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Single-wire earth return

Single-wire earth return (SWER) or single-wire ground return is a single-wire transmission line which supplies single-phase electric power from an electrical grid to remote areas at lowest cost. The earth (or sometimes a body of water) is used as the return path for the current, to avoid the need for a second wire (or neutral wire) to act as a return path.

Single-wire earth return is principally used for rural electrification, but also finds use for larger isolated loads such as water pumps. It is also used for high-voltage direct current over submarine power cables. Electric single-phase railway traction, such as light rail, uses a very similar system. It uses resistors to earth to reduce hazards from rail voltages, but the primary return currents are through the rails.

History
Lloyd Mandeno, OBE (1888–1973) fully developed SWER in New Zealand around 1925 for rural electrification. Although he termed it "Earth Working Single Wire Line", it was often called "Mandeno’s Clothesline". More than 200,000 kilometres (100,000 miles) have now been installed in Australia and New Zealand. It is considered safe, reliable and low-cost, provided that safety features and earthing are correctly installed. The Australian standards are widely used and cited. It has been applied around the world, such as in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan; Brazil; Africa; and portions of the United States' Upper Midwest and Alaska (Bethel).

Operating principle
SWER is a viable choice for a distribution system when conventional return current wiring would cost more than SWER's isolation transformers and small power losses. Power engineers experienced with both SWER and conventional power lines rate SWER as equally safe, more reliable, less costly, but with slightly lower efficiency than conventional lines. SWER can cause fires when maintenance is poor, and bushfire is a risk. Power is supplied to the SWER line by an isolating transformer of up to 300 kVA. This transformer isolates the grid from ground or earth. The voltage changes due to the transition from line-to-line to line-to-earth, typically reducing a 22 kV grid to 12.7 kV SWER or a 33 kV grid to 19.1 kV SWER.

The SWER line is a single conductor that may stretch for tens or even hundreds of kilometres, with a number of distribution transformers along its length. At each transformer, such as a customer's premises, current flows from the line, through the primary coil of a step-down isolation transformer, to earth through an earth stake. From the earth stake, the current eventually finds its way back to the main step-up transformer at the head of the line, completing the circuit. SWER is therefore a practical example of a phantom loop.

In areas with higher-resistance soil, the grounding rod can float to higher voltages, wasting energy. The resistance may be high enough to affect self-resetting circuit breakers, which usually reset due to a difference in voltage between line and neutral. With dry, high-resistance soils, the reduced difference in voltage between line and neutral may prevent breakers from resetting. In Australia, locations with very dry soils need the grounding rods to be extra deep. Experience in Alaska shows that SWER needs to be grounded below permafrost, which is high-resistance.

The secondary winding of the local transformer will supply the customer with either single ended single phase (N-0) or split-phase (N-0-N) power in the region's standard appliance voltages, with the 0 volt line connected to a safety earth that does not normally carry an operating current.

A large SWER line may feed as many as 80 distribution transformers. The transformers are usually rated at 5 kVA, 10 kVA, and 25 kVA. The load densities are usually below 0.5 kVA per kilometer (0.8 kVA per mile) of line. Any single customer's maximum demand will typically be less than 3.5 kVA, but larger loads up to the capacity of the distribution transformer can also be supplied.

Some SWER systems in the USA are conventional distribution feeders that were built without a continuous neutral (some of which were obsolete transmission lines that were refitted for rural distribution service). The substation feeding such lines has a grounding rod on each pole within the substation; then on each branch from the line, the span between the pole next to and the pole carrying the transformer would have a grounded conductor (giving each transformer two grounding points for safety reasons).

Mechanical design
Proper mechanical design of a SWER line can lower its lifetime cost and increase its safety.

Since the line is high voltage, with small currents, the conductor used in historic SWER lines was Number-8 galvanized steel fence wire. More modern installations use specially-designed AS1222.1 high-carbon steel, aluminum-clad wires. Aluminum clad wires corrode in coastal areas, but are otherwise more suitable. Because of the long spans and high mechanical tensions, vibration from wind can cause damage to the wires. Modern systems install spiral vibration dampers on the wires.

Insulators are often porcelain because polymers are prone to ultraviolet damage. Some utilities install higher-voltage insulators so the line can be easily upgraded to carry more power. For example, 12 kV lines may be insulated to 22 kV, or 19 kV lines to 33 kV.

