title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Gabriel decides to rejoin the Continentals and Benjamin soon follows, leaving the younger children in the care of Benjamin's sister-in-law, Charlotte. While traveling, they witness American soldiers and militiamen under General Horatio Gates engaging the British Army. Benjamin points out the foolishness of undisciplined and untested men fighting well-trained British regulars on open ground; sure enough, the Continentals are decisively routed. Benjamin meets his former commanding officer, Col. Harry Burwell, who appoints him as colonel of a newly raised militia unit due to his combat experience and also places Gabriel under his father's command. Benjamin is tasked with weakening Lord Cornwallis's regiments through a sustained campaign of guerrilla warfare. Benjamin is also provided the service of French Major Jean Villeneuve, who helps train the militia and promises more French aid.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Gabriel asks why Villeneuve and others often mention an incident at Fort Wilderness. Benjamin, having been hesitant to answer the question up to now, finally tells his son: while fighting in the British Army, he and several other soldiers discovered French soldiers committing an atrocity against British colonists. The enraged men caught up with the retreating French at Fort Wilderness and killed all but two of them. The survivors were forced to gather the heads of their comrades and present them to the Cherokee, convincing the tribe to betray the French and side with the British. Benjamin reveals that he has been haunted by guilt ever since.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Benjamin's militia carries out brutal ambushes of British patrols and supply caravans, even capturing some of Cornwallis' personal effects and his two Great Danes, and burn the bridges and ferries needed by Cornwallis. The general angrily blames Tavington for his setbacks, but when Benjamin uses what Cornwallis perceives as a dishonorable ploy to free some of the captured men, he reluctantly permits Tavington to do whatever he pleases if it puts a stop to the attacks. With the reluctant aid of Wilkins, a local Loyalist, Tavington has the homes of several militiamen burned and their families executed. Benjamin's family flees Charlotte's plantation as it is burned to live in a Gullah settlement with formerly enslaved residents. There, Gabriel marries his betrothed, Anne.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Tavington's brigade raids a town that has been secretly providing the militia with food. He has all the residents, including Anne and her parents, assembled in the church and demands the location of their camp. After their location is given, he has the doors barricaded, and orders the church to be burned, killing everyone inside. When they discover the tragedy, Gabriel and several other soldiers attack Tavington's encampment; Tavington is wounded but manages to kill Gabriel before retreating. Benjamin mourns and contemplates desertion before being reminded of his son's dedication to the cause by finding an American flag he repaired. Martin's militia, along with a larger Continental Army regiment, confronts Cornwallis' troops in a decisive battle at Cowpens. Benjamin rallies his side, and he and Tavington meet in personal combat. Tavington disarms and wounds Benjamin with his saber, before preparing to deliver the coup de grâce. At the last second, Benjamin dodges the attack and impales Tavington twice in the abdomen and throat respectively, killing him. The battle is a Continental victory, and Cornwallis sounds the retreat.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: After many retreats, Cornwallis is besieged at Yorktown, Virginia where he surrenders to the surrounding Continental Army and the long-awaited French naval force. After the conflict ends, Benjamin returns to his family, with Charlotte carrying their new baby, and discovers members of his former militia unit rebuilding his homestead on their old town road.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Screenwriter Robert Rodat wrote seventeen drafts of the script before there was an acceptable one. In an early version, Anne is pregnant with Gabriel's child when she dies in the burning church. Rodat wrote the script with Gibson in mind for Benjamin Martin, and gave the Martin character six children to signal this preference to studio executives. After the birth of Gibson's seventh child, the script was changed so that Martin had seven children. Like the character William Wallace, which Gibson portrayed in "Braveheart" five years earlier, Martin is a man seeking to live his life in peace until revenge drives him to lead a cause against a national enemy after the life of an innocent family member is taken.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Harrison Ford turned down the lead role of Benjamin Martin because he considered the film "too violent," and that, "it boiled the American Revolution down to one guy wanting revenge." Gibson was paid a record salary of $25 million. Joshua Jackson, Elijah Wood, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Brad Renfro were considered to play Gabriel Martin. The producers and director narrowed their choices for the role of Gabriel to Ryan Phillippe and Heath Ledger, with the latter chosen because Emmerich thought he possessed "exuberant youth".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The film's German director Emmerich said "these were characters I could relate to, and they were engaged in a conflict that had a significant outcome—the creation of the first modern democratic government."


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The film was shot entirely on location in South Carolina, including Charleston, Rock Hill—for many of the battle scenes, and Lowrys—for the farm of Benjamin Martin, as well as nearby Fort Lawn. Other scenes were filmed at Mansfield Plantation, an antebellum rice plantation in Georgetown, Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Cistern Yard on the campus of College of Charleston, and Hightower Hall and Homestead House at Brattonsville, South Carolina, along with the grounds of the Brattonsville Plantation in McConnells, South Carolina. Producer Mark Gordon said the production team "tried their best to be as authentic as possible" because "the backdrop was serious history," giving attention to details in period dress. Producer Dean Devlin and the film's costume designers examined actual Revolutionary War uniforms at the Smithsonian Institution prior to shooting.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The musical score for "The Patriot" was composed and conducted by John Williams and was nominated for an Academy Award. David Arnold, who composed the scores to Emmerich's "Stargate", "Independence Day", and "Godzilla", created a demo for "The Patriot" that was ultimately rejected. As a result, Arnold never returned to compose for any of Emmerich's subsequent films and was replaced by Harald Kloser and Thomas Wander.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 62% based on 137 reviews, with an average rating of 6.10/10. The site's critics consensus reads: ""The Patriot" can be entertaining to watch, but it relies too much on formula and melodrama." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The New York Times" critic Elvis Mitchell gave the film a generally negative review, although he praised its casting and called Mel Gibson "an astonishing actor", particularly for his "on-screen comfort and expansiveness". He said the film is a "gruesome hybrid, a mix of sentimentality and brutality". Jamie Malanowski, also writing in "The New York Times", said "The Patriot" "will prove to many a satisfying way to spend a summer evening. It's got big battles and wrenching hand-to-hand combat, a courageous but conflicted hero and a dastardly and totally guilt-free villain, thrills, tenderness, sorrow, rage and a little bit of kissing".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: A highly positive review was purportedly written by a critic named David Manning, who was credited to "The Ridgefield Press", a small Connecticut weekly news publication. During an investigation into Manning's quotes, "Newsweek" reporter John Horn discovered that the newspaper had never heard of him. The story emerged at around the same time as an announcement that Sony had used employees posing as moviegoers in television commercials to praise the film. These occurrences, in tandem, raised questions and controversy about ethics in film promotion practices.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: On the June 10, 2001, episode of "Le Show", host Harry Shearer conducted an in-studio interview with Manning, whose "review" of the film was positive. The voice of Manning was provided by a computer voice synthesizer.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: On August 3, 2005, Sony made an out-of-court settlement and agreed to refund $5 each to dissatisfied customers who saw this and four other films in American theaters, as a result of Manning's reviews.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Patriot" opened in 3,061 venues at #2 with $22,413,710 domestically in its opening weekend, falling slightly short of expectations (predictions had the film opening #1 with roughly $25 million ahead). The film opened behind Warner Bros.'s "The Perfect Storm", which opened at #1 with $41,325,042. The film closed on October 16, 2000 with $113,330,342 domestically, which barely recouped its budget of $110 million. It was successful overseas grossing $101,964,000 with a grand total of $215,294,342.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Patriot" was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound (Kevin O'Connell, Greg P. Russell and Lee Orloff). It also received several guild awards, including the American Society of Cinematographers award to Caleb Deschanel for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography and the Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Award for Best Period Makeup and Best Period Hair Styling.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: During development, Emmerich and his team consulted with experts at the Smithsonian Institution on set, props, and costumes; advisor Rex Ellis even recommended the Gullah village as an appropriate place for Martin's family to hide. In addition, screenwriter Robert Rodat read through many journals and letters of colonists as part of his preparation for writing the screenplay.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Producer Mark Gordon said that in making the film, "while we were telling a fictional story, the backdrop was serious history". Some of the resulting characters and events thus were composites of real characters and events that were designed to serve the fictional narrative without losing the historical flavor. Rodat said of Gibson's character: "Benjamin Martin is a composite character made up of Thomas Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens, and Francis Marion, and a few bits and pieces from a number of other characters." Rodat also indicated that the fictional Colonel William Tavington is "loosely based on Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who was particularly known for his brutal acts".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: While some events, such as Tarleton's pursuit of Francis Marion and his fellow irregular soldiers who escaped by disappearing into the swamps of South Carolina, were loosely based on history, and others were adapted, such as the final battle in the film which combined elements of the Battles of Cowpens and Battle of Guilford Court House, most of the plot events in the film are pure fiction.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The film was harshly criticized in the British press in part because of its connection to Francis Marion, a militia leader in South Carolina known as the "Swamp Fox". After the release of "The Patriot", the British newspaper "The Guardian" denounced Marion as "a serial rapist who hunted Red Indians for fun." Historian Christopher Hibbert said of Marion:


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Patriot" does not depict the American character Benjamin Martin as innocent of atrocities; a key plot point revolves around the character's guilt over acts he engaged in, such as torturing, killing, and mutilating prisoners during the French and Indian War, leading him to repentantly repudiate General Cornwallis for the brutality of his men.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Conservative radio host Michael Graham rejected Hibbert's criticism of Marion in a commentary published in "National Review":


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Was Francis Marion a slave owner? Was he a determined and dangerous warrior? Did he commit acts in an 18th century war that we would consider atrocious in the current world of peace and political correctness? As another great American film hero might say: 'You're damn right.' "That's what made him a hero, 200 years ago and today."


