the sun goddess Amaterasu, the moon deity Tsukuyomi, and the storm god Susanoo. He is a god that can be said to be the beginning of the current Japanese imperial family.

Name
His name is given in the Kojiki (c. 712 AD) both as Izanagi-no-Kami (伊邪那岐神) and Izanagi-no-Mikoto (伊邪那岐命), while the Nihon Shoki (720 AD) refers to him as Izanagi-no-Mikoto, with the name written in different characters (伊弉諾尊).

The names Izanagi (Izanaki) and Izanami are often interpreted as being derived from the verb (historical orthography ) or iⁿzanap- from Western Old Japanese 'to invite', with -ki / -gi and -mi being taken as masculine and feminine suffixes, respectively. The literal translation of Iⁿzanaŋgî and Iⁿzanamî are 'Male-who-invites' and 'Female-who-invites'. Shiratori Kurakichi proposed an alternative theory which instead sees the root iza- (or rather isa-) to be derived from isao (historical orthography: isawo) meaning 'achievement' or 'merit'. The etymological origin of the verb is suggested to be a precursor to the Middle Korean lemma yènc- meaning 'to place/put on [the top of]' reconstructed as *yenc-a (place-INF) in Old Korean.

The birth of the land
The Kojiki portrays Izanagi and his younger twin sister Izanami as the seventh and final generation of deities that manifested after the emergence of the first group of gods, the Kotoamatsukami, when heaven and Earth came into existence.

Receiving a command from the other gods to solidify and shape the Earth (which then "[resembled] floating oil and [drifted] like a jellyfish"), the couple use a jewelled spear to churn the watery chaos. The brine that dripped from the tip of the spear congealed and turned into an island named Onogoro (淤能碁呂島). The two descended to the island and, setting up their dwelling, erected a 'heavenly pillar' (ama no mihashira) on it. Izanagi and Izanami, realizing that they were meant to procreate and have children, then devised a marriage ceremony whereby they would walk in opposite directions around the pillar, greet each other and initiate intercourse. After Izanami greeted Izanagi first, Izanagi objected that he, the man, should have been the first to speak. True enough, the first offspring that resulted from their union, the 'leech-child' Hiruko, was considered imperfect and set adrift on a boat of reeds. Izanagi and Izanami then also begat the island of Awa (淡島 Awashima), but this too was not counted among their rightful progeny.

Izanagi and Izanami then decided to repeat the ritual, with Izanagi greeting Izanami first. This time, their union was a success, with Izanami giving birth to some of the various islands that comprise the Japanese archipelago (with the notable exceptions of Shikoku and Hokkaido), which include the following eight islands (in the following order):

 * Awaji-no-Ho-no-Sawake (淡道之穂之狭別島)
 * The double-named island of Iyo (伊予之二名島 Iyo-no-Futana-no-Shima, modern Shikoku)
 * The triple islands of Oki (隠伎之三子島 Oki-no-Mitsugo-no-Shima)
 * Tsukushi (筑紫島, modern Kyushu)
 * Iki (伊伎島)
 * Tsushima (津島)
 * Sado (佐度島)
 * Ōyamato-Toyoakitsushima (大倭豊秋津島, modern Honshu)

The two then proceeded to beget the various deities who are to inhabit these lands. Izanami, however, was badly injured and eventually died after giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi. In an act of grief and rage, Izanagi killed Kagutsuchi with his 'ten-grasp sword'. More gods manifest into existence out of Izanami's excreta, Kagutsuchi's blood and mutilated remains, and Izanagi's tears.

Descent into Yomi
Izanagi, wishing to see Izanami again, went down to Yomi, the land of the dead, in the hopes of retrieving her. Izanami reveals that she had already partaken of food cooked in the furnace of the underworld, rendering her return impossible. Izanagi, losing his patience, betrayed his promise not to look at her and lit up a fire, only to find that Izanami is now a rotting corpse. To avenge her shame, Izanami dispatched the gods of thunder (known as the Yakusanoikazuchi), the "hags of Yomi" (予母都志許売 Yomotsu-shikome), and a horde of warriors to chase after him. To distract them, Izanagi threw the vine securing his hair and the comb on his right hair-knot, which turned into grapes and bamboo shoots that the hags devoured. Upon reaching the pass of Yomotsu Hirasaka (黄泉比良坂, the 'Flat Slope of Yomi'), Izanagi took three peaches from a nearby tree and repelled his pursuers using them. He then declared the peach fruit to be divine and bade it to grow in the land of the living to help people in need. When Izanami herself came in pursuit of him, Izanagi sealed the entrance to Yomi using a huge boulder. Izanami then pronounces a curse, vowing to kill a thousand people each day, to which Izanagi replies that he will then beget a thousand and five hundred people everyday to thwart her.

Purification (Misogi)

Izanagi, feeling contaminated by his visit to Yomi, went to "[the plain of] Awagihara (i.e. a plain covered with awagi) by the river-mouth of Tachibana in Himuka in [the island of] Tsukushi" and purified himself by bathing in the river; various deities came into existence as he stripped off his clothes and accouterments and immersed himself in the water. The three most important kami, the "Three Precious Children" (三貴子 or ) – the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, the moon deity Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, and the storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto – were born when Izanagi washed his left eye, his right eye, and his nose, respectively.

Izanagi and Susanoo
Izanagi divides the world among his three children: Amaterasu was allotted Takamagahara (高天原, the "Plain of High Heaven"), Tsukuyomi the night, and Susanoo the seas. Susanoo did not perform his appointed task and instead kept crying and howling "until his beard eight hands long extended down over his chest," causing the mountains to wither and the rivers to dry up. After saying to his father that he wished to go to his mother's land, Ne-no-Katasu-Kuni (根堅州国, the 'Land of Roots'), a furious Izanagi then expelled Susanoo "with a divine expulsion," after which he disappears from the narrative.

In the Nihon Shoki
While the first generations of kami including Izanagi and Izanami are implied in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki 's main narrative to have manifested independent of each other, one variant cited in the Shoki instead describes them as the offspring of Aokashikine-no-Mikoto (青橿城根尊), another name for the goddess Ayakashikone-no-Mikoto, of the sixth of the first seven generations of gods. Another variant meanwhile portrays Izanagi as the offspring of a deity named Awanagi-no-Mikoto (沫蕩尊) and the fifth-generation descendant of the primordial deity Kuninotokotachi-no-Mikoto.

In the Shoki 's main narrative, the couple first begets the following eight islands after performing the marriage ceremony (in the following order):

 * Awaji (淡路洲), which "was reckoned as the placenta, and their minds took no pleasure in it"
 * Ōyamato-Toyoakitsushima (大日本豊秋津洲)
 * The double-named island of Iyo (伊豫二名洲)
 * Tsukushi (筑紫洲)
 * Oki (億岐洲) and Sado (佐度洲), born as twins
 * Koshi (越洲), what is now known as the Hokuriku region
 * Ōshima (大洲), identified with the island of Suō-Ōshima in Yamaguchi Prefecture
 * Kibi-no-Kojima (吉備子洲), identified with the Kojima Peninsula in southern Okayama Prefecture (formerly the province of Kibi)

Both Ōshima and Kibi-no-Kojima are not reckoned among the eight great islands in the Kojiki, instead being identified as being born after them. The other remaining islands, such as Tsushima (対馬島) and Iki (壱岐島), are said to have been produced by the coagulation of the foam in sea water (or freshwater).

title: Izanagi