Reinforced concrete poles have been traditionally used in SWER lines because of their low cost, low maintenance, and resistance to water damage, termites and fungi. Local labor can produce them in most areas, further lowering costs. In New Zealand, metal poles are common (often being former rails from a railway line). Wooden poles are acceptable. In Mozambique, poles had to be at least 12 m high to permit safe passage of giraffes beneath the lines.

If an area is prone to lightning, modern designs place lightning ground straps in the poles when they are constructed, before erection. The straps and wiring can be arranged to be a low-cost lightning arrestor with rounded edges to avoid attracting a lightning strike.

Safety
SWER is promoted as safe due to isolation of the ground from both the generator and user. Most other electrical systems use a metallic neutral connected directly to the generator or a shared ground.

Grounding is critical. Significant currents on the order of 8 amperes flow through the ground near the earth points. A good-quality earth connection is needed to prevent risk of electric shock due to earth potential rise near this point. Separate grounds for power and safety are also used. Duplication of the ground points assures that the system is still safe if either of the grounds is damaged.

A good earth connection is normally a 6 m stake of copper-clad steel driven vertically into the ground, and bonded to the transformer earth and tank. A good ground resistance is 5–10 ohms which can be measured using specialist earth test equipment. SWER systems are designed to limit the electric field in the earth to 20 volts per meter to avoid shocking people and animals that might be in the area.

Other standard features include automatic reclosing circuit breakers (reclosers). Most faults (overcurrent) are transient. Since the network is rural, most of these faults will be cleared by the recloser. Each service site needs a rewirable drop out fuse for protection and switching of the transformer. The transformer secondary should also be protected by a standard high-rupture capacity (HRC) fuse or low voltage circuit breaker. A surge arrestor (spark gap) on the high voltage side is common, especially in lightning-prone areas.

Most fire safety hazards in electrical distribution are from aging equipment: corroded lines, broken insulators, etc. The lower cost of SWER maintenance can reduce the cost of safe operation in these cases.

SWER avoids lines clashing in wind, a substantial fire-safety feature, but a problem surfaced in the official investigation into the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia. These demonstrated that a broken SWER conductor can short to ground across a resistance similar to the circuit's normal load; in that particular case, a tree. This can cause large currents without a ground-fault indication. This can present a danger in fire-prone areas where a conductor may snap and current may arc through trees or dry grass.

Bare-wire or ground-return telecommunications can be compromised by the ground-return current if the grounding area is closer than 100 m or sinks more than 10 A of current. Modern radio, optic fibre channels, and cell phone systems are unaffected.

Many national electrical regulations (notably the U.S.) require a metallic return line from the load to the generator. In these jurisdictions, each SWER line must be approved by exception.

Cost advantages
SWER's main advantage is its low cost. It is often used in sparsely populated areas where the cost of building an isolated distribution line cannot be justified. Capital costs are roughly 50% of an equivalent two-wire single-phase line. They can cost 30% of 3-wire three-phase systems. Maintenance costs are roughly 50% of an equivalent three phase line.

SWER also reduces the largest cost of a distribution network: the number of poles. Conventional 2-wire or 3-wire distribution lines have a higher power transfer capacity, but can require 7 poles per kilometre (12 poles per mile), with spans of 100 to 150 metres (110 to 160 yards). SWER's high line voltage and low current also permits the use of low-cost galvanized steel wire (historically, No. 8 fence wire). Steel's greater strength permits spans of 400 metres (¼ mile) or more, reducing the number of poles to 2.5 per kilometre (4 per mile).

If the poles also carry optical fiber cable for telecommunications (metal conductors may not be used), capital expenditures by the power company may be further reduced.

Reliability
SWER can be used in a grid or loop, but is usually arranged in a linear or radial layout to save costs. In the customary linear form, a single-point failure in a SWER line causes all customers further down the line to lose power. However, since it has fewer components in the field, SWER has less to fail. For example, since there is only one line, winds can't cause lines to clash, removing a source of damage, as well as a source of rural bush fires.

Since the bulk of the transmission line has low resistance attachments to earth, excessive ground currents from shorts and geomagnetic storms are more rare than in conventional metallic-return systems. So, SWER has fewer ground-fault circuit-breaker openings to interrupt service.

Upgradeability
A well-designed SWER line can be substantially upgraded as demand grows without new poles. The first step may be to replace the steel wire with more expensive copper-clad or aluminum-clad steel wire.