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Graham also refers to what he describes as "the unchallenged work of South Carolina's premier historian" Dr. Walter Edgar, who claimed in his 1998 "South Carolina: A History" that Marion's partisans were "a ragged band of both black and white volunteers".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Amy Crawford, in "Smithsonian" magazine, stated that modern historians such as William Gilmore Simms and Hugh Rankin have written accurate biographies of Marion, including Simms' "The Life of Francis Marion". The introduction to the 2007 edition of Simms' book was written by Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, who wrote:


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence...Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians...Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: During pre-production, the producers debated on whether Martin would own slaves, ultimately deciding not to make him a slave owner. This decision received criticism from Spike Lee, who in a letter to "The Hollywood Reporter" accused the film's portrayal of slavery as being "a complete whitewashing of history". Lee wrote that after he and his wife went to see the film, "we both came out of the theatre fuming. For three hours "The Patriot" dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery." Gibson himself remarked: "I think I would have made him a slave holder. Not to seems kind of a cop-out."


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: After release, several British voices criticized the film for its depiction of the film's villain Tavington and defended the historical character of Banastre Tarleton. Ben Fenton, commenting in the "Daily Telegraph", wrote:


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: There is no evidence that Tarleton, called 'Bloody Ban' or 'The Butcher' in rebel pamphlets, ever broke the rules of war and certainly did not ever shoot a child in cold blood.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Although Tarleton gained the reputation among Americans as a butcher for his involvement in the Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina, he was a hero in the City of Liverpool. Liverpool City Council, led by Mayor Edwin Clein, called for a public apology for what they viewed as the film's "character assassination" of Tarleton.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: What happened during the Battle of The Waxhaws, known to the Americans as the Buford Massacre or as the Waxhaw massacre, is the subject of debate. According to an American field surgeon named Robert Brownfield who witnessed the events, the Continental Army Col. Buford raised a white flag of surrender, "expecting the usual treatment sanctioned by civilized warfare". While Buford was calling for quarter, Tarleton's horse was struck by a musket ball and fell. This gave the Loyalist cavalrymen the impression that the Continentals had shot at their commander while asking for mercy. Enraged, the Loyalist troops charged at the Virginians. According to Brownfield, the Loyalists attacked, carrying out "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the most ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: In Tarleton's own account, he stated that his horse had been shot from under him during the initial charge in which he was knocked out for several minutes and that his men, thinking him dead, engaged in "a vindictive asperity not easily restrained".


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Tarleton's role in the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas is examined by Ben Rubin who shows that historically, while the actual events of the Battle of the Waxhaws were presented differently according to which side was recounting them, the story of Tarleton's atrocities at Waxhaws and on other occasions became a rallying cry, particularly at the Battle of King's Mountain. The tales of Tarleton's atrocities were a part of standard U.S. accounts of the war and were described by Washington Irving and by Christopher Ward in his 1952 history, "The War of the Revolution", where Tarleton is described as "cold-hearted, vindictive, and utterly ruthless. He wrote his name in letters of blood all across the history of the war in the South." Not until Anthony Scotti's 2002 book, "Brutal Virtue: The Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton", were Tarleton's actions fully reexamined. Scotti challenged the factual accounts of atrocities and stressed the "propaganda value that such stories held for the Americans both during and after the war". Scotti's book, however, did not come out until two years after "The Patriot". Screenwriters consulting American works to build the character Tavington based on Tarleton would have commonly found descriptions of him as barbaric and accounts of his name being used for recruiting and motivation during the Revolutionary War itself.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: Whereas Tavington is depicted as aristocratic but penniless, Tarleton came from a wealthy Liverpool merchant family. Tarleton did not die in battle or from impalement, as Tavington did in the film. Tarleton died on January 16, 1833, in Leintwardine, Herefordshire, England, at the age of 78, nearly 50 years after the war ended. He outlived Col. Francis Marion who died in 1795, by 38 years. Before his death, Tarleton had achieved the military rank of General, equal to that held by the overall British Commanders during the American Revolution, and became a baronet and a member of the British Parliament.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Patriot" was criticized for misrepresenting atrocities during the Revolutionary War, including the killing of prisoners of war and wounded soldiers and burning a church filled with townsfolk. While atrocities occurred during the war, the most striking of the film's depictions of British atrocities—the burning of a church full of unarmed colonial civilians—had virtually no factual basis nor parallel in the American or European 18th century wars, with the exception of the Massacre at Lucs-sur-Boulogne () in 1794, which was a purely French affair with no connection to British troops nor the American Revolution. The "New York Post" film critic Jonathan Foreman was one of several focusing on this distortion in the film and wrote the following in an article at Salon.com:


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: The most disturbing thing about "The Patriot" is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of" Independence Day)" and his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding the roles played by British and other Allied troops in the Normandy landings from his script for "Saving Private Ryan") depicted British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops—particularly the SS in World War II. It's hard not to wonder if the filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda... They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour—and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history's worst monsters... So it's no wonder that the British press sees this film as a kind of blood libel against the British people.


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Washington Post" film critic Stephen Hunter, a historian of the era, said: "Any image of the American Revolution which represents you Brits as Nazis and us as gentle folk is almost certainly wrong. It was a very bitter war, a total war, and that is something that I am afraid has been lost to history...[T]he presence of the Loyalists (colonists who did not want to join the fight for independence from Britain) meant that the War of Independence was a conflict of complex loyalties." The historian Richard F. Snow, editor of "American Heritage" magazine, said of the church-burning scene: "Of course it never happened—if it had do you think Americans would have forgotten it? It could have kept us out of World War I."


title: The Patriot (2000 film)

text: "The Patriot" was released on DVD on October 24, 2000, a Blu-ray release followed on July 3, 2007. The Patriot was later released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on May 22, 2018.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine is a chemical element with the symbol I and atomic number 53. The heaviest of the stable halogens, it exists as a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid at standard conditions that melts to form a deep violet liquid at , and boils to a violet gas at . The element was discovered by the French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811 and was named two years later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, after the Ancient Greek 'violet-coloured'.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine occurs in many oxidation states, including iodide (I), iodate (), and the various periodate anions. It is the least abundant of the stable halogens, being the sixty-first most abundant element. As the heaviest essential mineral nutrient, iodine is required for the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities.


title: Iodine

text: The dominant producers of iodine today are Chile and Japan. Due to its high atomic number and ease of attachment to organic compounds, it has also found favour as a non-toxic radiocontrast material. Because of the specificity of its uptake by the human body, radioactive isotopes of iodine can also be used to treat thyroid cancer. Iodine is also used as a catalyst in the industrial production of acetic acid and some polymers.


title: Iodine

text: In 1811, iodine was discovered by French chemist Bernard Courtois, who was born to a manufacturer of saltpetre (an essential component of gunpowder). At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, saltpetre was in great demand in France. Saltpetre produced from French nitre beds required sodium carbonate, which could be isolated from seaweed collected on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. To isolate the sodium carbonate, seaweed was burned and the ash washed with water. The remaining waste was destroyed by adding sulfuric acid. Courtois once added excessive sulfuric acid and a cloud of purple vapour rose. He noted that the vapour crystallised on cold surfaces, making dark crystals. Courtois suspected that this material was a new element but lacked funding to pursue it further.


title: Iodine

text: Courtois gave samples to his friends, Charles Bernard Desormes (1777–1838) and Nicolas Clément (1779–1841), to continue research. He also gave some of the substance to chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), and to physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836). On 29 November 1813, Desormes and Clément made Courtois' discovery public. They described the substance to a meeting of the Imperial Institute of France. On 6 December, Gay-Lussac announced that the new substance was either an element or a compound of oxygen. Gay-Lussac suggested the name ""iode"", from the Ancient Greek (, "violet"), because of the colour of iodine vapor. Ampère had given some of his sample to English chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829), who experimented on the substance and noted its similarity to chlorine. Davy sent a letter dated 10 December to the Royal Society of London stating that he had identified a new element. Arguments erupted between Davy and Gay-Lussac over who identified iodine first, but both scientists acknowledged Courtois as the first to isolate the element.


title: Iodine

text: In 1873 the French medical researcher Casimir Joseph Davaine (1812–1882) discovered the antiseptic action of iodine. Antonio Grossich (1849–1926), an Istrian-born surgeon, was among the first to use sterilisation of the operative field. In 1908, he introduced tincture of iodine as a way to rapidly sterilise the human skin in the surgical field.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine is the fourth halogen, being a member of group 17 in the periodic table, below fluorine, chlorine, and bromine; it is the heaviest stable member of its group. (The fifth and sixth halogens, the radioactive astatine and tennessine, are not well-studied due to their expense and inaccessibility in large quantities, but appear to show various unusual properties for the group due to relativistic effects.) Iodine has an electron configuration of [Kr]4d5s5p, with the seven electrons in the fifth and outermost shell being its valence electrons. Like the other halogens, it is one electron short of a full octet and is hence an oxidising agent, reacting with many elements in order to complete its outer shell, although in keeping with periodic trends, it is the weakest oxidising agent among the stable halogens: it has the lowest electronegativity among them, just 2.66 on the Pauling scale (compare fluorine, chlorine, and bromine at 3.98, 3.16, and 2.96 respectively; astatine continues the trend with an electronegativity of 2.2). Elemental iodine hence forms diatomic molecules with chemical formula I, where two iodine atoms share a pair of electrons in order to each achieve a stable octet for themselves; at high temperatures, these diatomic molecules reversibly dissociate a pair of iodine atoms. Similarly, the iodide anion, I, is the strongest reducing agent among the stable halogens, being the most easily oxidised back to diatomic I. (Astatine goes further, being indeed unstable as At and readily oxidised to At or At.)


title: Iodine

text: The halogens darken in colour as the group is descended: fluorine is a very pale yellow, chlorine is greenish-yellow, bromine is reddish-brown, and iodine is violet.