It may be possible to increase the voltage. Some distant SWER lines now operate at voltages as high as 35 kV. Normally this requires changing the insulators and transformers, but no new poles are needed.

If more capacity is needed, a second SWER line can be run on the same poles to provide two SWER lines 180 degrees out of phase. This requires more insulators and wire, but doubles the power without doubling the poles. Many standard SWER poles have several bolt holes to support this upgrade. This configuration causes most ground currents to cancel, reducing shock hazards and interference with communication lines.

Two-phase service is also possible with a two-wire upgrade: Though less reliable, it is more efficient. As more power is needed, the lines can be upgraded to match the load, from single wire SWER to two wire, single phase and finally to three wire, three phase. This ensures a more efficient use of capital and makes the initial installation more affordable.

Customer equipment installed before these upgrades will all be single phase, and can be reused after the upgrade. If small amounts of three-phase power are needed, it can be economically synthesized from two-phase power with on-site equipment.

Power-quality weakness
SWER lines tend to be long, with high impedance, so the voltage drop along the line is often a problem, causing poor regulation. Variations in demand cause variation in the delivered voltage. To combat this, some installations have automatic variable transformers at the customer site to keep the received voltage within legal specifications.

After some years of experience, the inventor advocated a capacitor in series with the ground of the main isolation transformer to counteract the inductive reactance of the transformers, wire and earth return path. The plan was to improve the power factor, reduce losses and improve voltage performance due to reactive power flow. Though theoretically sound, this is not standard practice. It does also allow the use of a DC test loop, to distinguish a legitimate variable load from (for example) a fallen tree, which would be a DC path to ground.

Use
Single-wire earth return is used throughout the globe, most commonly in New Zealand and Australia.

Alaska
In 1981 a high-power 8.5 mile prototype SWER line was successfully installed from a diesel plant in Bethel to Napakiak in Alaska, United States. It operates at 80 kV, and was originally installed on special lightweight fiberglass poles that formed an A-frame. Since then, the A frames have been removed and standard wooden power poles were installed. The A-framed poles could be carried on lightweight snow machines, and could be installed with hand tools on permafrost without extensive digging. Erection of "anchoring" poles still required heavy machinery, but the cost savings were dramatic.

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, United States estimate that a network of such lines, combined with coastal wind turbines, could substantially reduce rural Alaska's dependence on increasingly expensive diesel fuel for power generation. Alaska's state economic energy screening survey advocated further study of this option to use more of the state's underutilized power sources.

In developing nations
At present, certain developing nations have adopted SWER systems as their mains electricity systems, notably Laos, South Africa and Mozambique. SWER is also used extensively in Brazil.

In HVDC systems
Many high-voltage direct current systems (HVDC) using submarine power cables are single wire earth return systems. Bipolar systems with both positive and negative cables may also retain a seawater grounding electrode, used when one pole has failed. To avoid electrochemical corrosion, the ground electrodes of such systems are situated apart from the converter stations and not near the transmission cable.

The electrodes can be situated in the sea or on land. Bare copper wires can be used for cathodes, and graphite rods buried in the ground, or titanium grids in the sea are used for anodes. To avoid electrochemical corrosion (and passivation of titanium surfaces) the current density at the surface of the electrodes must be small, and therefore large electrodes are required.

Examples of HVDC systems with single wire earth return include the Baltic Cable and Kontek.

Installations
The following table shows various installations of SWER systems

title: Single-wire earth return


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Equestrian

The word equestrian is a reference to equestrianism, or horseback riding, derived from Latin equester and equus, "horse".

Horseback riding (or riding in British English)
Examples of this are:
 * Equestrian sports
 * Equestrian order, one of the upper classes in ancient Rome
 * Equestrian statue, a statue of a leader on horseback
 * Equestrian nomads, one of various nomadic or semi-nomadic ethnic groups whose culture places special emphasis on horse breeding and riding
 * Equestrian at the Summer Olympics, a division of Olympic Games competition

Other

 * The ship Equestrian, used to transport convicts from England to Australia, for example Alfred Dancey.

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

title: Equestrian


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Dummy

Dummy may refer to:

Dolls

 * Mannequin, a model of the human body
 * Dummy (ventriloquism)
 * Crash test dummy

People

 * Dummy (nickname), any of several people with the nickname
 * Dummy, the Witch of Sible Hedingham (c. 1788–1863), one of the last people to be accused of being a witch in England

Characters

 * Dummy (Marvel Comics), from the comic book X-Men
 * Dummy (DC Comics)

Films

 * Dummy (1979 film), a TV movie starring LeVar Burton and Paul Sorvino
 * Dummy (2002 film), a comedy/drama
 * Dummy, a 2009 coming-of-age drama starring Emma Catherwood
 * Dummy, a short film by Kira Muratova
 * The Dummy (1917 film), an American silent drama
 * The Dummy (1929 film), an American comedy

Music

 * Dummy (album), 1994, by Portishead
 * "Dummy", a song by 6ix9ine from the album Dummy Boy
 * "Dummy!", a track from the soundtrack of the 2015 video game Undertale by Toby Fox
 * "Dummy", a song by Portugal. The Man from the album Chris Black Changed My Life
 * "Dummy", a 2023 song by Keung To

Television

 * "Dummy" (Pushing Daisies episode)
 * "The Dummy", an episode of The Twilight Zone
 * Dummy (TV series), a 2020 web comedy

Other

 * Dummy, in contract bridge, the partner of the player who wins the auction, or that player's hand

Linguistics

 * Dummy auxiliary, such as do in some English sentences
 * Dummy pronoun, such as it in the sentence it is good to relax

Military

 * Dummy round, a round of ammunition that is completely inert
 * Military dummy, fake military equipment used for deception

Sport

 * Dummy (football), an association football (soccer), rugby league and rugby union ruse
 * Dummy pass, in rugby league football

Other uses

 * Dummy Lake (disambiguation), any of several places
 * Dummy sheet, a blank sheet folded as a pre-print newspaper test
 * Dummy variable, another term for bound variable in mathematics
 * Dummy variable (statistics), another term for binary variable in statistics
 * Pacifier, called a dummy in some countries
 * Steam dummy, a steam engine made to resemble a railroad passenger coach

title: Dummy


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Chelsea Physic Garden

The Chelsea Physic Garden was established as the Apothecaries' Garden in London, England, in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries to grow plants to be used as medicines. This four acre physic garden, the term here referring to the science of healing, is among the oldest botanical gardens in Britain, after the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. Its rock garden is the oldest in Europe devoted to alpine plants and Mediterranean plants. The largest fruiting olive tree in Britain is there, protected by the garden's heat-trapping high brick walls, along with what is doubtless the world's northernmost grapefruit growing outdoors. Jealously guarded during the tenure of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the garden became a registered charity in 1983 and was opened to the general public for the first time.

The garden is a member of the London Museums of Health & Medicine. It is also Grade I listed in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England by English Heritage.

History

The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries initially established the garden on a leased site of Sir John Danvers' well-established garden in Chelsea, London. This house, called Danvers House, adjoined the mansion that had once been the house of Sir Thomas More. Danvers House was pulled down in 1696 to make room for Danvers Street.

In 1713, Sir Hans Sloane purchased from Charles Cheyne the adjacent Manor of Chelsea, about 4 acre, which he leased in 1722 to the Society of Apothecaries for £5 a year in perpetuity, requiring in the Deed of Conveyance that the garden supply the Royal Society, of which he was a principal, with 50 good herbarium samples per year, up to a total of 2,000 plants.

That initiated the golden age of the Chelsea Physic Garden under the direction of Philip Miller (1722–1770), when it became the world's most richly stocked botanic garden. Its seed-exchange programme was established following a visit in 1682 from Paul Hermann, a Dutch botanist connected with the Hortus Botanicus Leiden and has lasted until the present day. The seed exchange programme's most notable act may have been the introduction of cotton into the colony of Georgia and more recently, the worldwide spread of the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus).

Isaac Rand, a member and a fellow of the Royal Society, published a condensed catalogue of the garden in 1730, Index plantarum officinalium, quas ad materiae medicae scientiam promovendam, in horto Chelseiano. Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal (1737–1739) was illustrated partly from specimens taken from the Chelsea Physic Garden. In 1781, the collection of specimens was donated by the Royal Society to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, then moved in 1881 to the Department of Botany of the British Museum in Kensington, now the Natural History Museum.

Sir Joseph Banks worked with the head gardener and curator John Fairbairn during the 1780–1814 period. Fairbairn specialized in growing and cultivating plants from around the world.

Parts of the garden have been lost to road development – the river bank during 1874 construction of the Chelsea Embankment on the north bank of the River Thames, and a strip of the garden to allow widening of Royal Hospital Road. What remains is a 3.5 acre patch in the heart of London.