title: Iodine

text: Elemental iodine is slightly soluble in water, with one gram dissolving in 3450 ml at 20 °C and 1280 ml at 50 °C; potassium iodide may be added to increase solubility via formation of triiodide ions, among other polyiodides. Nonpolar solvents such as hexane and carbon tetrachloride provide a higher solubility. Polar solutions, such as aqueous solutions, are brown, reflecting the role of these solvents as Lewis bases; on the other hand, nonpolar solutions are violet, the color of iodine vapour. Charge-transfer complexes form when iodine is dissolved in polar solvents, hence changing the colour. Iodine is violet when dissolved in carbon tetrachloride and saturated hydrocarbons but deep brown in alcohols and amines, solvents that form charge-transfer adducts.


title: Iodine

text: The melting and boiling points of iodine are the highest among the halogens, conforming to the increasing trend down the group, since iodine has the largest electron cloud among them that is the most easily polarised, resulting in its molecules having the strongest van der Waals interactions among the halogens. Similarly, iodine is the least volatile of the halogens, though the solid still can be observed to give off purple vapor. Due to this property Iodine is commonly used to demonstrate sublimation directly from solid to gas, which gives rise to a misconception that it does not melt in atmospheric pressure. Because it has the largest atomic radius among the halogens, iodine has the lowest first ionisation energy, lowest electron affinity, lowest electronegativity and lowest reactivity of the halogens.


title: Iodine

text: The interhalogen bond in diiodine is the weakest of all the halogens. As such, 1% of a sample of gaseous iodine at atmospheric pressure is dissociated into iodine atoms at 575 °C. Temperatures greater than 750 °C are required for fluorine, chlorine, and bromine to dissociate to a similar extent. Most bonds to iodine are weaker than the analogous bonds to the lighter halogens. Gaseous iodine is composed of I molecules with an I–I bond length of 266.6 pm. The I–I bond is one of the longest single bonds known. It is even longer (271.5 pm) in solid orthorhombic crystalline iodine, which has the same crystal structure as chlorine and bromine. (The record is held by iodine's neighbour xenon: the Xe–Xe bond length is 308.71 pm.) As such, within the iodine molecule, significant electronic interactions occur with the two next-nearest neighbours of each atom, and these interactions give rise, in bulk iodine, to a shiny appearance and semiconducting properties. Iodine is a two-dimensional semiconductor with a band gap of 1.3 eV (125 kJ/mol): it is a semiconductor in the plane of its crystalline layers and an insulator in the perpendicular direction.


title: Iodine

text: Of the thirty-seven known isotopes of iodine, only one occurs in nature, iodine-127. The others are radioactive and have half-lives too short to be primordial. As such, iodine is both monoisotopic and mononuclidic and its atomic weight is known to great precision, as it is a constant of nature.


title: Iodine

text: The longest-lived of the radioactive isotopes of iodine is iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15.7 million years, decaying via beta decay to stable xenon-129. Some iodine-129 was formed along with iodine-127 before the formation of the Solar System, but it has by now completely decayed away, making it an extinct radionuclide that is nevertheless still useful in dating the history of the early Solar System or very old groundwaters, due to its mobility in the environment. Its former presence may be determined from an excess of its daughter xenon-129. Traces of iodine-129 still exist today, as it is also a cosmogenic nuclide, formed from cosmic ray spallation of atmospheric xenon: these traces make up 10 to 10 of all terrestrial iodine. It also occurs from open-air nuclear testing, and is not hazardous because of its very long half-life, the longest of all fission products. At the peak of thermonuclear testing in the 1960s and 1970s, iodine-129 still made up only about 10 of all terrestrial iodine. Excited states of iodine-127 and iodine-129 are often used in Mössbauer spectroscopy.


title: Iodine

text: The other iodine radioisotopes have much shorter half-lives, no longer than days. Some of them have medical applications involving the thyroid gland, where the iodine that enters the body is stored and concentrated. Iodine-123 has a half-life of thirteen hours and decays by electron capture to tellurium-123, emitting gamma radiation; it is used in nuclear medicine imaging, including single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and X-ray computed tomography (X-Ray CT) scans. Iodine-125 has a half-life of fifty-nine days, decaying by electron capture to tellurium-125 and emitting low-energy gamma radiation; the second-longest-lived iodine radioisotope, it has uses in biological assays, nuclear medicine imaging and in radiation therapy as brachytherapy to treat a number of conditions, including prostate cancer, uveal melanomas, and brain tumours. Finally, iodine-131, with a half-life of eight days, beta decays to an excited state of stable xenon-131 that then converts to the ground state by emitting gamma radiation. It is a common fission product and thus is present in high levels in radioactive fallout. It may then be absorbed through contaminated food, and will also accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it may cause damage to the thyroid. The primary risk from exposure to high levels of iodine-131 is the chance occurrence of radiogenic thyroid cancer in later life. Other risks include the possibility of non-cancerous growths and thyroiditis.


title: Iodine

text: The usual means of protection against the negative effects of iodine-131 is by saturating the thyroid gland with stable iodine-127 in the form of potassium iodide tablets, taken daily for optimal prophylaxis. However, iodine-131 may also be used for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy for this very reason, when tissue destruction is desired after iodine uptake by the tissue. Iodine-131 is also used as a radioactive tracer.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine is quite reactive, but it is much less reactive than the other halogens. For example, while chlorine gas will halogenate carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, and sulfur dioxide (to phosgene, nitrosyl chloride, and sulfuryl chloride respectively), iodine will not do so. Furthermore, iodination of metals tends to result in lower oxidation states than chlorination or bromination; for example, rhenium metal reacts with chlorine to form rhenium hexachloride, but with bromine it forms only rhenium pentabromide and iodine can achieve only rhenium tetraiodide. By the same token, however, since iodine has the lowest ionisation energy among the halogens and is the most easily oxidised of them, it has a more significant cationic chemistry and its higher oxidation states are rather more stable than those of bromine and chlorine, for example in iodine heptafluoride.


title: Iodine

text: The iodine molecule, I, dissolves in CCl and aliphatic hydrocarbons to give bright violet solutions. In these solvents the absorption band maximum occurs in the 520 – 540 nm region and is assigned to a to "σ" transition. When I reacts with Lewis bases in these solvents a blue shift in I peak is seen and the new peak (230 – 330 nm) arises that is due to the formation of adducts, which are referred to as charge-transfer complexes.


title: Iodine

text: The simplest compound of iodine is hydrogen iodide, HI. It is a colourless gas that reacts with oxygen to give water and iodine. Although it is useful in iodination reactions in the laboratory, it does not have large-scale industrial uses, unlike the other hydrogen halides. Commercially, it is usually made by reacting iodine with hydrogen sulfide or hydrazine:


title: Iodine

text: At room temperature, it is a colourless gas, like all of the hydrogen halides except hydrogen fluoride, since hydrogen cannot form strong hydrogen bonds to the large and only mildly electronegative iodine atom. It melts at −51.0 °C and boils at −35.1 °C. It is an endothermic compound that can exothermically dissociate at room temperature, although the process is very slow unless a catalyst is present: the reaction between hydrogen and iodine at room temperature to give hydrogen iodide does not proceed to completion. The H–I bond dissociation energy is likewise the smallest of the hydrogen halides, at 295 kJ/mol.


title: Iodine

text: Aqueous hydrogen iodide is known as hydroiodic acid, which is a strong acid. Hydrogen iodide is exceptionally soluble in water: one litre of water will dissolve 425 litres of hydrogen iodide, and the saturated solution has only four water molecules per molecule of hydrogen iodide. Commercial so-called "concentrated" hydroiodic acid usually contains 48–57% HI by mass; the solution forms an azeotrope with boiling point 126.7 °C at 56.7 g HI per 100 g solution. Hence hydroiodic acid cannot be concentrated past this point by evaporation of water.


title: Iodine

text: Unlike hydrogen fluoride, anhydrous liquid hydrogen iodide is difficult to work with as a solvent, because its boiling point is low, it has a small liquid range, its dielectric constant is low and it does not dissociate appreciably into HI and ions – the latter, in any case, are much less stable than the bifluoride ions () due to the very weak hydrogen bonding between hydrogen and iodine, though its salts with very large and weakly polarising cations such as Cs and (R = Me, Et, Bu) may still be isolated. Anhydrous hydrogen iodide is a poor solvent, able to dissolve only small molecular compounds such as nitrosyl chloride and phenol, or salts with very low lattice energies such as tetraalkylammonium halides.


title: Iodine

text: Nearly all elements in the periodic table form binary iodides. The exceptions are decidedly in the minority and stem in each case from one of three causes: extreme inertness and reluctance to participate in chemical reactions (the noble gases); extreme nuclear instability hampering chemical investigation before decay and transmutation (many of the heaviest elements beyond bismuth); and having an electronegativity higher than iodine's (oxygen, nitrogen, and the first three halogens), so that the resultant binary compounds are formally not iodides but rather oxides, nitrides, or halides of iodine. (Nonetheless, nitrogen triiodide is named as an iodide as it is analogous to the other nitrogen trihalides.)