The Trustees of the London Parochial Charities took over management of the garden in 1899 and for the majority of the twentieth century, it was used for scientific research and was not open to the public. In 1983, the garden became a charity and was run by a private board of trustees, and a few years later in 1987, it was open to the general public for the first time.

As of 2020, the chairman of the trust that manages the garden is Michael Prideaux. His predecessor was Sarah Troughton. The garden director is Sue Medway. As of 2020 the garden is raising funds to restore the historic glasshouses on the site.

Current garden
As of October 2017, the garden included 5,000 plants, in areas such as:
 * The Garden of Medicinal Plants
 * The Pharmaceutical Garden, with plants arranged according to the ailment they are used to treat
 * The Garden of World Medicine, with medicinal plants arranged by the culture which uses them
 * The Garden of Edible and Useful Plants
 * The World Woodland Garden

Associated people
• William Aiton

• Johann Amman

• Alexander Anderson

• Joseph Banks

• John Bartram

• Elizabeth Blackwell

• Edward Augustus Bowles

• Mark Catesby

• Lilian Clarke

• William Curtis

• Samuel Doody

• Henry Field (apothecary)

• William Forsyth

• Robert Fortune

• John Fraser

• John Graeffer

• William Houstoun

• William Hudson

• Jacob van Huysum

• Lee and Kennedy

• John Lindley

• Carl Linnaeus

• William Gregor MacKenzie

• Georg Christian Oeder

• Anthony du Gard Pasley

• Robert Petre, 8th Baron Petre

• James Sherard

• Hans Sloane

• Daniel Solander

• Mary Somerset

• Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward

title: Chelsea Physic Garden


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Gelett Burgess

Frank Gelett Burgess (January 30, 1866 – September 18, 1951) was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, and association with The Crowd literary group. He is best known as a writer of nonsense verse, such as "The Purple Cow," and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris." He was the illustrator of the Goops murals, in Coppa's restaurant, in the Montgomery Block and author of the popular Goops books. Burgess coined the term "blurb."

Early life
Born in Boston, Burgess was "raised among staid, conservative New England gentry". He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a B.S. in 1887. After graduation, Burgess fled conservative Boston for the livelier bohemia of San Francisco, where he worked as a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1891, he was hired by the University of California at Berkeley as an instructor of topographical drawing.

Cogswell fountain incident
In 1894, Burgess lost his job at Berkeley as a result of his involvement in an attack on one of San Francisco's three Cogswell fountains, free water fountains named after the pro-temperance advocate Henry Cogswell who had donated them to the city in 1883. As The San Francisco Call noted a year before the incident, Cogswell's message, combined with his enormous image, irritated many:

"It is supposed to convey a lesson on temperance, as the doctor stands proudly on the pedestal, with his whiskers flung to the rippling breezes. In his right hand he holds a temperance pledge rolled up like a sausage, and the other used to contain a goblet overflowing with heaven's own nectar. But wicked boys shattered the emblem of teetotalism with their pea-shooters and now the doctor's heart is heavy within him."

In response, numerous acts of minor vandalism had been inflicted upon the fountain.

"Four iron posts with ornate lamps at the top originally graced the corners of this gurgling example of temperance, but now they lean and lurch and pitch like a drunken quadrille. Beer wagons heavy laden humped into the posts, shattered the stained-glass lamps and destroyed their equilibrium. Some of the lamps are canted over like a tipsy man's hat, and the whole group presents a most convivial aspect."

The toppling incident took place in the early hours of January 1, 1894. As the Call reported,

"Some iconoclastic spirits, probably made bold by too freely indulging in the convivialities of New Year's day, found vent for their destructive proclivities in the small hours of the morning yesterday. With the greatest deliberation, apparently, a rope was coiled around the mock presentment of Dr. Cogswell and with a strong pull, and all together, he was toppled from his fountain pedestal at the Junction of California and Market streets."

The newspaper noted that "no one professes to have knowledge of the perpetrators of the outrage," and no arrests had been, or were, made. However, Burgess's involvement was suspected and is generally viewed as the reason for his resignation from the university, reported by the Call on March 10, 1894, with the note that the resignation was "to take effect with the close of the year."

Burgess is now held in high regard at the University of California, Berkeley as a former professor and literary talent. A selection of his original works and his papers are housed in the Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus.