title: Iodine

text: Given the large size of the iodide anion and iodine's weak oxidising power, high oxidation states are difficult to achieve in binary iodides, the maximum known being in the pentaiodides of niobium, tantalum, and protactinium. Iodides can be made by reaction of an element or its oxide, hydroxide, or carbonate with hydroiodic acid, and then dehydrated by mildly high temperatures combined with either low pressure or anhydrous hydrogen iodide gas. These methods work best when the iodide product is stable to hydrolysis; otherwise, the possibilities include high-temperature oxidative iodination of the element with iodine or hydrogen iodide, high-temperature iodination of a metal oxide or other halide by iodine, a volatile metal halide, carbon tetraiodide, or an organic iodide. For example, molybdenum(IV) oxide reacts with aluminium(III) iodide at 230 °C to give molybdenum(II) iodide. An example involving halogen exchange is given below, involving the reaction of tantalum(V) chloride with excess aluminium(III) iodide at 400 °C to give tantalum(V) iodide:


title: Iodine

text: Lower iodides may be produced either through thermal decomposition or disproportionation, or by reducing the higher iodide with hydrogen or a metal, for example:


title: Iodine

text: Most metal iodides with the metal in low oxidation states (+1 to +3) are ionic. Nonmetals tend to form covalent molecular iodides, as do metals in high oxidation states from +3 and above. Both ionic and covalent iodides are known for metals in oxidation state +3 (e.g. scandium iodide is mostly ionic, but aluminium iodide is not). Ionic iodides MI tend to have the lowest melting and boiling points among the halides MX of the same element, because the electrostatic forces of attraction between the cations and anions are weakest for the large iodide anion. In contrast, covalent iodides tend to instead have the highest melting and boiling points among the halides of the same element, since iodine is the most polarisable of the halogens and, having the most electrons among them, can contribute the most to van der Waals forces. Naturally, exceptions abound in intermediate iodides where one trend gives way to the other. Similarly, solubilities in water of predominantly ionic iodides (e.g. potassium and calcium) are the greatest among ionic halides of that element, while those of covalent iodides (e.g. silver) are the lowest of that element. In particular, silver iodide is very insoluble in water and its formation is often used as a qualitative test for iodine.


title: Iodine

text: The halogens form many binary, diamagnetic interhalogen compounds with stoichiometries XY, XY, XY, and XY (where X is heavier than Y), and iodine is no exception. Iodine forms all three possible diatomic interhalogens, a trifluoride and trichloride, as well as a pentafluoride and, exceptionally among the halogens, a heptafluoride. Numerous cationic and anionic derivatives are also characterised, such as the wine-red or bright orange compounds of and the dark brown or purplish black compounds of ICl. Apart from these, some pseudohalides are also known, such as cyanogen iodide (ICN), iodine thiocyanate (ISCN), and iodine azide (IN).


title: Iodine

text: Iodine monofluoride (IF) is unstable at room temperature and disproportionates very readily and irreversibly to iodine and iodine pentafluoride, and thus cannot be obtained pure. It can be synthesised from the reaction of iodine with fluorine gas in trichlorofluoromethane at −45 °C, with iodine trifluoride in trichlorofluoromethane at −78 °C, or with silver(I) fluoride at 0 °C. Iodine monochloride (ICl) and iodine monobromide (IBr), on the other hand, are moderately stable. The former, a volatile red-brown compound, was discovered independently by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Humphry Davy in 1813–1814 not long after the discoveries of chlorine and iodine, and it mimics the intermediate halogen bromine so well that Justus von Liebig was misled into mistaking bromine (which he had found) for iodine monochloride. Iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide may be prepared simply by reacting iodine with chlorine or bromine at room temperature and purified by fractional crystallisation. Both are quite reactive and attack even platinum and gold, though not boron, carbon, cadmium, lead, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, and tungsten. Their reaction with organic compounds depends on conditions. Iodine chloride vapour tends to chlorinate phenol and salicyclic acid, since when iodine chloride undergoes homolytic dissociation, chlorine and iodine are produced and the former is more reactive. However, iodine chloride in tetrachloromethane solution results in iodination being the main reaction, since now heterolytic fission of the I–Cl bond occurs and I attacks phenol as an electrophile. However, iodine monobromide tends to brominate phenol even in tetrachloromethane solution because it tends to dissociate into its elements in solution, and bromine is more reactive than iodine. When liquid, iodine monochloride and iodine monobromide dissociate into and anions (X = Cl, Br); thus they are significant conductors of electricity and can be used as ionising solvents.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine trifluoride (IF) is an unstable yellow solid that decomposes above −28 °C. It is thus little-known. It is difficult to produce because fluorine gas would tend to oxidise iodine all the way to the pentafluoride; reaction at low temperature with xenon difluoride is necessary. Iodine trichloride, which exists in the solid state as the planar dimer ICl, is a bright yellow solid, synthesised by reacting iodine with liquid chlorine at −80 °C; caution is necessary during purification because it easily dissociates to iodine monochloride and chlorine and hence can act as a strong chlorinating agent. Liquid iodine trichloride conducts electricity, possibly indicating dissociation to and ions.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine pentafluoride (IF), a colourless, volatile liquid, is the most thermodynamically stable iodine fluoride, and can be made by reacting iodine with fluorine gas at room temperature. It is a fluorinating agent, but is mild enough to store in glass apparatus. Again, slight electrical conductivity is present in the liquid state because of dissociation to and . The pentagonal bipyramidal iodine heptafluoride (IF) is an extremely powerful fluorinating agent, behind only chlorine trifluoride, chlorine pentafluoride, and bromine pentafluoride among the interhalogens: it reacts with almost all the elements even at low temperatures, fluorinates Pyrex glass to form iodine(VII) oxyfluoride (IOF), and sets carbon monoxide on fire.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine oxides are the most stable of all the halogen oxides, because of the strong I–O bonds resulting from the large electronegativity difference between iodine and oxygen, and they have been known for the longest time. The stable, white, hygroscopic iodine pentoxide (IO) has been known since its formation in 1813 by Gay-Lussac and Davy. It is most easily made by the dehydration of iodic acid (HIO), of which it is the anhydride. It will quickly oxidise carbon monoxide completely to carbon dioxide at room temperature, and is thus a useful reagent in determining carbon monoxide concentration. It also oxidises nitrogen oxide, ethylene, and hydrogen sulfide. It reacts with sulfur trioxide and peroxydisulfuryl difluoride (SOF) to form salts of the iodyl cation, [IO], and is reduced by concentrated sulfuric acids to iodosyl salts involving [IO]. It may be fluorinated by fluorine, bromine trifluoride, sulfur tetrafluoride, or chloryl fluoride, resulting iodine pentafluoride, which also reacts with iodine pentoxide, giving iodine(V) oxyfluoride, IOF. A few other less stable oxides are known, notably IO and IO; their structures have not been determined, but reasonable guesses are I(IO) and [IO][IO] respectively.


title: Iodine

text: More important are the four oxoacids: hypoiodous acid (HIO), iodous acid (HIO), iodic acid (HIO), and periodic acid (HIO or HIO). When iodine dissolves in aqueous solution, the following reactions occur:


title: Iodine

text: Hypoiodous acid is unstable to disproportionation. The hypoiodite ions thus formed disproportionate immediately to give iodide and iodate:


title: Iodine

text: Iodous acid and iodite are even less stable and exist only as a fleeting intermediate in the oxidation of iodide to iodate, if at all. Iodates are by far the most important of these compounds, which can be made by oxidising alkali metal iodides with oxygen at 600 °C and high pressure, or by oxidising iodine with chlorates. Unlike chlorates, which disproportionate very slowly to form chloride and perchlorate, iodates are stable to disproportionation in both acidic and alkaline solutions. From these, salts of most metals can be obtained. Iodic acid is most easily made by oxidation of an aqueous iodine suspension by electrolysis or fuming nitric acid. Iodate has the weakest oxidising power of the halates, but reacts the quickest.


title: Iodine

text: Many periodates are known, including not only the expected tetrahedral , but also square-pyramidal , octahedral orthoperiodate , [IO(OH)], [IO(OH)], and . They are usually made by oxidising alkaline sodium iodate electrochemically (with lead(IV) oxide as the anode) or by chlorine gas:


title: Iodine

text: They are thermodymically and kinetically powerful oxidising agents, quickly oxidising Mn to , and cleaving glycols, α-diketones, α-ketols, α-aminoalcohols, and α-diamines. Orthoperiodate especially stabilises high oxidation states among metals because of its very high negative charge of −5. Orthoperiodic acid, HIO, is stable, and dehydrates at 100 °C in a vacuum to metaperiodic acid, HIO. Attempting to go further does not result in the nonexistent iodine heptoxide (IO), but rather iodine pentoxide and oxygen. Periodic acid may be protonated by sulfuric acid to give the cation, isoelectronic to Te(OH) and , and giving salts with bisulfate and sulfate.


title: Iodine

text: When iodine dissolves in strong acids, such as fuming sulfuric acid, a bright blue paramagnetic solution including cations is formed. A solid salt of the diiodine cation may be obtained by oxidising iodine with antimony pentafluoride:


title: Iodine

text: The salt ISbF is dark blue, and the blue tantalum analogue ITaF is also known. Whereas the I–I bond length in I is 267 pm, that in is only 256 pm as the missing electron in the latter has been removed from an antibonding orbital, making the bond stronger and hence shorter. In fluorosulfuric acid solution, deep-blue reversibly dimerises below −60 °C, forming red rectangular diamagnetic . Other polyiodine cations are not as well-characterised, including bent dark-brown or black and centrosymmetric "C" green or black , known in the and salts among others.


title: Iodine

text: The only important polyiodide anion in aqueous solution is linear triiodide, . Its formation explains why the solubility of iodine in water may be increased by the addition of potassium iodide solution:


title: Iodine

text: Many other polyiodides may be found when solutions containing iodine and iodide crystallise, such as , , , and , whose salts with large, weakly polarising cations such as Cs may be isolated.


title: Iodine

text: Organoiodine compounds have been fundamental in the development of organic synthesis, such as in the Hofmann elimination of amines, the Williamson ether synthesis, the Wurtz coupling reaction, and in Grignard reagents.


title: Iodine

text: The carbon–iodine bond is a common functional group that forms part of core organic chemistry; formally, these compounds may be thought of as organic derivatives of the iodide anion. The simplest organoiodine compounds, alkyl iodides, may be synthesised by the reaction of alcohols with phosphorus triiodide; these may then be used in nucleophilic substitution reactions, or for preparing Grignard reagents. The C–I bond is the weakest of all the carbon–halogen bonds due to the minuscule difference in electronegativity between carbon (2.55) and iodine (2.66). As such, iodide is the best leaving group among the halogens, to such an extent that many organoiodine compounds turn yellow when stored over time due to decomposition into elemental iodine; as such, they are commonly used in organic synthesis, because of the easy formation and cleavage of the C–I bond. They are also significantly denser than the other organohalogen compounds thanks to the high atomic weight of iodine. A few organic oxidising agents like the iodanes contain iodine in a higher oxidation state than −1, such as 2-iodoxybenzoic acid, a common reagent for the oxidation of alcohols to aldehydes, and iodobenzene dichloride (PhICl), used for the selective chlorination of alkenes and alkynes. One of the more well-known uses of organoiodine compounds is the so-called iodoform test, where iodoform (CHI) is produced by the exhaustive iodination of a methyl ketone (or another compound capable of being oxidised to a methyl ketone), as follows:


title: Iodine

text: Some drawbacks of using organoiodine compounds as compared to organochlorine or organobromine compounds is the greater expense and toxicity of the iodine derivatives, since iodine is expensive and organoiodine compounds are stronger alkylating agents. For example, iodoacetamide and iodoacetic acid denature proteins by irreversibly alkylating cysteine residues and preventing the reformation of disulfide linkages.


title: Iodine

text: Halogen exchange to produce iodoalkanes by the Finkelstein reaction is slightly complicated by the fact that iodide is a better leaving group than chloride or bromide. The difference is nevertheless small enough that the reaction can be driven to completion by exploiting the differential solubility of halide salts, or by using a large excess of the halide salt. In the classic Finkelstein reaction, an alkyl chloride or an alkyl bromide is converted to an alkyl iodide by treatment with a solution of sodium iodide in acetone. Sodium iodide is soluble in acetone and sodium chloride and sodium bromide are not. The reaction is driven toward products by mass action due to the precipitation of the insoluble salt.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine is the least abundant of the stable halogens, comprising only 0.46 parts per million of Earth's crustal rocks (compare: fluorine 544 ppm, chlorine 126 ppm, bromine 2.5 ppm). Among the 84 elements which occur in significant quantities (elements 1–42, 44–60, 62–83, 90 and 92), it ranks 61st in abundance. Iodide minerals are rare, and most deposits that are concentrated enough for economical extraction are iodate minerals instead. Examples include lautarite, Ca(IO), and dietzeite, 7Ca(IO)·8CaCrO. These are the minerals that occur as trace impurities in the caliche, found in Chile, whose main product is sodium nitrate. In total, they can contain at least 0.02% and at most 1% iodine by mass. Sodium iodate is extracted from the caliche and reduced to iodide by sodium bisulfite. This solution is then reacted with freshly extracted iodate, resulting in comproportionation to iodine, which may be filtered off.


title: Iodine

text: The caliche was the main source of iodine in the 19th century and continues to be important today, replacing kelp (which is no longer an economically viable source), but in the late 20th century brines emerged as a comparable source. The Japanese Minami Kanto gas field east of Tokyo and the American Anadarko Basin gas field in northwest Oklahoma are the two largest such sources. The brine is hotter than 60 °C from the depth of the source. The brine is first purified and acidified using sulfuric acid, then the iodide present is oxidised to iodine with chlorine. An iodine solution is produced, but is dilute and must be concentrated. Air is blown into the solution to evaporate the iodine, which is passed into an absorbing tower, where sulfur dioxide reduces the iodine. The hydrogen iodide (HI) is reacted with chlorine to precipitate the iodine. After filtering and purification the iodine is packed.


title: Iodine

text: These sources ensure that Chile and Japan are the largest producers of iodine today. Alternatively, the brine may be treated with silver nitrate to precipitate out iodine as silver iodide, which is then decomposed by reaction with iron to form metallic silver and a solution of iron(II) iodide. The iodine may then be liberated by displacement with chlorine.


title: Iodine

text: About half of all produced iodine goes into various organoiodine compounds, another 15% remains as the pure element, another 15% is used to form potassium iodide, and another 15% for other inorganic iodine compounds. Among the major uses of iodine compounds are catalysts, animal feed supplements, stabilisers, dyes, colourants and pigments, pharmaceutical, sanitation (from tincture of iodine), and photography; minor uses include smog inhibition, cloud seeding, and various uses in analytical chemistry.


title: Iodine

text: The iodide and iodate anions are often used for quantitative volumetric analysis, for example in iodometry. Iodine and starch form a blue complex, and this reaction is often used to test for either starch or iodine and as an indicator in iodometry. The iodine test for starch is still used to detect counterfeit banknotes printed on starch-containing paper.


title: Iodine

text: The iodine value is the mass of iodine in grams that is consumed by 100 grams of a chemical substance typically fats or oils. Iodine numbers are often used to determine the amount of unsaturation in fatty acids. This unsaturation is in the form of double bonds, which react with iodine compounds.


title: Iodine

text: Potassium tetraiodomercurate(II), KHgI, is also known as Nessler's reagent. It is often used as a sensitive spot test for ammonia. Similarly, Mayer's reagent (potassium tetraiodomercurate(II) solution) is used as a precipitating reagent to test for alkaloids. Aqueous alkaline iodine solution is used in the iodoform test for methyl ketones.


title: Iodine

text: The spectrum of the iodine molecule, I, consists of (not exclusively) tens of thousands of sharp spectral lines in the wavelength range 500–700 nm. It is therefore a commonly used wavelength reference (secondary standard). By measuring with a spectroscopic Doppler-free technique while focusing on one of these lines, the hyperfine structure of the iodine molecule reveals itself. A line is now resolved such that either 15 components (from even rotational quantum numbers, "J"), or 21 components (from odd rotational quantum numbers, "J") are measurable.


title: Iodine

text: Cesium iodide and thallium-doped sodium iodide are used in crystal scintillators for the detection of gamma rays. The efficiency is high and energy dispersive spectroscopy is possible, but the resolution is rather poor.


title: Iodine

text: Propulsion systems employing iodine as the propellant can be built more compactly, with less mass (and cost), and operate more efficiently than the gridded ion thrusters that were utilized to propel previous spacecraft, such as Japan's Hayabusa probes, ESA's GOCE satellite, or NASA's DART mission, all of which used xenon as the reaction mass. Iodine's atomic weight is only 3.3% less than that of xenon, while its first two ionisation energies average 12% less; together, these make iodine ions a promising substitute.


title: Iodine

text: Use of iodine should allow more widespread application of ion-thrust technology, particularly with smaller-scale space vehicles. According to the European Space Agency, "This small but potentially disruptive innovation could help to clear the skies of space junk, by enabling tiny satellites to self-destruct cheaply and easily at the end of their missions, by steering themselves into the atmosphere where they would burn up."


title: Iodine

text: In early 2021, the French group ThrustMe performed an in-orbit demonstration of an electric-powered ion thruster for spacecraft, where iodine was used in lieu of xenon as the source of plasma, in order to generate thrust by accelerating ions with an electrostatic field.


title: Iodine

text: Elemental iodine is used as an antiseptic either as the element, or as the water-soluble triiodide anion I generated "in situ" by adding iodide to poorly water-soluble elemental iodine (the reverse chemical reaction makes some free elemental iodine available for antisepsis). Elemental iodine may also be used to treat iodine deficiency.


title: Iodine

text: In the alternative, iodine may be produced from iodophors, which contain iodine complexed with a solubilizing agent (the iodide ion may be thought of loosely as the iodophor in triiodide water solutions). Examples of such preparations include:


title: Iodine

text: The antimicrobial action of iodine is quick and works at low concentrations, and thus it is used in operating theatres. Its specific mode of action is unknown. It penetrates into microorganisms and attacks particular amino acids (such as cysteine and methionine), nucleotides, and fatty acids, ultimately resulting in cell death. It also has an antiviral action, but nonlipid viruses and parvoviruses are less sensitive than lipid enveloped viruses. Iodine probably attacks surface proteins of enveloped viruses, and it may also destabilise membrane fatty acids by reacting with unsaturated carbon bonds.


title: Iodine

text: Before the advent of organic chelating agents, salts of iodide were given orally in the treatment of lead or mercury poisoning, such as heavily popularized by Louis Melsens and many nineteenth and early twentieth century doctors.


title: Iodine

text: In medicine, a saturated solution of potassium iodide is used to treat acute thyrotoxicosis. It is also used to block uptake of iodine-131 in the thyroid gland (see isotopes section above), when this isotope is used as part of radiopharmaceuticals (such as iobenguane) that are not targeted to the thyroid or thyroid-type tissues.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine-131 (usually as iodide) is a component of nuclear fallout, and is particularly dangerous owing to the thyroid gland's propensity to concentrate ingested iodine and retain it for periods longer than this isotope's radiological half-life of eight days. For this reason, people at risk of exposure to environmental radioactive iodine (iodine-131) in fallout may be instructed to take non-radioactive potassium iodide tablets. The typical adult dose is one 130 mg tablet per 24 hours, supplying 100 mg (100,000 micrograms) of ionic iodine. (The typical daily dose of iodine for normal health is of order 100 micrograms; see "Dietary Intake" below.) Ingestion of this large dose of non-radioactive iodine minimises the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland.


title: Iodine

text: As an element with high electron density and atomic number, iodine absorbs X-rays weaker than 33.3 keV due to the photoelectric effect of the innermost electrons. Organoiodine compounds are used with intravenous injection as X-ray radiocontrast agents. This application is often in conjunction with advanced X-ray techniques such as angiography and CT scanning. At present, all water-soluble radiocontrast agents rely on iodine.


title: Iodine

text: The production of ethylenediamine dihydroiodide, provided as a nutritional supplement for livestock, consumes a large portion of available iodine. Another significant use is a catalyst for the production of acetic acid by the Monsanto and Cativa processes. In these technologies, which support the world's demand for acetic acid, hydroiodic acid converts the methanol feedstock into methyl iodide, which undergoes carbonylation. Hydrolysis of the resulting acetyl iodide regenerates hydroiodic acid and gives acetic acid.