The Lark and its descendants

Burgess's departure from the university became an opportunity to reconsider his professional aspirations. With a group of like-minded associates, he founded in 1895 a humorous little magazine entitled The Lark. "The double meaning of its name was intended. While it would sing at heaven's gate, it would do so as a merry adventure and have fun with the little-magazine movement."

The Lark was more successful than its makers intended, eventually reaching a circulation of over 3,000. Before the official publication date, local publisher/bookseller William Doxey, intrigued by the first number, agreed to act as official publisher of the venture. Volume 1, number 1 of the 16-page monthly appeared on May Day: May 1, 1895.

I never saw a purple cow I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I'd rather see than be one!

"The Purple Cow" (the full title was "The Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least"), an illustrated four-line poem that appeared in the first number of The Lark, was to remain the ne plus ultra of nonsense verse that Burgess would spend his life unsuccessfully attempting to surpass.

At first, the magazine was edited and written primarily by Burgess, who took great delight in creating pseudonyms for himself. For example, in volume 1, four of the other "authors" are Burgess writing under different names.

The magazine soon attracted an eclectic group of contributors who hung out at the Montgomery Block building, who became known as "Les Jeunes" (English: the youth). Burgess was initially assisted by writer-artist Bruce Porter. These included Porter Garnett (who also took on editorial responsibilities), Carolyn Wells, Willis Polk, Yone Noguchi, and others. Local artists, including Ernest Peixotto, Florence Lundborg and Maynard Dixon, contributed illustrations and cover designs.

Number 24 of The Lark (April 1897) was declared to be the last, but a final issue, number 25 entitled The Epi-Lark, was published May 1, 1897.

By this point, Burgess had become thoroughly sick of "The Purple Cow", and wrote the following "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue" in The Lark, number 24 (April 1, 1897).

Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple Cow"— I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it; But I can tell you Anyhow I'll Kill you if you Quote it!

"Purple Cow" has been used as a brand name.

Subsequently, Burgess and publisher William Doxey recycled Burgess's contributions in such productions as The Purple Cow (1899) and ''The Lark Almanack (1899).

Another Lark spinoff, created by Burgess and friends one night in 1896, is Le Petit Journal des Refusées. Purporting to be composed of material written by women and rejected by other magazines, Le Petit Journal des Refusées was printed on wallpaper and cut to an irregular shape. It was announced with a mock call for submissions in the sixth issue of The Lark.

New York, France, later life
Burgess moved to New York City, where he wrote several books and articles for magazines including The Smart Set, Collier's, and Century. He made several trips to France and was evidently fluent in French. Eventually he returned to California, where he died in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1951.

In 1919, Rollin Lynde Hartt published an article about Burgess as one of "the funniest men who ever lived," which appeared in newspapers nationwide.

Burgess married Estelle Loomis at a Unitarian church in New York City in June 1914, and they were honeymooning in France when World War I broke out. A writer in her own right, Estelle Loomis worked on a number of literary projects throughout her marriage with Burgess, the two conferring together on each other's work. She was also an actress and a beauty contest winner. She was photographed shortly before their marriage by Arnold Genthe. Burgess and Loomis remained married until her death in 1947; however, she frequently suffered from illness and fatigue. They had no children.

The Wild Men of Paris
Leading up to 1910, one year before the scandalous group exhibiting that brought "Cubism" to the attention of the general public, Burgess wrote an influential article titled, The Wild Men of Paris. This illustrated text introduced Proto-Cubist art in the United States for the first time. It included the first reproduction of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Written after his visit to the 1910 Salon des Indépendants—the well-established anti-establishment art exhibition in Paris—the article drew from interviews with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Jean Metzinger, Auguste Herbin and Béla Czóbel. The Wild Men of Paris was partly humorous but partly serious.

Burgess wrote of Matisse's 1907 painting Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) in humorist fashion:

 There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses. Still-life sketches of round, round apples and yellow, yellow oranges, on square, square tables, seen in impossible perspective; landscapes of squirming trees, with blobs of virgin color gone wrong, fierce greens and coruscating yellows, violent purples, sickening reds and shuddering blues.

But the nudes! They looked like flayed Martians, like pathological charts—hideous old women, patched with gruesome hues, lopsided, with arms like the arms of a Swastika, sprawling on vivid backgrounds, or frozen stiffly upright, glaring through misshapen eyes, with noses or fingers missing. They defied anatomy, physiology, almost geometry itself!