title: Iodine

text: Inorganic iodides find specialised uses. Titanium, zirconium, hafnium, and thorium are purified by the van Arkel–de Boer process, which involves the reversible formation of the tetraiodides of these elements. Silver iodide is a major ingredient to traditional photographic film. Thousands of kilograms of silver iodide are used annually for cloud seeding to induce rain.


title: Iodine

text: The organoiodine compound erythrosine is an important food coloring agent. Perfluoroalkyl iodides are precursors to important surfactants, such as perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.


title: Iodine

text: The iodine clock reaction (in which iodine also serves as a test for starch, forming a dark blue complex), is a popular educational demonstration experiment and example of a seemingly oscillating reaction (it is only the concentration of an intermediate product that oscillates).


title: Iodine

text: Although iodine has widespread roles in many species, agents containing it can exert a "differential" effect upon different species in an agricultural system. The growth of all strains of "Fusarium verticillioides" is significantly inhibited by an iodine-containing fungistatic (AJ1629-34EC) at concentrations that do not harm the crop. This might be a less toxic anti-fungal agricultural treatment due to its relatively natural chemistry.


title: Iodine

text: I is used as the radiolabel in investigating which ligands go to which plant pattern recognition receptors (PRRs).


title: Iodine

text: Iodine is an essential element for life and, at atomic number "Z" = 53, is the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms. (Lanthanum and the other lanthanides, as well as tungsten with "Z" = 74 and uranium with "Z" = 92, are used by a few microorganisms.) It is required for the synthesis of the growth-regulating thyroid hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine (T and T respectively, named after their number of iodine atoms). A deficiency of iodine leads to decreased production of T and T and a concomitant enlargement of the thyroid tissue in an attempt to obtain more iodine, causing the disease known as simple goitre. The major form of thyroid hormone in the blood is thyroxine (T), which has a longer half-life than T. In humans, the ratio of T to T released into the blood is between 14:1 and 20:1. T is converted to the active T (three to four times more potent than T) within cells by deiodinases (5'-iodinase). These are further processed by decarboxylation and deiodination to produce iodothyronamine (Ta) and thyronamine (Ta'). All three isoforms of the deiodinases are selenium-containing enzymes; thus dietary selenium is essential for T production.


title: Iodine

text: Iodine accounts for 65% of the molecular weight of T and 59% of T. Fifteen to 20 mg of iodine is concentrated in thyroid tissue and hormones, but 70% of all iodine in the body is found in other tissues, including mammary glands, eyes, gastric mucosa, fetal thymus, cerebro-spinal fluid and choroid plexus, arterial walls, the cervix, and salivary glands. In the cells of those tissues, iodide enters directly by sodium-iodide symporter (NIS). The action of iodine in mammary tissue is related to fetal and neonatal development, but in the other tissues, it is (at least) partially unknown.


title: Iodine

text: The daily levels of intake recommended by the United States National Academy of Medicine are between 110 and 130 µg for infants up to 12 months, 90 µg for children up to eight years, 130 µg for children up to 13 years, 150 µg for adults, 220 µg for pregnant women and 290 µg for lactation. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults is 1,100 μg/day. This upper limit was assessed by analyzing the effect of supplementation on thyroid-stimulating hormone.


title: Iodine

text: The thyroid gland needs no more than 70 μg/day to synthesise the requisite daily amounts of T4 and T3. The higher recommended daily allowance levels of iodine seem necessary for optimal function of a number of body systems, including lactation, gastric mucosa, salivary glands, brain cells, choroid plexus, thymus, and arterial walls.


title: Iodine

text: Natural sources of dietary iodine include seafood, such as fish, seaweeds (such as kelp) and shellfish, dairy products and eggs so long as the animals received enough iodine, and plants grown on iodine-rich soil. Iodised salt is fortified with iodine in the form of sodium iodide.


title: Iodine

text: As of 2000, the median intake of iodine from food in the United States was 240 to 300 μg/day for men and 190 to 210 μg/day for women. The general US population has adequate iodine nutrition, with women of childbearing age and pregnant women having a possible mild risk of deficiency. In Japan, consumption was considered much higher, ranging between 5,280 μg/day to 13,800 μg/day from dietary seaweed or kombu kelp, often in the form of kombu umami extracts for soup stock and potato chips. However, new studies suggest that Japan's consumption is closer to 1,000–3,000 μg/day. The adult UL in Japan was last revised to 3,000 µg/day in 2015.


title: Iodine

text: After iodine fortification programs such as iodisation of salt have been implemented, some cases of iodine-induced hyperthyroidism have been observed (so-called Jod-Basedow phenomenon). The condition seems to occur mainly in people over forty, and the risk appears higher when iodine deficiency is severe and the initial rise in iodine intake is high.


title: Iodine

text: In areas where there is little iodine in the diet, typically remote inland areas and semi-arid equatorial climates where no marine foods are eaten, iodine deficiency gives rise to hypothyroidism, symptoms of which are extreme fatigue, goitre, mental slowing, depression, weight gain, and low basal body temperatures. Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable intellectual disability, a result that occurs primarily when babies or small children are rendered hypothyroidic by a lack of the element. The addition of iodine to table salt has largely eliminated this problem in wealthier nations, but iodine deficiency remains a serious public health problem in the developing world today. Iodine deficiency is also a problem in certain areas of Europe. Information processing, fine motor skills, and visual problem solving are improved by iodine repletion in moderately iodine-deficient children.


title: Iodine

text: Elemental iodine (I) is toxic if taken orally undiluted. The lethal dose for an adult human is 30 mg/kg, which is about 2.1–2.4 grams for a human weighing 70 to 80 kg (even if experiments on rats demonstrated that these animals could survive after eating a 14000 mg/kg dose). Excess iodine can be more cytotoxic in the presence of selenium deficiency. Iodine supplementation in selenium-deficient populations is, in theory, problematic, partly for this reason. The toxicity derives from its oxidizing properties, through which it denaturates proteins (including enzymes).


title: Iodine

text: Elemental iodine is also a skin irritant. Direct contact with skin can cause damage, and solid iodine crystals should be handled with care. Solutions with high elemental iodine concentration, such as tincture of iodine and Lugol's solution, are capable of causing tissue damage if used in prolonged cleaning or antisepsis; similarly, liquid Povidone-iodine (Betadine) trapped against the skin resulted in chemical burns in some reported cases.


title: Iodine

text: People can be exposed to iodine in the workplace by inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (Permissible exposure limit) for iodine exposure in the workplace at 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a Recommended exposure limit (REL) of 0.1 ppm (1 mg/m) during an 8-hour workday. At levels of 2 ppm, iodine is immediately dangerous to life and health.


title: Iodine

text: Some people develop a hypersensitivity to products and foods containing iodine. Applications of tincture of iodine or Betadine can cause rashes, sometimes severe. Parenteral use of iodine-based contrast agents (see above) can cause reactions ranging from a mild rash to fatal anaphylaxis. Such reactions have led to the misconception (widely held, even among physicians) that some people are allergic to iodine itself; even allergies to iodine-rich seafood have been so construed. In fact, there has never been a confirmed report of a true iodine allergy, and an allergy to elemental iodine or simple iodide salts is theoretically impossible. Hypersensitivity reactions to products and foods containing iodine are apparently related to their other molecular components; thus, a person who has demonstrated an allergy to one food or product containing iodine may not have an allergic reaction to another. Patients with various food allergies (shellfish, egg, milk, etc.) do not have an increased risk for a contrast medium hypersensitivity. As with all medications, the patient's allergy history should be questioned and consulted before any containing iodine are administered.


title: Iodine

text: Phosphorus can reduce elemental iodine to hydroiodic acid, which is a reagent effective for reducing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine. For this reason, iodine was designated by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as a List I precursor chemical under 21 CFR 1310.02.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he made a point of using his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Born into a musical family, Rachmaninoff took up the piano at the age of four. He studied with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1892, having already composed several piano and orchestral pieces. In 1897, following the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff entered a four-year depression and composed little until successful supportive therapy allowed him to complete his enthusiastically received Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901. In the course of the next sixteen years, Rachmaninoff conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre, relocated to Dresden, Germany, and toured the United States for the first time.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Following the Russian Revolution, Rachmaninoff and his family left Russia, and in 1918 they settled in New York City. With his primary source of income coming from performances as a pianist and a conductor, Rachmaninoff had little time to compose. Because of this, he completed just six works between 1918 and 1943, including the "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini", Symphony No. 3, and "Symphonic Dances". By 1942, his declining health led to his relocation to Beverly Hills, California, and later became a US citizen a few weeks before he died of advanced melanoma in 1943.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff was born on into a family of Russian aristocracy in the Russian Empire. The family tradition claims descent from a legendary Vasily, nicknamed "Rachman", a supposed grandson of Stephen III of Moldavia. Rachmaninoff's family had strong musical and military leanings. His paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich, was a musician who had taken lessons from Irish composer John Field. His father, Vasily Arkadievich Rachmaninoff (1841–1916), was an army officer and amateur pianist who married Lyubov Petrovna Butakova (1853–1929), the daughter of a wealthy army general who gave him five estates as part of her dowry. The couple had three sons and three daughters, Sergei being their third child.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff was born in the family estate in the village of Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa, Novgorod Governorate. His birth was registered in Semyonovo church book and signed by Priest Platon Savitsky and acolyte Peter Lubochsky. After Sergei turned four, the family moved to another house in Oneg estate, about 110 miles north of Semyonovo, and the Semyonovo estate was sold in 1879 by Rachmaninoff's father. Young Sergei Rachmaninoff was raised in Oneg estate from age four until aged nine, and he mistakenly cited it as his birthplace in his adult life. Rachmaninoff began piano and music lessons organized by his mother at age four. She noticed his ability to reproduce passages from memory without a wrong note. Upon hearing news of the boy's gift, Arkady suggested she hire Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher and recent graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, to live with the family and begin formal teaching. Rachmaninoff dedicated his famous romance for voice and piano "Spring Waters" from 12 Romances, Op. 14 to Ornatskaya.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff's father, who wanted him to join the military, had to sell the five estates one by one to pay his debts due to his financial incompetence and therefore could not afford an expensive military career for him. The last estate in Oneg was auctioned off in 1882, and the family moved to a small flat in Saint Petersburg. In 1883, Ornatskaya arranged for Rachmaninoff, now 10, to study music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Later that year, his sister Sofia died of diphtheria, and his father left the family for Moscow. His maternal grandmother stepped in to help raise the children with particular focus on their religious life, regularly taking Rachmaninoff to Russian Orthodox Church services where he first encountered liturgical chants and church bells, two features he would incorporate in his compositions.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In 1885, Rachmaninoff suffered a further loss when his sister Yelena died at age 18 of pernicious anaemia. She was an important musical influence on Rachmaninoff and had introduced him to the works of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. As a respite, his grandmother took him to a farm retreat by the Volkhov River. At the Conservatory, however, he had adopted a relaxed attitude, played truant, failed his general education classes and purposely altered his report cards. Rachmaninoff performed at events held at the Moscow Conservatory during this time, including those attended by the Grand Duke Konstantin and other notable figures. However, upon his failing his spring exams, Ornatskaya notified his mother that his admission to further education might be revoked. His mother then consulted with Alexander Siloti, her nephew and an accomplished pianist and student of Franz Liszt. He recommended transferring Rachmaninoff to the Moscow Conservatory to receive lessons from his former teacher, the more strict Nikolai Zverev, which lasted until 1888.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In the autumn of 1885, Rachmaninoff moved in with Zverev and stayed for almost four years, during which he befriended fellow pupil Alexander Scriabin. After two years of tuition, the fifteen year old Rachmaninoff was awarded a Rubinstein scholarship, and graduated from the lower division of the Conservatory to become a pupil of Siloti in advanced piano, Sergei Taneyev in counterpoint, and Anton Arensky in free composition. In 1889, a rift formed between Rachmaninoff and Zverev, now his adviser, after Zverev turned down the composer's request for assistance in renting a piano and greater privacy to compose. Zverev, who believed composition was a waste for talented pianists, refused to speak to Rachmaninoff for some time and organised for him to live with his uncle and aunt Satin and their family in Moscow. Rachmaninoff then found his first romance in Vera, the youngest daughter of the neighbouring Skalon family, but her mother objected and forbade Rachmaninoff to write to her, leaving him to correspond with her older sister Natalia. It is from these letters that many of Rachmaninoff's earliest compositions can be traced.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff spent his summer break in 1890 with the Satins at Ivanovka, their private country estate near Tambov, to which the composer would return many times until 1917. The peaceful and bucolic surroundings became a source of inspiration for the composer who completed many compositions while at the estate, including his Op. 1, the Piano Concerto, which he completed in July 1891, and dedicated to Siloti. Also that year, Rachmaninoff completed the one-movement "Youth Symphony" and the symphonic poem "Prince Rostislav". Siloti left the Moscow Conservatory after the academic year ended in 1891 and Rachmaninoff asked to take his final piano exams a year early to avoid being assigned a different teacher. Despite little faith from Siloti and Conservatory director Vasily Safonov as he had just three weeks' preparation, Rachmaninoff received assistance from a recent graduate who was familiar with the tests, and passed each one with honours in July 1891. Three days later, he passed his annual theory and composition exams. His progress was unexpectedly halted in the latter half of 1891 when he contracted a severe case of malaria during his summer break at Ivanovka.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: During his final year at the Conservatory, Rachmaninoff performed his first independent concert, where he premiered his "Trio élégiaque" in January 1892, followed by a performance of the first movement of his Piano Concerto two months later. His request to take his final theory and composition exams a year early was also granted, for which he wrote "Aleko", a one-act opera based on the narrative poem "The Gypsies" by Alexander Pushkin, in seventeen days. It premiered in May 1892 at the Bolshoi Theatre; Tchaikovsky attended and praised Rachmaninoff for his work. Rachmaninoff believed it was "sure to fail", but the production was so successful the theatre agreed to produce it starring singer Feodor Chaliapin, who would go on to become a lifelong friend. "Aleko" earned Rachmaninoff the highest mark at the Conservatory and a Great Gold Medal, a distinction only previously awarded to Taneyev and Arseny Koreshchenko. Zverev, a member of the exam committee, gave the composer his gold watch, thus ending years of estrangement. On 29 May 1892, the Conservatory issued Rachmaninoff a diploma which allowed him to officially style himself as a "Free Artist".


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Upon graduating, Rachmaninoff continued to compose and signed a 500-ruble publishing contract with Gutheil, under which "Aleko", Two Pieces (Op. 2) and Six Songs (Op. 4) were among the first published. The composer had previously earned 15 rubles a month in giving piano lessons. He spent the summer of 1892 on the estate of Ivan Konavalov, a rich landowner in the Kostroma Oblast, and moved back with the Satins in the Arbat District. Delays in getting paid by Gutheil saw Rachmaninoff seeking other sources of income which led to an engagement at the Moscow Electrical Exhibition in September 1892, his public debut as a pianist, where he premiered his landmark Prelude in C-sharp minor from his five-part piano composition piece "Morceaux de fantaisie" (Op. 3). He was paid 50 rubles for his appearance. It was well received and became one of his most popular and enduring pieces. In 1893, he completed his tone poem "The Rock", which he dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In 1893, Rachmaninoff spent a productive summer with friends at an estate in Kharkiv Oblast where he composed several pieces, including "Fantaisie-Tableaux" (aka Suite No. 1, Op. 5) and "Morceaux de salon" (Op. 10). In September, he published Six Songs (Op. 8), a group of songs set to translations by Aleksey Pleshcheyev of Ukrainian and German poems. Rachmaninoff returned to Moscow, where Tchaikovsky agreed to conduct "The Rock" for an upcoming European tour. During his subsequent trip to Kyiv to conduct performances of "Aleko", he learned of Tchaikovsky's death from cholera. The news left Rachmaninoff stunned; later that day, he started work on his "Trio élégiaque" for piano, violin and cello as a tribute, which he completed within a month. The music's aura of gloom reveals the depth and sincerity of Rachmaninoff's grief for his idol. The piece debuted at the first concert devoted to Rachmaninoff's compositions on 31 January 1894.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff entered a decline following Tchaikovsky's death. He lacked the inspiration to compose, and the management of the Grand Theatre had lost interest in showcasing "Aleko" and dropped it from the program. To earn more money, Rachmaninoff returned to giving piano lessons—which he hated—and in late 1895, agreed to a three-month tour across Russia with a program shared by Italian violinist Teresina Tua. The tour was not enjoyable for the composer and he quit before it ended, thus sacrificing his performance fees. In a more desperate plea for money, Rachmaninoff pawned his gold watch given to him by Zverev. In September 1895, before the tour started, Rachmaninoff completed his Symphony No. 1 (Op. 13), a work conceived in January and based on chants he had heard in Russian Orthodox church services. Rachmaninoff had worked so hard on it that he could not return to composition until he heard the piece performed. This lasted until October 1896, when "a rather large sum of money" that was not his was stolen from Rachmaninoff during a train journey and he had to work to recoup the losses. Among the pieces composed were "Six Choruses" (Op. 15) and "Six moments musicaux" (Op. 16), his final completed composition for several months.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff's fortunes took a turn following the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 on 28 March 1897 in one of a long-running series of Russian Symphony Concerts devoted to Russian music. The piece was brutally panned by critic and nationalist composer César Cui, who likened it to a depiction of the seven plagues of Egypt, suggesting it would be admired by the "inmates" of a music conservatory in Hell. The deficiencies of the performance, conducted by Alexander Glazunov, were not commented on by other critics, but according to a memoir from Alexander Ossovsky, a close friend of Rachmaninoff, Glazunov made poor use of rehearsal time, and the concert's program itself, which contained two other premières, was also a factor. Other witnesses, including Rachmaninoff's wife, suggested that Glazunov, an alcoholic, may have been drunk. Following the reaction to his first symphony, Rachmaninoff wrote in May 1897 that "I'm not at all affected" by its lack of success or critical reaction, but felt "deeply distressed and heavily depressed by the fact that my Symphony ... did not please "me" at all after its first rehearsal". He thought its performance was poor, particularly Glazunov's contribution. The piece was not performed for the rest of Rachmaninoff's life, but he revised it into a four-hand piano arrangement in 1898.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Rachmaninoff fell into a depression that lasted for three years, during which he had writer's block and composed almost nothing. He described this time as "Like the man who had suffered a stroke and for a long time had lost the use of his head and hands". He made a living by giving piano lessons. A stroke of good fortune came from Savva Mamontov, a Russian industrialist and founder of the Moscow Private Russian Opera, who offered Rachmaninoff the post of assistant conductor for the 1897–98 season. The cash-strapped composer accepted, conducting "Samson and Delilah" by Camille Saint-Saëns as his first opera on 12 October 1897. By the end of February 1899, Rachmaninoff attempted composition and completed two short piano pieces, "Morceau de Fantaisie" and Fughetta in F major. Two months later, he travelled to London for the first time to perform and conduct, earning positive reviews.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: During his time conducting in Moscow, Rachmaninoff was engaged to Natalia Satina. However, the Russian Orthodox church and Satina's parents opposed their announcement, thwarting their plans for marriage. Rachmaninoff's depression worsened in late 1899 following an unproductive summer; he composed one song, "Fate", which later became one of his Twelve Songs (Op. 21), and left compositions for a proposed return visit to London unfulfilled. In an attempt to revive his desire to compose, his aunt arranged for the writer Leo Tolstoy, whom Rachmaninoff greatly admired, to have the composer visit his home and receive words of encouragement. The visit was unsuccessful, doing nothing to help him compose with the fluency he had before.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: By 1900, Rachmaninoff had become so self-critical that, despite numerous attempts, composing had become near impossible. His aunt then suggested professional help, having received successful treatment from a family friend, physician and amateur musician Nikolai Dahl, to which Rachmaninoff agreed without resistance. Between January and April 1900, Rachmaninoff underwent hypnotherapy and supportive therapy sessions with Dahl on a daily basis, specifically structured to improve his sleep patterns, mood, and appetite and reignite his desire to compose. That summer, Rachmaninoff felt that "new musical ideas began to stir" and successfully resumed composition. His first fully completed work, the Piano Concerto, was finished in April 1901; it is dedicated to Dahl. After the second and third movement premiered in December 1900 with Rachmaninoff as the soloist, the entire piece was first performed in 1901 and was enthusiastically received. The piece earned the composer a Glinka Award, the first of five awarded to him throughout his life, and a 500-ruble prize in 1904.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Amid his professional career success, Rachmaninoff married Natalia Satina on 12 May 1902 after a three-year engagement. Because they were first cousins, the marriage was forbidden under a Canon law imposed by the Russian Orthodox Church; in addition, Rachmaninoff was not a regular church attendee and avoided confession, two things a priest would have had to confirm that he did in signing a marriage certificate. To circumvent the church's opposition, the couple used their military background and organised a small ceremony in a chapel in a Moscow suburb army barracks with Siloti and the cellist Anatoliy Brandukov as best men. They received the smaller of two houses at the Ivanovka estate as a present and went on a three-month honeymoon across Europe. Upon their return, they settled in Moscow, where Rachmaninoff resumed work as a music teacher at St. Catherine's Women's College and the Elizabeth Institute. By February 1903 he had completed his largest piano composition of his career at the time, the "Variations on a Theme of Chopin" (Op. 22). On 14 May 1903, the couple's first daughter, Irina Sergeyevna Rachmaninova, was born. During their summer break at Ivanovka, the family was struck with illness.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In 1904, in a career change, Rachmaninoff agreed to become the conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre for two seasons. He earned a mixed reputation during his time at the post, enforcing strict discipline and demanding high standards of performance. Influenced by Richard Wagner, he pioneered the modern arrangement of the orchestra players in the pit and the modern custom of standing while conducting. He also worked with each soloist on their part, even accompanying them on the piano. The theatre staged the premiere of his operas "The Miserly Knight" and "Francesca da Rimini".