Other literary works
Burgess's completely serious writings include "War the Creator", an account of a young man he had met in Paris in July 1914, and saw again as a wounded soldier a few months later: "a boy who, in two months, became a man."

Burgess wrote and illustrated several children's books about the habits of strange, baldheaded, idiosyncratic childlike creatures he called the Goops. He created the syndicated comic strip Goops in 1924, and worked on it to its end in 1925.

His books The Maxims of Methuselah and The Maxims of Noah were illustrated by Louis D. Fancher.

Film adaptations
Many of Burgess's works were adapted for the screen, beginning with The Persistent Mr. Prince, a short film released by Vitagraph in 1914. Two films based on Burgess's stories were released in 1917, The Mysterious Miss Terry and The Countess Charming. Burgess's novel The White Cat (1907) was adapted into two films, The Two-Soul Woman (1918) and The Untameable (1923). A Manhattan Knight (1920) was adapted from Burgess's novel Find the Woman. The Heart Line (1921) was based on Burgess's novel of the same name. The Caveman (1926) was adapted from Burgess's 1915 play. All of these were silent films.

In the sound film era, Burgess's novel Two O'Clock Courage was adapted into the 1936 film Two in the Dark and the 1945 movie Two O'Clock Courage.

Legacy

The word "blurb", meaning a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes, was coined by Burgess in 1906, in attributing the dust jacket of his book, Are You a Bromide?, to a "Miss Belinda Blurb" depicted "in the act of blurbing". His definition of "blurb" is "a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial".

In that book "Are You a Bromide?" and related essay "The Sulphitic Theory", Burgess is credited for coining the usage of the word "bromide" as a personification of a sedate, dull person who said boring things. Bromide meant either the boring person himself or the trite statement of that person.

In his blurb for Are You a Bromide?, Burgess mentions a popular book titled Janice Meredith, which was written by Paul Leicester Ford, and published in 1899 by Dodd Mead. Janice Meredith happens to be one of the first books to have a blurb on its dust jacket. It was originally printed with a blue cover, and Burgess' humorous mention (in 1906) that its cover has "faded to a mauve magenta", seems to be a suggestion that it is time for a new book.

He also coined the phrase, "Love is only chatter; friends are all that matter."

The Gelett Burgess Center for Creative Expression was formed in Burgess's name in Portland, Oregon, in December 2011 to promote "family-friendly books" to parents and educators. Annually, the Gelett Burgess Children's Book Award is given in his honor to the top children's books of the year.

Burgess founded the San Francisco Boys' Club Association, now the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, in 1891 and became its first president. The club was the first of its kind west of the Mississippi River.

Burgess was a friend of the British writer Oliver Onions, and encouraged Onions to write fiction.

Works

 * "Vivette" (1897); novelette
 * The Lively City O'Ligg (1899); juvenile
 * Goops, and How to be Them (1900); juvenile
 * A Gage of Youth (1901); poems, chiefly from The Lark
 * The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901); prose and verse
 * The Romance of the Commonplace (1901)
 * More Goops, and How Not to Be Them (1903); juvenile
 * The Reign of Queen Isyl (1903); short stories in collaboration with Will Irwin
 * The Picaroons (1904); short stories in collaboration with Will Irwin
 * The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne (1904); satire
 * Goop Tales Alphabetically Told (1904); juvenile
 * A Little Sister of Destiny (1904); short stories
 * Are You a Bromide? (1906); short book, Open source e-book (California Digital Library)
 * The White Cat (1907); novel
 * The Heart Line (1907); novel, e-book (Internet Archive)
 * The Maxims of Methuselah (1907); satire
 * Blue Goops and Red (1909); juvenile
 * Lady Mechante (1909); novel
 * Find the Woman (1911); novel
 * The Master of Mysteries (1912)
 * The Maxims of Noah (1913)
 * The Goop Directory (1913); juvenile
 * "War, the Creator" (magazine essay 1915, book 1916)
 * Mrs. Hope's Husband (1917)
 * The Goop Encyclopedia: Containing Every Child's Every Fault (1916); juvenile
 * Have You an Educated Heart? (1923)
 * Ain't Angie Awful (1923)
 * Why Be a Goop? (1924); juvenile
 * Why Men Hate Women (1927)
 * Two O'Clock Courage (1934)
 * Look Eleven Years Younger (1937)
 * The Goop Song Book (1941), music by Elizabeth Merz Butterfield
 * New Goops and How To Know Them (1951); juvenile

title: Gelett Burgess