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In the course of his second season as conductor, Rachmaninoff lost interest in his post. The social and political unrest surrounding the 1905 Revolution was beginning to affect the performers and theatre staff, who staged protests and demands for improved wages and conditions. Rachmaninoff remained largely uninterested in the politics surrounding him and the revolutionary spirit had made working conditions increasingly difficult. In February 1906, after conducting 50 performances in the first season and 39 in the second, Rachmaninoff handed in his resignation. He then took his family on an extended tour around Italy with the hope of completing new works, but illness struck his wife and daughter, and they returned to Ivanovka. Money soon became an issue following Rachmaninoff's resignation from his posts at St. Catherine's and Elizabeth schools, leaving him only the option of composing.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Increasingly unhappy with the political turmoil in Russia and in need of seclusion from his lively social life to be able to compose, Rachmaninoff with his family left Moscow for Dresden, Germany, in November 1906. The city had become a favourite of both Rachmaninoff and Natalia, and they stayed there until 1909, only returning to Russia for their summer breaks at Ivanovka. In Paris, during the summer of 1907, he saw a black and white reproduction of "The Isle of the Dead" by Arnold Böcklin, which served as the inspiration for his orchestral work of the same name, Op. 29. Despite occasional periods of depression, apathy, and little faith in any of his work, Rachmaninoff started on his Symphony No. 2 (Op. 27) in 1906, twelve years after the disastrous premiere of his first. While writing it, Rachmaninoff and the family returned to Russia, but the composer detoured to Paris to take part in Sergei Diaghilev's season of Russian concerts in May 1907. His performance as the soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 2 with an encore of his Prelude in C-sharp minor was a triumphant success. Rachmaninoff regained his sense of self-worth following the enthusiastic reaction to the premiere of his Symphony No. 2 in early 1908, which earned him his second Glinka Award and 1,000 roubles.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: While in Dresden, Rachmaninoff agreed to perform and conduct in the United States as part of the 1909–10 concert season with conductor Max Fiedler and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He spent time during breaks at Ivanovka finishing a new piece specially for the visit, his Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30, which he dedicated to Josef Hofmann. The tour saw the composer make 26 performances, 19 as pianist and 7 as conductor, which marked his first recitals without another performer in the program. His first appearance was at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for a recital on 4 November 1909. The second performance of the Piano Concerto No. 3 by the New York Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Gustav Mahler in New York City with the composer as soloist, an experience he personally treasured. Though the tour increased the composer's popularity in America, he declined subsequent offers due to the length of time away from Russia and his family.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Upon his return home in February 1910, Rachmaninoff became vice president of the Imperial Russian Musical Society (IRMS), whose president was a member of the royal family. Later in 1910, Rachmaninoff completed his choral work "Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom", Op. 31, but it was banned from performance as it did not follow the format of a typical liturgical church service. For two seasons between 1911 and 1913, Rachmaninoff was appointed permanent conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Moscow; he helped raise its profile and increase audience numbers and receipts. In 1912, Rachmaninoff left the IRMS when he learned that a musician in an administrative post was dismissed for being Jewish.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Soon after his resignation, an exhausted Rachmaninoff sought time for composition and took his family on holiday to Switzerland. They left after one month for Rome for a visit that became a particularly tranquil and influential period for the composer, who lived alone in a small apartment on Piazza di Spagna while his family stayed at a boardinghouse. While there he received an anonymous letter that contained a Russian translation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells" by Konstantin Balmont, which affected him greatly, and he began work on his choral symphony of the same title, Op. 35, based on it. This period of composition ended abruptly when Rachmaninoff's daughters contracted serious cases of typhoid and were treated in Berlin due to their father's greater trust in German doctors. After six weeks, the Rachmaninoffs returned to their Moscow flat. The composer conducted "The Bells" at its premiere in Saint Petersburg in late 1913.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: In January 1914, Rachmaninoff began a concert tour of England which was enthusiastically received. He was too afraid to travel alone following the death of Raoul Pugno of an unexpected heart attack in his hotel room which left the composer wary of a similar fate. Following the outbreak of the First World War later that year, his position of Inspector of Music at Nobility High School for Girls put him in the group of government servants which prevented him from joining the army, yet the composer made regular charitable donations for the war effort. In 1915, Rachmaninoff completed his second major choral work, "All-Night Vigil" (Op. 37). It was received so warmly at its Moscow premiere in aid of war relief that four subsequent performances were quickly scheduled.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Alexander Scriabin's death in April 1915 was a tragedy for Rachmaninoff, who went on a piano recital tour devoted to his friend's compositions to raise funds for Scriabin's financially stricken widow. It marked his first public performances of works other than his own. During a vacation in Finland that summer, Rachmaninoff learned of Taneyev's death, a loss which affected him greatly. By year's end he had finished his "14 Romances", Op. 34, whose final section, "Vocalise", became one of his most popular pieces.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: On the day the February 1917 Revolution began in Saint Petersburg, Rachmaninoff performed a piano recital in Moscow in aid of wounded Russian soldiers who had fought in the war. He returned to Ivanovka two months later, finding it in chaos after a group of Social Revolutionary Party members seized it as their own communal property. Despite having invested most of his earnings on the estate, Rachmaninoff left the property after three weeks, vowing never to return. It was soon confiscated by the communist authorities and became derelict. In June 1917, Rachmaninoff asked Siloti to produce visas for him and his family so they could leave Russia, but Siloti was unable to help. After a break with his family in the more peaceful Crimea, Rachmaninoff's concert performance in Yalta on 5 September 1917 was to be his last in Russia. Upon returning to Moscow, the political tension surrounding the October Revolution found the composer keeping his family safe indoors and being involved in a collective at his apartment building where he attended committee meetings and kept guard at night. He completed revisions to his Piano Concerto No. 1 among gunshots and rallies outside.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: Amidst such turmoil, Rachmaninoff received an unexpected offer to perform ten piano recitals across Scandinavia, which he immediately accepted, using it as an excuse to obtain permits so he and his family could leave the country. On 22 December 1917, they left Saint Petersburg by train to the Finnish border, from where they travelled through Finland on an open sled and train to Helsinki. Carrying what they could pack into their small suitcases, Rachmaninoff brought some sketches of compositions and scores to the first act of his unfinished opera "Monna Vanna" and Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "The Golden Cockerel". They arrived in Stockholm, Sweden, on 24 December. In January 1918, they relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark, and, with the help of friend and composer Nikolai von Struve, settled on the ground floor of a house. In debt and in need of money, the 44-year-old Rachmaninoff chose performing as his main source of income, as a career solely in composition was too restrictive. His piano repertoire was small, which prompted the start of regular practice of his technique and learning new pieces to play. Rachmaninoff toured between February and October 1918.


title: Sergei Rachmaninoff

text: During the Scandinavian tour, Rachmaninoff received three offers from the US: to become the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for two years, to conduct 110 concerts in 30 weeks for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and to give 25 piano recitals. He was worried about such a commitment in an unfamiliar country and had few good memories from his debut tour in 1909, so he declined all three. Not long after his decision, Rachmaninoff considered the United States financially advantageous as he could not support his family through composition alone. Unable to afford the travel fees, he was sent an advance loan for the journey by Russian banker and fellow emigre Alexander Kamenka. Money was also received from friends and admirers; pianist Ignaz Friedman contributed $2,000. On 1 November 1918, the Rachmaninoffs boarded the SS "Bergensfjord" in Oslo, Norway, bound for New York City, arriving eleven days later. News of the composer's arrival spread, causing a crowd of musicians, artists, and fans to gather outside The Sherry-Netherland hotel, where he was staying.